futureMusic1
I wish my scrap/note viewer was online so I could go through the older things I've written on this, but no matter. It'll be up soon enough.
Writing in a word processor is infinitely inferior to writing on scraps of paper. I guess I have the option to link to other things I've been thinking of, with immediate access to those things in this format. That's pretty useful. I'm writing these while waiting for flash files to upload to the Apex server.
I've been listening to Jay's albums lately. Before this I was listening to Cousins a lot. It's nice to start appreciating rock music again. Perhaps part of the reason I'm struggling to write my essay on experimental music and its direction is a result of disenfranchisement... Learning vocab for the GRE is really fun. Maybe because I'm not planning on taking the GRE anytime soon. But seeing words that I've read and comprehended in context laid bare like that is really fun. It's like learning a foreign language but much easier.
The future of music project that Brandon and I are working on seems to be indefinitely delayed. He's working out some new content and I'm really trying to get over the writer's block. It's difficult presenting an essay alongside Brandon.
A few things I've already been working on are:
Q. Why try to make music in the first place (I am by no means a musician)
A. I felt like I had a special view of the unexplored regions of music. I felt it was my duty to recreate what I could see, not unlike an English explorer sketching a rhinoscerous to show to his countrymen.
Q. What did I see?
A. Well my album does a pretty good job of showing what I could see. Maximalist music. Music made of sampled sounds. One of the unrealized ideas I had was to create a program that would take microsamples (microsound is a term I learned while researching for this essay - see Horacio Vaggione), analyze them to find their dominant tone, then rearrange them according to whatever midi file was inputted. IF this is made, there can be NO pitch readjustment, that would just sound like meowing cats singing christmas carols. i appreciate this, but i am trying to do something else. these would be sounds taken directly from the real world and rearranged by a computer program. i would like to hear BACH this way. oh i also forgot that an optional function of this program would be to take long samples (entire songs, for example) and cut them into tiny chunks. see:
Q. What else?
A. There is a reason the catchiest song is always somewhere in the middle of an album. It serves a good purpose: you can place your difficult songs at the beginning so people have to listen to them, perhaps furthering their sensibilities over time. I'm not sure what goes after the best song. Maybe songs to help you get over the excitement from climaxing so hard. Or the crappy songs you think are good but no one else does.
Q. What else?
A. I wanted to make music that sounded like DearRaindrop paintings. Or that would accompany their videos. Lookie here.
Q. What does that mean?
A. Collage music that is so frenzied that it vibrates manicly (how the hell do you say that) into itself. The whole no longer bears any resemblance to the parts taken by themselves, examined individually. I just turned the font size on my browser way up. Welcome to the beginning of 'the golden years.' I found out recently that periods fall inside quotation marks becuase they kept falling off the ends of sentences in the days of printing presses. The quotation marks actually held the periods in place.
But you still catch pieces of the original sounds here and there. If you concentrate you can hear all the really loud ones or something. Next time you can hear all the midrange tones. Maybe you try to hear all the voices. I don't know. But there is pretty much no way that you can hear everything all at once. It overwhelms you, you have to listen passively as microsounds that you may or may not recognize melt your brain. Now I had to turn down the brightness on my screen. I guess that's a good thing.
I'm looking forward to the day when the following happens: desktop computers, which are the computers that you leave at home but which are very powerful, will shrink to the size of laptops, and laptops, which are the wimpier computers you carry with you, will shrink to the size of cellular phones. The cell phone sized computer will have a very big screen (maybe some sort of oakley visor thing) and typing on it will be very easy (this is impossible to explain without a sketch, but there are ways to do this without some sort of laser projection thing). The laser projection idea is nice but I can't imagine it works very well. How are you supposed to type on it if BY TYPING ON IT you block the laser? Also what if there's no level surface?
It would be really amazing to use jingles and pop songs and bottles crashing - sounds that pretty much everyone in the USA recognizes. To play with the collective consciousness a little bit. To turn it back on itself. Dearraindrop is really good at that. Their paintings are full of pop, but they're a bit different, kind of fucked up. It's nice to see how Captain America looks in Joe's memory.
But I think this is confusing. I'm not very interested in trying to show what the sound of a bottle shattering sounds like in my mind. That would be amazing, maybe a future project. It's pretty hard to create super-complex sounds from scratch. And, if I was to start with a recording of a bottle shattering, that would probably affect my memory.
I might be able to synthesize it. I'd try to replicate the gestalt that I hear when I remember a bottle shattering. Start with white noise, put a dynamic high pass filter on it. The rest would be experimentation. I tried to do something like this in the album, actually.
Q. What was that?
A. Well a few things, to tell the truth. First I tried to create an artifact - a recording of two machines having a conversation. That's towards the end of the album. I think a million people have done this, but it was fun. I tried to make a bunch of fake recordings. I tried to make a fake recording of an airplane flight. I tried to make one of a car ride. In that one I took an old recording of the radio that I'd done with a digital voice recorder and chopped into pieces. Made the radio announcer say things like "..." I forget. I think i still have that on a minidisk somewhere. Most of the stuff I made is long gone. My hard drive got stolen when we got evicted from the warehouse. I lost everything that I didn't have on my CD or on a minidisk somewhere.
