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9

Feb

Mixtur 2003

Scritto da:Mauro Graziani @ 2010.02.09.00.10.37 — Archiviato in: Elettroacustica

Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Mixtur 2003 (Forward Version)”
for 5 orchestra groups, 4 sine-wave generator players, 4 sound mixers, with 4 ring modulators and sound projectionist

From the Musica Viva Festival
Bavarian Radio Orchestra, Lucas Vis
Recorded January 27, 2008
Muffathalle, Munich

The essential aspect of MIXTUR is, on one hand, the transformation of the familiar orchestra sound into a new, enchanting world of sound. It is an unbelievable experience, for example, to see and hear string players bowing a sustained tone and to simultaneously perceive how this tone slowly moves away from itself in a glissando, the pulse accelerates, and a wonderful timbre spectrum emerges. Orchestra musicians are astonished when they hear the notes they play being modulated timbrally, melodically, rhythmically, and dynamically. All shades of the transitions from tone to noise, noise to chord, from timbre to rhythm and rhythm to pitch come into being from such ring modulations, as if by themselves.

Finest micro-intervals, extreme glissandi and register changes, percussive attacks resulting from normally smooth entrances, complex harmonies (also above single instrumental tones), and many other unheard-of sound events result from this modulation technique and from the variable structuring.

Secondly, the ring modulation adds new overtone- and sub-tone series to the instrumental spectra, which can be clearly heard, especially during sustained sounds in MIXTUR. Such mixtures do not occur in nature or with traditional instruments. Through these mirrored overtone harmonies, one is moved by alien, haunting sensations of beauty, which are completely new in art music.

Only such renewal in how music affects us imbues new techniques with meaning.

– Karlheinz Stockhausen

From ANABlog

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4

Feb

Torment of the Metals

Scritto da:Mauro Graziani @ 2010.02.04.17.37.53 — Archiviato in: Elettroacustica

coverThe sound of Akashic Crow’s Nest begins with the use of an image synthesizer which turns very long photographic images into audio output, in the manner of a piano roll. The initial part of composing this music is thus designing the picture. For this latest project, the first audio output is converted to midi and run through a different softsynth, before being subjected to a battery of effects to get to the sounds you hear on this album.

Download from Webbed Hand Records

Excerpt:

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1

Feb

Interlace

Scritto da:Mauro Graziani @ 2010.02.01.03.53.32 — Archiviato in: Elettroacustica

logoThe English netlabel INTERLACE devotes to concerts featuring free improvisation, live electronic music, interactive composition, and, of course, a mixture of it all. It is a continuous series of concerts aiming at 3 or 4 times per year.

Excerpts from the Interlace archives: three improvisations from the concert dated 18 July 2009

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21

Jan

Recreating the Philips Pavilion

Scritto da:Mauro Graziani @ 2010.01.21.23.35.16 — Archiviato in: Architettura, Elettroacustica, Multimedia

Prof. Vincenzo Lombardo, from the Department of Computer Science of the University of Turin, and his team have done an extraordinary job of unearthing the secrets of the legendary Philips Pavilion.

In 1958, Philips Industries commissioned Le Corbusier to build their pavilion for the World’s Fair to be a showcase of their technology. Iannis Xenakis was working for Le Corbusier at the time and ended up designing the building as well as writing music for some of the spaces (Concret P.H.).

Le Corbusier designed the visuals for the inside and chose Edgar Varèse to create the music for the main space. It was an extremely complex installation with 350 speakers, all sorts of lights, slide and film projectors, sculpture and more. Xenakis’ music and architecture was heavily based on mathematics, especially hyperbolic paraboloid shapes.

Edgar Varèse worked in Philips new sound studio in Eindhoven with two full-time technicians to create the main musical piece. Le Corbusier worked with his firm to create the visuals.

Now, the virtual recreation by Prof. Lombardo and his team give new life to this legendary space. His site it’s well worth a (long) visit enjoying all the materials archived online.

Philips Pavilion

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6

Jan

PLOrk

Scritto da:Mauro Graziani @ 2010.01.06.00.01.32 — Archiviato in: Elettroacustica

PLOrkThe Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk; click image to enlarge) is a visionary new ensemble of laptopists, the first of its size and kind.

Founded in 2005 by Dan Trueman and Perry Cook, PLOrk takes the traditional model of the orchestra and reinvents it for the 21st century; each laptopist performs with a laptop and custom designed hemispherical speaker that emulates the way traditional orchestral instruments cast their sound in space. Wireless networking and video augment the familiar role of the conductor, suggesting unprecedented ways of organizing large ensembles.

