http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosi_Braidotti
"Rosi Braidotti" Wikipedia Entry
I deliberately chose a Wikipedia page to be controversial! This website provides a summary of Rosi's biographical information focusing on an impressive array of academic achievements, publications and related work - claiming that throughout which, "Braidotti asserts and demonstrates the importance of combining theoretical concerns with a serious commitment to producing socially and politically relevant scholarship that contributes to making a difference in the world." These credentials give her credibility and leads the uninitiated to believe that the content is accurate and to be trusted. As with all Wikipedia pages it is up to date (last modified on 19 September 2008) and there are a number of working links to other Wikipedia entries, as well as related external links to other sites (including her own) which list her work and corroborate her credentials (e.g. the Utrecht University site where she is a 'Distinguished Professor'). Interestingly though, there are no academic references directly on the Wikipedia page!
http://www.let.uu.nl/womens_studies/rosi/cyberfem.htm
"Cyberfeminism with a difference" by Rosi Braidotti
This article talks about feminism in relation to a post-modernist approach to technology and culture. Written in 1996, it is well referenced and cited by academia. I particularly found the section entitled 'Post-human bodies' interesting, where Rosi selects three 'cyborg goddesses' - Dolly Parton, Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Fonda - suggesting that these 'emblems of postmodern femininity' symbolise the culturally enforced icons of white, economically dominant, heterosexual Americans - and more specifically a 'Californian 'body beautiful' ideology'. I can see where she's coming from with Liz and Jane, but I'm not sure about Dolly! To further legitimise this text, this section has been published as a chapter in 'The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader' (2003) by Amelia Jones.
http://www.obn.org/inhalt_index.html
"The Old Boys Network: The mode is the message - the code is the collective"
After reading Rosi's piece on cyberfeminism I decided to google the term and found this website which is a feminist collective forum, ironically entitled 'Old Boys Network'. It claims to be the first international alliance of cyberfeminists 'aimed at contributing to the critical discourse on gender-specific aspects of new media'. The people involved include an array of individual academics and artists (mainly women unsurprisingly), as well as whole agencies and societies, which suggest it is legitimate. After checking out some of the founding members I found this article on Jstor which corroborated their credentials http://www.jstor.org/pss/778008, and they (Claudia Reiche and Verena Kuni) have also published a book on the subject entitled 'Cyberfeminism: Next Protocols' (2004). However, this book is yet to be published according to the website so it is clearly not maintained regularly (last updated 28.07.02) and some of the links no longer work, rendering it a less reliable source - although it still makes some interesting points and is relevant to the module.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
Lecture 7: Critical Thinking and Essay Preparation
What is critical thinking?
“Reasonable reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do”
-- Robert Ennis
“Active, presistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusion to which it tends”
-- JohnDewey
What is reflective thinking?
“Judgment suspended during further inquiry”
-- Dewey
Think of the scientific method as a way of organising your argument in your essay:
- Definition of the problem
- Proposal of the hypothesis/hypotheses
- Observation
- Measurement
- Qualitative/Quantitative Analysis
- Testing
- Interpretation
An "ideal" critical thinker should employ these attributes:
- Inquisitive
- Open-minded
- Orderly
- Focused
- Persistent
- Devise testing strategies
- Formulates alternative solutions/hypotheses
- Judges acceptability of premises and inferences
- Draws conclusions
Classic way *not* to structure your essay:
Syllogisms:
All X are Y. Z is X.
Therefore, Z is Y.
--or—
All X are Y. No Z is Y.
Therefore, no Z is X.
For next week: critically evaluate three websites/online resources that fit with feminist theory and digital cultures. Title your blog post: Lecture 7, Critical Thinking, Name.
Coursework Essay DUE DATE: 7th May, 4:00pm
Lecture 6: Music and Digital Culture. Amanda Moffat
..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................The Silent Blog?
