Sunday, January 31, 2010

Classical Chicken

Me! And Me! Me me me me...

Musique Concrète

Quatre Études de Bruits (1948)

"This determination to compose with materials taken from an existing collection of experimental sounds, I name musique concrète to mark well the place in which we find ourselves, no longer dependent upon preconceived sound abstractions, but now using fragments of sound existing concretely and considered as sound objects defined and whole."
(Schaeffer, cited in Chadabe, 1997, pp. 26-27)

"You have two sources for sounds: noises, which always tell you something – a door cracking, a dog barking, the thunder, the storm; and then you have instruments. An instrument tells you, la-la-la-la [sings a scale]. Music has to find a passage between noises and instruments. It has to escape. It has to find a compromise and an evasion at the same time; something that would not be dramatic because that has no interest to us, but something that would be more interesting than sounds like Do-Re-Mi-Fa." (Schaeffer, cited in Kahn, 2001, p. 110)

(part of a document given in a workshop about sound, MA Digital Arts, Camberwell College of Arts)

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Onement

One-copy records label
Onement is a label whose concept is to release records at one copy only.
Each recording is not reproduced - there is just one item.




Can you hear the colour of my heart



How we see the world, meaning everything that is around us, is sometimes misplaced by our limitative cognitive sensors, meaning not only our senses but also our prejudices, our judgments.
Synesthete people perceive the world with misplaced senses.
In my opinion all of us do exactly the same with our feelings and emotions.
We misplace them. We don't express them or express them incorrectly. And in the end we become dull.

dull:
1. mentally slow, stupid
2. slow in perception or sensibility
3. slow in action
4. not resonant or ringing
5. lacking sharpness of edge or point
6. lacking brilliance or luster
7. of a color: low in saturation and low in lightness

part of the exhibition on Synesthesia:
Eggshell Clangwave Oscillator System Looking Quiet
Camberwell College of Arts
25 January - 5 February 2010

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Dead Music Object Series 1

Freshly squeezed from Camberwell letterpress








Flash brings nice reflections



thanks James

I've used a CD and a vinyl to print.
Tape is set with borders, rullers and other typographic elements.

New ideas: to print the sentences directly on the objects.
LP: should it be on the vinyl or on the cover?
If I can get the vinyl: Radio Kill the Video Star or some relevant album cover.
Same question for other objects.

Monday, January 18, 2010

Sunday, January 17, 2010

music recorded in VHS

"First album of Wavves was recorded on tape. A format that, as reaction to the hyper-technological drift of the XXI century music, has resurfaced occasionally. The Times New Vicking went further: after trying the tape, did a leap forward and recorded their last album in VHS."
in Ípsilon, Público, 18Sept 2009

The Future of Music

Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution
By: David Kusek, Gerd Leonhard


Brian Eno on...

On listening

"If you think of the mid- to late-50swhen all of this started to happen for me, the experience of listening to sound was so different from now. Stereo didn't exist. If you listened to music outside of church, apart from live music, which was very rare, it was through tiny speakers. It was a nice experience but a very small experience. So to go into a church, which is a specially designed and echoey space, and it has an organ, and my grandfather built the organ in the church where we went, suddenly to hear music and singing was amazing. It was like hearing someone's album on a tiny transistor radio and then you go and see them in a 60,000-seater. It's huge by comparison. That had a lot to do with my feeling about sound and space, which became a big theme for me. How does space make a difference to sound, what's the difference between hearing something in this room and then another room. Can you imagine other rooms where you can hear music? It also made a difference to how I feel about the communality of music in that the music I liked the most, singing in church, was done by a group of people who were not skilled – they were just a group of people, I knew them in the rest of the week as the coal man and the baker."

On recording

"I came out of this funny place where I was interested in the experimental ideas of Cornelius Cardew, John Cage and Gavin Bryars, but also in pop music. Pop was all about the results and the feedback. The experimental side was interested in process more than the actual result – the results just happened and there was often very little control over them, and very little feedback. Take Steve Reich. He was an important composer for me with his early tape pieces and his way of having musicians play a piece each at different speeds so that they slipped out of synch.

"But then when he comes to record a piece of his like, say, Drumming, he uses orchestral drums stiffly played and badly recorded. He's learnt nothing from the history of recorded music. Why not look at what the pop world is doing with recording, which is making incredible sounds with great musicians who really feel what they play. It's because in Reich's world there was no real feedback. What was interesting to them in that world was merely the diagram of the piece, the music merely existed as an indicator of a type of process. I can see the point of it in one way, that you just want to show the skeleton, you don't want a lot of fluff around it, you just want to show how you did what you did. As a listener who grew up listening to pop music I am interested in results. Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop. Did it work? No. We'll do it differently then. Did it sell? No. We'll do it differently then. So I wanted to bring the two sides together. I liked the processes and systems in the experimental world and the attitude to effect that there was in the pop, I wanted the ideas to be seductive but also the results."

