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oliver sudden
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« Reply #180 on: 09:27:28, 05-05-2007 » |
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Another hello to Philipp.
Indeed, I think that field is wide open if you want to give it a go. On the other hand never underestimate the value of actually introducing the tractor or the recycling bin into the instrumentarium. It would be sure to get you press attention. (Look what Richard's flower pots did for him!)
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Chafing Dish
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« Reply #181 on: 13:11:25, 05-05-2007 » |
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I guess I'm most interested in whether this has occurred in real, recorded music already. I'm aware of experiments by Thomas Kessler in Freiburg, and here in Urbana, IL, there's a fellow named David Psenicka working on something... He tells of a computer which had a go at orchestrating some unspecified sound: the computer gave him back a full orchestral realization, complete with dynamics, and the computer had decided the sound needed 5 unison contrabasses: 4 contrabasses playing ff, and one playing pp (that was exactly the right dB level, apparently!)
It made me think that there is a lot of room here for exploration. And the example of the dump truck isn't unappealing in and of itself, I just doubt that a "realistic" rendition of such a sound is a particularly engaging aesthetic objective, any more than making an orchestra sound as if it's saying "Good morning".
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time_is_now
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« Reply #182 on: 13:25:11, 05-05-2007 » |
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Urbana in filmIn the 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Urbana was named as the location where the malfuctioning HAL 9000 computer of the ill fated Discovery Mission to Jupiter was programmed. The 1959 comedy Some Like it Hot also mentions Urbana. Near the beginning of this film, Jack Lemmon's character, an unemployed bass player, suggests to Tony Curtis, a saxophone player, that the two visit Urbana to play at the University of Illinois. Instead, the two musicians elected to join a women's band in Florida. Urbana provides the setting for Bert I. Gordon's 1957 science fiction film, The Beginning of the End. Parodied on the television program, Mystery Science Theater 3000, this movie features the unintentional creation of dangerous, giant grasshoppers as a result of agricultural research gone awry.
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The city is a process which always veers away from the form envisaged and desired, ... whose revenge upon its architects and planners undoes every dream of mastery. It is [also] one of the sites where Dasein is assigned the impossible task of putting right what can never be put right. - Rob Lapsley
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Chafing Dish
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« Reply #183 on: 13:40:34, 05-05-2007 » |
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Urbana in film Super. Thank you for the perfectly tangential cinema history lesson. This is also where Lejaren Hiller made the Illiac Suite. It's also a place where corn (maize to you Brits) is abundant. Very abundant. But not cheap. If you wish to eat it. Cheap if you wish to convert it into fuel. Every hectare not slated for development is covered with ears, but they never listen to me. Exception is a lovely restored prairie park that I visit occasionally with my wife and now with our newborn, and that's about the only place where I ever hear crickets, and then only at night. Incidentally, it would really be something if a composer were to infest his orchestra with real crickets, and then cut the lights in the middle of the piece as part of the composition. ... May I have some more feedback now? |
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Sydney Grew
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« Reply #184 on: 13:56:46, 05-05-2007 » |
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I'm most interested in whether this has occurred in real, recorded music already. We have always greatly admired Honegger for his very realistic imitation of a steam engine. Those Members who are too young ever to have heard a real steam engine will perhaps not realise how accurate and skilful he was. Then there was Mossoloff's "mighty hymn to machine work", R-K's bumble bee, and lots of other things. Ravel's imitation of a Viennese waltz is really very clever too. But at present we are rather more interested in the use of a computer the other way round - id est to input to it the sound of a performance and produce as output a notated score. The last time we looked (a year or two ago now) there were a couple of programs which claimed to be able to do this, but they did not work very well. Specifically they did not work very well on some popular songs from Bali which we tried. But it may be worth looking again now. In our view one reason why modern serious music is not terribly popular is that it often concentrates on sound for sound's sake and dispenses with melody altogether. This is another bad influence which stems from the early Schoenberg (specifically from his Farben (Colours), the third of the Five Orchestral Pieces opus 16). We hear so many thoughtless and unoriginal imitations of it! Having said that, there is still a rôle for new and unusual sound effects, but in moderation. |
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richard barrett
