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.
A ferret guitarist, or as they say over at immanent discursivity, “the Keith Rowe of ferrets.” Funny how this is cheezburger material, but birds playing guitar is art. Maybe this ferret owner needs a gallerist.
(via immanent discursivity)
A cool little PD patch that uses a piezo and a jar of jumping beans to trigger some ambient, indeterminate music.
(via Create Digital Music)
Ghost Detector is a musical instrument built by ‘hacking’ any electronic device that generates sound. Random lengths of wire are connected to randomly chosen places on its circuit board. The wires receive radiation of all kinds, and the results are translated into sound.(via we make money not art )
I’m a little late to the game on this, but apparently last year Deerhoof released a sheet music version of one of their songs before the recording. This video compiles some of them in charming/ingratiating “man on the street” form.
(Take that, Fiery Furnaces!)
(via wnycradio)
A former student of mine picked up on the theme of “covers as musical indeterminacy” we discussed in my class on Indeterminacy this summer. We talked a lot about what different versions of a song need to have in common for them to be considered the “same song,” and what parts of a song are nonessential to its core “identity.”
Vicky took this to heart and rounded up a variety of videos of “Such Great Heights” by the Postal Service, collecting a pretty impressive variety. I may just have to use them as an example next time I teach that class.
And, in a flight of fancy right up my alley, she suggests listening to the first three simultaneously.
Go check it out.
In 1787, Mozart wrote the measures and instructions for a musical composition dice game. The idea is to cut and paste pre-written measures of music together to create a Minuet.This site uses the rules of Mozart’s dice game to create little MIDI ditties. Worth going just to click on a button that says “Make Music!” and have a website from 1995 play you a song that is indeterminate with respect to its performance.
This site is an implementation of such a game. The music and table of rules for this game appear to have been published anonymously in 1787, and interestingly, the table of rules for this Minuet is identical to Mozart’s. However, it is not clear who the composer of these measures is.
There are 176 possible Minuet measures and 96 possible Trio measures to choose from. The result of a dice roll is looked up in a table of rules to determine which measure to play.
Two six-sided dice are used to determine each of the 16 Minuet measures (i.e. 11 possibilities for each of 16 measures). One six-sided die is used to determine each of the 16 Trio measures (i.e. 6 possibilities for each of 16 measures). So in theory, there are (11^16) * (6^16) = (1.3 * (10^29)) possible compositions. Of course, many of them will be closely related. Nevertheless, there are still many interesting possibilities.
Edward Rondthaler, a man I had never heard of before, died a couple weeks ago at age 104. According to the New York Times, he was best known for his “energetic campaign to respell English,” which would result in the opening lines of Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” changing from this:
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk.
to this:
Mi hart aeks, and a drouzy numnes paens
Mi sens, as tho of hemlok I had drunk,
Or emptyd sum dul oepiaet to the draens
Wun minit past, and Lethe-wards had sunk.
It reminds me of memorizing the first lines of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—somewhat unsurprisingly, given that Middle and Old English spelling were generally more phonetic than modern English. And, with nonstandard orthography throughout the realm, spelling could and would vary by local pronunciation.
This made me think of indeterminacy (as most things do nowadays); what is the relationship between the written word and the spoken word? In terms of meaning, a word written and a word spoken are generally the same (although I wonder if there are any great counterexamples to this). In terms of sound, though, the written word is an inexact score.
As Rondthaler noted, words that are pronounced similarly are often spelled quite differently, and vice versa. Interpreting these correctly leads to one level of indeterminacy, and regional dialects lead to another.
Sum food fohr thot, I guess. (Faking phonetic spelling is harder than you might think it should be!)
This video of Rondthaler giving his spiel about phonetic spelling is charming and essential watching:
(via NYTimes)
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]
I recently spent a little time trying to make a version of Terry Riley’s In C using Ableton Live.
The original piece, if you’re not familiar with it, is a landmark of aleatory minimalism—a score with 53 short fragments that are repeated by the players in an ensemble of varying size. Each fragment is repeated until a player decides to move on to the next. The collective result of these individual decisions is a vibrant pulsing mass of sound, with emergent melodies and rhythms coming from the phasing and combination of the different fragments. You can see a bit of it here:
Riley specifies that the players try to stay within about three fragments of each other, and to come into unison periodically, for dramatic effect.
To approximate this in Live, I used “follow actions.” Follow actions let you specify what happens when a clip (in this case one of the 53 fragments) finishes. You can choose two behaviors and assign them probabilities. So my first setup: when a clip finished, there was a 10:1 chance it would repeat. Otherwise, it would advance to the next clip.
The main distinction between a track in Live and a human player here is that the track has no knowledge of what the other tracks are playing. So, Riley’s admonition that “It is important to think of patterns periodically so that when you are resting you are conscious of the larger periodic composite accents that are sounding” is a little tough.
- Since the players have no knowledge of each other in Live, they can only advance based on probabilities; this means that the clips tend to drift apart over the course of playing (I noticed at one point clips 15 fragments apart playing at the same time!)
- It appears that part of the reason to stick together in In C is that fragments that are far apart can actually be dissonant with each other, while local groups are generally well-matched. So, this drifting is actually problematic from a basic listening perspective as well as a “doing what the score says” perspective.
- Also, using the same probability for all clips means that shorter clips will advance faster than longer clips, encouraging this spreading.
I tried messing around with varying the probabilities throughout the piece, basically to make little speed bumps, where the probability of advancing past fragment 11 is low, so the clips catch up with each other. The problem with this is that it then holds on to a few clips for too long, spreading everyone out again.
I’ve uploaded the Live file for people with Live to check out. It has 35 voices as recommended in the score, all using piano variously panned for easiness; you’ll want to freeze the tracks to play it unless you have a monster processor. The quick fix to the drifting problem seems to be to just go around triggering clips to keep everything in sync. Try experimenting with different follow action probabilities!
I haven’t uploaded an audio file because I haven’t gotten it to a place where it sounds good leaving to computer to its own devices. This is really a job for Max/MSP, which would let me make tracks that are aware of the positions of other tracks, but that’s a project for another procrastinatory night!
