Saturn is a source of intense radio emissions, which have been monitored by the Cassini spacecraft. The radio waves are closely related to the auroras near the poles of the planet. These auroras are similar to Earth’s northern and southern lights. This is an audio file of radio emissions from Saturn.

The Cassini spacecraft began detecting these radio emissions in April 2002, when Cassini was 374 million kilometers (234 million miles) from the planet, using the Cassini radio and plasma wave science instrument. The radio and plasma wave instrument has now provided the first high resolution observations of these emissions, showing an amazing array of variations in frequency and time. The complex radio spectrum with rising and falling tones, is very similar to Earth’s auroral radio emissions. These structures indicate that there are numerous small radio sources moving along magnetic field lines threading the auroral region.

Time on this recording has been compressed, so that 73 seconds corresponds to 27 minutes. Since the frequencies of these emissions are well above the audio frequency range, we have shifted them downward by a factor of 44.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The radio and plasma wave science team is based at the University of Iowa, Iowa City.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the instrument team’s home page, http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/cassini/.

Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Iowa

• + Play sound of Saturn’s radio emissions, which have changing frequencies

From NASA.gov

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La home page del sito del rumorista inglese Jliat (James Whitehead) è quanto di più pazzesco io abbia mai visto, tuttavia chi riesce a superare lo sbarramento iniziale ci trova dentro ottime cose, come una serie di drones liberamente scaricabili, esempi:

• The Ocean of Infinite Being
• Hilbert’s Hotel

I suoi lavori si collocano sempre agli estremi: nella più assoluta cacofonia o nella quiete più totale. In ogni caso vivono in una immobilità irraggiungibile.

Gli esempi sonori di cui sopra erano tranquilli. Se volete qualcosa di un po’ più noising, andate qui.

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Un po’ di sana aggressione sonora in stile post free jazz europeo non fa mai male. Dalla netlabel Insubordinations, l’ultimo lavoro del gruppo svizzero Diatribes, un duo formato da cyril bondi (drums, percussions) e d’incise (laptop, obects, treatments), attorno ai quali gravitano molti musicisti ospiti.

Diatribes,a strongly libertarian ensemble, began its existence in a Geneva basement in Winter 2004. Their idea was to mix distinct various types and approach of the sounds, in order to develop a malleable musical mass. The instruments merge into the electronics treatments in a primary dance, where construction and deconstruction coexist, and envy and disgust unite. There are no limits in the way of playing, where rhythms, melodies and noise meet sporadically, merging into each other until they are almost forgotten. Free jazz in its approach, acoustic and electronic in its execution, the trio is capable of exploring the minute like the intense.
Initialy a trio with Gaël Riondel on saxophone, diatribes became a polymorphous formation, extending its spectrum with guest musicians such as the guitarist Christian Graf, the electroacoustician Nicolas Sordet, the pianists Jacques Demierre and Johann Bourquenez, the bassist Dragos Tara or the saxophonist Piero SK..

L’intero album è scaricabile qui.

• Diatribes - Tornade
  cyril bondi: drums, percussions - d’incise: laptop, objects - jacques demierre: grand piano - johann bourquenez: grand piano

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“Music,” says Toshio Hosokawa, “is the place where notes and silence meet.” This identifies his aesthetic concept as a genuinely Japanese one. It is found both in Japanese landscape painting and in the music, such as the courtly gagaku, in which audible sound always stands in relation to nonsound, i.e. to silence. In their rhythmic proportions Hosokawa’s compositions are oriented around the breathing methods of Zen meditation, with their very slow breathing in and very slow breathing out: “Each breath contains life and death, death and life.”

Hosokawa Toshio (細川俊夫) è nato nel 1955 a Hiroshima. Ha studiato composizione in Europa, a Berlino e Friburgo con Isang Yong e Klaus Huber.

Di lui conoscevo solo Circulation Ocean per orchestra. Poi ho trovato questi pezzi per fisarmonica e shō (un organo a fiato tipicamente asiatico; esiste in varie fogge dall’India alla Cina; vedi wikipedia).

Alcuni di essi, come quello che potrete ascoltare, derivano da brani tradizionali del Gagaku, altri sono stati composti da Hosokawa, ma tutti sono modellati su un ritmo lentissimo, con i suoni dei due strumenti, quasi sempre nel registro acuto, che diventano praticamente indistinguibili.

• Hosokawa Toshio - banshikisho no choshi

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Chaya Czernowin è una compositrice israeliana nata nel 1957. Vive in Austria.
Vi faccio ascoltare Ina, un buon brano con sonorità particolari, per flauto basso e 6 altri flauti (basso e ottavino) preregistrati.

Ulteriori informazioni su di lei si trovano nella sua pagina presso Schott.

Chaya Czernowin - Ina, per flauto basso e 6 flauti preregistrati

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Barry Truax, Pacific Fanfare (1996).

Pacific Fanfare was composed to mark the 25th anniversary of both the Vancouver New Music Society and the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University. It is comprised of ten soundmarks recorded by the WSP in the Vancouver area either from the early 1970’s or more recently, and thus reflects the changing soundscape of the city. The various sound signals are heard both in their original state, and digitally resonated and time-stretched in order to let them “resonate” in our own memories.

