Barry Vercoe: “Synapse” for Viola and Computer (1976). Marcus Thompson, viola; tape realized at the MIT Experimental Electronic Music Studio.
Archivi tag: computer_music
Tiny Jungle
Un altro video di Jon Weinel su cui, stavolta, abbiamo qualche informazione
This is my latest audio-visual work, a collage of different material created in Maya, Jitter, After Effects, Flash etc. It Uses hand-drawn animation as source material. The basic concept is to explore the idea of entoptic phenomena (spiral dot patterns experienced in altered states of consciousness), through the audio visual medium.
Action rituelle
Agnes Heginger, soprano e Karlheinz Essl, elettronico, hanno registrato poco meno di un anno fa, all’Essl Museum in Vienna, questo disco, dal titolo Out of the Blue.
Sei brani, di cui tre collaborazioni e tre soli. Lo stile è generalmente quello della free music europea, virtuoso, ma spesso destrutturato e a tratti manierista (esiste, naturalmente, un manierismo anche nella free music).
Ma c’è almeno un brano, questo Action rituelle, inciso in duo, che, a mio avviso, trascende il genere e conquista per la sua intensità.
Il disco è distribuito dalla netlabel portoghese XS Records e liberamente scaricabile anche dall’Internet Archive.
Agnes Heginger e Karlheinz Essl – Action rituelle
Il triangolo
Nathan Davis, nato in Alabama nel 1973, è percussionista e compositore elettroacustico. Fra le altre cose, è cofondatore del duo elettroacustico violoncello e percussioni Odd Appetite dal cui sito traiamo questo estratto da Diving Bell (2002), un brano in cui tutti i suoni sono generati “dall’umile e meraviglioso” triangolo.
È il tipo di brano che, prima o poi, invito i miei studenti a fare perché lavorare su una singola sonorità aiuta a capire che c’è un universo complesso all’interno di ogni suono.
Note dell’autore:
Diving Bell invites the listener to delve deeply into the sound of the humble and magnificent triangle. By striking the triangles at different points and with different materials, and by using a handheld microphone, I extract and re-sculpt single overtones that are present in the overall sound of the instruments, hidden sounds that are normally only apparent when one holds the triangle up to their ear, like a tuning fork. With the help of tape delay modeling software, I layer these rich overtones in a structured improvisation.
Il brano fa parte del CD Memory Spaces.
1-Bit Symphony
I casi della vita sono strani.
Tristan Perich sta facendo fortuna con il suo concetto di musica a 1 bit che non è altro che la ripresa, pari pari, della sintesi sonora utilizzata nei primissimi personal computer (il Commodore 64 era già più avanti, ma le sonorità sono simili).
In pratica, si utilizza un piccolo circuito con un flip-flop, cioè un dispositivo che alterna 1 e 0 a intervalli di tempo regolari, generando un’onda quadra. Se, per esempio, il flip-flop alterna uno e zero 440 volte al secondo, si genera un’onda quadra a 440 Hertz, cioè un LA, che però conterrà solo gli armonici dispari (così è l’onda quadra) e un po’ di quelli pari ma solo per distorsione armonica, con effetti temibili già sulle consonanze più lontane di 8va e 5a (ovvero praticamente tutte).
Questo sistema era usato nei vecchi pc per pilotare il piccolo e nefando altoparlante di sistema perché richiede risorse minimali. Era semplice, quindi, costruire circuitini di costo bassissimo in grado di produrre molte onde quadre a frequenze diverse contemporaneamente, come nel famigerato SID del Commodore 64 (il cui nome tecnico era 8580 SID chip, dove la sigla stava pomposamente per Sound Interface Device).
Peraltro, questo tipo di sintesi è già utilizzato da anni dai vari gruppetti che fanno quella che viene chiamata 8-bit music, proprio perché si rifà alle vecchie macchine a 8 bit.
Ora Perich ha ripreso questo disturbante suono realizzando varie installazioni e composizioni, alcune delle quali sono anche strutturalmente interessanti ma, per le mie orecchie, sono indelebilmente marchiate dal suono del C64 che mi fa venire voglia di piazzare un bel filtro passa-basso a valle di tutto l’audio.
La cosa buffa è che, quando eravamo piccoli, di cose del genere ne abbiamo fatte a tonnellate, ridendoci sopra. Però, ripeto, i casi della vita sono strani e oggi la gente trova un gran gusto nel farsi trapanare le orecchie dalle onde quadre.
Non so che dire. Esiste, nella vita, il fascino delle cose antiche riprese e riviste, che è anche quello che spinge della gente a suonare musica antica con strumenti d’epoca e corde di budello che però, proprio perché d’epoca, non stanno accordati per più di 5 minuti, costringendo l’interprete a suonare stonato per metà del pezzo (NB: non ce l’ho con la musica antica ma solo con quelli che fanno come sopra).
Ecco alcuni esempi fra i migliori (ne trovate altri sul suo sito), nonché il video della temibile 1-Bit Symphony.
