Month: March 2022

Introduction and Graphic Scores

What is a graphic score? A graphic score / graphic notation is a way of representing audio in a visual form in opposed to using the traditional musical notation.

A graphic score is open to interpretations and none can necessarily be right or wrong as it is a personal response to the music/audio. It became popular in the 1950s to challenge the idea of classical musical notation.

Graphical scores

During researching graphic scores I found a few from my favourite musicians. This is Brian Eno’s graphic score for Music for Airports, he created it as he’s not a trained musician and cannot read music. He used symbolism to represent different phrases or loops which are separated by white space to represent time in-between the phrases.

I found a video on Vimeo about Aphex Twin’s remote orchestra, in the 2011 video he used midi controllers to cue a graphic score which a 48 part orchestra and a 24 piece choir followed, it was supposedly done in one rehearsal.

John Cage:Aria

For my graphic score I decided to use an

Lindsay Wright – Visiting Practitionar

Lindsay Wright is an award winning British composer who composes for film and TV. She’s most known for composing for The Crown, The Mystery of D.B. Cooper and Law & Order.

grew up playing the viola, singing in bands, playing bass, when a kid/teenager, went to national film and television school, started working as assistant to other more established composers,

sound world, tempo queues, key change second or minor third higher than the previous queue 

pro tools had 2 second lag, uses video sync now

doesn’t use templates for the scores, starts with empty project,

finds interesting sounds, makes sounds, manipulates them in logic and builds up the identity and sound palettes for scores as she goes along. 

sonic cinema sample company – used a lot of the bass flute samples from there for 70s vibe

sounds to her have themes, can only use certain sounds for certain characters

re-recording mixer, delivers full mix of the music and up to 12 stems (different instrument groups or whatever works best for the score) 

MUDLARKS –

about 2 homeless girls living by side of the thames, have. a tent under the bridge and work in shifts to project the tent and go out and get food/ whatever they need to survive. one of them doesn’t come home after night shift, the other girl is torn between protecting her home or going out to look for the other girl. guitar and violin were the main melodic instruments, used synths as well for soundscape, 

her work – 

raw apple tv series

the crown

angela black

forgotten battles (netflix)

the mystery of db cooper

mudlarks

lines 

Pamela Z – Visiting Practitionar

she does sampling, looping on her voice in real time to create abstract performance works
her work using layering of vowels and short phrases reminds me of a song called gum by Cornelius.
like yan jun she also uses gestures and hand movements to trigger and create sounds
she always likes to say that she considers her instrument to be a combination of her voice and the electronics that she uses
she’s being doing this since the mid 1980s
she was using separate hardware devices when she started
rack mounted sampler, multi effect processor, mixer on the top,
she ported all the effects into a computer, into max and ported her hardware into software
over time the rapid advance of technological upgrades has proved to be a blessing but also a curse, mac OS being a problem, also compatibility issues,
technology wasn’t reliable using hardware
4-7 minute pop song like works, started wanting to work on longer forms started working in a sort of modular way, picked a topic to base the work on and then went from there
used internet browser online installation, flash player means it’s not viewable anymore
tape loops, sonic suitcases, bag x-ray
voice can be tuned to be notes in a musical composition
parts of speech –