Tag: music

Who’s Streets?

I found a call for recordings for a politically themed musical thing, which always makes me happy because this sort of thing motivates me a lot. It’s got an item for consideration, “How do we view the fact that our instruments for organising sounds are linked to instruments designed to control? Is there a relationship between organising and controlling?” (the whole thing is at http://www.sonoscop.net/pop-up/convzepp09ENG.html)

So I was thinking I could use some recordings I made of people chanting at the G20 protests in London and then juxtapose that with recordings of military chants that I could steal from YouTube.

And I am astounded, perplexed and unnerved that pretty much, crowds watching troop drills sound exactly like crowds at protests with chanting. I would not be able to listen to a recording and know if I’m watching an implicitly normative crowd cheering for marching at a football game or a bunch of leftists out to reclaim the streets. (I mean, the words are different, but playing recordings for a non-english speaking audience looses that signifier.)

This is kind of worrying because it suggests that there’s not so much difference between how these positions are articulated or perhaps even between the positions themselves as they manifest in a public space.
Which manifestations are empowering and which are alarming would only seem to have to do with whether your own advantage is the one being promoted. Of course, I think there’s more to it than that. Are we supporting the rights of people who already have power or people who do not? But this suggests that both positions might fill the same needs for observers and participants. And somehow that’s disturbing me. Maybe people are more empowered by being reactionary. How can we reach out to them in that case?
Speaking of protests, there’s one today about biofuels and I don’t know whether or not I want to go. Burning acres of rainforest to grow soybeans for fuel has a worse carbon footprint than burning a whole lot of petrol. Is there a role for non-waste oil biodiesel in a green, sustainable model for fuel? I don’t know. I really believed in biodiesel.

Questions for composers

When you compose, do you start with the form or with the content? Do you decide on the structure before you gather materials? Do the materials suggest a structure to you or vice versa?
I’ve never been so good at structure and I really need to do something about this. I wonder if there are any good books on musical structure? Maybe I should try to write some stuff with historical structures. Not sontata form, though. When I was at Wesleyan, I realized that I wrote everything in sonata form and stopped doing that, but I didn’t really replace it with any other structures, just sort of trying to intuit things for every piece.
What pieces are best to study for cues into form and structure? I’ve been thinking of looking at John Cage’s Square Root pieces, something my supervisor has encouraged.
But I think I should also get a book. Back in my miss-spent youth, I thought I wouldn’t need to know anything about non-electronic music because the world was shiny and new and out with the old and in with whatever I was doing. So I didn’t pay a lot of attention in some of my classes. Much like when I was 17, and similarly had an idea that I would never need to know statistics.
So, due to a lack of diligence in my studies, I’m totally unclear on how this works at all, really. I imagine that it’s like having a bunch of plastic boxes, like you use for food storage. And in each one, there’s a different sort of food. Each like a course of a fancy meal. So they all go together, but they’re all separate. However, they probably have ingredients in common like olive oil. Or pumpkin both in the pie and the soup. However, this metaphor is crap, as it’s non temporal. Pumpkin soup is a gestalt. It doesn’t change over time. Maybe it’s like stanzas in a poem or chapters in a book? I imagine that stanza length is decided a head of time, whereas chapters seem to stem from the content that fills them?
Is it ironic not to have a structure of understanding to apply to structure?

Unpopular Music

Once in a while, I get the idea of doing algorithmic pop music and labor intensely on it and then come up with something and then walk away horrified. So, um, if anybody’s interested, here’s the latest incarnation of this cycle: S’onewall.
The samples are recordings of the largest-ever transgender rights protest in the UK, which took place last month. And then there are drum beats. The bassline uses a subset of the Bohlen-Pierce scale, in just intonation, with notes chosen according to a variation of Clarence Barlow’s “digestibility” formula. To determine the relative consonance of two ratios, divide one by the other and then take the result and add the numerator to the denominator. A lower number indicates greater simplicity of the result and thus a higher degree of consonance. There is ugly code, available for your perusal. Quick examples are at the bottom of this post.
This is not on my podcast because I’m not so into it. I have ideas of what might fix it, but I suspect those ideas are wrong and it’s taken up so much time already. However, as un-enthused as I am, I think somebody, someplace might want to remix this. Or maybe I’m flattering myself.
I wish I could offer the pieces sent to different tracks, but, ha ha, the only way I could get this to record was with Audio Hijack, because there’s a logic problem somewhere in the code which causes it to hang right at the end and chasing that bug is just more trouble than it’s worth.

