Category: Second Year

Research: Plunderphonics

Plunderphonics is described as “a music genre in which tracks are constructed by sampling recognizable musical works”.

Who owns the work once it has been resampled and repurposed?

“A good composer does not imitate, he steals”

“Some of you, current and potential samplerists, are perhaps curious about the extent to which you can legally borrow from the ingredients of other people’s sonic manifestations. Is a musical property properly private, and if so, when and how does one trespass upon it? Like myself, you may covet something similar to a particular chord played and recorded singularly well by the strings of the estimable Eastman Rochester Orchestra on a long-deleted Mercury Living Presence LP of Charles Ives’ Symphony #3, itself rampant in unauthorized procurements. Or imagine how invigorating a few retrograde Pygmy (no slur on primitivism intended) chants would sound in the quasi-funk section of your emulator concerto. Or perhaps you would simply like to transfer an octave of hiccups from the stock sound library disk of a Mirage to the spring-loaded tape catapults of your Melotron.”

Dream Research

We dream for 6 years over the span of our life on average, your mind is more active during a dream than when your’e awake , we sleep to recover from the days stress on the body, repair muscle damage and get ready for the next day. your dreams only see familiar faces, the faces in your dreams are people you’ve already seen , you can’t read in your dreams, when you’re asleep your subconscious is taking a break, you can’t look in the mirror,

Christina Wheeler

Where are you in the space of your piece? Where do you want your audience to be? Do you want them horizontal, vertical, do you want where they are to change over time? Where do you want your sound source options to come from? How do you experience sound in the space? Voice from vocals, instruments, objects, moving sculptures. Where are these sound placed during the piece, are they moving througought the piece? Is the audience sitting on the stage? Do you want to use music? Do you want to include a soundscape?

Curatorial Practices in West Germany

The sense of touch is a sense that is usually disregarded by sound artists, seeing and hearing are closely related. Fiir Augen und Ohren was an exhibition that took place in Berlin in 1980 it highlighted the synthesis and central role of sight and hearing. The visitors of the exhibition were allowed to touch and play with the exhibited works. The exhibition included the works of Luigi Russolo, Man Ray, Christina Kubisch and Bernhard Leitner.

“There was, however, at least one other sense inquisitively employed by the visitors and that is the sense of touch. The visitors to the exhibition were allowed to touch play with the exhibited works”

Kunstgewerbemuseum in Cologne hosted Sehen und Hören: Design und Kommunikation in 1974 which “alluded directly to the importance of technology to the senses of sight and hearing”. Peter Frank was who curated the exhibition and divided the exhibition into three broad categories which were “How we expand communication”, “How we orientate in time and space” and “How we process information”. In each room there would be products and items that relate to these three categories which were exhibited in “sterile looking rooms”.
“Despite this sterile, perhaps cold site, visitors to this design and communication exhibition were allowed to touch and test all the items on display.”

In Dusseldorf John Cage used the white cube setting to show his work 33 1/3 from 1969 which was composed of twelve records playing simultaneously different music and the audience played the roll of a DJ and picked what music they were going to listen to.

John Cage, 33 1/3, 1969. Installation view at daadgalerie Berlin, 1988–89. Courtesy of the John Cage Trust. Photo: Werner Zellien, © Archiv Broken Music

Pro Tools Lesson 2

1.Name some of the folders and files that ProTools creates as part of the session hierarchy. Where is the session file (. ptx) stored? 

Sample files, session files, clip groups and also videos if you render them. The session file is stored in pro tools session and can be saved to wherever you decide.

2.What is the WaveCache.wtm file used for? What happens if the WaveCache file gets deleted or goes missing? 

It’s used to show the waveform which can help Pro Tools to open faster. If the file goes missing pro tools can recalculate where it is or you can update its location.

3. Where are audio files stored in the session hierarchy? 

They are saved into the audio files folder.

4.Where are Pro Tool’s is MIDI files normally stored? 

in the session

5. Which components should you turn on first when powering up a Pro Tools system? Which component should you turn on last? 

External hard drives. Audio monitoring system. Check inputs and outputs on system preferences and Pro Tools sound engine settings.

6. What type of processing does the hardware buffer size affect? What type of processing does it not affect?

Native plug-in processing. DSP Processing. It affects purely audio.

7. What kinds of commands can be found under the ProTools View menu? How does the view menu differ from the window menu?

You can hide or show the windows, tracks, and track data . You can arrange the way the way the windows on display look.

8.What kind of commands can be found under the ProTools Options menu? How does the options menu differ from the setup menu?

It lets you select several editing, recording, monitoring, playback, and display options and the setup menu allows you to configure functions or operations that involve multiple settings.

9. Which main Pro Tools window displays audio waveforms and can be used to work directly with audio, MIDI, and video files on tracks?

The edit window

10. Which ProTools window provides access to Pan controls and Volume faders for each track?

The mix window

Making a contact mic

To make the contact mic we used 35mm Piezo discs and attached them with a soldering iron to a 6.35mm jack, using the 6.35mm jack was very helpful as it could be connected to a field recorder or to an interface easily without using an adapter. The process was relatively easy and I was scared at first to use a soldering iron as I haven’t before and thought I would solder too much by accident but this wasn’t an issue. I really enjoyed making the microphone and it has lead me to start getting into building guitar pedals and eurorack modules as I now know how to solder and have been reluctant to in the past.

This is a drawn out sketch of the process I used to create the contact mic.

Sound Walk 8th of October

We started the sound walk off at Forest Hill station (my local station) and while we waited for the whole class to arrive we started the walk by going into the stations under passage. We were given eye masks so that we were only focusing on sound. Personally the sounds in the under passage were my favourite of the whole trip. The sounds started off pretty ambient and were mostly just footsteps and the jangling of people keys/money in their pockets. Occasionally you could hear the train announcer saying “This is the London Overground service to Highbury and Islington” and you could hear the cars passing by both sides. Then instantly the whole tunnel was filled with reverb and a steady pounding four to the floor at around 90bpm kick like sound which was the train passing overhead. I then heard a few women speaking amongst themselves and asking what we were doing under the tunnel, that was followed by the sound of an ambulance’s siren to the east of me. Occasionally I could hear coughing from the public and the light breeze of wind against my ears, I could also hear the crackiling of plastic as a member of public opened something while passing.

We then went around the corner to stand on the side of the train tracks, we stood against the wall nd put our eyes masks on. The first sounds I heard were the chirping of birds and the sound of a hose/carwash coming from infront of me. This was then followed by he sound of a train passing fast by me which sounded more like a whirring and like an aeroplane taking off. There were also trains that went by slower which occasionally had a clicking electrical hiss which is the sound that sometimes comes out of a trains wheels. On the side of the tracks you could also hear the announcements a lot louder and clearer. Opposite the sidewalk were a few workers that were doing sawing and shouting which was pretty loud.

After we headed to Horniman Museam where we would begin to experiment with walking with the blindfolds with a partner.

I found this one hard as I was being lead downhill and kept feeling like I was tripping over stuff.