- Between the Silences for nine strings, nine-part 1-bit music (2008)
- All Possible Paths for clarinet, acoustic guitar, cello, double bass, marimba, piano, 5-channel 1-bit electronics (2008), commissioned by Bang on a Can’s People’s Commissioning Fund
Mortuos Plango Vivos Voco
Jonathan Harvey: “Vivos Voco” (1980) for concrete sounds processed by computer.
Born in Warwickshire in 1939, Jonathan Harvey was a chorister at St Michael’s College, Tenbury and later a major music scholar at St John’s College, Cambridge. He gained doctorates from the universities of Glasgow and Cambridge and also studied privately (on the advice of Benjamin Britten) with Erwin Stein and Hans Keller. He was a Harkness Fellow at Princeton (1969-70).
An invitation from Boulez to work at IRCAM in the early 1980s has resulted in eight realisations at the Institute, or for the Ensemble Intercontemporain, including the tape piece Mortuos Plango Vivos Voco, Ritual Melodies for computer-manipulated sounds, and Advaya for cello and live and pre-recorded sounds. Harvey has also composed for most other genres: orchestra (including Madonna of Winter and Spring, Tranquil Abiding and White as Jasmine), chamber (including three String Quartets, Soleil Noir/Chitra, and Death of Light, Light of Death, for instance) as well as works for solo instruments.
analyzed by Pierre Boulez
Marco Stroppa: the video
After the Marco’s master, I publish here the link to the IRCAM video about his works for solo instrument and chamber electronics.
Here you can find excerpts from …of silence, hist whist and I will not kiss you f.ing flag. You can also see Arshia Cont, the creator of the astonishing score and tempo following software Antescofo.
I already posted this link on Dec. 12 2009, but now I point out again because here the students can see some applications of the systems that Marco described in his lecture.
In any case, the video is very interesting.
PLOrk
Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) is a visionary new ensemble of laptopists, the first of its size and kind.
Founded in 2005 by Dan Trueman and Perry Cook, PLOrk takes the traditional model of the orchestra and reinvents it for the 21st century; each laptopist performs with a laptop and custom designed hemispherical speaker that emulates the way traditional orchestral instruments cast their sound in space. Wireless networking and video augment the familiar role of the conductor, suggesting unprecedented ways of organizing large ensembles.
In 2008, Trueman and Cook were awarded a major grant from the MacArthur Foundation to support further PLOrk developments. Performers and composers who have worked with PLOrk include Zakir Hussain, Pauline Oliveros, Matmos, So Percussion, the American Composers Orchestra, and others. In its still short lifetime, PLOrk has performed widely (presented by Carnegie Hall, the Northwestern Spring Festival in Chicago, the American Academy of Sciences in DC, the Kitchen (NYC) and others) and has inspired the formation of laptop orchestras across the world, from Oslo to Bangkok.
“Connectome” Performed by the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) (Director Jeff Snyder), PLOrk[10] concert, May 3 2017 Composition: Mike Mulshine Neuron model audio synthesis: Jeff Snyder and Aatish Bhatia Projection: Drew Wallace
Excerpt: Autopoetics I by Ted Coffin: listen to or watch a video
140 chars of music
A twitter. An SMS. That’s the challenge. Writing a piece of electronic digital music using only 140 chars of code.
It started as a curious project, when live coding enthusiast and Toplap member Dan Stowell started tweeting tiny snippets of musical code using SuperCollider. Pleasantly surprised by the reaction, and “not wanting this stuff to vanish into the ether” he has recently collated the best pieces into a special download for The Wire.
Of course, to satisfy such a constraint, you need a very compact programming language and SuperCollider is the best choice (see also here). It is an environment and programming language for real time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition. It provides an interpreted object-oriented language which functions as a network client to a state of the art, realtime sound synthesis server.
SuperCollider was written by James McCartney over a period of many years, and is now an open source (GPL) project maintained and developed by various people. It is used by musicians, scientists and artists working with sound. For some background, see SuperCollider described by Wikipedia.
You can download the code snippets here. Note that many of these pieces are actually generative, so if you have a working SuperCollider environment and re-run the source code you get a new (i.e. slightly different) piece of music.
Some excerpts:
The artists notes are here.
Anthèmes 2
Anthèmes 2 (1997), by Pierre Boulez, has evolved from Anthèmes, a substantially shorter piece for solo violin.
Andrew Gerzso has for many years been the composer’s chief collaborator on works involving live electronics and the two men regularly discuss their work together. He describes the way in which all the nuances in this nucleus of works were examined in the studio in order to find out which elements could be electronically processed and differentiated. As a result, the process of expanding these works is based not only on abstract structural considerations (such as the questions as to how it may be possible to use electronic procedures to spatialize and to merge or separate specific complexes of sound),but also on concrete considerations bound up with performing practice: in a word, on the way in which the instrument’s technical possibilities may be developed along figurative lines.
As a result, Anthèmes 2 provides us with both an analysis and an interpretation of Anthèmes: it is a text in its own right and the same time a sub-text of the earlier piece.
[notes from the CD]