How Cunning the Ear is to Deceive Us

This last week I was baffled by the Stuart Dempster piece in the cistern. I honestly could have lost a huge bet on what was actually sounding. Baffled. But after hearing some really loud notes hit later in the piece- I think even without the answer given to us, I could have placed the sound.

I still find it funny that two things can emulate each other so well. Or how one thing emulates another, really. It really startled me when I heard the answer too. I felt like I should have known better being that I have played trombone for the greater portion of my life. It also shows how well it worked as an example for what we talked about afterwards.

Room. Make some room in your music for room. It could be its own genre. "Room Music." It's perfect. No. Let's not go there.

In reality, what makes a room "good"? Is there an 'all purpose room'? Or is it really just to fit the situation accordingly in each individual instance? Probably the latter mentioned. I have a friend that owns a studio, and the sound of the room is one of the biggest influences on every sound. From drums, to guitar, to bass, to vocals, to keyboards... Each really needs its own different space to be captured in their own 'perfect' ways, or at least for the aesthetic they are looking for.

Thinking in this way poses a slight problem- I could be on a wrong path of thought, but- if each instrument requires a different size room to perhaps "create the most beautiful sound" of its own- why does it work out when all the instruments are put together live? Take for instance a big drum kit with a booming bass drum and wicked loud cymbals- you need a pretty hefty room to accommodate just the size of the drums let alone the sound produced. It is a big stretch when comparing it to the small sound-proofed isolation booth needed for vocals to be crisp and 'in your face'.

I understand that there are entire institutions devoted to bringing these physical limitations into our grasp, but what about the amateur musician striving to make their trumpet sound better? I have no idea what I just meant by that, but I'm sure I was going somewhere with it so I will keep it. I guess my question would be: how would someone without prior knowledge learn these precise things without analysis of music to a very fine ...lack of word... state. There we go. To a very fine state of understanding.

I guess my whole post was, in a way, without fully understanding what was meant by the post below, to bring to light some of the intricacies that are needed to create even the most simple music. Whether or not the music is created with an intrinsic knowledge of all of the complexities music has to offer- there has to be some intuition of these to make a musical decision that produces, well, good music.

Most people have it- they can recognize good music and can tell exactly what they like about it. They don't have to use very technical details- but their explanation could be worded in various ways- including anything from a lush personal story of enlightenment and experience, but also one could use mathematical formulas and theoretical statements to accurately describe the same musical situation. It really comes down to individual personality. I would go as far to purport that this is not just my opinion, but a pretty rational explanation of some differences in taste.

I don't really know how to close out this post. I guess I feel like the semester is already over- a bad feeling to have- often letting homework slip through my fingers and relinquishing that pleasant grade for a less pleasant grade. Maybe a few Redbulls later I will change my mind. But anyways.

The post I am trying to close out... If anything- it is better to know that there are other methods of understanding how music makes us feel good, then not to know of them. Bleh! I'm rambling. Time for sleep.

Roomate sound

It seems a lot of people get inspired by wild and crazy things. In my experience nobody ever talks about the simple inspirations in life that are not so professional. It seems I am inspired by such simple things that I can easily entertain myself with the instant beauty of life. This raises a question. Why did music become so vibrantly impossible to enjoy in the professional world? Nobody was complaining with music until money became involved. So now I take my classes at state while being harassed with how much money I am NOT going to make after if I proceeded with a major in New Media or any Music major degree. Reviewing what I just phrased into a smaller word; Suck. If music is your crutch to success then fantastic, but I have to stay away from you because my mind creates gaps between whats real with the human body and sound, and whats logically presented with numbers and values in the common social world. I titled this room-mate sound because I hear things that my bud in my apt. plays and I simply enjoy it without analyzing it or portraying it in the music business. I feel like I'm the only one that does so?
p.s: This is a huge opinion and I do not direct it towards anyone.

it all ADDS up

Additive synthesis was brought up this week in class and talked about how it has been used in more common music. Thinking about it, its a very true thing. Take a guitar riff for example. If you hit a note and either simultaneous or soon thereafter strike any other note the sound that will be projected or amplified has the additive qualities.

