frey

i just dug this up out of an old hard drive – it’s for a project for school, back when i was studying eloctroacoustic composition at Victoria University.

MP3

sociocultural meanings

What it does
————

Compresses digital audio signals, allowing them to be transmitted across computer networks with significantly reduced size and thus cost and technological requirements.

Lossy compression format: discards audio information considered ‘unnecessary’ to the faithful reproduction of the sound. Uses a combination of filtering systems and transforms to turn a time-domain signal (PCM waveform) into a frequency-domain signal.

How it is used
————–

digital broadcast

share files

How its function and use translates into sociocultural meaning and potential use in sound art
——————————

Reduced transmission cost radically lowers barriers to entry
- For free, anyone can share anything with anyone from anywhere on the world.
-> crude
-> defenders
-> anne westphalen?
-> sami abu shumays

Collaboration with people around the world
-> exquisite corpse

Complete shift in the relationship between distributors, publishers, and creators. Why go on to iTunes and download music for $1.99 when you can access piles of high-quality music for free?
-> westphalen
-> speakeasy

Access to vast archives
-> wax cylinders
-> intro inspection

Industry fear of this ->
Copyright strengthening, embedding of DRM into technology to support a dying industry
–> lessig
-> christina
-> intro inspection

in popular music, shift to single, unfocussed listening, loss of fan loyalty: complete commodification, further extension of capitalism into music on one hand;
on the other hand, massive democratisation: myspace

Henri van de Velde against “the degrading levels of easel pictures and drawing room statuettes”:

‘In assuring you that we can make our homes the direct reflection of our own wishes, our own tastes, if we will but choose, i know the answer you are going to give me is that it is impossible. It is only impossible so long as we go on resigning ourselves to the repression of our own personalities and accept the human environment imposed on us with the same mute submissiveness as dogs do their kennels and horses their stables. And this simply because of the unreasoning belief that very few people were born with the gift of self expression – which is not true, and could only be true if civilization had deprived us of a capacity even our primeval ancestors possessed. Will no one stand up to assert the consciousness of having an aesthetic conscience of his own and bring some spontaneous echo of his inner being, some genuinely individual contribution, to the furnishings of his own home?’

- from Henri van Velde, “Memoirs: 1891-1901″, via http://www.socialfiction.org/crystalpunk/

I’ve been thinking a lot about slow life. Having moved from England, where the pace of life is hectic, to Amsterdam, where the pace of life is slower but still fairly fast, I am presently on a residency in a place in Portugal called O Espaço do Tempo (The Space of Time). Here time moves much, much slower.

I’ve taken a job as an interactive installation programmer, four days a week. I’m wanting to keep the extra day for my own projects. At the same time I don’t want to fill every second of my life up. I want to leave time for contemplation in the middle of everything.

I stumbled upon this today: Is Google Making Us Stupid? (via OneGoodMove). I’m finding this idea of contemplation to be extremely important in the artworks that I’m making and planning. Over the last few days I’ve planned and executed a project that takes a video image of a moving scene and turns it into sound. I made it with moving grass in mind, but it should work with any kind of movement. In any case the point of it is to provide a space for contemplation of visual stimuli by augmenting them with sound. In other words, it takes what you are seeing and sonifies it, in a way that makes you more aware of the movement and thus better able to slip into a state of contemplation, where time seems to stop.

I appear to be rediscovering composing music. Again. Funny. This seems to happen every now and again.. I feel like I’ve run out of musical things to say, for a very long time, then someone says something, or something happens, and it all comes back.

Tonight myself and Bobby were in his studio, mulling over a track that I’d started a while back but had never quite finished. And I was asking him, if this was his track, what would he do next? He said something that made an enormous amount of sense, but was something I’d never quite been able to pin down for myself. Which was this: try and find a core for the track, its identity, the one or two elements that define it and make it what it is. They may be there already, or they may need to be added; either way, once they have been found then you can strip everything else away if you want to, and as long as you’ve still got that then you’re doing fine.

Bloody good advice. Thanks Bob. That’s what you get from a man who’s been doing it for 15 years, collaborating with Biosphere and being invited to DEMF/Movement… aah, one day.

Just dug this one up from my archives: seems I never published it. Here you go:

June 28th 2006:
I’ve been thinking about causality in music lately.