Code Example

Ok, using the ScaleLattice: First declare a scale with some ratios in it:

 ~scale = ScaleLattice([[1, 1], [11, 9], [9,7],  [7,5], [5, 3], [9, 5], 
     [11,5], [7,3], [27, 11], [27, 25],  [25, 9]], 3);

That’s not the scale from the piece, but it’s also a nice one. We can then try to construct a melody, by getting some step-wise motion:

 ~melody = ~scale.getNsteps(4);

And them maybe jump to the most consonant note from the tonic, followed by one step down:

 ~melody = ~melody ++ ~scale.getIstepsBelowJconsonance(2, 0);

Um, and then let’s get the most consonant pitch from the last one in the melody:


 ~melody = ~melody ++ ~scale.consonanceAtFloat(0, ~melody.last);

Yeah, this probably sound bad, but we could play it:


 Pbind(dur, 0.3, freq, Pseq(~melody * 440, 1)).play;

I have a hypothesis that with the combination of relative consonances and stepwise motion, you could abstract music theory to the point where you could construct a meaningful melody from an arbitrary scale. Such that the program doesn’t know the scale ahead of time. The missing piece is notes that are too close to each other, which I suspect will have very high relative dissonance. I may think on this further, or I might go back to doing whatever else it is that I do.

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Room for Improvement

Five months ago, I posted a video to YouTube. A few weeks later, I played it for my supervisor, who gave me some very good feedback. He suggested that I vary the sounds of it and put the voice nearer the end, in order to not give it away and consider doing something about the sameness of the video. He indicated that it was too short to be minimalist, but too unchanging to fill the entire duration.
So this is what I’ve been working on. And working on. And working on. Every change I make seems to make the video worse. Which is hardly encouraging. It’s hard to work on for that reason. And also because I picked sounds for it that make me feel very nervous and edgy. And also because the subject matter makes me squirm.
It’s not that it couldn’t be better, it’s that I can’t seem to make it better.
The deadline is fast approaching for the Transgender Film Festival (indeed, if it is not already passed) and I’ve shown this video once to a small group and gotten some feedback from the YouTube posting. It seems to resonate well with women and gender minorities / queers. If straight men aren’t moved by it as much, should I care? Or am I just annoyed because the changes I’m making are really not helping?
Can it still be part of my PhD if I can’t repair it?
None of the composed music I’ve done in the last year has been especially engaging.

Oy, I’m knackered

Tired and going native in my speech habits, but not, so far, my drinking habits. A normal night on the town here can quite often involve vomit from over-indulgence. This just doesn’t sound fun to me. So my tiredness is from appropriately puritanical sources. I’ve been working at something called a “test setup.”
We took a hundred or so speakers and arranged them as if we were giving a concert, but there was no concert. Instead, we were testing things. We’ve got a cool Berlin guy to build us a box with 64 motorized, touch-sensitive faders. He flew in with the prototype and there was discussion of firmware. The plan is purchase three of these.
Then we tested Ambisonics which is a method of positioning sounds in space with an oddly cult-like following of users. People who like it really really like it. It sounded weird on our system. One outside observer informed us that we were sending in the wrong sort of sounds for it to work. The easy comment is that a panning system that only works with a few types of sounds is not the most useful, but that comment is unfair. A speaker array like ours turns into a sort of architecture and not all sounds work in all spaces. Gospel music is great, but sounds bad in cathedrals. It needs a room with a short decay time. Similarly, plain chant in an acoustically dead church is going to fall very flat.
Obviously, people compose for the kinds of spaces and instruments that they have. Modern concert halls are very dry and sound really good with the sort of stochastic-like short pulses of 20th century music. So it shouldn’t be surprising that our rig is going to have a body of work that sounds good with it and not as good with different controlling software.
We normally use something that’s pronounced as “V-bap”, but I don’t know what the acronym stands for. It’s equal power pan spread across three speakers to localize a sound in space and it seems to require quite a lot less math. Basically: you know that you can make a sound seem to move back and forth by twisting the balance knob on your stereo. Well, add a third speaker above and a second knob and you can make it go up and down too.
For my part, I carried things around and otherwise did grunt work, which can be a good way to learn about a system without having to ask too many questions or go to a lecture. I tried to play my phone phreaking piece, but I couldn’t get it to work on the computer attached to all the speakers, alas.
One of my favorite students in the program flew in from Spain to work on the test setup, so it was good to talk to him. Apparently he used to have an internet addiction and now he talks about strategies to stop using the net aside from getting email and how much better his life is net-free. I remain unconvinced. Besides, I can quit any time.
Still the internet has kind of begun to bore me. The social network sites are dull and give me little for my time. The news is still valuable. But blogs . . . so many of them are narcissistic and dull. Maybe I should stop.