Lecture 6: Music and Digital Culture, Andy P
i forgot to take a picture....alas. so instead i offer a video of prof hugill 2003
the lecture ran at a nice relaxed pace. not too slow or too complex so as to discombobulate, even though i am no musician or even critic myself. so where to begin? the beginning? seems to easy. while the fundamentals are important, the lecture contents importance was not chronological to me (though personal taste only)... so we'll start with (can carry on with) issues that mattered to me the most. note that for each section i suspend belief in the other sections written. as you will see, since i can talk about something that doesn't exist;
music is organized sound?:
"music is organized sound" was the definition Prof hugill preferred. a phrase coined by anton webern (known to us for his use of the twelve-tone technique also explained in the lecture). the problem i find with this definition is that if music is simply organized sound, then the very act of writing anything at all down makes it music notation though the shear intent of communicating something "as it was intended". this of course means that anything ever written is music (presumable if spoken/played out loud).
a point that goes even further than this is the work of john cage, who's sense of music transcended 'organization' and was composed by chance happenings in a very post modern statement about opposing organized structures of sound(though arguably was in fact organized the moment he wrote it down). so what we have in the end is music is both organized and unorganized sound.but then if everything is music, then surely nothing is music, so why study music at all?
upon first thinking about it, i prefer a music defined as organized emotive sound. to organize is not enough, but to have feelings about it (any feeling at all) is what places value on music to me. it was argued however that to say it is emotive is to say it is subjective (such as emotions are). therefore to say music is subjective is to say music is undefinable, which in itself is not a definition. to this i have a few thoughts:
1, if music is art, then to this effect i have not found any satisfactory answer to 'what is art?' or 'what is music' for that matter. therefore both are undefined at this moment to me other that to say it is an emotive expression.
2, emotion is definable. subjective, yes, but definable. this simply means that they vary in intensity: mild amusement, overjoyed etc are states of happiness in varying intensity. if emotion were undefinable, there would be no difference between happiness and depression and all emotion could be viewed as chemical imbalances in the brain, yet to artists (though not one myself) im sure emotion is more than this.
3, the examples for 'music is organized sound' are two extremes of music is organized sound (12-tone) and music is also unorganized sound (cage) (which i assume is music since it was brought up and we were told as much).
4, break down everything in the universe into atoms, break all the atoms down to the subatomic and anywhere in between, i challenge anyone to show me one gram of music. sound may exist as compressions of particals, but nowhere does music exist except for in the realms of emotion as we perceive it. so i don't think its unfair to say that music is emotive.
so to restate, if anything is music, then nothing is music(therefore everything is sound/noise), so why study music at all and if so, what to study?
total cerealism - the crunchy nut flakes of music:
'total serialism' was the next logical step to the twelve tone technique. the twelve tone technique used 12 notes in a scale, each played only once to avoid putting any importance one any one note. however, it was noted that not only could one play notes, but pitch, duration, tambre, volume and articulation also played their parts for the sound of each note played (i suspect there are more things that could alter how a note is played, but these 5 where given in the lecture). total serialism then, proposed that each of these affect a note in a manner similar to the twelve tone technique (so its really like the twelve tone technique to the 6th power, ergo a 6-dimensional matrix of note variations played one after another).
since total serialism is a very logical, if not mathematical process, why do we need humans to make this 'music' at all? a computer could easily generate every combination of the twelve notes with twelve (for the sake of argument) variations for each parameter:
eg (in pseudo code for ease of understanding).
create 2d array 'music' of 1 to x; //(where 'x' is 12 to the 6th power... or make it dynamic)
y = 1;
for note(1 to 12);{
for pitch(1 to 12);{
for duration(1 to 12);{
for tambre(1 to 12);{
for volume(1 to 12);{
for articulation (1 to 12);{
music[y] = note,pitch,duration,tambre,volume,articulation;
y= y+1;
}}}}}}
within that output for the program would lie every possible 'total serialism' piece of music that can be created with those parameters. unfortunately, since it can be generated by a computer with no inspiration need at all and (at this time to me) sounds terrible, how can we say it is any different from what we would accept as patterned 'noise' from any other aesthetically unpleasing machine? this being said...is it really music?
