Consonance / dissonance

It’s a small step from equal temperment to total dissonance. Have you ever noticed how all the melodic composers are in to alternate tunings? This because equal temperment is just out of tune. It doesn’t sound that way to me and maybe you, because we’re used to it. But consonant folks can hear it. So they experiment with just intonation, new tunings, historical tunings, anything to fix the out-of-tuneness of the equally tempered system.
Tuning ought to be built on fractions. This note vibrates three times, during the time this other note vibrates two times. Equal temperment has no fractions. It’s based on the twelfth root of two. An octave, from any note, is excatly twice the frequency of the octave below. A chromatic step from a note whose frequency is N, the frequency of the next higher note is N+N*2^^(1/12). Got that? This is not a fraction.
So everyone used to equal temperment is used to tuning that is not fraction based. Every other tuning in the world, as far as I know, is fraction-based. Our tuning is weird and artifical. It always sounds somwhat out of tune, so as to avoid ever sounding completely out of tune. The charecter of older pieces of music suffers for this. But furthermore, we lose a reference point for consonance. A fifth should sound completely consonant. But in equal tempermant, it’s not because the fractions are off. It should be a fraction of 3/2, but it’s something different. If you graph the frequencies, they don’t cross at Y=0, even though they should. Since everything is out of tune, everything is in tune. You lose track of consonance completely. After a while, it sounds just dandy to put a tritone in the bass line. Can’t decide on a fourth or a fifth? Go in between! It does sound fine and dandy, because the tuning is encouraging it.
All notes are equally valid, you know, like 12-tone rows, because it’s just the obvious direction for equal temerment to go. Tritones are great. minor seconds are great. Sitting in the bass on a minor 6th in a major chord is just as good as anything else.
If you see my band-mates, please pass this along….

Jenny gave birth

today. It’s a boy. A big one too. Not yet named.
I was suppossed to have dinner with her last night, which ws her due date. She cancelled. This is good, since it would be awkward to have dinner with someone and she went into labor. Also, Berkeley is along way from Stanford hospital. I guess we could have gotten food in the Palo Alto area.

Planned Obsolescence?

Did you know the new apple airport is faster than the old one (provided you also get new network cards) and is blue-tooth ready (whatever that means) and you can attach a USB printer to it, so you can print acorss the network (provided you are running 10.2 or better). Pretty cool, eh? I was saying that if I didn’t already have an ariport bass station, I’d want to get one, you know, if all my ‘puters were on 10.2 and I didn’t already have older network cards.
I’d been having some problems where my airport network was going down intermittantly. Then, this morning, it started having it’s red LEDS blink on and off while it made buzzing sounds. Not good. Resetting did not help. So I sold it for parts to Elite Computing and got the brand new one, which has many features that I can’t use. yay. they don’t make the old ones anymore and I’m not sure buying a used one would be very smart, given the sad, slow burn mine went through.
Anyway, I took the old one apart, looking for an obvious indicator of something wrong, like a loose connector or a smoking chip. I found nothing. But there’s a lucent card inside. It’s not apple technology. It’s apple re-marketting Lucent technology. The super drive isn’t apple either, it’s panasonic. And motorolla akes apple processor chips. I guess Apple is a software company and a hardware reseller, that’s not bargain friendly. I wonder if people still have “Hackentoshes.” Those were home-brew ‘puters mixing apple-type and Intel-type technology. They were rumored to be fast, upgradable and able to speak both apple and PC in the time when that didn’t happen.

Another call for scores

(this one might have an Esperanto angle)
Greetings from Singapore! ICMC2003 will take place in this Lion City from
September 29 to October 4, 2003. The deadline for music and paper
submissions is March 1, 2003.

While in the last century we had experienced the benefits of the narrowing
of gaps in worldwide communication and the bringing together of world
cultures, one of the unexpected results of the process was the creation of
barriers. For some, the rapidly changing landscape presented too fast a
change in well-established traditions and cultures, and they who live in
these societies set up boundaries to stem the erosion of their way of
life. Though there are valid reasons to believe so, it need not be the
case, especially in music.

This year’s conference theme, Boundaryless Music, celebrates music without
barriers of cultures or genres, without the prejudices of the traditional
or the contemporary perspective, without discrimination against the old or
the young. We cannot totally remove all barriers, but we can make them
more permeable to the flow of information, ideas, resources and energy.
Celebrate an open and sharing environment, experiment with new processes
and technologies, and cultivate new approaches to learning and teaching;
all of which involve interconnected processes instead of isolated ideals.
Boundaryless Music invites all to celebrate a common vision and an
encompassing human spirit in music making.

