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Free MP3s: Shoegaze Punk • Piano Minimalism • Reclaimed "Industrial" • Topics: #sound-art, #classical
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Listening to art. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

Tag Archives: video-games

Tangents: Lunch Sounds, Shuffler.fm, Polluting Noise, …

[ December 14, 2011 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]

Audio Flaneur: The excellent soundscrapers.blogspot.com by Nick Sowers is three deep in a new series of “Lunchwalks.” What’s a lunchwalk? Explains Sowers, “Got an hour? Take a walk. Inside of a thirty-minute radius, an infinitely detailed (though finitely bound) landscape is within reach.” On each walk, he records the sounds he encounters. He maps the walks, and takes photos, which tend to feature his microphone, which in turn takes on the appearance of Sowers’ fuzzy walking buddy (see above). His descriptions are splendid (“The gear boxes and cable junctures add a constant hum to the background static of the city”), and he also posts samples of the audio, such as this from his third walk:

Read them, as his walking progresses, at soundscrapers.blogspot.com.

Banner Music: I don’t look too deeply into the statistics for this site. When you write about free music and about galleries that require no entry fee, as well as commercial music that often sells in the under-500-unit zone, the whole notion of pageviews can be an exercise in misdirection, if not futility. I do take note, because the dashboard in WordPress (the publishing tool that is this site’s backend) puts the information front and center, that this site seems to get a lot more visitors via Facebook than Twitter, even though I dedicate more time to Twitter than to Facebook. (Perhaps the automated posting of Disquiet’s RSS feed to Facebook that currently occurs is something I should do more of on Twitter? Somehow that doesn’t seem right. My approach to Twitter is conversational.) Anyhow, in the mix of sites sending somewhat significant traffic to this one is a service that was previously unfamiliar: shuffler.fm. The site is an aggregator of blog-filtered music (it bills itself as an “audio magazine made by music blogs”). You can search and sort by artist, genre, blog, and so forth. And, niftily enough, you can end up navigating this very site with a top bar that lets you listen to the music on a given page and navigate the site that way. The following link, unlike the previous one in this entry, will take you to an example: shuffler.fm. For the time being, the shuffler.fm service doesn’t seem to be infringing on this site’s non-commercial Creative Commons license, though there is a page on the site that talks about advertising.

Outside Man: Perhaps the craziest thing about the movie Bunraku isn’t its surreal set (part Kill Bill, part Sin City), its peculiar cast (Demi Moore and Ron Perlman and Woody Harrelson and Josh Hartnett), or the voice of its narrator (Mike Patton, of Faith No More, Mr. Bungle, Fantômas, etc.), but that the score is by trumpeter Terence Blanchard, best known for his numerous Spike Lee films. (The New York Times called the movie “a potpourri of genres that ends up a morass of clichés”) Back in reality, Blanchard is also tied to Red Tails, about the African American Tuskegee Airmen.

Dark Portal: The second and third freely downloadable volumes of the score to the excellent video game Portal 2 are available at thinkwithportals.com. The first volume was covered here in late June, in the Downstream department. (Via joystiq.com and nobuooo.com.)

Polluting Noise: Noise pollution is a subject that gives noise a bad name. A story in a local news site in my area, the San Francisco baycitizen.org, touched on how emotions color perception of noise: “On Sept. 12, 2001, no flights took off at San Francisco International, but complaints were lodged nevertheless.” The science-and-scifi site i09.com has been noting how birds and dolphins have shown adverse effects of human-made sound.

The Listener: Author Warren Ellis has launched a new podcast. Second episode came out the 5th of this month, at warrenellis.com, featuring such Disquiet.com favorites as Daphne Oram and Scott Tuma. Episode one had Moondog and Tangerine Dream.

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Tools Formerly Relegated to a Supporting Role (MP3)

[ November 25, 2011 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

The 20th issue of the journal Vague Terrain (at vagueterrain.net) has 10 entries. They’re divided between, one might say, thought and art, between essays (plus one interview) about art, and then art itself. (One of the essays is mine. It’s titled “New York and New York, New York: A Midsummer Sound Diary,” and I wrote a bit more about it, and the overall Vague Terrain issue, earlier this week.)

