Max/MSP had a brainfart.
Ep 2.1: Walks
Walk everywhere. Nowhere. Take in the sounds of the city. Take back cognitive experience.
Featuring walks through the installations at the Pixilerations festival in Providence, RI.
Playlist: [Ryan Lester : Claps, Tim Rovinelli : puma automatic, John Caley : Reading Room (Walked through by Ryan Lester), Daniel Jones (erase) : Prime Composition, Blair Neil : Color-a-Sound, Peter Traub : ItSpace Physical Version (Walked through by Ryan Lester)]
Sources: http://www.freesound.org/people/rutgermuller/sounds/50725/, http://vimeo.com/7306407, http://vimeo.com/11606420, http://www.turbulence.org/Works/itspace/
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Episode 3: Brought To You By
This week on Sine Languages: we twist advertisments inside out, with auditory abstraction and statistical manipulation. We get up on all the latest advertising techniques, moving beyond Freud to listen to Markov and Max. We get the subliminal messages across.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
The Music as Message Episode. Check the playlist here.
Notes: All the music on this show is killer, but the first 25 minutes are completely different than the last half+5 of the show. Music as message is almost too broad a theme, since (as the episode demonstrates) it can be interpreted to mean a number of things. Social message/change music, emotionally charged music that transmits the emotional state of the musician, and straight information (0s and 1s). The multiplicity of the episode translated to an abrupt shift from Chicago (in their early, funky days) to gamelan music half-way through the show. It was a little awkward. But, I get my point across.
Expect a follow-up post on McLuhan and music later this week.
Music as Sacred
“he who
jubilates does not utter words but a sound of joy without words; it
is the voice of a soul spilling over with joy, expressing, as much as
it can, its emotion, not comprehending the sense.”
“qui jubilat,
non verba dicit, sed sonus quidam est laetitiae sine verbis; vox est
enim animi diffusi laetitia, quantum potest, exprimentis affectum, non
sensum comprehendentis”
-St. Augustine, Psalmum XCIX
This week’s episode of Archaeology of Crates featured Stephen Higa, a historian of Early Music at Brown University. We chatted about the formation of Sacred Music, its roots, and its various intersections with folk music, contemporary classical, and Indian sacred music.
The one thing I wanted to talk about more in the blog post was the connection between folk music and sacred music we touched on in the show. Augustine’s ‘jubilus’ was not not a ecclesiastical chant; instead it was “a sort of shout or song of the people, particularly the country folk at work”: in other words, a yodel. The jubilus of the harvester, of the shepard, of the pastoral was drawn upon by Augustine to explain the use of the word jubilare in the 65th psalm: “A man burst forth in a certain voice of exultation without words… because filled with too much joy, he cannot explain in words what it is in which he delights.” The monks as well were often described by others as bursting forth into song and chant spontaneously, as a part of everyday life. It is exactly this kind of integration of life and music, and the use of music to express the inexpressible, that also appears in folk music throughout the ages: for what is folk music but an attempt to sing that inexpressible feeling, the sound of the joys and sorrows of the people, and integrate what cannot be said in words back into life?
This yodel of the people and the yodel of the monks hint at a curious connection beyond the sacred and into raw sociality… but that’s a story to tell in a later post.
The New Project
Archaeology of Crates (AoC) is my radio show, started in 2009 back when I was a young bright-eyed freshman at Brown university. I’ve changed times a few times, but I’m currently at midnight:30 to 1:30 every Wednesday night / Thursday morning, and there to stay, more likely then not. Archives of all my shows are up on the BSR website.
No one at the station ever got the pun behind the title, but whatever. They at least got the second meaning. My show was to be more than simple crate digging; it would go beyond funk, jazz, hip-hop, techno, indie, metal, classical, whatever, and get real deep, relentlessly mixing genres and unveiling connections between disparate types of music. I got really good at the ‘mixing genres’ part, not so much at the ‘unveiling connections’ part. I will listen to almost any genre, so the first part came easily; but the analysis is tougher, requires more active effort.
Even more, I began to realize there was something wrong with the way I was approaching things; I was emphasizing similarities, but never, ever, differences. It was a way around some common traps, but it also meant I always was riding along the surface of music, never really getting between the grooves and figuring out what made that music special, different, powerful. And so, I ditched my old project.
Now I’ve got the new project.
- The mission: to uncover the essence of music, the ground from which music is constructed. It’s an impossible mission, I’ll admit, but that doesn’t make it a futile one.
- The tools: unique lenses providing ways to approach music; eg. music as message, music as sacred, music as magic. This, I’ve come to believe, is the only way to enact my project, as there are many different ways to approach music, each one as “right” as the others. Each episode will use a single lens, revealing certain fissures and traces guiding us deeper, transforming the way we think about music, maybe even revealing new lenses for further analysis.
- The blog: A way for me to think through each week’s theme before and after the show. Hopefully, having to write a post will focus my comments and song selection and keep things coherent, something the semi-improvised AoCs of the past have had issues with. It’ll also give me a chance to expound upon points I ran out of time to talk about on the show.
My suitemate joked that I should change the name to “Anthropology of Crates,” but the name will never change.
The project will start this week by examining “music as sacred.” Stephen Higa, a historian here at Brown, will guest host, leading us through the Medieval sacred music he holds so dear. We’ll also trace its influence into the 21st century and examine the fusions and mixtures it has formed with the most unlikely of partners. It’ll be my first real chance to put all of these ideas into practice, to figure out if there’s really anything here.
So, why not follow along? If this is to go anywhere, I need the help of others; give me comments and feedback with which I can dig deeper, perfect my playback.
Cause music will never stop spinning; it’s only the needle that drops.
