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.
This audio clip is from Hear the Bill, a project organized by a group of voice actors to read the entire health care bill and make it available online. If you are like me, you are probably thinking, “Dear God, why would anyone want to listen to someone read legislation?” or “How would listening to hours of mp3s actually make me understand the health care bill?”
At first, I assumed this must be in the camp of right-wing health care opposition (the folks who use length as a symbol of government inefficiency and waste)—reading the whole thing is a pretty good way to emphasize just how long it is. But, if there is a political agenda here, it is quite well-hidden; the length is never referenced (at least I couldn’t find it while looking for some “total mp3 hours” count on the site).
This video is a PSA from the group: (sorry dashboard/RSS people, you probably need to click through to see it)
I find the implication that a child would actually listen to this with his parents quite hilarious.
What the whole project (and particularly the opening bit I posted here) says to me is something about the different natures of literacy and orality. The structure of the bill (the audio clip here is introductory material and a table of contents, read aloud—no, seriously) is not an auditory one. Tables of contents do a particular kind of visual work for readers, and when they are read aloud, their embeddedness in visual process is made quite obvious. At first, I thought this must be some kind of art project. Who wants to hear someone read a table of contents? It reminded me of One Million Years by On Kawara [not really his twitter feed in that link].
In the end, it seems most likely that this is about publicity for a group of voice actors, as their bio pages are very focused on voice-overs and their history with them. But it makes me wonder: What would a sonically organized healthcare bill sound like?
John Coltrane: “Giant Steps” + “Giant Steps (Alternate Version)”
I recently crammed this together in Ableton. I took the two versions of “Giant Steps” I have on my computer, tempo-matched them, and then extended the one that was shorter so they end at the same time.
You can really hear the structuring principles behind the piece here, both the large scale structure of sections and the patterns within the improvisation.
Live has a hell of a time with non-electronic music, so I had to go in and correct most of the beats by hand; this means that occasionally the drums in the two versions go temporarily out of phase, but oh well! I recommend listening on headphones or speakers with decent stereo separation, because it can get a little muddy in there—I’ve panned the two versions out a little, so it actually sounds (I think) kind of nice through headphones.
update:
A couple images for the visually-minded among you—one of the whole piece, one of the intro segment.
The top track is actually one continuous piece; I just split out the middle section to adjust the volume a little.
bah bah bah bah bahhhh bah bah:
This applet analyzes MIDI files for repeated forms, and then outputs an image like the one above, linking repeated parts. The image above is a mazurka by Chopin, with a “complex, nested structure.”
There is an image gallery worth checking out just for the extremes of repetition and non-repetition: Glass and Schoenberg are in there.
(via the music of sound)
