Category: Uncategorised

Musicking

The essence of music lies not in musical works but in taking part in performance, in social action. Music is thus not so much a noun as a verb, ‘to music’. To music is to take part in any capacity in a musical performance, and the meaning of musicking lies in the relationships that are established between the participants by the performance. Musicking is part of that iconic, gestural process of giving and receiving information about relationships which unites the living world, and it is in fact a ritual by means of which the participants not only learn about, but directly experience, their concepts of how they relate, and how they ought to relate, to other human beings and to the rest of the world. These ideal relationships are often extremely complex, too complex to be articulated in words, but they are articulated effortlessly by the musical performance, enabling the participants to explore, affirm and celebrate them. Musicking is thus as central in importance to our humanness as is taking part in speech acts, and all normally endowed human beings are born capable of taking part in it, not just of understanding the gestures but of making their own.

Psychoacoustics is an interdisciplinary science focusing on the psychological perception of sound. It establishes relationships between objective physical parameters (sound pressure level, frequency, ear anatomy…) and subjective hearing impressions (pleasantness, pitch, perceived volume…).

Different psychoacoustic metrics such as loudness, sharpness, tonality and roughness provide a linear representation of human hearing perception. Each metric measure one specific sound parameter: level for roughness, amount of high-frequency components for sharpness, etc. However human auditory perception is global and takes into account all different parameters according to complex auditory phenomena. It is thus needed to combine the different metrics within a global sound quality estimation to get a good estimation of the human ear perception. It is done with hearing tests following rigorous protocols with a sufficient number of normal-hearing subjects.

The voice is one of the most dynamic instruments that we have access to, our society is based on oral tradition and languages were spoken before written in a lot of my recent music i have been deconstructing how i use my voice in relation to the pieces i have made. I was experimenting with creating ambient drones and new instruments using various pitches of my voice and then running it through multiple FX such as reverb and a bit crusher to change it from a lead vocal into more ambient chords. In going through this process i realised how much my vocals can be manipulated to create almost anything.

Beginning in 1971, Oliveros began designing short programs for each meeting. This was out of necessity: the group had begun to experiment with nonverbal communication, as the scholar Martha Mockus describes in her book on Oliveros. The archived program for the sixth session, dated November 30, 1971, is typical:

1. Mirror
2. Kinetic Awareness—Make your last audible breath a sung tone
3. Circle—Visualize your signature letter by letter slowly. Simultaneously hearing your name. Do this forward, then backwards. (Without sound) See your signature in a selected color. Do these with eyes closed and eyes open.
4. Bowl Gong Meditation. If you lose track of the pitch or want to verify your memory hit the gong again.
5. Walk once around the room as slowly as possible backwards
6. Teach yourself to fly as long as possible

Several of these instructions would develop into the now recognizable text scores from the “Sonic Meditations.” At some point, however, distinctions between musical work and bodywork became blurry. Was Oliveros’s indication to walk “as slowly as possible backwards” an exercise in Kinetic Awareness? Or was it an early version of “Meditation” No. 5 (“Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears”)?

Questions 1 through 5 refer to Figure 2.25.

1. The window shown in Figure 2.25 is called the Edit window.
2. The area labeled A across the top of the window is called the Toolbar.
3. The areas labeled B on the sides of the window are called clip list and track list
4. The buttons labeled C at the top of the window are called Edit Tools .
5. The controls labeled D on the top-right side of the window are called Transport controls.

6. The window shown in Figure 2.26 is called the Mix window.
7. The signal routing controls labeled A at the top of the window are called insert.
8. The signal routing controls labeled B at the top of the window are called send.
9. The signal routing controls labeled C and D in the I/O section are called the selector and the input and output selector, respectively.
10. The control labeled E in the middle of the window is called the automation selector.
11. The slider labeled F toward the bottom of the window is called the volume fader.

