When I was studying analog electronic music in The Hague at Sonology, one of the techniques that Kees Tazelar really promoted was the re-working of recordings. The composer would record a sound and then playback that recording though another patch, like a filter or ring modulator or something and record the results of that and then repeat the process with the new recording.
This approach is nice because the resultant material has a link with the material that preceeded it. When the composer mixes it all togther, the material has a connection which may be audible. I used to record completely new patches with new sources for every sound in an analog work, but now I also do a lot of reprocessing.
My idea is to do a collaboration with other interested electronic artists. We could each publish one source sound and then publish some reprocessing of that sound and other artists’ sumitted sounds. We could then mix some of those sounds (with possibly some extra processing) and make new pieces with these collaboratively devloped sounds. These could then be released as a group via a netlabel or something.
I think this might be fun and if people document what they did, it could also be a nice learning tool. Anyone interested?
Tag: music
Gaga Over Information Overload
Penguin Books has a video about the future of publishing that’s quite clever. The cleverness starts halfway in and requires you to have watched the first half, so stick it out.
Part of what struck me about the video, aside from it’s strategic use of where it put the word “not,” was how it places caring “about what Lady Gaga is wearing” in binary opposition to caring “about what Gandhi did 50 years ago.” I find this annoying, because I actually care about both. I mean, obviously a liberation movement was more immediately vital while it was going on. But, for example. Gaga’s costume in the prison yard of the Telephone video, with the lit cigarettes on her glasses, is also interesting and worthy of discussion. It’s less vital than liberation movements that are going on right now, but I would not want to have to rank it against other bits of current cultural output.
Indeed, I think what she’s wearing is some of the most compelling part of her performance and presentation. Her music is acceptable pop music. Some of it is catchy. But the visual images in her videos and her glammness is stunning. In this age, visual information is much more dominant than audio – we read more than we hear and we watch even more yet. Videos and the written word are the primary means of dispersing information. So even though she’s ostensibly a musician, her artistry seems to be concentrated in the visual sphere.
I went to a club last night and the people I was with were all talking about her (well, they were shouting over the din of exceedingly bad DJing). Jack Halberstam (of Female Masculinities fame) has got a blog post up about her. There’s almost certainly conferences being planned at this moment: Gaga and Postfeminism etc etc etc. She is the hot thing right now in pop culture and cultural studies and litres of virtual ink are being spilt over her – by people who are “smart” enough to care about Gandhi. There are elitists who want to posit that the analysis of images and ideas within a culture s vapid. Such a bias is not only wrong, it’s boring. Snobbery is tiresome.
Gaga is all so very now, immediate and new and clamouring for attention. Blog posts, news articles, tweets, facebook wall posts, background babble, shouting in clubs. This is the kind of effervescent pop phenomenon that one could easily miss while on an extended holiday or just taking a break from media saturation. The hype is not, in and of itself, vapid, but some portion of it is intended to be distracting. The hype machine is less interesting than her fascinating videos. It constitutes part of the information overload that keeps one from working on one’s thesis. I want to create a piece that is about information overload in some way.
For my MA thesis, I incorporated the distracting barrage of information directly into my work. At that time, I was overly interested in cable news cycles and pundits. I could sample them directly. But sampling Gaga directly raises additional copyright issues as making music from her music is clearly a derivative work and requires permission. Also, her musical work is already music and her visual output is tied to her music.
So is it possible to engage her work within the genre of electroacoustic / noise music without taking recognizable samples of her directly? I could calculate her frequency spectrum and work within that or copy some of her timbres, like pitch correction or the glitchy repeating in the telephone song. But even if I was able to successfully allude to her music, it’s still not what’s most interesting about her. I’m instead taken with the changing contexts of corpses in Paparazzi and Telephone. And by her use of repeated images and objects to tie her videos together: the gold jaw of Bad Romance is referenced again in Paparazzi, where the dogs of Poker Face also make a brief cameo. There’s a boom box in Telephone that is also in a previous video (which one?!?). The camera lingers on it. The viewer is meant to notice. How could that be explored in my music? Or can it? Am I just distracting myself?
