On things...

Spotify-list: Griffiths Modern Music and After (part 1)

2012-02-16T12:02:00.001+01:00

I'm using Paul Griffiths comprehensive but still concise overview of the history of modern western art music after 1945, Modern Music and After, in one of my courses. This spotify-list is a collection of some of the central works he is discussing. It doesn't include every piece, but it should at least contain one example from every composer mentioned (if available on Spotify). The list is refering to the first part of the 2nd edition of the book (until page 150). The examples should not differ much from the new 3rd edition that was published last year. Since I recently got my copy of the 3rd edition, the next list will refer to this version of the book.

Spotify link to Griffiths Modern Music and After (part 1)

Listening through the noise (on Spotify)

2011-12-31T14:30:00.000+01:00

I'm planning to use Joanna Demers' eminent book Listening Through the Noise - the Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music (Oxford uni press 2010) in a course I'm going to teach this spring at NTNU. The music examples used in the book are exhilerating, and I've compiled this Spotify-list of music examples from the book, based on the Discography, p. 191-193.

Naturally I was not able to find all of the music examples. Some extra tracks I found in Wimp - the Norwegian equvivalent of Spotify: http://wimp.no/playlist/c99ae63e-f5a1-40d4-b63c-25c202a3bd7c

I hope these links can be of help for other readers of the book.

Le lieu unique....

2011-12-23T15:55:00.001+01:00

...is a very nice place to both hang out and work in Nantes, France. Highly reccomended for anyone passing through Pays de la Loire. http://www.lelieuunique.com

The current exhibition in the Grand Atlier: wall art

I spend my days in this café trying to fulfil my writing obligations for the theory of science course I'm following

Detail from Le Lieu Unique exerior. The place used to be a biscuit factory.

Symposium report: Analysis of electronic music

2011-11-16T21:38:00.001+01:00

First I want to say sorry for being a bit long and dull in this post. This is a web version of a report I wrote for my university about the symposium What do we want from analysis of electroacoustic music and how might we get it? at the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre (MTI), Du Montfort University in Leicester on 5th of November 2011. Needless to say: this is for the music tech crowd, geeks and nerds, a selected few academics only.

Meeting Leicester

MTI Research Centre, Du Montfort Uni, Leicester

Even if it has its charm, Leicester is not really among the prettiest of British cities. Concrete has replaced red brick in a slightly too extensive fashion. When industry left the East Midlands, much of the momentum also followed. It's a fairly small, around 300 k-people, and with London only 1½ hour away on the train line, culture does not have the most fertile soil. But it has its roman ruins, a decent football team, and most importantly in this regard: a thriving music technology group.

De Montfort University was established as Leicester School of Art in 1870, later turning into a polytechnic, but retaining a strong humanities department. It got university status in 1992, and serves some 20 000 students. The MTI thus has both a strong technological side and an artistic side - not unlike the MusTech department in Trondheim. The centre was started in 1999 by Andrew Hughill, and currently employs 8 faculty with Leigh Landy and Simon Emmerson being the most prominent. They host the journal Organised Sound, with Landy as editor. They teach approx 150 undergrads and around 30 postgrads/PhDs. Their facilities include several mixing studios, and a quite nice concert hall fully equipped with a 12 (?) channel system. The MTI is not the only Artistic Research-group at the university, but is part of a larger Performance Arts Centre of Excellence. More on what they can brag about on the website.

The symposium

The state and future of analysis is clearly a topic of interest. There were visitors from all over Britain, as well as foreigners travelling from far away places like Greece (escaping the economic and political turmoil?) and Norway (me). Even though it was not advertised widely there had been lots of interest in the symposium, and several people had to be turned away. All in all I guess we were around 50 lucky ones.

The goal of the symposium was not to make a "grand theory of analysis" but to "unify and thus broaden possibilities for communication between the different approaches" (quote Emmerson I think…). Never the less, the symposium can probably be interpreted as an effort of standardization, focusing on common terminology, graphic language and software tools.

Eleven invited speakers from different fields under the wide umbrella of electronic music were given 10 minutes (and only one slide!) each to discuss the problem of analysis from their artistic viewpoint. Then followed an hour of discussion, two project descriptions, and an "un-keynote" sum up by Michael Clarke from Huddersfield. The whole symposium was guided by a strict time keeping Simon Emmerson.