The one extremely evident case of this with guitars is what "scenies" commonly call "dissonant chords." Really they aren't chords in a structural sense of the word chord but whatever. Playing two notes half a step apart in pitch is extremely common in today's rock, pop, and metal music. In fact in harder metal or hardcore music its been so used that for a time being there was a slight joke of a movement against bands that used this aspect in their songs because they were just ripping off what NORMA JEAN (website) had come up with and i highly doubt that they *invented the idea* but they do deserve credit for being an early band to coin a style of use for the "dissonant chords."

I see those "dissonant chords" as a very effective example of the additive synthesis in common music because the notes fight so evidently, so that is why i concentrated on that subject so much, but all in all pretty much everything that involves numerous notes performed from one instrument entails additive synthesis in a way. I guess this is another case that suggests new media to be not so different after all.

Chris Lundeen

heavy metal

i was watching a report on some channel i forgot about heavy metal. Twisted Sister was a lead part of this show, where the singer suggested a lot of things to the camera. I guess before my time (1986) or so, some Gore woman was upset about metal music. This lead to the famous "Parental Advisory" label on CD's that have bad language. Assuming this would only warn kids, it just made them more likely to buy the CD due to its intense content.

More Nothing: The Presequel to My Earlier Blogs Yet to be Posted

Aside from reminding me about what every episode of Seinfeld is about, "Lecture On Nothing" was actually more enjoyable to read than I thought it would be. It showed me especially that Cage was a formidable philosopher as well as musical pioneer.

The whole time I just wish I could join into the lecture with some further discussion about what it really connotes. The piece/lecture can be looked at so many ways. In no way is it "nothing"- the irony being that it is quite something. Even the punctuation is structured. Each individual topic he chooses, whether directly relevant or not, can be dissected into another discussion. Even though it seems very tangential it still occupies verbal territory regarding nothing.

I apologize. I can't think very well right now and I feel like I am typing with some weird vernacular that doesn't quite make sense. I think it is a side-effect of sitting, staring at a ProTools session for 5-6 hours straight.

Continuing on...

The work itself really dove into an area of thought that I like delving into everyonceandawhile:

Something that is either totally absolute, or absolutely
nothing or non-existent.

This is really flossing the teeth of extremism in philosophy, but I don't believe "nothing" exists. The only rational explanation for, the ironically stated, "existence of nothing" is that it is only a pseudonym to express an all-encompassing opposite for "everything". And being that everything is still here, intact, to my knowledge, and my perception, to me, gives "nothing" only a function within theory, conversation and controversy... and shenanigans.

The only acceptable answer I have come up with is that: only when and if all perception is gone- from any being that is able to perceive- knowingly or unknowingly---- Then there is nothing. Even if the sun still burns in the sky and the barren Earth still spins in its same direction, no one would be there to prove that it does or doesn't exist.

ARE YOU READY FOR MORE MIND-BLOWING BLATHER!!?!??!

Tune into my next blog.

Thanks.

Frequencies

okay so here is a formula for a sinusoid wave.
Basically it's the mathematical way of saying how Dr.T showed us the Sine Square Triangle and Sawtooth method.

Wikipedia states...(Any non-sinusoidal waveforms, such as square waves or even the irregular sound waves made by human speech, can be represented as a collection of sinusoidal waves of different periods and frequencies blended together. The technique of transforming a complex waveform into its sinusoidal components is called Fourier analysis. "WIKIPEDIA")

I think this is interesting, but I am almost posting to express an opinion across music. Which is... It should never be mathematically equated like this. I think it ruins every aspect of music possible. Knowledge is power but this is a bright meaning of ignorance is bliss.

Talkin' About Nothing!

Just thought I'd pop up a quicky message about the Cage lecture on nothing. After reading Cage's lecture I had a few things that came to mind. The first being the idea that I came into reading this not knowing what talking about nothing would be like and was happy to read that he DID, in fact, go off on tangents talking about some things! The part that was purposefully repetitive and annoying was a bit much even if it proved the point it was trying to prove. I still have yet to form an idea of how this is to be read if one is not to follow the way the words are spread out on the page. Reading it in a normal way sounds right but feels awkward when seeing how the wordings are spaced. I also question what if anything could be played or done in union with the speaking of this lecture. We wouldn't want something to overpower it but alone it doesn't seem quite enough. We'll see.

