An homage to the great Alvin Lucier, this piece explores the ‘photocopy effect’, where upon repeated copies the object begin to accumulate the idiosyncrasies of the medium doing the copying. Full words:
I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice as well as the image of myself, and I am going to upload it to YouTube, rip it from YouTube, and upload it again and again, until the original characteristics of both my voice and my image are destroyed. What you will see and hear, then, are the artifacts inherent in the video codec of both YouTube and the mp4 format I convert it to on my computer. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a digital fact, but more as a way to eliminate all human qualities my speech and image might have.
For everyone snowed in on the east coast right now, go check out Get High Now. The website is a companion to the book Get High Now (without drugs) The author has gathered examples of audio and visual “highs” designed to blow your mind. I would recommend Risset Rhythm and Shepard Tones. If you enjoy the visual illusions, then check out Beau Lotto’s TED talk.
Over at Boing Boing, guestblogger Stephen Worth has a great collection of posts from his online screening “Adventures in Music”. The videos he shares are really wonderful. From the listing and shown above is Sviatoslav Richter playing Chopin Etudes Op. 10 No. 1-4. Worth says:
Russian virtuoso Sviatoslav Richter (on DGG and EMI) was one of the towering figures of classical music in the 20th century with a repertoire as broad as any pianist before or since. He saw himself as a servant of the composer and criticized performers who took liberties with the letter of the score. He disliked recording, and preferred to perform in quickly arranged concerts in almost total darkness.
Richter believed that performing with only a single small light on the piano helped the audience focus on the music. Undoubtedly, it also helped him focus, and in this clip, he very nearly loses his cool. The BBC negotiated for months with Richter to be able to televise one of his performances. He grudgingly agreed, but stipulated that he have total control of the lighting and camera angles. Just after Richter launched into some of the most technically difficult pieces in all of the repertoire for piano, the video director decided to turn up the lights a little, thinking no one would notice. Well, Richter noticed, and in the middle of concentrating on his performance, he flashed a look to the camera that would melt steel. I’ve seen that look before on my dad’s face when I was a kid!
You can see the light change and glare at 1:10 (along with a few more glares throughout that etude). I’d also recommend his posts A Scenester and A Square (Jimmy Dean and Jim Henson’s Rowlf, “You Are My Sunshine”) and The “Boffo” Finish (Finale to “Stormy Weather” 1943 with Cab Calloway, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Lena Horne and the Nicholas Brothers).
I stumbled upon DarwinTunes a few days ago. The website serves as an experiment in “cultural evolution” by creating music through a computer program that mimics evolution. Visitors to the website vote on short loops to determine how well the loops “reproduce” and pass on their musical traits. As of today, they have passed the 500 generations mark which is the formal conclusion for the experiment. You can hear snapshots of the audio at different points in the project on their front page.
The experiment is rather interesting and it’s definitely fun to listen to the different generations, but there are some issues. I wish that they would provide real world examples of musical evolution, although I realize case studies would be really difficult. The study is limited to success as a result of musical preferences, but marketing and other factors influence the popularity of music in the real world. The project’s original loop already contains distinct traits (it uses a regular pulse and is tonal) that are based on a particular cultural idea of music. I would be more interested in the outcome if the original loop was random, allowing the voting to to push it in any direction.
Here’s a fun music video for Sour’s “Hibi no Neiro”. From the YouTube page:
This music video was shot for Sour’s ‘Hibi no Neiro’ (Tone of everyday) from their first mini album ‘Water Flavor EP’. The cast were selected from the actual Sour fan base, from many countries around the world. Each person and scene was filmed purely via webcam.
This (awesome) video has been making the rounds on the internet. From the YouTube page:
Miro Markus, an elementary school student from Berlin, narrated the text for the performance: Youth as a hope for the older generation.
The Austrian composer Peter Ablinger transferred the frequency spectrom of the childs voice to his computer controlled mechanical piano.
Peter Ablinger: I break down this phonography, meaning a recording of something the voice, in this case -, in individual pixels, one can say. And if I have the possibility of a rendering in a fairly high resolution (and that I only get with a mechanical piano), then I in fact restore some kind of continuity. Therefore, with a little practice, or help or subtitling, we actually can hear a human voice in a piano sound.
In Bb 2.0 is a webpage/project that puts a modern spin on Terry Riley’s In C. Created by Darren Solomon and Science for Girls, the project uses 20 YouTube videos (triggered by the you of course) as parts for a single piece. I love the simple directions they provide: “play these together, some or all, start them at any time, in any order.”
Thanks to the wonder that is the internet, there is now a version of Arnold Schoenberg’s Drei Klavierstücke edited together from cat-on-piano videos. The creator of the video has a webpage with tons of information on the project, including a direct comparison of the finale result to a reference Glenn Gould recording.
You can hear the actual piano version of this movement on YouTube.
Here’s a great video I learned about from Boing Boing’s Bobby McFerrin hacks your brain with the pentatonic scale. McFerrin using a simple experiment to reveal an audience’s musical expectations. He does lead the audience a little by singing a melody at one point, but they do an amazing job picking out notes based on his movement. I wish that they had pulled off the major third he tries around 0:58.
This a clip from the 2009 World Science Festival’s Notes and Neurons event.
This TED talk by Keith Barry is something that I’ve been meaning to post for quite a while. He is described as “a hacker of the human brain” on TED’s website. The pairing of magic and the brain was also presented in a New York Times article that describes brain scientists and magicians working together to gain insight into human perception. The article refers to a paper in Nature Reviews Neuroscience (includes several videos from the The Magic of Consciousness Symposium that are great, especially video “S6″ listed under Supplementary information).
Keith Barry’s presentation is really amazing and left me wondering how he did some of the magic. Certainly, seeing it via video makes me inclined to assume that I am being tricked. Barry emphasizes that, unless one is trained in the art of deception, the reasoning we apply to comprehend the magic we saw is going to be flawed. Be sure to watch until the end of the video!
Contour Lines explores the landscape of contemporary saxophone, presenting commissioned works by Benjamin Taylor, Paul Leary, and Victoria Cheah alongside pieces by Gérard Grisey, Fabien Lévy, JacobTV, Kati Agócs, and Katarina Miljkovic.
East Coast mini tour is complete!
Once last performance:
May 17 - On The Cusp (Jersey City, NJ)
1st Construction:
Check out my new trio's recent performance of Come Down Heavy! by Evan Chambers.
Emerging Voices Project:
Over the past year Elisabeth Halliday and I have fundraised, commissioned, recorded, and premiered new music for voice and sax. The result is our new CD, Emerging Vocies, available at my store.
