Quotes of the Week: Machover, Banalaties, Suspicion

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The MIT Media Lab legend and early music-technology figure Tod Machover contributed a rangy essay at nytimes.com this week. After a brief autobiography, he talks about the relative democratization of music technology, and then about an opera he’s been at work on. In the process, he expresses his own concerns about the pace of progress and the potential negative influences of technology:

“Musical technology is so ever-present in our culture, and we are all so very aware of it, that techno-clichés and techno-banalities are never far away and have become ever more difficult to identify and root out. It is deceptively challenging these days to apply technology to music in ways that explode our imaginations, deepen our personal insights, shake us out of boring routine and accepted belief, and pull us ever closer to one another.”

And yet, as is so often the case online, the comments are riddled with enmity. One commenter writes, in full,

“One more marketing guru talking about ‘The Future Of Music’. What’s the name of his iPhone application we must buy to be considered cool hipsters?”

Another:

“This man is obviously desperate for big-figure grants.”

The culture war isn’t an entirely contemporary affair, either; writes a third,

“As far as music technology and pop music is concerned, you can directly trace the collapse of songwriting to the explosion of studio technology in the ’70’s.”

Another commenter goes all ad hominem, attacking not Machover’s ideas or his expression of those ideas, but his

“unbridled egotism and hubris.”

While the comments (55 as of this writing) aren’t necessary reading — nor are all of them negative — they do lend context to Machover’s article. Even for all the populist success of his efforts over recent decades — as he notes, Guitar Hero and Rock Band resulted from ideas explored in classes he has taught — the mesh of music and technology (more broadly, of art and technology) remains a potent source of suspicion.

Full piece at nytimes.com.

Recorded Voice -> Historical Experimental Audio (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

One of the best Resonance FM podcast series is focused, as its name puts it in an admirably straightforward way, on the Voice on Record. The series, hosted by Sean Williams, shares various audio examples that emphasize human speech.

In the past, this has involved everything from children’s records to the landing of man on the moon to early modern poets. The November 17, 2009, episode of Voice on Record, just posted online earlier this week, focuses on the sound of the voice in experimental music and sound art (MP3). Among the pieces heard is work by Luciano Berio. In between examples, Williams discusses the origins of this sort of music in not only technological advances, but in the culture of experimental radio. The segment, the 12th in the Voice on Record series, is titled “The Voice in Musique Concrète and Electronic Music.”

[audio:http://podcasts.resonancefm.com/podpress_trac/web/3130/0/VoiceOnRecord12-Nov17th2009.mp3|titles=”Voice on Record 12″|artists=Sean Williams (host)]

Full details at resonancefm.com. More on Voice on Record‘s Williams and this specific segment of the series at sbkw.net.

Not a whole lot of vocal music gets covered on Disquiet.com, for reasons that have somewhat eluded me, though came into mental focus when I read the following recently in Martha Mockus’s book Sounding Out (Routledge, 2008), a critical overview of the work of Pauline Oliveros, the avant-accordionist and deep thinker about improvisation and listening. This is Oliveros speaking, as quoted in Sounding Out:

“I figured out a practical use for the overtone series. As you know tones consist of not one but many overtones. If you listen carefully you can hear them. The tone quality of any instrument depends on the prominence of these overtones. For example, the sound of the flute, the octave overtone is most prominent but not the higher overtones. On the clarinet the octave but mainly the 12th is prominent and etc. The human voice though has the most complex overtone series.”

Much of contemporary experimental music, especially experimental electronic music, is focused on the transformation of individual sonic elements. There’s something about the human voice that is so dense with tone, so complex, that it can overshadow everything around it. When the human voice is one of those elements subject to transformation, often the composition, the instrumental composition, becomes a background — becomes secondary — to the vocal. The exception, of course, is when the meaning of what is sung or spoken is itself ignored — or, more to the point, rendered secondary — in favor of tone and texture. And that is the sort of vocal music that ends up getting covered here.

In any case, this Voice on Record segment is a good introduction to early experiments in using tape delay and extended vocal techniques to transform the human voice.

Classical Music -> Turntablist Hip-Hop (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Class distinctions and cultural assumptions aside, classical music isn’t foreign to hip-hop. Violins are a common emotional cue for producers, and enough hip-hop hits — from Coolio to Nas to the Beastie Boys, just to name a few — have sampled classical music to register it a common if not everyday occurrence. Hip-hop is often symphonic, built on over-sized emotions, dramatic syncopation, and room-filling sound. But DJ Rob Swift makes the connection literal on his forthcoming album, The Architect, due out February 23 on Ipecac (the record label run in part by Mike Patton, patron of noise and benefactor of sonic irritants).

