Eric Lyon’s article: Chinese version

by lawrence

I’ve worked out a Chinese version of Do We Still Need Computer Music?




E. Lyon: Do We Still Need Computer Music?

by lawrence

Eric Lyon kindly permitted us to publish his talk on MusicAcoustica 2006 titled Do We Still Need Computer Music?, It is, IMHO, the most relevant paper for non-academic sound artists and laptop performers.

Besides this talk and the diffused concert at the Central Conservatory, Lyon also played a fantastic set at the vital local new music venue D-22. Photos of that gig will be uploaded soon.

He’s also the co-author of the Max/MSP objects FFTease.

Do We Still Need Computer Music?, by Eric Lyon.




(Extra)ordinary sayings about sound #6

by lawrence

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




Off-MusicAcoustica event (1)

by lawrence

Miha Ciglar at 2 Kolagas

Miha Ciglar live at Waterland Kwanyin series, 2 Kolagas, Beijing. This is one of the two off-MusicAcoustica events this year.

2 Kolagas audience

Audience.




“Daisy Bell” - Max Matthews version

by lawrence

Marc Battier gave a fantastic lecture on the history of electronic music the day before yesterday, as one of the master classes held at the conference. Besides Onde Martinot, Theatrophone, Hammond Organ and other awe-inspiring novelties of the past 100+ years, he played the lovely little tune Daisy Bell (better known as Daisy, daisy), as realized by Max Matthews on an IBM 704 in 1961. After the lecture Prof. Battier kindly made a copy of the song for us and we played it in our hotel for four to five times. It had a magical, mesmerizing effect on us, kept repeating itself in our mind. Later it turned out it had the same effect on another audience of the lecture: the Shanghai-based, Seattle-origined game designer and sound artist Ben Houge (who plays with the NOIShanghai gang quite a lot.)

So I’ve decided to share the song with you.




MusicAcoustica ‘06: Leonardo/ISAST award

by lawrence

The winner is criticalartware.




MusicAcoustica ‘06: Jackass of the conference

by lawrence

What’s a translator without the ability to discuss his own subject of study in target language (in this case, English)? What’s a professor who, against everyone else’s will, insists on taking 30 mins of a panel _discussion_ and read his own paper? How many inches of skin does one need to lecture to a floor of experts on elementary level Chinese comprehension?

Ladies and gentlemen, let’s welcome the professor of Shanghai Conservatory, Mr Sean “Iron Tinnitus” Li. (applause)

Sean Li on MusicAcoustica '06

Right: Sean Li (LI Sixin 李斯心)




Horror Vacui

by Dajuin

How can a concert of solid works composed by GRM (Le Groupe de Recherches Musicales) members and flawlessly diffused by a professional GRM composer on a high quality 8-channel speaker system that superbly projected the spatialization of Christian Zanesi’s Schaefferian train in a magnificent concert hall possibly go wrong? Six works by GRM composers including such luminaries as Francois Bayle, Christian Zanesi, and Daniel Teruggi were presented at MusicAcoustica 2006 at the Central Conservatory on Oct 24. Somehow, this supposedly foolproof GRM-style acousmatique concert managed to be presented in a manner that we have never experienced before.

Instead of printed brochures, the audience had to read bilingual artist biographies and program notes on a huge projection screen on stage. This clever and thoughtful idea turned sour as the audience realized that the projector was left turned on for the entire duration of the concert. Neither my composer friend Lydia Ayers (former professor at Hong Kong University of Technology) nor myself had ever seen any electroacoustic/acousmatic concert presented in this way, as most of the audience ended up staring at the projected text or trying to comprehend the English during the whole show.

What can be more ironic? The very core of the concept of the acousmatique, which the GRM literally re-invented and have heralded for about half a century, is to disconnect the sight of the sound source from the aural perception, so as to focus our attention on the sound objects themselves. Although strictly speaking, the program notes are not the source of the sounds; nevertheless, it is visual distraction that has been avoided like a plague in concerts of this nature. On a deeper level, are not the forced visibility of biography of the artist and the genesis and description of the piece, and even the listing of the sound sources themselves equally “anti-acousmatic”?

That evening’s GRM concert felt more like watching a silent film made from English and Chinese text stills with soundtrack, or, a lecture on the current state of GRM with sound examples. Even if the audience wanted to close their eyes and enjoy a true acousmatic concert, the after-vision of bright yellow text on black background were still visible after the eyelids were closed.

Not only that, there were some unfriendly applause from the audience at several points when agitating music was quieting down in the pieces.

These phenomena point to a deeper issue of horror vacui, an art historical term referring to the fear of empty spaces in visual designs. The horror vacui that ran deep under the surface of the concert that night was not only visual, as indicated by the former phenomenon, but also aural, as indicated by the latter.

For the former, I have come up with a wonderful excuse for the concert organizer – that this year’s theme of MusicAcoustica is indeed “language,” therefore listening to GRM works while checking out the English-Chinese translation of program notes was only fitting, not to mention its educational value for Chinese students of music, who really need to sharpen their foreign language skills.