In 2008, Trueman and Cook were awarded a major grant from the MacArthur Foundation to support further PLOrk developments. Performers and composers who have worked with PLOrk include Zakir Hussain, Pauline Oliveros, Matmos, So Percussion, the American Composers Orchestra, and others. In its still short lifetime, PLOrk has performed widely (presented by Carnegie Hall, the Northwestern Spring Festival in Chicago, the American Academy of Sciences in DC, the Kitchen (NYC) and others) and has inspired the formation of laptop orchestras across the world, from Oslo to Bangkok.

Excerpt: Autopoetics I by Ted Coffin: listen to or watch a video

Other multimedia materials here.

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5

Jan

Old School Computer Music

Scritto da:Mauro Graziani @ 2010.01.05.00.01.30 — Archiviato in: Audio, Elettroacustica

Csound BlogDr. Boulanger has put up a wondeful collection of Csound mp3s at Csounds.com.

Download 4csoundCompositions.zip (99.1 MB)

The pack comes with 20 tracks, with everything from ambient to minimal to cheesy techno to synth-generated halloween sound fx.  All of the original source code is included in case you are curious to see what these compositions look like in their original state.

From The Csound Blog

Excerpts:

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12

Dec

hist whist

Scritto da:Mauro Graziani @ 2009.12.12.00.01.57 — Archiviato in: Elettroacustica

An insteresting video (mostly in french) about the making of hist whist for violin and live electronics by Marco Stroppa at IRCAM studio.

Composer and computer scientist, fellow traveler of IRCAM since the beginning of the 1980s, Marco Stroppa is an artist for whom musical invention is inseparable from the exploration of new scientific and technological arenas. His series of works for solo instrument and chamber electronics (including little i, I will not kiss your f.ing flag, and … of silence) offers the opportunity to explore novel methods for projecting sound in the concert hall and renew the computer paradigms that regulate the relationship between the worlds of instrumental and synthesized sounds.

What is the relationship between a poem written by a young ee cummings, the score-following program Antescofo, and a column of loudspeakers placed in the middle of the stage next to the violinist Hae-Sun Kang found in the new work in this series, hist whist (2009).

Click here to start the video.

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10

Dec

140 chars of music

Scritto da:Mauro Graziani @ 2009.12.10.16.06.35 — Archiviato in: Audio, Elettroacustica

A twitter. An SMS. That’s the challenge. Writing a piece of electronic digital music using only 140 chars of code.

It started as a curious project, when live coding enthusiast and Toplap member Dan Stowell started tweeting tiny snippets of musical code using SuperCollider. Pleasantly surprised by the reaction, and “not wanting this stuff to vanish into the ether” he has recently collated the best pieces into a special download for The Wire’s online readership here.

Of course, to satisfy such a constraint, you need a very compact programming language and SuperCollider is the best choice (see also here). It is an environment and programming language for real time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition. It provides an interpreted object-oriented language which functions as a network client to a state of the art, realtime sound synthesis server.

SuperCollider was written by James McCartney over a period of many years, and is now an open source (GPL) project maintained and developed by various people. It is used by musicians, scientists and artists working with sound. For some background, see SuperCollider described by Wikipedia.

You can listen to all the pieces or download the whole album on this page and also look at the code snippets here. Note that many of these pieces are actually generative, so if you have a working SuperCollider environment and re-run the source code you get a new (i.e. slightly different) piece of music.

Some excerpts:

The artists notes are here.

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16

Nov

Construction in Space

Scritto da:Mauro Graziani @ 2009.11.16.10.17.42 — Archiviato in: Elettroacustica

“Construction in Space” (2000) by Olga Neuwirth for 4 orchestra groups, 4 solists and live electronics (excerpt).

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13

Nov

Anthèmes 2

Scritto da:Mauro Graziani @ 2009.11.13.21.37.28 — Archiviato in: Elettroacustica

Anthèmes 2 (1997), by Pierre Boulez, has evolved from Anthèmes, a substantially shorter piece for solo violin.

Andrew Gerzso has for many years been the composer’s chief collaborator on works involving live electronics and the two men regularly discuss their work together. He describes the way in which all the nuances in this nucleus of works were examined in the studio in order to find out which elements could be electronically processed and differentiated. As a result, the process of expanding these works is based not only on abstract structural considerations (such as the questions as to how it may be possible to use electronic procedures to spatialize and to merge or separate specific complexes of sound),but also on concrete considerations bound up with performing practice: in a word, on the way in which the instrument’s technical possibilities may be developed along figurative lines.

As a result, Anthèmes 2 provides us with both an analysis and an interpretation of Anthèmes: it is a text in its own right and the same time a sub-text of the earlier piece.

[notes from the CD]

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