Direct to Consumer

Well, I’ve been doing this commission project for over a year now. There were a few months of it that I wasn’t pushing it very actively. Most of the people who got commissions from me, though, were people with whom I already had a connection. This is not surprising. You wouldn’t buy a CD from a band that you’d never heard, so why would you buy a commission from somebody whose music you didn’t know at all.
Still, I wanted to get the idea of the project farther out. I think the best way to spread is organically, by word of mouth and via social networking. But the idea of direct-to-consumer advertising is also compelling. So I approached the writer of the Comics Curmudgeon, which is rated as one of the top 100 American blogs. His blog has nothing to do with music. I asked him if I could trade a week long banner ad for a commission. Josh was extremely enthusiastic about the idea, so I made a one minute piece for him.
So far, everybody that’s gotten a piece has been happy with it, Josh included. I think that people are more likely to like a piece of music that they feel a connection to. Personally, I’m more likely to think positively of music written by bands I already like or by my friends. Everybody has that. This seems to be especially true for people who commission pieces. In this case, Josh was happy enough that he dedicated a blog post in which he recommended me and embedded a YouTube video I made of the piece.
It’s been a couple of weeks and the banner ad has timed out. The number of people watching the video has slowed to a trickle. I don’t know how many thousands of people saw the post, or subsequently subscribed to my podcast, but I know that more than 3800 watched the video, which is a fantastic reach for me. I got zero new commissions.
This is exactly why my career in marketing was so short (no really). While it’s true that I want to reach everybody, a one-off ad in a totally unrelated medium is not the way to do it. So my failure to get any new commissions is not necessarily an indication that the project is doomed. Most people have to hear about something three times before it clicks. Commissioning music is a totally new idea to many people. So if I want to get people to understand the idea, I need to make certain they hear about it multiple times. This effort was, therefore, much too small to work. However, there’s another problem in that I can’t do 100 commissions in a week. I can do maybe three. If four thousand people suddenly understood what I was up to and thought it was cool, if less than 1% of them tried to commission me, I’d be swamped.
However, one thing that I learned when I worked in marketing is that competition is correlated with growth of the category. For example, if there was just one time of sugary, fizzy water, the manufacturer might have to explain to people why they would want to drink such a thing (I, for one, am unconvinced it’s a good idea). However, having multiple pop companies means that more people have heard of pop and the overall demand is higher. Is this cause or effect? Who knows. However, in the case of commissioning music, every other composer who starts doing this is also letting people know that such a category of goods exists. So I want more people to start doing this. I can’t say for certain that it’s going to work, but the startup costs are low.
I wonder, also, if I should retreat to a lower cost. At a time when people are losing their houses and the price of food is rising, commissioning noise music is definitely going to seem like a luxury.
Finally, while my advertisement experiment failed to gather me any new business, I’m still quite pleased with the number of ears that I reached. A number of them probably considered it to be a novelty, but that’s the path musical genres take to reach popular acceptance. One small step for noise music, one giant leap for my hit counter.

