This is a nice and arty short video about R. Murray Schafer and his views on the soundscape. At the end, there is a very nice touch when Schafer holds up a sign that says “Listen.” and the audio fades out so you can listen to your own environmental sounds. (The effect is changed a bit if you’re wearing noise-canceling headphones like I was.)
I (obviously?) disagree with his contention in the video that recorded sounds are not “real,” although I think I understand the sentiment behind it. Sounds played back from a speaker are certainly different from those sounds as captured by a microphone, but imagining the recording device as some kind of sonic hatchet, chopping wild sounds from their sources and letting them loose, seems an oversimplification.
(via Anti-Gravity Bunny)
Andrew Spitz documents an attempt at time-lapse phonography over at his blog.
I wrote a program in Max/MSP to automize the whole process. Every 144 seconds, the software capture one frame from the webcam and a 100ms slice of sound, with a 5ms fade in and out to attempt ironing out the non-zero crossing clicks. Each new sound slice gets appended into a buffer containing the other sounds, which then gets exported and combined with the video.
(via sound + design)
“Playing Guitar With Power Tools.”
(via Music of Sound
84 plays
For those of you who saw Inception, an experiment to find the source of the BWWWAAAAAAA [warning: auto-play] sound, using the soundtrack’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” by Edith Piaf as source material:
In the dream world, time is sped up, usually by five times usual speed. However, in the final dream sequence, it is stated that they are using a special sedative that accelerates dream time to 25 times the speed of the real world.
At the end of the film, the crew finds themselves three dreams deep in the “Ice World,” and thusly, dream time is going really, really fast.
A song playing at normal speed in the real world would end up playing drastically slower in a dream three levels deep. (Think of it in terms of the van falling, the van falls in a few seconds, but they have an hour or two of time on the third level of the dream.)
So based on this I took the song “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” and slowed down the first 10 seconds of it by 70%. The end result is about 40 seconds long, you’ll notice the “BWAAAA” sound throughout, but the best example is at about the 15-20 second mark (Or the 5 second mark when played at normal speed.)
There are about a million easier ways to produce a generic “dramatic” sound, but this is a fun origin myth, at least.
(via @overthinkingit)
Linus Åkesson’s Chipophone is an organ in which he replaced the guts with microcontrollers that produce the typical chiptunes sounds. It’s a very fun-looking device for playing music that was designed to be played by a chip “live,” and Linus is clearly a skilled player of it.
What I find the most amazing, though, are the various ways he’s found to play with the fact that chiptunes is generally a music listened to as a recording. There are typical features like a step sequencer and arpeggiator that seem to take on new meaning in the context of live chiptunes playing, but the craziest thing for me is the “fadeout button” he demonstrates. After he presses it, he continues to play, while the volume automatically decays. It’s a fantastic incorporation of something very distinctly “record-like” into live performance.
(via everyone)
Viking Eggeling’s 1924 Symphonie Diagonale
I don’t know more than is on his Wikipedia page or in the video:
Made in 1924 by Viking Eggeling, SYMPHONY DIAGONALE is the best abstract film yet conceived. It is an experiment to discover the basic principles of the organization of time intervals in the film medium.
-Frederick J. Kiesler
(via visualmusic)
The Echo Nest Remix API offers a very cool tool that lets you re-create one video using segments of another. Here, Keith Moon’s drum track from “Who Are You” gets re-made by Animal. Dancing by Rita Moreno.
(via Music Machinery)
Before the New York Philharmonic presented its first concert of the season in Central Park last week, the executive director of the orchestra had an announcement: Audience members could vote for an encore from the evening’s soloist by text message. The choices were a Chopin étude or, in honor of the guest musicians from the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, a traditional Chinese melody.
The Chinese melody won, and so did marketers for the soloist, the piano virtuoso Lang Lang. Voters swiftly received a reply offering a discount to “pre-order” his new CD set, “Live in Vienna,” and an invitation to follow him on Facebook.
A 1933 video about “Sound Waves and Their Sources,” covering the fundamentals of sound as vibration. How I wish I had this video for my class last week!
(via fieldmic)
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