Acoustic Ecologies - Microcosms of Sound

This Faces Made for Radio podcast looks at the acoustic ecology movement and how it has developed since its original creation by the World Soundscape Project in the late Sixties. The podcast explores how different artists have taken field recordings in different directions and suggests why they have done so. Throughout the podcast there are rich recordings of soundscapes by such artists as Hildegard Westerkamp, Francisco Lopez, Annea Lockwood, and Barry Truax, just to name a few. Also featured are several interviews with these artists, who discuss their processes and the meanings behind their recordings. I compare the different lenses through which these artists see the soundscapes around them and what the artists are trying to accomplish with their work. Though R. Murray Schafer helped start the movement, today's soundscape artists have moved in directions Schafer never envisioned. This feature-length podcast chronicles these nuances with hopes that its listeners might start to hear the world around them with a more critical ear.

Download the "Acoustic Ecologies" podcast (25:47).

Dr. Cornwallis and the Hyphy Movement

Come take a magical journey with Dr. Cornwallis as he answers one of the many unanswered questions of the universe. This episode’s special guest is Junior from Wichita Kansas, who asks Dr. Cornwallis about the Hyphy movement of the San Francisco Bay area and what kind of unique culture has arisen from this distinct style of music and dance. This feature-length podcast is chock full of audio samples from Hyphy music and interviews with the artists.

Download the "Hyphy Movement" podcast (21:33).

Suspending Disbelief: Inauthenticity in Modern Popular Music

"Suspending Disbelief" approaches pop music with a critical eye, focusing on the production tool known as auto-tune, as well as the practice of lip-synching. While these may be the most obvious techniques which flag popular music as inauthentic, this podcast argues that criticizing artists for utilizing auto-tune is moot; pop music is and always has been inauthentic since the beginning. Although we're normally able to ignore the fabricated nature of popular music, auto-tune and lip-syncing are simply too overt for us to suspend disbelief. These ideas and more are explored through interviews and excerpts of popular songs ranging from Marvin Gaye's "I Heard it Through the Grapevine" to T-Pain's "Buy U A Drank (Shawty Snappin')".

Download the "Suspending Disbelief" podcast (14:16).

Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère!

My podcast looks at the work of Diamanda Galas in the context of appropriation art, specifically Galas's use of poetry by Charles Baudelaire as a foundation for her vocal manipulations. Examining the relationship between language and sonic setting, or covering, and the radical turn Galas makes from other efforts to set Baudelaire to music, I turn to compositions of Baudelaire's poems by actress Yvette Mimieux, electronic composer Ruth White, and The Cure, analyzing the differences that animate these pieces.

Download the "Diamanda Galas" podcast (22:00).

Remixing Collective Memory: Low End Theory Sound

This feature-length podcast, Remixing Collective Memory: Low End Theory Sound explores collective memory, remix, and genre melding from the epicenter of the Airliner’s Low End Theory Night. For the last few years, L.A.’s Airliner club has sponsored Low End Theory Night, which has exposed some of the most innovative and contemporary artists in hip-hop. One common thread amongst Low End Theory artists is a collective exploration of Eighties and Nineties youth culture, through their subject matter, aesthetic, and sample base. Other strong influences include science fiction, glam, crumping/pop and lock, and metal.

Remixing Collective Memory explores the Low End Theory scene and its artists through the lens of technonostalgia, collective memory/shared experience, and remix culture. Paul D. Miller writes that the phonograph and recording technology produced “a non-sequential form of text, one including associative trails, dynamic annotations, and cross references" (Miller, 349). This is juxtaposed against the writings of Jaron Lanier, who suggests that digital collectivism promotes mediocrity and that there is no unified pop aesthetic of our time. Exploring the musical aesthetics and artists of the Low End Theory scene will reveal that remix and recombinant music acts as a transmitter or instigator of collective memory because the samples involved create an external network of meaning and association that exists between the artists and club-goers. For instance, much of the aesthetics and samples of Future Blap are heavily reminiscent of Eighties and Nineties youth culture, especially as sonified through early video games, hip hop, punk, metal, cartoons, Sci-Fi, and Horror movies. While these elements are often embedded in the music, they act as a three dimensional mosaic for the listener familiar with that culture, connecting the DJ/Artists’ memory to that of the listeners’ via shared experience.

Special thanks to Lunice, Daedelus and Daddy Kev. I appreciate your willingness to help a fan.

Download the "Low End Theory" podcast (32:45).

Improvisational Identity and Sound Tribe Sector Nine (STS9)

For my podcast, I focus on STS9's authentic sound and their style of instrumental music. Most people refer to Sound Tribe as a jam band, but in this instance the band members themselves do not place or categorize themselves into one specific genre. The authentic improvisational style of STS9 encourages a new way to think and listen to music, partly because STS9 uses every type of music style. Not just repetitive of past sounds, though, Sound Tribe brings a new element to the music scene today and shows a lot of growth and development through their on and off stage appearances. Take it or leave it, this instrumental band show no signs of stopping or being placed into any kind of genre other than the genre of "STS9"!

