Posts tagged liveness
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)
The fact that applause was removed from recordings of live music suggests another factor in the transformation of the concert ritual: habits acquired through listening at home. Seated before the wireless or the gramophone, we grew accustomed to those brief bands of silence between movements. Perhaps this explains why resistance to the suppression of applause seemed to subside rather quickly in the thirties and forties.
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 super interesting, especially for me in the ways it intersects with how people think of “live” music.
(via The Rest Is Noise)
Tristan Perich’s newest release in his set of 1-bit compositions is set to be released in August. Like his 1-Bit Music, the music is produced by a microchip stuck inside a CD jewel case.
I love this stuff because of the intentional play Tristan engages in around the ideas of “performance” and “liveness”: since the chip produces the music (in 1-bit, no less), it can be said to play “live.” Of course, this is similar to the way a player piano might be said to play “live,” in the way that “live” has come to mean “not on an audio recording.” 1-bit audio doesn’t need to be processed as it comes out of the chip—the ons and offs translate directly into the motion of the speaker cone—so it has a kind of immediacy.
Tristan was kind enough to sit in on a class I was taking at MIT last year and talk about his work with the Loud Objects, which provided me with the material to write an article about this kind of immediacy and “liveness” in the context of noise art. Maybe someday, when I’m done polishing up another thing, I’ll get back to that one and make it postable.
(via Synthtopia)
The Heart Chamber Orchestra plays music generated from their heartbeats, in front of a screen with visualizations based on the same. This must be an amazing experience live.
You can see another video with more explication on the Heart Chamber Orchestra’s site.
(via Everyday Listening)
This video shows some live music programming by Alex McLean in Haskell. It’s worth watching full screen if you can’t read the words: by using cycling patterns instead of fixed time signatures, McLean has created a pretty versatile setup for polyrhythmic live computer jams. You can read about some of the background voodoo here.
( via jesusgollonet)
This is a preview of the KarmetiK Machine Orchestra, a group that brings together custom-built robotic musical instruments and human performers with modified instruments, unique musical interfaces, and hemispherical speaker-pods.
Can’t help but reblog something called the “machine orchestra.”
(update: and some more details over at Create Digital Music.)
(via Synthtopia )
Introducing is a talented, Oxford-based nine-piece band with a very specific goal. Every show they perform is essentially the same. With the exception of slight variations in their encores, the set never changes. Their mission? To perform DJ Shadow’s first LP, “Endtroducing”, in its entirety, from start to finish.
This kind of stuff fascinates me. DJ Shadow’s record, of course, is created from samples (which may, in turn, have been created from other samples). This band wants to dive through all of those layers of sampling to the original instruments and then combine them together into one physical space. But, one major issue is that the “original instruments” are not the point of DJ Shadow’s album; he doesn’t use samples just because he can’t play instruments and they’re a useful way to collect stuff together. The feeling of the various samples, from the recording, mastering, and all that jazz, is not just in the instruments.
Also, I wonder what that laptop is doing in there. Do MacBooks finally count as “real” instruments now?
(via More Intelligent Life)
