Posts tagged tempo
A lovely little infographic from Neven Mrgan, comparing the durations of Gould two major recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations:
Here’s a little chart I made. Glenn Gould recorded two remarkably different versions of Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’. The 1955 version is fast, virtuosic, and energetic (even frenetic). The 1981 version is deliberately paced and elegant. They are both dizzying masterpieces.
Most people prefer one over the other. On an average day, I will favor the 1981, but only by about 5%. I am very glad that both of them exist.
Jürgen Hocker has done a fantastic thing and uploaded videos of his Ampico Bösendorfer grand piano playing the rolls of every Conlon Nancarrow study for player piano. He reputedly is the only one with a whole set, having worked with Nancarrow during his lifetime, and the videos all begin with a few photos of Nancarrow, Hocker and archival material.
It is fantastic to be able to see the keys and roll while the studies play. (Not to mention the pleasure of hearing them on a different piano than usual, restored under Nancarrow’s supervision.) See the rest at Hocker’s YouTube page.
(via mmd)
Some interesting variations on the Goldberg Variations at Michael Century’s Vimeo page.
In this version, performers use a Nintendo wireless controller to modulate dynamics, tempo, and incidence of looping. Computer programmed in Max strictly follows the 32 bar harmonic structure composed by Bach, but it’s possible to jump from variation to variation, in “random mode” (this only occurs rarely in this demo). The “linear mode” proceeds through Bach’s score as composed, though in the demo here it seems the computer sometimes has a mind of its own. Abrupt gestures caused seizures, sometimes with, and sometimes without recovery.
Sort of like a fancypants version of pianola controls, but with the ability to loop at will.
(via immanent discursivity)
On his New Yorker blog, Alex Ross posts some very neat musical data visualization: the average BPM of recordings of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, first movement, by recording year. I don’t see too much trending in there, but the distribution is interesting (red dots indicate that the repeat was taken, blue dots no repeat).
You can see a lot more at An Eroica Project. (Seriously, a lot, go check it out.)
(via Unquiet Thoughts)
Nick Seaver: Fergie Study #8 (video)
From the archives, this video is actually a class project I made last year.
The audio is a shortened version of one of my Pop Studies, which is made from a sample of the intro to “Glamorous” by Fergie. I took that sample, pitched it around and layered it, and then listened to what happened when I used Ableton Live’s time-stretching feature in extremes. Time-stretching is supposed to allow you to change the speed of a sample without affecting the pitch, but beyond small changes, it introduces interesting artifacts.
Since the original sample has no strong beat, I wanted to see how the perceived tempo would change as these artifacts piled up. The distinct beat/melody heard around 2:55 in the video is just the result of time-stretching artifacts.
The video is a one-second sample from the official music video, looped and cut up using Jitter in a patch I put together. Little production side note: because I couldn’t install Jitter on the class computer I used to make this, I had to create a freestanding patch that altered the video based on data in a text file. In class, I just edited the text file to make edits to the video. Here is the whole text file, just for kicks:
0, shift clear;
1, shift 1 2 1;
39, shift 1 2 0 2 1 1;
79, shift 2 1 0 3 3 1;
119, shift 3 3 0 0 0 1;
159, shift 0 0 0 2 4 1;
200, shift 2 1 1 3 3 1 0 0 1 2 4 1 1 2 1;
260, dim 90 60 loop 2;
400, 0;
480, 0;
720, 0;
1200, 0;
1380, 0;
1870, 0;
2000, 0;
2220, 0;
2340, 0;
2550, 0;
