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Notes from 11/26/2013

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I mentioned some of Frank Zappa’s warped collages of recorded voice and instrumental passages. The piece I specifically mentioned was “Are You Hung Up?” from We’re Only In It for the Money (1968). In the context of the discussion, though, I was really thinking of so many of his recordings that are obscured because they’re awkwardly-miked live recordings, e.g. “The Old Curiosity Shoppe” on Finer Moments (1972/2012). The latter half of “Flower Punk” from We’re Only In It for the Moneyis an example of the extensive static-but-agitated moments he builds. Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music (1975) lends itself better to moment listening as I was discussing it.

I also mentioned Bill Frisell for his reputation for placid textures and recent use of loopers to build them. Here are a couple videos of him demonstrating some of his techniques:

Example of music and narrative sounds in layers

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“Years” (2012) by Alesso and Matthew Koma was brought up as an example of effectively using layers of narrative sounds overtop an already fully-featured musical passage with a strong structure of its own. In your work, you’ll of course need to focus on the listenability over danceability (i.e., music for ears and attention, not the dance floor), but this video includes several useful moments to serve as “case studies,” including multiple layers of independent musical passages laid over each other.

Examples of meter, pitch, and quotes used expressively

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Around this time of the semester, many first-semester students start getting itchy to make what they can’t help but refer to as “normal”/”real”/”good” music (they usually mean “familiar” or “comfortable”). When we started the class, I explained that we’re temporarily setting aside:
  1. Non-musical things like intelligible words, recognizable sounds, and danceability (things that speak to other parts of our brains/bodies than the purely musical parts and distract from the pure musicality) and
  2. Structures-become-crutches like time signatures and key signatures (things that should be descriptive, to analyzemusic, but end up prescriptive, sterile formulas for making new music)

This is so we can rediscover musicality in its most raw form and return to familiar music with new ears. We’re not here for you to learn how to make better hamburger/driving/doing laundry music—that ability will naturally improve once you’ve focused on the pure musicality of your work.

We end up working with a narrow slice of even electroacoustic art music. The simplest assumption by students is that melodies and beats aren’t allowed at all, but that’s not so. They’re just risky because they easily allow us to rely on non-musical things instead of building our musicality.

Reflect a moment on the pieces we’ve studied so far:
  • The contour of melodic motives and counterpoint built from quasi-pitched voices in Yuasa, Projection Esemplastic For White Noise (1964) are key points in the piece.
  • The repeating and then rising pitch patterns of the “orchestra hit”-like sounds in Wishart, Tongues of Fire (1993) have a significant role in moving the piece forward, as well as the accelerating pulses.
  • Westerkamp, Cricket Voice (1987) uses some almost-recognizeable sounds—frankly, I think that distraction makes it harder to analyze its musical elements even though it is usually considered the most accessible piece of the ones from the analysis projects.
  • Deck of Cards (2012) builds tension over time by stacking up chords (given pitches by resonant filters).
  • Hit the Deck (2012) uses three pitches and a stable metric rhythm at times to evoke a sense of confident, energetic, focus, in contrast with the mayhem depicted when we are knocked out of those moments of focus.
Now is the point where most students just becoming mature enough musically to start using melodies and beats in expressive, dynamic ways, but I need to see that it’s not an “all or nothing” situation. You can organize events in line with a recurring pulse, use various forms of accent to suggest a hierarchy among the pulses (e.g., downbeats, backbeats, etc.), but you don’t have to set it and leave it like striped wallpaper (there’s nothing wrong with striped wallpaper, but you’d have a hard time passing it off as your own painting). The clarity of the pulses and hierarchy can come in and out of focus, become more stable or less stable, change and lead to new moments or stay the same and cultivate moments of stasis; that hierarchy can shift, as can the number of beats, the tempo, the time scope at which we hear the “main beat” (“is it a fast 1 2 3 4 | 1 2 3 4 or a medium 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – ?”). And when you build those structures—just enough to suggest the pattern—then play with them, you can use them to build and resolve tension, move the music forward, make it an active, compelling contribution to the music.
Peter Klingelhofer’s composition, “Antarctica” appears to have a steady pulse when it’s noticeable at all, but there are also several free-floating moments. Accent patterns on the pulses suggest hierarchies at times, but they are fleeting; they allow foot tapping at times but elude counting “1-2-3-4-” for very long before that pattern gets overturned. At times it sounds like multiple layers of time are overlapping, each with their own pulse and metric hierarchy, strong within itself but different from the others (like the moments with the truncated female voice and the reversed male voice). It keeps our pattern-recognition machines (our brains!) thinking. These techniques use time in musically expressive ways, not just as wallpaper.

Peter Klingelhofer, Antarctica (2013)—DO NOT DISTRIBUTE (Posted here with permission of the composer)

Here is an effective example of an even more tricky issue: quoting tonal music. (Remember that the intellectual property rule of the class basically limits us to public domain works). Check out this past MUSC 316 final project that is based on Chopin’s Nocturne No. 20 but clearly has its own identity, de/reconstructing the nocturne and making something new.

Aaron, Loveall, Familiar Through the Haze (2009)—DO NOT DISTRIBUTE (Posted here with permission of the composer)

So,

Yes, you can do that. You know what’s important about our focus in the class now. I’ve been reminding you since the first day. It’s not black and white: welcome to grey. Don’t let old habits lead you astray from growing musically.

Hosting the First Annual Fresh Minds Festival

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Fresh Minds Festival PosterSeptember 26, 2013, featuring four international guest artists and live spatialization by students in a 10.2 channel 3D surround sound system, using a multitouch interface.

