EntheoHouse

The listening in class yesterday, specifically the ambient and spiritual house tracks (Enigma's "Sadness" and KLF's "Chill Out"), was very interesting and enjoyable. The class did, however, make me very confused about the distinctions between genres - I never would have thought to classify some of the songs we heard as "house" - and the genre chart we were shown only made this confusion worse. The ambient and spiritual house, songs, for example, sounded extremely similar to general ambient/dance songs I've heard - what's the difference?

Over the past few weeks I've acquired a distinct taste for ambient music, so I thought it would be interesting to compare a couple of these songs to the listening from class and try and draw out the line between the genres. 

First, here is KLF's "Chill Out:"

This song, once the "four to the floor" beat comes in, definitely falls within the house BPM range (probably around 130). Though its natural samples make it distinctly ambient, the electronic sounds and drum machine tie it to its roots in house. 

Next let's look at the music of Entheogenic, a two-man German band and music project that produces ambient/psytrance tracks and which an Australian friend of mine recently introduced me to. Here is one of their songs, "Kashmir Day Trip:"

This song has the same ambient quality and 4/4 meter as the ambient house songs sampled, but is much slower. This track is around 109/110 BPM, placing it outside the normal range for house music and into the straight ambient music category, which is generally slower and can also be divided into sub-genres accordingly. 

Generally, though, I still find it very hard to classify music by sub-genre - the overlap between categories such as these makes it especially confusing. Hopefully by the end of this course I'll be able to tell more easily what defines "Chill Out" and not "Kashmir" as house. In the end though, I don't really care what the genre is - If I like a song I'll listen to it, regardless of its category. 

radiaLoops

For the second assignment in 295b, we were given a short series of four "clicks," and told to make three twenty second dance loops from them using Cycling '74's radiaL software. 

This is what I came up with:

Come Out, Artikulate, and Make Some Animusic

Two experimental pieces shown in class this past week struck me as particularly interesting: "Come Out" and "Artikulation." Both reminded me of youtube videos I keep in my repertoire of "cool clips," and gave me new insight into the musical influences and history of these pieces.

Steve Reich's experimentation with phase shifting, as demonstrated in class by the piece "Come Out," is something that has intrigued me for a while. The ways in which the phase shift technique plays with our perception of sound and music is fascinating - the gradual and deceiving divergence and then re-convergence of a loop, such as the "come out" clip in Reich's piece, creates an auditory illusion as fascinating as the Shepard Tone (see below). This past fall, a friend of mine showed me a video titled, "1 musician, 2 pianos," which is a a performance of another of Reich's experiments with phase shifting title "Piano Phase." Watch it here:

This video is not only a perfect demonstration of Reich's phase shifting technique, but also a showcase of brilliance on the Piano(s). I have played piano since I was 3, but cannot and will never be able to do anything as complex as this. This requires an incredible ability to hear, control tempo, movement, and thought. In other versions of this song, two players on two different pianos perform, or in most cases a computer manipulates the loops. Here one player exhibits an unmatched level of coordination and skill that I envy.

The other piece that caught my attention was Wehinger's score of Ligeti's electronic piece "Artikulation." It was not so much the score itself that interested me, but the concept of visual representation of musical ideas. The interaction between auditory and visual medias, which has become much more advanced with the progress of digital technology, is something that is of great interest to me. Animusic is a company that specializes in the composition of digital media composites, specifically animated representations of original musical creations. Their creativity is unrivaled, their product extremely entertaining. Here is an example: 

Search "animusic" on youtube to view other examples of their work, or visit their website (www.animusic.com). Though infinitely more complex, this way of visualizing music is fundamentally the same as Wehinger's attempt to create a visual score for "Artikulation." The pipe instruments in "Pipe Dreams" not only allow us to see the music being played, but also allow for a form of three-dimensional score, which one could potentially read to recreate. 

These examples highlight the progress we have made in skill, imagination, and articulation of our multimedia desires. 

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Hear the Shepard Tone auditory illusion here:

Assignment 1

Though I spent many frustrating hours in the music lab today working on my first assignment - the "ringtone" - I think I've created a good product. (Listen to Ringtones Below)

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Ring 1 is a twenty-second continuous "soundscape" ringtone that consists of two main parts. The first is a crescendoing set of four time-stretched and reversed clips taken from recorded sounds (glass breaking, girl screaming, etc.). Following this crescendo, the tone transitions into a reiteration of these samples at normal speed and with a more precise rhythm. Ten or twelve additional samples are also added at this point (mixed down into one track) to provide flavor to the work (I used Frequency and Spear to add effects to these tracks - reverse, invert, time-stretch, and pitch-bend). As the tone fades out, the build up and mix will no doubt have already caught the attention of the phone-holder. 

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Ring 2 is another twenty-second ringtone this time created as a loop of a single sample. The sample I chose for this piece was a simple sine police siren (we asked a stopped police officer to sound the siren from her squad car for us). I time-stretched the sample to a three-second clip, a 1:30 clip and a :75 clip, so that I could easily establish rhythm using a 4/4 meter with the three-second clip equaling the whole note. The method proved successful and I am particularly happy with this piece.

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