"My week is your year": Side A of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music

For the blog entry on reviewing an electro-acoustic piece, I've wracked my brains wondering which piece to do, until the obvious hit me: the infamous collision between the worlds of pop-rock and experimental sound as exemplified by songwriter and former Velvet Underground member Lou Reed's cacophonous Metal Machine Music, released in 1975.

For an artist with a formidable backlog of lyrical works, putting out a double-record album with no vocals and drums, consisting only of swirling feedback tones which last over an hour, nevertheless generated a great deal of speculative and mostly negative text from the burgeoning rock lit-crit community who had been previously intrigued with his deadpan deliveries of stories about transexuality and illicit drug use. The album's front photo no doubt fed into misconceptions that this was another live album of his (as in the cover of Lou Reed Live).

Although the album contains no vocals or lyrics, an accompanying set of writings by Reed, shot through with amphetamine-derived sentence fragment babble and alcohol-fueled take-it-or-get-lost antagonism (Reed was a notorious abuser of both drugs) served in a similar capacity. As it turned out, very few of the tens of thousands of people who bought the album stuck with it to find out whether Reed's commentary was indeed a possible lyric sheet; soon after its release, record stores were deluged with customers seeking to return their copies, and magazines like Rolling Stone proclaimed it one of, if not THE, worst albums of 1975. Yet it nevertheless found an influential backer in critic Lester Bangs, who cheekily proclaimed it the greatest album ever made, beating out Kiss' Kiss Alive. Record cutting engineer Bob Ludwig, who oversaw its pressing to vinyl, listened to it in its entirety and compared it favorably to works by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis, both of whom Reed was aware of and revered even before his days in the Velvet Underground. It also proved extremely influential to the nascent industrial music scenes in countries like Germany and the explosion of noise music acts hailing from Japan, and it's even been referenced by name by acts as well-known as Smashing Pumpkins.

So just what does it sound like? Limiting myself to Side A of the first record, it sounds as if it behaves in perfectly logical fashion: the beginning sounds like any sort of regular intro to a sound piece, rising from initial sounds to sustained drones that relate to each other in ways that approximate a major key. Scattered high squeaks intermittently sound at the onset, then fade away, only to return at various points. Different textures move in, linger, and then are replaced by slightly different ones. A sense of space is created via the modulation and "beating" of certain frequencies. Little linear melodies dot in and out, never to be repeated. Bits that sound vaguely atonal are treated as almost passing tones, bent slightly out of a relative key and then returned to rough normality. By side's end, the music concludes much as it began: the inaugural sounds make a return appearance to bookend the first half of the first record

How did he do it? There've been many questions to that effect, and Reed himself was for a time interested in tweaking journalists' perceptions: he once maintained that he deliberately inserted bits of Mozart and Beethoven into the sonic fray. As an acousmatic work, something that wasn't conceived as being performed by a live band, a true recording-as-THE-work, it really shouldn't matter as to how he did it. The sounds ought to be what really counts . . . except on the back of the album he put the words "No Synthesizers," as if to ground an otherwise extreme conceptual leap in a vague reassurance that, "Well, at least he isn't using THOSE!" Seeing as Reed immediately undercut the acousmatic linings of MMM, I feel less conflicted about revealing in this entry that he used two guitars tuned in a certain way, each one leaning up against its own amp in order to feed back on itself (notions of Reich's Pendulum Music here), recorded them into his 4-track in his apartment, split them into four channels and manipulated the sounds, probably similar to how he manipulated lyrics and arrangements in his more usual fare, as the sounds appear to follow a certain logic. It supposedly took him a week to do, and his final comment in his original notes of "My week beats your year," instead of being a boast of a sleep-deprived speed freak, speaks more to the actual production of the album (and also the means by which he flouted a yearly record contract).