the (anti)modernism of music:
john cage has already been discussed above (the man who wrote 'music' though chance). personally, i really like this guy. not for his music but for the fact that he appears to have a fantastic sense of humor while managing to present his so called work in a sensible way. but then i guess that's post modernism for you. if total serialism is structured and ordered, then cage is chaotic and almost anarchistic. true musical modernism versus post modernism, but to the naked ear, resulting in exactly the same thing.
can you hear me?.....110001101:
microsound music('glitch' and other like phenomena) is the culmination of inaudible noise, either so short or so quiet that psycho-acoustically, we as humans cannot pick it up. i say psycho-acoustically, as the ear itself will in fact pick up the sound and in turn our brain will dismiss it as unimportant. apparently it has been shown that the playback of these sounds can have an effect on peoples moods despite being inaudible. this leads me to an interesting thought. we know that subliminal messaging is not allowed in advertising. but to define subliminal messaging we need an audio/visual actual message (be it words or images). microsound affects mood (i am lead to believe), but has no message per sae. therefore could we use microsound as an almost empathic subliminal messaging to make consumers 'feel good' when viewing a product?.... unfortunately, one could never regulate it if it were possible, since it is essentially just noise.
how did you make/hear that?:
since noise is the topic at hand, other things of note include additive and subtractive methods of sound synthesis.
think of 'sound' as a block of wood.... the sound you want to make is a particular shape made of wood. subtractive sound synthesis would strip away the wood until the shape is reveled (like whittling) while additive sound synthesis would use tiny bits of wood (sawdust perhaps) to build up that shape. now replace the word 'wood' with 'frequencies' (frequencies being sine waves of correct wavelength and amplitude) and you have a decent explanation of additive and subtractive methods of sound synthesis.
come out, come out, wherever you are:
steve reich “come out". lots of pieces of work where discussed, and while it was all quite interesting, this is the one that made me want to seek it our to hear it. the work consists of a single line (taken form the harlem riots if i remember correctly: "I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them" .... specifically "come out to show them" ) looped and replayed in parallel with versions of the same phrase at varying speeds. each version of the phrase introduced at specific intervals. the net effect is to have a single voice that builds into 'out of sync' voices to (as prof hugil puts it) 'create a wall of sound'. while i love the idea (especially with the social context of the phrase) is it not remarkably similar the the additive methods of sound synthesis described above? each speed of voice can be seen as a different frequency that is added until we get the final 'sound'. this is perhaps not completely accurate as the sound is (or becomes) out of phase with it predecessor. in this respect it is very much like OFDM (another topic entirely that could take hours(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OFDM)). in any case, i cant bring myself to think of it as new information or even a new style, though i do love its simplicity.
disclaimer:
all of this was based on a single 2 hour lecture and therefore may be incomplete in places. i am not an artist, musician, formal critic or superhero. and please remember: flame responsibly.
the lecture ran at a nice relaxed pace. not too slow or too complex so as to discombobulate, even though i am no musician or even critic myself. so where to begin? the beginning? seems to easy. while the fundamentals are important, the lecture contents importance was not chronological to me (though personal taste only)... so we'll start with (can carry on with) issues that mattered to me the most. note that for each section i suspend belief in the other sections written. as you will see, since i can talk about something that doesn't exist;
music is organized sound?:
"music is organized sound" was the definition Prof hugill preferred. a phrase coined by anton webern (known to us for his use of the twelve-tone technique also explained in the lecture). the problem i find with this definition is that if music is simply organized sound, then the very act of writing anything at all down makes it music notation though the shear intent of communicating something "as it was intended". this of course means that anything ever written is music (presumable if spoken/played out loud).