Pacific Fanfare is part of the Islands CD that can be ordered on the author’s site.

Pacific Fanfare (1996) è un breve brano di Barry Truax composto per celebrare il 25° anniversario della Vancouver New Music Society e del World Soundscape Project, di cui abbiamo parlato qualche giorno fa.

È basata su 10 “soundmarks” registrati nell’ambito del WSP vari anni prima (chi ascolta le nostre proposte sonore riconoscerà subito la sirena della nave con cui iniziava “Entrance to the Harbor” nel post di cui sopra.

Il concetto di “soundmarks” è fondamentale nel lavoro del WSP e designa quei suoni che caratterizzano un determinato paesaggio sonoro. Questi suoni riproposti in Pacific Fanfare sia nella loro versione originale che elaborata mediante riduonatori digitali (una riverberazione artificialmente colorata) e time-stretching (allungamento temporate del suono di solito senza alterazione della frequenza).

Il brano è incluso nel CD Islands, acquistabile sul sito dell’autore.

• Barry Truax - Pacific Fanfare (soundscape)
  

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Dopo il video sul potere della scala pentatonica, ecco l’intero intervento di Bobby McFerrin alla conferenza Notes & Neurons. Qui sotto il primo video, in questa pagina gli altri.

Is our response to music hard-wired or culturally determined? Is the reaction to rhythm and melody universal or influenced by environment? Join host John Schaefer, Jamshed Barucha, scientist Daniel Levitin, Professor Lawrence Parsons and musical artist Bobby McFerrin for live performances and cross cultural demonstrations to illustrate music’s note-worthy interaction with the brain and our emotions.

Here is the first part. Click here to see the following videos.
Filmed on June 12, 2009

World Science Festival 2009: Notes & Neurons, Part 1 of 5 from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

Segnalato da Federico

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George Crumb completed the final revisions for Zeitgeist (Six Tableaux for Two Amplified Pianos, Book I) in 1989. The work is approximately twenty-eight minutes in duration. It was commissioned by the Degenhardt-Kent piano duet. The first performance took place at the Charles Ives Festival in Duisburg, Germany in 1988.

After that. the composer reworked the piece to his liking. Like the rest of the Crumb catalog, this work includes enigmatic sounds and titles for the movements, such as “The Realm of Morpheus (” … the inner eye of dreams”).” The extended techniques involves the players reaching into the piano to attack the strings directly in order to achieve specific timbres that would not otherwise be available from without.

Like many of the composer’s earlier works, elements of the work suggest a coherent and exotic belief system or world view in all its eccentricities. Like his Makrokosmos series for amplified piano(s) in the 1970s, the listener is often drawn to the poetic allusions as potential clues to unlocking the arcane secrets of the composer’s mind.

The sound suggests some very concrete ideology or mystic purpose behind his clear yet unique musical formations. Webern had his naturalist Catholicism; Crumb’s point of departure is anybody’s guess. Part of its enduring interest is its lack of posturing. Scriabin, for example, reveled in the role of the eccentric, mystic genius, and played it up. Satie did something similar, though in a more modern and self-stylized way that was grounded in the Rosicrucians. It was less of a romantic cliché than was the hackneyed persona of his Russian peer.

Crumb has all the interior components of a similarly mystical artistic personality but none of the mannerisms or apparent affiliations. He is the anchor of his own spirit, and nothing else resembles his art, with the exception of a plethora of imitators.

When listening to a work such as Zeitgeist, being a world famous artist does not sound preoccupying to the composer. There is compassion to his music that does reflect back upon him as a leader of any wounded aesthetic congregation, as if he does not regard himself as the vital part of an equation consisting of listener, performer, and composer.

Above all, Crumb’s music is American. More precisely, it is nocturnal, pastoral Americana of the highest caliber, revealing a deeply compassionate, inquisitive, and independent imagination. A work such as Zeitgeist does not have more in common with the work of most composers from the United States than it does with the Europeans, with the exception of Charles Ives.

There is little in the scores themselves that verify this connection, but both demonstrate a relationship to the land that is difficult to pin down but easily recognized. Crumb uses fewer indigenous references than Ives, though the Zeitgeist’s fifth movement contains bits of an Appalachian folk song. It could be said that both composers felt less bound to music history than other composers; neither man sounds determined to either break with tradition or serve it.

The music simply is, and that is a rare quality. Even if the listener accepts these rather speculative conjectures, questions remain. Why Zeitgeist? What is the deeper meaning of its movements’ individual titles? It is the apparent importance of these questions that proves that the music is engaging. Many listeners are rarely satisfied to know a piece works. The rigor of Boulez’s syntax has everything to do with why the music works, and one can detect what is working by recognizing its nature, if not its particulars. Crumb’s music remains a mystery, a beautiful one, even with repeated listening.
[All Music Guide]

Excerpts: I have already published a post about the 3rd mov. (Monochord) here. Now go listen to the 4th and 6th.