Download the "STS9" podcast (14:05).

Retaliation Vibration: Thievery Corporation, War & World Hunger

My podcast focuses on the band Thievery Corporation and how they use music to promote political awareness, particularly about war and world hunger. The album Radio Retaliation includes songs like "El Pueblo Unido" and "Sound the Alarm." Unique to this album are Thievery Corporation's collaborations with international artists and their incorporation of instrumental sounds and musical styles from around the world, which contrast significantly to the noisy music of Muslimgauze and the idea of Project Peace on Earth. In the case of Project Peace on Earth, Michael Kang of the String Cheese Incident and yoga teacher Gurmukh help me bring out the purpose of the Project in order to show how the concepts of sound vibrations differ from ideas of sonic retaliation.

Download the "Retaliation Vibration" podcast (16:19).

The Clever Children play ... Stockhowzen VS The Technocrats

Students of the "Digital Sound Cultures" (Winter 2010) class responded to a dialogue between two generations of electronic and digital sound producers by making short mashups. The resulting audio work highlighted or resolved tensions evident in The Wire magazine's "Advice to/from Clever Children" (Nov. 1995), which pitted the father of electronic music, Karlheinz Stockhausen, against a younger generation of electronica represented by Aphex Twin, Plastikman, Scanner, and Dan Pemberton. The Clever Children album extends this dialogue into additional works by Grandmaster Flash, Brian Eno, Janet Cardiff, Francisco Lopez, Bjork, Christian Marclay, and many more.



Track List
1. Brad Ginsburg - "criticalmashup" (3:27)
2. Andrew Baldwin - "Technocrats" (5:05)
3. Angela Malley - "Critical Mashup" (3:15)
4. Roxi Carter - "critical maship" (3:04)
5. Leo Kacenjar - "Hunter's Down" (4:49)
6. Kanoa James - "kanoa remix" (4:42)
7. Eric Peterson - "Critical Mush" (3:38)

Download The Clever Children at the Internet Archive.

Click's and Cuts an expression of Minimalism

Kyle Gann attempts to quantify and clarify what it means to be minimalist when reviewing or discussing a piece of music through a set of twelve descriptions of minimalism's process. In looking at Thomas Brinkman's piece, 011, on the album, Clicks & Cuts Vol 2. it is easy to identify how much this work has been influenced by previous minimalist's works and the processes that those works used to create their sound. Minimalism as an art movement avoided decorative trappings or accouterments. In the same way minimalists stuck to very simple tones through the use of static harmony or keeping the harmony related to a specific scale or part of a scale. Though Brinkman's work is hard to place as specific notes on a scale, as a sonorous object there does seem to be a range of clicks, pops, and other sounds that are at different pitches on a progressive scale. In the same way minimalism uses the processes of addition and repetition 0100 also relies on the repetition of certain beat cycles of clicks creating new sounds by combining several cycles of beats on top of one another. Gann explains that this use of repetition and addition brought the idea that minimalism was more of a process than anything else, an idea I don't necessarily agree with.

Brinkman's piece certainly doesn't fall under all of the categories that Gann describes, but then neither does every minimalist piece. "This is hardly a complete list of techniques and features of minimalist music, but it does constitute a family of character traits. No minimalist piece uses all of these, but I could hardly imagine calling a piece minimalist that didn't use at least a few of them." The trouble with Brinkman's piece in describing it as minimalist is that in part it uses the techniques of minimalism while using sounds I would describe as post-minimalist. Its taking these clicks and cuts and putting them into minimalist processes. In part that may be because Brinkman's music came after minimalism and thus was influenced by these other artist's works. Another artist's work that I would posit, might have influenced Brinkmann might be Steve Reich's, Drumming Pt. 1. Many of the processes seem similar and later on in Reich's piece the phase shifting seems similar to Brinkman's, the offsetting of beats to slightly different tempos helps bring the addition and repetitive processes to a culmination. Lastly I would point towards the fact that in both pieces the audible structure is easily apparent, by revealing their structure to all those that listen closely it makes the music both easy to comprehend yet it forces the listener to focus on it.

Works cited

Brinkman, Thomas. 0100. Clicks & Cuts, Vol. 2. 2001

Gann, Kyle. "Thankless Attempts at a Definition of Minimalism." Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. Ed. Cristpoph Cox and Daniel Warner. New York: Continuum, 2008.

Reich, Steve. Drumming, Pt. 1.

The Studio as Composition Vis à Vis MBV

Brian Eno talks about the studio as a compositional tool, representing the shift from "composer" or "musician" to "producer." He writes,

"You're working directly with sound, and there's no transmission loss between you and the sound--you handle it. It puts the composer in the identical position of the painter... He always retains the options to chop and change, to paint a bit out, to add a piece, etc."