Call for Music

ICMC 2003 invites music submissions of digital audio, interactive,
multimedia and installation works for presentation in Singapore. Works
related to the conference theme of Boundaryless Music are particularly
encouraged, which might include multi-cultural interfaces, performance
interfaces, spatial strategies or aesthetic approaches.

Performance forces include a piano/violin duo, chorus (SATB), and
percussion ensemble as well as Chinese, Indian, and Gamelan ensembles.

Visit http://www.nus.edu.sg/cfa/UCC/index.html for more on the performance
halls.
The spaces available include the Theatre for afternoon concerts and the
Hall for evening concerts. Installation works may reside in the foyers
(2nd and 3rd floors).

Submission Formats Accepted

For Audio: CD, DVD, ADAT, DAT
Electronic submission of digital audio files (44.1 KHz 16bit format; aiff
or wav) will be available. Please visit www.icmc2003.org after January 26,
2003 for submission procedure.

For Audio/Video: VHS, SVHS, DVD
If the work is for instruments and digital audio, please include a score
of the instrumental part, a recording of the electronics, and/or, a
recording of a performance. For works involving live electronics, you may
include documentation such as a software patch or description.

Music Papers: A music paper demonstration proposal about the ideas and
techniques behind the composition may be submitted accompanying a music
submission.

Send materials to:
ICMC2003 Music
Singapore Conservatory of Music
National University of Singapore
Blk ADM, Level 3
10 Kent Ridge Crescent
Singapore

Call for Papers

ICMC 2003 invites paper, poster and demo submissions on artistic,
musicological, scientific, educational and technological aspects of
computer music. Submissions related to the conference theme, Boundaryless
Music, are most welcomed. Also related to the conference theme is a
special paper session titled, Education on Music and Technology, which
welcomes contributions from all.

Electronic submission of papers will be available. Please visit
http://www.icmc2003.org after January 26, 2003 for submission procedure.
IMPORTANT: Please note that all submissions to this years conference
should be photo-ready for publication. All papers should be submitted as
postscript or pdf files. The names of authors should be reflected on the
paper.

Send materials to:
ICMC2003 Papers
Singapore Conservatory of Music
National University of Singapore
Blk ADM, Level 3
10 Kent Ridge Crescent
Singapore 119260

Deadline (postmark) March 1, 2003
All materials MUST be received by March 7, 2003.

Website will be available at http://www.icmc2003.org after January 26, 2003.
Please send enquiries to enquiries@icmc2003.org.

Has anyone seen my reverb?

la la la la la la
I love doing work that doesn’t get used. That’s why I loved working at AOL.
I don’t mind so much writing a piece of music that never gets played. If it’s tape, then someone might stumble across it and hear it. or I can put it on a CD. If it’s notated, then I can save it for future calls for scores. Anyway, I like it (usually) and maybe I learned something. It can live in my portfolio until such time as it is needed. you own music, poetry, novel, whatever can take up all of your time and you don’t begrudge that time. No, you just begrudge the world for failing to recognize your genious. such it is when you work for your self.