a point that goes even further than this is the work of john cage, who's sense of music transcended 'organization' and was composed by chance happenings in a very post modern statement about opposing organized structures of sound(though arguably was in fact organized the moment he wrote it down). so what we have in the end is music is both organized and unorganized sound.but then if everything is music, then surely nothing is music, so why study music at all?
upon first thinking about it, i prefer a music defined as organized emotive sound. to organize is not enough, but to have feelings about it (any feeling at all) is what places value on music to me. it was argued however that to say it is emotive is to say it is subjective (such as emotions are). therefore to say music is subjective is to say music is undefinable, which in itself is not a definition. to this i have a few thoughts:
1, if music is art, then to this effect i have not found any satisfactory answer to 'what is art?' or 'what is music' for that matter. therefore both are undefined at this moment to me other that to say it is an emotive expression.
2, emotion is definable. subjective, yes, but definable. this simply means that they vary in intensity: mild amusement, overjoyed etc are states of happiness in varying intensity. if emotion were undefinable, there would be no difference between happiness and depression and all emotion could be viewed as chemical imbalances in the brain, yet to artists (though not one myself) im sure emotion is more than this.
3, the examples for 'music is organized sound' are two extremes of music is organized sound (12-tone) and music is also unorganized sound (cage) (which i assume is music since it was brought up and we were told as much).
4, break down everything in the universe into atoms, break all the atoms down to the subatomic and anywhere in between, i challenge anyone to show me one gram of music. sound may exist as compressions of particals, but nowhere does music exist except for in the realms of emotion as we perceive it. so i don't think its unfair to say that music is emotive.
so to restate, if anything is music, then nothing is music(therefore everything is sound/noise), so why study music at all and if so, what to study?
total cerealism - the crunchy nut flakes of music:
'total serialism' was the next logical step to the twelve tone technique. the twelve tone technique used 12 notes in a scale, each played only once to avoid putting any importance one any one note. however, it was noted that not only could one play notes, but pitch, duration, tambre, volume and articulation also played their parts for the sound of each note played (i suspect there are more things that could alter how a note is played, but these 5 where given in the lecture). total serialism then, proposed that each of these affect a note in a manner similar to the twelve tone technique (so its really like the twelve tone technique to the 6th power, ergo a 6-dimensional matrix of note variations played one after another).
since total serialism is a very logical, if not mathematical process, why do we need humans to make this 'music' at all? a computer could easily generate every combination of the twelve notes with twelve (for the sake of argument) variations for each parameter:
eg (in pseudo code for ease of understanding).
create 2d array 'music' of 1 to x; //(where 'x' is 12 to the 6th power... or make it dynamic)
y = 1;
for note(1 to 12);{
for pitch(1 to 12);{
for duration(1 to 12);{
for tambre(1 to 12);{
for volume(1 to 12);{
for articulation (1 to 12);{
music[y] = note,pitch,duration,tambre,volume,articulation;
y= y+1;
}}}}}}
within that output for the program would lie every possible 'total serialism' piece of music that can be created with those parameters. unfortunately, since it can be generated by a computer with no inspiration need at all and (at this time to me) sounds terrible, how can we say it is any different from what we would accept as patterned 'noise' from any other aesthetically unpleasing machine? this being said...is it really music?
the (anti)modernism of music:
john cage has already been discussed above (the man who wrote 'music' though chance). personally, i really like this guy. not for his music but for the fact that he appears to have a fantastic sense of humor while managing to present his so called work in a sensible way. but then i guess that's post modernism for you. if total serialism is structured and ordered, then cage is chaotic and almost anarchistic. true musical modernism versus post modernism, but to the naked ear, resulting in exactly the same thing.
