Listening Assignments: Opinion and Dissection

Listening Assignments:

Xenakis: Concrete ph: The sounds heard in this piece are crystalline in nature. They sound almost like an enhanced rain-stick. With emphasis being put into the sharpness of pitch when each "crystal" strikes surface; each sound cutting away quickly, as to make room for the next.

Terry Riley: In C: This piece is an excellent example of "wall of sound." It begins with a single note being played on each beat, setting the tempo. In come the piano, slowly, then violin, then flutes. Each sound adds to the spectrum until it becomes one huge cacophony. Truly a composed piece, not just tweaked or filtered sound.

John Chowning: Stria: This is an excellent example of ambient music being filtered to become the "center of attention" to the listener. It starts off as a small, continuous tone and grows to become a vast collection of sharp and resounding tones. The pitch and tone takes from the horror genre, creating uneasy tones while maintaining a largeness of feel. All of the effects and filters placed into this piece were intentionally put there to knock the listener off balance and make them feel vulnerable. It does an excellent job of doing this by creating an atmosphere of large, echoing sounds that fade off and return suddenly and unexpectedly. This creates the feeling of grandness of scale; as though the listener were hearing the piece in a large auditorium. The sounds often fade off in the distance to return very loud and very close to the listener, which creates a sense of unease and a feeling of powerlessness in the listener. When a person hears a sound fade out, they know where it has gone; in the distance, it has faded away. When the tone returns loud and close, with no warning to the listener, it subconsciously informs the listener that they do not have the ability to guess what is about to come next. Their comfort zone is shattered. Chowning does an excellent job of keeping the listener in a state of unease.

Steve Reich: Come Out: I immediately like what Reich did with cutting and looping the voice audio. The Polyphony he builds up to has a dramatic effect, eventually making one man's segmented audio clip sound like a crowd speaking in unison. I believe he then up a reverb or echo filter onto a few of the polyphony segments in order to create an elongated, drawn-out effect of the audio clip. Doing this creates a feeling of grandness of scale of sound within the listener.