Re: [microsound] arranging & the like

[macrosound@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

I like your idea of having visual models to describe sound.  It's not a
new one.  People have been "writing" music for a long time.  What you are
saying is that we can map some minimalist visual art to some music.  I
think we can map just about anything to music (or anything to anything,
for that matter!).

I have been experimenting a lot with using binary files as audio sources.
Binary, as you may know, is very structured.  However, to the human ear it
sounds utterly chaotic.  The changes happen so quickly that there appears
to be no order.  The effect is alienating, but the ear also senses the
alienation as digital.  It's definitely not the sound of a burbling brook,
but the sound of running water is also 'random'.

I think any people crave that feeling of alienation because it makes us
feel human and feel the difference between ourselves and our environment. 
It's almost impossible to go somewhere and be entirely alienated.  We may
travel and see and do things that we've never seen or done before but we
have usually seen other people do them or read about them.

Anyway, that's my little disjointed piece about the relevance of
microsound in our culture.

Peace.

graham wrote:
> this is good stuff! yay - a discussion!
>
> to take things one step further, i'd say the aesthetics at work within the
> microsound movement - in terms of arrangement - are much more prevalent in
> the
> realm of graphic design than that of music per se. a while back i
> mentioned
> last year's mutek logo as one of its best representations: monochromatic,
> geometric, and yet flawed (a chip is missing). and yet, simultaneously
> this
> 'flaw' is still a geometric 'perfection' of sorts - as in: it can be
> described
> mathematically, a vector based graphic. and yet still there's this piece
> missing - we know something is 'wrong' with the picture - a Perfectly
> rendered
> 'wrongness.' anyway, that reminds me of much of this music and much of the
> stuff in the domain of glitch techno. despite all these glitches, there is
> still this 'perfect' mathematical beauty within the shards themselves...
> these
> perfect little vector graphics of sounds, as triangular, as irregular as
> they
> might be... like when things blow up in tron... still not enough
> computation
> power to render chaos convincingly...
>
> still though, the layout, the organization, the irregularity and almost
> perfectly (anally) organized lack of symmetry that prevails in so-called
> hip
> modern graphic design (designers republic, buro destruct, ect) is often a
> template or map for the organized chaos of many microsound pieces. i mean,
> if
> john cage was drawing pictures instead of notation, if miles davis was
> doing
> these things as well, why not assume this kind of graphic design as a sort
> of
> score of sorts - adobe illustrator instead of logic audio! vector graphics
> run
> through the virtual shredder instead of quarter notes and treble clefs...
>
> a perfect example of what i'm on about is the autechre video for
> gantz_graff by
> (the sublime) alex rutterford. amazing stuff that lays it out more
> eloquently
> than any issue of computer music journal could ever hope to.
>
> ultimately there is no difference between any artistic discipline, i
> think.  my
> interests in film, graphic design, sound design in music always come back
> to
> the same (chipped) square.
>
> anyway, forgive the rant - i'm into a few becks and it's time for avant
> mutek
> soon:)
>
> graham
>
> p.s. check this: http://www.beflix.com/index.html
>
> scott allison wrote:
>
>> >Tim,
>> >I've thought about this some.  My observation is that a lot of
>> microsound
>> >sounds the way a lot of minimalist painting looks, in that the
>> arrangement
>> >is not in juggling lots of separate forms, but in creating a surface
>> that
>> >is all of a piece, but constantly changing at the same time.  Like
>> looking
>> >at a wall (brick,painted) - it's all the same thing, but the variety
>> within
>> >that limitation is endless.
>>
>> eM...
>>
>> hehehe...
>>
>> Agree. slowly I have been working on a series called "Various Fields"
>> with
>> the above concept in mind. Stopped for a while on it cause I got tired
>> of
>> computer sounds. But working with more organic acoustic sounds, softer
>> sounds, warmer sounds, seems to fit/reflect the art influcening this
>> project, took me awhile to come to this point.
>>
>> best
>> scott allison
>>
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