Category: Reference

Other people’s work and ideas

Sound Notation

0003 Birds in C, Computation, Reference

Reading and Transcribing Sounds

Musical scores are a precise set of actions: play this note, at this speed, at this volume, for this duration, with these other notes. They are read and then played. They are rules for the future, outlining the sounds to be played.

Sonograms (also known as spectrograms) and waveforms exist after the sounds have been played. They are visual artifacts of the sound. Sonograms show the spectrum of frequencies in a sound selection with time along the horizontal axis and frequency along the vertical axis. The colour intensity often represents the amplitude of the individual frequencies. When frequency is shown logarithmically, rather than linearly, the musical and tonal relationships are emphasized.

Scores and sonograms bracket the event of music being produced.

  • A sonogram is a visual analysis of a recording, of sound already played
  • By parsing out notes from the sonogram, I’m going through a translation of played > recorded > parsed > replayed in a new context
  • Using the sonogram to approximate a note and then building it into the composition
  • Bird songs are complex, polyphonic yet the score (In C) is composed of single notes, no chords – monophonic

Experimental Notation Precedents

Robert Moran
Louis Andriessen, Blokken from “Souvenirs d’enfance”
Brian Eno’s graphic notation for Music for Airports, published on the back of the album sleeve
Brian Eno’s graphic notation for Music for Airports, published on the back of the album sleeve
Artist John De Cesare’s rendition of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries”
Gyorgy Ligeti
Konstellationen by Roman Haubenstock Ramati

Week 8 Summary

Glossary, Reference, Weekly Summary

Things I Learned

  • Aleatoric music..is music in which some element of the composition is left to chance, and/or some primary element of a composed work’s realization is left to the determination of its performer(s). (Wikipedia)
  • Sonograms are the predominate visualization of bird songs.
A Fox Sparrow's Breeding Song (Source: The Bird Guide)
A Fox Sparrow’s Breeding Song (Source: The Bird Guide)
  • Ideal 1/4” acrylic vector cut settings for the 60W laser: 8/100/5000 with two passes

References

“The UI and UX will change when the data does. I’m interested in seeing how it will change and what design will look like when it’s optimized for transparency around data and not for minimal efficiency.” –

Caroline Sinders, #tfw your side hustle becomes your main gig

The First Mac OS Control Panel, captured by Dan Vanderkam (https://www3.nd.edu/~jvanderk/sysone/)
The First Mac OS Control Panel, captured by Dan Vanderkam (https://www3.nd.edu/~jvanderk/sysone/)

”It provides a means of recognizing the spatialities of software—not simply linking the screen, register, and algorithm with roads, rooms and runways, but showing how such things in turn transduce each other…”

  • Matthew Fuller, “Foreward” in Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2011.
jazz.computer by Yotam Mann and Sarah Rothberg (http://jazz.computer)
jazz.computer by Yotam Mann and Sarah Rothberg (http://jazz.computer)

”We usually understand and acknowledge that a documentary is a creative treatment of actuality, not a faithful transcription of it…Documentaries marshal evidence and then use it to construct their own perspective or proposal about the world. “

Guest Speakers

Tega Brain, “More Questions Than Answers”

  • When technology fails or works in an unintended way, what does it enable? How can technology be productively inefficient?
  • Being Radiotropic, 2016 questions how we are increasingly orienting ourselves to wireless infrastructures through a series of three wifi routers that “misbehave” or behave eccentrically. One is based on the phases of the moon, another is paired with the lighting and “unlighting” of a candle, and the last responds to the disposition of a house plant.
  • How the “format” of the work, such as a start-up or business, can also be a mode for critical practice (Unfit Bits and Smell Dating).

Luciano Berio

Reference

“A musical work always has an impalpable zone with which we can only come to grips through the mediating influence of works that we have already assimilated. They don’t necessarily have to be works that we identify with, but ones that we draw close to and observe—in other words, love—because they seem more richly impregnated with history than do other works, and because we find ourselves more freely able to invest them with what is perhaps the unrealized best of ourselves, and with a more open expression of our musical unconscious.”

Luciano Berio: Two Interviews (1985), bolding mine

This idea of finding ourselves within the work of others ties back to my earlier post about remixing and the influence of others’ creative work. But it also goes further by arguing that association is a means of identifying ourselves – or getting to know ourselves.

BERG’s Little Printer

Physical Computing, Reference

We’re interested in this idea of ‘the weather’, of the inherent conditions of something. You can think of things having a weather, just as places do, and you usually just have to work with it. If you’re a coder, you have to work with the weather of the Amazon S3 server…We opt to be part of the cultural landscape. We’re obsessed with these ideas of the near future, of the universe next door, by extrapolating peculiar edges

From “Little Printer: A portrait in the nude”, Domus

In an interview with Domus, Jack Schulz of BERG describes the five-year design process for bringing the Little Printer to fruition. Unfortunately the Little Printer is no longer available.

Matt Webb, also of BERG, wrote an early blog post about the idea in 2006. He imagined it as a “social letterbox”, in which other people could print things directly to you, rather than simly emailing or uploading to a shared folder.

All of this points to a very different product from the present-day desktop printer. It could be done today–printer manufactures could bundle social letterbox software with their devices, just as digital camera manufacturers bundle photo management applications. But I think that’d be missing the point: the social interactions change the physical device itself.

Sound and Data

Glossary, Reference, Video + Sound

Sonification

mapping information or data into non-speech sound

Further Reading

stAllio!’s Editing Images with Sound Software Tutorial

stAllio! result from cutting and pasting the data from a bitmap file within a sound editing program
stAllio! result from cutting and pasting the data from a bitmap file within a sound editing program

Shawn Graham, Tutorial on Sonification

Sounds of Science, the Mystique of Sonification

Mark Sample, Notes toward a Deformed Humanities

The deformed work is the end, not the means to the end. The Deformed Humanities is all around us. I’m only giving it a name. Mashups, remixes, fan fiction, they are all made by breaking things, with little regard for preserving the original whole.

Daniel Temkin, Glitch && Human/Computer Interaction

Precedents

Andy Baio’s experiments of converting original MP3s to MIDI, and back again to MP3s

Jordan Hochenbaum and Owen Vallis’s “Weather Report” which translates weather data into sound