Vibrations and how they get to your ears.
Noise for airports is a blog about culture, sound, music, and technology.
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Updated (sometimes) by Nick Seaver.
An improvement, I would say, on the katzenklavier.
Cats on YouTube playing Schoenberg’s Op. 11 (cats in left channel, Glenn Gould in right channel), by Cory Arcangel
Related to this post, or read about it at Arcangel’s site.
A new work on YouTube by Cory Arcangel uses videos of cats playing the piano as source material. Using a software program that works not unlike the Echo Nest Analyze API used for this piece, Arcangel took Schoenberg’s famous Op. 11 and recreated it by stitching together various notes as played by cats in videos he took from YouTube. The result sounds incredibly close to the recording by Glenn Gould that he used as his reference. I’ll post the mp3 he made with the cats in one channel, Gould in the other for comparison after this post (damn you tumblr for making mixed-media posts so complicated).
This kind of tongue-in-cheek work is perfectly representative of the work that makes so many people either love or hate Cory Arcangel. It has an enviable simplicity of method (although Arcangel definitely used the “slow way” of matching the notes) that is reminiscent of Christian Marclay’s gallery work—a tightly focused exploration of a particular historical form made from an interesting perspective. At the risk of over-explaining the joke, what makes this work more than just an “oh I wish I had thought of that” sort of piece is the density of meanings called into play through the method.
Arcangel is making/spoofing a fairly standard critique of atonal music: cats walking on the keys. But at the same time, he is exploring issues of authorship and YouTube as a medium, using the music as a pretext. The style is noncommittal, and as usual, Arcangel presents his work with the detachment of a teenager posting a video to YouTube. His casual attitude towards the work belies its conceptual richness as an exploration of both YouTube and atonality. In any case, it is a thought-provoking and entertaining piece of “new media” art.