I can't think of a more illuminating example of this than My Bloody Valentine's Only Shallow from their 1991 release Loveless. Using the painting metaphor, if a composer's palette consists of the instruments he is arranging, MBV's palette is typical of any other rock band (guitars, a bass, and drums), but the sounds it produces are anything but. The track explodes with a shrieking, spinning, siren only remotely resembling anything a guitar would produce. That sound and most others produced on the record are a product of hundreds of hours of studio time, spent meticulously experimenting: tapes reversed and affected, guitar amplifiers faced directly at each other with a microphone between them capturing the wave phase behavior, etc. It's difficult to imagine the band producing a song as sonically adventurous and dense without the ability to work with sounds in a tangible form in the studio. And indeed, having had the opportunity to see the band perform Only Shallow at the Fillmore last April, I can attest to the fact that the live sound, though powerful in its own way, is distinct from the recording, due in large part to the fact that some of the recorded sounds are simply impossible to reproduce live.

Eno also makes light of the fact that, prior to the availability of recording technologies, people like him couldn't have dreamed of composing music because they weren't technically proficient enough or had little knowledge of its written representations. Wind on Water, a piece which Eno produced in collaboration with guitarist Robert Fripp, is a piece that is sonically, surprisingly similar to Only Shallow, if the latter were stripped of its rock influences. Though produced in a wholly different manner using tape loops, the pieces share more than tonal similarity: they are both likely impossible to recreate perfectly in a live situation, and they were both produced by self-taught musicians. Kevin Shields has gone from (at least compared to guitar virtuosos like Hendrix or Page) a fairly run-of-the-mill guitarist to 95th greatest in the world, due in large part to the sonic creativity afforded to him by the studio used as a compositional tool.

Hi-Fi transformation: Stereolab

If during the time of space age music created optimism over technology in the late 1950’s and 1960’s in France as well as created anxiety or ambivalence in America, then towards the early 1990’s the progression of space age music has taken shape. Stereolab’s, “Stars to our Destination” uses the progression of French and American influence to drive its space pop rock to the next level. Taylor states, “To understand space-age pop music-jazz influenced popular music of the late 50’s and 60’s that thematized the exotic, whether terrestrial or in space, and was intended to be played on hi-fis….” These hi-fi systems were supposed to be played in the home during the postwar era that brought about new technologies that progressed the future. Stereolab revived that influence of previously fringe music of the 60’s rock and used many methods of recording such has hi-fi’s and analog synthesizers to invoke the succession of the space age pop to the 90’s.

Although many saw the hi-fi system a masculine object of desire, women made the transition as well as to adjust to future technologies for the home. With the new technology scares in the 50’s eluding to the fact of the atom bomb many were frightened with the idea of space and the unknown as well as these new technologies given in stride. The mix between men and women and the use of technologies was quite far fetched and as in the present time the work of Stereolab combines the nature of space rock with a touch of both men and women in collaboration. Although the clash of masculinity reeks through the technologies of the 50’s the main stay have feminized relations in the 90’s. “If the federal government’s plan for massive expenditures of income tax dollars on nuclear energy and weapons and later the space race were to be justified, this technology thus had to be made acceptable to everyone, not just men.” The work of Stereolab’s album Mars Audiac Quintet provides the generational gap between the power that both men and women can make new technologies (synthesizers) as well as older technologies (hi-fis) create a sound in which can generate new age space rock with a touch of the older influences to absorbed the space age unknown.

Staying Out the Time

Steve Reich's Drumming, Pt.1 employs the technique of phasing, a kind of collaboration or transmission between two players (or a player paired with a recording) where one player preserves a static beat and the other follows along - miming, transcending and undermining the metronomic rhythm. A structure is generated from the first moment which expands, unwinding throughout the track, the two drums conversing in an exchange of time and action. Through this call and response, Reich maintains a consistent pattern for several minutes and then it breaks down, fragmenting the reply, withdrawing radically from established sound. "The underlying structure operates according to an additive process rather than either a traditional mode of representation or... abstraction" (McClary 295). One drum rolls up ahead up the beat, collapses on itself, and then returns and slows down, finally culminating in an ecstatic clamor. Reich's composition illustrates the divide between repetition and "the formalist excesses of High Modernism" (McClary 295) by providing a framework in which repetition and structural innovation can comment on each other, arriving at a kind of utopian trance in which all difference or disagreement is relieved.

To transmit - "to convey or communicate (usually something immaterial) to another or others... Also, to convey (force or movement) from one part of a body, or of mechanism, to another" (OED). Joy Division's Transmission implores us to "Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance to the radio," invoking the electromagnetic wave of wireless telephony as well as the body's desire to reach another body through physical action. Transmission reproduces through language the commentary on repetition and the new which Drumming, Pt.1 performs -

And we would go on as though nothing was wrong.
And hide from these days we remained all alone.
Staying in the same place, just staying out the time.
Touching from a distance,
Further all the time.