The starting point of was the following paragraph circulated on email before the meeting:

Our subject field has been divided into 9 ‘cliché’ genres (which are a starting point and may themselves be critiqued). Each invited speaker (see below) will have a maximum of 10 minutes to present no more than a single projected slide of bullet points addressing the theme for their genre. [...] The discussion sessions will be devoted to sharing responses and an attempt to delineate commonalities and differences across the field. What do we need? What is missing?

Leigh Landy started with addressing the main theme of the symposium:

What do we want from analysis of electroacoustic music and how might we get it?

which tools/approaches
for which works/genres
for which users
with what intentions?

Then followed presentations from each of the 9 cliché genres

sampling & plunderphonics: Leigh Landy
post-concrète and the acousmatics: John Young & Manuella Blackburn
soundscape: Katharine Norman
real world reference: Panos Amelides
glitch, hacking, failure aesthetics with live post-instrumental (hardware hacking, found and constructed instruments): John Richards & Neal Spowage
sound art, installation and the site-specific: Pete Batchelor
algorithmic and interactive: Owen Green
live instrumental (mixed and live electronics): John Dack
electronica/EDM related: Ben Ramsay

In addition we had two short presentations on audio only computer games by Andrew Hugill and discourse analysis by Simon Atkinson. After the break followed two longer presentations on the OREMA-project and the EAnalysis software. These two presentations were the main focal point of the symposium, so that will be my starting point.

The OREMA project

The OREMA is a web portal and community for analysis of electronic music. Users can submit and discuss analysis of works, and find tools. taxonomy and a toolbox. The portal is still in private beta, but is scheduled for going live in March 2012. The project looks exiting, and the value as a teaching resource looks very promising. The project is lead by Michale Gatt. The website can be found here.

Even though the site is in its build up phase, the analytical toolbox (http://www.orema.dmu.ac.uk/index.php/Toolbox) can already be very useful for teaching purposes. This is actually the first comprehensive list I have seen of commonly used tools and approaches to the analysis of electronic music. Several of the texts are based on the magnificent Ears website, but the great value of the OREMA-approach is that the selection and framing of the tools are directly relevant for musical analysis.

The site also contains a list of helpful software - take special note of the iAnalyze software, which is made for analyzing classical music score (more on that later).

So far the site contains some 20 analyses of 6 electronic works. The analysis of Hugh Le Caines Dripsody (1955) can serve as a good example of the potential of the site. Here three different approaches to the work is included. Note also the bibliography and list of available recordings of the work.

The site is currently written in MediaWiki, but will before the actual launch be ported to Drupal. The Drupal version looks nicer (we got a glimpse of it at the symposium), and I guess it will be easier to maintain. It`ll be exciting to see what can come out of this.

EAnalysis

The second "technical" presentation was the EAnalysis software, developed by Pierre Couprie. The program has its roots in the Acousmographe from GRM, but is more sophisticated and intuitive, drawing on lots of features from Coupers iAnalyse-program. You can easily add and switch between different views (sonogram, waveform, listening score and so on), and make tailor made representations of the music you're analysing. The software is still in closed beta, but will go alpha within the next months. Later iterations of the program will include video.

The potential of the program is vast - for teaching situations and for doing analysis. It’s possible to request beta testing at Coupries website

It is also worth to note Coupries iAnalyse, that can be used for analyzing/demonstrating score based music. This video of Bachs Art of Fugue Contrapunctus 1 gives a good indication of the potential:

For an overview - see:

Notes from the talks:

Leigh Landy (now representing sample based music)
In an analysis of this kind of music you would be interested in

what samples/sources are used
how are they treated
how are they treated legally (stolen/creative commons etc)
are they modified beyond recognition or are they recognizable?
what role do they play in the preformance / composition

He also used the notion "meaningful objects": what do we want to focus on in our analysis. What are the meaningful objects in the sonic stream we are analyzing?

Manuella Blackburn spoke from a composers’ viewpoint on how analyzing your own work or other works can be inspiring for composing. She was stressing how we need a common symbolic graphical language for sound.