Gaga Video: Post Feminism and Americana
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard about Lady Gaga’s new video for her song Telephone:
What to make of this? There are some who want to put a feminist label on it, due to Girl Power-esque elements of the video, like the truck labelled “Pussy Wagon” and the female symbol at the end. However, I think this is a misreading. She references Thelma and Louise rather obviously at the end, but much of the rest of it is from exploitation movies of the 70’s. My media studies prof gf notes that these existed in dialog with the women’s liberation movement and thus the video is squarely within a post-feminist context.
I have the same problems with this video that I have with Natural Born Killers (which also clearly influenced it) in that it’s really much too violent to be camp. Lesbian serial killers are the stuff of exploitation films. And, of course, that scene of underwear dancing in the prison is just standard male-gaze music video stuff. It is slightly more complex than this, in that there are ‘real’ seeming lesbians in the prison yard scene. The leather clad dyke appeals to actual lesbians and is less easily placed in the male gaze.
There is also a lot of talk about product placement, which I think is also more complex than it initially appears. I’m sure Virgin was happy to be in the video and may even have paid for it, but Polaroid doesn’t even make those cameras or film anymore and I’m sure Wonder Bread and Miracle Whip are not exactly pleased to be linked with poisoning people to death. I think, instead, the products are meant to construct an image of Americana. The tropes of the video: prison, joshua trees, diners, cheap motel rooms, serial killers, pick up trucks, fuzzy dice; are all very american. And Gaga and Beyonce dancing around in pseudo Wonder Woman outfits at the end explicitly reference the flag, as do the placemats in the diner.
Thus we have an image of America made up of incarceration, road trips and violence. And the formation of (national) identity through consumption. Which may be depressing accurate, but at least is heavily satirised in the video. This is the biggest video in, like, forever and it’s been banned form MTV: the final sign of their irrelevance, as it’s easily viewable via YouTube. The major disappointment is the music. What in that song called out for that treatment? The lyrics talk about being too busy dancing ata club to talk on the phone. It’s ironic when paired with a prison fight scene, but, still, wtf? It’s no Thriller. And yet, every time I watch the video, it grows on me a little.
Taking Your Ball and Going Home
Who owns online communities?
First, a case study.
Jeff Harrington, the founder of New New Music has been pushed too far / is having a strop. He’s renamed the site to “New Music Shit Hole” and deleted a lot of the content. He sort of explains why in a post, in which he complains about trolling. The money quote is, “The big picture is that this online new music scene is basically 200 guys in their basements with MIDI synthesizers.”
What’s mostly surprising about this development is the timing, as the community had been surprisingly active lately. Last week, they released a compilation CD which they were selling will all proceeds going to benefit Haiti. Shortly before that, there was some sort of contest in which a great number of one minute pieces were created. The site actually was mostly populated by hobbyists (in their basement with synthesizers), which is why I wandered off. But aesthetically, some of the stuff that was going on there was worth paying attention to.
On the other hand, the number of people in the world who actually have interesting things to say about music is very small. The number of people who have interesting musical thoughts is less small, but putting those thoughts into words is notoriously difficult and can distract attention from putting those thoughts into music. So when composers (or wannabe composers) start talking about stuff, they most often start talking about sort of side issues like technology or gossip about composers or economic issues related to music or some kind of ideological whatever.
Tech talk abounds on the internet. It should be avoided if you actually want to make anything. Hobbyists don’t tend to have any good gossip and their economic interests are sometimes contrary to mine. As for ideology, well, this is probably where the flame wars came from.
So, in frustration, Mr Harrington renamed the site and deleted a bunch of content. There were no other moderators, and possibly no backups. The site, which was clearly valuable enough to have been doing projects even last week, is dead.
Community Projects are Hard
I worked for a couple of years on one for my day job, back when I was a music hobbyist and then, after enough time has passed for me to kind of forget the horror, I spent a year or so helping moderate a high traffic community on live journal. There is practical advice that helps: Have a team of moderators, enough so that if one or two of you wander a way for a bit, things keep going. Replace moderators when they burn out, which will take two years max. Have rules against stupid flamey crap and enforce them. Ban disruptive people – even if somebody is a god of music, it doesn’t mean they can participate well in a community.
One person trying to run a large community site is pretty much a guarantee that it will go up in flames. Which it did. And with it went the content. But any number of other things could have gone wrong. Ning, the company that hosts it, could have inexplicably decided to shut down this particular site (maybe they’re uptown). Or they could have decided to cease operations entirely. These scenarios expose a fundamental flaw in the way that community sites are structured.
Pyramid Shapes
A lot of people make content, but a few people own the distribution of it. I’m not talking about copyright, since a lot of the more casual content, like playlists, that populate this kind of site shouldn’t be under copyright anyway. But users spend time creating these and their discussions and comments and this is what actually forms the substance of the community. Yet, a very small number of people – the admins, the moderators, the hosting company – are actually the ones directly in control of the integrity of the content. The power of a community is it’s distributed user base, but all of it ends up concentrated in a single point of weakness, vulnerable to the whims of a few.
Web pages make for very nice front ends, and they can be a great way to organize how content is accessed, but in terms of actually working well with actual people who are not being paid to run them: usenet has a way better model. All the pre-web stuff was better designed for working with communities and had robust implementations. IRC and usenet are distributed. The content lives across many servers. There is no master copy. No one person can destroy a group. And yet groups can still be moderated.
The web was originally exciting because of inline images and some formatting stuff. It looked pretty. This might not sound like much, but back in those days, you couldn’t open a windows-created word file on a macintosh computer because there was nothing in common for different platforms of home users (a situation we are happily skipping back towards with phones, but that’s another post). The web let you actually all look at the same document. And it had pictures!
There’s a lot of reason to love that. We can all have our own little space which is ours and put up pictures of our pets and it was centralized in that we controlled our own space. Corporations loved the control aspect. They could entirely run some service and get users to pay for it and show them ads and if any user becomes annoying, they can be expelled. It’s sort of feudal, but, ooh, pictures! The major trend of web 2.0 is not user-generated content, since the early days of the web were all user generated. The major trend is centralization and corporate control. This transfers ownership of our content to a much smaller groups of people or individuals. They may treat it appropriately, or they might get really tired of trolls and delete all of it.
Everything old is new again in 2010. We need to go back to usenet and use it the basis for how community back ends work. If Net New Music wants to get going again, they should probably reconvene there.
It’s that time of year
At the very end of December people’s minds turn to two things. Submissions for ICMC and New Years Resolutions!
Resolutions
Every year I resolve to do the same things. Play more gigs, write more music, work harder, etc. But I know a few people who have made much more extreme, massively life-style altering resolutions. I’ve contacted them recently to see how those went and will be reporting on it, citizen-journalist interview style, in the next few days. If you made a major resolution and want to tell people about it via my blog, please contact me.
ICMC
When I was working on my MA, I actually had a much better method of workflow. When I was writing a piece, I would blog drafts of it and solicit feedback and I would make presentations of it as a work in progress at public venues. I need to start doing this again. Now, I mostly work alone, only demo-ing my stuff for my supervisor and then submit it to things that want a premiere. And I don’t write about my ideas as often. This results in me having weaker pieces that take longer to write.
Unfortunately, these kind of CV boosting events, like ICMC do want premieres. I’m submitting to the piece plus paper category and I haven’t quite work out what to write about what I’ve written. Heck, the piece doesn’t even have a name yet.
Like most of the pieces I’ve written since my MA, it actually started out as several unrelated ideas that coalesced together. For a long time, I’d been thinking that I should record the sounds of trains, so when I was home for my uncle’s funeral, I recorded CalTrains and Amtrak to go with my collections of UK and EU train sounds. Also, I had been listening to a lot of drone music, especially the music of composer David Seidel. I noticed that though his music was drony, it was not at all static, but had a lot of variation. It was also calming when I was having anxiety issues. It seemed to involve FM tones and I had just coded up some libraries to deal with Dissonance Curves and FM tones, so I wanted to do something that could tune drones on-the-fly based on randomly generated FM parameters. Finally, I analyzed some of the bell sounds I recorded with trains and used those also for tuning.
So basically, I just took a bunch of sounds that I like and put them together. I don’t know if it’s interesting to talk about why I like train sounds. My flat in Berkeley is a block from the tracks and I could hear train whistles blowing through the night. Some of my neighbors object tot his, but I found the whistles kind of mournful and haunting. They are a bit siren-like to me. Sometimes, when I hear the train whistle blow, I get an incredible longing, that I wish I was on the train as a passenger or a hobo, going someplace – anywhere the train is going.
One day late in 2001, or early 2002, I was sitting at a café near the tracks and a freight train started to go by, loaded with hundreds of army tanks. They were clearly going to be deployed to Afghanistan. The café fell silent as well started uneasily at the military cargo.
I focused on my California train sounds instead of European ones just because American train sounds are just much more train-y. My mom used to complain that the “new” diesels sounded dull in comparison to the old steam engines, but the diesels are more interesting than the electric ones. Also, the signals and many of the trains have bells on them. CalTrains, in particular is loud and full of very characteristic old-fashioned train noises. There’s something kind of ironic about such old-timey-sounding trains serving Silicon Valley.
But there’s also something kind of not-ironic. Infrastructure and transit in America has been neglected for decades. Like, trains are the future, I think. But the glass-topped observation decks of the Pacific Starlight Express, while being a good way to get to Oregon or Washington, is more of an antique than the future. The romance of train sounds comes from it’s sort of time capsule quality.
I took my train recordings and put them through feedback and comb filters and plate reverb and other things to make them slightly less obviously field recordings. I used the drone tunings for tuning these effects also, which has hopefully created a bit of glue between the train sounds and the drone sounds.
Perhaps, I should also talk about Dissonance Curves. Tones are considered consonant if they are close enough together in pitch to have slow beating or if they are far enough apart to be outside of each other’s critical band. (http://jjensen.org/DissonanceCurve.html) Any sound is made up 1 or more tones, so if you want to know if two sounds are consonant, you can compare all of the tones of sound A with all of the tones of sound B. In order to create a Dissonance Curve, you compare a sound with itself at a shifted tuning, and then graph how relatively dissonant all of the possible tunings are. The minima on the curve are places where consonance is high, and thus make good tunings. (http://eceserv0.ece.wisc.edu/~sethares/consemi.html)
I wrote and published some code for computing Dissonance Curves in SuperCollider, which I used in this piece. I like open source code and I like sharing, which, incidentally, I think it related to why I like trains, because they both involve collectivized solutions and building useful infrastructure.
So the underlying drone sounds are FM tones which are tuned according to their dissonance curve. On top, there are train recordings, run though filtering processes using the same tuning. Then, closer to the end, the tuning and timbre both shift to one based on some of the bell sounds. Some of the tuning is kind of fudged, though, because I detuned the left and right by 10Hz. I did this because of dubious claims that such a detuning effects brain waves and makes people feel more relaxed. I wanted ot write music that would do good things for my general anxiety levels. This makes the tuning not work in one channel, but it’s only slightly off and this isn’t rocket science.
I need 4 or 8 pages in proceedings. How many words go on a proceeding page?
TuningLib
Yesterday, I added a new Quark to Supercollider, called TuningLib. It requires a recent version of MathLib, one with the Bessel.sc file included. There are several classes in the new Quark, all realted to tuning.
Stuff from Jascha
Scala – This class is based on the SCL class from Jascha Narveson, but updated so it’s a subclass of the newer Tuning class. It opens Scala Files, which means you can use the large and interesting scala file library of thousands of tunings.
Key – Jascha’s SCL file also did a bunch of other interesting tuning-related things that the newer Tuning class does not, so I put these features in Key. It tracks your key changes and can interpolate between a given frequency or tuning ratio and the current active Scale.
Dissonance Curves
DissonanceCurve – is, I think, the most interesting part of the TuningLib. It generates Tunings, on the fly, for a given timbre. Give it your spectrum as lists of frequencies and amplitudes, or as a FFT buffer or as the specs for an FM tone, and it makes two different scales.
The first kind of scale it makes is the sort described by Bill Sethares. If you want to see the generated curve, you can plot it. Or you can get a Tuning from it. Or, you can get a scale made up of the n most consonant Tuning ratios. This is used in the second section of my piece Blakes 9
The other sort of tuning it does is based on a similar idea, but using the classic Just Intonation notions of consonance. Like with Sethares’ algorithm, every partial of a timbre’s spectrum is compared against every partial of the proposed tuning. It calculates the ratio between the frequencies. This could be 3/2, for example, or 115/114 or any whole number ratio. The numerator and denominator of that ratio are summed. In just intonation, smaller numbers are considered more consonant, so the smaller the sum, the more consonant the ratio. (This sum is related to Clarence Barlow‘s ideas of ‘digestibility.’) Then, the resultant sum is scaled by the amplitude of the quieter of the two partials. So if they are 3/2 and one has an amplitude of 0.2 and the other of 0.1, the result will be 0.5 ( = (3 + 2) * 0.1). This process repeats for every partial, and the results for each are summed, giving the level of dissonance (or digestibility) of the proposed tuning.
After computing the relative dissonance of all 1200 possible tunings in an octave, the next step is to figure out which ones to select as members of a scale. For this, the algorithm uses a moving window of n potential tunings. For a given tuning, if it is the most consonant of the n/2 tunings below it and the n/2 tunings above it, then it gets added to the Tuning returned by digestibleTuning.
I don’t have any sound examples for this usage yet, but I’m working on some. I don’t know of any pieces by anybody else using this algorithm either, but I’m sure I’m not the first person to think of it. If you know of any prior work using this idea, please leave a comment.
Tuning Tables
Lattice – This is based on some tuning methods that Ellen Fullman showed me a few years ago. Based on the numbers you feed it, which should be an array of 2 and then odd numbers, it generates a tuning table. for [2, 5, 3, 7, 9], it creates:
1/1 5/4 3/2 7/4 9/8 8/5 1/1 6/5 7/5 9/5 4/3 5/3 1/1 7/6 3/2 8/7 10/7 12/7 1/1 9/7 16/9 10/9 4/3 14/9 1/1
You can use this class to navigate around in your generated table. For otonality, adjacent fractions are horizontal neighbors, so they share a denominator. For utonality, neighbors are on the vertical axis, so they have the same numerator. Three neighboring ratios make up a triad. You can walk around the table, so that you’re playing a triad, and then pick a member f that triad to be a pivot. Then, create a new triad on the other axis that contains your pivot as one of the members.
For example, one possible walk around the table, starting at 0,0 would be [1/1, 5/4, 3/2], [5/4, 1/1, 5/3], [3/2, 4/3, 5/3], [8/5, 4/3, 8/7], [8/7, 9/7, 1/1] etc. As you can (hopefully) see, the table wraps around at the edges.
I’ve done several pieces using this class, usually initializing it with odd numbers up to 21. Two examples are Beep and Bell Tolls
Undocumented
There is also a class FMSpectrum that will compute the spectrum for a FM tone if given the carrier frequency, the modulation frequency and depth (in Hz). I would like to also add in a class to calculate the spectrum of phase-modulated signals, but I don’t have the formula for this. If you know it (or where to find it), leave a comment!
Terre Thaemlitz says
When I look at members of the transsexual community who are actively seeking out physical alteration of their bodies… on the one hand, of course, I have this anti-essentialist reaction against it – that it’s about transforming bodies towards something that is, in the end, I think, conservative. But on the other hand, I do have this envy of their body transformations, which I feel are beyond my capacity. And part of that is because of the mythology in the media about the beautiful, successful transsexual. Because that’s who you see in the media. You don’t see the people who got totally fucked up, and look totally fucked up – which I would say are the majority.
— The Laurence Rassel Show “On Transgendered Authorship”
Terre Thaemlitz thinks that “the majority” of transsexuals “look totally fucked up.” And published an mp3 saying so. Why should we care what this Julie Bindel-wannabe thinks about trans people? Because Thaemlitz is one of two serious composers that I know of who are out as trans.
Yes, he says, “I’m a transgendered identified male (both my transgenderism and maleness are documented in different public spheres)” (http://www.chaindlk.com/interviews/index.php?interview=TerreThaemlitz) No, that doesn’t mean that he’s ftm. He’s a very subversive guy who dresses up like a woman sometimes in order to fight patriarchy. Or something. I’m not being terribly respectful of his identity in that description, but I’m afraid I’m infuriated by his failure to respect mine.
And terribly, terribly disappointed. I wrote about this guy in MA thesis and thought he was awesome, especially since he was not only out as trans, but tackling trans issues head-on through his work. He would show up to very technology-based music institutions in Germany and give lectures that were full of gender theory. He, like me, wants cis people to have to think about gender sometimes and how it’s constructed. Heck, the purpose of this project I’ve quoted from is purportedly, to “[deal] with issues of authorship and copy-left from feminist and transgendered perspectives.” (Ibid) But for him, despite using a plural form on “perspectives,” I guess there’s only one legitimate gender position and that’s his. People who transitioning are “reactionarily conservative,” passive victims of the “medical industry” He says, “The transsexual community that focuses on transitioning the body . . . in the end, it’s capitulatory.” (“On Transgendered Authorship”)
He says, authoritatively, as a cissexual,
For me, transgenderism arises out of the problem of not fitting in. and it comes out of those crisis – not only a gender crisis, but a larger crisis of social relations. It’s not so much a crisis of the body, which Gender Identity Disorder and the medical industry want to present it as being about.(Ibid)
It’s really great for him that he’s never experienced dysphoria. But he goes from “I’ve never experienced dysphoria,” to “therefore it must not exist.” Well, a lot of men have never experienced any kind of trans identity. So if bloke A has never experienced wanting to cross dress, does that mean that it also doesn’t exist as a valid perspective?
A big part of Thamelitz’s problem is that he sees trans a a radikewl thing to do. A way to challenge patriarchy. Alas for him, my goal is not to “[indtroduce] a new breed of masculinity into the male workplace, into the male social structure.” (ibid) Heck, I don’t think my masculinity is especially new or in any way subversive. Indeed, I object even to the idea of “the male workplace.” Alas, the gender balance of some workplaces is not ideal, but I can’t imagine terming any place the male workplace. What kind of feminism and transgenderism in this, pushed forward by a male-identified man? I’m starting to think he doesn’t actually understand what these words mean.
The piece I really loved from him before dealt with problems faced by intersexed people, who were often forced into surgery as babies, which was treated as an emergency when it was not at all life-threatening, just a social crisis. But now I fear he doesn’t see IS people as people, just as symbols of non-gender essentialism. Living examples to prove his theory. The ultimate gender queers. And I wonder why he feels like he has to exploit trans identities and IS identities to prove his point.
This is profoundly disappointing and an example of how divisions can be sewn among trans people. If there are multiple perspectives, one of them must be wrong, because I can be the only right one. And in his case, it’s not enough that he be the only true transperson, he has to fall into a load of transphobic, sexist, and transmysoginist language. Does he really think he isn’t just repeating a tired old trope when he says that transwomen are ugly? Trust me, this idea has been well circulated previously. It’s tiresome, untrue and sexist as hell. Judging women by their appearance is not feminist. Maybe the reason the German government backed out of broadcasting this is not because feminism is not “sexy” (http://www.chaindlk.com/interviews/index.php?interview=TerreThaemlitz) but because he’s failing at it.
Terre Thaemlitz, I used to think you were cool.
Who’s Streets?
I found a call for recordings for a politically themed musical thing, which always makes me happy because this sort of thing motivates me a lot. It’s got an item for consideration, “How do we view the fact that our instruments for organising sounds are linked to instruments designed to control? Is there a relationship between organising and controlling?” (the whole thing is at http://www.sonoscop.net/pop-up/convzepp09ENG.html)
So I was thinking I could use some recordings I made of people chanting at the G20 protests in London and then juxtapose that with recordings of military chants that I could steal from YouTube.
And I am astounded, perplexed and unnerved that pretty much, crowds watching troop drills sound exactly like crowds at protests with chanting. I would not be able to listen to a recording and know if I’m watching an implicitly normative crowd cheering for marching at a football game or a bunch of leftists out to reclaim the streets. (I mean, the words are different, but playing recordings for a non-english speaking audience looses that signifier.)
This is kind of worrying because it suggests that there’s not so much difference between how these positions are articulated or perhaps even between the positions themselves as they manifest in a public space.
Which manifestations are empowering and which are alarming would only seem to have to do with whether your own advantage is the one being promoted. Of course, I think there’s more to it than that. Are we supporting the rights of people who already have power or people who do not? But this suggests that both positions might fill the same needs for observers and participants. And somehow that’s disturbing me. Maybe people are more empowered by being reactionary. How can we reach out to them in that case?
