(Extra)ordinary sayings about sound #12

by lawrence

‘I was learning the fugue when suddenly a vacuum cleaner started up beside the piano. Well, the result was that in the louder passages, this luminously diatonic music in which Mozart deliberately imitates the technique of Sebastian Bach became surrounded with a halo of vibrato, rather the effect that you might get if you sang in the bathtub with both ears full of water and shook your head from side to side all at once. And in the softer passages I couldn’t hear any sound that I was making at all. I could feel, of course - I could sense the tactile relation with the keyboard which is replete with its own kind of acoustical associations - and I could imagine what I was doing, but I couldn’t actually hear it. But the strange thing was that all of it suddenly sounded better than it had without the vacuum cleaner, and those parts which I couldn’t actually hear sounded best of all. Well, for years thereafter, and still today, if I am in a great hurry to acquire an imprint of some new score on my mind, I simulate the effect of the vacuum cleaner by placing some totally contrary noises as close to the instrument as I can. It doesn’t matter what noise, really - TV Westerns, Beatles records; anything loud will suffice - because what I managed to learn through the accidental coming together of Mozart and the vacuum cleaner was that the inner ear of the imagination is very much more powerful a stimulant than is any amount of outward observation.’ - Glenn Gould’s account of his experience when studying one of Mozart’s Fantasias. Liner notes written by Michael Stegemann (translated by Gery Bramall), found in The Glenn Gould Edition SONY SMK 52 626.




(Extra)ordinary sayings about sound #11

by lawrence

Robin over at Snarkmarket offered a fantastically-detailed and touching account of a lecture Stephen Hawking gave two days ago at University of California, Berkeley. A real subtle and beautiful sonic experience.

His voice still sounds pretty much like that original Macintosh synthesizer — you’d recognize it as, like, “generic computer voice” — except here in Zellerbach it’s loud, amplified, everywhere at once.

Hawking controls his world via a sensor that watches his eye — I think he blinks, or at least flexes the blink-muscle, to trigger it. And when it triggers, it makes a whispery beep. So throughout his talk, you can hear a background rhythm of these beeps: faint, just on the edge of perception even with the microphone so close, but distinctly there. Like a pulse.




Bad Bye Engine MP3 download

by lawrence

[In the previous version of this post, the title of this album was mis-put as ‘Bye Bye Engine’. It has been corrected now, and GNO apologizes for this mistake.]

Ulf Bilting and Zbigniew Karkowski’s 1988 vinyl release Bad Bye Engine is now in public domain and open for free download. (MP3 format.)

The studio consisted of two Yamaha TX816 banks (equivalent to 16 DX7s), an AKAI S900 sampler, analog mixer and two TEAC tape recorders, 8- and 2-track. Very little midi sequencer software was available at the time, so a system of programs for generation, manipulation and playing midi data was created on the VAX-11 BSD Unix system at the department. Time-stamped midi data (an invented format preceding standard Midi Files) was transferred to a specially built processor with 8 midi interfaces that controlled the real-time playing, recording and synchronization of midi.

Many of the tracks use a technique of playing many, very short sounds on the TX816s to create musical shapes, e g the first sound heard in He Van He consists of about 800 attacks with a duration between 0.1 and 0.2 secs.

The idea of making short tracks was quite unique at a time when almost any electroacoustic music piece were streched out over an entire LP, or several.




‘What the fu k is that!!!’

by lawrence

Poster designed by Shanghai electronic musician/graphic designer B6. (Lou Nanli)

Antidote 19




times.
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