The soundscape composer Kathrine Norman talked about how one while analysing a work consisting of natural world sounds need to investigate the meanings and intentions behind the sounds, not just the sonic qualities an sich (forget the sounds, focus on the listening!).

This was backed by Paros Amendas notes on real world reference: Sounds often carry specific meaning, and recalls experience through memory (ie. if you use sounds from the WWII blitz, the sounds signify meaning that reach far beyond the acoustic information). When confronted with this, do we really care for the spectromorphological analysis? In other words we should analyse both the physical signal and the psychological reference.

Peter Bachelor was talking about in sound art, and how you need to compare different approaches to SA with approaches to other media. You need to bear in mind when in the artistic process is the analysis being conducted, and what is there in the piece to be analyzed. Bachelor is looking for a robust integrated multidisciplinary approach encompassing time, space and the social in the study of sound art.

Owen Green was also talking about intentions, onthologies and epistemologies, and, like Landy, "salineces in the sonic stream" (Landys meaningful objects).

Ben Ramsay talked about three approaches often used in analysis of electronic music: reduced listening (Schaeffer), language grid (Emmerson) and Spectromorphology (Smalley).
He also mentioned a blue sky idea: Since space (the placement of a sound object in the "sonic room") is such a significant feature in electronic music, this should also be analyzed. But how can this be done?

Andrew Hughill called, with reference to Dewey ("art is not a thing, but an experience"), for tools also focusing on experience, pleasure and interaction.

As we see, several of the talks touched on topics like intentionality, exogenous reference, sociological context, communities of practice and so on. In the following discussion Bret Battey raised The Big Question: What questions we are trying to answer? Or, what kind of map do we want to make of the music we are studying? (You need different maps for different purposes). So what question we are trying to answer is really the most important question to ask.

This touches the old debate on why we analyze in the first place (three easy answers: to see patterns, to help composition, to help listeners), and if we really want it (can it damage the listening experience?). The main consensus in the symposium was that analysis is a good thing (quite natural given the topic of the symposium), since it helps us to listen. There was also a consensus for increased focus on pleasure, aesthetics and subjectivity - the actual experience of the work. But this is very much difficult to visualize with a spectrogram.

Musical experiments at 11:11, 11.11.11

2011-11-11T11:13:00.000+01:00

When it comes to music I consider myself primarily as a pop-musician/rock guitar player. But I also nourish this strong fascination for ugly sounds. I can hurt my ears with sharp edged noise for hours upon hours. It's fascinating to wear on headphones whilst walking through the city. It's an inspirational backdrop whist working. It's all about opening your ears to the unexpected.

So, sometimes if I get hold of a synthesizer or some exciting software, I make stuff that does not sound nice. To celebrate 11:11, 11.11.11 I give to you two of these experiments. The first one is me fiddeling around with two analog synthesizers, creating a preliminary study for a synth part in my (very much straight forwards rock'n'roll) solo album that I'm never able to finish. The second one is a small idea preformed with my laptop microphone and Max/MSP.

Should I say "hope you like it"? I guess I don't even bother ;-)

Electronic improvisation #2 by Nordic Sound Lab

Phase study #1: Unity by Nordic Sound Lab

Musikkteknologidagene 2011 Conference report

2011-11-03T18:22:00.002+01:00

Rockheim is clearly the new pride of Trondheim, at least when it comes to museums. It's a thrill in interactive and technological communication of history. It embodies so much of the current trends in music technology. So it was a great ide of the organizers to arrange this years Musikkteknologidagene conference here. Is this why it was such a good conference? I don't think it was the only reason.

Rockheim (foto: Rockheim/Geir Mogen)

Before I start, I should say a couple of words about why I'm writing this text. I'm blessed with a bad memory. You've heard the definition of happiness? Bad memory and good health. So at least I'm halfway there. Now, this is a clear disadvantage in my work as a historian. Luckily there are several remedies available. Writing is the most prominent one. I find that taking notes really helps. But I must admit that no matter how many Moleskins i fill up, it's when I write for others that I really activate my mind in way that things might stick. A conference bombards you with impressions. You meet people, hear about exiting research (and some not so exciting), and the brain goes on full power and caffeine. If you're lucky, a good conference will lead to a flurry of great new ideas and perspectives. If you're not so lucky, hopefully you at least visited a cool place and ate some nice food.

