Sound Unbound Ch18: Raymond Scott

Socially awkward and preferring to work with machines, Raymond Scott sure had the personality of a genius. I think its almost sad though how much of his life he spent creating machines that would have been insignificant to construct with even an early computer. Scott spent time building various contraptions to vary voltage and keep time - both are functions easily provided by computers.

I do think its interesting that Scott, in the early 1900's, was working toward a goal of melding the human mind with a machine. Obviously this is a goal that receives a lot of work today - especially to help subjects who have lost limbs, eyesight, hearing, etc.

I also got the impression that Scott was a bit of an egotist. It seems like every idea he had he ran down to the patent office. Then when he actually built something significant he worked his name in there. Then, at the beginning of the chapter Scott mentions feeling bad about keeping his work on the first "synthesizer" so private....yeah now that its far too late to capitalize commercially and all he can hope for is public recognition, he wishes he had gone public at the onset.

So-Unb-und-ound.

When reading Reich and Miller I couldn't help but to think how different their thought processes were. At least from their writing, it seems that Reich prefers a step by step approach, recognizing problems, pondering solutions, and implementing them. While Miller does the same thing, he draws a hundred parallels, compares them to his problem, and from them draws his own solution. This is a reflection of their times, and with that, their approach to music. Reich the innovator, finding ideas and thinking of solutions, and Miller the sampler, plundering and borrowing to create his own masterpieces.

One thing that bothered me when doing the readings was with what decisiveness and brevity Reich spoke. It was almost as if his reaction to writing an introduction was that he expressed about writing for the opera, "No. I didn't have any sympathy for..."
However when reading chapter two I was unsure as to whether I'd found relief in reading someone that appears to be ecstatic about the subject, or dumbfounded with the speed at which Miller jumps from one thing to another, to draw the readers' attention to details he probably knows, and make his answers set an example for sampling itself. After reading I was glad to have done so, and see where he was going although I admit having to reread quite a few sentences throughout the chapter to ease my confusion as to what he was getting at.

I particularly enjoyed the comparison to architecture Miller employed, that buildings "are nothing but correspondences between relationships... from...ideas drawn people working, living, and breathing together to create a structure." By quoting Sullivan's famous detail concerning architecture, "form should follow function," adding to that Goethe and Shelling's "architecture is nothing but frozen music," to reveal epiphany-like that if reverse-engineered, music is liquid architecture, and thus sound becomes unbound. In that brief portion of a paragraph (although he built on it for over a page before), Miller has presented us with something we're familiar with; buildings, and architecture, has sampled other ideas; FTP servers, Sullivan, Goethe and Shelling's, and drawn out a simple, quintessential conclusion: there are no limits to what you can do with sound, and nothing should limit you. A conclusion people may take for granted, but it is not the conclusion alone which makes this section so excellent, is the fact that on the way Miller has showed his audience how to do it.

Sound Unbound and my Audio Clips

Cinq Études De Bruits: Étude Violette - What can I say... it was reaaaaally short.  It did, however, seem like something that I would use in a movie clip or something like that.  It was a kinda cool piece.  Now, would I go out of my way to listen to it over and over again?  No.  Not a chance.  But it's still pretty cool.

Poème Électronique - I have actually heard this piece before.  It was when  took a music appreciation course.  I didn't quite get it then, but since I've started listening to more audio clips and pieces like this, I've kind of gained an appreciation for it.  While, once again, I wouldn't normally listen to it over and over again, I do realize that there is so much to this that you don't get out of what most would consider conventional music.  It offers so much to think about, and puts so many different images in your head.

Concret PH - The one thing I really thought about when listening to this was a rainstick.  I also heard these little beeps and boops that made me think it sounded like it was a computer generated rainstick, because it sounded like a rainstick... that beeped and booped...

I offered some minor descriptions of my pieces on the pieces themselves in soundcloud.  If you would like something more in depth, please, feel free to ask:

http://soundcloud.com/bpokorny1/little-lucy-draft-1

http://soundcloud.com/bpokorny1/some-kinda-beat

http://soundcloud.com/bpokorny1/techy

http://soundcloud.com/bpokorny1/rock-meets-roll

http://soundcloud.com/bpokorny1/mister-weird

Sound Unbound Chapter 1

My only regret after reading the author's first chapter of sound unbound is that I read the first chapter of sound unbound. However, I can certainly understand why the author asserts that reality largely exists in our minds - based on the complete lack of unified thought in that text, the author must have a few people living in his head.

