Acoustic Botany, by David Benqué, extracts Synthetic Biology and Genetic Engineering from the usual context of health care, food and environment and examines instead the role they could play in the sphere of culture and entertainment.
via [we make money not art]
BBC Four spoiled its audience recently with a collection of brilliant music documentaries that underline the impact technology, namely the synthesizer, had on popular and academic music in Britain.
via [silent listening]
Julian Treasure asks us to pay attention to the sounds that surround us.
via [silent sound]
What is Burial’s music ‘about’? What does it ‘do’? Come to think of it, what is his music? What does it mean? Of course, all of this is up to the listener’s imagination, but for a while now there’s been a certain degree of consensus on the answers to these questions: Burial ‘mourns the death of rave’, his music is (to paraphrase a handful of commentators) a ‘plaintive echo from a bygone era of collective energy’, ‘a melancholy, ghostly memory of the faded promise of rave, drenched in weathering and mired in urban decay’.
Interesting post about Burial and his music at Rouge’s Foam Blog.
Bobby McFerrin demonstrates the universal power of music – especially the power of the fifths ;) The audience knows exactly how to follow McFerrin’s jumps…
John Piscitello explains the physics behind it:
The major pentatonic scale is formed by taking the 5 “fifths” in succession. If you start on C, you get the notes C, G, D, A, and E. Put those into a single octave and you get the scale of C, D, E, G, A. (In solfege, this is “Do, So, Re, La, Mi”, rearranged to “Do, Re, Mi, So, La”).
These “fifths” are formed by a fundamental ratio in nature of 3:2. (If middle C rings at 291 Hz, then the fifth above it, a G, rings at 392 Hz). The notes’ waveforms will literally line up in space.
That lining up is felt in our bodies. That’s why the audience can sing those notes.
It’s also choirs will nearly always go out of tune only on the 2 notes *not* in the pentatonic scale – in C major, that’s F and B (or Fa and Ti).
via [filmcomposerblog]
Metastasis is an orchestral work by Iannis Xenakis, a Greek composer.
“Metastasis was inspired by Einstein’s view of time (a function of matter & energy) and structured on mathematical ideas by Xenakis’s colleague Le Corbusier. The 1st and 3rd movements don’t have a melodic theme to hold them together, but rather depend on the strength of this conceptualization of time. The 2nd movement does have some sort of melodic element. A fragment of a 12-tone row is used, with durations based on the Fibonacci sequence (1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34…) ”
via [Twitter - Richard Devine]
“Phono/Graph” by Ed Davenport
“Two vinyl record players are adapted to create a machine capable of ‘drawing’ the sound of a record as it is played.
One turntable plays a standard 12inch vinyl and sends a signal to another turntable, which uses a vibration unit to make the whole thing shake in time to the music.
A pen replaces a needle on this vibrating turntable, allowing a pattern to be tracked onto a paper circle, which can be removed and examined. See the result below.”
[Via vvork]