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« Reply #185 on: 15:10:31, 05-05-2007 » |
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5 unison contrabasses: 4 contrabasses playing ff, and one playing pp The computer obviously hadn't heard of acoustic masking, since the closer two sounds are in frequency the easier it is for the louder one to make the quieter one inaudible in principle. This henomenon also depends on the relative complexity of the spectral structure of the two sounds, but in this case there oughtn't to be any difference, so I think I can say it's extremely unlikely that the quiet contrabass will be heard at all or make any contribution to the perceived sound. One point for the human race. Ha! These "computers" will never catch on! making an orchestra sound as if it's saying "Good morning" You might be aware of Clarence Barlow's piece Im Januar am Nil, in which the string ensemble plays material based on the formant structure of various phrases and sentences, including the title - using only vowels (including the German "j") and the consonants l, m, n and r (another memorable phrase used was "Nonnen in Onanieren lernen"). While the results can be heard as phonemes, with a little goodwill, in Barlow's electronic realisation, a real string ensemble is less than convincing (although the sound it makes is quite fascinating, which is justification enough). Oliver Knussen gives a fair orchestral approximation of an old-fashioned vacuum cleaner in Where the Wild Things Are, I seem to remember. |
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« Last Edit: 15:24:32, 05-05-2007 by richard barrett »
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Chafing Dish
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« Reply #186 on: 15:29:42, 05-05-2007 » |
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Seems the computer simply thought that the pp contrabass would make that specific frequency just a bit louder, not that the extra instrument would add much timbral information.
I completely agree that computers will not ever make better decisions than people: the Psenicka example was meant to illustrate that in a rather absurd fashion. If the successful use of computers for aesthetic goals was ever read as a slap in the face of the human race, then we give computers way too much credit. Computers could, however, be taught to be some kind of "unbiased listeners" that show us aspects of sound that we, quite literally, don't hear because we listen with ears trained by language and culture.
The next step will be to re-submit the computer data to our biases, which we depend upon for our creative momentum. The data have the potential to deepen and enrich those biases.
And let me pre-empt the literalistic Corinthian-crappers by saying that I know that computers are not entirely unbiased -- nothing is.
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richard barrett
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« Reply #187 on: 15:52:35, 05-05-2007 » |
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Seems the computer simply thought that the pp contrabass would make that specific frequency just a bit louder I'm not sure it would even do that, but I know no more of psychoacoustics than what I generally need in order to go about my business. As you know, I'm not at all averse to using computers for many musical purposes (excluding notation!) if a composer were to infest his orchestra with real crickets, and then cut the lights in the middle of the piece as part of the composition. The original performances of my piece Opening of the Mouth took place outside Perth in 1997, in an ex-industrial venue which wasn't soundproofed but which was far from the city and its sounds, so that during the course of the evening performances (the piece lasts about 85 minutes) the music was accompanied by a gradual crescendo of crickets as darkness fell outside. This effect is clearly audible on the live recording, such that I was asked a couple of times whether it was a deliberate (electronic) feature of the music. Crickets are of course easy to buy in bulk at any good petshop, for feeding cuddly pet reptiles, as are patented cricket dispensers. |
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time_is_now
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« Reply #188 on: 16:21:03, 05-05-2007 » |
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Clarence Barlow's piece Im Januar am Nil That's very bizarre: that piece is on my desk in a pile of 'things to listen to for the first time this Bank Holiday weekend'!  |
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The city is a process which always veers away from the form envisaged and desired, ... whose revenge upon its architects and planners undoes every dream of mastery. It is [also] one of the sites where Dasein is assigned the impossible task of putting right what can never be put right. - Rob Lapsley
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richard barrett
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« Reply #189 on: 19:37:48, 05-05-2007 » |
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I hope you enjoy it.
I'm not sure whether I like the fact that at two points (in typical Barlow fashion) a completely unrelated interlude occurs, after which the inexorable progress of the main "thread" of the piece continues. I think I would have preferred it without these, engaging though they are in themselves. I have the feeling that they were inserted out of a feeling that the rest of the piece is too one-dimensional and "minimal", but I for one don't have a problem with that.