Sound and Fury

I went to a noise show tonight. It was really really fucking loud. That was probably the primary adjective: loud. It was brilliant. I mean, most of my classmates did not fully agree with this assessment, but I think there’s a certain value to just hearing really fucking loud noise once in a while.
Also, there was a full room of people in the audience. A whole bunch of people turned out to hear really fucking loud noise. And there was a table selling records. I talked to the record people. There’s a local record company that just does noise music and dark ambient. Brilliant. I decided to purchase a record with the headline act on it. (It’s less fucking loud on my home system, but it would still be a wall ‘o noise.)
The record table was lit by candle light. The kind in those red glass containers you see at nightclubs and cabarets. I got the wrong CD. I didn’t notice until I got home. So I was slightly disappointed, but still popped it into my computer to put it into my itunes library. I started typing in the track names. “iii. is it wrong to love a transexual”
. . .
You know, I was in a really good mood. I had a couple of pints of beer. I hung out with people. I had some really good chips. I heard fucking loud noise.
. . .
It’s like somebody hit the pause button on my enthusiasm. I stopped breathing for a minute. I typed in the rest of the track names. And then I hit eject.
so if anybody wants a CD of dark ambient or noise, it could be yours. Unless I drop it in the trash first. I don’t think I have the energy to try to get a refund from the record company. Alas, I’ve had this conversation before.
It’s always, like, I’m excited about something and then all of the sudden, wham.
I was reading a scifi webzine. And wham. I spoke up. The editor literally told me not to worry my pretty face. The writer gave me a little lecture on what “passing” means, as if, possibly, I might not know (where would minorities be without white straight men informing of us of our own subculture?). And then explained he couldn’t transphobic because he’d had a transgender girlfriend once. Just like I could never possibly write or say anything racist because of my girlfriend. And why no straight guy could ever possibly be sexist.
I feel like the ur-queer lately. Somebody says something about gay men, and hey, I’m a queer man. Somebody says something about lesbians, and I was a lesbian. Somebody says something about about women, and I was a woman. I’m noticing sexism more than I used to. The scifi story I worried my little head about . . .. I got as far as a minor character sketch in which the main baddie was shown to be bad because he owned a woman that he used for sex. Your worst nightmare is just an aside.
Sci-fi can be dystopian. My favorites are. Sci-fi can contain slurs. Again, Man in a High Castle is slur-filled and completely dystopian. And it’s fantastic. But they’re not asides. If you’re going to have the third person narrator use a slur that’s currently in common usage and just throw in as an aside human trafficking, well, it’s fair to assume that the writer hasn’t really thought things out.
But, being ur-queer isn’t not all negative. I feel solidarity with everybody too. I feel like I can kind of fit in with any group of people. Well, as much as an Esperanto-speaking transsexual is ever going to fit in, if you know what I mean. I feel more at ease around people than I’ve ever felt. It’s a weird transition, to being much, much happier and at ease and, at the same time, a gigantic target for hate. So alien other as to not really even be a person anymore. And yet, I can go to the pub, have a pint and chat with anybody.
I need to toughen up and not let the little shit get to me. And I need to be prepared for it coming from any direction at any time from any one under any circumstance.
It’s a lot to get used to.

