Noise Music is a class of music that focuses on using noise as the base of the track. Through using a multitude of different techniques and different samples of sound and noise, this genre creates a different kind of music. Artists in this area use techniques like improvisation, distortion, higher volume, cacophony, and extended technique. This class of music has pervaded through many different genres, like avant-rock, glitch, and industrial techno. It can incorporate live machine sounds, electronically generated noise, stochastic processes, unconventional musical instruments, or what have you. It has come around to be used as a way of creating music out of various souces of noise and sound, when everything is brought together.
Here is my Grain Synth Homework.
Monday, February 3, 2014
MIDI, OSC, & Noise Music
MIDI is a protocol/hardware device that allows instruments
and computers to communicate with each other. Open Sounds Control (OSC) is the
communication of sound to devices through binary numbers and other methods such
as strings and floating point numbers. Both OSC and MIDI are message protocols
that are hardware transport independent. OSC is a more modern approach to
digital sound, and offers more flexibility and control than MIDI. Despite this, MIDI is still the industry
standard for professional recorded music. When carried on Ethernet, MIDI bits
move at the same data rate as OSC bits carried on Ethernet, because the data
rate is a factor of the transport, not the protocol. In terms of throughput,
MIDI can actually have better throughput than OSC because it takes fewer bytes
to make common MIDI messages than it does to make comparable OSC messages.
Noise music is classified to encompass multiple discrete
genres of sound composition involving the categories of both noise and music. It
can feature acoustically or electronically generated noise, and both
traditional and unconventional musical instruments. These artists have incorporated
noise music in their work: Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Helmut
Lachenmann, Cornelius Cardew, Theatre of Eternal Music, Rhys Chatham, Ryoji
Ikeda, Survival Research Laboratories, Whitehouse, Cabaret Voltaire, and
Psychic TV.
MIDI, OSC, Granular Synthesis, and Noise Music
Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) is a protocol or hardware device(s) that allow musical instruments and computers to communicate. It does this by converting signals and sounds into binary numbers that are recreated as sounds and frequencies on computers and other hardware. The most common approach is by using a MIDI controller, that looks like (or can be) a standard, but smaller keyboard.
Open Sounds Control (OSC) on the other hand, is a format of messaging sound to multimedia devices through binary numbers and other methods such as strings and floating point numbers. OSC is a more modern approach to digital sound, and offers more flexibility and control than MIDI. Despite this, MIDI is still the industry standard for professional recorded music.
Granular Synthesis is a method of sound synthesis that is comparable to sampling. Sounds are split into multiple smaller pieces called grains. These small pieces can then manipulated in any fashion, including: layering, repeating, tempo changes, etc. Using this technique, an infinite number of sounds can be created to suit many different purposes. Granular synthesis is often used to create a musical atmosphere, or even sounds for special effects. Xenakis was the first known musician to use the technique, and did so in his composition "Analogique A-B."
Noise music is a broad genre of music that prominently features noise in its compositions. It is created through many different means, and can feature noises created digitally, with live instruments, or with the use of unconventional sounds. Feedback and static are common examples, and melody is often present with the combination of the noises. Keiji Hano is a Japanese musician who is known for composing songs in many different genres, including noise music. He uses a wide set of instrumentation and is influenced by Xenakis. He also finds inspiration in the concept of "Ma," which refers to the spaces between the notes in music.
Open Sounds Control (OSC) on the other hand, is a format of messaging sound to multimedia devices through binary numbers and other methods such as strings and floating point numbers. OSC is a more modern approach to digital sound, and offers more flexibility and control than MIDI. Despite this, MIDI is still the industry standard for professional recorded music.
Granular Synthesis is a method of sound synthesis that is comparable to sampling. Sounds are split into multiple smaller pieces called grains. These small pieces can then manipulated in any fashion, including: layering, repeating, tempo changes, etc. Using this technique, an infinite number of sounds can be created to suit many different purposes. Granular synthesis is often used to create a musical atmosphere, or even sounds for special effects. Xenakis was the first known musician to use the technique, and did so in his composition "Analogique A-B."
Noise music is a broad genre of music that prominently features noise in its compositions. It is created through many different means, and can feature noises created digitally, with live instruments, or with the use of unconventional sounds. Feedback and static are common examples, and melody is often present with the combination of the noises. Keiji Hano is a Japanese musician who is known for composing songs in many different genres, including noise music. He uses a wide set of instrumentation and is influenced by Xenakis. He also finds inspiration in the concept of "Ma," which refers to the spaces between the notes in music.
OSC
Open Sound Control (OSC) is a protocol for communication among computers, sound synthesizers, and other multimedia devices that is optimized for modern networking technology. Bringing the benefits of modern networking technology to the world of electronic musical instruments, OSC's advantages include interoperability, accuracy, flexibility, and enhanced organization and documentation.