The song presents dancing and listening to the radio as methods through which human interaction can become possible - the repetition of the mandate to "dance" acting as a reification of the "ecstatic structure of time in our moment" (McClary 295). Yet, unlike the visionary fervor which ends Reich's Drumming, Pt.1, Transmission laments the distance and loneliness embedded in the act of dancing to the radio, a kind of isolation which leads to abjection despite the possibilities which repetition opens up. The longing to connect is what animates both of these tracks, whether they are negotiated and absolved through rapture or resisted while still aching to close the gap.

Works Cited
Joy Division. Transmission. Factory, 1979.

McClary, Susan. "Rap, Minimalism, and Structures of Time in Late Twentieth-Century Culture." Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. Ed. Cristpoph Cox and Daniel Warner. New York: Continuum, 2008.

Reich, Steve. Drumming, Pt. 1.

"transmit, v." The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 12 Feb. 2010 .

Dub, Studio, and Additive Vs. Subtractive Process

Brian Eno suggests that recording technology, the multi-track tape, seminally influenced music production by allowing sound to leave the constraints of temporality. The recording practices that emerged transformed the musician and studio into painter and palette. Dense forms of music like heavy metal, dub, and some of Eno’s own tape music assume the studio as instrument paradigm. For Eno, this technological evolution meant an additive process where tape systems would build layers like sediment. In Jamaica the arrival of recording technology was harold to the birth of dub. David Toop writes about King Tubby’s early experimentation, “[Tubby] discovered the thrill of stripping a vocal from its backing track and then manipulating the instrumental arrangement with techniques and effects…for the dubmaster they can displace time, shift the beat, heighten the mood, suspend a moment.” (Toop, 356) Toop highlights a process of pairing down recordings and adding effects that would become common throughout Dub production. The resulting aural phenomenon is rich and cavernous, bearing a nimbus of reverberation and decay. This subtractive effect driven process activates the producer and studio as Eno suggests, but differs in audio aesthetic through its initial act of disassemblage.

Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Guiding Star Dub (1996-1997) and Eno’s Lizard Point (1982) are illustrative of both the studio as instrument, and the differences in primarily subtractive and additive processes. Guiding Star Dub opens with a shattering splash of drums, heavy on reverb and characteristically stripped down rhythm of trumpets. These elements feel almost disparate in their juxtaposition, as though their harmonizing element had been removed. Then a downtrodden voice, undoubtedly sampled and reduced from pop-reggae, appears on top. The aegis of horns suddenly fragment, ring, and dissipate echoing from left to right, leaving nothing but emptiness. The voice returns, but the instrumental track continually falls out from beneath him, creating a space of despair that seems to trail on indefinitely. Perry achieves this feel through chopping up and reducing his sources. Perhaps he subtracted from a previous cut until nothing but drums, bass, and horns remained, removing all binding elements, which formerly rendered the source cohesive. As a sculptor he would then use the tools of the studio, echo and reverb to stretch and bend the shards into a landscape of fluctuation. Oppositional in approach are Eno’s use of tape systems. Lizard Point almost feels cyclic at points. There is a more apparent layering going on. The deep and swelling tones pile up on top of each other forming a tightly joined stratum. The feel of this piece is directly related to Eno’s additive process of recording in which the tape continually records over itself, compiling a new band. Both of these pieces are generated through the studio, with the control panel as the main instrument. However, their aesthetic separation is drastic, and this stems from the difference in subtractive and additive processes.

Works Cited

Toop, David. “Replicant: On Dub.” Audio Culture Readings In Modern Music. Ed. Cox, Christolph and Daniel Warner. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008.

Space Age Masculinity

Taylor discusses how during the 1950s men used their high powered and complicated Hi-Fis to play music in their home environment as an attempt to reassure their dominance. This came about after the war because of the overflow of new technologies available to women. Suddenly the home of everyman was littered with push button technologies, vacuums, blenders and microwaves. To take back some sort of dominance in the home environment, men purchased Hi-Fis. These, machines reeked of masculinity and heterosexuality, reassuring the male of the 1950s that he was still the keeper of his castle. The ideas behind these machines were, like most complicated technologies, men could only use them properly; therefore women lacked the mental capacity to operate such machines.

“The point is, though, not that women were untechnological but that complex technology was defined as the proper domain of the man."

"Moon Moods," a track from the classic album, Music of the Moon, is a perfect example of this. Right from the beginning you are introduced to a melody sung in harmony by men. The atmosphere created is relaxed but sophisticated at the same time. Harps, Xylophones and trumpets lay down jazz influenced riffs, while drums resonate somewhat of a simplified exotic beat. Electronic instruments such as an electric guitar take points in the song to play short solos redefining the melody. Finally the Theremin chimes in and out sporadically carrying the same tune proliferated throughout the piece, but when played with the Theremin it is given an otherworldly feel. This exotic theme plays directly to the male listener. In a sense he is exploring the intricacies of sound, listening to the beats of other worlds and incorporating them into his music library. Other songs in this Space-Age Music genra such as "How High the Moon" by Bobby Christian have a very different feel but still address the concept of masculinity. "Moon Moods" would be a song played by a man who wants to assert his dominance over his household, while "How High the Moon" falls under the category of mood music. A symphony of sound is heard, as whimsical melodies from violins, cellos and bells lull the listener into a relaxed state. Echoed bells give an illusion of space and create the feel of mysticism. ,“…the bachelor could seduce his date with his fancy hi-fi by playing mood music,” says Taylor. Being able to seduce a woman with an “intellectually demanding” device such as the hi-fi must have been a major ego boost to the space age bachelor.

