Laurie Spiegel

Laurie Spiegel's Website:
http://www.retiary.org/ls/index.html

I found out about her on the digital design blog, but am posting this video here since it has to do with sound.

Quote of the Day!

The most powerful instrument on the planet is the human voice!!!!

Fellini/Rota

Fererico Fellini

Federico Fellini, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI[1] (January 20, 1920 – October 31, 1993) was an Italian film director. Known for a distinct style which meshes fantasy and baroque images, he is considered as one of the most influential and widely revered film-makers of the 20th century.

Nino Rota

Nino Rota (December 3, 1911 – April 10, 1979) was an Italian composer best known for his work on film scores, notably the films of Federico Fellini. He also composed the music for two of Franco Zeffirelli's Shakespeare films, and for Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy.

Rota also composed ten operas, five ballets and many other orchestral and choral works, the most famous being his string concerto.

Sound Design Week 4

Period

~Researching music of the time

social
political
culture
entertainment



Download Max/MSP

Max/MSP

This version represents a new era of Max programming, with a completely redesigned multi-processing kernel and a streamlined development environment built on a platform-independent foundation. With a new patcher interface, searchable database of objects and examples, integrated documentation and new tutorials, the new Max user will find a smoother learning curve while experienced users will see improved productivity.

Miller Puckete

Miller Smith Puckette is the associate director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts as well as a faculty member at the University of California, San Diego, where he has been since 1994. Puckette is best known for authoring Max, a graphical development environment for music and multimedia synthesis, which he developed while working at IRCAM in the late 1980s. He earned a Ph. D. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1986 after completing an undergraduate degree at MIT in 1980. He was a member of the MIT Media Lab from its opening in 1985 until 1987 before continuing his research at IRCAM, and since 1997 has been a part of the Global Visual Music project.

Max Matthews

Max Vernon Mathews (* November 13, 1926, in Columbus, Nebraska) is a pioneer in the world of computer music. He studied electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving a Sc.D. in 1954. Working at Bell Labs, Mathews wrote MUSIC, the first widely-used program for sound generation, in 1957. For the rest of the century, he continued as a leader in digital audio research, synthesis, and human-computer interaction as it pertains to music performance.


SoundProject


1. Eno/Byrne Samples

2. Cecilia --- On file

Strectch.Warp

3. Midi - Reconstitute

Archive - UBU
Stream - ShoutCast > Freesound
Hard: Wire Tapper

4. Live
5. Midi Efftects

Export to:

Wav-Stereo-Pen 16

6. Bring Ableton/Put in Pat's Box
7. Mix All Sounds In Audacity/Twick them in Cecilia
8. Download Koan/Noaticle

I think I found the Maple Midi Drivers not sure yet gotta check on my comp

Scrol down the page to the download section I think this is it... I'll check when I get home on my comp and let y'all know tomorrow.

http://www.postpiano.com/Maple/maple-index.htm

Keykit Introduction

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8153

Herbert Brun Reading

Technology and the Composer
Herbert Brun
(1970)

As read to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Stockholm, June 10, 1970.

I.

Between 1877 and 1896 Edison and Berliner developed their cylindrical and disc phonograph systems, providing us with the new ability to store audio signals and to retrieve them from storage by electro-mechanical means. About half a century later, and nearly 30 years after Lee DeForest had initiated Electronics with the first vacuum tube (the triode audion), the phonograph-disc was joined by magnetic tape and the phonograph by the tape recorder. During the last 15 years great progress has been made in learning how the computer could assist the musician towards achieving ever higher degrees of precision in storing and retrieving audio information.

The emergence of electronics, vacuum tubes, transistors, and all kinds of increasingly sophisticated circuitries supplied the impetus to delve anew into the still only vaguely answered questions about the physical nature of sound, the possibilities of analyzing and of synthesizing any desired sound, the problems of psycho-acoustical phenomenology. It also led to a vast arsenal of electronic sound sources, sound modifiers, devices for control and amplification of sound, to microphones and loudspeakers, but most important of all: it led to an improved concept of storage, to the concept of simulated memory, to the programmable studio and to the even more programmable digital and analogue computer system.

Although composers became aware of these developments rather early -- although Busoni, Schoenberg, Varese, Schillinger, Stokowski, Chavez, and many others wrote and talked about the promising influence of science and technology on composers in their search for new compositional procedures -- it was not until rather late in the game that some notable connections between technology and composition were established. Most of the time since 1906, when Dr. Thaddeus Cahil demonstrated his Telharmonium or Dynamophone, was dedicated to the invention and enormous improvement of techniques for the production, manipulation and performance of sound. In 1916 Edgar Varese asked for new musical instruments and enrichment of our musical alphabet, and a few years later for the cooperation between electrician and composer. From 1927 till 1936 he tried to get financial support for the development of an electronic instrument for composition at Bell Telephone Laboratories, where Harvey Fletcher and Rene Bertrand would have collaborated with him on the project. He could neither get a Guggenheim Fellowship nor any help from sound studios in Hollywood. In the meantime Hammond had produced his organ, the Novachord, the Solovox, and one can follow this instrument-oriented trend through the years up to the present.

In the United States composers began work with tape and tape recorders in about 1950. The next ten years saw the establishment of various studios and laboratories, where composers, musicians, and technicians could collaborate in furthering all kinds of projects pertaining to the relationships between electronics and music. In North America almost all such studios are located at and affiliated with universities. Major examples are the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, and the studios at the Universities of Illinois and Toronto. Now there are hundreds of such installations to be found in the western hemisphere; and if ten years ago many a music department chairman did not know what an electronic music studio was, today that chairman would at least always know whether the school has one or not.

For some time now music has been getting involved with the computer. This also began mainly at universities, notably at the University of Illinois, where Lejaren Hiller and L. M. Isaacson completed their first computer assisted composition in 1956. If one combines positive experiences with apparently justified expectations then one can predict that the interaction between computers and the composer will prove far more fertile with regard to compositional procedures than will either the availability of new instruments, or the more and more streamlined modular compactness of portable studio equipment and tape recorders, or even the integration of performing humans into ever-more sophisticated circuitries that allow for unlimited amplification of naturally redundant autobiographical sound portraits.

As the composer meets technology through the computer, both have a chance to see one another far more clearly than the usual barriers, namely sound and industry, permit. The composer has begun to recognize that technology is not merely the provider of instruments, of devices, of conveniences; in short, the composer is learning that technology is not just techniques and engineering. The composer now defines technology as the science and art of applying knowledge to the desire for problem solving and I, for one, concede that technology would have a far more beneficial impact on society if its potentials were controlled by technologists rather than by industrialists and politicians.

It is desirable that the technologist take a fresh view of the composer. The time has come for the technologist to see that composers are not merely music makers, or art makers, who think that their products have to measure up to an established standard of culture and who are eager to call them merchandise and sell them. Many composers today would like to live in a socially concerned and courageously heuristic environment: they are looking for problems; they do not claim to know but are eager to create models for solutions; they would rather produce some dynamic input than find their product flatly output and consumed; they have experienced the width and the narrowness of at least one medium in depth and so can move in it or on to the next. They would want contemporary technology to return the respect they have for it by using and assisting them so that their work may escape the psychologist's case study and the aesthetician's collection, and instead, be given a chance to become a dynamic input to the contemporary social system. Together with technology, the composer defines input as something that induces and initiates such changes of state in a system as would not occur, without this input, at the moment or possibly ever.