The only live performance I've seen was in Darmstadt at some point in the late 80s, conducted by Roger Redgate, which was notable for having the largest number of page-turners I've ever seen onstage at one time (including myself), on account of the string parts having virtually no rests for the entire duration of the piece.
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increpatio
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« Reply #190 on: 22:14:54, 05-05-2007 » |
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We have always greatly admired Honegger for his very realistic imitation of a steam engine. Those Members who are too young ever to have heard a real steam engine will perhaps not realise how accurate and skilful he was.
Let us not forget that it was, indeed, Alkan alone who had the genius to imitate a steam engine *first*. Have a very, very soft spot for Prokofiev's efforts also. |
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time_is_now
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« Reply #191 on: 22:24:54, 05-05-2007 » |
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I hope you enjoy it.
I'm not sure whether I like the fact that at two points (in typical Barlow fashion) a completely unrelated interlude occurs, after which the inexorable progress of the main "thread" of the piece continues. I think I would have preferred it without these, engaging though they are in themselves. I have the feeling that they were inserted out of a feeling that the rest of the piece is too one-dimensional and "minimal", but I for one don't have a problem with that.
Spinning as I speak. I like it very much (so far: I haven't got to the interlude yet). It sounds a bit like late-Vivier harmonies re-scored for strings alone * (although quite a large number of solo strings), but with a curious and slightly uncomfortable sense that the whole thing was being played back on a record at a slightly too fast speed. I have no idea who's playing or whether it's a commercial recording. Someone made a copy of it for me a couple of weeks ago, along with a Radulescu piece called Thirteen Dreams Ago which I'll probably leave for another day, given that I don't like most Radulescu very much at all (though I imagine this piece is a bit different, since the person who copied it for me shares my feelings about the bulk of R.'s output). Ahem. The interlude is upon me, and after that really rather breathless 13 or so minutes, in which (I should explain in case you were thinking I'm deaf) the strings were joined presently by a low piano and then later by saxophones, I do rather feel as if I've landed in a different piece. Though I don't think I'd go along with Richard in saying the interlude was added for variety, since it seems to carry equal weight in a way to what surrounds it (and indeed the transition back into the main material is rather less marked than the arrival of the interlude, partly because the interlude begins with some very churchy harmonies that really are for strings alone and then seems to move forward through a sort of 'history of music in 10 minutes'-type progression).Second edit. I've now listened twice, and am able to clarify that the saxophones were in fact present from the beginning, which partly explains the rather wonderful spectral glow of the harmonies I mentioned, which did still remind me of Vivier to start with, though that feeling subsides fairly soon into the piece, probably because the 'grammar' that the piece invents for itself as it goes along is so single-minded and therefore 'learnable' that you very quickly get absorbed in following and understanding the piece's own processes (and worrying that it's about to trip itself up, which it constantly sounds on the verge of doing) rather than thinking about comparisons.
I'm a bit puzzled about the two interludes Richard mentions, since I can only really hear one point at which the piece radically changes direction. Though I do take back what I said about the end of the interlude not being clearly defined. |
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« Last Edit: 23:04:00, 05-05-2007 by time_is_now »
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The city is a process which always veers away from the form envisaged and desired, ... whose revenge upon its architects and planners undoes every dream of mastery. It is [also] one of the sites where Dasein is assigned the impossible task of putting right what can never be put right. - Rob Lapsley
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George Garnett
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« Reply #192 on: 22:38:51, 05-05-2007 » |
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Let us not forget that it was, indeed, Alkan alone who had the genius to imitate a steam engine *first*. Verdi gave it his best shot though:  |
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martle
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« Reply #193 on: 22:53:34, 05-05-2007 » |
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Let us not forget that it was, indeed, Alkan alone who had the genius to imitate a steam engine *first*. Verdi gave it his best shot though: George,   |
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Green. Always green.
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oliver sudden
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« Reply #194 on: 22:59:26, 05-05-2007 » |
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t_i_n, doesn't it actually move backwards through the history of music? I freely admit that's the main bit of the piece that does it for me. (Er, is this also the piece with the gunshot and Bartered Bride in it or is that Sprite the Diner? Now you know it's been ages since I heard them.) Oh, and George, you've done it again!  |
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