By playing his music, the man’s presence fills the house beyond just the room he occupies. This asserts an overbearing dominance, a reminder to all who hears the exotic tunes and beats, that this house is ruled by a man, and no one has the power to play music like this but him.

Water Creatures of Astra and the Space Age

When Space Age came about in the late 1940s and 50s, it brought curiosity as well as apprehension, and some music sought to reflect the time in an exaggerated way. The song “Water Creatures of Astra” by Russ Garcia illustrates this concept with its buildups and peaks. Even though the sounds of the song are mostly recognizable like musique concrète, the way they are placed together creates mystery and prospect as well as nervousness. The song sounds like melodies tiptoeing across the tape until they approach the ending cut where they spike in surprise. During the space age people became very intrigued by what the future may hold, but fear also came with this interest. In Strange Sounds, Timothy Taylor wrote, “Even though the allure and anxiety over technology and the future were real, many of these albums coped by making fun of it, perhaps attempting to skewer some of the more hyperbolic predictions” (p. 90). The song by Garcia may use some of the ideas of the exaggerated predictions of the future because of the way the instruments vibrate in ambiguity and jump into unexpected revelations.

Like Garcia’s “Water Creatures of Astra,” Louis and Bebe Barron’s “Battle with the Invisible Monster” from the move Forbidden Planet also coincides with Taylor’s concept of the Space Age. This combination of sounds travels through a mysterious atmosphere and stumbles upon unanticipated occurrences. Taylor talks about Forbidden Planet and explains how it represented the anxiety of the time through its plot (p. 93). Even with all the advancement of technology, a civilization was not guaranteed to survive. These songs illustrate the curiosity as well as fear that the future holds.

Bloom

So I was back at the mac store recently getting some more things fixed on my computer when I happened across this Iphone/ipod touch app. Its called Bloom by Brian Eno In thinking about how those that experiment with music seem to eventually turn their creative process into one that can replicated well this is Brian Eno's version. Now you too can create ambient music with the touch of your finger.

Actually I found it pretty cool as it takes your touch and turns it into a note, it repeats your touches in the exact order you did them in or it can randomize them. It cycles as well so it plays and you can insert new touches throughout the piece. Considering this isn't being done on a computer but a peripheral, its fun rather than technical. It has a feel to it and though it isn't for those that are extremely serious about composing it is almost like a casual gaming but casual composing. The songs you create can be saved and shared. Definitely something to check out. ~~Andrew

Ted Riederer

i figured out the name of that artist i was talking about who smashed up the instruments and then played them - Ted Riederer & the piece is called "the Resurrectionists."

Evolving West Coast Hip Hop Microcosms

It was requested by Trace that I include some of the hip hop I mentioned in class the other day. I'm really into a hip hop scene on the West coast that suggests strong influences by DIY electronics, Electronica, Dub, 70's/80's glam, science fiction, pop and lock/krumping, and remix/mashup. I've also included a lot of samples if you've never heard any of this before.





To my understanding most of this music culminates in and around Low End Theory night at the Airliner, a bar in LA. Here is a really interesting documentary project (someone beat me to it) where Daedalus (Alfred Darlington) talks about the fusion of rock, electronic aesthetic and hip-hop in this specific club scene. The resulting music is complex and sophisticated, melding earth pounding bass with throwback funk and punk sensibilities. Here is a brief tour de force of some of the artists breaking ground:

LazerSword:
http://www.myspace.com/lazersword

Low Limit:
http://www.myspace.com/lowestlayer

Nobody:
http://www.myspace.com/nobodyelvin

The Gas Lamp Killer:
http://www.myspace.com/thegaslampkiller

Samiyam:
http://www.myspace.com/samiyambeats

Robot Koch (from Berlin):
http://www.myspace.com/robotkoch
Mixtape:
http://soundcloud.com/robot-koch/robot-koch-robots-dont-sleep

Lunice (from Toronto all of his albums are free there are links on his Myspace):
http://www.myspace.com/Lunice

Slightly Different scene but also involved:

Flying Lotus:
http://www.myspace.com/flyinglotus

Many Low End Theory Podcasts:
http://www.lowendtheoryclub.com/podcast/



Finally, on another note I thought I'd share what came to mind in reading about the space age bachelor pad music. Fat Jon takes on the nom de plume Maurice Galactica for Humanoid Erotica, science fiction imbued, headphone hip-hop. Here are two nice tracks from the album as well as the very "Heavenly Bodies" like album cover.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyTPiLTMDKk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDkTAWSYXjk

Mainstreaming the Mashup

The tagline says it all: "(CNN) -- Some great songs were released in 2009 and thanks to a mashup master named DJ Earworm you can listen to the top 25 releases from the year in just under six minutes."

