Thursday, March 27, 2008
Wk 4 forum
Continuing on with the presentations of work done by second and third years, the idea that the composer is obsolete is now firmly established in my mind. The music that students create using technology rarely has any premeditated design...but it sounds fine, and is applicable to the real world..chances are people would pay for a CD of it (gullible fools). So, who needs a composer nowadays when you can grab and sound tech student from uni and tell them to go through a, b and c arbitrary sound manipulating processes to produce an end product. (Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, it could be the natural evolution of music, I mean, I use this same trial and error, do it if it sounds good technique when I am coming up with riffs..).
So, what proof do I have of this phenomenon this week....our friend Freddy was told to make 'sounds' using a guitar (strictly not allowed to 'play' said guitar though). He sequenced and recorded these sounds using software sequencing programs where in real time he was then able to add effects and processing to these 'sounds' (like mass pitch shift, reverb and the such). He made recordings of his output and chose his favourite out of several. This end composition surely is nothing more than the nicest/most interesting sounding out of a collection of potential compositions generated out of the experimental process. But it sounds absolutely awesome, I would not be surprised if I heard it on a TV show, or in a video game, somehow, it has value.
Wk 4 Audio
I could resubmit my experiments with recording acoustic sound from last year but I am boycotting the process on grounds of wanting to learn something new!
Wk 3 Forum looking at other students wonderful creations
Today in forum, we first years got to experience some of the work that the second and third years have done in their time at Adelaide. By the end of the lecture I found myself wondering about composition, their compositions and the value of a composition…and the composer….
Take John for example… I can only really describe his software as a composition generator. He has programmed software to trigger random samples (the random samples mostly consisted of sample tank strings) and made a whole bunch of recordings. Stating that he programmed this software because he likes large tone clusters, I can only assume that his favourite recording out of 20 featured a lot of these along with the standard build and decay present in most music.
Two students on and another piece of software that does similar things…in this instance it was Dave with his ‘self contained sampling unit with on board effects processing unit’. With the samples that Dave loaded in, I can see no value in this thing at all. Potentially, with different samples, the resulting ‘music’ might be more, uh, musical, at any rate, the end result is a product of chance and whimsy.
So, what value can a piece composed in this manner could possibly have? If the end result hasn’t been premeditated in some way, if you just land on it by chance, can it still claim legitimacy as a composition and value as a piece of music?
Wk 3 Audio studio 2
Still behind, haven't actually done anything. This lecture did provide one invaluable piece of info....the engineer that can be bothered to listen to what's coming through the cans is the engineer who is a step above the rest. An artist's performance can be made and broken depending on the vibe they are getting from their situation, a good headphone mix is a crucial part of the puzzle. At this point in my recording career, I have only ever listened to the head phone mix through the monitors, always adjusting the levels of the incoming instrument to be balanced or slightly louder and asking the musician for feed back. So, it's really time I learnt to have two or more mixes going, mission for my next recording session.
Blogs - Black Holes of Time just like this one
It seems that by missing forum, I missed nothing of consequence as it consisted of two hours conversing on the subject of ....BLOGS
So my thoughts on the things? Maybe they are a useful tool for spreading your message, promoting yourself or others, finding like minded people...the online blog provides a free, easy access platform to speak your mind, essentially becoming a virtual soapbox. I am sure there are a slim number of instances where this freedom to speak and distribute your thoughts amongst the growing number of people suffering blogitis (an overwhelming compulsion to vent your woes/joys or blabber your message freely). however, the most widespread use of the blog is meer self glorification.
Most people use them as a kind of online, immensely public journal. Maybe, in a way, this appeals to people because it provides a easy, hit and miss platform to vent and seek counsel with your peers...maybe the perpetrators of these irrelevant online journals are meerly somewhat self obsessive (see the entire emo culture). Whatever, this overl;oad of personal information leads to a generation of people who know their friends better through reading their blogs and personal info than through conversation with them. It also lends itself the the growing practice of voyeurism in our society (ie the slew of reality tv shows bombarding our primetime telly).
In a nutshell, I think that a 2 hour forum on blogs would probably have been a black hole of time just like the blog phenomenon it seeks to discuss.
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