Tape+Loop
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I am sitting in a room
Alvin Lucier, 1969
- Marc Chia (Onemannation/Tara Transitory): Bufferrrbreakkdownnn Arkestra
- Lieven Van Speybroeck: Word in Process
Tactical cut-ups / Mass media manipulation
... when you cut into the present the future leaks out
FROM The Electronic Revolution, 1970
AS A LONG RANGE WEAPON TO SCRAMBLE AND NULLIFY ASSO- CIATIONAL LINES PUT DOWN BY MASS MEDIA
The control of the mass media depends on laying down lines of association. When the lines are cut the associational connections are broken. President Johnson burst into a swank apartment, held three girls at gunpoint, 26 miles north of Saigon yesterday. you can cut the mutter line of the mass media and put the altered mutter line out in the streets with a tape recorder.
Example: Cutting into the BBC
Qaeda Question Quickly Quiet
Rocked by rape
People like us
"Pluderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative"
The precarious commodity in music today is no longer the tune. A fan can recognize a hit from a ten millisecond burst,9 faster than a Fairlight can whistle Dixie. Notes with their rhythm and pitch values are trivial components in the corporate harmonization of cacophony. Few pop musicians can read music with any facility.
An active listener might speed up a piece of music in order to perceive more clearly its macrostructure, or slow it down to hear articulation and detail more precisely. Portions of pieces are juxtaposed for comparison or played simultaneously, tracing "the motifs of the Indian raga Darbar over Senegalese drumming recording in Paris and a background mosaic of frozen moments from an exotic Hollywood orchestration of the 1950's (a sonic texture like a "Mona Lisa" which in close-up, reveals itself to be made up of tiny reproductions of the Taj Mahal."
Piracy or plagiarism of a work occur, according to Milton, "if it is not bettered by the borrower". Stravinsky added the right of possession to Milton's distinction when he said,. "A good composer does not imitate; he steals." An example of this better borrowing is Jim Tenney's "Collage 1" (l961) in which Elvis Presley's hit record "Blue Suede Shoes" (itself borrowed from Carl Perkins) is transformed by means of multi-speed tape recorders and razorblade. In the same way that Pierre Schaeffer found musical potential in his object sonore, which could be, for instance, a footstep, heavy with associations, Tenney took an everyday music and allowed us to hear it differently. At the same time, all that was inherently Elvis radically influenced our perception of Jim's piece.
- Dab, from 1989 Plunderphonics Album
- Michael Jackson and Plunderphonics
(Re) Ordering the archive, Erkki Kurenniemi's Audio Diaries
A taste of granular synthesis
Max Dovey is working on manipulating audio recordings (using Sox and Python) about the limits of time.
The technique of producing new sound waves with microsecond samples is generally termed granular synthesis.
Some tools
- Audacity is a free software program for audio manipulation.
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/manual-1.2/tutorial_basics_1.html
Exercise for after the break
- Option 1: Make a version of I am siting in a room... You may use the instructions as Lucier wrote them, or alter them to fit your situation. Instead of tape, consider how the tool you use (such as Audacity or another digital recorder) influences the result.
- Option 2: Make some raw or treated audio; You may use the Granular synthesis example as a guide. Think about what source you want to treat and why/how (How can your treatment relate to the source in terms of its content, quality, structure or other particular aspect.