Earlier this year, we had a lecture in my electroacoustic music class where we looked at a piece of music that was all about causation. It started with the sound of a clockwork toy being wound up, and then used the metaphorical energy of the winding to make the sounds following it make sense. There was a clear cause-and-effect chain between the elements in the music.

Now, this is academic electroacoustic music; but I’m more interested in how these ideas can be put to use in ‘popular’ music. Specifically, if we think about rhythm, I’m interested in how different elements of a beat can be said to cause different other bits.

I used to listen to Adam F back when he was making drum’n'bass, and one of the things I noticed about his track Jaxx was the way the noises making up the beat at any one time have a noise centre pitch that moved around the spectrum rhythmically — and that over the course of a four-bar pattern this noise centre visits each portion of the spectrum a vaguely equivalent amount. It’s like the beat is a single conscious object that is moving up and down the spectrum.

Berestez is an even better example. Plokcity’s beat is composed of little beat creatures than run around and chase each other. For the first 1 minute the bass/kick and percussive elements share a single space, dancing backward and forward like capoeira players, then listen as the ride symbol and that upward-sliding bass thing swap places, and then when it makes the 2 minute mark, they’re joined by even more — but listen how even at its most complex the beat feels like a single line.

I think this is to do with implying causality. A beat is a small logical system; a good beat is a small tight highly cohesive logic system, where each element is the best possible response to what came before it, and with a clear relationship to what comes after it. Each bit needs to relate to all the other bits, and all the other bits need to relate to it; the parts need to sound like they cause each other.

Right, I’m off to listen to some complicated machinery…

Ok, check this out:

Transformers teaser trailer

Now watch it again with your screen turned off.

If the sound in the film is anything like the sound on the trailer, then I’m really, really looking forward to this one.

So much of the energy of films is carried by the soundtrack, and yet sound is by far the least hyped aspect of films. I’m currently developing an installation for the Wellington Fringe Festival 2007 that deals with this — the idea is, put someone in a room with minimal lighting/projection and a sound system that responds to their movements, guiding them through a virtual space built primarily from sound. I’ve already written the tracking system, using a camera suspended from the roof, but have a lot more experimentation to do.

I’m drawing a lot of inspiration from horror. A horror movie, especially scifi horror, is usually made or broken based on its soundtrack. I’m thinking the Alien franchise and Event Horizon, which are some of my favourites. But it also applies to games too. I’ve been playing System Shock 2 which is significantly scarier than Half Life but exceeds Half-Life’s already impressive sound design. Things rumble, whirr, and pulse in eery and unsettling ways. Try playing it with the sound off and you’ll feel what I mean — it’s just not the same experience. More info on the game, as well as a download link that is NOT LEGAL (good luck trying to legitimately buy a copy though) is available here.

This project is going to be a lot of fun, I think.

I’m investigating groove at the moment, groove as a mathematical system.

I know from my own composition efforts with looping rhythmic material (read ‘electronic dance music’) that, during the construction of a ‘groove’ in 4/4 time, adding particular sounds to particular places in a pattern can make it ‘groovier’, while adding the same sounds to other places in the pattern can make it distinctly less ‘groovy’. By the same token, removing a particular sound that is ‘getting in the way of the groove’ can vastly increase the ‘grooviness’ of the pattern. (Sorry about the scare quotes, I don’t know any other language that would convey what I mean effectively.)

Having done this for about four years now I’ve reached a point of skill where I can do this mostly intuitively; ie, I can listen to a ‘groove’ and tell in my mind (or by beatboxing with my mouth) what sounds to add, and where to add them, to make it ‘groovier’. The development of this intuitive skill has led me to believe that my brain is somehow hooking into the maths of the pattern, that said additions work to enhance certain mathematical properties of the pattern. I’m fairly certain that a lot of the ‘organic’ ‘funkiness’ of a good funk band is paradoxically due to the performers being metronomically precise with their rhythms and accents, and I believe this mathematical basis could be extended further.