Swift is a veteran turntablist, best known as a member of the ace ensemble called X-Ecutioners, who were to turntablism what the Mills Brothers were to vocalizing and the Harlem Globetrotters are to basketball: showoffs turned showmen who make crowd-pleasing entertainment out of incredible choreographed feats. (More recently he’s recorded as part of the trio Ill Insanity, with DJs Total Eclipse and Precision.) For The Architect, Swift is pretty much on his lonesome, and he has reportedly focused on classic-music samples for the entire album. That’s certainly evident in the one track made available thus far, “Raida – 2nd Movement,” which opens with beats that could date from a Run-DMC single, before the source material slowly makes itself clear during a richly orchestrated and melodramatic fade (MP3).

[audio:http://www.girlieaction.com/music/rob_swift/downloads/Rabia%20-%202nd%20Movement.mp3|titles=”Rabia – 2nd Movement”|artists=DJ Rob Swift]

There’s a video for the track on youtube.com, showing Swift walking through Manhattan and up the stairs to the great second-story record shop Fat Beats.

More on Swift at djrobswift.com and ipecac.com.

Dripping Clothes -> Generative Music (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

File this one under “happy accidents.” That’s how Tom Player, aka Lost Track, characterizes the subject of a recent post he made to the website audiocookbook.org, which is something of a public salon and playroom and group-blog for a handful of experimental sound folk.

The track in question is a nearly four-minute recording of what Player describes as chance generative music (MP3):

[audio:http://audiocookbook.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/generative_dripping_clothes.mp3|titles=”Generative Dripping Clothes”|artists=Lost Track]

Now, “chance” and “generative” are closely linked terms in the construction of experimental music, in part because it is precisely matters of chance that lend a lifelike, considered and even sentient, certainly not entirely predictable sensibility to much generative sound — generative sound being sound that is produced as the result of a rules-based system rather than a traditionally notated composition. These days that usually means in some manner an automated system, such as generative software like the Automaton plug-in by the software firm Audio Damage (audiodamage.com), or the sonic sculptures of Survival Research Labs member Matt Heckert (mattheckert.com).

Audio Damage uses Conway’s Game of Life as the basis for implementing and manipulating sound in Automaton. It’s a procedural descendant of the kind of work John Cage did in utilizing the I Ching as a tool for decision-making in composition and improvisation. In those situations, minor alterations — a new dot inserted in Conway’s grid, a left-field trigram for a Cageian performer — can radically change the direction of a piece of music.

In the case of Player’s track, however, he’s not talking about chance; he’s talking about an accident, which is perhaps the most quotidian meaning of “chance.” The music that came of it no less affecting, even if the source is water dripping from clothes. Player describes the system, humble as it may sound, that led to the recording as follows:

I set up a few cardboard loo rolls to resonate with the sound and stood around for 5 minutes recording it all. There are some really interesting syncopated moments, all underpinned with a regular metronomic beat. I liked the intrusion of external sounds to the mix, as you listen on.

The entire situation is John Cage by way of Rube Goldberg. The MP3 is a light percussive piece (that’s the “metronomic beat” he refers to) in which nothing is ever quite the same twice. There are various beat-like sounds that have the slightly funky feel of an experimental rhythmic track, to the point that one must remind oneself that none of this was planned, none of it predetermined, except to the extent that Player (could a musician who makes generative sound have a better name?) set up the system and adjusted it to achieve a result that appealed to him.

Original post at audiocookbook.org. More on Player at lostrack.co.uk.

Indian Call Center -> Sound Art (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Above a deep chasm of sound, a tiny whir comes and goes. It’s like a surveillance drone flitting here and there, keeping its eye — and, more importantly, its ear — on the surroundings, and only making its own presence noticeable when it gets just too close. At which point it veers away. Then human speaking intrudes, monotonic, initially sounding like the chatter of multiple telephone voice-mail menus heard all at once. This is the echo chamber that is a call center, and eventually one voice emerges from that chamber — a woman’s, Indian. It’s just her side of the conversation, as she politely, and with some discomfort, attempts to get information out of her English-language interlocutor (MP3).

[audio:http://download.cronicaelectronica.org/cronicast055.mp3|titles=”Call Center”|artists=Mathias Delplanque]

The piece is by Mathias Delplanque. Titled “Call Center,” it’s recent a stereo reduction of a sound installation of his from several years back. It was part of an exhibition titled “Bombay Maximum City.”The sounds, he reports, were “recorded during the summer of 2006 in a call center in Gurgaon (suburbs of New Delhi).” The result is a half hour of sound that flirts with narrative, but also manages to transform the everyday into something sonically complex. That the source of the audio is itself such a quintessential emblem of technology, of globalism, of communication services, and of interpersonal mis-communication only adds to its impact.

More at the releasing netlabel, cronicaelectronica.org.

Chances are this is not what M.I.A.’s forthcoming “I’m Down Like Your Internet Connection” (reportedly based on her three-hour tech-support phone call, according to Rolling Stone) is going to sound like.