Recordings
Prepare
Watch Tones Drones and Arpeggios
Explore
Architecture, acoustics, music
- Hear Here! (20khz)
- Reverb: The Evolution of Architectural Acoustics (99% Invisible)
- Why a new NYC concert hall sounds so much better (NPR)
- Art + Physics = Beautiful Music (NYT)
- An Acoustical History of Theaters and Concert Halls
Musical Instruments at the Met
The Museum’s collection of musical instruments includes approximately five thousand examples from six continents and the Pacific Islands, dating from about 300 B.C. to the present. It illustrates the development of musical instruments from all cultures and eras. Selected for their technical and social importance as well as for their tonal and visual beauty, the instruments may be understood in a number of ways: as art objects, as ethnographic record, and as documents of the history of music and performance.
Listening to Classical Music
…the composer has become a non-instrument-bound sound organizer, a function which simply did not exist before. Conventionally, the instrument maker was inventing new instruments and therefore dealing with the relationship between music and technology. After the Second World War the composers themselves started to work with autonomous electronic sound.
Dick Raaijmakers
…much music produced nowadays is only meant for listening to through loudspeakers or headphones in a private atmosphere. The recording is not a copy anymore of the live performance, but is a genuine musical performance in itself. By the time the Beatles had become a studio band, and participated in the producing work for albums such as Revolver (1966) and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), it had become indisputable that music could be composed for recording instead of for performance.
Cathy van Eck
Long Playing (LPs) Records and Albums
Read an extract from David Toop’s Ocean of Sound – Crack Magazine
The trance of blankness can invade us in supermarket aisles, waiting in queues, stuck in traffic, driving fast on a motorway, watching television, working a dull job, talking on the telephone, eating in restaurants, even making love. Jack Gladney, narrator of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, hears “an eerie static” emanating from plastic food wrap in his freezer. The sound makes him think of dormant life, moving on the edges of awareness. He searches for certainties, despite fearing them, in a sea of shifting, irrelevant information. In the evenings he watches from the overpass as a drama of spectacular, toxically provoked sunsets unfolds. “May the days be aimless”, he tells himself. “Let the seasons drift.”
Ryuichi Sakamoto – Tokyo Melody
Brian Eno, Music for Airports (Interactive)
The concept of music designed specifically as a background feature in the environment was pioneered by Muzak Inc. in the fifties, and has since come to be known generically by the term Muzak. The connotations that this term carries are those particularly associated with the kind of material that Muzak Inc. produces – familiar tunes arranged and orchestrated in a lightweight and derivative manner. Understandably, this has led most discerning listeners (and most composers) to dismiss entirely the concept of environmental music as an idea worthy of attention.
Over the past three years, I have become interested in the use of music as ambience, and have come to believe that it is possible to produce material that can be used thus without being in any way compromised. To create a distinction between my own experiments in this area and the products of the various purveyors of canned music, I have begun using the term Ambient Music.
An ambience is defined as an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint. My intention is to produce original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue of environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres.
Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regularizing environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncracies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these. Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to `brighten’ the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and levelling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.
Ambient Music must be able to accomodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.
liner notes to Ambient 1: Music for Airports
Imagine any record released in the past couple of years being beamed back in time to, say, 1995 and played on the radio. It’s hard to think that it will produce any jolt in the listeners. On the contrary, what would be likely to shock our 1995 audience would be the very recognisability of the sounds: would music really have changed so little in the next 17 years? Contrast this with the rapid turnover styles between the 1960s and the 90s: play a jungle record from 1993 to someone in 1989 and it would have sounded like something so new that it would have challenged them to rethink what music was, or could be.
Despite all its rhetoric of novelty and innovation, neoliberal capitalism has gradually but systematically deprived artists of the resources necessary to produce the new. In the UK, the postwar welfare state and higher education maintenance grants constituted an indirect source of funding for most of the experiments in popular culture between the 1960s and the 80s. The subsequent ideological and practical attack on public services meant that one of the spaces where artists could be sheltered from the pressures to produce something that was immediately successful was severely circumscribed. As public service broadcasting became ‘marketized’, there was an increased tendency to turn out cultural productions that resembled what was already successful. The result of all of this is that the social time available for withdrawing from work and immersing oneself in cultural production drastically declined. Perhaps it was only with the arrival of digital communicative capitalism that this reached terminal crisis point. Naturally, the besieging of attention described by Berardi applies to producers as much as consumers. Producing the new depends upon certain kinds of withdrawal — from, for instance, sociality as much as from pre-existing cultural forms — but the currently dominant form of socially networked cyberspace, with its endless opportunities for micro-contact and its deluge of YouTube links, has made withdrawal more difficult than ever before… in recent years, everyday life has sped up, but culture has slowed down.
Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life
4 Chord Song
Ableton Learning Music
What can you tell about the kind of music this helps you explore?
Genres and Drum Programming
Ubuweb
Early Experimental Cinema
For no montage can be accomplished if there is no inner “melody” to determine its construction!
Serguei Eisenstein, Reflexões De Um Cineasta
This inner melody may resound so powerfully that sometimes it determines the rhythm of one’s behaviour at the time one edits certain scenes.
Contemporary Film Examples
Longer Forms
Culture, Memes, and Structure
Techno before techno
The Amen Break
808
Apply
Build a Reaper template with markers to break down linear form into sections using terminology that is inspiring to you. Feel free to be as granular or zoomed out as you want. Eg:
- beginning, middle, end
- verse, chorus
- tension, release
