Vuvuzela Concerto in B flat

(via @christianbok)

Marco Fusinato’s Mass Black Implosion works are gorgeous drawing on top of the scores to avant-garde musical pieces. By connecting all the notes to an arbitrary central point, he makes incredibly dynamic figures (check out the gallery to see his drawings on some more unconventional scores).

The notes suggest that these new scores might be used as the basis for improvisational play, upending the “expectation-frustrating dynamics of the academic avant-garde” with “the energy and volume of rock.” Now, I’m one of those people who finds the academic avant-garde more exciting than frustrating (easy to do when I don’t have to deal with them face to face, I guess), but regardless of the notes, these drawings are fantastic.

(via swissmiss)

Nathalie Miebach is a sculptor who makes “sculptural musical scores” based on weather data. If that sounds confusing, imagine how you might play the sculpture pictured above. Apparently the process goes: gather weather data, make into score that looks like this, and then make either a sculpture or music from it. She’s got a lot of pictures of her sculptures on her website.

(I like how “data” is in her list of media for the sculptures.)

The Turntablist Transcription Method (TTM) is a way to notate turntable scratching. It basically takes the linear time of the recorded sound on record and maps it onto a second dimension; this second dimension allows you to represent the time manipulations of the turntablist’s hands.

I think it’s very interesting how this notation does and does not relate to the sounds made when following it; depending on the record, certain motions will obviously sound different, but I wonder if some of the quicker motions sound pretty similar, even on different records. (That’s a question for DJs to answer, I guess.)

It’s fascinating to see how a practice that originated from explicit violations of interface standards can be codified and transcribed to create a new set of standards.

In any case, this video is the best guide to the system I’ve found, and you can see more in the flash-ridden official TTM site.

(via SCRATCH)

This is the score I put together for the Scratch Music orchestra I’ve been meeting up with the past couple weeks.

We went through it last week. I had decided that I didn’t want to provide any kind of interpretation for the group or take an authorly meaning-making role, because I was curious about how people would interpret the numbers.

We ended up coming up with two interpretations as a group:

The first read the numbers as a sort of metric—the drummer played a consistent beat, and in the number of beats specified by the right side of the column, each of us had to play the number of notes specified in the left side. So, a general density of notes could be heard, but nothing intentionally tonal. The persistent drumbeat ended up sounding a little too martial and dirge-like, so we tried another approach.

The second divided the group into two halves who divided the range of their instruments into six. “1” was the lowest you could play (or thereabout) and “6” the highest. One half took the left side of each column, and one half took the right, and we advanced through the rows on a signal from the drummer. Once we got to the bottom right corner, the drummer played a killer solo and we read it backwards, with the halves switching columns. This one was more fun to play, I think, yet still quite cacophonous.

I think someone was taking audio recordings, but I don’t know if/when they’ll be online.

Oh yeah, and the numbers are just arbitrary.

(via Eve Essex)

update: There is a nice variety of other scores to check out over at Eve’s blog.

Scores are silent music!

Spelling is Scoring

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)

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

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]