This simple yet powerful protocol provides everything needed for real-time control of sound and other media processing while remaining flexible and easy to implement.
Features:
Open-ended, dynamic, URL-style symbolic naming scheme;
Symbolic and high-resolution numeric argument data;
Pattern matching language to specify multiple recipients of a single message;
High resolution time tags "Bundles" of messages whose effects must occur simultaneously;
Query system to dynamically find out the capabilities of an OSC server and get documentation;
Features:
Open-ended, dynamic, URL-style symbolic naming scheme;
Symbolic and high-resolution numeric argument data;
Pattern matching language to specify multiple recipients of a single message;
High resolution time tags "Bundles" of messages whose effects must occur simultaneously;
Query system to dynamically find out the capabilities of an OSC server and get documentation;
Granular Samples:
Granular Synthesis and Other Posts
Some of the differences between OSC and MIDI are as follows:
- MIDI defines a hardware interface, and OSC is typically transmitted over ethernet.
- OSC allows someone to transmit multiple data types commonly used on modern computers, and MIDI only transmits integers.
- OSC includes a high-precision timestamp with picosecond-resolution that allows OSC messages to be scheduled, recorded and reproduced with minimal jitter, and the MIDI beat-clock is a low-resolution clock having a precision on the order of several milliseconds at best.
Noise music is a class of music that consists of multiple
discreet genres of sound that tend to disturb the categories of both sound and
music. Noise music has been created by many well-known musical groups,
including Throbbing Gristle (an English music and visual arts group that was established in 1975 [but now disbanded] that evolved from the performance art group COUM Transmissions), Keiji Haino (a Japanese musician and singer-songwriter since the 1970s whose work has included rock, free improvisation, noise music, percussion, psychedelic music, minimalism and drone music), Tony Conrad (an American avant-garde video artist, experimental filmmaker, musician/composer, sound artist, teacher and writer), and Psychic TV (a video art and music group that performs psychedelic, punk, electronic and experimental music).
Granular synthes is a basic sound synthesis method. It operates on the microsound time scale that is based on the same principle as sampling. However, the samples are not played back conventionally, but are instead split into small pieces of around 1 to 50 milliseconds. These small pieces are called grains. Grains may be layered on top of each other, and may play at different speeds, phases, volume, frequency, and more. Some well known musicians that have used granular synthesis include Barry Truax (a Canadian composer who specializes in real-time implementations of granular synthesis, often of sampled sounds, and soundscapes), Curtis Roads (a composer of electronic and electroacoustic music specializing in granular and pulsar synthesis, an author, and a computer programmer), and Iannis Xenakis (a Greek-French composer, music theorist, and architect-engineer who passed away in the year 2001).
Here are my 5 Granular samples that I created with Cicilia.
This first one I created mainly using uniform wave distribution in the stochastic generator.
This next one I created mainly using beta distribution of waves in the stochastic generator.
This one was created with a distribution setting called DroneAndJump.
This one was created with a distribution setting called Loopseg.
This one was created with a distribution setting called Drunk.
MIDI vs. OSC
MIDI and its younger "cousin" OSC are closely related in function, but differ in their advantages and disadvantages. As a matter of fact, OSC was created as a way of getting around the problems inherent in MIDI's most basic form. Here is a rough primer into the pros and cons of both audio protocols.
MIDI (short for Musical Instrument Digital Interface) became the standard for digital music producers in 1983 for allowing a wide array of musical instruments to interact with each other and with a computer. Because it allowed musicians to create complex musical scores in only a few hundred lines of code and in a relatively compact file size, it ushered in a whole new generation of music producers.
As great as MIDI is, it does have its drawbacks; namely, the fact that data must be ordered sequentially, which could pose a problem when faced with heavy data streams. Enter Open Sound Control, or OSC, a protocol developed in the mid-90's to get around MIDI's transfer speeds and its representation of pitch. Transmission rates for OSC take place at broadband network levels, making it faster than MIDI in some cases. In addition, where MIDI can only represent pitch as an integer data type, OSC can represent it as an integer or a floating-point type, making it less restrictive. Yet, one major advantage MIDI has over OSC is that its messages are much smaller in size than that of the latter's, thereby making MIDI the preferred choice when it comes to playing audio on mobile devices. Also, the advantage in speed when using OSC seems to be null when both protocols are transmitted over equal media.
One major problem holding OSC back is that it is not as widely used as MIDI, so it is unlikely that it will become the new standard. Therefore, while OSC might benefit the musician in one instance, MIDI might serve him/her better in another. For this reason, many people find using MIDI and other alternatives, such as OSC, to be ideal.