Q.
Writing in a word processor is infinitely inferior to writing on scraps of paper. I guess I have the option to link to other things I've been thinking of, with immediate access to those things in this format. That's pretty useful. I'm writing these while waiting for flash files to upload to the Apex server.
I've been listening to Jay's albums lately. Before this I was listening to Cousins a lot. It's nice to start appreciating rock music again. Perhaps part of the reason I'm struggling to write my essay on experimental music and its direction is a result of disenfranchisement... Learning vocab for the GRE is really fun. Maybe because I'm not planning on taking the GRE anytime soon. But seeing words that I've read and comprehended in context laid bare like that is really fun. It's like learning a foreign language but much easier.
The future of music project that Brandon and I are working on seems to be indefinitely delayed. He's working out some new content and I'm really trying to get over the writer's block. It's difficult presenting an essay alongside Brandon.
A few things I've already been working on are:
Q. Why try to make music in the first place (I am by no means a musician)
A. I felt like I had a special view of the unexplored regions of music. I felt it was my duty to recreate what I could see, not unlike an English explorer sketching a rhinoscerous to show to his countrymen.
Q. What did I see?
A. Well my album does a pretty good job of showing what I could see. Maximalist music. Music made of sampled sounds. One of the unrealized ideas I had was to create a program that would take microsamples (microsound is a term I learned while researching for this essay - see Horacio Vaggione), analyze them to find their dominant tone, then rearrange them according to whatever midi file was inputted. IF this is made, there can be NO pitch readjustment, that would just sound like meowing cats singing christmas carols. i appreciate this, but i am trying to do something else. these would be sounds taken directly from the real world and rearranged by a computer program. i would like to hear BACH this way. oh i also forgot that an optional function of this program would be to take long samples (entire songs, for example) and cut them into tiny chunks. see:
Q. What else?
A. There is a reason the catchiest song is always somewhere in the middle of an album. It serves a good purpose: you can place your difficult songs at the beginning so people have to listen to them, perhaps furthering their sensibilities over time. I'm not sure what goes after the best song. Maybe songs to help you get over the excitement from climaxing so hard. Or the crappy songs you think are good but no one else does.
Q. What else?
A. I wanted to make music that sounded like DearRaindrop paintings. Or that would accompany their videos. Lookie here.
Q. What does that mean?
A. Collage music that is so frenzied that it vibrates manicly (how the hell do you say that) into itself. The whole no longer bears any resemblance to the parts taken by themselves, examined individually. I just turned the font size on my browser way up. Welcome to the beginning of 'the golden years.' I found out recently that periods fall inside quotation marks becuase they kept falling off the ends of sentences in the days of printing presses. The quotation marks actually held the periods in place.
But you still catch pieces of the original sounds here and there. If you concentrate you can hear all the really loud ones or something. Next time you can hear all the midrange tones. Maybe you try to hear all the voices. I don't know. But there is pretty much no way that you can hear everything all at once. It overwhelms you, you have to listen passively as microsounds that you may or may not recognize melt your brain. Now I had to turn down the brightness on my screen. I guess that's a good thing.
I'm looking forward to the day when the following happens: desktop computers, which are the computers that you leave at home but which are very powerful, will shrink to the size of laptops, and laptops, which are the wimpier computers you carry with you, will shrink to the size of cellular phones. The cell phone sized computer will have a very big screen (maybe some sort of oakley visor thing) and typing on it will be very easy (this is impossible to explain without a sketch, but there are ways to do this without some sort of laser projection thing). The laser projection idea is nice but I can't imagine it works very well. How are you supposed to type on it if BY TYPING ON IT you block the laser? Also what if there's no level surface?
It would be really amazing to use jingles and pop songs and bottles crashing - sounds that pretty much everyone in the USA recognizes. To play with the collective consciousness a little bit. To turn it back on itself. Dearraindrop is really good at that. Their paintings are full of pop, but they're a bit different, kind of fucked up. It's nice to see how Captain America looks in Joe's memory.
But I think this is confusing. I'm not very interested in trying to show what the sound of a bottle shattering sounds like in my mind. That would be amazing, maybe a future project. It's pretty hard to create super-complex sounds from scratch. And, if I was to start with a recording of a bottle shattering, that would probably affect my memory.
I might be able to synthesize it. I'd try to replicate the gestalt that I hear when I remember a bottle shattering. Start with white noise, put a dynamic high pass filter on it. The rest would be experimentation. I tried to do something like this in the album, actually.
Q. What was that?
A. Well a few things, to tell the truth. First I tried to create an artifact - a recording of two machines having a conversation. That's towards the end of the album. I think a million people have done this, but it was fun. I tried to make a bunch of fake recordings. I tried to make a fake recording of an airplane flight. I tried to make one of a car ride. In that one I took an old recording of the radio that I'd done with a digital voice recorder and chopped into pieces. Made the radio announcer say things like "..." I forget. I think i still have that on a minidisk somewhere. Most of the stuff I made is long gone. My hard drive got stolen when we got evicted from the warehouse. I lost everything that I didn't have on my CD or on a minidisk somewhere.
Q.