As for the latter, I am as clueless as the unfriendly applauding audience.




MusicAcoustica ‘06: some Chinese papers

by lawrence

Ken Fields requested a brief translation of the titles and abstracts of the Chinese papers, so that foreign participants who had missed it due to the clashing of schedule (which means 99% of them, because the EMS paper session was going on at the same time) would not be totally in the dark. Instead of doing that, I’ll try to recap what I’ve seen and heard (and occasionally said) during the Chinese paper session this afternoon.

I didn’t sit through all of them as I’ve been shuttling between the Chinese session and the EMS session. And while I do have soft copies of all the Chinese papers, I’m going to run them through a filter in my head. For example, papers about how to construct the discipline of electronic music studies and more education-oriented papers won’t be covered here. Sorry to those who are interested in these, but there ain’t no objective journalism. ^_^

  • An analysis of the sound-morphing techniques used in GRM Tools and the two general tendencies of modulation in electronic music, by LI Pengyun 李鹏云

  • Dialogues between different spaces - a suite, by ZHANG Ruibo 张睿博

    • This is Zhang Ruibo’s introductory analysis of an award-winning piece realized in Paris in 1992 (first part) and 1993 (second part). The strange thing was that Zhang Ruibo didn’t mention the name of the composer during the whole presentation, so that we naturally thought it’s his own work, until he started to complement the work towards the end! Shocked by this unusual gesture, I can’t help approaching him for the authorship of the piece after his presentation, and found out it was Zhang Xiaofu - Ruibo’s professor.

  • An analysis of Kontakte and the electronic music theory of Stockhausen, by HUANG Zhenyu 黄枕宇

    • I didn’t catch all of it, but apart from analysing Kontakte, the speaker also spent some paragraphs on the famous “four criteria of electronic music” of Stockhausen.

  • Explanation of the Chinese and English version of some key terms in electronic music, by Huang Zhenyu

    • This topic is of utmost importance so we (Dajuin Yao and I) were glad that we had catched it after a quick visit to Perry Cheng’s MIDI masterclass in another building.

    It’s also the most revealing Chinese paper of that afternoon.

    Mr Huang is known as the Chinese translator of The New Music: The Avant-garde since 1945, by Reginald Smith Brindle. During the Chinese paper session he discussed terms like “electronic music”, “electro-acoustic music”, “computer music” and “experimental music”. His references include the Grove music dictionary, books by Charles Dodge, Barry Schrader, Peter Manning, John Schaefer et al. The paper consists of basically translations and paraphrases of the texts on the topic by the above authors, with no mentioning of the Chinese literature at all. I suppose some studies has been done in the Chinese academic world (although I’m not aware of any), but there’s one essential article which was written and distributed seven years ago outside of the Conservatory system, and since it has clarified the issue with deep insight and clear logic, it has become the de facto standard Chinese translation and definition of those terms in the non-academic electronic music community.

    The article is called Guide to Electroacoustic Music 電子原音音樂入門法, written in Chinese by Dajuin Yao and published on New Music Web in 1999. You can read it here.

    I believe Yao is the first to come up with a Chinese translation of “electroacoustic music” (电子原音音乐, Dianzi Yuanyin Yinyue). In the article, he defined the music as one that involves the the modulation of usually “acoustic” (as in “acoustic guitar”) sounds with “electronic means”. And “Dianzi Yuanyin Yinyue” is simply a direct, straight translation of the English version. This translation is widely accepted and fluently used - in both oral and written language - by sound artists, experimental musicians, underground musicians, phonographers/field-recordists, in a word: all the non-academic new music practitioners in China. Although most of them know some English, but those who are better at reading than speaking usually refer to the concept as Dianzi Yuanyin Yinyue in conversations.

    Huang’s paper informed me that two Chinese translation of electroacoustic music exist in the academic studies: one is 电子声学音乐 (Dianzi Shengxue Yinyue), the other is 电子音响音乐 (Dianzi Yinxiang Yinyue). I presume that Huang is not aware of Yao’s translation.

    The first one is a mis-translation. The translator misunderstood the “acoustic” in “electroacoustic” as “of or relating to sound”, while the real meaning here is, as we all know, the same as in “acoustic guitar”: Of or being an instrument that does not produce or enhance sound electronically. So it’s kind of like the flipside of “electronic”.

    The second one, Dianzi Yinxiang Yinyue, is of very low comprehensibility and a lot of ambiguity. In Chinese-language, the word Yinxiang usually refers to audio playback equipments, and in less cases, to “abstract sounds”. When being used together with Dianzi (electronic), it usually refers to sounds which has a lot of “electronica flavour” - certainly not what the original English term means.

    I’m sure you’ve seen the problem here even without further analysis.

    For those who’re interested, I’ve uploaded Huang’s paper to our server, you can download and read it here (Word format). It’s written in Chinese.




MusicAcoustica 2006

by Dajuin

All photos are here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/93095554@N00/sets/72157594342449038/




MusicAcoustica ‘06: Opening

by lawrence

CCOM Entrance
Lawrence Li under the billboard at the entrance of Central Conservatory of Music (CCOM), Beijing.

main hall
The foyer of the building where many of the concerts and panel discussions will take place.

Ken Fields

Kenneth Fields, one of the masterminds behind the conference.

Doing interpretation for the the opening speeches of these events in China can be either pain or bliss, depending on your perspective. When the same phrases repeat for the 30th time, you know you are doing machine’s job. It’s good that I somehow found a way to enjoy the mind-boggling challenge of switching between the two contexts and mindsets.

main hall
Prof. Zhang Xiaofu, executive president of MusicAcoustica 2006, Director of CEMC, President of EMAC. No, it’s not that I’m reading a transcript in target language given to me in advance!

Mark Battier
Mark Battier, co-founder of Electroacoustic Music Studies Network.

Opening speakers

The guests and speakers on the open ceremony.

There’s not much to be blogged about the open ceremony, after which we were treated with a mini-workshop-like-concert at the entrance hall by JIN Ping 金平 - a professor and Director of the Theory and Composition Program at the State University of New York at New Paltz, and SUN Xiaohua 孙晓华, currently a PhD candidate in Design and Computation in the Architecture Department at MIT. The two projected video from the ceiling and Sun was playing with a Max/MSP patch presumably written by her, while Jin was briefing about the technique used in the piece.

Jin Ping & Sun Xiaohua
The video was projected from the ceiling, on the table were two Powerbooks (or Macbook Pro) running patches and a Korg keyboard.

Jin Ping & Sun Xiaohua

Max patch of Jin Ping
This is for all you reverse engineering freaks out there. :)

Billboard in Campus
Billboards are everywhere in the campus.

Group photo
Group photo of delegates, known as Quan Jia Fu in Chinese, is of typical Chinese characteristic.

All photos by Dajuin Yao.

I’ve created a photoset of MusicAcoustica ‘06 on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lawrencelry/sets/72157594340959153/

And the Flickr tag for the photos is “musicacoustica06“. Would be great if we all use this tag to group the photos together.

For swag (Stuff We All Get), we have a pen, a notebook, a comprehensive brochure (more on this later), tickets of various concerts, four CDs of works by young Chinese composers, and an introductory leaflet of the Chinese version of Curtis Roads‘ Computer Music Tutorial, which is going to be published next year and is one of the topics of the conference.




MusicAcoustica ‘06: A Quick Update

by lawrence

Curtis Roads couldn’t come because he got no visa because until arriving at the airport, he was not aware of the fact that as an American, you need a visa in order to enter China.

So, no lecture of Roads, his concert will simply be a playback of his works (with video) on a DVD, which is the way he would have performed himself had he made the trip. Btw, it will be the same works as you’ve heard and seen on his Asphodel release Point Line Cloud.

Other couldn’t-make-it guests: Daniel Teruggi, Carl Stone, Bob Gluck……

Anyway, everything starts tomorrow, we’ll keep you posted.




MusicAcoustica ‘06: list of papers

by lawrence

http://dao.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ProposalAbstracts2006

A list of the papers (with abstracts) to be delivered on MusicAcoustica 2006, due Oct 22 - 29 in the Central Conservatory, Beijing. Better known names include Alberto De Campo, Christian Eloy, Kenneth Fields, Bob Gluck, Carl Stone, Daniel Teruggi, and of course Curtis Roads (who’s not included in that list, which consists of only those who will deliver papers, Roads will give concert and lecture). I’m not sure all of them are coming though.

Personally I’m interested in Eric Lyon’s paper titled Do We Still Need “Computer Music”?, abstract from the above page:

Eric Lyon
Music - School of Arts, Histories and Cultures
The University of Manchester
Martin Harris Building
Coupland Street Manchester, M13 9PL
UK
+44 (0)161-275-3246
eric.lyon [at] manchester.ac.uk

Do We Still Need “Computer Music”?

Abstract

The earliest music produced on computer was shaped by severe limitations of the medium, which restricted the practice to a relatively small number of institutions and required constant attention to arduous hardware and software maintenance. In the 1980s standardized hardware and software solutions emerged, and by the early 1990s it had become possible to create music on computer primarily as a tool user, rather than developer/maintainer. This trend accelerated sharply with the advent of laptop performance, and sophisticated music-making is now often done by musicians who have and need little knowledge of the low-level design of these tools.

In the fixed-medium audio art world, there has been an increasing focus on aesthetics of the medium, with hardware and software design relegated to the role of enabler. In some circles “computer music” has acquired the pejorative connotation of being overly focused on technical problems with insufficient concern for the sound quality of the result, in contradistinction to “acousmatic music”. This paper considers whether the practice of computer music has served its purpose, to be superseded by a more traditional division of labor between musical tool users and tool builders, or whether it can still make a unique and vital contribution.

GNO bloggers Lawrence R.Y. Li and Dajuin Yao will participate in one or two panel discussions on terminology and the non-academic new music scene in China. We’ll also be responsible for the consecutive interpretation of some sessions.




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