can you hear me?.....110001101:
microsound music('glitch' and other like phenomena) is the culmination of inaudible noise, either so short or so quiet that psycho-acoustically, we as humans cannot pick it up. i say psycho-acoustically, as the ear itself will in fact pick up the sound and in turn our brain will dismiss it as unimportant. apparently it has been shown that the playback of these sounds can have an effect on peoples moods despite being inaudible. this leads me to an interesting thought. we know that subliminal messaging is not allowed in advertising. but to define subliminal messaging we need an audio/visual actual message (be it words or images). microsound affects mood (i am lead to believe), but has no message per sae. therefore could we use microsound as an almost empathic subliminal messaging to make consumers 'feel good' when viewing a product?.... unfortunately, one could never regulate it if it were possible, since it is essentially just noise.
how did you make/hear that?:
since noise is the topic at hand, other things of note include additive and subtractive methods of sound synthesis.
think of 'sound' as a block of wood.... the sound you want to make is a particular shape made of wood. subtractive sound synthesis would strip away the wood until the shape is reveled (like whittling) while additive sound synthesis would use tiny bits of wood (sawdust perhaps) to build up that shape. now replace the word 'wood' with 'frequencies' (frequencies being sine waves of correct wavelength and amplitude) and you have a decent explanation of additive and subtractive methods of sound synthesis.
come out, come out, wherever you are:
steve reich “come out". lots of pieces of work where discussed, and while it was all quite interesting, this is the one that made me want to seek it our to hear it. the work consists of a single line (taken form the harlem riots if i remember correctly: "I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them" .... specifically "come out to show them" ) looped and replayed in parallel with versions of the same phrase at varying speeds. each version of the phrase introduced at specific intervals. the net effect is to have a single voice that builds into 'out of sync' voices to (as prof hugil puts it) 'create a wall of sound'. while i love the idea (especially with the social context of the phrase) is it not remarkably similar the the additive methods of sound synthesis described above? each speed of voice can be seen as a different frequency that is added until we get the final 'sound'. this is perhaps not completely accurate as the sound is (or becomes) out of phase with it predecessor. in this respect it is very much like OFDM (another topic entirely that could take hours(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OFDM)). in any case, i cant bring myself to think of it as new information or even a new style, though i do love its simplicity.
disclaimer:
all of this was based on a single 2 hour lecture and therefore may be incomplete in places. i am not an artist, musician, formal critic or superhero. and please remember: flame responsibly.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Lecture 6: Music and Digital Culture, Paul D. Found
Thanks to the sterling efforts of Mandy and Maxine, I'm not sure there is anything I can add. I certainly cannot add a photo because I do not own a camera and my phone has neither a cable nor Bluetooth so I did not take any.
ADDENDUM
It took a while for me to "get into" this lecture because I am not a musician, and although I listen to and even write reviews for loads of music, I do not as it were, know how it works.
There was a very interesting comment to open the lecture, with Andrew stating that he believed Digital Cultures is a reaction against modernism.
The first piece of music was "Concerto for 9 Instruments" (1943) by Anton Webern. Although only 2.22 minutes it seemed much longer. Musical time can, due to the density and compression of the piece distort the impression we get of real time. I would say that current bands can achieve a similar effect - The Mars Volta producing very dense music which seems to last much longer than it does. It is a phenomenon I had noticed but not really thought about. I digress...
Edgard Varese offered the following definition of music - it is "organised sound". I actually quite like that definition but could disorganised sound also be considered to be "musical"?
There followed some discussion on the formal structure (organisation) of music which is the part where musically inability meant I started to get a bit lost...
Western music was invented in the 15th century with the introduction of major and minor chords, and triads. There are high and low notes. There octaves (8 notes between each octave) which are the same "sound", whereas intervals have 5 notes (the 5th). All this occurs naturally in nature (acoustics) but Western music is merely an approximation and allows key changes/pitch. Not all music uses this system. Indian music for example, has a constant note - the drone - around which the piece is built.