One take away I obtained from reading the text is a firm confirmation that I would have hated majoring in English. There seems to be some obsession in expressive writing with using unnecessarily complex diction, and trying as hard as one can to bury the message of the piece. Maybe thats how literary scholars weed out the wannabes? If you can read a text and draw a single valid conclusion then you must be a literary genius. I, however, have little appreciation for this pointless weaving of an SAT verbal section into a quilt of an essay. Although....maybe its the opposite of intelligence that results in this kind of writing. Reading this chapter felt a bit like listening to Sarah Palin - you're never quite sure what word will come next, nor what context she thinks shes in. I am finding especially with musicians that there is some innate need to forgo context. I mean, of course the author believes the world exists in our heads - he describes the world as if talking to himself...why provide context or connection or explanation, he already knows what hes talking about and thats all that matters.

Communication strategies aside (despite the fact the author makes a case for everything being information while epitomizing absolutely terrible transference of said information), I was not at all convinced that this concept of sampling is anything special. In fact, I couldn't even figure out if the author was claiming it was something new and revolutionary, or something as old as dirt. First we see architecture and music related to this idea of sampling - art forms we know are very old. Then we hear about this great impact of software and the internet and FTP servers (for whatever reason that particular technology was chosen...). What was the message here? I saw no cohesion to the argument.

Further, I believe I saw an assertion early on in the chapter that this idea of sampling resulted from an exhaustion of possibilities. For example, the author mentioned a painter who stopped painting because he felt that he was just filling in the spaces. Yes, a very nice choice to try and make that point about having exhausted originality and therefore needing to compose non-original pieces to achieve originality. There is probably no better choice than someone who's life revolves around taking a white rectangle, filling it, hanging it, and finally grabbing a new white rectangle. However, lets consider the theme of mashups in our technology driven culture. The purpose in software development has nothing to do with running out of things to create, it has to do with progress. We have reached a point where the man-hour investment to move forward is prohibitively expensive in the absence of a preexisting foundation. In fact, sampling is THE MECHANISM which ENABLES original software services that the layperson considers both engaging AND original. These products are far more than the sum of their parts and in this context the samples are nothing but gears in the machine - do we consider watches to be mashups because they are made of re-usable parts (or any other machine for that matter)? I certainly don't. Once the casing is added, if that casing is sufficient to hide the influence of the parts entirely, then what you have is original.

Look at it this way - what we call "original art/creation" looking back over history consists of artifacts built on the framework of nature. Why aren't those mashups? One would probably argue, because they required human inspiration to draw art from the chaos of nature! But our revolutionary web services don't? Of course they do - our web services are built from a specific selection of technologies which come from a chaotic sea of technologies. In fact, it probably requires even greater inspiration today because nature isn't expanding exponentially - but the technology selection is. Based on this single chapter I certainly do not accept the notion that building on a man-made framework somehow makes something a mashup while the earliest art pieces are original because they were built on a natural framework.

Finally, if the theme was that all of nature is a mashup, then I must wonder why the author needed to spend so much time grinding away at this point. Of course nature is a mashup - we've had a pretty good understanding of that fundamental fact for at least 100 years, and an intuitive understanding of that fact for a couple thousand years. There are atoms, and molecules, and cells, and organs, and organisms, and ecosystems, and worlds, and galaxies, and universes. There are fundamental combinations with finite or bounded possibilities like DNA, states of electrons, particle velocities, orbital patterns, etc, etc, etc. This is neither a new truth nor a new idea - the only people who are really just now arriving at this idea of universal connection and universal information are the despicable data miners working to turn all our information, habits, and interactions into a streamlined commercialism....and I'd rather they never realized it.

So maybe it would be good for the author to worry less about the universal implications of relativity and scope the claims more to the recent history of audio and video design - because I'm really not convinced these claims hold any water past that domain.

Six Marimbas, In C, and Sound Unbound

Six Marimbas by Steve Reich

Six Marimbas is quite relaxing and simple in structure. However its drawn out nature and the lack of progression leaves the listener wanting more at the end. It seems that a big part of Steve Reich’s piece is looped. The sound evolution throughout the piece is subtle enough to make you think that you are always hearing the same melody. However, there are few progressions which build up the song and upon reaching a climax the song returns to the original melody.