Managing Extremes

Puberty . . . wow. I won’t say that being 20 years older than last time isn’t making it easier, because it is. But getting used to a really different hormonal situation still takes some time to get used to it, like probably several months. In the mean time, I’m kind of feeling at extremes. I’m not neutral about much of anything. Things are either amazingly great or the worst fucking thing ever. Sometimes my mind can change on whether something’s fantastic or awful within a a very few moments. It’s emotionally exciting and as such is completely awesome! It totally fucking sucks!
I try to moderate my responses when I’m around people, and this actually helps keep them moderated. So I’m trying to get out more. Also, music helps. My appetite for loud, angry punk rock has recently re-emerged. And, again similar to my youth, making music helps a lot. Even esoteric, algorithm driven, computer pieces that sort of play themselves. They almost help more because of the emotional detachment necessary to get them working, but the need for emotionality in evaluating the results. It’s like slowly releasing pressure from a canister.
Although, it doesn’t sound like slowly releasing pressure from a canister. It sounds like the canister has just fucking exploded and killed three people. Or something. Yesterday morning, I was actually shaking the music building. I feel a little guilty about that, because the studios are supposed to be soundproofed, but I kind of forgot about how low frequencies will travel through soundproofing and through walls and apparently disturb a class next door. Oops. My supervisor came by afterwards to see what was going on, mentioning only once his class was over that it had been hard for them to hear. Oops. He left, telling me to “rock on.” So maybe it’s ok in moderation, as long as I don’t disturb all his classes?
I could get night hours and not disturb other people, but then I would lose all the value of interacting with other people. Valuable interactions like, “what are you doing??” and “I feel sorry for your ears.”
A couple of years ago, Brum got a gigantic grant of something like £500000 to buy speakers and fix up the studios. And they did a great job. We can gig with well over a hundred discrete audio channels and speakers. It boggles the mind. When I was a wild and crazy youth, I really wanted to have a million dollars worth of speakers and A/D converters. Think of all the things you could do! But my laptop only has stereo outs, and it turns out that if you have 8 or 16 or N number of speakers, you have to carry them and all the cables and everything, so I learned to love stereo. I don’t think that I had a real idea of what to do with 60 speakers then, and I really don’t now. I mean 60 speakers! You can do it just to show off your vast speaker wealth (and thus how incredibly sexy you must be), but I think it’s better to justify it somehow. The piece you do with 60 speakers should really need that many of them. My colleagues all succeed at this, but I want to work within my pre-existing vocabulary of very artificial sounds. If you’re using recordings of water drops, you can just send a bunch to the upper left side and then that part of the audience feels like you’re going to drip on them. But what do you with sine tones?
Well, obviously what you do with sine tones is to come up with something that will hurt the audience! You assault them with sine tones! Out of tune, slowly phasing low frequencies shaking you from every direction! Muahahahaha.
I think I want to do an installation. There’s a lot of hierarchy and social control inherent in the concert hall paradigm. People come in before everything starts, sit quietly and appreciate your music, clap at the end and the shuffle back out when everything is finished. But 60 or 100 speakers really creates a physical space. There’s no one sweet spot in the middle where everything sounds best. There’s sounds coming from every direction. If you’re close to one particular speaker, that’s entirely different than being in the center or at another edge. I don’t want to dictate to people how long they should listen or where they should listen or how they should listen (or if they should bother at all). I’d like to give them something that slowly evolves over several minutes and gradually returns to it’s starting state and then re-evolves. That kind of music requires a patience that I don’t want to enforce. I don’t want to make people wait it out if they’re not drawn in on their own. I don’t want to tell them them what to do. Of course, anything presented has some hierarchy, it’s inescapable. I’ve got control of the speakers and they don’t. But it does have a slightly more anarchist edge to it when they don’t have to just sit and suffer through if they don’t want to.
So I want to hurt people, but in a non-heirachical, listener-empowering fashion. I can’t decide if that’s the most fucking stupid contradiction ever, or the most fascinating idea to ever emerge from the academy.

Music Discovery

Ok, it’s no secret that most radio stations are kind of disappointing, especially commercial ones. If you live in an urban area, you might have an awesome local radio station that actually plays good music. You should listen! However, alas, most of the good music might be on 10PM – 2AM on Thursday nights. Or maybe you live some place with Clear Channel, Sony and nobody else? How do you find out about music?

Pandora – for Americans

There’s a couple of very interesting online services to aid you in this task, with sort of opposite philosophies. If you live in the US, you can try out something called Pandora. (Outside, the US, scroll down) Alas, it doesn’t work outside of the US, but if you can get it, it’s actually pretty cool. It’s got a very top-down approach. You tell it a song that you like and it guesses what songs you might like based on that one song. You can refine the results by telling it when it’s correct or wrong. It’s an interesting way to find out about music within (or near) a genre that you like.
How it works is that expert musicologists listen to stuff and classify it. This piece of music is electronic, is 130 bmp, has glitch elements, has IDM influences, uses minor key harmonies, blah, blah, blah. It can alternately make you feel smart when you understand what they’re talking about, or it can make you think they’re smarter than you. They don’t tell you everything about a track, because that would be giving away secrets! But it’s not secret that part of what I like about this is that it provides jobs to people with graduate degrees in music. We need the work!
So, you say you like Tag by Agf and it guesses you might also like a few tracks by Boards of Canada. Cool! But, part of the shortcomings of this is that you can’t give it more exact feedback. I had a Riot Grrl station set up, which meant I was pretty much only interested in female vocalists, aside from Huggy Bear and the few other Riot Grrl groups with male singers. It just did not get it. And I certainly couldn’t tell it that I didn’t want to hear sexist lyrics. I could only give it a lot of thumbs down and hoped it would guess that’s what they all had in common.
Nevertheless, it’s interesting and I would use it again if they offered it in the UK.