II.

The story of music and technology tells of a very old couple which composers keep visiting in order to have their dreams materialize, their intentions implemented, their problems solved. It depicts in various terms, largely depending on the storyteller's choice of emphasis, the emergence of our need for the control of acoustical events for a purpose, and our ways of catering to this need through a maze of apparently continuous chains of either observed or stipulated problems, and either found or invented or stipulated solutions. The story would show composers to be motivated by a more-or-less intuitive allergy to the inevitable decrease of information in the systems through which they see their world at any given time; even the systems they love exhibit symptoms of decay and stagnation, and all they can do is retard the final curtain by creating systems wherein that which passes swiftly in reality would stay alive a little longer in an analogy. It does not matter much in what language and in which terminology composers happen to think their thoughts: their concepts of what is to be music next are always related to some technological considerations, and this relationship ranges from extreme subtlety to gross obviousness. There ought to be no need at this point to elaborate on the rather commonplace notion that technological considerations show the way from a musical idea to its realization, first in some code and then in a performance; and that technological considerations lead to the availability of the acoustical phenomena needed by composers for an audible representation of their musical ideas. It may be appropriate, however, to remember that musical ideas are thinking models in more or less deliberately stipulated linguistic systems; that, for reasons to be discussed later, the complexity of such systems is increasing in many a sense and dimension and that, therefore, composers now have to turn to technology with the additional request for assistance in handling the systems they stipulate.

But as composers turn to technology today, they are bound to find themselves forced into two intertwined admissions: that the belief according to which we live in a technological era is merely a belief, unsubstantiated by any sufficiency of facts; and that the concept conjured up by the word composer needs broadening until it embraces more than just music, painting, or the arts in general; that it must extend its pretensions towards the regions where the languages thrive, grow old and wither, the natural, artificial, formal, and the dead alike.

As long as technology is ruled and controlled by hard and fast beliefs and as long as it makes its way to the people through a veritable maze of filters consisting of almost exactly those same hard and fast beliefs, we are living in the era of hard and fast beliefs, in the ideological, not in the technological era. The services that technology renders to all those who---being no technologists---need destructive power in order to survive better knowledge, and to those who---not being composers---use the languages of an incurably sick system to curse and condemn even the discussion of attempts at composing a yet-unpolluted one: these services never were designed by technologists.

Technology being the science and the art of applying knowledge to the desire for problem solving, it takes a believer and ideologist to present as applied knowledge the advanced techniques of murder, brain-washing, and destruction. Where such a presentation is accepted and successful there one cannot help but rebel against the power that language wields over thought, imagery, and desire. For much of the power of presentation rests in language, in the grammatical and syntactical innocence with which it acceptably supports even the unspeakable. As long as all this power and innocence act in favor of the believer's and ideologist's presentation, attenuating the voices of everyone else, so long the technologists and the composers have an axe to grind in common.

If ever there will be a technological era worth talking about, it will be thanks to technologists and composers. By their joint efforts, extended over a prolonged period, they may contrive to emancipate thought from language sufficiently for a rehabilitation of both, and continuing from that, introduce an era for mankind where every thought has its language, and where all people have at their disposal a device that will respond to each person's input according to the language stipulated by that person. Today we still labor and suffer under the oppression of those who can hide their determined unwillingness behind a modestly confessed lack of understanding, behind less modestly uttered claims for everyone's right to misunderstand, behind aggressive attacks on an allegedly unrealistic but in effect only nonconformist intellect. Tomorrow, in the technological era, if it is to merit this label, this kind of hide-and-seek game should have lost its power-illuminated glamour, and have made place for a prosaic and, thus, nonviolent confrontation, in language and in action, between those who can articulate the desire for an intelligent society and those who understand, but do not want it. There should be no question as to what an intelligent society is, nor as to who wants it and who doesn't. The difference between technology and composition will dwindle to an insignificant degree of a nuance; whereas the difference between nuances of thought will acquire significant proportions, worthy of the discriminating potentials of the human mind.

When, many years ago, I was first invited to give talks and lectures, the invitations meant that I was to be a composer of music who is to discuss and to present music for an audience interested in music. I felt that, therefore, I had to show how the thoughts I really wished to talk about were relevant even to music. Under this pressure I soon found out that the composition of music, is, in fact, relevant to the thoughts I consider important at any given time. Finally, I asked myself: What if it were true that composition simply is the generator of relevance, and that composers, no matter of or in what, are people who desire that whatever they create be relevant to whatever they consider important? If this were true (and I stipulate it is), then I could go on and state: The thoughts I consider important, and the medium in which I try to create what otherwise might never happen, are related through my desire for relevance; thus they become representatives of two systems which ought to show a high degree of mutual analogy, once a structure composed by me is applied to both. Wherever such an attempt is successful one can consider the process as a model of some effective method for reaching a desired state; this, then, allows for a new look at what may now appear to be---besides and beyond being desired---also desirable.

The definition of a problem and the action taken to solve it largely depend on the view which the individuals or groups that discovered the problem have of the system to which it refers. A problem may thus find itself defined as a badly interpreted output, or as a faulty output of a faulty output device, or as a faulty output due to a malfunction in an otherwise faultless system, or as a correct but undesired output from a faultless and thus undesirable system. All definitions but the last suggest corrective action; only the last definition suggests change, and so presents an unsolvable problem to anyone opposed to change.

To the composer, however, a suggestion of change is a signal sent out by the system, signifying a deficiency of input and the urgent request for the creation of what otherwise may never happen, be it even a new and different system. The composer's basic attitude is system-conscious and is nourished by observations which give repeated reassurance that it will always look only the way the composer looks at it, and so may look different if looked at differently.

Discerning between composition of art and the far broader concept of an art of composition I contend that the latter need reach a higher level if the former is to be an input for, not only an output of, society. I suspect that an intuitive awareness of the recent meagerness of input has led, almost justifiably, to the contemptuous sneer at the word culture prevalent in many circles, intellectual and otherwise. Many words, including this one: culture, could be rehabilitated if they were to refer to the dynamics of input rather than to the kinetic triumphs of output. Not that there is a lack of continuously offered input. But the words that indeed refer to it also reject it. The message announcing an offered input is called a threatening disaster, disorder, anarchism, and the like; yes, this society's language is in such a panic that it frequently, in its confusion, calls a threatening disaster that which actually was nothing but a message of its own accomplished output. Such an obvious disorder in so highly a respected system as our language is a challenge to all those composers who are not exclusively interested in their music. It is a challenge to the art of composition in general; and the composer---oscillating between music, languages, linguistics, analogies, systems, structures, logics, logistics, some mathematics, and an enormous repertory of words burdened with apparently indelible and frequently quite obsolete meanings---calls it all just so much language and begins to search for some way in which the composer might construct languages that do not yet support any power but their own.

In the meantime I shall use the term language for denoting structured systems which are made by humans, which humans thus can change or replace, and which, as a significant property, possess the capacity for involvement in the storage and transmission of intended messages or unintended messages or both. Technologists in all the branches of science and engineering, and composers in all the arts, both continuously design, construct, create, and change languages of all kinds, in order to store and transmit the thoughts or images they had in mind. Little of this is heard in an environment where power can be seized, and more power gained, by redesigning, reconstructing, and recreating thoughts and images that comfortably fit the language everybody knows and speaks already, where trust and confidence can be earned by proving these thoughts and images to have existed for generations as popular grammatical fictions in a language common to us all. No wonder then if within such boundaries everybody thinks they know what everybody is talking about and words are said to mean simply what people take them to mean.

