eMusic Technique 1

I got thinking that there are so many different little techniques that one can use in electronic music and that I might catalog some of them. I will make an effort to post more going forward. Sort of a cookbook of Electronic Music techniques.

Today I came accross a post for a conference on the duality of Binary. The first that entered my head is the fact that a great deal of electronic music is in two channels. Of course, it could be mono, or it could be n-channeled, but 2 channels is the predominant paradigm. One reason is that once you go beyond the duality of two, the gain is not as significant as from 1 to 2. (I am ignoring the fact that we all own stereo's and rather am considering why is that we own stereo's with 2 instead of 4 speakers, etc etc). There is also the fact that we have 2 ears, an obvious but profound statement. We do transduce a some auditory information through our bones and flesh and it is no surprise that the senatorial aspect of the sub woofer is a prominent feature in some music's.

But this is all an introduction to my thinking about the fact that when we produce electronic music, the resulting file is stereo. That said, when one commits global changes to 1/2 of a mix, it is a very radical and interesting thing. Hence, I made an experiment with altering the playback speed of 1/2 of a mix. The initial sound is something that I generated some time ago (not sure I remember how).

Source


I took this sound and split the stereo file into 2 mono files and then altered the playback speed of one file to slow and speed up. This is a shot of the max patch


I recorded the output and put this file along with the unaltered other channel to create a new version.

AlteredV1


This is a vary simple operation, but I think the results are rather striking.

Another means of accomplishing this is the delay of samples per channel. Here is a version I through together in Logic where the right channel has the a sample delay envelope. This does not alter the pitch as in the previous version and so the effect is different.

AlteredV2


Here is a screen shot of the logic session. The delay on the right channel is represented by the orange line in the second track.

symmetry

I love patterns and symmetry, here is an answer for part of the reason.

Wild Card Wednsday

Today I was invited to speak about my life as a graduate student at UCSB and about an upcoming concert (Nov. 6 2009 The Hub @ UCSB's Lotte Lehman Concert Hall) along with my teacher Clarence Barlow. This was an AM radio station in Santa Barbara, KZSB and the show is call Wednesday Morning Wild Card, hosted by Barron Ron Herron(he is the gent wearing a hat and seated in the above picture that I found online. I have no idea who the other person is). It was an amazing experience. Listen.

Oh, and the reason that we were late... The email that we received from John Villar accidentally directed us to 1317 STATE Street, not Santa Barbara St. It is a simple mistake to make and Clarence and I should probably have double checked the address before embarking,but we didn't. That meant that Clarence and I, both fresh as one can be after an evening discussing music and drinking red wine can be, showed up to the Arlington Theatre and were a bit perplexed. Eventually, modern technology, in the form of a cell phone made this happen.
"

form

When I was completing my Qualification Exams (and that must be capitalized), I created an installation in conjunction with Alejandro Casazi. We later made a movie from that same material and we are once again working on that material and developing it further. For the exam, I completed the installation in 2 days. And upon completion had to answer questions about the installation and then my written answers from the previous week. One question that has stuck in my head since the exam was asked by Curtis Roads, "What is the form of the piece?" At the time I provided an answer about my experience of the piece, remarking quite honestly, that I had thought very little about that aspect but rather had entrusted that component to my subconscious or intuition.

I am led back to the that question tonight having spent some time with the words of Adorno. He goes into some discussion on what is an expressionist form and a surrealist form and offhandedly remarks about montage. This remark on montage got me thinking about the ideas of montage in Luc Ferrari and micromontage in Curtis Roads or Horracio Vaggione. Then it occurred to me that there is another form, one that is often present in electro acoustic music (but certainly not limited to that medium), that of the unfolding. By this I mean to indicate an algorithm or maybe more basically a set of procedures that are allowed to unfold, when the process has completed, the piece is done. James Tenney and Clarence Barlow come to mind. This is a form that has often drawn my admiration and attention, yet I can't think of a time that I have come across it in "the literature" (please, dear reader, alert me if you are aware of the verbiage and bibliographic information that I am so necessarily need_. Surely, this is an over-site on my part. I shall spend some time in the library to rectify this.

