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Freemuse
In a post on the Freesounds website a few days ago I noted how easy it is for sounds to go free: how anyone can upload or download sound samples to and from this website and use them in their work. But while sounds may go free, in many parts of the world the people… Continue reading
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The Hang Drum: Real and Virtual
Do you like the sounds of steel pans and gamelans? Then you might really be intrigued by the sound of the Hang, a percussion instrument created and hand-built by the Swiss company PANart (Felix Rohner and Sabina Scharer) since 2000. The Hang consists of two steel sheets welded together to make a convex shape, a little… Continue reading
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Sounds Want To Be Free: Freesound
Freesound (www.freesound.org) is a collaborative database of Creative Commons Sampling Plus-licensed sounds. At freesound, anyone can upload or download sounds. What kinds of sounds are here? You name it: environmental sound field recordings (wind, rain, ice cracking), industrial and mechanical sounds, human voices, sound effects, digitally processed sounds, drones . . . All of the… Continue reading
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On Autechre: Exercising The Materiality Of Machine Music
I don’t think of a sound in my head and try and find it on the keyboard. I just find the sound on the keyboard. -Sean Booth, Autechre Have you ever listened to the music of Autechre? They are a UK-based electronic music duo that has been releasing their unique brand of adventurously experimental and probing techno music… Continue reading
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Feedback On African Feedback
In 2004, Italian composer and sound artist Alessandro Bosetti traveled to villages in Mali and Burkina Faso and asked villagers to listen to recordings of Western experimental, minimal, electronic, and improvised music. As they listened through headphones to randomly selected pieces, Bosetti recorded their real-time reactions–“comments, breaths, attempts to imitate what was heard”–with a stereo microphone.… Continue reading
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On Impetuses For Making Views From A Flying Machine
I recently finished a series of nine electronic music pieces begun in December 2009. One impetus for collecting and finishing the works came by way of an organ recital I heard at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London this past spring. (I was in England to give a paper at a conference for the British Forum For… Continue reading
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Ordinary Affects and The Ethnography of Everyday Experience
If you are interested in ethnography, a remarkable study that might interest you is Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects (Duke U. Press, 2007). Stewart is an anthropologist who teaches at the U of Texas, Austin, and her book is finely tuned ethnographic study of everyday life–her life, in fact. One aim of the book is to render… Continue reading
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Jaron Lanier on Technology: Music and MIDI
Jaron Lanier, an American computer scientist, musician, and author, is pretty cool in my book. In his recent manifesto, You Are Not A Gadget, he makes a strong case for probing how technology reduces us as the creative humans that we are, muting the “cultural anger” we need to come up with new tools that do… Continue reading
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Flying Lotus and The Density Of Musical Information
There has been a lot of well-deserved hype surrounding Flying Lotus’ latest record,Cosmogramma. Lotus (aka Steven Ellison) is one of the leading figure on L.A.’s experimental instrumental hip hop scene, blending beats with experimental textures. His live performances are intense, visceral and physical, and the music has a great, pounding weight to it. On Cosmogramma, there… Continue reading
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Reading About Silence
I’ve been enjoying George Prochnik’s recent book, “In Pursuit Of Silence.” He articulates sentiments of many who live in densely noisy urban places: What is the effect of noise on our body-minds? How does silence heal? And how can we pursue the idea of silence in the midst of noise? As a frequent headphone wearer… Continue reading
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