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 live performance at the Tower of the Juche Idea in Pyongyang:
So much of North Korea’s technology is broken or obsolete that many things are done by hand—painting the white circles on traffic cones, for example. In music, too: live bands and orchestras are used to produce faultlessly rhythmic, very synthetic-sounding accompaniment for events like the Pyongyang circus. The accordion-and-a-singer format is standard for all kinds of small ceremonies; we saw the same configuration at a model commune farm holding a ceremony to celebrate a harvest, and also at a picnic at the entrance to the DMZ (with a bass guitar too, as I recall).
(via The Rest Is Noise)
Not much else to say about this, other than that it is incredible:
Kraftwerk - Pocket Calculator in Italian!
(via songz)
From Alex Ross, a more thorough (near-complete, I think?) video of the recent MakeMusicNY lake performance of Xenakis’ Persephassa, in which a percussion sextet surrounds the audience. In this case, on boats.
(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)
Okay, when you’re in the thick of writing about piano performance technology from 1920, it’s kind of gratifying to see that there’s an app for that.
![In an article for New York Magazine, Justin Davidson manages to tie together the majority of my musical/academic interests in a single argument about mechanical music and performance.
No really, he talks about Zenph Studios’ “re-performed” Rachmaninoff Plays Rachmaninoff, Ulrich Krieger’s arrangement of Metal Machine Music (the focus of my undergrad thesis), Conlon Nancarrow’s player piano studies, and Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique.
Needless to say, this is all right up my alley. Davidson’s point, generally, is that the relationship between humans and machines in music-making is complicated:
Zenph and Krieger may be heading in opposite directions—one automates performances, while the other puts mechanical art into human hands—but they are converging on the same goal: transforming a recording into a performance. Imagination rolls into technology and then back into live experience. Instrumentalists have always treated their specialized contraptions as expressive extensions of themselves, and technological improvements like valved horns, steel strings, and GarageBand all aim to enhance creativity. But Zenph’s musician-free live performance and Krieger’s warm-blooded robotic clangor aspire to a fresh and perfect synthesis of spirit and machine.
These attitudes towards instruments and music-making machines are exactly the focus of my research, and it is tremendously exciting to see the topic pop up in the public discourse like this.
[I apologize for the lightness of posts recently—apparently this is what thesis term is like. I promise I have some longer things coming down the pipe, when I get a moment between research trips and grad school interviews.]
(via New York Magazine, mailbackwards)](http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kxfbx6kUOT1qzf8epo1_250.jpg)
In an article for New York Magazine, Justin Davidson manages to tie together the majority of my musical/academic interests in a single argument about mechanical music and performance.
No really, he talks about Zenph Studios’ “re-performed” Rachmaninoff Plays Rachmaninoff, Ulrich Krieger’s arrangement of Metal Machine Music (the focus of my undergrad thesis), Conlon Nancarrow’s player piano studies, and Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique.
Needless to say, this is all right up my alley. Davidson’s point, generally, is that the relationship between humans and machines in music-making is complicated:
Zenph and Krieger may be heading in opposite directions—one automates performances, while the other puts mechanical art into human hands—but they are converging on the same goal: transforming a recording into a performance. Imagination rolls into technology and then back into live experience. Instrumentalists have always treated their specialized contraptions as expressive extensions of themselves, and technological improvements like valved horns, steel strings, and GarageBand all aim to enhance creativity. But Zenph’s musician-free live performance and Krieger’s warm-blooded robotic clangor aspire to a fresh and perfect synthesis of spirit and machine.
These attitudes towards instruments and music-making machines are exactly the focus of my research, and it is tremendously exciting to see the topic pop up in the public discourse like this.
[I apologize for the lightness of posts recently—apparently this is what thesis term is like. I promise I have some longer things coming down the pipe, when I get a moment between research trips and grad school interviews.]
(via New York Magazine, mailbackwards)
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 )
Allora & Calzadilla’s Stop, Repair, Prepare is a performance piece in which a pianist tries to play a piano from a hole that has been cut in its center, while walking said piano around the gallery. The pedals have been turned backwards, and the middle keys just thud (the strings have been cut out for the hole).
Those of you in New York can see the performances at the Gladstone Gallery on 24th Street from late January through February, thanks to a set of pianists who appear to be very dedicated to playing such a difficult set-up!
update: oops, time travelers only, it was 2009 not 2010. (thanks ted)
