Alberto Bernal is a classically trained sound artist from Spain who’s work consists of installation pieces, performance art, video art and concerts. He also is a lecterur and teaches composition at the university of music of zaragoza. I was very intriged by his impossible music series which consits of a lot of graphic scores like the ones shown below. I decided to turn my favourite of his scores into midi and play Ableton’s waveform through it, this is how it sounded/looked.
Visiting Practitioner- Fari Bradley / Hannah Kemp-Welch
Fari Bradley is a sound artist from Iran, they use electronics, sound objects and textiles to create their work
Brian Eno – Music for Airports
Brian Eno was a pioneer of ambient music. I first found out about Brian Eno through his work with David Bowie especially on his albums Low and Heroes. I have also listened to all of his solo albums with Here Comes The Warm Jets being my favourite. I found out about his ambient work after listening to a lot of his more pop / rock music. Music for Airports was released in 1979, Music for Airports consists of four songs, 1/1, 1/2, 2/1 and 2/2. All four of the songs are around the 10 minute mark which is a lot longer than the conventional song length ( 3-5 minutes long). The album was made with very long tape loops playing various piano, choir and synth 3-4 note phrases.
“The particular piece I’m referring to was done by using a whole series of very long tape loops, like fifty, sixty, seventy feet long. There were twenty-two loops. One loop had just one piano note on it. Another one would have two piano notes. Another one would have a group of girls singing one note, sustaining it for ten seconds. There are eight loops of girls’ voices and about fourteen loops of piano. I just set all of these loops running and let them configure in whichever way they wanted to, and in fact the result is very, very nice. The interesting thing is that it doesn’t sound at all mechanical or mathematical as you would imagine. It sounds like some guy is sitting there playing the piano with quite intense feeling. The spacing and dynamics of “his” playing sound very well organized. That was an example of hardly interfering at all.“
I have listened to this album many times before finding it for this reserarch and it has definitely inspired a lot of my work outside of uni.
https://www.discogs.com/master/6265-Brian-Eno-Ambient-1-Music-For-Airports
https://reverbmachine.com/blog/deconstructing-brian-eno-music-for-airports/
John Cage – Fontana Mix
“The score consists of 10 sheets of paper and 12 transparencies. The sheets of paper contain drawings of 6 differentiated (as to thickness and texture) curved lines. 10 of these transparencies have randomly distributed points (the number of points on the transparencies being 7, 12, 13, 17, 18, 19, 22, 26, 29, and 30).”
This piece has inspired me on making my graphic score a I like the style of layering paper and this is something I could include in my final graphic score.
https://johncage.org/pp/John-Cage-Work-Detail.cfm?work_ID=79
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.
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 –
Week 18: Sensory Ethnography: Doing Sonic Research for your Essay
Global Sound Cultures
Global Sound Cultures
Music and Musicking
What is music? Music is
What is musiking? The act of performing and listening to music.
“uniting them in their common purpose of buying and selling”
“isolating him from his surroundings. Inside his head is an infnite space charged with music that only he can hear”
uniting and isolating are opposites that music manages to
“There is no such thing as music. Music is not a thing ar all but an activity, something that people do. The apparent thing “music” is a figment, an abstraction of the action, whose reality vanishes as soon as we examine it at all closely.“
“What is the meaning of music?” becomes the more manageable ‘What is the meaning of this work (or these works) of music?”- Which is not the same question at all.”
“The presumed autonomous “thingness” of works of music is, of course, only part of the prevailing modern philosophy of art in general. What is valued is not the action of art, not the act of creating, and even less that of perceiving and responding, but the created art object itself.”
The medium is who perceives and responds to the musiking
What are the relationships between those taking part and the physical setting?
What are the relationships among those taking part?
What are the relationships between the sounds that are being made?
Music is structural and sonic is free from structure
Glossary –
Anodyne = inoffensive, dull.
