Vibrations and how they get to your ears.
Noise for airports is a blog about culture, sound, music, and technology.
You can filter the posts to see just things I wrote or made.
Updated (sometimes) by Nick Seaver.
Dick Whyte’s reconstruction of 4’33”, stitching together YouTube performances of the piece.
(Source: rhizome.org)
John Cage: Sonata #1 for Prepared Piano (Bieber edit by Nick Seaver)
Sorry, John.
Some John Cage for you (with a little bonus Beuys thrown in). It’s funny how much of my enjoyment of this comes from just watching him listen.
(via immanent discursivity)
A promo video for a documentary about avant-garde pianist Margaret Leng Tan. She plays the toy piano as if it were a real piano, and the real piano as if it were a big box of resonant strings. (As they both are.)
Some of the extended techniques shown in this video are so cool—I’ll definitely need to track this down eventually. (and did I mention she worked with John Cage for the last 11 years of his life?)
(inspired via the music of sound)
Imaginary Landscape No. 5 for the Jonas Brothers
by Nick Seaver/John Cage/Jonas Brothers
I made a version of John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 5 in MaxMSP. The original score calls for a set of 42 records to be recorded and arranged together in a precise organization (derived from the I Ching). My patch arranges selections from any 42 audio files according to the score, and when finished, allows you to export an .aiff file of the whole 3 minutes. (It also displays the divisions Cage notated in the score, and which tracks are playing at what time, so you have something to look at.)
Supposedly Cage used the score with jazz records to help him overcome his aversion to jazz. The version here uses 42 Jonas Brothers songs.
update: it seems that by using the [normalize~] object in MaxMSP, I’ve messed up some of the subtle amplitude variation from the score. I’ve made a new version of the app with manual volume control instead, and when I have a moment, I’ll swap that in and put up a new audio file with fewer sudden, unscored amplitude shifts.
update 2: audio file fixed, still need to polish up the app.
update 3: app fixed, uploaded, rejoice, etc.
The patch [download if you have Max]
The app [should work with any folder of 42 audio files, mp3, aiff, or wav, but probably only on Intel Macs]