At the end of the 19th century, music changed. Instead of being "pantonal" where all the pitches are used at once, modernist music became "atonal", i.e. music with no sense of pitch or key. There is no structure as such, but it is far from random. It is very organised, uses merkered pitches (1 - 12) within an octave. The order might read 3-6-8-1-11-9-10-4-2-12-5-7 ensuring there is more no repetition and no note is more important than any other. This called serial music and is pure mathematics - a universal language or law. The purpose is to remove any cultural association between the listener/composer and the structure/form of how music "should" be created. This led to a split between the composers of traditional music and modernist music.
Music is either vertical e.g. pop music, or horizontal e.g. jazz music.
Pitch, duration, timbre (sound), volume, articulation are the basic components of music, not melody and harmony. This led to total seriaism where very parameter of music became organised as a series. Messiaen was the first to attepmt a fully serialised piece but Boulez said this was not good enough as there was repitition. Iannis Xenakis and Boulez used computers to compose music. Although much of it sounds random, it is not.
Incidentally, Damon Albarn used serial methods to compose some of the score to Monkey: Journey to the West.
John cage used "chance" to compose music. For example, he would flick ink at blank sheets of muscial score paper, and discovered that his work sounded very similar to that of Boulez. Boulez took 5 years to compose his work, Cage took a week. Cage also experimented with with "aleatonic" music - that composed using the rolls of dice.
Cage also famously composed a piece of silent music (4' 33") which forced the audience to listen to the sounds around them. This could be said to go against Varese's definition of music being organised sound, as Cage did not organise sound, but arrange silence. the sounds the audience heard were not organised as such - it might consist of the sound of the audience coughing, shuffling, booing and so on.
Pierre Schaeffer coined the term "musique concrete", in which real-world sounds were/are manipulated to create music. The were no instruments, just timbre. It used analogue and very early computer technology. He was also the first DJ and invented turntablism in 1945 (to learn more about modern turntablism, borrow the documentary "Scratch" from me!!).
Delia Derbyshire of the BBC polyphonic orchestra created, around 1962, the first electronic dance music, as well as creating the famous "sound" of the Dr. Who theme. Derbyshire and The Beatles on their White Album used looped tapes to create the sounds.
The unwanted "noise" removed from remastered music is now used as an art form/music genre called "glitch" or "micro-sound".
There are 2 ways to create digital sound - "subtractive" whereby you start with white noise (every pitch played simultaneously and in equal amounts, then filtered to get recognisable "notes". Synthesisers do work in this way. The opposite method is the "additive" method where you start with silence and add frequencies or "sine waves".
"Granular synthesis" takes a small sounds, to create "music" which although inaudible to us still effects our moods (see Richard Chartier).
Minimalism is made from the least possible material, but it is not necessarily simple. LaMonte Young's piece X for Henry Flynt (1967) involved nothing more than the performer playing a single note repeatedly until it changed, then stopping. It could be either the music or the listener which changed, and rendered the piece "finished".
Steve Reich's "Come Out" consists of a phrase played on two tape recorders played at different speeds so they start in-sync, then out, then back in until they eventually form a wall of noise.
Fluxus was heavily influenced by Dada, the idea being to be staunchly "anti-establishment". Practitioners of the fluxus movement are "intermedia" - they are concerned with how different forms of media intersect.
There was a lot of information to take in...
ADDENDUM
It took a while for me to "get into" this lecture because I am not a musician, and although I listen to and even write reviews for loads of music, I do not as it were, know how it works.
There was a very interesting comment to open the lecture, with Andrew stating that he believed Digital Cultures is a reaction against modernism.
The first piece of music was "Concerto for 9 Instruments" (1943) by Anton Webern. Although only 2.22 minutes it seemed much longer. Musical time can, due to the density and compression of the piece distort the impression we get of real time. I would say that current bands can achieve a similar effect - The Mars Volta producing very dense music which seems to last much longer than it does. It is a phenomenon I had noticed but not really thought about. I digress...