Grumpy Update

Yes, I’m grumpy and this is what I’ve been doing:
Christi came home Tuesday night without her laptop. Wednesday morning, we had to go pick up Joe/Zeppie and take him to the OM Tape archives. Apparently, last time it was aproblem because we showed up at 9:02 instead of 9:00 and made the building owners late for something. So we have to be there absolutely by nine and Christi has left Zeppie’s address on her computer, which is in San Francisco. This story is not that exciting. We arrived at 9:00 and spent several hours cataloging stuff, including something called the World Ear Project. Back when KPFA was extra cool, they would just play any sonds that anybody recorded. Tape recorders were kind of expensive then, so they had a smaller number of potential folks sending stuff in, and people who had tape recorders generally knew how to use them, so these are pretty high quality recordings. None of the tapes had numbers, but they all have titles (and the shelfs are numbered). So we were typing things like, Cat eating cat food in a backyard on Regent Street. with the actual address. Part of the reason we’re figuring out what is in the archive is so that we know what’s there, but it’s also so we can go to potential doners and say, “Here’s a fabulous recording that needs to be digitized! Give us the $400 we need to do it!” I’m not sure that this 1971 cat is going to be a big money maker. Christi was joking that we could go knock on the door of that address and see if the persons living there now want to pay for restoring the tape. Charles Amirkhanian glanced at the tape and told us whose house it used to be and a bunch of background. He can look at any tape in the archive, no matter how minimally labelled, and tell you all sorts of things about how and when it was recorded, who was there, what happened, etc. Anyway, he found a tape of the premeire of Lou Harrison’s piece King David’s Lament and got very excited about doing it at the OM9 festival and decided he had to go right away to digitize the tape and left it behind.
So after lunch, we went by his home/studio with the tape and recorded it to protool. Charles did not clean his tape haed at first, until it was questioned about how dirty it might be. Zeppie wanted to photgraph it. There was actualyl a piece of tape stuck to the head. We had already played the Harrison tape a few times when this was noticed. I think the tape might have been degrading with every play…. We spent time trying to mix it there. Maybe and hour. Then I decided maybe it would be better to do it on my own computer.
So I went home with the Pro Tools project and spent an hour or so trying to get the super-optimal mix. Then Christi and I went to Spanish class. The teacher there is obviously spending his non-teaching hours writing a thesis on second language acquistition. He spent the first 45 minutes or one hour of the class talking about how language is acquired. Interesting. I can’t imagine he would beleive in Esperanto as it doesn’t jive with his theories. He told us that the most important conversations we would have with folks would be practical. “Where is the bathroom?” “What’s your phone number?” “What’s your name?” “What’s your passport number?” etc. So we learned some shape named and colors and then he gave us cut out squares, rectangles and circles and some phrases for locating things and had us play battle ship. Then he talked extremely briefly about shops and then gave us lists of clues for where the shops fit into a map that he gave us. He said, “There is only one correct solution as there is only one correct solution for all of my exercizes. . . We can talk about why this is some other time.” La tienda de X es entre A y B. or something. I’m not sure how much spanish I learned, but I feel good about second language acquistion. I think the exercizes would work really well for a lesson 5 in Esperanto. At lesson 5, you’d have some vocalubulary and kinds know how the language works and then you could learn more vocab, like shapes, colors and locations by doing exercizes and you’d probably feel a lot less lost than I did.
Then we went back to Charles’ house with a zip disk of the Harrison piece. He was super-excited because he was reading Lou’s biography and the piece was mentioned, but the biographer didn’t know it had ever been preimered. Apparently, it’s for four hands on the piano and the players interlock arms. The piece is beautiful and is a very moving lament. I wish we could have had it at my mom’s funeral, for example. It’s wonderful. Anyway, Christi was looking at the bio and discovered that a choal version had been recorded in the 80’s and was included with the CD that came with the book. We put on the CD and found a excellently recorded, well produced, much bigger and hiss-free version of the same song. Charles said, “wow! Adn we were wasting time with that rinky-dink piano version!” yes indeed. non-profit is just like for profit, but without the profit.
So I went home and couldn’t sleep and so woke up late for my thursday volunteer in the OM office day and we missed BART so drove in. I could not wake up until I had a double latte. I had one yesterday morning too. I think I’m addicted. Anyway, so they gave me a list of people whose addresses I was suppossed to locate. This list included Lilly Tomlin, Sharon Stone, etc. You always hear about cyber-stalkers. I think they are after people less well-known. I couldn’t even find Lilly Tomlim’s agent. Not that I had an idea of how to search besdies google. I tried searching for “Lilly Tomlin” AND agent, but apparently she is widely quoted in signatures, something on the order of, “I always wanted to be someone when I grew up. I guess I should have been more specific.” Nerds love this quote. So I found many lengthy usenet archives of discussions for AI groups on intellegent agents.
Another guy that I was suppossed to look for was named “Eric Smith.” Whoever suggested him for this list had gone home. Was he a famous photographer? Does he lives in Texas and do topiary as an avocation? Has he writted books on pharmocology? All-righty. So I got through a large chunk of my list. (You can actually find a name and address for a Sharon Stone agent on a geocities site. Is it real? Who knows.) and gave up on the rest and came home and spent 20 minutes eating a banana and petting my dog and went back to Charles’ house for a meeting on the MPR project. This was 7:00 PM.
Minnesota Public Radio wants to air a show on modern music that draws material from the KPFA tape archives. They would give us money to digitize the tapes and possibly pay the people working on it. I got on the list for the project as a sound engineer or producer or composer or something. This show would be broadcast on NPR-affiliates, so people all over the country could hear it, except in much of the Bar Area, cuz KQED doesn’t do music anymore.
So we show up at Charles’ house at 7:00. We assemble in his studio and he says, “why have we called this meeting? What is this about?”
We remind him and on the meeting goes. He set the tone, kind of, with the start. At some point, he told Christi and I took keep a diary, so years from now when we try to remember details of the music scene, or a particular composer, we can go look at our journals and remember stuff. My blog, especially today, is dedicated to that vision. He also said, during an interview that will air tomorrow at 4:00, that peple who wanted to reminis about Lou Harrison could go to the Other Minds website to do so, because there would be kind of a memorial message board. Such a board does not currently exist. Christi does not work on Fridays. Really.
I got home at around 9:45 – 10:00, had a plate of noodles with canned pasta sauce (actually, bottled pasta sauce) and then typed away in my blog. Mitch would be concerned about the pasta, but my lunch was very healthy. There is a wonderful vietnamese restaurant near the OM office. I had string beans with tons of garlic and mushrooms and it came with a salad and wonderful soup (pinapple and vinegar were in it, as well as tamaters and tofu and other vegetable matter) and rice (ok, it was white rice) and an Imperial roll (this is a new phrase for me. It’s a really long fried thing, similar to a spring roll, but bigger). It was great. Especially the soup and garlic beans. The thai place across the street from it also has excellent soup. The mission is a soup neighborhood. I just made that up. I’m tired. I’m grumpy. I want shepherd’s pie and asparagus and artichokes for dinner, but I’m suffering for art.
tiffany is asleep, so I can’t work on my symphony (this situation will persist until digidesign ships digi001 drivers for OSX). Phillip Glass only has time to write music in the mornings, so he would only write down musical ideas that came to him during morning hours and thus trained himself so that now he only has musical ideas in the mornings, or so he wrote in a book that I read. That’s discipline.