Reification = when you treat something immaterial as a material thing
Research into Memphis Horrorcore – Global sound cultures essay
Memphis horrorcore is a sub-genre of hip hop music that originated in Memphis, Tennessee in the early 1990’s, with artists such as DJ Spanish Fly, Three 6 Mafia and Tommy Wright III being pioneers of the genre. The genre comprises
Week 17: Musiking, Sonicking: What is Really Going on Here?
Yan Jun – Visting Practitioner
hand made machines, electricity and social more professional in other countries, when playing gin China he realised there was no ground with the electricity to protect his sound/him, sound is swung and dirty without ground, the feedback with grow overwhelmingly 80% of his sound will be based off that one 50hz sound, the venue needs to have ground otherwise he won’t have the “perfect noise”. his noise is a phenomenon of the social, he lives in a. country of noise, the noise controls the environment, everything in china is more professional, he almost never plays electronic music in china.
he is using his physical gestures to control the sound, the sound of the photographers is the music, if he moves fast they will take more photos, if he stays still they will take time to take photos.
Creative Sound Projects Week 1
Pro Tools – Mixing and creating a bounce
1. What term is used to describe an audio patch point that applies a signal processor directly into the signal path on a track? How many of these patch points does Pro Tools provide on each track?
Inserts are the audio patch points and there are 10 on each track.
2. What term is used to describe a signal path carrying a mix output of one or more tracks routed for parallel processing? How can this signal be returned to the sending device?
The signal paths are called sends and they can be returned to the sending device with the aux input track.
3. What menu would you use to display or hide the Mix window? What keyboard shortcut can you use to toggle between the Mix and Edit windows?
The window menu, the shortcut is command (+) =
4. What menu command can you use to display or hide an Inserts or Sends view area in the Mix window?
The view menu
5. What type of plug-in provides real-time processing? What type provides non-real-time processing?
6. What are some commonly used plug-in options for EQ and dynamics processing in Pro Tools?
7. Which Pro Tools automation mode discussed in this lesson records changes to track controls in real time when playing back the session?
8. What is the difference between Read mode and Off mode? Which mode allows you to play back existing automation on the track?
9. What track control can you use to display an automation playlist? What window are automation playlists displayed in?
10. What tool can you use to add, move, or delete automation breakpoints? What modifier can you use to delete a breakpoint by clicking on it?
11. Why is it important to back up your Pro Tools sessions? What are some ways in which your Pro Tools work can be lost accidentally?
12. How is the Save Copy In command different from the Save As command, in terms of the files that are saved?
13. Which session will be open after completing a Save Copy In operation: the original or the copy? How is this different from the Save As operation?
14. What command can you use to save a session with a different sample rate or bit depth?
15.What are some considerations for bouncing audio in Pro Tools? How is the bounce affected by soloed or muted tracks? How is it affected by the active selection?
16. What command lets you mix your entire session directly to a stereo file? What file types are supported for the bounce file with this command?
17. What bit depth and sample rate should you use when bouncing if you plan to burn the file to CD without further processing?
18. How can you add audio files to iTunes for use in burning a CD??
Cut-Up Research
Audio cut-up to make new stories out of old ones.
“For first you write a sentence,
And then you chop it small;
Then mix the bits, and sort them out
Just as they chance to fall:
The order of the phrases makes
No difference at all.”
Created by the poet Tristan Tzara, ‘cut up’ is the deconstruction of a primary text using the random cutting up of words and phrases to form new sentences and thus a new piece of writing. It is a process of extraction and reconstruction of a new meaning of language, based on chaotic intuition and the free creative flow.
Kurt Cobain, who had the opportunity to meet and collaborate with Burroughs, was one of the maximum exponents in the 1990s of cut-up literature, declaring that his lyrics were the result of his cut up poems. Later, Thom Yorke would imitate the form that was supposedly first used by the surrealists, pulling cut up words out of a hat to write the entire Kid A album.
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?