Edgard Varese offered the following definition of music - it is "organised sound". I actually quite like that definition but could disorganised sound also be considered to be "musical"?
There followed some discussion on the formal structure (organisation) of music which is the part where musically inability meant I started to get a bit lost...
Western music was invented in the 15th century with the introduction of major and minor chords, and triads. There are high and low notes. There octaves (8 notes between each octave) which are the same "sound", whereas intervals have 5 notes (the 5th). All this occurs naturally in nature (acoustics) but Western music is merely an approximation and allows key changes/pitch. Not all music uses this system. Indian music for example, has a constant note - the drone - around which the piece is built.
At the end of the 19th century, music changed. Instead of being "pantonal" where all the pitches are used at once, modernist music became "atonal", i.e. music with no sense of pitch or key. There is no structure as such, but it is far from random. It is very organised, uses merkered pitches (1 - 12) within an octave. The order might read 3-6-8-1-11-9-10-4-2-12-5-7 ensuring there is more no repetition and no note is more important than any other. This called serial music and is pure mathematics - a universal language or law. The purpose is to remove any cultural association between the listener/composer and the structure/form of how music "should" be created. This led to a split between the composers of traditional music and modernist music.
Music is either vertical e.g. pop music, or horizontal e.g. jazz music.
Pitch, duration, timbre (sound), volume, articulation are the basic components of music, not melody and harmony. This led to total seriaism where very parameter of music became organised as a series. Messiaen was the first to attepmt a fully serialised piece but Boulez said this was not good enough as there was repitition. Iannis Xenakis and Boulez used computers to compose music. Although much of it sounds random, it is not.
Incidentally, Damon Albarn used serial methods to compose some of the score to Monkey: Journey to the West.
John cage used "chance" to compose music. For example, he would flick ink at blank sheets of muscial score paper, and discovered that his work sounded very similar to that of Boulez. Boulez took 5 years to compose his work, Cage took a week. Cage also experimented with with "aleatonic" music - that composed using the rolls of dice.
Cage also famously composed a piece of silent music (4' 33") which forced the audience to listen to the sounds around them. This could be said to go against Varese's definition of music being organised sound, as Cage did not organise sound, but arrange silence. the sounds the audience heard were not organised as such - it might consist of the sound of the audience coughing, shuffling, booing and so on.
Pierre Schaeffer coined the term "musique concrete", in which real-world sounds were/are manipulated to create music. The were no instruments, just timbre. It used analogue and very early computer technology. He was also the first DJ and invented turntablism in 1945 (to learn more about modern turntablism, borrow the documentary "Scratch" from me!!).
Delia Derbyshire of the BBC polyphonic orchestra created, around 1962, the first electronic dance music, as well as creating the famous "sound" of the Dr. Who theme. Derbyshire and The Beatles on their White Album used looped tapes to create the sounds.
The unwanted "noise" removed from remastered music is now used as an art form/music genre called "glitch" or "micro-sound".
There are 2 ways to create digital sound - "subtractive" whereby you start with white noise (every pitch played simultaneously and in equal amounts, then filtered to get recognisable "notes". Synthesisers do work in this way. The opposite method is the "additive" method where you start with silence and add frequencies or "sine waves".
"Granular synthesis" takes a small sounds, to create "music" which although inaudible to us still effects our moods (see Richard Chartier).
Minimalism is made from the least possible material, but it is not necessarily simple. LaMonte Young's piece X for Henry Flynt (1967) involved nothing more than the performer playing a single note repeatedly until it changed, then stopping. It could be either the music or the listener which changed, and rendered the piece "finished".
Steve Reich's "Come Out" consists of a phrase played on two tape recorders played at different speeds so they start in-sync, then out, then back in until they eventually form a wall of noise.
Fluxus was heavily influenced by Dada, the idea being to be staunchly "anti-establishment". Practitioners of the fluxus movement are "intermedia" - they are concerned with how different forms of media intersect.