So I’m looking for some research into the heuristics of ‘groove’, or even just analysis along these lines. I’m well aware that such heuristics may not even exist, but I’d like to believe otherwise :-)

I’ll post anything that I find up here..

arpi wrote (in response to Musical Structure – Build, Climax, Drop):

frey, your comments surprise me! How can you value machine generated “music” over live musicians’ work? The machines’ outputs are continuous, infinite, saying the same thing repeatedly … until the musician adjust the erformance of the instrumetn/computer … when it says something else continuously, infinitely …

Well, i’d say here that actually a guitar, or a drum, or a piano, also makes ‘machine-generated’ music. the difference between a computer and a piano is like the difference between a piano and a guitar, and the difference between a guitar and the human voice. What you’re after in each case is a feedback network between a mechanical system (wood/metal strings/speakers/laptop/vocal chords), sound (through speakers or acoustic), and some kind of control system (nervous network/brain/instinct, ie the musician).

In each case you’ve got a ‘machine’ (except perhaps the voice, although vocal chords are organic machines) that does something continuously until the musician adjusts its performance. Blow air through stretched vocal chords and they’ll make the same note until the muscle tension changes. A guitar keeps playing the same note after you’ve plucked it (continuosly, autonomously, especially if the guitar is feeding back on itself) until you move your hands on the fretboard. A piano is even more an autonomous machine – you hit a key and bunch of mechanical bits of wood strike a string, which then keeps on playing itself until it dies away and you have to hit another key to change its ‘performance’.

When the piano first came out people said the same thing as they do about the computer now, that it’s not ‘real music’, ‘just a machine’ because the musician has no direct interaction with the strings.

Listening, you can tell the difference between a laptop-musician playing in a band who is actually performing, responding to the other members in the band, and one who isn’t. A good laptop performance consists in changing the parameters of the ‘infiniteness’ of the machine’s ‘performance’ constantly or constantly enough to be a musical ‘fit’ to what’s going on with the rest of the band (if in a group) or to the direction of their set (if solo).

What do you want music to do? Bore the audience stupid? Induce mindlessness? Paint a picture? Tell a ’story’ without a beginning, middle or end? Tell a story with a structure? [tautology perhaps?] Communicate between musiciains and audience? (… sorry) Achieve communitas (a brief ecstatic and emotional state involving a sense union with everyone present and physiological responses such as ‘shivers down the spine’) for some/all people present? … or capable of buying the CD? or finding the midi file? Help everyone have a good time? Sort out identities – who claims a particular genre, or Not?

As a listener, I want music to take me on some kind of a journey around a musical landscape I haven’t visited yet. As a performer, I want music to allow me to share my particular vision of said musical landscape with an audience. Comunitas sounds like the most drastic symptom of the effect that I’m talking about, I think.

I’m not so interested in particular genres, although I have great interest in the freeing of the particular conventions of particular genres from those genres into a wider musical context; for example, releasing the steady 1/1 bass pulse from the mental/musical-political stronghold of ‘electronic dance music’, because in my experience it is not only that but so much more..

Roomology

Drinking whiskey laced with vodka can not not produce drunkenness: a room first entered evokes in you an immediate involuntary mental sensation. The human mind senses environments by instinct, scans and evaluates them for properties like ambience, lines of sight and darkness. The horror genre, invented by the partisan architect Horace Walpole, thrived on the discovery that rooms can scare you to death. The grassroots study to this little understood effects of space on mind that transpires through everything humans undertake, as after all you are always somewhere, is called psychogeography.

So much cool stuff! Aaargh. (Social Fiction)

before I go home:

Pleix are a group of artists from France who make music videos to electronic music. They range from the totally abstract and almost synaesthetic to the highly narrative and trippy-as to the totally bloody amazing.

I especially recommend

‘Simone’

‘Plaid-Itsu’

and

‘Bleip-No’

And while you’re waiting for those to download, here’s some writing by Kodwo Eshun, the author of More Brilliant Than the Sun, a book which looks like this:

So if you go back to 1992 when Cypress Hill started… The first thing you hear is the sound of inhalation, people breathing in, the sound of the hits from the bong. That kind of magnification, that idea of sound microscoping right in close to your ear, that what was fascinating about hip hop, and that was, immediately, when you started to realise that reality was starting to morph.

So as you soon as you’d got that, you started listening again, and then you see that the actual beats started slowing down, become narco-totized. They became crippled; it’s almost like someone had gone out and kneecapped the beats. This is what we call the gangster lean, where the whole gait of the tune limps and you find yourself slowing down, and you feel yourself being grasped by this terrible slowness, this pathological slow motion…

Something tells me I should go read more articles from the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit.