Monday, October 29, 2007

guess and tell

Last week in class we each took roles to perform different sections of a structured piece that had interesting rules. Never having done anything like this before with playing based off formula, I found it very intruiging. The cool thing was that it worked very well and didn't turn into a plain chaos. There was actual phrasing just like the music of a jamband that just plays based on experience with eachother.
Actually no, the parts fit even better than that. There was structure to the starting points of every stimulus and reaction and much control over volume for the reactions. This will greatly enhance my creative musical mind!

Chris Lundeen

Thursday, October 25, 2007

What Rhymes with Radio?

Nothing as far as I can tell.

If anyone knows of something that rhymes with radio, go ahead an comment.

I'll post more soon.

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Collaborating music and lights

I think a rare topic that comes up amongst music majors is collaboration, and when it does, it's usually from a one on one talk with a professor or speech given, not taught. You can collaborate with almost anything in life. I believe as long as it has the same tempo or meaning or just a mood of the song then you have successfully produced a collaboration. In this case I tried to find an example and was successful. This is a collaboration of music and lights (typical mixture) that usually Awe's the audience for many bands and variations of music.

Monday, October 22, 2007

The silence

LISTEN TO THAT! Listen to what?

In last week's class we performed a radio music piece that involved tuning stations at random timing according to the order of a sheet with the only limitations being it would span 6 minutes and you could not stay on one station for the whole time. Because of this inbetween stations we encountered a lack of a radio program however, i would argue that we still got tonal music in the "blank" frequencies. I feel this way because there is still noise in the background. If you asked someone to listen after you turned the dial on a radio from a station to a unused frequenced you would get the "Listen to what?" response and it would be common to hear them say what am i listening for there is nothing there, its just silence. This wouldn't occur in some cases where a radio projects the static very loudly, but especially on many newer radios nothing would project and maybe there IS silence. However i would still argue this is very much so musical for many reasons.
Mainly I would argue for that because you can easily compare the empty frequencies to the pauses in songs. Is it not true that just as you are dialed in with your attention in a song when its paused, and you wait for something to happen? Is it not also true that when you have a radio on and it is not tuned to a broadcasting station it makes that same desire for something to happen occur? In my mind much of the effectiveness in music might be in the commonly unnoticed, suspense of pause or silence. THE SILENCE is what brings forth our desire for more, and does its job every time.

Chris Lundeen

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Being a sensitive listener

I am a very sensitive person. Therefor I look at all aspects of life with sensitive senses. Smell, Touch, Sight, Hearing, Tasting. Hearing is the most sensitive of all. The slightest noise attracts me or distracts me. I cannot sleep due to these small noises some nights. Rock music keeps me jacked up. And I wondered why. I always have to gradually turn the volume up, never blast it right away, which I assume you all do too. But can audio music provoke not just emotions such as... Depressed/Sad, Happy/Jacked up, Relaxed, Tensed ext... But actual physical movements? Literally at the sound of something, a normal human being WILL move physically? I think this clip proves my point. ***WARNING*** obscene language is present, please excuse this.


http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/42237/

Monday, October 15, 2007

2 Different Melodies Creating a Third

I thought this would be a good opportunity to discuss, in brief, some of the sonic experimentation of one of my favorite bands, The Animal Collective. On record, the band makes use of many ideas involving sound manipulation and abstract ways of creating melody, but what I want to talk about here is something they do in the live setting. The way the band performs live changes from tour to tour and currently it is just three guys with one of them working with samplers and effects, and the other two singing and using effects. With no use of actual guitar or drum it's hard to convey to someone who hasn't seen them that they still very much so have a live band dynamic, and for the most part this comes through the use of vocals. The key idea behind the new songs they are playing is the idea that during many moments one singer will be singing a completely different melody from the other, and while this at some points seems like it's about to clash and become incomprehensible to the human ear and mind, more often than not the two differing melodies mesh together in and out of creating a very definite third melody. This also ties into some of the transitions between the songs where, seamlessly, one song goes into the other so gradually there really doesn't feel like one ends or the other begins, and the time in between some lingering sound of the ending song melds with a beginning sound of the next song. It is tricks like these that really make for an interesting and mind-blowing music experience. One thing I also found funny was that the band was on Conan O'Brien recently and if you had the subtitles on the description of the two singers was quite amusing. Not sure who was in charge of typing that up! haha!

Click Here

In another class I am taking this semester we listened to "Sonic Contours" by Vladimir Ussachevski. We spoke mainly about the history of the piece and the significance in that manor, but we just grazed the top of it analytically. So I will, for purposes of this class re-skim what I thought about the piece and how it affects me musically.

Throughout the piece there is a dichotomy between sounds that are very tonal in their nature, and those that are more rich regarding their spectrum. The latter of these sounds have more inharmonic spectra (frequencies in between what we would call "notes" in a tonal structure). These two sounds are intertwined in the first section showing relationships between their range and also the specific frequencies present- one just has more differing frequencies (and is probably derived from the first sound [the """"piano"""" sounding thing] but I will not go too much into the source of these sounds.) A similarity in these first two sounds, or gestures from now on, is their almost chordal structure. There usually is an interval in the first gesture or a similar intervalic range produced in the second gesture; only in the second this interval is filled in or has some frequency material between the frequency maximum and minimum.

The second "section" that I noticed was more melodic by far, not being driven by intervals harmonically, but rather- you guessed it: melodically. I wouldn't classify it as a classic lullaby, but its softness does offer a rather delicate nature often becoming more active dynamically but then receding back to its almost docile quality. This section is then accompanied by rich long tones and intervals that provide a background texture to add some color to the sound pallet. Soon this section reveals another instance of the """""""piano""""""" sounding thing and is much more agitated for a period of time. Now we are beginning to experience delay! Or at least a much greater semblance than we have heard so far. Now the melodic gestures are accompanied by themselves and create the intervalic material from well, itself. Then... There... Is... A... Slower... Section... Lots... Of... Space... Then... An alien talks. Well. No. Not really.

Being the humans we are, we immediately notice someones voice no matter how drastically changed it is. This is one source that I oftentimes have a real difficulty listening to and not just shouting, "HEY! I KNOW WHAT IT IS!!!" So I will. Just this once... maybe.

And then... MORE DELAY!!!! I CAN'T GET ENOUGH OF THIS STUFF!!!

The delay that he used in the piece decays rather quickly, losing a lot of the frequencies from the original gesture in only 1 or 2 generations. At the 5th and 6th generation it is a totally different sound. Almost like the difference between the dichotomy of the two sounds/gestures in the beginning...

But I really don't know. So I'll leave you with that for now.

mystical noise

There is something about the noises of things like R2D2 from Star Wars that can just make a person smile and laugh, but also there are things about the sounds that are simply put as cool.
I listened to "Dialogue" by Tenney, and was pleasantly reminded of the R2D2 effect as i will call it. There are what seem like random pitched and timed note sequences that make up the phrases of such music.

However cool all that is, that wasn't the main point of this. The main sounds of this include a rhythmic background that comes and goes, and creeping whistle noises making it reminiscent of the forbidden planet and other scary movie parts but not for long because they are quickly interupted by the above mentioned R2D2 randomization.

What i got from this was basically a feeling of curiosity, which I think is natural when listening to music that both stimulates lurky and random things in my head.

Chris Lundeen

Friday, October 12, 2007

White Noise?

I woke up on the wrong side of bed today and decided that I will throw some sticks in the spokes of "The Sea Darkens" or at least the way we refer to it in an analytical sense. I remember that we used the term "white noise" for metaphorical purposes, but in reality, there was absolutely no white noise in the piece by definition.

white noise
–noun
1.
Also called white sound. a
steady, unvarying, unobtrusive sound, as an electronically produced drone or the
sound of rain, used to mask or obliterate unwanted sounds.
2.
Physics.
random noise with a uniform frequency spectrum over a wide range of
frequencies.

This handy definition from dictionary.com shows us that any structuring of the white noise makes it no longer "white". White noise is a very specific quality of sound that has its own definition. There is no audible semblance of the word "white" or "sea" in white noise. If we subtract enough sine waves through subtractive synthesis we may uncover such a phenomenon, but we would destroy the purity of true white noise in the process by changing it. If we must use the idea of "white noise" let us only refer to it as part of the source or process in creating the piece we heard, but not so much of any exact sound presented in the piece. I sound pushy don't I? Well, I'll stop here. I would probably get quite annoying if I continued.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Xenakis

i listened to this sound clip of the artist Xenakis. It seems to be a gradual air lifting piece that im unsure of. I cant really say a whole lot about it, other then heres an EA piece that i listened to. Its not large enough to get the full feel, but ill keep looking and repost if i find something of a greater extent. Here is the link and info on the piece i heard.

this clip of Xenakis' electronic music includes the main works from his 1st period (1957-1962), - Diamorphoses, Concert PH, Orient-Occident - one from his 2nd, (1969-1977) - Hibiki-Hana-Ma -and one from his last - S.709.

http://www.digital-music-archives.com/webdb2/application/Application.php?

Monday, October 8, 2007

White Noize

Hearing Yausa's musical piece "the Sea Darkens" (from a study in white) helped me realize how something that could be considered quite minimal and experimental was also complex and calculated. The idea that every sound was made from human voices, even if heavily distorted, was something I picked up on right away while listening to it, yet this did nothing to stop me from wondering how each and every sound was made. The complexity comes in with the dual nature of the song, where the male/female, English/Japanese, and feelings of both white/light and black/darkness created a juxtapozed sound that worked both as two and one. It switched from feeling very human to very alien at many points and often felt like both were at play. This lead me to think of the many times in less straight-forward music where the human voice is utilized as if it was an instrument itself. There is less focus on the meaning of words and more on their sound, rhythm, and dynamics. I remember the lead singer of Radiohead once saying, about his lyrics, that more often than not he chooses words for the way they sound over their actual meanings. The other main idea that was heavily discussed in class was the idea of this song unintentionally aligning up with the inverse golden ratio when broken down into parts. It still boggles my mind that these major changes in sound and mood were unplanned, and to me points out the idea that some people are just born with the ability to naturally do something like that in the same way that some people are just good at drawing or picking up an instrument and others are not.

That thing

In music the typical listening experience is in a car or at work or some show of a favorite band right?
Well i've spent a lot of time with not-so-typical music in the past year and studied with the basis that the sound's source is unimportant on many occassions. However different the listening experiences of bands and the studying its funny how much the things i've learned in studying apply to the typical listening.
First of all, when bands play most of the time everyone thinks, yea i know what that sound is its a bass drum or a snare head or you name it. The thing that many people are oblivious to are that many times in live performance and/or recording sure someone played a bass drum or snare head, but the sound that comes out is a desired triggered sound that is pre-recorded and used for that *near perfect* sound.
Also, many sounds that are live or real are now days easy to mix up with instruments because of processing and effects. In fact people have confused keyboard and guitar parts since the 80's rock music of van halen and i'm sure even before that. What this leads me to conclude is that new media music and pop music however different they seem in aesthetic tonality, really value the same thing, that being how something sounds. I've come to see that whatever "that thing" is that we like to here we don't care how it is generated.
It's funny what a year in new media does to your outlook. A couple years ago i would have just called anyone that wants anything to do with the WEIRD MUSIC a little goofy in the head, but now i see how the important sound aspects correlate perfectly with typical popular music.

Chris Lundeen

Saturday, October 6, 2007

Two week-old hat...

I originally wrote this as a response to a posting from Logan, and realized it'd probably be better as a post...

More situations with a variety of difference tones? Yes, please! That'd be awesome. I've had a fascination with what results when two guitar strings are tuned and/or fretted in such a way as to create an interval of a major second or less (i.e. C & D, C & Db, etc), an affliction whose acuteness stemmed mostly from becoming aware of the method behind this band's madness, which involved near-unison, but not quite, notes strummed quickly, repetitively, and at high volume.

I guess my initial openness to something perhaps as strange as the music of Arab on Radar stems from a search for alternate approaches to playing guitar which maximize the instrument's visceral potential, or at least lead to questions such as "That's a GUITAR making that sound?!"

As a tangent from this as well from as the earlier discussion of experimental music often being used for horror films, a piece by the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima," comes to mind. I think that, given our cultural background, it becomes something of a physical ordeal to process information like tone clusters, which I would guess is probably why it was chosen as part of the soundtrack to Kubrick's movie version of "The Shining" - as an aid to heightening the feeling of sensory overload. I was pleased to find that this piece was also used recently in a scene from "Children of Men" in a context removed from outright horror, placed instead in a climatic setting of senseless militaristic violence perhaps more closely aligned with the piece's actual title.

The initial unsettled feeling I experienced when first hearing these dissonant (and what I learned later were sometimes microtonal) clusters of pitches quickly passed into, well, a sort of enjoyment as a result of my being unsettled. This was illustrated when, in class, I paused between the two speakers trying to find the point where someone (who was it again?) said they felt ill as a result of the pitch(es) being projected by the two speakers, sadistic as it may have seemed.

When I found out more about the phenomenon of difference tones last year in a physics of music course, I was thrilled to discover that something to which I had intuitively/perversely been attracted actually had something to do with my perception of these notes adding that additional tone which was allowing me a certain subtle texture achievable without the use of an effects pedal, as well as its lending of an additional element of physicality to the sounds I was making.

If I can find a means to host some clips of audio, I'd like to put up some links to examples of this interest of mine reflected in guitar parts that I've written and recorded with a band.

Also, apologies for using Wikipedia. It makes things too damn easy (and sometimes isn't factually correct, either).

Wednesday, October 3, 2007

WHY DO FANS MAKE ME SLEEP SO GOOD!?

I'm not sure why they make me sleep so good!! Thats why I asked people in yahoo blogs. (link *1 located on bottom). I realized a bit later that the topic was "Why do fans make you sick when you sleep." So my question wasn't quite answered.
BUT I DON'T GIVE UP!
I moved on to another source. Link *2 located on bottom.
HOLD ON BABY.
This isn't about fans anymore hunny, this is about WHITE NOISE! Yes, white noise, the frequencies we all learned about in class.
Whats this? WE CAN MAKE MONEY SELLING WHITE NOISE? People are so stressed out and they just want to sleep dang-it. Sleeping pills just are not enough.
This is my favorite part "Comfort your crying or fussy baby" Damn those fussy babies. Just take a gander and read all of these symptoms that WHITE NOISE can solve. No wonder Dr.T is so relaxed.
We have been working refining our Pure White Noise® for over 20 years. (Ref: link *2 on bottom)
Yes you have it folks. They have been refining "pure" white noise for 20 years. 20 full years of filtering frequencies. They even crossed the line a bit in this example (http://www.purewhitenoise.com/clips/pwn_wav.wav) yes, they named it pwn_wav.
"pwn" in geek terms pwn = Owned. They sure owned me with this amazing job on white noise.

BUT DONT BE DISCOURAGED the cd is only 10.00 dollars. So don't waste 10 seconds of your day filtering a random sound to white noise, let them do it for you with 20 years of experience.
Well as you can see looking for why fans make me sleep so good turned into white noise. I'll just give it a shot and say anything that remains equally pleasant to an ear continuously through the night will keep you well asleep.