Speaking of protests, there’s one today about biofuels and I don’t know whether or not I want to go. Burning acres of rainforest to grow soybeans for fuel has a worse carbon footprint than burning a whole lot of petrol. Is there a role for non-waste oil biodiesel in a green, sustainable model for fuel? I don’t know. I really believed in biodiesel.
Questions for composers
When you compose, do you start with the form or with the content? Do you decide on the structure before you gather materials? Do the materials suggest a structure to you or vice versa?
I’ve never been so good at structure and I really need to do something about this. I wonder if there are any good books on musical structure? Maybe I should try to write some stuff with historical structures. Not sontata form, though. When I was at Wesleyan, I realized that I wrote everything in sonata form and stopped doing that, but I didn’t really replace it with any other structures, just sort of trying to intuit things for every piece.
What pieces are best to study for cues into form and structure? I’ve been thinking of looking at John Cage’s Square Root pieces, something my supervisor has encouraged.
But I think I should also get a book. Back in my miss-spent youth, I thought I wouldn’t need to know anything about non-electronic music because the world was shiny and new and out with the old and in with whatever I was doing. So I didn’t pay a lot of attention in some of my classes. Much like when I was 17, and similarly had an idea that I would never need to know statistics.
So, due to a lack of diligence in my studies, I’m totally unclear on how this works at all, really. I imagine that it’s like having a bunch of plastic boxes, like you use for food storage. And in each one, there’s a different sort of food. Each like a course of a fancy meal. So they all go together, but they’re all separate. However, they probably have ingredients in common like olive oil. Or pumpkin both in the pie and the soup. However, this metaphor is crap, as it’s non temporal. Pumpkin soup is a gestalt. It doesn’t change over time. Maybe it’s like stanzas in a poem or chapters in a book? I imagine that stanza length is decided a head of time, whereas chapters seem to stem from the content that fills them?
Is it ironic not to have a structure of understanding to apply to structure?
Unpopular Music
Once in a while, I get the idea of doing algorithmic pop music and labor intensely on it and then come up with something and then walk away horrified. So, um, if anybody’s interested, here’s the latest incarnation of this cycle: S’onewall.
The samples are recordings of the largest-ever transgender rights protest in the UK, which took place last month. And then there are drum beats. The bassline uses a subset of the Bohlen-Pierce scale, in just intonation, with notes chosen according to a variation of Clarence Barlow’s “digestibility” formula. To determine the relative consonance of two ratios, divide one by the other and then take the result and add the numerator to the denominator. A lower number indicates greater simplicity of the result and thus a higher degree of consonance. There is ugly code, available for your perusal. Quick examples are at the bottom of this post.
This is not on my podcast because I’m not so into it. I have ideas of what might fix it, but I suspect those ideas are wrong and it’s taken up so much time already. However, as un-enthused as I am, I think somebody, someplace might want to remix this. Or maybe I’m flattering myself.
I wish I could offer the pieces sent to different tracks, but, ha ha, the only way I could get this to record was with Audio Hijack, because there’s a logic problem somewhere in the code which causes it to hang right at the end and chasing that bug is just more trouble than it’s worth.
Code Example
Ok, using the ScaleLattice: First declare a scale with some ratios in it:
~scale = ScaleLattice([[1, 1], [11, 9], [9,7], [7,5], [5, 3], [9, 5],
[11,5], [7,3], [27, 11], [27, 25], [25, 9]], 3);
That’s not the scale from the piece, but it’s also a nice one. We can then try to construct a melody, by getting some step-wise motion:
~melody = ~scale.getNsteps(4);
And them maybe jump to the most consonant note from the tonic, followed by one step down:
~melody = ~melody ++ ~scale.getIstepsBelowJconsonance(2, 0);
Um, and then let’s get the most consonant pitch from the last one in the melody:
~melody = ~melody ++ ~scale.consonanceAtFloat(0, ~melody.last);
Yeah, this probably sound bad, but we could play it:
Pbind(dur, 0.3, freq, Pseq(~melody * 440, 1)).play;
I have a hypothesis that with the combination of relative consonances and stepwise motion, you could abstract music theory to the point where you could construct a meaningful melody from an arbitrary scale. Such that the program doesn’t know the scale ahead of time. The missing piece is notes that are too close to each other, which I suspect will have very high relative dissonance. I may think on this further, or I might go back to doing whatever else it is that I do.
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