Last.FM

Where Pandora is top-down, organized by people who are smarter than you, Last.FM is bottom up, organized automagically using some smart computer algorithms and it’s user base. Pandora is like Yahoo, or the Open Directory Project and Last.FM is like Google.
Last.FM is more general and can be used in many different ways. A typical user pattern would be that you go install the spy software called a scrobbler. This software spies on what you’re listening to and reports back to last.fm. Ok, it’s moderately creepy. However, you can see when it’s running and when it’s not. When you don’t want people to know that you’re secretly listening to Esperanto Subgrunda, you can turn it off. Note, also, that Pandora is also tracking what you listen to. If you want to keep your listening habits secret, then you’re not going to be able to use any music discovery tool that I know of.
Ok, so you have last.fm installed and you’re listening to Madonna, Justin Timberlake and The Coup. Based on that, it’s created a sort of radio station of stuff you might like. This doesn’t happen because smart people have noted that these artists have a pop sensibility, make heavy use of sampling, have major key and pentatonic harmonies and have a beat you can dance to. No, this happens because a bunch of other users also these same three artists and also like a bunch of other musically-related acts. The correlation happens automatically based on people’s listening habits. Nice!
Additionally, you can find your friends on the service (I’m celesteh1). You can go listen to their radio station and see what they like. Maybe mock them behind their back. And find out they like some cool band that you’d never heard of. Boom, musical discovery based on your friends. It’s like the old days of tape trading, but less interactive. In addition to being able to check out your friends, it gives you a list of users who have closely related tastes to yours. You can scope out their stations and also find stuff.
Finally, you can use it like Pandora in that you can just ask for stuff based on an artist or song that you like. It generates a play list and will play it in a web browser or in it’s own client. The client doesn’t have ads and uses a lot less CPU than a web browser, so it’s much less resource stealing to have the last.fm client than it is to have pandora in a browser. But since all the playlists are generated based on what other users have listened to, they can lack subtlety and can be way off for lesser-known acts. I almost never use this feature. However, for example, the similar to Maggi Payne station is really interesting, so it’s definitely worth checking out.
Ok, I don’t know about you, but I hate making choices. It is possible to use last.fm and pandora at the same time. This is left as an exercise to the reader. Or, if there’s interest, I’ll do a follow up.
Finally, let’s admit it, you think your musical taste is stellar, cutting edge, amazing. You secretly relate to Indy Rock Pete. Ok, maybe that’s just me. But you can get some sort of listener creds through last.fm. You can show of how cool you are. (White people like that.) It’s appealing, at least at first. And then you miss the new Madonna album or SexyBack and it’s all downhill from there. (But seriously, the Confessions on a Dance Floor is awesome. Timberlake? Not so much. But still somehow compelling.) Take it to the bridge.

For Musicians

Ok, what about artists? People are listening to our sol la ti, so we should get some do re mi, right? Indeed. Pandora will only consider CDs with UPC codes. And they don’t take everything. “Top down” means curated. But they do pay royalties. Anyway, you can be on both. If you want to be on Pandora, mail them a CD. The pay according to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
Last.fm keeps track of everything that people report to it. If you listen to that mp3 of your best friend’s garage band while scrobbling, they know about it. Which means that they know about a lot more stuff than does Pandora. If you have mp3s in circulation or a released CD, they probably already know about you. Go look yourself up on the service. Maybe they already have a bio and a picture for you. If they do, it’s because some friend or fan set it up – or because you’re already famous. If they don’t, you can add that stuff. (and terrible candid shots of your musician friends. ahahahaha!) You can also upload some of your own music.
Last.fm has a plan in place to pay royalties, but have not yet started to do so. However even in this pre-royalty time, it’s in your best interest to give them a couple of tracks for the same reason that it’s in your best interest to put some tracks up on your website. The point is to get people listening to your music through a sort of word-of-mouth(-like) buzz. People see that a friend or musical neighbor has been listening to you. They get curious. They try to listen also. Make sure there’s something there for them.