June 2010
30 posts
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WatchI was lucky enough to visit artist Craig Colorusso’s installation piece Sun Boxes today. I’ve blogged it before, with the video of a windy test run that was making the rounds, but with slightly better conditions (and my new iPhone) I put together a minute of new video. Nothing can really match the spatial feeling of walking through the speakers, trying to identify and follow the notes,...
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A Request
What historical and amateur-friendly (no music training required) piece of experimental music would you most like to see/hear performed by a group of high school students? I’m preparing for a summer project. Suggestions in the comments, please!
Current pieces:
John White’s Drinking and Hooting Machine
A page of Cardew’s Treatise, as scratch orchestra
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WatchAstronomers at the University of Sheffield have managed to record for the first time the eerie musical harmonies produced by the magnetic field in the outer atmosphere of the sun. They found that huge magnetic loops that have been observed coiling away from the outer layer of the sun’s atmosphere, known as coronal loops, vibrate like strings on a musical instrument. In other cases they...
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WatchEric Archer’s Lumicon sound camera takes light input and treats it as analog audio signal, making for some beautiful, warm sounds. He says, “Its like eavesdropping on a world of sounds that were never intended to be heard.”
You really should listen to some of his other examples.
(via computermusicblog)
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“The tangible relationship between music and emotion is no surprise to anyone,...”
– You have to listen to the audio samples of two-word phrases they analyzed for musical intervals.
(via Scientific American)
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WatchAnother marvelous hybrid instrument from Diego Stocco: the Bassoforte, constructed from the parts of a piano keyboard and an electric bass (among other things), and played with loops and great aplomb. I think it sounds kind of like a sick cover version of “Personal Jesus.”
(via Synthtopia)
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WatchEvan X. Merz has posted his new album, Black Allegheny, which he composed using generative music software he designed. The effect is aleatory and quite lovely. The video above visualizes some of how it was composed (although I’d love to learn about it in even more detail!).
(via computermusicblog)
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“The fact that applause was removed from recordings of live music suggests...”
– Alex Ross just posted a PDF of a wonderful lecture on applause he gave at the Royal Philharmonic Society. If you’re interested in performance norms, public social discipline, or stories about Barack and Michelle, then you should read it. The social history of classical music performance is...
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WatchThe Tunable Sound Cloud is an interesting idea: a mechanically-modifiable acoustic layer that hangs from the ceiling, capable of altering its reflective properties (absorption and directionality) on the fly.
It’s the kind of thing that is probably better in concept than in reality: given how little attention people tend to pay to the specifics of acoustic environments (outside of...
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A Brief(er) History: Gould's Hologram
This post is part of my attempt to port my master’s thesis into blog form. Over the next [arbitrary and probably long amount of time], I’ll be posting longer-form pieces that track the various themes of the thesis, from the dominance of the speaker/microphone paradigm to the use of scientific rhetoric by 1920s player piano laboratories. I’m hoping they’ll be intelligible on...
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Under Construction
In the interest of making my blog look a little more pro, I’ve been messing around with themes. Of course, you know the end of this story already: I broke some stuff, fixed some stuff, and now the website is in a sort of halfway-fixed state. Apologies for those of you who come via the URL (you intelligent RSSers will have to take my word for it). I appear to currently have issues with the...
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John Cage: Sonata #1 for Prepared Piano (Bieber...
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A Brief History of Re-performance
The long wait is over, and my master’s thesis for the MIT Comparative Media Studies department is now online. It’s a relief to have it done (in this incarnation at least—I’ll be crushing it down to article length this summer), and kind of nice to remember that I started blogging the summer before I started at MIT, trying to get my brain back into shape for grad school.
The...
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Music for Dogs
Laurie Anderson is putting on a high-frequency concert for dogs:
The recital, called “Music for Dogs,” is being presented as part of Sydney’s Vivid LIVE arts festival, which is being curated by Ms. Anderson and her husband, Lou Reed. Announcing the dog-friendly composition at a news conference, Ms. Anderson explained that at a previous event, she thought: “Wouldn’t it be great, if you were playing...