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.
Kawamura Ganjavian’s “Earshell”:
We use earrings as symbols of distinction since time immemorial, however they are not particularly useful items. The EARSHELL is a simple, efficient and elegant sound enhancing device. It can be used to improve our listening of music or opera. Its refined and sleek profile gives it a jewellery feel.
Not quite these, but interesting to see the idea proposed as jewelry. Of course, the inclusion of “opera” specifically is an appeal to high taste. I think the picture is probably cropped like that on purpose, to hide the fact that you’d most likely end up looking like this if you wore them.
(via NOTCOT)
Cathy Berberian: “Ticket to Ride”
This is opera singer Cathy Berberian’s cover version of the Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride,” off of her album of Beatles covers, Revolution.
Cathy Berberian was a darling of the experimental music scene back in the day, married to Luciano Berio, writing her own experimental music, and performing works written for her by John Cage.
I don’t know what else to write. This either says something about the effects of taking a holiday blog break or something about the effects of listening to A WHOLE ALBUM OF OPERATIC BEATLES COVERS.
Welcome to 2010.
In this video, avant-garde opera singer Cathy Berberian performs her piece “Stripsody,” so named because the score is based on comic book sounds. (The video displays the score while she performs, so you can follow along.)
A nice example of an existing visual language adapted into a notational system, with a correspondingly unusual performance as the result!
On Smith’s mind was an age-old difficulty all soprano singers face: They mispronounce lyrics when singing powerfully in the top half of their range. This “soprano problem” was formally recognized at least as far back as 1843, when French composer Hector Berlioz wrote in his Treatise on Instrumentation that “[sopranos] should not be required to sing many words on high phrases, since this makes the pronunciation of syllables very difficult if not impossible.” It does not appear, however, that Berlioz—or anyone else—ever understood why this problem occurred.
This article in Seed describes how it was discovered that in Wagner’s operas there is a statistically significant correlation between high pitches and vowels that are easier for sopranos to sing at high pitches. Go figure.
(via Kottke)
The Royal Opera House is “commissioning” a libretto for a new “experimental” opera via their twitter account.
The Royal Opera House is to stage an opera created through social networking site Twitter.
Members of the public have been invited to submit their “tweets” online - messages of up to 140 characters - which will form the new libretto. The first scene of the as-yet-untitled work has already been completed and features a man who has been kidnapped by a group of birds. Excerpts will be performed at the Royal Opera House in September.
The opera will be set to original music by composer Helen Porter along with some more familiar opera tunes.
A very Cagean way to write opera, although the video in that linked story shows that traditional crowd-pleaser melodies will be used as well; I’m curious what the target audience is for such a thing.
It reminds me of a project undertaken at my elementary school some years after I left: in collaboration with musicians and writers, the students came up with the synopsis and some melodic lines for an opera, which, once written by the collaborators with student input, the students performed. Its title? Sergio the Magic Sweatshirt. The only line I remember is from when bully Sergio gets cursed into a sweatshirt: “We’ll see how you fend as a cotton/poly blend.”
