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Database: Carter Harman On Semi-Automatic Clichés
“The reason those bleeps and chirrups and the rest of the clichés appear is that they are semi-automatic, and turned on with a minimum of effort, to fill in embarrassing gaps in the composition. But finding fault with the medium because synthesizers are capable of making bad music is like faulting all piano music because… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Annie Dillard’s “Teaching a Stone to Talk” (1981)
“At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects,… Continue reading
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Database: Richard Skelton On Coaxing Music From Disparate Sounds
“I record acoustic instruments, and the challenge is to record them as authentically as possible. This could become an obsession, but I’m pragmatic about what I can achieve with the tools at my disposal. Once recorded, the process of composition involves transforming the sounds whilst somehow retaining something of their original essence. For me composition… Continue reading
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Keywords: Get The Volume Right
(Photo: Speaker array for Janet Cardiff’s “Forty-Part Motet”) Getting the volume right is adjusting your monitors or headphones so the music sounds lifelike, realistically filling the room or headspace in which you’re working. Dialing in this sound level suspends your disbelief about the virtual nature of your musical tools and loudspeakers’ mediations. Not too loud,… Continue reading
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Same Walk, Different Music
Ravel/Peter Phillips, “Miroirs: No.5, La Vallée des Cloches” (1904-1906). MIDI’s non-electronic predecessor was the piano roll, a punch card-like storage medium that was used to direct “player” pianos in the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries. Piano rolls were continuous (looped) rolls of paper with perforated holes whose vertical and horizontal locations on the sheet represented,… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Dave Hickey’s “The Invisible Dragon” (1993/2023) and “Perfect Wave” (2017)
“If images don’t do anything in this culture, if they haven’t done anything, then why are we sitting here in the twilight of the twentieth century talking about them? And if they only do things after we have talked about them, then they aren’t doing things, we are. Therefore, if our criticism aspires to anything… Continue reading