This proposed distinction between “thought” and “art” is confused in part because the art here is, in most cases, accompanied by an essay written by the artist who committed it. Of the entries that fit in the “art” category, the MP3 provided for free download by David Kristian is placed in an especially self-aware context. Kristian knows his influences (“i.e Fripp & Eno, Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze’s early works,” he writes), and he explains how his career developed to the point where instruments are beside the point:

I use very little in terms of traditional electronic musical instruments to generate sound, preferring instead to rely on an ever-growing collection of effect units and guitar pedals. Everything you hear in the piece I submitted to Vague Terrain was made using pedals, with no actual synthesizers or sequencers, at least none with keyboards or other standard performance controls.

Which is to say, it isn’t so much a matter of instruments being beside the point as it is of traditional instruments being put aside in favor of less traditional ones. Even without the knowledge of the instrumentation (displayed up top, in the photo that accompanied the essay), the track, titled “In Your Sleep,” sounds heavily technologically motivated. The sine-wave phasing that provides much of its sound could easily be the noise on a song recorded in a poorly grounded studio. But in place of a song we have the noise. Or, more to the point, the noise becomes a song. With each subsequent listens the piece, which is just under 20 minutes in length, displays increasing variation, increasing warbles and inconsistencies in what initially seems to be an automated whole.

Between the track and the essay, one thing becomes clear: it makes perfect sense that much as ambient music draws attention to background sounds, ambient music is especially meaningful when perpetrated on tools that were previously relegated to a supporting role — tools such as the ones used here: “a variety of oscillator pedals, a sequenced ring modulator, fuzz(es), flangers, phasers, filters, choruses, delays, and reverbs.”

Get the track for free download in a Zip file, and read Kristian’s full essay at vagueterrain.net. More on Krisian, who has created music and sound for film and video games (including Splinter Cell: Conviction; Army of Two: The 40th Day; and TERA: The Exiled Realm of Arborea), among other things, at davidkristian.com.

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Annotating the Sounds of Las Vegas and New York in Vague Terrain

[ November 23, 2011 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]

I have an essay about the sonic environments of New York and Las Vegas in the 20th issue of the excellent journal Vague Terrain. This issue of Vague Terrain takes as its theme a single word, “ambient,” and the invitation to contribute led me to focus on the sounds in the background that come to the foreground. It opens as follows, before proceeding to annotate various sonic experiences during a two-week period this past August when I listened to no pre-recorded music — well, no pre-recorded music that I myself actively elected to play:

Music is sound that someone has taken the time to organize. Generally speaking, that person is called a musician. Not all sound is immediately enjoyable as music, which means that achieving the goal of music can require widely varying levels of exertion and ingenuity on the part of the musician. Some everyday sound has an inherently musical quality, such as the beat of a windshield wiper or the hum of an apartment radiator. This sort of sound is so self-evidently musical it can be said to self-organize, requiring no effort on the part of a musician, or on the part of the listener.

Everyday sound is the sound nearly universally thought of as background noise, noise even further back than background noise – it is the sonic backdrop to background noise. Such noise can take on the qualities generally attributed to music depending on the effort a listener is willing to make. Far less effort is usually required on the part of a listener than on the part of a musician. What helps sound take on the appearance of music is the model provided by music.

Read the full piece, “New York and New York, New York: A Midsummer Sound Diary,” at vagueterrain.net. As a format, the sound diary has a precedent here in the well-received “Tokyo Sound Diary” I published back in 2007.

I’m proud to be in Vague Terrain, a great resource for considered reflection on technologically mediated culture. This is a particularly strong edition. Here’s a quick overview:

In my favorite of the batch, Michel McBride-Charpentier listens to the everyday sounds of a video game, Half Life 2, and considers the artificial reality in the context of R. Murray Schaefer’s research on soundscapes. In a fascinating turn, reminiscent of some of Jane McGonigal’s perceptions, the narrative turns the tables on reality: “The sound of traffic in an actual city isn’t just atmosphere, but subconsciously processed evidence of radiating streets forming blocks and neighbourhoods, giving us confidence in our unperceived reality.” (I actually pitched a similar subject when approached to contribute to the issue of Vague Terrain, but McBride-Charpentier had beat me to it. I hope to write about the artificial sonic environments of video games in the near future.)