Christi says that I am making all the mistakes that new symphony composers make. Apparently, if you have the whole symphony playing at once, you’re kind of assaulting the audience. She says this is a bad thing. She says, “the symphony is the strings. It’s like if you have a dress, the other instruments are just the lace.” I said, ok, I’ll cut the strongs from my thirty second introduction. She said, “No, then it’s like you’re just warpping a person in nothing but lace and it’s all see-through…” The conversation sort of went astray around then…

THE WOMEN’S PHILHARMONIC
CALL FOR SCORES

PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY

2003 Music in the Making: New Music Reading Session
Deadline: Friday, March 14, 2003 (in the office)
Complete Guidelines: http://www.womensphil.org

The Women’s Philharmonic invites women composers with U.S. legal residence
(no age limit) to submit orchestral compositions that have not yet been
performed by a professional orchestra for our 16th annual Music in the
Making: New Music Reading Session.

Up to four works will be selected anonymously by a panel of distinguished
musicians for performance by The Women’s Philharmonic in a reading session
in San Francisco at the end of May 2003. Selected composers must attend
the reading; an honorarium is available to help defray travel costs. Each
selected composer will receive a professional orchestral reading, a
professionally-engineered recording for non-commercial use, and feedback
from conductors, musicians, and audience members.

Please consult guidelines at http://www.womensphil.org
for required
instrumentation and length, as well as application procedure.

The Women’s Philharmonic
44 Page Street Suite #604D
San Francisco, CA 94102
Telephone: 415-437-0123
Fax: 415-437-0121
Email: nmrs@womensphil.org

Music in the Making is made possible, in part, through the generous support
of The San Francisco Arts Commission.

Another Call for Submissions

AETHER FEST #1: Festival of International Radio Art

June 1-29, 2003 at KUNM fm ^?Albuquerque, New Mexico USA

Presented by KUNM, Nonsequitur, and Harwood Arts Center

Artists and producers of all ages, nationalities and disciplines are invited
to
submit recorded works of experimental radio art (and visual art on the theme
of
radio) for possible inclusion in this juried broadcast festival/gallery
exhibit. We
seek work that challenges what radio is and does and explores what it might
be and
could do.

^?adio Art^?is here defined as a work made specifically for radio broadcast,
with the
intention of expanding the creative and aesthetic possibilities of the
medium. Such
works may or may not employ elements of other established genres such as
radio
theater, spoken word, performance art, h?iel, text-sound or sound poetry,
electroacoustic music, soundscapes, documentary, talk show, etc. They might
be
^?bout^?radio, subverting or exploiting the conventions and expectations of
the
medium; or, they might make use of the radio apparatus itself as instrument
or content.