But wherever it is true that, as the saying goes, words mean what people take them to mean, these words cannot escape the meaning given to them by people. Where there is no escape, there are no alternatives, there is no freedom; and any meaning that argues with words which never escaped it just tells the story of its life. Every thought, idea, or concept, as it emerges for the first time in a given society, needs words so that it be expressed, be presented, be heard, understood, and finally communicated. In search of such language one has to either create new words, or add and attach new meanings to old words. If a word, in the course of time and usage, has accumulated many kinds, shades, nuances of meaning, then we have to consider the context in which the word appears in order to know which particular meaning it is to carry. From this it follows that a new meaning of a word may be suspected, or assumed, if the context is such that none of the conventional meanings would fit. It is easier to coin and integrate into language a new word, a new sound, a new visual unit, than to make an old one mean something new. This is because the newly coined word announces its newness in every context. Its function is unambiguous and thus not context-bound. A new meaning, on the other hand, cannot be announced by an old word alone but only by a context to which the old word is a newcomer, in which it had never functioned before. The older a word is, the more meanings it has accumulated, the more ambiguous it becomes, the more context-bound it is. Whereas a new word adds to the language by enlarging the vocabulary, a new meaning adds to the language by increasing the significance of context.

All this I contend to be analogously the case in all systems in which the elements enter into temporarily significant coalitions, and where some communicable meaning becomes associated with either their moments of appearing or with the particular structure causing their appearance. Words in language, gestures of sound in music, definitions of visual units and colors in painting are just a few of the many terms denoting such coalitions.

On the one hand, I concede that in order to relate or permute established thoughts and ideas it may be sufficient to know what the listener takes words to mean, and to form one's language accordingly. The success of this language is then measured by the degree of comprehensibility. The problem of the speaker here is a problem in communication. The speaker's aim consists in having a new constellation of old thought understood by the currently valid rules and usages. For the presentation of new thoughts, on the other hand, the speaker should be requested to make words mean what they heretofore had not meant, thus adding to the available repertory of a word's meanings that new meaning which is necessary for the presentation of the new thought. The success of this language can only be measured by the degree to which it questions the sufficiency of meanings already associated with words, and by the quality of the thoughts that so become audible for the first time; at which time there is, obviously, never enough of the kind of evidence available that would allow for completely correct evaluations.

As this is the point where the arts, including music, come in, let me formulate a useful term. Where a new thought is presented, the speaker's problem is not any longer only a problem in communication, but one of communication. My useful term is introduced thus: A speaker with a new thought has to solve a problem of anticommunication. The syllables "anti" are used here as in antipodes, antiphony, antithesis, not meaning "hostile" or "against" but rather "juxtaposed" or "from the other side". Anticommunication faces communication somewhat as an offspring faces the progenitor. And just as the offspring eventually will in turn become a progenitor so will anticommunication, in time, become communication. This knowledge ought to make it possible for a community of people to have a good time with either. Indeed it should be noted that the good time lasts longer with anticommunication which leaves a lot open for the next occasion than with communication which puts everything neatly away on the spot. Anticommunication is an attempt at saying something, not a refusal to say it. Communication is achievable by learning from language how to say something. Anticommunication is an attempt at respectfully teaching language to say it. It is not to be confused with either non-communication, where no communication is intended, or with lack of communication, where a message is ignored, has gone astray, or simply is not understood. Anticommunication is most easily observed, and then often can have an almost entertaining quality, if well-known fragments of a linguistic system are composed into a contextual environment in which they try but fail to mean what they always had meant and, instead, begin showing traces of integration into another linguistic system, in which, who knows, they might one day mean what they never meant before, and be communicative again.

However, when something new is conceived, introduced, and noticed, then there appears a temporary gap, an interregnum which will disappear only when that "something new" begins to be accepted, understood, and used: when it begins to grow old. This time of transition is a time in which messages are sent that no one receives and in which messages are received that no one sent.

This is the time in which a language gained is a language lost. By most people this time is experienced only occasionally, in passing, in some concert, some exhibition, some reading, and then usually not too happily; for it gives them a hard time or no time or too much time, but no answer to their question: "What does it all mean?"

It is this time, however, that is the almost continuous time present for those poets, painters, and composers who move with it, who always think of themselves as living and working just in that mute and dumb moment where the language they gained got lost, where it won't do and say what they would have it do and say. It is therefore a sign of understanding and perceptivity if one expects their productions, their works and words to escape the prevalent level of communicativity under the condition that all of their activities and objects be at least propositions and at best provisions for the next, now the future, level of communicativity. Creative Art resides in poetry, music, dance, painting, architecture, theater, film, television, writing, and even in "Happenings" only if each of these sub-disciplines functions by anticommunication, which is my term for potential and virtual expression in a field devoid of communicative guarantee. One ought to expect, yes, as an ambitious audience, even demand that this field be cultivated at a time later than the last harvest and earlier than the next.

But what if it is not only the much maligned audience, the people who come to listen and to see who have the wrong expectations? What if it is society itself, and therewith also the performers, the dancers, the actors, the musicians, who do not know that their profession consists in handling competently the temporary incompetence of their language? What if it is a property of all our social systems not to have matured enough in order to liberate and promote language from its fictitious status of a slave which will do the best it can, to the status-independent existence of students and scholars, who will try to do better than the best they or anyone can?

III.

I challenge technology to escalate its push towards a socially beneficial technological era by designing and constructing for all of us the compound facility wherein and wherewith many people can be induced to come and enjoy the effort of learning how to compare and measure their languages against and with their imagination and their desires. I am speaking of an artificial system which should function as an accepted member of society and be respected and used equally by the few and by the many, as long as this differentiation will have any validity left.

I imagine a building in which the arts are met by technology and the sciences on their common ground. They all investigate, stipulate, create, and exploit systems. They are all faced with the puzzles and the functions of structure. And their aims and results complement one another because of their difference. While the sciences observe or stipulate systems which are to be analogous to an existent truth or reality, and while technology stipulates and creates systems that are to function in an existent truth or reality, the arts stipulate and create systems which are analogous to an existence desired to become true or real.

All three must be represented with all their branches and departments in the team that has to invent, to stipulate, to study, to discuss, and eventually to decide on the interior and exterior requirements that such an artificial system must be able to fulfill. Let me mention just one area of research that might demand no less than such a team's collective efforts before it will even begin to reveal its dimensions and secrets.

What if it were true that, as the saying goes in many quarters, the human mind is limited by nature to the potentials we already know, and that we may thus not expect it to ever possess the properties necessary for the creation of what we call an ideal society? If this were true we would need artificial systems that possess those properties to guide us. And if it were true that, as the saying goes in other quarters, the human mind has shown here and there the potential for change and development but that precisely the rarity of such an event generates hostility against it in the many who did not participate in it, then we would need artificial systems that remove the property of rarity by demonstrating the participation of all. No matter on which assumed truth it is based or to which conjectural reality it may be meant to correspond: any such artificial system should possess properties that we either cannot have, or do not yet have, but that we need and thus should be able to imagine or be taught to imagine.