George Crumb - Zeitgeist (Six Tableaux for Two Amplified Pianos, Book I)

• IV: Day of the comet
• VI: Reverberations

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Questo, che a prima vista sembra un pianoforte normale (cliccare l’immagine per ingrandire), è in realtà accordato a 16mi di tono.

Sì. Al posto dei normali 2 semitoni, ci sono 16 suddivisioni. Di conseguenza, fra un Do e un Do#, che di solito sono contigui, qui troviamo ben 7 tasti.

La cosa è evidente ingrandendo (click) l’immagine a destra, in cui si vede chiaramente l’intervallo fra un fa (f) e un fa# (fis).

Questo strumento microtonale è costruito dalla Sauter rifacendosi alle teorie del messicano Julian Carrillo (1875 - 1965) che, nel 1895, iniziò a occuparsi di accordature microtonali. Nel 1925 ideò un sistema di notazione e fondò un ensemble che eseguiva brani microtonali insieme a Stokowski, con il quale andò in tour negli anni ‘30.

Nel 1940, dopo aver depositato i brevetti di almeno 15 pianoforti microtonali, contattò la Sauter che gli costruì alcuni prototipi presentati, nel 1958, all’Expo di Bruxelles. Oggi due suoi pianoforti, accordati risp. a 1/3 e 1/16 di tono, si trovano al Conservatorio di Parigi. Altri sono a Nizza e a Mexico City.

Il piano a 1/16 di tono è accordato in modo che l’intervallo di quinta corrisponda a un semitono. Di conseguenza, l’intera tastiera copre circa una ottava, il che è sicuramente un limite. Sarebbe interessante pensare a un gruppo di 6/8 strumenti di questo tipo accordati su ottave diverse (ma mi viene un brivido immaginando la fattura dell’accordatore).

Il suono si può ascoltare in un disco da cui vi presento due estratti. Nel primo è subito evidente la peculiarità dello strumento. Val la pena di raccontare che, quando l’ho ascoltato senza sapere niente, ho subito pensato a un pianoforte elaborato digitalmente e mi sembrava interessante dal punto di vista sonoro. Solo quando ho avuto il disco mi sono reso conto che in realtà era uno strumento naturale. Il secondo, invece, non punta immediatamente sull’effetto sonoro. Alla prima nota, sembra un pianoforte normale, ma, dopo pochi accordi, chi ha un orecchio musicale si chiede cosa diavolo stia accadendo (è un po’ spiazzante, in effetti).

Il disco si intitola The Carrillo 1/16 Tone Piano (edition zeitklang, si trova per es. alla Naxos Music Library o a ClassicsOnline)

• Flammer Ernest Helmuth - Klavierstuck VIII (Martine Joste, pianoforte microtonale)
• Kilchenmann Marc - Vertrautheitsselig Auf Eis (Dominik Blum, pianoforte microtonale)

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The World Soundscape Project (WSP) was established as an educational and research group by R. Murray Schafer at Simon Fraser University during the late 1960s and early 1970s. It grew out of Schafer’s initial attempt to draw attention to the sonic environment through a course in noise pollution, as well as from his personal distaste for the more raucous aspects of Vancouver’s rapidly changing soundscape. This work resulted in two small educational booklets, The New Soundscape and The Book of Noise, plus a compendium of Canadian noise bylaws. However, the negative approach that noise pollution inevitably fosters suggested that a more positive approach had to be found, the first attempt being an extended essay by Schafer (in 1973) called ‘The Music of the Environment’, in which he describes examples of acoustic design, good and bad, drawing largely on examples from literature.

Schafer’s call for the establishment of the WSP was answered by a group of highly motivated young composers and students, and, supported by The Donner Canadian Foundation, the group embarked first on a detailed study of the immediate locale, published as The Vancouver Soundscape, and in 1973, on a cross-Canada recording tour by Bruce Davis and Peter Huse, the recordings from which formed the basis of the CBC Ideas radio series Soundscapes of Canada. In 1975, Schafer led a larger group on a European tour that included lectures and workshops in several major cities, and a research project that made detailed investigations of the soundscape of five villages, one in each of Sweden, Germany, Italy, France and Scotland. The tour completed the WSP’s analogue tape library which includes more than 300 tapes recorded in Canada and Europe with a stereo Nagra. The work also produced two publications, a narrative account of the trip called European Sound Diary and a detailed soundscape analysis called Five Village Soundscapes. Schafer’s definitive soundscape text, The Tuning of the World published in 1977 [trad. it. “Il Paesaggio Sonoro”, Ricordi/Unicopli], and Barry Truax’s reference work for acoustic and soundscape terminology, the Handbook for Acoustic Ecology published in 1978, completed the publication phase of the original project.

Excerpts from The Vancouver Soundscape 1973:

• 01 - Ocean Sounds
• 03 - Entrance to the Harbour

The WSP group at SFU, 1973; left to right: R. M. Schafer, Bruce Davis, Peter Huse, Barry Truax, Howard Broomfield

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