There was a lot of information to take in...
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Lecture 6: Music and Digital Culture, Maxine Armstrong
Mandy has summarised the lecture so here are a few more details about some of the composers mentioned.
Edgard Varèse (1883 – 1965)
Born in
He was very influential and a leading pioneer of electronic music.
'Poeme électronique' (1957-8) was composed for the Philips Pavilion at the Universal Exposition. Loudspeakers were placed throughout a walk-through installation. Some sounds were recorded, whilst others were from electronic instruments.
Anton Webern (1883 – 1945)
Austrian composer and conductor
'Concerto for 9 Instruments' (1943)
Twelve-tone method – serialism.
Pierre Boulez (born 1925)
French composer and conductor
Student of Olivier Messiaen
History is Dead
Wanted to remove all repetition. Thought music traditions were irrelevant to the new language.
‘Structures’uses serialism.
To be continued ...
Lecture6: Music and Digital Cultures _ Mandy
Summary of Andrew’s lecture
The basic concepts of Musical Modernism
• Music had developed much like literature
• Music is organized sound (from a definition of Anton Webern)
• A key aspect of Modernism is the use of sparse notes but a lot still packed in
History of music
• 14-15th centuries music marked by maj/minor triads
• western music marked by dividing octaves into 12 equal steps
• This allows ‘transpositioning’, you can transpose, cycle around w same note dispersion to get
Webern (1943, concerto for 9 instruments) – “pantoneality” – all the keys at once
Atonal – music without any sense of key
Webern used complex mathematics to devise a score that didn’t repeat, going through al 48 possible variants of all 12 notes. This began musical modernism
Why? “pureism” essay 1934 by Busia (spelling?) example of the sphere as a universal symbol everyone understands regardless of culture. This is along the same lines as what music modernism tries to do.
Harmony – a relative concept… vertical (stacked base, chords, tune) and horozontal (jazz a good example, can hear each instrament)
Pitch, duration, tambre, volume, articulation – all aspects of music
Musical modernism ends up with “total serialism” - first played 1949
Pierre Boules “History is Dead”
Messiaen (taught Boules)
Then came John Cage, American who used chance (termed Aleatoric by Boulez) vs compex mathematics to achieve same things as Webern. He’s known for his piece called “scielence” – proving there is no such thing. In this piece no music was played. Forces audience to hear other sounds around them.
Boules and Cage clashed – modernism against post modernism. Cage believed in the equality of ALL sounds
Then comes Varese (1957) – born ahead of his time… tried to make music with machines making sounds… he simply didn’t have the instruments to play his compositions. He was a leading pioneer of electronic music and “Music concrete” – use of sounds from real world
Tambre becomes a major quantifying tool. Varese progress was very slow and hard, hard to produce at the time.
Pierre Schaeffere – first DJ 1945 (used turn tables to create sound)
Delia Derbyshire – came up with the futuristic sound of the Dr Who theme
Beatles – experimented with tape loops (looping) to produce interesting sounds
Analog vs Digital sound
Analog is physical; magnetic tape, record groove, a physical substance read by a machine.
Digital uses a computer, converting 1’s and 0’s into anaolog, ie physical sound so we can hear it;
“Glitch”, microsounds, sine waves… these elements underpin digital music. → connects to Musical Minimalism, repetition of sound, droning. But, no such thing as repetition, either the sound changes or we change.
Richard Chartier – makes ‘bat music’ or sounds that are our of our hearing range, but you can still feel the vibes
Steve Reich – “come out” a piece that starts simply then ends up with a wall of sound. Wrote music for 18 musicians, harmony pulse
Terry Rielly – westcoast minimalist
Bauhaus – artists/designers/engineers/ product design / interior design… Phillipe Dause (the lemon squeezer guy)
Fluxux, Dada, Marcel Duchamp, Percy Granger
We covered a lot in 2 hours!!
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