CNN coverage of DJ Earworm's year-end Billboard Top 25 mashup:

http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/Music/01/25/dj.earworm/index.html

Acousmatic listening

Location: Driscoll Lounge

A low beat, consistent, accentuated by a higher pitched humanoid forced exhalation.
Intermittent high pitched beats, short bursts of them then fading away.
A short sucking high pitched sound.

Soft clicking noises interspersed with a short intake or sucking sound.

A low thrum, constant..

Highly pitched beat muddled by mid to low range sounds, in the background behind the other noises. Further away.

Lower pitched humanoid sounds, punctuated by higher pitched ones, alternating.

Low pitched exhalation, distorted and forced.

A High pitched clatter in the distance.

A new low thumping, regularly spaced, disappears then reappears as it gets louder. Eventually it too fades.

Similar noises but higher pitched with a thumping beat.

Slower this time with longer pauses, a rhythmic beat.
Two beats at a time, same pattern as before, louder,
off beat but close together.

Several humanoid voices in seeming competition.
All in pairs, in a 1-2 progression or a 1-2-2-1 progression.

Humanoid sounds low pitched or just further away, too hard to make out.

Music / Noise / Sound / Silence

The timing couldn't be any more perfect with this upcoming performance from DU's own experimental music group, The Playground Ensemble:

Music / Noise / Sound / Silence
When: Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 7:30pm
Where: Hamilton Recital Hall, Newman Center for the Performing Arts
2344 E. Iliff Ave, Denver CO (303) 871-6412
Tickets: $18 adults, $16 seniors, and free for students from any school and DU/ID
Web: www.playgroundensemble.org

What is music? When is sound just noise? The attempts of 20th-century composers to grapple with these questions generated some of the most important musical innovations of the era. In this concert, the Playground presents music that redefines these terms and examines the boundaries between them.

The performance will include:
Profilo Sintetico-Musicale di Marinetti by Silvio Mix
Suite for Percussion by Lou Harrison
4'33" by John Cage
Sound Patterns by Pauline Oliveros
Clapping Music by Steve Reich
Dots, Lines, Zigzags by Sofia Gubaidulina
The Dead Man by John Zorn
Tabula Rasa by Einstürzende Neubauten

Artists-in-Residence at DU's Lamont School of Music, The Playground Enemble is a force for new music in the Rocky Mountain region. The group strives to provide stimulating performances, expand common perceptions of both contemporary music and the chamber ensemble, and nurture a community around this music that we love.

Brian Eno's "2/2"

A low murmur is joined by two higher, yet still subdued wails from opposite sides. Even more wails join in, but further apart, and seemingly at random. The sounds are elongated and seem to trail on forever, imperceptibly fading out behind even more moans. The moans are harmonious, rarely breaking out of fifths, thirds, and octaves. There is an occasional augmented third in the chaos that sporadically resolves into a major third. The structure of each moan becomes clearer as the sound continues: they fade in quickly from nothing and peak before fading back out into infinity. This chaotic pattern continues until only the slightest hint of a unified, orchestrated rising progression makes its way to the fore before quickly being lost in the infinite, subdued, harmonious disorder. How can such a contained, orderly harmonious sound simultaneously be perceived to be so chaotic and disorderly?

Brian Eno's "Lizard Point"

An eerie whisper. A constant background noise, its volume and pitch rising and falling. Slowly a melody/rhythm forms in the foreground, yet so soft it easily falls into the background. The sounds move backwards, unintelligibly, almost a groaning. As that fades a rhythmic mid-toned sound emerges punctuated by drips and a drop they quickly come in, then out. They deteriorate into digital/metallic sounds and fade. Sounds never quite heard fade in then out. Mid tones sweep in and out like labored breath following a distinct rhythm. A building in the distance, machinery thrumming as it slows. Going down into the basement or down a dark alley, the groans of something left behind. A small sound whips around, barely heard above the original background noise and the soft melody. Everything fades. Why should my hair stand on end, these soft sounds and rhythms bring little peace but the flavor of forgotten things, perhaps best forgotten?

Daniel Pemberton's "Voices"

Ears awaken to a monochrome train station, purgatory. Several sharp and composed tones guide the amplification of a choral roar. Voices in the form of an indistinguishable tide pulsate, forming a low pitch drone, which begins to pan from left to right growing in amplitude. A slow sighing whoosh follows the pattern making the voices recede to a dull hum. Low oscillating tones emerge hypnotically, following the same slow, steady pan. The remnant voices ebb and flow in presence and tempo. The ears are lost in a hazy labyrinth, left then right then left. Several metallic jetties arrive, grinding from low to high volume. Then it’s over. How could anyone escape Pemberton’s space, dreamed into ambience, built from loops and directional nuance?