It is quite obvious: any such artificial system will contain a computer installation. But what kind of an installation? Nobody knows yet because it should not be developed before the software, the programs that define the structure of the system, have been written. And these programs should be written, and the assembler code should be constructed, only after a decision has been reached as to what the whole system is supposed to do for the user. The user, however, is not to be seen as a paying consumer, whose demands have to be educated until they fit the available offers.

The word user refers instead to a member of one subset of the set of all possible kinds of input. The first task then is to define this subset until it contains every possible kind of user. Every user is an element of at least two social systems: the social system the user sees and at least one social system that sees the user. The artificial system must be able to insist on getting just so much input from the user as it needs for identifying the social systems in which the user's existence is definable. The response of the artificial system could then adopt the property of an input to any one or all of the systems defining the user's existence. The complete set of all possible kinds of input would thus contain all users and all responses by the artificial system. If we roughly define input as something that induces and initiates such changes of state in a system as would not occur without this input, at the moment or possibly ever, then we may expect that the artificial system thus would be capable of supporting what I called corrective action as well as what is called creative acts.

What is asked for is a heterogeneous assembly of input-oriented minds that would define an intelligent society, redefine the user, and develop an artificial system that by its response capability would show its users their roles in an intelligent society so that they may become induced to also want it in reality.

Inevitably such a project progresses in stages of partial fulfillment of set goals. At every significant stage, however, the results reached should be incorporated into a systems program which is to be submitted to and analyzed by technologists. They, in response to this input, would proceed to invent and construct the apparatus, the hardware, the computer, the input-output interface which best can represent, simulate, execute, and display the functions of an artificial system that possesses properties which we either cannot have or do not have yet. Clearly this installation will also be used to reach the next stage of significance, and will, if intelligently conceived, eventually only have to be modified and improved. Should there ever come the day, and an invention or discovery be made, that would render obsolete this whole machinery, possibly even the whole project, it will be either a no-man's day or a day for world-wide celebration.

Work on the project has to begin simultaneously in as many places as possible all over the world. Every school, every university or equivalent institution could assign to a selected but preferably heterogeneous group of its members the task of starting research towards a definition of the potential user in the immediate environment up to and including the areas overlapping with those defined by neighboring groups.

The building I imagine should be planned and constructed at each place, combining special features reflecting local preferences with those more general features that would make it a compatible member of a world-wide network of equivalent institutions. Everywhere it should grow as the results of such research accumulate everywhere.

Composers in the technological era are professional members of such projects. Their profession is the art of composition and their work establishes and demonstrates connections of various kinds between various elements, stipulated and desired connections that cannot occur in the eternal feedback loop of empirically functioning thinking processes.

Technology in the technological era sees the composer's work as an input of a particular nature, as an analogy to a desired reality which may have to be implemented and to be observed in functional action before anyone can possibly judge whether such a reality is---besides and beyond being desired---also desirable.

To the question whether a statement is true, let there be added the question: what if it were true?

To the question whether a composition is music, let there be added the question: what if this were music?

So that language may not become a fossilized fetish, let it be praised for the thought it expresses, but ruthlessly criticized for the ideas it fails to articulate. Language is not the standard against which thinking is to be measured; on the contrary: language is to be measured by a standard it barely reaches, if ever, namely the imagery of human doubt and human desire.

To measure language, with imagery as a standard, is the function of art in society. The arts are a measuring meta-language about the language that is found wanting. If the imagery succeeds in containing, anticommunicatively, for later, the simulation, the structural analogy to that which was found wanting, then, who knows, it may tell us or someone some day with breathtaking eloquence and in the simple terms what we, today, almost speechlessly have wanted so much.

Our present era meanwhile dictates in ever more venomous terms that we must turn to artificial systems if we wish to conduct intelligent research and intelligent experiments without causing bloodshed, corruption, and misery.

(A few days after this paper had been read, the chairman of the meeting requested that I submit to the experts present at the symposium a proposal summarizing the goals and ideas implied by my paper. The experts, then, were to vote on whether to recommend that steps be taken towards an implementation of the proposal.)

I propose that an international apparatus be defined and initiated which would investigate and analyze submitted ideas, compositions, statements and general propositions with regard to their function (potential or real) as structural models. The apparatus should be so formed and equipped that it can answer the following questions: What is the composition and the structure of that system in which the submitted item would have the greatest significance? In which system, social, political, physical, would the submitted item be compatible with concepts of truth, reality, practicability, etc.?

(The assembled experts declared this proposal to be incomprehensible. They requested that I resubmit it with an explanatory addition.)

Explanatory Addition

The apparatus mentioned above would face each and every statement, but not with the question: "Is this a consistent statement?" The question would be: "Which system needs to be stipulated so that, therein, the statement becomes consistent?"

This kind of questioning statements is and has always been the composer's profession. In looking at the composer's work we perceive the extent to which the composer succeeded in establishing that system in which the composed statements are consistent; we no longer discuss the value of statements but rather the value of the systems implied by the statements.

As the composer stipulates systems, elements, and structures, the composer becomes increasingly proficient in recognizing the problems that appear in systems.

Problems may attack a system from within---a malfunction in the system---or from without: the system as a whole is questioned. The states, and thus also the problems of large complex systems, do not show themselves in their real totality but rather in smaller less complex subsystems which imply---by analogy or by disintegration---the system wherein they are consequences and consistent or inconsistent statements.

In contradistinction to Industry and Business who must dominate the system to which they adjust, Technology and The Arts need neither dominate nor adjust. Composers and technologists are not concerned with the exploitation of, and adjustment to, problems. They are concerned with the solution of problems and, as a first step in this direction, with the design of models, structural analogies, of the desired solution.

The construction of models for problem-solving in the broadest and most general sense is the goal which Technology and Composition have in common. In order to reach and to effectively demonstrate this goal they have to preserve their independence from temporarily ruling values which always imply and reaffirm only the system that ought to be investigated and that gave rise to the problem. If technologists and composers were to join forces in an internationally supported endeavor of systems-research and systems-creation they could hope to avoid loops of futility, to preserve their independence from temporarily ruling values, to reach and to effectively demonstrate their goal. Their findings, discoveries, suggestions, and explanations should throw considerable light, be it welcome or not, on our ability of changing, if need be, just those concepts which we most automatically take for granted.

The contemporary distance between composers in the technological era and the systems that rule their lives is a required prerequisite for their effectivity as temporarily inabsorbable, critical, and necessary inputs to their society.

(Whereupon the experts, who, really, were only specialists, refused to vote on the proposal. Some argued that it was irrelevant to the meeting's theme. Some argued that it would offend member states in UNESCO. This argument was flatly denied by the participating representatives of UNESCO, but to no avail.)

Notes

1. Hugh Davies: Repertoire Internationale des Musiques Electro-Acoustiques, International Electronic Music Catalog. London, 1967, The M.I.T. Press, 1968.

2. Lowell Cross: Electronic Music, 1948-1953 in Perspectives of New Music Vol. 7, No. 1, 1968.

3. L.A. Hiller and L.M. Isaacson: Experimental Music McGraw-Hill Book Co., N.Y. 1959.

mario's absence!

hi guys... i apologize for my absence today!

i'm on this phone conference at we speak... and have been for the last 2 or so hours!

as soon it's done i'll there. i had no idea it was gonna take so long!!!

