Re: [microsound] two very important questions

[jake elliott <racter@xxxxxxxxx>]

i'd lke to talk a bit about a project i'm working on right now in
relation to this train of inquiry, and hope that its relevance
outweighs its promotion.

the project is http://structuredsound.net/popsketchseries/

i've taken a set of pop songs and visualized them as line drawings.  a
technical explanation and sourcecode are on the site, but suffice to
say that it's a very simple and shallow visualization of pitch+volume
from midi files.

the output, however, is very complex and has been very pleasing to me.
 principally, what i notice is that the resulting drawings oscillate
between childlike doodles and very regimented, geometric graphs.

the software has effectively divorced these songs from most of their
content - and, i would argue, from the content they bear by which we
actually define them.  i'm not just talking about lyrical content, but
textural and semiotic content (non-verbal references to popular
forms+products).

the visualization or inter-media remixing of these songs, then,
discards those "markers" and "codes" that were present in the original
recordings.  to retrieve these objects as political objects, i've had
to frame them specifically in relation to the original recordings'
existence as "markers" and "codes."  i've tried to capture some of
what might be called the "dishonesty" of this process in my statement
about the work.

on a related and projective note, i think it would be interesting to
see more work using recordings (audio or midi) of popular music
literally as "codes for behavior" - ie instruction sets - just as in
this work i have quite simply translated musical objects into a set of
angles and distances that might as well have been drawn in pencil as
pixel.

sorry if this doesn't address the questions head-on!

enjoying the discussion,
jake

On 4/13/05, Kim Cascone <kim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> - How do musical recordings function as markers of power and codes for
> regimenting behavior?
> 
> - Can we sample/alter those recordings to create
> alternative musical narratives and different codes?
> 
> I would love to see a microsound TWiki text project develop around
> these two questions...any takers?
> 
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