Brian Eno’s "Lantern Marsh"

It starts with resonating harmonies and ghostlike screams from far in the distance. “Other-worldly Calls” are made, reverberating with the harmonies of the background growls. Echoing and a slow drone give the feeling of being on a strange planet. High pitched vocals and moans surge forward and back accompanied by clangs of movement. Deep drones of bass hum to balance the piece. Then the volume increases and surges only to die back down, awaiting the next wave of sounds. Repetition of change creates the illusion of familiarity. The fact that the sounds are undistinguishable creates the air of mystery, and fear. This leaves me with the question, “Why is it that I’m calmed in this dark world created by Mr. Eno; when I feel afraid?”

Pauline Oliveros's "Beautiful soop"

the beautiful - here it is a disruption of harmony and proportion. the elderly warble of a woman - her sentiment cuffed by a flip, a reversal - widening and branching out, a man's voice with a flange trailing after it, spreading out, increasing his original words. a story, a narrative arc interrupted by a high-pitched tone swelling and dropping; a cloak of squeals amplifying, obscuring the melodrama which struggles for awhile and then reasserts itself. a kind of patter, switching back and forth, to and fro: a conversation enacted between the past moment of utterance and the presence of process in a time that is not now. this juxtoposition elevates language to a position of excess and disproportion, refuses to repair the rupture, refuses and continues to send the word farther into a decadent canopy of noise. nonsense and response; the commentary of a fluttering, electric pulse on human language. finally, the voices liquefy into a synthetic soup, the surge of a dominant electric whine. if articulation cannot, will not join the dance, is speech still a means for locating new possibilities, new potentials for embodying experience?

Dan Pemberton's "Phoenix"

Sounds like an opening into an infinite wormhole swirling around and growling at a high-pitched bell. It speeds up, spinning faster and expanding the space. The resonance creeps closer and progressively becomes louder. It morphs into a shadowy creature demanding an escape before a mellow peace sweeps across to take its place. The melody showers downs, erasing the memory of darkness. All that remains is a pulsating euphoria. Suddenly the song plummets back into the wormhole and swirls to a quick end. How can such a mixture of warped noise create an emanating fear while also releasing an unwinding peacefulness?

Plastikman's "Koma"

Sounds begin to form dense altered noise, as if it is descending into a spiral that speeds up to a recognizable sequence. This beat maintains the melody with a slow fade that brings up a cult beat that makes the objectives of the piece a fluid motion. The up-tempo spiral of beats becomes almost harmonious, perpetuating a stacking of sounds. The mid-range level of the sequence moves with a longer piece that becomes more rhythmic, and the tone becomes a bit louder. The strange rhythm opens one's ears to the hallucinatory, altered state that could bring about a dream state. Does this composition provide a key to our dreams or does it become something more?

The Qualities of Sonorous Objects

Writing reviews based on Pierre Schaeffer's article on "acousmatics" and the "sonorous objects" is not easy, and hardly what we're used to when reading music reviews. Few reviewers describe sounds, describe individual audio tracks or whole albums based on the sound alone, without falling into more poetic descriptions and analogies ("this sounds like a person standing lost in a crowded train station"). Many frequently describe music in terms of their emotional elements. Many reviews also tend to compare to other songs, albums, artists (e.g., "On his new album, Julian Casablancas sounds like Lou Reed fronting the Electric Light Orchestra") or entire genres.

So how do we go about writing in ways that describe sound objects on their own terms, without relying on analogies, emotional evaluators, or comparisons as a way to describe the sound? These terms might help, pulled out of Schaeffer's writings and our discussion, as general descriptors that can become specific based on the individual track you choose:

* Duration of sounds: long, short, alternated, sequenced into rhythms.
* Repetition of sounds: tempos, beats, regularity, irregularity.
* Frequency: high, low, and/ or mid-range tones/pitches, or specific mixtures of those into melodies (tones arranged one after the other) or harmonies (tones stacked or layered at one time).
* Amplitude: loud, soft, foreground, background.

Constant Noise

• Short clanging “tsstsstssts”
• Mechanical, medium to high, “ME”
o Its constant
• High ear piercing grind going up and down as if straining at different parts
• Vocal “Hua” hum of vocal tones, high and nasal.
• Crinkle sounds as someone eats, like a cricket almost rhythmic.
• High sexy undulation saxophone lout to soft, romantic and passionate to high strain and climax to soft flutter.
• Drone of gurgling, repetitive and pulsing
• “SCREECH” 1 pause 2 pause 3 pause 4 pause, “SCREECH!” sharp to fade, “EEE” “EEE” “EEE” “EEE” “EEE”
• “BEEP” high, very high pitch about the duration of someone’s foot touching the ground while sprinting
• “Saw” sound of machine, non tonal, almost percussion like, constant cracking “REE” “REE” “REE” always in bursts of three.
• Cough
• Knock of high heels, rhythmic like, “clock clock clock clock” making the third clock the highest in tone. 1 2 3 4. Reverberates and echoes with acoustics making it fill the entire room. No one notices but me as the voices start to compete and get louder as well. The sound dies down and gets softer, the voices remain the same.
• Girl sings
o Vocal is high pitched. Almost full of air and wispy. Almost super sonic, higher pitch than when your ears ring after a concert. Very raspy and annoying. Probably what a dog hears when you blow a dog whistle.