All this thought about form brought me to notions of exactly what role it plays in our existence. Chunking and demarcation of cognitive bits... is it our role as creative artists to suggest new and elaborate/elegant forms? Such that these new forms allow us access to new and possibly better means of experiencing life and the universe? What formal designs do other animals appreciate?

Quotes and Notes

Celestial points in an emerging notion of the aesthetics of the modern situation.

"Art has the privilege and the mission to shape, regardless, whether matter-of-fact reality wishes to borrow the experiences gathered in this process. In that respect, true art has always been unselfish, something which is not likely to change in the future." Dick Raaijmakers - Cahier M Page 120

"Among the reproaches most obstinately repeated by these critics, the most widely spread is that of intellectualism: modern music has its origins in the brain, not in the heart or the ear; it is in no way conceived by the senses, but rather worked out on paper. The inadequacy of these clichés is evident. The critics present their arguments as though the tonal idiom of the last 350 years had been derived from nature, and that to go beyond these firmly established theoretical principles were a violation thereof; whereas these ossified principles themselves are actually the very evidence of social pressure. The idea that the tonal system is exclusively of natural origin is an illusion rooted in history."
Theodor Adorno - Philosophy of Modern Music
Page 11

This passage has led me to consider the possibility of acoustically based music (spectral music, or electronic music based on the known perceptual realities) could be an unconscious reaction to years of criticims of modern music being unnatural. The idea being that it is in-fact more natural and perceptually agreeable than tonal music as it is based on factual information that tonal music does not account for.

"When people say apologetically that they don't know anything about music it is quite often that they have a very broad and deep experience of listening to music, with strong likes and dislikes , and in some cases a considerable ability to reproduce music previously heard or improvise new music. What they really mean is that they don't read musical notation or that they know insufficient words about music. Our predominantly symbolic way of communicating musical process has so distorted our general perception of what 'knowing' about music is, that somebody with a command of everything that matters in 'knowing' about music can be made to feel ignorant. Meanwhile the people who have charge of the symbols and words remain reasonably complacent that they do 'know' about music."
David Keane - At the Threshold of an Aesthetic from The Language of Electroacoustic Music edited by Simon Emmerson Page 104


The experience of music.... sound as a medium that is interacted with on some or multiple levels (movement - dance, melody - singing, intellectual - recontextualization, recollection - revelation, extension - perceptual exploration, transformative) is something that is common to all people. The level of awareness and interaction determines what the individual understands of the experience and what they take from it. This is based on the assumption that the "music" that is a genuine and expression of the musician.

work relief

When I work a lot I end up watching of videos.

Great audio. Interesting narrative as well.

BCAST 1: Brooklyn. from theworldofadam on Vimeo.

I love the opening sounds.

This is quite fun, Inside Bill Mooriers Head.

some work and some play

I got my life back in order today after a week of holiday. Kayaking Tomales Bay was spectacular, the highlight being either the stars or the paddle up to grilled Oysters.

Today I completed the first assemblage of the viola piece that I have been at for over a year. That felt amazing! Now to get together with Shannon and shape it into a full on piece.

This afternoon I made some bread and this evening I finished up a little project of audio processing video. The story goes that I made a sound file by drawing each sample by hand and then reworking it a bit. I then took an Impulse Response that I like and made 3 different versions of it by granulating it. The point of this was the repitch the grains of the IR and spread it out in a different fashion. I then played the sound file through the 3 different Convolution Reverbs and scripted the quantity of each of the three and the amount of dry.
This is what it looks like. (Yellow = dry, Orange = Reverb 1 etc)

I played this for Christine and she noted that when she saw the playback in Logic it made more sense to her. This made sense to me, so I thought why not map the quantities to elements of a video. The result is a combination of a video that I shot while in Nebraska this summer (looking into the water of the Missouri river), where the Red, Green, Blue and Overall Brightness is controlled by the amplitude of each track.
Here is the video.


Waiting for the star show and watching the world spin.

History Lesson

This popped into my head

Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.

Turns out it goes like this.

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

here
and it is from George Santayana. An Italian philosopher and writer who is considered an American "man of letters".