The Fresh Minds Festival is a public performance of audiovisual artworks by professional artists, student-curated under the direction of a multi-disciplinary team of faculty. Continue reading →

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Wrapping Cables

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Yes, there is a best way to wrap cables, and people like to talk or be snobby about it. It’s true that when you take proper care of your cables, it almost seems like they uncoil and re-wrap themselves on command—it’s hard to find such easy and effective ways to make your life happier. Here is one of many videos to demonstrate the over-under technique. Search for more if you want to find a different angle on the subject or if you want to be amazed at how long some people can take to explain this.

Notes

For cables 25ft and longer, the coils should be about forearm length. Shorter cables should have a smaller coil, but it should never feel tight. Very, very long and thick cables may feel more comfortable with a larger coil, but those should be exceptional cases. In your own studio, you may want to settle on one smaller size coil to use, so all your cables use one size or the other.

If you have a poorly-treated cable, some “cable therapy” may be in order. Here’s what I prefer to do:

  1. In a large space, throw out the cable to uncoil it in a straight line as much as possible.
  2. Run the cable tightly through your hands from one end to the other, twisting and massaging lumpy areas (with badly twisted wires inside) and keeping any naturally-forming coils ahead of you. Keep pushing them ahead, and they’ll work their way out the far end. Two points of caution:
    1. Don’t be too rough on your cable. You may need to let a couple rough spots pass and repeat this step before your cable behaves. Despite the wording used in one video above, truly forcing your cable into shape can do as much damage as mistreating it did.
    2. Avoid burning your hand by holding the cable too tightly and running the cable through it too fast.
  3. Wrap your cable using the over-under method. Roll the cable in your fingers to guide its natural twist to sit comfortably in wrapped coils. If a coil twists after you’ve wrapped it, back up and redo it. Fasten with velcro when you’re done.
  4. If your cable is still a little warped, massage the whole cable by grabbing it firmly like a steering wheel and twisting slightly to help all coils sit in their new form more comfortably. Inch your hands all the way around the coil bit by bit, massaging as you go.

Sound Design for Journey’s End

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journey's endTexas A&M University hosted the  World War I conference, “1914 and the Making of the 20th Century” and as a part of it, the Theatre Arts program produced Journey’s End by R. C. Sheriff, directed by Anne Quackenbush. I directed some exciting developments in sound design for the show, which you can read about here: link.

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Sonic Glimpses Art Installation

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Created for the grand opening of our new building at TAMU, built by students, and covered in World Architecture magazine.

Sonic Glimpses is a site specific interactive art installation to celebrate the grand opening of the five-story Liberal Arts: Arts and Humanities building on the prestigious East Quad on the main campus of Texas A&M University in College Station, The building was designed by Brown Reynolds Watford Architects to meet the criteria of the Leadership in Engineering and Environmental Design (LEED) silver rating. The opening gala was held April 19, 2013, and the installation remained on display through July 15, 2013.

The art installation was designed to turn a trip up the grand staircase into an audio tour of the research and creative work being done in the building. Sound clips are triggered by traffic on the staircase, sounding near the location of each passerby. Faculty and students in the building contributed clips of their own creative work or the literature they study. Students in the Department of Performance Studies recorded the sound clips, performed some of the voice-acting work, installed the hardware, assisted in calibrating the software settings, and created the video documentation of the project. Creators Jeff Morris and Autum Casey worked with the building proctor, Environmental Health and Safety department, and the Audiovisual Surveillance Technology committee to ensure the installation satisfied concerns of all stakeholders.

The heart of the installation is a secure rack with Apple Mac Mini computer inside, along with multichannel audio interface, amplifier, and rack-mounted keyboard, trackpad, and video display. The computer runs a custom software program created by Jeff Morris in the Max graphic programming environment (by Cycling74). The rack is connected to two analog video cameras for control input (connected to digitizers inside the rack) and six bare speaker cones for audio output.

For aesthetic reasons and also to satisfy Environmental Health and Safety officials, especially since the grand staircase is the primary emergency exit route for most building occupants, we took efforts to keep the hardware minimally invasive. Most notably, we used only two video cameras for motion detection, mounted overhead, instead of sensors mounted on the stairs, such as pressure sensors, infrared tripwires, or infrared or ultrasonic proximity sensors.

The cameras provide vastly more data than such local sensors. This allowed for complex variations in the control data, resulting in the appearance that the artwork responds with a human-like whimsical character, with varying moods. The software turns cameras into motion detectors through frame differencing: calculating the absolute difference between each frame and the next, pixel by pixel, and summing the absolute difference of each pixel to yield a single number corresponding to motion. Since the staircase runs along a large windowed wall, natural light, changing throughout the day and affected by weather, influenced the artwork’s responsiveness over time, and differently so for each color. Further, the color contrasts and patterns of visitors’ clothing, skin, and hair and the ways in which they move each trigger the sounds in unique ways.

Designed by: Jeff Morris and Autum Casey

On the occasion of the Liberal Arts: Arts and Humanities building grand opening April 19, 2013 through July 15, 2013

Content contributors: Jayson Beaster-Jones, Michael Collins, Jeffrey Davis, Rayna Dexter, Mariana Gariazzo, Amy Guerin, Emily McManus’s Music in World Cultures class, Britt Mize, Rohan Sinha, Nancy Warren, Jennifer Wollock, Jaeeun Yi, Costume shop student workers

Content recorded by: Marco Pisterzi, Trent Tate, Casey Gilbert, Priscilla Lopez, Katharine Hinson Installed by Jeff Morris’s Intermedia Performance class and Autum Casey’s New Technology for Designers

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