[microsound] microspace upload

[john saylor <js0000@xxxxxxxxx>]

hi

a bit late, but it's in:
Home/projects/microspace/js/nbcao.mp3




# necessity being code alter-otherness
# nbcao.txt
# 2008 feb 10 -> js


1.

this music is a submission to the microspace project organized on the
.microsound email list [http://microsound.org/]. the main project guidelines
were to use the audio files from the 'selected sounds of space' website
[http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/space-audio/sounds/] as source material, and
create something less than five minutes in length.


2.

Sound/Silence (1972 - IE Vol.I)

What can I say other than the music itself?
Music?
Yes, the the ears that dare to hear
That dare to hear
Both the silence and the sound!
Music?
Yes, the silence/sound duality necessity belongness ... Balanced
projection pointless
Cosmo-Nature/natural feeling sensitivity
Dial pointer vibration-intensity indicator
Express image expression need necessity being code alter-otherness conintuance
Coninuance On .. On .. On
The music is in the world of words ON .......

Sun Ra, _Collected_Works_vol._1:_Immeasurable_Equation_, ed. A, Abraham.
Chandler, AZ: Phaelos Books, 2005, p. 174


3.

i had the inspiration that the samples would be played forward and backward and
at different speeds [the particulars chosen more or less at random within some
boundaries] and this would be the background upon which i would place the
foreground of theremin playing [and at various times i thought of adding
organ, but the theremin seemed sufficient].

i was concerned with a few things in making the music:
how do you mix pitched and noisy sounds?
how much randomness in generating the music is too much?
how can i evoke the sound of space?
how is the sound of space different than silence?
how can i play the theremin like the voice of an alien?

and finally:
why don't i practice playing the theremin more often?


4.

"When Theremin provided an instrument with genuinely new possibilities,
Thereministes did their utmost to make the instrument sound like some old
instrument, giving it a sickeningly sweet vibrato, and performing upon it, with
difficulty, masterpieces from the past. Although the instrument is capable of a
wide variety of sound qualities, obtained by the mere turning of a dial,
Thereministes act as censors, giving the public those sounds they think the
public will like. We are shielded from new sound experiences.

The special property of electrical instruments will be to provide complete
control of the overtone structure of tones (as opposed to noises) and to make
these tones available in any frequency, amplitude, and duration."

Cage, John, "the future of music: credo". 10 Feb 2008
<http://www.ele-mental.org/ele_ment/said&did/future_of_music.html>


5.

getting all the samples in the same sound space was a bit of a challenge, since
they had different bit rates, and some were mono and some were stereo. i had to
process the samples with the same profile together, then compress them as oggs
[my choice, any common format would have worked] to combine them. the open
source audio editor audacity was very helpful for this and other tasks.

i wrote a perl program to write the csound score that was used to generate the
background sounds. i am also indebted to the generous programmers who have made
these tools freely available.

when i had finished the music, it clocked in at over thirteen minutes.
i thought
about grabbing an excerpt, but it was hard to know what to pick [and more
importantly, what to leave out]. fortunately, audacity had an effect that
allowed me to 'Change Tempo' without changing pitch.

i ran it, shortening the running time to five minutes. there were
elements of the
music that were lost by this transformation, but somehow, it seemed to me that
this space music would survive the compression ...


6.

released under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License
MD5 (nbcao.mp3) = 0ba83f7deefc1c2f3295a56bb6526031

-- 
\js  [ http://or8.net/~johns/ ]

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: microsound-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
For additional commands, e-mail: microsound-help@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
website: http://www.microsound.org