Plunderphonics

I think music is supposed to be borrowed and stolen. It's like a good piece of information. I can give you a good piece of information but it's what you decide to do with that piece of information which makes it worthwhile or not. How do you think inventions have come about. inventors borrow and use other people's ideas in order to lead up to the culmination of what is known. Henry Ford was not the first inventor of the car. There were many models known before. Peanut oil driven cars, cars powered by steam. Henry Ford used those models and invented the Model T. I know there was a car invented before that by him but I can't think of it. And is not music an invention, it's a composition for the soul. Music is not trivial, to most it's the cornerstone to a sane life. For most, these so called hackers, piraters, composers, remixers, music is an outlet a source of creativity, and for most they do not know what or how much their piece of work is inspiring. It's sound in the air, and there is no way of calculating the influence, but most would say music has saved them. So who is to say a song made by me a college bozo or a song made by Enya is more influential to people. Music is a sound collage, it has just become more complex over the years. From the beginning of music starting with notes they were passed on "borrowed" by the first ever musicians and it became more complex through the centuries up to now where we are not only borrowing notes but we are borrowing riffs and sounds. If you want me to explain this I can in more depth. Just ask me in class!! Again it's a bout the intention of the artist. Chopped and Screwed is a hip hop style known throughout the South. Songs are taken and slowed down and intersticed into other songs to reflect the Southern drawl of the South. Is this stealing. But it's recognized as a legitimate hip hop style. Some words of thought!!!

Plunderphonics

In the Plunderphonics paper, Oswald says “as curious tourists should we not be able to take our own snapshots through the crowd rather than be restricted to the official souvenir postcards and programmers”. As I understand it, he is saying that we should have the right as individuals to interact with music from our own unique angles and thereby remix the culture surrounding us according to our inclinations. In this way, listeners no longer are just passive. Instead, they too become active in the process of music making much like a person who is enjoying the architecture of a beautiful city through the lens of his camera.
However, I am still a bit confused as to what exactly constitutes plagiarism when sampling music. A person can take a picture of the Eiffel Tower in his own unique fashion and not worry about such restrictions, but in the world of music, the rules seem to be different and not well defined. At least from what I can understand at this point.
The Wikipedia page on John Oswald quotes him as saying, “if creativity is a field, copyright is the fence”. I found that to be a very succinct and memorable way of explaining the problem that Plunderphonics runs into.

John Oswald's Plunderphonics

Here's a link to some music clips of John Oswald's Pluderphonics.

http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:xn4uak2k0m3x

MIDI Virtual Driver for Vista Users

30 day Trial for LoopBe1

http://www.nerds.de/index.html
click "Downloads"

Get the LoopBe1

Terry Riley Video

Terry Riley begins speaking of the cross-cultural influences of music that he was doing in the mid 1960's. I think the influence of other cultures while a good thing oftentimes to a young artist can be a precarious road to walk. Oftentimes perhaps musical influences can be pulled with no clear connection or lack of connection whatsoever. Also there exists the possibility of too many influences leading to a mashed up mess with no sense of cohesion and loses the individual flavors of the cultures from which they were drawn. The idea of a mirror being reflective of the various cultures was mentioned at one point in a previous blog. The inherent danger is that by the mixing of so many cultures those shards of mirrors can eventually be ground into so much dust that the ability to be able to reflect the light is lost.

Eno Video

I particularly enjoyed Eno's tie in of the idea of music as reflective of the organisms and systems inherent in the world to resonate with my own ideas. The concept that each thing in the world exists as a byproduct f many different events and interactions not as an individual entity but part of a complex system of relations translates over to music to create an idea of give and take between not only musicians but also individual notes, melodies, types of instrumentation and likewise the influences that germinate the music and all that leads up to the generative moment of conception for the music/sound itself. Likewise the existence of the music then permeates the rest of the world through its own interactions ad infinitum. Kind of like an osmosis of sound.

The Wire Tapper 19

This was a really cool ixture of different sounds. Some of them were a it annoying but I kept thinking about sounds in nature that were pulled to make this CD. The music sounded like things you would here everyday.: to the simplest things such as typing on a keyboard or the creeks in the wooden floors. i have a new found perspective on music now. lol Well not completely but it is cool what you can do with sounds from nature. i'm so use to the popular songs out now with the in studio made beats and piano keys.

Reed Phase- Track 12

Wow........... is all I can say about this track. I didn't realize how annoying the repetition of a certain sound could be. At first I was like this is beautiful until I realized the looping of the song wasn't going to break. But if you were to visually apply an image to the sound it kind of incases the awkward beauty of the sound. I started to imagine a waterfall flowing continuously down a river bed, or even the dripping of my bathroom faucet after I cut it off. it's crazy how I first thought to be annoying, but it is kind of cool!

Terry Riley on self realization

On so many levels I agree with Terry Riley. He mentioned in the video that music is " a way of knowing more about yourself in relationship to the Universe." The only difference for me is that music serves as a relationship between me and God. it defintitely connects to the spiritual side of your being. I think that people make music which expresses what their insides would say or sing out loud if they had a voice....lol Funny but that's what I think

Brian Eno

I really respect anyone who creates their own sort of style and can accurately as well as opinionatedly express themselves. I can agree with Eno's aspects of his form of music being improvisation mixed with collaborative elements. I think at times the best art is art that is developed right on the spot and is not planned out and when you can add other elements to give it a nice polishing

In repsonse to Mario's comments on Terry Riley

In response to Mario's comments on looping and vedic hymns, is that track from Bush of Ghosts a vedic hymn? I was wondering if that track held any great significance or if they just lied the sounds mixed together. It was very meditative sounding. But yeah.... just wondering.

Ambient and Generative music

Being in a society where most music I listen to is composed of organized notes with a consonant melody, the whole ambient sound is kind of awkward. Hearing some of Brian Eno's work my mind quite often feels like I'm on drugs, like I am sitting on a cloud. It's kind of creepy.But at the same time I think it allows you to be free and break away from tradition. Who says that music has to be something with a steady and rhythmic eight count?

As far as generative music goes I donot understand all four primary perspectives that characterizes it. I some what can understand the structural style of generative music and the creative style. I don't know if I understand the interactive style of generative music. I do agree with Eno's theory of music changing and evolving. Here are the the four theories in case someone's wondering what I am talking about:

Linguistic/Structural

music composed from analytic theories that are so explicit as to be able to generate structurally coherent material (Loy and Abbott 1985; Cope 1991). This perspective has its roots in the generative grammars of language (Chomsky 1956) and music (Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983), which generate material with a recursive tree structure.

[edit] Interactive/Behavioural

music generated by a system component that ostensibly has no inputs. That is, 'not transformational' (Rowe 1991; Lippe 1997:34; Winkler 1998). Brian Eno's Generative Music 1 is an example of this.

[edit] Creative/Procedural

music generated by processes that are designed and/or initiated by the composer. Steve Reich's Its gonna rain and Terry Riley's In C are examples of this (Eno 1996).

[edit] Biological/Emergent

non-deterministic music (Biles 2002), or music that cannot be repeated, for example, ordinary wind chimes (Dorin 2001). This perspective comes from the broader generative art movement. This revolves around the idea that music, or sounds may be 'generated' by a musician 'farming' parameters within an ecology, such that the ecology will perpetually produce different variation based on the parameters and algorithms used

The Beat Generation- Spontineity

I think the beat generation has alot to do with the negative depictions in society today. This generation really pushed the envelope on the topics of sex, drugs and artying. You can only expect the generations that follows behind to top what was done in the past. The very art of music and the instruments that create the melodies aren't as important anymore, because the focus is put on valuables and sexual promescuity. I mean the beat generation brought forth some great talent but I feel like it is a contributor to the music industry's limitation of creative music topics.