Musikkteknologidagene 2011 was in my view a really good conference. Much better than I expected, I have to admit. I probably assumed it would be too much local flavor - nothing bad about that, we need these conferences too. But I was happily surprised to see that the program was packed with interesting people and projects, and that the level of the presentations were very high. It was actually a bit awkward that the conference language was Norwegian, as maybe a third of the participants were not Norwegians. I guess this will change for next year. How many were we? I will guess around 40 - 50 on the most crowded sessions.

As academic fields go, music technology is quite fresh. At the NTNU the Mus-tech people can celebrate it's first decennial this year. This is one of the beautiful things about the filed. You find lots of different people, from senior studio technicians that barely ever touched an academic paper to full fletched academics tweed jacket and all. The majority is doing something along the lines of what's today gaining fame as AR (Artistic Research). This roughly translates: making an in depth artistic study of something, and then writing about it in an academic fashion. Lots of exciting stuff is going on, and I just enjoy listening in.

Some highlights from the program? I don't know - there were many. I only end up doing unjust to the people I don't mention by highlighting examples. The best moment I have to say was Gerhard Stenikes dense but witty recollection of the Subachord story. Great entertainment. Myself, I presented some preliminary findings on the history of the sculpture Ode til lyset by Arnold Haukeland from 1968, that Arne Nordheim made music for. By the way - I'm not pretending that this was a highlight! It was the first presentation of my PhD project, and although I was a bit nervous a couple of months ago that I would have nothing to present (and thus tried to press inn some theoretical points as well), I instead experienced the luxury of having prepared too much material. To be frank I only finished 2/3 of my talk. Lesson learned: stay on only one topic. Just one. I got too ambitious when I wrote the abstract. Classical mistake. Not doing it again (I hope).

The other obvious highlight was the tour of the museum. Man, I could have spent hours up there. This museum must be designed for me - it reflects both my musical upbringing and my current interests. I could see several of the conference participants feeling the same way. Some people were almost crying when they saw that synthesizer or that drum machine. I spent almost an hour looking at photos and videos of Motorpsycho, Seigmen, Turboneger, Jokke, fiddeling with the mixing desk from Nidaros Studio and so on. This photoset from Rockheims flickr-page gives you an idea:

So far I haven't written anything about the concerts. The reason is that I sadly couldn't attend so many of them. A shame really, but that's life when you're breeding a new generation :-)

The first post

2011-10-27T22:52:00.003+02:00

So then. Welcome to the new blog! This is actually my third webhome. The first one was a crappy MSN Space thing back in 2005 (anyone remembering the MSN Space? Oh the horrors). The second was a moderately successful Wordpress blog, that allowed me to play sys-admin on my own site for some years (it's still out there. Should I take it down?). This third one was started because I was fed up with being administrator, having to deal with all the upgrades, the PHP code and the other nerdy stuff. I wanted to start anew. I wanted to get rid of the slag of history (which is a bit ironic, since I'm a historian by training, usually spending my days trying to make people preserve history). I wanted a place where I can just write. Nothing else. It's a bit like buying a new notebook. Wonderful blank pages full of promises of intellectual bravery and poetic twiddle. We'll see how it goes this time.

This is also a place where I will practice writing in English. Being a PhD candidate in the humanities, I'm a writer by trade. But writing is like playing an instrument. You have to do it all the time to keep it up. This is especially true when you´re writing in a language that is not your own. I recently attended a writing seminar where the teacher told us to write freely and spontaneously at least fifteen minutes every day. This would supposedly keep our minds and language in motion, even on days when writing is not on the agenda (like today for instance, a day of valuable research time wasted on administrative issues - well it has to be done). The idea is good. I might not write every day, but I keep filling up my Moleskins with ramblings of various qualities. From now on I will also post some ramblings here.

Finally this is the place where I try to keep track on what I've been doing. Here I'm keeping a fairly updated CV, and I'm in the process of building up some kind of virtual project archive. I won't ask of you to read any of this - it's there mostly for my self. And because it's a Very Modern Thing to do.