On the naming of things

"A way to make new music is to imagine looking back at the past from a future and imagine music that could have existed but didn't. Like East African free jazz, which as far as I know does not exist. To some extent, this was how ambient music emerged. My interest in making music has been to create something that does not exist that I would like to listen to, not because I wanted a job as a musician. I wanted to hear music that had not yet happened, by putting together things that suggested a new thing which did not yet exist. It's like having a ready-made formula if you are able to read it. One of the innovations of ambient music was leaving out the idea that there should be melody or words or a beat… so in a way that was music designed by leaving things out – that can be a form of innovation, knowing what to leave out. All the signs were in the air all around with ambient music in the mid 1970s, and other people were doing a similar thing. I just gave it a name. Which is exactly what it needed. A name. A name. Giving something a name can be just the same as inventing it. By naming something you create a difference. You say that this is now real. Names are very important."

On hindsight

"Instead of shooting arrows at someone else's target, which I've never been very good at, I make my own target around wherever my arrow happens to have landed. You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre."

On the end of an era

"I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. I always knew it would run out sooner or later. It couldn't last, and now it's running out. I don't particularly care that it is and like the way things are going. The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you'd be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate – history's moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber. Eventually, something else will replace it."

Part of a series of conversations that were filmed for a BBC Arena documentary.
Paul Morley

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Art to the Masses

Social Music Objects

What is it?
SMOs are musical objects which enable new ways of interacting with digital music. In the world of the near future, where our digital life resides completely in the “cloud”, we theorize that hard drives will become obsolete and all we’ll be carrying are interactive ID cards, representing not our physical selves, but our segmented digital selves. An SMO thus represents my “music self”.
Those objects can bring social media to the table, literally.

SMOs

At first SMOs eliminate and hide all technology aspects, there are no itunes playlists, nor opening application such as Winamp.
They do so by simply playing music once you interact with them (usually by laying the objects on a small surface or table).
At first, the interface seems minimal and limited to a single action of playing a specific playlist. Still, complex interactions are hidden within the possibilities this system can provide.
For example: by placing two different objects representing two different genres, the current playlist will be a mix of the two genres. Furthermore, one can control “how much” each genre is dominating the current play list – simply by rotating the object.
This allows great level of diversity in managing and playing music in the home environment, and even more on the social aspect, once other people are present. They may use their own objects representing their musical taste and by that a new social interaction emerge as two (or more) people mix their musical taste in a most intuitive and simple way.

[ VIDEO ]

Scenario1: coming home / individual use
Viviana comes home after a long working day, wanting to relax – she decides to put on some music. Opposing to the long and wearing process of approaching the computer, lunching the music software and selecting a playlist – she simply throws a music object on the table, that initiate the music.
In our scenario Viviana uses a dice with 6 different sides, each side represent a music genre. That said, one of the of the dice faces is heavier than the others, so that when Viviana throws the dice, there is a higher probability that it will fall on the heavier face (her preferred music genre). The other faces correspond to other genres – thus providing randomness. At the same this Viviana can select a specific genre, simply buy placing the dice on the corresponded dice face.

Scenario 2: Having a guest / social aspect
As guests arrives, they can use the current music object laying on the table, or other musical objects, either one from Viviana house, or ones they carry with them, assuming they have the same system at home. By adding other musical objects that correlate to other playlists, the music is a mix representing the users preferred music for the moment. The system is connected to both itunes-like music players, and/or online music tools such as last.fm.

Is it visible?
Well, yes, it is present and easily available, we actually had a prototype of the system running and you can have one as well – follow our HOWTO [LINK] guide

Team:
Navid, Viviana, Matteo, Marcello, Aidka
First Song: Flyswatter, by Eels
Second Song: Still got the Blues, by Gary moore

The Remains of Music

WIP
magnetic tape
vinyl
CD
mini disc

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Can you hear WIP

Can you hear the colour of my heart
I'm louder than music, louder than sound, louder than silence
There's noisy silence coming from me

Oblique Strategies: working

The brief is:
Over the 5 weeks of Xmas take 1 image I've presented on the 1st meeting for Sam Wilson's workshop. Apply Oblique strategies to this image.

1."Take a break"

2."Do nothing for as long as possible"

3."Find a safe part and use it as an anchor"
I've worked in the video "Video Killed" building the music on the 'right' time sequence: from 21 dec until the 2nd jan. This the first experience of working with other people music covers, karaoke, ... Some of this people are just filming themselves at home in front of the computer, not even singing a long, just moving to the sound of the music and pretending to sing.
Does it make sense to use this footage?



I have the game now installed on my computer and the next ones will be:

4."When is it for?"
It doesn't really have a schedule...
I've decided to start working on the project for the exhibition and see if it makes sense to merge both together. Eventually I'll use images of me on youtube singing with no sound: "Can you hear the colour of my heart", which is the 'title' of my project for the synesthesia exhibition.

5."Discover your formula and abandon them"
The idea is to recreate, reinterpret, use other people recreations, to create music. Isolate sounds, taken from videos on youtube of people doing covers, and make music with this sounds as if the're music notes.
I could even create a music score.
Or write with video snap shoots on music sheet.
-To listen is to participate
-I'm the audience and I'm the artist
-What do you do when you are listening to music?