environmental sound object

short, intermittent scrapes from behind. sh-SHH-sh.... ch-SHHH-sh...sh-SHHHH-sh..... barely audible, high-pitch fade in / fade out. clop Clop CLOP Clop clop. low murmur............ mmmmmMmmMMMmmmmmmmm. in front of me ssSSSSSSsssssss. TAP TAP TAP Tap tap tap tap. huammmmmnnnnnssssss. CLANG! (Muffled, rhythmic, periodic) Bbbb--Kkk--Bbbbb-Kkkk. clop clop clop.

PLTSS.

claptinkleClopclopJangletinkleclopClopCLOPClopclop. low murmur, echo clap YEEEEAAHHhhhh........ Ckkkkkkkshhhhh. tap !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmclopmmmmClopmmmmCLOPmmmmmsqueakCLOPmmmmsqueakCLOPmmmmmmmm

PLTSS.

PL-PLTSS.

clop....clop...clop....clop...clop........ clopclopclopclopclopclopclopclopclopclopClopCLOP!

PLTSS....PLTSS. P-PLTSS.........PLTSSS.....PLTSS.PLTSS. CLPSS...CLPSS.

hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Sound Walk

Here is the link to my sound walk: http://drop.io/amalley.

I had to attach it because the coloring, sizing, and spacing did not show up when I copy and pasted it. It is under documents and named Sound Walk.

Leo's Acousmatic Walk

Here is a chronological transcript of my walk:

• scuff-riff-tear: low frequency, low amplitude, loosely period, reoccurring, but brief
• humanoid rumble: mixed frequency, low amplitude, droning, continuous duration
• low fuzz: mid-low frequency, low amplitude, droning, continuous duration
• oscillating abrupt tone: alternating high-mid frequency, low amplitude, filtered, brief
• high pitch jingle: high frequency, crescendo to med. amplitude decrescendo low, brief
• low rumble: low, very low frequency, low amplitude, filtered, drone, continuous duration
• clop-clop-clop: rhythmic low frequency, low amplitude, resonant
• mid pulsing fuzz: rhythmic, slowly oscillating frequency, medium amplitude, drone, continuous duration

Major change in acoustic density.

• ting-ting-ting: quick staccato pulse yet resonant, high frequency, low amplitude, very short duration
• thud and bang: quick though randomly reoccurring resonant, low frequency, medium amplitude varying duration
• internal pop: quick pop, low frequency, low amplitude, not resonant
• brief resonant tones: distinct, deliberate pitches, short, very resonant, varying frequency, medium amplitude, short duration
• cyclic hiss: low frequency, rhythmic amplitude, not resonant
• deep-to-high gurgle: low to med frequency pulse, med amplitude, couple minutes duration
• sharp clop: much more percussive than before
• delicate jingle: very delicate ting, high frequency, light amplitude, very brief
• soft clatter: percussive, organized, deliberate, filtered, changing frequency low amplitude, very brief
• high frequency fuzz: slightly pulsing, high frequency, medium amplitude, continuous duration
• muted tones: muted tones composing a deliberate melody, low amplitude, very brief
• stereophonic hum-varying frequency, high amplitude, drone, continuous duration
  

She trudges, schlepps, trains, drags..her load

1.

sudden heaving: the response of surface to weight. a complaint thrown towards the box, a blunder. some iron sparking, a collection pocketed in cotton - layering of fabric, flesh. singing split end and then loud mouthed hooves on this unsteady hallway.

2.

a rush of air disrupting the troublesome business of a grumble. some contamination meeting with a wall and one laugh - a signal without answer. guided by the rest, then falling; something caught and spit up: wads of tinsel, shredded. there is an impulse to stop, to make a revision: a hand moving through a flock of bubbles, shattering blood. a kind of gasp, release for awhile. nothing eerie about faded light, this prolonged drone.

3.

insects sucked through a wet tube, tongued. the suture of a threshing edge, unsettled snow dark with roars. let go and quick: bound back, snapping radiance against the air. everything must be a result. from the lips a wail not yet ready, embarrassing admissions poised and unwelcome. the beast withdrawing, layering it's unwholesome self against the road, a chugging of all at once: rubber and the belly. without pause, a piston.

"Stockhausen vs. the Technocrats" (plus Björk!)

Here are music videos and performance footage for works by Stockhausen, Aphex Twin, Plastikman, Scanner, and Björk, plus lectures, interviews, and documentary footage of the artists.



To jump to individual chapters of the video program, here's a direct link to the playlist.

Next, here is Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Advice to clever children," an article from The Wire, November 1995.

And here is Björk's interview with Stockhausen, "Compose Yourself," from "Dazed and Confused" (#23 1996).