In the last couple years, Zeitkratzer, a German group dedicated to playing the "new" music of the 20th century, worked up a score derived from MMM and performed their interpretation of it live in Europe, inviting Lou Reed to add a heavily-processed guitar solo over the last minutes of the piece. Having by then passed the age of 60, he obliged.



A 30 second clip from the beginning of Side A can be heard here

Feedback Pendulums & Lucier Wires

The class session where we performed Steve Reich's "Pendulum Music" was inarguably the most intense thing we've done or will probably do this year. The sheer loudness created sounds that were not only heard, but very definitely felt also. While a few of the other pieces had this element of "feeling" the music in your body, none compared with the magnitude and force of this one. As for the actual experience and what was heard, it was a case where the sounds were the most interesting in the beginning with the microphones movings very quickly and somewhat in sync with each other in a pendulum motion of movement. Hearing how they changed as they stepped out of the same movement and how they worked together (all of 3 of them) was very interesting. As it slowed down the lower, more comforting sounds of one of the three greatly constrasted from the sort of squelchy whooping of the other two mics. I was surprized to learn later that the speakers and sound intake was set as low as possible in order to achieve feedback. The idea that this could not be performed any quieter than this was somewhat amusing! With most of the things we have done I wondered how experimenting with the set-up would change the results, such as adding in other noises that would be picked up by the microphones or setting it up as to where they would all collide into each other at various random points. With Lucier's music for a long thin wire, I think it was a bit hard for me to understand the mechanics of what was going on. It would have been curious to see more things done with that or it going on longer and with a longer wire, but as we discovered, the set-up was pretty temperamental!

pendulum pain

A couple weeks ago we performed pendulum music in the little room that is THE CLASSROOM.
Being that we performed a piece thats loud in a concert hall, it was heard by the entire building and required an awesome yes we're loud sign on the classroom door to the hallway.

As joyous as the torture it brings upon other building residers to hear the volume, nonetheless PENDULUM PAIN is a good way to state what occurs. I was lucky enough to have earplugs on me that day and i must say it was still VERY loud as in the type that you feel the vibrations in your body.

I find this piece very comparable to modern music events because 1-it is performed at a deafening volume. 2-there is some ridiculous distortion. & 3-some people get ticked off by it easily =]

However, I did severely enjoy the pendulum music re-enactment in class, and the awesome frequency responses we were capable of generating just as i enjoy extremely loud modern concerts. So... to this PENDULUM MUSIC i say BRAVO!!!

Chris Lundeen

Penduludium. It's the New Sonata.

Pendulum Music.

Remember when we did that? I almost don't. But I luckily still do. So as a new rule to myself, which I hopefully will abide by, I am going to attempt to update this blog faster than I have been in the recent past. We will see how long this lasts. Probably until the end of the semester.

So... My first question/response to our couple of performances is:

1. How can we reproduce this amazing *THAWOMP!* sound on a second occasion?

This question comes from a specific part of our first performance where Isaac's speaker setup was producing an incredibly low frequency with some pretty sweet low-level distortion (from what I could hear). This sort of sound deserves to be preserved, why?... Just my opinion. This is just one of those pieces that it wouldn't be to bad of an idea to record some results every so often just for chance purposes- especially if you are into sounds that aren't regularly heard- that are also not digitally manipulated with any sort of software. It reminded me a lot of some of the sound-ideas that we come up with in MUSM 437: DYI Audio. Check it out if you are tech*slash*music savvy- or aren't and want to be.

So... I am pretty sure I made enough of a fuss in class for everyone that was there to know how much I enjoyed just one of the sounds produced so I will leave that to rest.

The other times we performed the piece I was not as stunned. Well, I take that back. The sound probably stunned me either way because of the volume even with earplugs in.

But sort of on the same lines of that low frequency- I Wiki'ed for a while the other night and found a little bit more about "brown-noise" which we talked about a while back. (I have no idea what I was looking for, but landed on Brownian motion and the random functions therein and found a whole page of different types of noise. Brown, Pink, Grey, White, Red... all with different frequency/amplitude relationships. Check it out. (CLICK THIS for link). And sorry guys- there is no brown note. Although Southpark references it to an exact frequency...

