More from Peter Ablinger (of the child-voiced piano): This time, he’s taken a letter from Schoenberg and done his piano-vocoder magic with it. (Basically running a spectrum analysis and using the keys of the piano to play back the frequency data, like a lo-res vocoder.) It seems like there are some extra notes in there too, perhaps a musical quote from Schoenberg? I’m not sure.

It’s much harder to decipher without subtitles than the other one, and even with the text, I had a hard time following along:

Mister:
You…. In spite of my protest,
you have published
Leibowitz’ performance
of my Ode to Napoleon
with a woman voice,
which I find
terrible.
(…behind the orchestra…)
I can only tell you now,
that you will
hear from me.
You will, I can tell you,
you will regret this act
severely.
I will
be busy to help you
to be ruined
by this
what I will do….
(Some of the instruments … in small….)
You are not only a bugger …
You are not only a man who disregards an artist’s wishes,
his artistic beliefs,
you are also a man
who does not care
to keep a contract.
You know that you signed a contract,
according to which
you have
to account to me regularly.
You must have sold
quite
a number of records
of my Violin Phantasy,
of the Trio,
and other things which you…
but which you issued without my consent.
I tell you,
you will hear from me also about these things,
and I hope it will cost you very much money.

Yours…

You can see a video with the text and audio lined up here [.mov link].

(via Rhizome)

Good use of klangfarbenironie.

(via immanent discursivity)

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

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.

Dodecaphony, or Cats Playing the Piano

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.