The quote given on wikipedia is

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,"[1] (sometimes called Santayana's Law of Repetitive Consequences)

Ok, it seems there are many ways to phrase and mis-phrase this aphorism, but they all get at the notion that we should study the errors in history and learn from them. Right? Is that not what we did in grade school? Study the wars, the conquest, the Holocaust, the Reformation, the .... You get the picture. Well, that indeed was history class for me (you can contrast this with your own educational background). There were other classes in the Social Studies area, where one would look at how the government works or economics, but history's lessons are, the things that we should not repeat.

Now I ask, have you ever taken a music or art history class? All that you look at are success stories. You study it so that you are not doomed to repeat it? No, you study it to learn why and how it is great. Fine. But what about the failures? Why not study these and why they do not work? If you have taken a class in counterpoint or some other compositional discipline you will recognize that when it comes to critique of your student work and deciding the merit of the work, that is left to the teacher and it is hoped that in the process you learn the pitfalls of your ways and construct your own ability to critique your future students. If you are lucky, you find a way to do this.

In reality, one of the most important skills that any artist can learn is that of critical analysis. Not an analysis of how a great piece works, but rather, why a section or component is not working. Why and where failures occur, that is what we strive to avoid repeating, but we hope that by surrounding ourselves with success we will find ways to make our own versions of it.

Of course, lurking in the notion of studying failures (war, conquest etc.), we are on some level celebrating these things. Indeed, there is an aspect of greatness in overcoming Hitler or Napoleon or rising against the British so as to avoid paying taxes. But with this truth also comes the admission that our means of achieving these goals are quite despicable. Yet, we study them as great works. One quickly jumps at the notion of our having surpassed such barbaric means of enslaving other people, yet with any small degree of reflection one soon recognizes that the imperial forces that sustain the Developed Worlds reign are certainly just as barbaric, if not in a more discrete fashion.

And so I am left with the question, if you teach people the failures, will they learn how and why not to repeat them? Or is one better off to teach success stories and hope that we aspire to those pillars? Certainly it is not an either or, but lurking below the surface, each of these methods has downfalls, might we not consider a middle ground?

9.9.09

These are the images that got me going today, they are the design work of Naoto Fukasawa.




I found a link to an 2007 interview of Naoto Fukasawa this AM and find myself captivated by the notion of hari, which is characterized this way in the intro.

a Japanese concept that in physical terms implies surface tension and in the emotional milieu refers to balance and fulfilment.

While the article is full of matter for contemplation, I particularily liked the notion of designing the atmosphere versus the flower.

EK Is there ever any point in challenging people’s core awareness of design? Is it ever productive to try and make people accept what they don’t immediately understand?

NF Making tables that exactly fit the expectations of the environment creates a kind of disappearance. People don’t feel a new table there. I like that challenge. Even my design in this room: the body feels, ‘Oh this is a nice room’, but nobody knows why it’s good. Either the chair you design is very quiet, not really expressing anything, or it can be like a flower in the room, like a Philippe Starck chair. There are two different tendencies in design. There are those who like to create flowers and those who prefer to sort out the atmosphere for those flowers. I would say I am more towards the latter kind.

Then I came along to this

Neurosonics Audiomedical Labs Inc. from Chris Cairns on Vimeo.

So many wonderful things happening in our little world (I watched
Watch Carl Sagan's Cosmos, Part 1 in Entertainment  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com">Cosmos last night, which has turned me to considering humanities minute role in the universe). Human happiness is creating and observing.

Today's work brought me to contemplation of this image of DC offset. Not a problem to clean it up, maybe a bit tedious with lots of different files, but it just makes my sound work look so animated (in a way that is not auditorily perceptible.

generative

I have been exploring generative strategies to mix and extend various sound files, one of which is generative and one which is hand made. The core of my interest came from reading about some about auditory cues and considering the notion of dividing the frequency space and then delaying these divisions. Here are the results
The file that is being processed is something that I made with a generative patch 2 years ago when I was first learning Max/MSP.

787"

The sound file here is a granulation of some twigs scratching. After generating several versions, I pulled these together in Logic to clean up the rough edges.

214"

Christine reminds me that it is almost time for the 9.9.09 blog (part 2, as I thought happened last month, as I have a habit of not knowing the number of the month at all times). I should note though, this is the 9.6.09 blog....