"92 cents below the lowest octave of E-Flat" LOL!

Thank you Wikipedia. Thank you so much.

So everyone remember to tune your pianos regularly... OR ELSE!!

...

Oh, I remember what I was looking for now... I was looking to see if a perpetual motion machine had been created. This was a cool theoretical device (if it worked).

Still Nothing That Rhymes with Radio

Ah, postponed-post.

"Radio Music" is always a fun piece to perform in my opinion. There is always some difference in every performance that brings to my mental table another sample of sound that I have not heard before. There is always this energy between engaged performers that makes the piece almost more enjoyable to the performer than the audience- I will have to assume this because I have never seen an audience while performing the piece. But we will see soon maybe, possibly?

My critiques for our performance would be that we could have tried moving around the room to find different timbres for each radio's sound, plus adding another form of spacializaion in addition to having the radios placed in differing locations around the room. I remember a movie in Music History where Cage was performing one of his "Circus's" and the performers were walking around while performing, and to me, this would create a more amiable sound- at least in volume, to the audience instead of just raising and lowering the volume from the radio itself. Hey, and the more sound manipulation the better, eh? eh?

I did particularly like the "transposition" of the piece into the FM bandwidth. This could also have a lot more connotations though, this "transposition." What if every performer had access to XM radio and could make a continuous stream of stations that way. I don't know if that is physically possible at the moment, but it would definitely open up a huge range of timbres and sounds that maybe haven't been explored.

Go ahead, try it.

Wolff Orchestra

The multiple pieces we played that were designed and composed by Christian Wolff were definitely the most extensive pieces yet in regards to actual performance, where each one of us had our part to play. This one, to me, seemed to be so very complex for some of the pieces, to the point where I think they would be quite hard to organize if you had an extended amount of groups or orchestras. This was partially the point, as we discussed, and as one could see by the tenth and final performance's rules involving flight, which was kind of amusing. To me, this continued along with a similar idea that the Cage radio session had, where much more leniance is given to the performers and the overall piece involving ideas that move a bit more beyond than just normal performance and composing into the territory of a somewhat philosophical slant. These two especially, but also pretty much every weeks class, pushed the boundaries of what experimental music and music itself in general can be. It also showed a less minimal, but still avant garde approach to electro-acoustic styled music. The idea of chaos coming into play again is what intrigued me, where sometimes the performance may have moments that don't work at all, others work very well and surprise us, and the general idea of how the human mind is at work within itself and among others in this integration and interplay of playing in and out of harmony. Of course, it also proved that music can even be funny and make us laugh, when I hit that little sped up drum beat and the week before with the Cage radio performance and the Native American flute music.

Cage Radio

For me, the class where we performed the Cage piece with the AM (and FM!) radio stations was one of the most interesting and dynamic of all the things we've done so far. The idea of a piece that did have structure and rules, but also left it quite open to chance and the whims of the performers was what it made it for me. The sounds and overlapping were often chaotic or nothing but barely audible static, but then every so often things would come together in an unexpected way. I definitely think moving on to the FM band added another dimension, seeing as how there were more stations that played music rather than just talk radio. With this and other examples of pieces like this from Cage or possibly others came the idea of putting more power in the performer and random chance. There would be no way to ever truly duplicate the performance of a piece like this, which is in many ways a thrilling idea, even if you take into account that any performance no matter how similar won't be an exact duplication. This also kind of ties into my last post, but to an even higher degree, where many seperate sounds or music every so often come together to create a third type of sound.

What to do after college...

Well, if we graduate and have failed to make individual music, i think working for someone like this would be a nice job. My main issue is how do you get a job like this? and where would I want to go after scsu to even get close to getting a job like this?

"I prefer laughter to tears..."

With regards to last week's Cage piece with radios, here is another piece of his involving radios (which he unfortunately couldn't use as originally written) that he performed on another broadcast medium (television) in the 60's:

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2007/04/john_cage_on_a_.html

It's really interesting to note that the format of that particular game show was left behind in order to allow him to play the piece, as well as the fact that union politics entered into and affected the performance of an avowedly lefty composer!