MIDI (short for Musical Instrument Digital Interface) became the standard for digital music producers in 1983 for allowing a wide array of musical instruments to interact with each other and with a computer. Because it allowed musicians to create complex musical scores in only a few hundred lines of code and in a relatively compact file size, it ushered in a whole new generation of music producers.
As great as MIDI is, it does have its drawbacks; namely, the fact that data must be ordered sequentially, which could pose a problem when faced with heavy data streams. Enter Open Sound Control, or OSC, a protocol developed in the mid-90's to get around MIDI's transfer speeds and its representation of pitch. Transmission rates for OSC take place at broadband network levels, making it faster than MIDI in some cases. In addition, where MIDI can only represent pitch as an integer data type, OSC can represent it as an integer or a floating-point type, making it less restrictive. Yet, one major advantage MIDI has over OSC is that its messages are much smaller in size than that of the latter's, thereby making MIDI the preferred choice when it comes to playing audio on mobile devices. Also, the advantage in speed when using OSC seems to be null when both protocols are transmitted over equal media.
One major problem holding OSC back is that it is not as widely used as MIDI, so it is unlikely that it will become the new standard. Therefore, while OSC might benefit the musician in one instance, MIDI might serve him/her better in another. For this reason, many people find using MIDI and other alternatives, such as OSC, to be ideal.
Granular Synthesis
I missed class on Thursday but I still researched about granular synthesis and played with Cecilia and made these samples:
Afterwards, my cecilia unfortunately kept crashing and unfortunately I could not record anymore.
https://soundcloud.com/alexisbenter/gran1
https://soundcloud.com/alexisbenter/gran2
Granular synthesis is denoted because of the microsounds called grains that are splits of 50 ms to 1 s samples that are layered on top of each other and edited around different parameters such as speed, volume, and frequency. The micro sounds does not fit on a normal time scale. The waveform, spatial position, density, and envelope allow the many different variety of sounds to be produced. Riverrun is known as the most versatile real time granular synthesizer today written by Barry Truax and he has written other pieces as well. Iannis Xekanis was the first inventor of this synthesis technique, being the first one to explain compositional theory with grains of sound. He said, "All sound, even continuous musical variation, is conceived as an assemblage of a large number of elementary sounds adequately disposed in time. In the attack, body, and decline of a complex sound, thousands of pure sounds appear in a more or less short interval of time." (1959)
Curtis Roads is also a author, composer, and computer programmer specializing in granular and pulsar synthesis. Here is a video I found helpful of Curtis Roads himself explaining the mechanism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ehu8u_JTjw&feature=player_embedded#at=75
Noise music:
Noise music is music that contains multiple genres of composition that are in the categories of noise and music. Generally it contains aspects of improvisation, extended technique, cacophony, indeterminacy along with conventional use of melody, harmony, and rhythm. Jimi Hendrix is a domain example with his use of feedback. Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and Keiji Haino, and Tony Conrad are all examples of noise music. Here is a live performance of Throbbing Gristle that perfectly defines the noise music elements and the synthesis of them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRcgQ_e3w4g
Afterwards, my cecilia unfortunately kept crashing and unfortunately I could not record anymore.
https://soundcloud.com/alexisbenter/gran1
https://soundcloud.com/alexisbenter/gran2
Granular synthesis is denoted because of the microsounds called grains that are splits of 50 ms to 1 s samples that are layered on top of each other and edited around different parameters such as speed, volume, and frequency. The micro sounds does not fit on a normal time scale. The waveform, spatial position, density, and envelope allow the many different variety of sounds to be produced. Riverrun is known as the most versatile real time granular synthesizer today written by Barry Truax and he has written other pieces as well. Iannis Xekanis was the first inventor of this synthesis technique, being the first one to explain compositional theory with grains of sound. He said, "All sound, even continuous musical variation, is conceived as an assemblage of a large number of elementary sounds adequately disposed in time. In the attack, body, and decline of a complex sound, thousands of pure sounds appear in a more or less short interval of time." (1959)
Curtis Roads is also a author, composer, and computer programmer specializing in granular and pulsar synthesis. Here is a video I found helpful of Curtis Roads himself explaining the mechanism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ehu8u_JTjw&feature=player_embedded#at=75
Noise music:
Noise music is music that contains multiple genres of composition that are in the categories of noise and music. Generally it contains aspects of improvisation, extended technique, cacophony, indeterminacy along with conventional use of melody, harmony, and rhythm. Jimi Hendrix is a domain example with his use of feedback. Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and Keiji Haino, and Tony Conrad are all examples of noise music. Here is a live performance of Throbbing Gristle that perfectly defines the noise music elements and the synthesis of them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRcgQ_e3w4g
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)