*1)http://sg.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060821182653AA52pmw
*2)http://www.purewhitenoise.com/usewhitenoise.html

Monday, October 1, 2007

Sound in a garage

Hello again!
I recently played a show in a garage with my band members from Valia. This experience lead me to a philosophy on sound waves inside and outside of the garage. As we were projecting the sound from inside the garage, it was all being pushed out via the entrance. When you were outside of the garage where the sound was being pushed, it was not that tremendously loud. It was rather quiet. When moved in the right spot, the sound was almost unbearable (not next to the speaker but almost in a certain row back from the speakers and in the middle. I am unsure of what caused this but I would like to know!

Octaves Anonymous

Around and around we go...

Upon being asked to steady a mic cable in class confusion was set in. Dr. Twombly then twirled the cable so it would revolutionize as one big piece, and confusion remained. At first, a wondering came to be about whether profs think students in music dont understand that notes correlate to wave forms, but this did not last long. After talking about this basic concept, it was time to steady teh end of the cable again, and this time things were a little different. Twombly sped up the pase at which he twirled the cable causing it to revolution at two points. Why did he do this? He did it because as he then stated that it was a representation of octaves.

It is funny how physical examples of sight can help one understand something. Obviously it would have been really hard to create a speed where the cord had anything like 10 spinning sections, but the first demonstrations did the job. With physical representation, concepts become much clearer, and in this case it brought much of the new media world towards home so to speak. When you see the basics of how a sound wave works for a pitch with a physical example it says so much more than just that.

Without any explanation concepts of chordal structures and what makes an octave can confuse a person, but seeing how partials go together in a more physical manner settles many questions. To the idea of teaching octaves with a cord, i give this a bravo just for making things so much more simple.

Christian Lundeen

Sign.wav/

My immediate reaction from friends is, "Are you serious?..."

This is when I tell them that I enjoyed a 20 minute span of listening to sine waves interfering with other near-frequency sine waves. I think more people should have this mindset. Sine waves are cool right? Sure. But moving on from the opinion section.

The reason I was so enthralled with this interference is that it produces the difference pitch, or however it was labeled in class. It is almost startling when someone proves to you that there are only two sine waves produced from the speakers by turning one off. BAM. Both the frequency produced by the speaker and the perceived frequency produced by the difference drop out.

My first thoughts are: What else can you do with that difference pitch? Could you perhaps make another difference pitch along with it by interfering with it again? And again? Someone might know. With some time- I will soon know. Or maybe Dr. Twombly will just comment the answer or something to incite me to find out sooner. My second thought is: What if there are several frequencies moving higher or lower- out of synchronization with each other? What happens then? I guess we will see. Two little experiments that have either been tried and will need to be reactivated, or maybe new to some- and need to be explored further to ensure a thorough investigation.

Differing Tones

The experiment of differing tones and how we perceive sound changing by way of nodes was a simple, yet interesting experience. It would be especially nice to see how Lucier's actual set up for an installation / art gallery was done and how people reacted to the shifting sounds. Going to many concerts, I definitely know how where one stands in regards to the speakers can affect the music experience of live bands. Very often I find I am near the very front but off the the far left or right of center stage with one ear a few feet away from the speakers and the other facing away towards the crowd. The idea of Lucier's installation done in a revolving circular room, possibly with the speakers revolving in the opposite direction, was something I had wondered about in class. As well as changing other factors of two different tones, such as them having different pitch or some effects being used on them such as filtering or reverb. The other big thing I thought to myself was actual differences in sound and how the brain might possibly "hear" things different to how they actually are. One such case would be my alarm clock, which has a typical annoying repeating sound. I find that sometimes, on days when I don't even want to get up to turn it off, that if I listen to the sound of the alarm noise in a certain way the rhythmn actually changes. It sounds less like a repeating noise and more like two slightly different sounds set to a different, almost faster beat. Just by changing the way I am hearing and thinking about these two seperate alarm clock noises I can focus really hard and switch the way I hear them and alternate the differing sounds to hear, in my head, a type of dancey melody. It's hard to explain really, but I think it is an apt example of how we actually hear sounds and what we think we hear and then the whole idea of the sound of sound.