Subterranean Homesick Blues

I think the video was really interesting. It kind of reminded me of Charlie Chaplin films, the beginning of filming. I think that connection made me connect with it as the beginning of an era. Rock videos...... I lost focus sometimes because I was trying to read the signs as welas keep up with the music. if I could borrow from this video, but instead of pairing up the signs with the lyrics, I would have it silent and have the viewers focus on reading the lyrics presented. I think something along those lines. But it might just be that I had a hard time focusing on the selected words from the song.

Erik Davis

My question here is: why are acoustic spaces so effective in this regard? What is it about sound that is so potentially immersive? I think it has to do with how we register it—how it affects different areas of the bodymind than visuals do. Affect is a tremendously important dimension of experience, and one of the most difficult to achieve in a visual environment. "Atmosphere" might be a good way to describe this aspect: sound produces atmosphere, almost in the way that incense—which registers with yet another sense—can do. Sound and smell carry vectors of mood and affect which change the qualitative organization of space, unfolding a different logic with a space's range of potentials. Ambient music, or an ambient soundscape, can change the quality of a space in subtle or dramatic ways.

Terry Riley

I grew up in India (89-96) and for me Terry's words are very familiar; the relationship between "looping" and "Vedic hymns".

In Ancient Vedic Texts you find the term "mantra-siddhi" mentioned frequently in relation to meditation and spiritual life (self-
realization). Mantra-siddhi (mantra a compound word meaning "mind liberating") and siddhi (perfection) implies that a prayer be repeated thousands of times in order to tune into a spiritual reality...

Anyway, it's all fascinating to me!!!

Brian Eno

I find amazing the precise choice of words he uses! I would expect nothing less from a sound genius!

His analogy about organisms reconfigured by "forces and constrains" to create other more complex organisms i think can be and is the basis for and can be applied to art in general at various levels.

I also admire his creative freedom, "I want to be on this edge between improvisation and collaboration" that phrase says it all.
As a dancer and performer when I hear the word "improvisation", I hear "awareness", "real time", "presence"... "ever-fresh"!!! I think that it's a improvisation is an essential in any art; it's what keeps that form of expression alive.

Reed Phase, track 12

Reed Phase, track 12 on the CD that came with Sound Unbound, is not a track that I would care to listen to over and over again for any extended amount of time. However, I do appreciate the artist exploring the way in which repetition intensifies the sound. While listening to it, I was at times lost in it like a stream of thoughts pulling me further and further in. Then, just as I was becoming lost in the repetition, the repetition would become too much. At this point, it felt like a form of Chinese water torture with each repetition being one more drop landing on my head. I could hear the piece loop at times and yet was confused as to whether I was hearing the exact same sounds through the entire piece or if it was changing slightly. It was like the repetition was playing with me!

The Loudspeaker in the Tower

I had an amazing supplemental reading about bells called "The Loudspeaker in the Tower" by Ivan Illich. Check it out dudes!!!

Campanalogy

Campanology (late Latin campana, "bell" + Greek λόγος, "knowledge") is the study of bells. It encompasses the physical realities of bells — how they are cast, tuned and sounded — as well as the various methods devised to perform bell-ringing.

In particular, it is common to collect together a set of tuned bells and treat the whole as one musical instrument. Such collections — such as a Flemish carillon, a Russian zvon, or a British "ring of bells" used for change ringing — have their own practices and challenges; and campanology is likewise the study of perfecting such instruments, composing music for them, and performing it.

Generative Music and Terry Riley

Generative Music relies on a system or process to create a continually evolving and ever-changing piece of music. Unlike a live performance or recorded music, Generative Music is never the same. Using software and technology as paintbrushes, the artist is able to create his own sounds and then let them free within pre-set parameters. The process is similar to a craftsperson creating a wind chime so that he can hear music. The craftsperson knows that he will only be able to control the type of material and how thick it is and how many chimes there will be on the finished piece. Such construction will directly affect the sounds that will emanate from the wind chime, but beyond this he will have no more control. Once the piece is finished, the craftsperson must hang it in the wind for unpredictable sounds to emerge as the wind blows.
As I scanned a few articles on this topic, I began to wonder more and more about how we will experience music in the future. One article pointed out that because generative music is ever changing it cannot be recorded and therefore copyrighted. What will the affect of this be?
I am also very curious about generative music being brought into more public spaces like Brian Eno’s 1975 project, “Music for Airports”. I am specifically interested in bringing such music into a hospital environment where people lay staring at white walls for hours on end without much stimulation except for the static and whirr of hospital machines and the un-rejuvenating noise of the television. Last year, I took part in a one month intensive class with Shands Arts in Medicine that looked at using the Arts in a hospital setting to foster healing in patients. I saw music in particular to be very powerful. One woman who had been in a lot of pain and not able to fall asleep, fell asleep within 10 minutes of three people performing live music right by her bedside. I even watched the monitor that was hooked up to her change to a more relaxing state right before my eyes! As part of this class, we were also lead through a musical journey in which we all played various instruments at different intervals with our eyes closed. The process took about 10 minutes. It brought us into another state and when we finally opened our eyes again, we came out of this musical journey refreshed. So, the healing qualities of music are undeniable.
The Terry Riley video that is posted on this blog talks about the possibilities that music opens up for a person to more fully realize himself. Riley says that “music carries a powerful message about who we are”. I think that is true not only on a personal level, but can also be applied to the larger society. If music has this power, then incorporating its effects into the larger society should be something we aim for. We should be including the positive and healing aspects of music into our everyday lives in the different public spaces that we interact within.
The idea of music as including healing and spirituality makes me wonder what sounds exactly affect one’s mind in such a way as to cause this mental shift. What makes one noise grating and another uplifting? The sounds of the sitar have a very calming effect on me so I’d like to find out why that is so.

Sound Design

Sound design is one of the youngest fields in stagecraft, second only to the use of projection and other multimedia displays. The idea of sound design has been around since theatre started, however the first person to receive a credit as Sound Designer on the poster and in the programme alongside the lighting and scene designers was David Collison for the 59 Theatre Company Season at London's Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith in 1959. The first person to be titled the "sound designer" on Broadway was Jack Mann for his work on Show Girl in 1963 [3], and for regional theatre to Dan Dugan at the American Conservatory Theatre (ACT), San Francisco in 1968. Since then the field has been growing rapidly. The term "Sound Design" was introduced to the film world when Francis Ford Coppola directed (and his father, Carmine Coppola, arranged the music for) a production of Private Lives at ACT, while the final cut of the film The Godfather was being edited in 1972.

Currently it can be said that there are two variants of Theatrical Sound Design. Both are equally important, but very different, though their functions usually overlap. Often a single Sound Designer will fill both these roles, and although on a large budget production they may work together, for the most part there is only one Sound Designer for a given production. Where such distinctions are made, the first variant is "Technical Sound Design" (which has also been termed Theatre Sound System Design by the United States Institute for Theatre Technology's (USITT) Sound Design Commission), which is prevalent on Broadway, and the second "Conceptual Sound Design" (which has also been termed Theatre Sound Score Design by the USITT), which is prevalent at Regional Repertory Theatres. Both variants were created during the 1960s. These terms are really examples only, and not generally used in practice since most Sound Designers simply call themselves Sound Designers, no matter which role they are filling primarily.