Figure 2.26 The Pro Tools window that displays channel strips

Script:

The infinite mirror prison 

A mutant of their dream 

Moulded to their vision 

They see what they see

Stuck in status 

In my cocoon 

Putridly painless 

We Consume 

This Reality 

a preordained  perception 

A fishing net sifting through the void 

Where  spread like an infection 

The physical is slowly destroyed 

Surrender to the noise 

Dare to dream beyond this fleshy husk

Fusion with the metallic 

But even metal rusts 

Dust settles 

This feels too real 

I peel the skin off my eye lids 

Broken Achilles heel 

Can’t get rid of the beast 

harbouring within 

This mouth in my brain 

This bottomless bin 

Feel like I’m shrinking 

this thing grows inside 

Sinking

 paralysed 

Parasitic entity is here to stay 

Replay all the Past memories

Why won’t you go away 

There is no remedy for grief 

As this thief runs  away it’s a piece of innocence 

Floodgate 

A parallel realm 

Transported against my will 

Lost control of the helm 

When i was researching for my radio assessment i wanted to portray a sc-fi radio short, which is what i used to listen to on the radio. The sci fi radio shows have very ambient soundtracks with haunting drones i wanted to replicate the same sound, like a juno synth, and incorporate them into my piece. I was my ow so i decided to write a poem about the internet feasting on our dreams, i recorded it on my phone and then put it into ableton where i put a vocoder on it to make it sound like a robot. I really was intrigued by the copy paste method of plunderphonic genre so i took an extract from Carl Jung talking about dreams and put it over my piece. I am currently struggling to mix this piece as there are a lot of distorted tracks and clashing frequencies so im going to strip it back to find more space.

https://www.holliebuhagiar.com/

Hollie Buhagiar is a multi award-winning Gibraltarian composer based in London, who specialises in crafting bespoke scores for film, TV and Games. She has worked on a plethora of projects for shorts, feature length films and series alongside Grammy and Academy Award winning engineers in the finest studios across London. Graduating from Leeds College of Music with first-class honours in Music production, Hollie continued on to complete a Masters at the National Film and Television School.

Throughout her career she has been hailed for her unique and varied sonic palette as well as her ability to create fascinating scores that approach traditional composition from a new and exciting perspective. Hollie’s experience spans worldwide and includes work for the likes of Amazon, Sky, Channel 4, BFI, NOWNESS, Creative England, Tate, The Guardian, Film London, VICE and BBC. Her projects have received critical acclaim winning various prestigious awards, these include a Porsche Award, a Gold British Arrow and the McLaren Award for Best British Animation, as well as being a two time Unity Awards nominee. She was also honoured with Gibraltar’s first ever Extraordinary Achievement Award for her work in the arts. 

https://viviennegriffin.com/

Born in Dublin and living in London, Vivienne Griffin studied fine art at City University New York supported by a Fulbright Scholarship. Griffin is a recent recipient of an Oram Award, named after legendary producer and electronic musician Daphne Oram, the award celebrates innovation in sound and music.

Vicki Bennet

Since 1991 British artist Vicki Bennett has been working across the field of audio-visual collage, repurposing pre-existing footage to craft audio and video collages with an equally dark and witty take on popular culture. She sees sampling and collage as folk art sourced from the palette of contemporary media and technology, with all of the sharing and cross-referencing incumbent to a populist form.

“Her 30 year catalogue of slicing, splicing and subverting found
sounds and footage comprises albums, films, radio
shows and audiovisual performances that draw
endless connections within popular and unpopular
culture while also constantly overlapping, quoting
and reflecting themselves.”

Plunderphonics

“A music genre in which tracks are constructed by sampling recognizable musical works. The term was coined by composer John Oswald in 1985 in his essay “Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative”,^[1] and eventually explicitly defined in the liner notes of his Grayfolded album. Plunderphonics can be considered a form of sound collage. Oswald has described it as a referential and self-conscious practice which interrogates notions of originality and identity.”

Refernces:

http://www.plunderphonics.com/xhtml/xplunder.html