Musician David Kristian contributes a free download, which I’ll be covering in this site’s Downstream section in the near future.

Andrea-Jane Cornell provides a track, and an admirably detailed and open self-critique of her attempt to record it (“I was too intent on recreating the ambiance of a live performance of a piece”).

Andrew Lovett-Barron pulls back, fortunately, from sound and discusses ambient interaction (“the subtle gesture, the shifting of weight, and the tone of voice which tell your friend that something is wrong”), and pushes into the manner in which such interactions can be enhanced or insinuated with digital tools.

Jim Bizzocchi, like Cornell, is an artist describing a practice, in his case ambient video, drawing a direct connection between what he is attempting to do, and the aspirations of Brian Eno’s genre-defining work.

Leonardo Rosado talks about his own music-making, and how his art production aligns with his work as the administrator of a netlabel, the estimable Feedback Loop.

Little Oak Animal is the duo of Robert Cruickshank (projections) and Dafydd Hughes (sound), who contributed a series of short pieces in which neither part (the image or the audio) is intended to take a more prominent role than the other.

Michelle Teran is interviewed by Greg J. Smith (the editor for my piece) on the art of surveillance and finance, among other fascinating subjects.

And Scott M2 contributes two audio-visual works developed on the iOS operating system.

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A Little Turret Music (Portal 2 MP3s)

[ June 28, 2011 / Department: downstream / Comments: 7 ]

For all the benefits of free music, something celebrated here on Disquiet.com almost daily, it’s hard not to read some free offerings as a reflection on relative cultural status. The Grammy Awards, in its not uncontroversial recent revamp, finally added a video-game-score category, while doing away with numerous other genre-specific awards (the latter move having many calling foul). Yet it’s not like these scores are doing particularly big business — at least not as recorded standalone fixed artifacts. As part of the ensemble creativity that goes into video games, they are an essential and largely overlooked component of interactive media. But when a property like Bioshock puts its full score online for free, as it did back in 2007, and as now Portal 2 has also done, it’s hard not to sense that the companies doing so know that the artifacts are just that, shards of experience.

A formal game score release is as much a parody of a movie score as it is a parallel. Music in video games by and large doesn’t progress the way it does in a film — it shifts according to how the game play proceeds, and that is based almost entirely on decisions made by the player. Thus, the game score lacks not just the visuals, but the sense of user-directed flow, the manner in which play directs causality.

To listen to the Portal 2 score if you’ve played the game is, among other things, to laugh, to know the jokes that the cues coincide with, but also to know more broadly how the theatrical bombast and surveillance chic collide into an unlikely and singular form of entertainment. There’s much to enjoy in the Portal 2 score collection, titled Music to Test By, even if you haven’t played the game, but it is even further removed from the experience of the game than is a movie score. If the score to Star Wars is once removed from the experience of the theatergoer, the score to Halo is twice removed from the experience of the gamer. Music fans have not yet fully recognized the appeal of video-game music, but even video-game music fans have yet to fully comprehend what that music means when separated from the games it was intended to accompany.

The score is available, along with a handful of Android- and iPhone-ready ringtones, for free download at the official Portal 2 site, thinkwithportals.com.

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A Different Kind of “Local” App

[ March 3, 2011 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]

Thicket app co-developer Morgan Packard currently lives in Denver, Colorado, and a local alternative weekly for which I do some writing, the Colorado Springs Independent, picked up my interview (“Being Decimal: The Anticipatory Pleasures of the Thicket App”) with him. The app is his co-creation with Joshue Ott. The new version has a different introduction and has been trimmed for a more general audience, and it includes some additional information about the local community he’s found in the area, having moved there from New York with his wife. Packard focuses on the Communikey Festival (communikey.us), to be held next month and at which Monolake, William Basinksi, and Radere (Carl Ritger), among others, many from Colorado, will be performing. Read the piece (“There’s a Thicket for That”) at csindy.com.

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