Aether Fest will be broadcast on radio station KUNM 89.9 FM, located at the
University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA (also webcast at
http://www.kunm.org). Primary broadcast hours will be each Sunday night from
8:30
-11:30 during the month of June, 2003, with the possibility of adding other
hours
throughout the month.

There will also be a concurrent exhibit of visual art related to the theme
of radio
(broadcasting, transmission, aether, communication, airwaves, disembodied
voices,
etc.) held throughout the month of June at the Harwood Art Center in
Albuquerque;
this will be juried by the HAC^? Visual Arts Committee.

Artists may submit both audio and visual work, and are encouraged to do so
if they
work in both media.

Awards

Cash awards of $300 US will be given to each of three outstanding audio
works
selected by the jury.

Submission Guidelines

^?There are three general categories for submissions:

  1. recent work (made since 1998)
  2. older work (made before 1998)
  3. shorts (complete, unedited pieces of 5 minutes or less)

We are most interested in recent work, but will of course consider works
created at
any time (recorded works which have been released commercially are ok, too).

^?You may submit as many different works for consideration as you wish.
Please
specify if each work has been previously broadcast, or if this would be a
premier.

^?The content of all works submitted must be completely original; straight
adaptations of published texts or works which use previously released
recordings of
music or sound by other artists as a ^?oundtrack^?will not be accepted.
(allowances
will be made for creative use of sampling; if you have questions about this,
contact us)

^?We prefer individual works that are 25 minutes or less, but longer works
will be
considered. (for long pieces, we suggest that you also include an edited
version as
an alternate choice)

^?CD, CD-R or DAT is preferred, but cassettes will also be accepted if the
artist
does not have access to digital recording media.

^?Send 3 copies of each work submitted (you may include more than one work
per
CD/tape; please use index points on CD or DAT, or clear silences separating
pieces on
cassette)

^?Please include biographical information, credits for all participants, and
anything
else you want us to know about the work (3 copies). It is a good idea to
mention what
qualifies the work as ^?adio art^?if that is not obvious.

^?For works in which text plays a major role, at least half of the text
should be in
English (we are flexible about this); however, works in other languages will
be
considered, especially if an understanding of the text is not crucial to the
appreciation of the piece. Works without any spoken text are also
acceptable.

^?Volunteers and Staff of KUNM may submit work to be considered for
broadcast, but
are not elligible to receive cash awards.

^?Sorry, we can not return your submitted materials. All recordings etc.
received
will be archived at KUNM and Nonsequitur.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES FOR VISUAL WORKS

^?We are seeking artwork (realist, abstract, conceptual, etc.) which somehow
addresses the theme of radio.

^?Artists who are submitting audio work may also submit visual work.

^?You may submit as many different works for consideration as you wish.

^?Works may be two- or three-dimensional, in any media (sorry, no video). We
will
consider proposals for small-scale installations, but keep in mind that
gallery space
is limited. There is also a large space for sculpture outside, between the
building
and the street.

^?In the case of conceptual works which may or may not yet have been
created, please
send a clear written description of what you intend to do. If you have
slides or
photos of other relevant work, please include them.

^?Do not send original artwork! If your work is selected, we will contact
you about
shipping it.

^?Send clearly labeled slides or prints for each work you would like to
submit for
consideration. Include a separate sheet of paper with title, dimensions,
materials,
and year made for each work. Also include biographical information and a
brief
statement about the work.

^?If you wish to have your slides etc. returned, you must include a
self-addressed
stamped envelope. MATERIALS SUBMITTED WITHOUT SASE WILL NOT BE RETURNED!

^?There is no entry fee for this exhibit, however artists who are chosen to
participate must pay for the cost of shipping their work to the gallery. The
festival
will pay for return shipping.

^?IMPORTANT NOTE: While the Harwood Art Center does not carry insurance for
artwork,
they do provide 24 hour video recording surveillance for the galleries as
well as
security patrols during off hours. Artists whose work is chosen will be
asked to sign
a release stating that the Harwood Art Center, Nonsequitur, and KUNM will
not be held
financially responsible for any damage or theft that may occur, either on
the
premises or in transit.

Deadline

All audio and visual submissions must be received NO LATER THAN APRIL1,
2003.

Send audio and visual submissions to:

Aether Fest
c/o Nonsequitur
PO Box 344
Albuquerque, NM 87103 USA

For more information, contact Steve Peters at Nonsequitur:

tel/fax: 505-224-9483
e-mail: nonseq@swcp.com

Information updates will also be posted at http://www.kunm.org