G.N.O. » ESAS

(Extra)ordinary sayings about sound #13

lawrence — Sun, 27 May 2007 11:24:21 +0000

‘……I’ll include links to three sites that everyone who knows anything at all about free improv is familiar with: Metamkine, Erstwhile and Sound 323—they were in the Wire years ago, for goodness sakes—a magazine which features pop artists like Fennesz, PanSonic and Ryoji Ikeda.’

- Du Yisa, in response to a post on Danwei.org, May 26, 2007

(Extra)ordinary sayings about sound #12

lawrence — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 13:34:12 +0000

‘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

lawrence — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 05:09:35 +0000

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.

(Extra)ordinary sayings about sound #10

lawrence — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 09:39:35 +0000

arbyth: So you see, the initials of (the Chinese experimental label) Little Sound are ‘ls’, which happens to be that Unix command. (to list all files within a directory.)

GNO: Yeah, why?

arbyth: Nothing, it’s just kinda funny: what Little Sound has been doing with their releases is like ‘ls-ing’ all the Chinese sound artists.

(Extra)ordinary sayings about sound #9

lawrence — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 07:11:37 +0000

‘Those who make a living by making sound don’t have time (and don’t bother) to listen - this has always been the case. As we all know, (classical music) performers don’t listen to music, composers don’t listen to music, and conservatory students have the deafest ears in the world. That’s why jazz players are often found praising their colleagues: great ears on that guy, he keeps listening to other band members’ sounds and chords even when he’s doing his own solo.’ - Dajuin Yao, blog post. (Translated by Lawrence Li.)

(Extra)ordinary sayings about sound #8

lawrence — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 09:58:06 +0000

“(Ornette) Coleman’s parents were too poor to be able to afford music lessons for him; Ornette acquired his musical tools on his own. No one told him that a saxophone is notated differently than it is tuned. So, at the age of fourteen to fifteen - a crucial phase in his development - he played everything written ‘wrong’ in the academic sense.” — Joachim E. Berendt (revised by Guenther Huesmann), The Jazz Book: From Ragtime to Fusion and Beyond.

(Extra)ordinary sayings about sound #7

lawrence — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 06:59:56 +0000

“Why use reverb? You don’t live in a cave.” - Daniel Menche.

(Extra)ordinary sayings about sound #6

lawrence — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 11:07:57 +0000

“I hate MIDI because I love sound.” - Leigh Landy, lecture on MusicAcoustica 2006

(Extra)ordinary sayings about sound #5

lawrence — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 14:18:21 +0000

“In the summer, I moved to an in-law’s apartment on the edge of the town. It was an attic, looking into a front yard as deep as a hundred yards. The landlady drove from the house to the front door to pick up the mail. Right behind the house lies a railway, beyond which cornfields opened up to infinity. The landlady warned me about the noisy passing of a daily train at ten o’clock in the evening. When the train arrived punctually, it came not only with noise but also vibration. The whole house shivered, with joy, as I soon came to realize. Since the train passing constituted the singular, physically stimulating event of the day. More than once, I caught myself waiting for the train.” - CHANG Yung Ho, in Yung Ho Chang Writes 作文本, Joint Publishing, 2005.

(Extra)ordinary sayings about sound #4

lawrence — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 16:23:26 +0000

“The so-called idol singers are not unlike the reporters from our cable TV stations. How should I say…they squeak instead of sing. Their voices are distasteful, the lyrics unmeaningful, the songs indistinctive; most of them simply call for earplugs. After listening to so many pop songs recently, I have one discovery: how beautiful the humming noise of my computer’s fan is! Really, I have ceased to think of the fan sound as noise.” - Chih-hao Tsai on Taiwan 2.0, Oct 17, 2006. Translated by Lawrence Li.