nice thread idea dan.i've always been interested in this kind of thing and probably even ended up doing a degree in ethnomusicology because of it:)
i'm 32, so i was basically in my 'formative' years in the late seventies and early eighties. i was obsessed with the first star wars film. i've been told that i would watch it every day - i don't remember but i certainly knew the whole film, all the dialogue and music from beginning to end. but in addition to the dialogue, i knew every sound effect. i was obsessed with the sound design. the sounds were like melodies or hooks. i could remember them so well. in my head, just like a song.
sci-fi cinematic sound design always seemed very musical to me. when i discovered techno and glitch later on, i thought 'oh yeah! here's a music made from these sounds.' it was a huge revelation. the music itself sounded like the hypothetical, imagined computers, environments and technology of the future. or rather 'a' future. a kind of musique concrete, fabricated from the sounds of machines that only existed in hollywood sci-fi masterpieces.
if you want to hear what i mean, just check the opening sequence of 1979's alien, when the onboard computer 'mother' is awakened. that sound design for that sequence was probably made in 1978 and would have no problem being released as 'legitimate' microsound today. it sounds just as modern, just as relevant. and here it was, the most cutting edge and experimental of 'music' embedded or disguised within a mainstream hollywood film. but no one thought of it as music. there are countless examples.
that's what did it for me. you take those sounds and structure them into an aural narrative and you have music.
graham. On 18-Oct-08, at 8:53 PM, Dan Friedman wrote:
So I've just recently gotten back into making music after a 5 yearhiatus of professional software development work. I'm using Csound much more seriously than I ever did before (I've been more of a free/ jazz sax player in the past), so I figured it wouldn't hurt to pick up the Csoundbook. In particular, I'm currently reading Kim Cascone's chapter on"recontextualizing Ambient Music in Csound", and found the descriptionsof formative childhood electronic music exposure resonated with me strongly.Although it's taken me a long time to realize how important synthesizedmusic is to me--I'm only just coming "back" to it now after years ofimprovisational sax playing, instrumental composition, folk singing, and most recently, 5 years of very little musical output--it really has beenwith me "all along"; when I was a kid in the 70s, I used to listen to this crazy old LP my dad had of 1960s Stanford music lab stuff: Ilhan Mimaroglu, Tzvi Avni, and others. Sure, there was plenty of Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot in his collection too, to which I also devoted a fair amount of listening time, but I kept inexplicablybeing drawn back to this weird, wild, and yet somehow totally compelling album of electroacoustic music (for reference, it was "Electronic Music"on Turnabout, fourth album listed at http://www.gardenofearthlydelights.com/Electronica.html). I'm curious if anybody else has childhood formative 'microsound' experiences that they'd like to share. Anybody got a good story? What would you look back on now and point to as your earliest 'microsonic'experience? What, from your early life, made you interested in doing thesonic work you're doing now? Dan --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: microsound-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx For additional commands, e-mail: microsound-help@xxxxxxxxxxxxx website: http://www.microsound.org
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