Technical Sound Design requires the sound designer to design the sound system that will fulfill the needs of the production. If there is a sound system already installed in the venue, it is their job to tune the system for the best use for the given production using various methods including equalization, delay, volume, speaker and microphone placement, and this may include the addition of equipment not already provided. In conjunction with the director and musical director, if any, they also determine the use and placement of microphones for actors and musicians. A Technical Sound Designer makes sure that the performance can be heard and understood by everyone in the audience, no matter how large the room, and that the performers can hear everything they need to in order to do their job.

Conceptual Sound Design is very different from technical sound design, but equally important. The designer must first read the play and talk to the production's Director about what themes and messages they want to explore. It is here that, in conjunction with the director and possibly the composer, the designer decides what sounds he will use to create mood and setting of the play. He or she might also choose or compose specific music for the play, although the final choice typically lies with the director, who may want nothing but scene change music or, on the other extreme, will want ambient beds under every scene, such as Robert Woodruff of the American Repertory Theatre or Bill Ball, Ellis Rabb and Jack O'Brien who were active at ACT and the Old Globe Theatre, San Diego, in the mid 1960s where Dan Dugan initially began his art. Many sound designers are indeed accomplished composers, writing and producing music for productions as well as designing sound. With these designers, it is often difficult to discern the line between sound design and music.

Some noted Sound Designers and/or Composers include David Budries, Abe Jacob (considered by many to be the Godfather of modern Theatre Sound Design), Steve Canyon Kennedy, Otts Munderloh, Mark Bennet, Hans Peter Kuhn, Obadiah Eaves, John Gromada, Darron West, Michael Bodeen, Rob Milburn, Tom Mardikes, Jon Gottlieb, Dan Moses Schreier, Jim Van Bergen, Bruce Ellman, Richard B. Ingraham, David Van Tieghem, Joe Pino, Steven Brown, Richard Woodbury, David Collison, Jonathan Deans, Tony Meola, Paul Arditti and John Bracewell.

On occasion, the director may be very hands-on and will tell the sound designer what sounds to use and where to play them. In such cases, the sound designer becomes little more than an audio editor, but this depends to a large degree on the director and his relationship and level of trust with the sound designer. There are also collaborations such as exist between Ann Bogart and Darron West in the Siti Company, where he is in rehearsal from the day one and sound is really another character of the play. Also, the Conceptual Sound Designer must build the "prop sounds" (telephones rings, answering machines, announcements etc.) and figure out how to fit them into the established themes with regard to when and where the action is supposed to be taking place. For example, using a modern cellular phone ringtone would be out of place for a phone ringing in the 1940s. A Conceptual Sound Designer uses sound to enhance the audience's experience by conveying specific emotion or information without using words.

Above all, both the Technical Sound Designer and the Conceptual Sound Designer must call on experience and "uncommon" sense to ensure that the sound and music are contributing constructively to the production and are in harmony with the work of the actors and other designers.

The union that represents theatrical non-Broadway sound designers in the United States is United Scenic Artists (USA) Local USA829 which is now integrated within IATSE. Theatrical Sound Designers in Canada are represented by the Associated Designers of Canada (ADC). Sound Designers on Broadway working on productions falling under the League of American Theatre and Producers contracts (i.e. all Broadway theatrical productions) are represented by IATSE Local One[1], by virtue of Local One's merger with IATSE Local 922, the former Theatrical Sound Designers local union. Local One maintains a binding contract with Broadway producers for work performed on Broadway shows.

Charlie Richmond assembled a set [4] of Definitions, Communication Standards, Recommended Working Procedures, Information List, and suggested Contract Addenda to the ADC in 1990 in order to assist them in creating a Sound Design contract which finally occurred in 2004.

Other audio positions in a production that may or may not be filled by the designer include that of the production engineer.

eno link test

watch and blog

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKQiBksphXY

BLOG ASSIGNMENTS

are not optional

i am grading your responses to the materials assigned in class.
As it stands now only Shamar and Mario have done any blogging and the rest of you have zeroes on the first two. Meet with me Tuesdays and thursdays 9:30-12:30

pp

Ambience - Class Notes

La Monte Young

Is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer, and one of the four most celebrated leaders of the minimalist school.

Mela Foundation

The Theater of Eternal Music: Sometimes later known as The Dream Syndicate, [1] was a mid-sixties musical group formed by LaMonte Young [2] that focused on experimental drone music. It featured the performances of La Monte Young, John Cale, Angus MacLise, Terry Jennings, Marian Zazeela, Tony Conrad, Billy Name, Jon Hassell, Alex Dea and others. The group is stylistically tied to the Neo-Dada aesthetics of Fluxus and the post-John Cage noise music continuum.

Just Intonation

In music, just intonation is any musical tuning in which the frequencies of notes are related by ratios of whole numbers. Any interval tuned in this way is called a just interval; in other words, the two notes are members of the same harmonic series.

John Cale

Though most well-noted for his work in rock music, Cale has worked in a variety of styles and genres, including drone, noise andclassical.

Andy Warhol

Andrew Warhola (August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987), known as Andy Warhol, was an American artist and a central figure in the movement known as pop art. After a successful career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol became famous worldwide for his work as apainter, an avant-garde filmmaker, a record producer, an author, and a public figure known for his membership in wildly diverse social circles that included bohemian street people, distinguished intellectuals, Hollywood celebrities and wealthy aristocrats.

Songs:

Pan-Sonic
Oval
Matmos
Exploding Plastic Invitable
Velvet Underground
Venus in Furs
Heroes
Music for Airports

Fluxus

Is a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well asliterature, urban planning, architecture, and design. Fluxus is often described as intermedia, a term coined by Fluxus artist Dick Higginsin a famous 1966 essay.

Brian Eno

known popularly as Brian Eno (pronounced /ˈiːnoʊ/), is an English musician, producer, music theorist, and singer, who, as a solo artist, is best known as the "Father of Ambient Music". Art-school-educated, and inspired by minimalism, he became artistically prominent as the keyboards and synthesizer player of the 1970sGlam rock and Art rock band Roxy Music.

Robert Fripp (Frippertonics)

Frippertronics (a term coined by Joanna Walton, Fripp's poet girlfriend in the late 1970s) is an analog delay system consisting of two reel-to-reel tape recorders situated side-by-side. The two machines are configured so that the tape travels from the supply reel of the first machine to the take-up reel of the second, thereby allowing sound recorded by the first machine to be played back some time later on the second. The audio of the second machine is routed back to the first, causing the delayed signal to repeat while new audio is mixed in with it. The amount of delay (usually 3 to 5 seconds) is controlled by increasing or decreasing the distance between the machines.

My Life in the Bush Of Ghosts

Is a 1981 album by Brian Eno and David Byrne, titled after Amos Tutuola's 1954 novel of the same name. The album was re-released in expanded form in 2006.Receiving strong reviews upon its release, My Life is now regarded as a high point in the discographies of Eno and Byrne.[1] In a 1985 interview, Kate Bush[2] stated the album "left a very big mark on popular music," while critic John Bush describes it as "[a] pioneering work for countless styles connected to electronics, ambience, and Third World music."[3]

Found ARt

The term found art—more commonly found object (French: objet trouvé) or readymade—describes art created from the undisguised, but often modified, use of objects that are not normally considered art, often because they already have a mundane, utilitarian function. Marcel Duchamp was the originator of this in the early 20th-century.

