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PPPP (closing reception Feb 13)
Lucas Entertainmet @ career center
Toby Heys lecture Feb 10

Webboard ­ threads
End class early to take questions about assignment #2

MUSIC/SOUND
I) Quote - CAGE

2) history of electronic Music
 Historically musicians & artists have experimented with sound, whether that meant creating and refining their own instruments or experimenting with harmonics & tones (Shoenberg) in composition

BACK & FORTH WITH DEVELOPMENTS OF TECHNOLOGY

beginning of this current wave of experimentation comes with the invention of machines (phonograph and then the radio)
record, manipulate and distribute music
1877-1896 Thomas Edison & Emile Berliner independently develop and patent phonograph
  1880's Alexander Bell finances his own lab to research sound and acoustics
1890s ­ 1900s - rise of Machine in culture
 steam engine, Industrial Revolution, trains, industrial cities

SHOW MODULATIONSÖ.

STOP 1
NEW SOUNDS
 
FUTURISM!
aesthetics of machine/city
Luigi Russolo - painter
http://www.futurism.fsnet.co.uk/music.htm
interested in "noise instruments"
Noise was born with 20th century - advent of machinery - before that no noise
Body is evolving to deal with new soundscapes produced by machines (like pollution as well)
ART OF NOISE - concert April 21,1914
performed on "Intonarumori" (noise instruments whose sounds howls,roars,shuffles,gurgles,etc.) were hand activated and projected by megaphobes - CAUSE A RIOT

THE ART OF NOISE - futurist manifesto (one of many ) 1913

concert halls = "hospitals for anemic sounds"
"Noise accompanies every manifestation of our life. Noise is familiar to us. Noise has the power to bring us back to life. On the other hand, sound, foreign to life, always a musical outside thing, an occasional element, has come to strike our ears no more than an overly familiar face does our eyes. Noise, gushing confusedly and irregularly out of life, is never totally revealed to us and it keeps in store innumerable surprises for our benefit.

Our expanded sensibility will gain futurist ears as it already has futurist eyes. In a few years, the engines of our industrial cities will be skillfully tuned so that every factory is turned into an intoxicating orchestra of noises."

At this time there was alot of experimentation with creating new instruments with electronics
Theremin (1919) in Russia - show tape
Hammond Organ
Trautonium

early 1920's Edgar Varese insists that "the composer and the electrician will have to labor together"
 ARTISTS/ENGINEERS collaborating
 proposes getting rid of "middlemen - musicians - direct relationship of composer to audience -- prefigures today's studio created multi-track compositions

1929 - first synthesizer - controlled by punched paper rolls
COLLABORATION WITH EXPERIMENTAL FILM MAKERS
 George Antheil - Ballet Mechanique
car horns, airplane propellers, saws & anvils, etc.

STOP 2
MUSIQUE CONCRETE - precursor to sampling
first school of electronic music
late 1940's - 1950's Radio - Concerts de Bruits
Pierre Schaeffer & Pierre Henri
everyday life as symphony - musicalization of sound
PLAY PIECE

ORGANIZED SOUND
Edgar Varese - Poem electronique (1958)
PLAY>>6
in collaboration with Architect le Corbusier for Brussels exposition - circus tent with three peaks - placed along these hypberbolic and parabolic curves were 400 loudspeakers - continuous arcs of sound - accompanied by projected images chosen by le Corbusier
15-16,000 people a day in audience for 6 months - evoked terror, anger, stunned awe, amusement, wild enthusiasm - USE OF LOOPS and FILTERS
 

STOP 3
THEREMIN
Leo Theremin ­ Russian composer
Using sound waves & electronics ­ unusual interface

STOP 4
BRIAN ENO ­ Ambient MUSIC
Play Music for Airports

STOP 5
 JOHN CAGE
Born in LA in 1912 - MOST INFLUENTIAL COMPOSER OF 20th century
1939  -- Imaginary Landscape #1 - Victor frequency record  - turntable has clutch for speed change
PLAY>>>IMAGINARY LANDSCAPE>>3
FUTURE OF MUSIC CREDO
 "I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard. Whereas in the past, the point of disagreement has been between dissonance and consonance, it will be, in the immediate future, between noise and so-called musical sounds. The present methods of writing music, principally those which employ harmony and its reference to particular steps in the field of sound, will be inadequate for the composer who will be faced with the entire field of sound.

