Do you ever write a bunch of paragraphs and then look back and decide that they are quite horrible and should never be seen by anyone ever again, including yourself? Yeah, I did that several times over the weekend. So, instead of trying to be unsuccessfully creative again, here’s a play-it-safe, YouTubey type post. This time it’s a synthesizer which while not sounding terribly fantastic has a sort of cunning input mechanism, which reminds me an awful lot of beaming around lasers in lab:
It’ll be very interesting to see what other pseudo-physical/visual music systems crop up with the immenent take-over of touchscreens.
I’ve been conditioned to believe that human beings have been conditioned to believe there’s beauty in symmetry…
If anyone knows where that lyric comes from I’ll be very, very surprised (and impressed, but mostly surprised), partly because I can’t remember the exact album location myself. I’m not mentally or physically warmed up enough to go dredging through the acres of archived CDs (long live the MP3) hibernating in the upper aerie of my cupboard to work it out. Buuut… it was either a track by this guy or one of his associates:
This is particularly relevant to the topics on this blog because I hold these people responsible for prepping me into my classical music acceptance phase. This is because I absolutely *hated* one of their albums (the self-titled cLOUDDEAD, if you are interested). Initially anyway. I couldn’t stand it. I only bought it because a lot of the recommendations for new music which suited my taste were extracted from internet reviews that mentioned other groups I already owned — and this being the heady late nineties meant that the reviews frequently did not come with samples of the music, so it was all bought sound unheard.
I credit this with preparing me for classical because after initially dismissing this music, it later became my absolutely favorite album ever. I don’t think there are any blatantly obvious similarities in the musical style, it’s more an attitude issue. It brought right forward to the forefront that I could form an incredibly deep bond with music which not only didn’t make sense on initial listenings, but which actively turned me off.
As it turned out I had to pretty much rerealize this process when coming to classical, but I am pretty positive that this trial run primed certain mental circuits
PS - Ahhh, I remembered where that track came from, it was actually on “In The Shadow Of The Living Room” by Reaching Quiet. Here’s probably my favorite track from that album (in which almost all of the tracks are under 2 minutes):
They mostly used broken instruments to make the album, and apparently their sequencer also could not function for longer than a few minutes, hence the short length of the tracks.
One nice feature of having a decent collection of blog posts up and active is that every now and then someone leaves you a nice comment on a piece you had pretty much forgotten about. Today this was a comment from chaika, who commented on this post back from the depths of last year in which I really, really wanted a piece of software which would automatically display the tonality of a piece of music as it progresses.
Miss/Mister commenter provided me an excellent lead on the subject: Elaine Chew at USC has published a bunch of papers which attempt to do exactly that. Not only are her papers relevant, but via her references I can now work out all the other important writings on the subject. Awesome.
So far it seems that her method for determining tonality is based on a spiral:
In which each point on the spiral is a major fifth higher than the last (and so each point vertically above ends up being a third higher, which is why those chords look like triangles, because it’s a point connected to a spiral-neighbor and a vertical-neighbor) That spiral looks kinda complicated, I know, and I’m feeling the pain a bit because I only know the most basic music theory. However, I’m fairly determined to get to grips with the ideas in this paper, and it’s actually a rather interesting (and effective) way to learn the theory for me: backward from the math.
There’s been less than lots of updates here this week, due in significant part to g’s shortly pending department to NYC. This weekend is the move away from the apartment here, and next weekend is the move into Manhattan. Unsurprisingly this means that things are a little lively at the moment. Additionally I’ve been in a bit of classical downturn at the moment, these things go in phases.
Instead, the music colonizing my player has been Mr Scruff, an old favorite:
He was one of the guys I listened primarily to before switching over to almost exclusively classical music. It’s nice to have a bit of a resurgence. The boundaries between musical styles are completely artificial anyway, and there is something constraining and unpleasant about claiming I feel like listening to classical music or non-classical music. It’s all highly-stylized waves of compressed air, in the end.
I’ll leave you with another summery piece of Mr. Scruff, with an actual video this time:
Well well well, what a busy little weekend we’ve been having over here. There’s been a fancy mix of things which are required (such as shipping g back and forth to Syracuse for exams) and things which are fun (such as spending g’s one hundred dollar gift certificate on copious amounts of alcohol.) In fact, just ten minutes ago we arrived back from an exclusive wall-size movie viewing session. One of the perks of being a grad student is that we can “borrow” things such as HD projectors from the lab.
Given the huge-assed nature of the screen we can spray out of the projector, the film choice was a toss-up between Aliens (one of my absolutely favorite movies of all time) and Children of Men (which most of us had not yet seen). We ended up choosing the latter, and saving the former for when we have some surround-sound action.
So CoM is a somewhat harrowing watching experience, but a pleasurable one. It’s pretty kick-arse, to use the technically correct critical language. Its also rammed full of sneaky highbrow type references, which most of us probably failed to pick up because the cultured parts of our minds have been corrupted by all the science we do daily.
I did manage to pick out a couple of the classical music references though, particularly the Shostakovich 10 and Prokofiev violin concerto which get about half a minute of airtime when they run into the Russians in the refugee camp. Like I mentioned last week, when you know a piece of music well it really jumps all up in your grill. My non-classically inclined friends probably didn’t notice anything much about the music during those scenes, but for me it was like doing that snapping awake thing when you are falling asleep in a lecture. A bit of your brain goes from fuzzy to focused after a few familiar notes.
Oh yeah, it also had “Omgyjya Switch7″ by Aphex Twin. Extra awesome.