Sound Unbound (1st reading)

There is an Italian expression,"L'arte D'arringiarsi" which means "The Art of making something out of nothing." This what resonates in my mind as I read every word, phrase and sentence of "Sound Unbound"

The idea of "noise being another form of information" is both fascinating and liberating. It opens a whole different world in which sound, if taken to the right editing editing point, can create virtual realms in the minds of people. 

As I read through first few chapters I hear the words of Maya Angelou, "Everything in the Universe has rhythm; everything dances." I hear ancient bits and pieces of the Vedic sound theory, where sound is intrinsically alive it just has to be channeled and sculpted right can create parallel worlds. 

The Wire Tapper

Life Is a Beautiful Monster

The piece started out as a repetive sound, much like a skipping cd, and then suddenly leaped into an experimental jazz sort of chaos. It sounded like a party with all of the different noises representing people interacting and moving, moving, moving. Then the saxaphone mellowed out a bit as if a person were leaving the party or taking some time for reflection out in the streets. The music then seemed to get darker and spookier as if ghosts were entering the scene or as if a homeless person suprised someone in the dark shadows by appearing at an unexpected time. It ends with an owl like sound and barking noise.

Sweetest Charms

The song gave me the feeling that I was an observer watching a young woman walk through a forest filled with water drops and electronical bugs and birds and glitter dust. Then, because of a static sound that would sometimes appear, it made the entire picture that I was forming in my head seem less real and more like it was existing only on some sort of television screen or pixilated reality that had the ability to shift or fade in and out in sync with the static. I liked how the soft whisper of the girl and occasional child-like voices mixed with stringed instruments, nature noises and harsher static sounds all mixed together to take me on a journey in only about five minutes.

The Wire Tapper #12

"It don't bother me/Where is Mike" is a solemn funeral party remix. 

It reminds of you an Afro-peruvian song about death. A slave boy dies and is thrown on the flat bed of an improvised tricycle made to be a funeral vehicle.  His feet hang off the edge and bounce up and down on his way to the burial. His mother is crying hysterically so is every one else. 

However a contrasting element is also present, one that doesn't fit in. The boy's mother begins to move her hips to a rhythm. People noticed it and cheer her on, "Cry on, cry on black woman, cry it out and but keep moving those hips". She cries to mourn the death of her baby boy; she dances because death is better than slavery.

In more contemporary context remix Mike might the boy's name.

Subterranean Homesick Blues

Looking at this film clip through the lens of the Beat Generation, although Bob Dylan was not a member of such, I can see the first attempt to capture contemporary audiences using a visual, acoustic and literary medium. I think that Bob Dylan and the Beatniks saw a need to take self expression to the net level and permeate audiences senses subliminally by instilling socio-political messages in the context of entertainment, design and technology.

The Beatniks

One thing I found fascinating about the The Beat Generation is their collective eclecticism. The fusion, if you will, of spontaneity, open emotion and most important visceral engagement was unprecedented. This blend of raw creativity became the basis for self expression and artistic imagination sampling ideas from every philosophical, artistic and literary tradition, ripped them, cut them, remixed them and rendered a visual, acoustic and tactile medium that created a canvas on which to paint our ever-changing contemporary reality.

The Beat Generation

In reading about the Beat Generation, I began to make connections between Dadaism, Surrealism, the Beatniks and the later 60s counterculture of the Hippies. The Beats incorporated the Dadaist spontaneity and its non-conformity to bourgeois values and, like Surrealism, allowed the imagination to move freely through the subconscious. Injecting their writings with spiritual references and inspiration from the truths they found in the streets, poems such as Ginsberg’s Howl emerged. In listening to DJ Spooky’s, “Once loved/ A footnote to Howl”, I could hear Ginsberg saying such things as “The bum is as holy as the seraphim. The madman as holy as you my soul are holy. The typewriter is holy. Holy the jazz bands’ marijuana hipsters, peace, and junk, and drums. The tongue, and cock, and ass-hole, holy. Holy Holy Holy. Everything is Holy.” Obviously, such thoughts were not mainstream but were proclaimed anyways, breaking free of societal constrictions. The Beatniks grew out of the media attention surrounding writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. As the decade turned, the Beatniks morphed into the new cultural phenomenon of the Hippies.
In is interesting to note the effect that media played in taking what was spontaneously happening in the cultural scene of New York and elsewhere during the 50s and then taking that energy, repackaging it and selling it to the masses. In one of the Beat Generation documentaries on You Tube, many of those interviewed said that they were not aware of what they were doing as any sort of movement, per se. Rather, they were just having fun and experimenting with new ways of expressing themselves. For example, the rhythm of music and the body movements of the performers such as Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk were a large influence on the poetry as were painters of the time such as Franz Kline.
It is interesting to note that Ginsberg himself even says that nobody knew whether they were “catalysts or invented something, or just the froth riding on a wave of its own.”

Subterranean Homesick Blues

In Subterranean Homesick Blues I’d sample “You don’t need a weatherman to see which way the wind blows”, “20 years of schooling and they put you on the day shift”, “Better stay away from those that carry a fire hose” and “I’m on the pavement thinking about the government”. I like the fact that the music is very upbeat and yet the lyrics, used within the right setting, could talk about serious subjects. The upbeat nature of the music could add a bit of humor or light-heartedness to a serious piece and I think that is key.

Thoughts on DJ Spooky's Interview, Errata Erratum and Digital Media as an art form

In his interview, DJ spooky said something like…the landscape of culture and technologies and memory are tools for editing and manipulating memory and this is a new type of art form.

It as if through this art form we can both time travel and teleport. But rather than move our physical bodies, our mind is transported down the roadways of sound and images. By taking images, voices and sounds from different historical periods and parts of the world and then merging them into the present through this digital art form, a magical mirror is created that reflects our society back to us in a completely new way. Even with a short attention span and historical memory, a person watching such a performance is able to see the dots of their age connected before their eyes. And beyond this, they are able to feel the impact within themselves because of the music and sound which work in conjunction with the images.

In Errata Erratum, DJ Spooky goes one step farther by allowing the audience members the power to actually control aspects of the artwork wherever they may be in the world, so long as they are connected to the web. To me, that is absolutely fascinating! I have always enjoyed interactive art pieces, but this is the first one that I have partaken of on the internet.

On another note, I wonder what will happen when the whole world begins to sample each other…and even sample those samples and on and on like two mirrors reflecting each other again and again. What will be the next step? If blues, jazz, techno, hip hop, jungle, bass etc. came out of the collision of Africa and Europe as DJ spooky said, then what will come out of the musical rhythms of the entire world colliding? I just imagine more and more collaboration for the future. I imagine the most varied artists working together and communicating from across the globe. I imagine building on, for example, what the Digital Worlds Institute is already doing with global artist collaborations. Also imagine the possibilities of say, bringing the arts into classrooms through digital media and on top of that allowing the kids to actually become creators of interactive artworks…putting the power into their hands. I know a lot of this is already starting and it will be fascinating to watch this art form continue to unfold, web-out, network etc…..