The composer (organizer of sound) will not only be faced with the entire field of sound, but with the entire field of time. The frame or fraction of a second, following established film technique, will probably be the basic unit in the measurement of time. No rhythm will be beyond the composer's reach." 1937

OTHER DEVELOPMENTS: - developed over decades as experimental figure
"indeterminacy" - randomness - nonintention

FOCUS ON LISTENING - SOUND/MUSIC exists without our direction or intention
tell story ­ isolation booth
JOINED WITH OTHER COMPOSERS & VISUAL ARTISTS ­ FLUXUS
La Monte Young, Nam June Paik, Alison Knowles, Yoko Ono, George Maciunas, etc.etc.

COMPOSITION -  4'33"
Played at piano - divided into three movements - all notes are silent - takes 4'33" to perform
pianist uses a stopwatch to control tempo"
SILENCE - RADICAL - listening in a new way
philosopher as well

1950s MOOG SYNTHESIZER (analog)

POETS & ELECTRONIC EXPERIMENTS
EARLY TAPe experiments of William Burroughs
Potentialities of tape recorder - Not finished compositions

ARCHIVES -
Creepy Letter - Cut-Up at the beat hotel (1959) - first cut-up - spontaneously cut-up - insertion of other words with second machine "When you cut up and rearrange words, new words emerge, the future leaks through, seemingly at random."
Inching - (1965) manually pulling the recording tape through the heads of the tape recorder while recording

Trying to question control and break into that domination of words as linear, sequenced controllers of meaning. "Mutates and rearranges words in order to reveal both their disease and its non-linear antidote"

6) COMPUTER EXPERIMENTATION

1955-56 LeJaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson at U.of illinois
Illiac Suite for string Quartet - first complete piece composed with a computer
PLAY>> 8
4th movement
examined a purely mathematical and complete oriented technique for composition
"stochastic music" - dependent on probability and weighted frequency distributions

L.H. had been working in Chemistry dept. and was thinking about "restricted random walks" as a problem in statistical mathematics. Realized after using computer to help understand problems with any complexity, that a "walk" through space could also be a "walk" through a grid defined to represent musical elements such as pitch and rythmic durations and timbre choices.

RESEARCH more than expressive composition
Structuring

LATER ­
AI - David Cope - using computer to analyze Bach compositions and create more

NOW - Experiments in interface

MIDI - Musical Instrument Digital Interface - control/trigger
Separation of hardware/software

Other:
IMPROVISATION:
George E. Lewis ­ system that he improvised with
David Rokeby
EYE-TRACKING: Andrea Polli - http://homepage.interaccess.com/~apolli/

POPULAR MUSIC
SAMPLING - APPROPRIATION - NEGATIVELAND
 "Sonic Outlaws" PLAY TAPE
Visual Culture - Craig Baldwin "RocketKitKongoKit" "Tribulation 99"
 Political stance
MAINSTREAM manifestations:
 Beck, FatBoy Slim, etc.

8) DISTRIBUTION ­ NAPSTER, iTUNES, pirate radio

MP3 compression - democratic, avoid middlemen...straight to public
 EVERYONE's a DJ - download, press onto CD's
 IMPACT ON INDUSTRY, IMPACT ON ARTISTS
INTERNET RADIO (micromicroradio)- smaller audiences - still support music
 SHOUTCAST
Legalities - FCC needing to rethink licensing... - approved on limitied basis - in courts now!
RIAA

CONTEMPORARY TECHNO/HOUSE
works with & against technologies
KRAFTWERK & Tangerine dream - precursors 1971
drum machines
>>PLAY AUTOBAHN
tape/analog recording - Cottage Industry
consumer synthesizers (many of which wre discontinued)
 Detroit techno -  Roland TB 303 baseline - bass synthesizer
 inexpensive recording technologies - fueled underground DJ culture
 cheap samplers - ARTIST as PRODUCER
 BREAK BEATS, Jungle other rhythms not possible with human drummer
SUB-Categories
Detroit Techno, Chicago Acid house, DJ Europop, Bleep & Bass, UK Acid House, Gabba/Hardcore (1000bpm - fastest possible music on earth), Ambient, Trance (Trancecore, Goa trance, etc.), Jungle, Ambient Jungle, Trip-Hop
SOUND SYSTEMS - crafted for clubs, sensurround
DRUGS & TECHNOLOGY fuel the mix, experimentation
SIMON REYNOLDS "Generation Ecstasy" 1999

Sound/ Installation artists

Toshio Iwai
Ben Rubin
Golan Levin
John Klima
Josh Portway