In C by Terry Riley

In C starts off as a more dynamic piece and it evolves much quicker than Six Marimbas. I am not sure why the metronome effect was used throughout the whole song but it definitely creates a distraction for the listener. The builds up are much quicker and they create an edgier feeling. Towards the middle of the piece a few sounds are introduced which create a cacophonous environment that greatly impact the listening pleasure. Overall I would say that In C is more innovative than Six Marimbas and ultimately made my listening experience much better.

Sound Unbound

Cika-Laka/Cool Noises/Bbb by Shukar, RadioMentale, Raoul Hausmann

Cika-Laka combines vocal elements that for me create a flashback into my childhood memories. The piece resides in a paradoxical environment since it begins with a very formal speech and then burst into silly sounds, eliminating any pre-conceptions of seriousness. Some of the sampled voices have meaning in my home country and this adds extra depth to the relevance of Cika-Laka. The main melody closely resembles a Disney cartoon but the way it is sampled suggests that is done just so that it can be mocked throughout the whole track.

Listening Assignment: Subotnick, Reich, Reily

For this week’s assignment, I familiarized myself with three pieces. The first was Steve Reich’s “Six Marimbas” (1986), performed at the University of Kentucky’s Singletary Center for the Arts in 2008. The video of the performance appeared in two parts on YouTube, and being able to watch the musicians on stage made for a more interesting experience. The instruments were paired back-to-back, and viewed from the end, created a visual puzzle. The six marimbas were played by musicians striking notes in unison for the most part, with one leading the melody for a time, and passing the melodic thread on to another. Not being a fan of minimalist music, I was surprised to find the sounds to have a softness, the mellowness of wood, with a vaguely Latin beat. There was enough melody and structure to be pleasing, and a planned monotony that reminded me of the whimsical clockworks in a medieval European village, I thought perhaps work for an animation soundtrack.

The second piece was Terry Riley's “In C” from a 2006 performance of 124 musicians. Hitting a constant 8^th note in C, it had a steady four count beat with an intermittent sound like a horn. The impression this piece left me with was of abstracted traffic noise as heard from the window of a high rise in New York City. After listening for a while, there was a warbling effect. Not being a musician, I’m not sure what this would be called.

The third piece was Morton Subotnick’s work in the remix "Mandolin/Acid Bassline" from Sound Unbound. This work contained ethnic music, possibly Middle Eastern, and German spoken word passages, and well as phrases about Death. I thought it seemed to be a reflection a mental landscape, of the ebb and flow of Consciousness, and what is sometimes called the “monkey mind” by Buddhists, a restlessness which is difficult to tame. Even though I can appreciate these explorations, much like aural paintings, in researching Subotnick, I came across the work of his son Steven. He is an animator who sometimes works on projects with his father. I can imagine that his character Hairyman might be a being who hears those kind of voices in his head. Just a thought. Guess I was right about the animation soundtrack idea...

Listening Assignment- Dias, Dias, Dias

One of a group from Brazil known as the Noigandres poets, Augusto de Campos was intrigued with both the word-images of Concrete Poetry as well as the sounds of the Samba. In an 1983 interview, he stated:

“I like to read tradition as a trans-temporal music sheet, making, at each moment, synchronic-diachronic ‘harmonies,’ translating culture’s past onto a creative present.”

So it is only appropriate that his words have been translated into our creative present by forming part of the piece entitled, “Dias, Dias (Spoken by Caetano Veloso)/Above The Earth/Contacte.” There is something both ancient and contemporary in this work, both foreign and familiar, as the murmured Portuguese words wash over us, the listeners. The mesmerizing quality of the sounds allows images to flow across the mind, and the unhurried cadence of the measured speech evokes sacred incantations. Like the film collage "Rose Hobart" of Joseph Cornell's, as Catherine Corman writes in Sound Unbound, it is “taking us beyond one location with its specific, identifying sounds, to an unlimited space of devotion- what Simic calls the “cosmic church” (p.378).

The image is Cornell's piece from 1963, "Penny Arcade."

West African Polyrhythm - The Jamani Drummers

In relation to Chapter 5 of Sound Unbound: