Music Tech in the 1950′s vs. Today

The use of music technology was developing in the 1950′s Although the primary medium for making music was still on tape, there were a lot of analog effects similar to technology w use today. Distortion, dynamics, equalization, synthesis, pitch correction, and many other effects were all relevant. Today, we primarily work with a digital medium, allowing music files to be much more adaptable. You can also seemlessly share and stream music. In the 1950′s, editing sound was a much more intricate process, adding effects over tape meant dealing the tape back and performing it with dials in real time. Now we are able to scrub over and draw our effects in our DAW, then visualize and tweak as we please. The cost of tape was also pretty expensive. Creating music with technology required much more risk, where now we can simply hit the “undo” button. 

John Cage Williams Mix

The piece Williams Mix by John Cage is oddly striking. It has a jumbled ominisque vibe which may confuse the listener. Thinking of this piece being played in the time it was created (1952), we can feel the boundaries being pushed on what was conceivable to our ears. John Cage does a remarkable job of creating an avant garde texture with samples of tape and synthesis. John Cage also uses an important variable in his music which wasn’t common for that era; chance. Chance gave Williams Mix life in that the possibilities for the structure of the song were endless. Instead of being bound by counterpoint, phrasing, harmony, and other common musical variable, John Cage is able to explore what is seemingly impossible to recreate. Theres a liberating feeling when listening to the piece because of the uncertainty. The piece is created using tape, consisting of different types of sounds put into categories. The piece of tape are then divided up and played against different tempos. When using this technique the variable chance is expanded in that any sounds can be produced in a moment however are still following a specific guideline. The score for this piece marks the tempos and timing of how to play the tape but is extremely complicated to follow. 

Observing Vladimir Ussachevsky’s “Of Wood And Brass” , Jean Claude Risset’s “Mutations” and Aphex Twin’s “Nannou”

During our Max MSP class we studied a couple electronic pieces. Vladmir Ussachevsy’s “Of Wood And Brass”, was on the more earlier works for the genre. In the piece you can here Vladmir manipulating sounds of instruments, however they have such an unnatural effect that it’s hard to make out exactly what is being played. Vladmir uses several effects to achieve this sound such has distortion, pitch shifting, panning, and sampling. You can hear at times what sound like audio clips which have been reversed or scrubbed through. Theres so much creativity and innovation explored in this piece and demonstrates how technology allows for the freedom of this expression in Vladimir’s art. Then looking into Jean Claude Risset’s “mutations”, we an also see an earlier piece of work from the electronic genre. Jean Claude Risset’s piece calls for more supernatural sounds through his effects. Jean uses synthesis as well as a wide range of effects to achieve his sound. The music has a free shape with clear motives such as large sweeping crescendoes of synths at once to generate seemingly impossible sounds. These sounds convey a powerful message of how our potential is limited when we are not exploring these types of free forms. Jean Claude Risset’s Mutations is very innovative for it’s time in 1969 and helped sculpt what was possible with t=sound and the use of technology. Last we looked at the piece Nannou by Aphex Twin. This piece was more contemporary however involved using a lot less effects compared to the other pieces. In the piece, Aphex uses wind up toys to create sounds, however he clearly is sampling the sounds very specifically in order to create a piece with modern phrase structure. Theres is a more familiar structure to the piece, with movements that are clear to see such as verses and choruses. It seems that Aphex is trying to suggest how technology can still sound very organic and and be placed in the same bracket and expertise as other instrumental musicians, which has always been a struggle for many electronic composers. 

The Role of Technology In Poème Électronique

The piece Poème Électronique is by Edgard Verese. The piece is designed to showcase music by the means of electronics through recording. The recording process used was tape. Noticeably, you can hear the cutting and movement of different recordings together in order to create a new seiries of sounds. Poème Électronique is 8 minutes long and features many different “instruments”. Most of these “instruments” found are not typical instruments. In the beginning of the piece you can hear what appears to be a jack hammer, and some synth like sounds. It seems as if Edgard is trying to break the stereotype of the common art form. While listening to the piece, there is a sense of liberation in destroying the rules that may be associated with music such as counterpoint and harmonic theory. I believe Edgar’s process of using technology is crucial in the outcome of this liberation. The piece makes for a jarring kind of quality, however their seems to be a method to the madness. This method is where Edgard makes the instruments interact with each other, placing the different recordings in time to blend. This method also hints at the piece being a type of poem, where the music is behaving as a conversation between different sounds. The piece was first performed in Brussels, in the Phillips Pavilion. The Phillips Pavilion is shaped like a sharp circus tent. Inside Edgard. In the Pavilion there were around 450 speakers, however since the speakers were hard to toggle based on the technology of the day, an estimate of 350 speakers were used. Also, Edgard used a film compiled of black and white photos to play along with the piece.    

AKAI FORCE

Akai launched an all new piece of gear this year called the AKAI Force. The Force is basically an all in one midi controller. The Akai force comes with 64 launch pads. These launch pads are touch sensitive and are able to play in three different modes. Launch allows you to trigger clips and scenes, Note lets you play notes and chords, and step sequencer turns the pads into a sequencer. This Akai force comes with a fully stocked sound library 10GB and holds 16GB of storage. The Akai Force also has a DAW inside. Not only does it pair perfectly with Ableton, it comes with an editing window which can do everything and more than most stock DAW’s. The screen s touch screen which makes it really simple to edit midland audio files. The Force also comes with studio quality plugins and effects. Not only can you edit midi and audio really quickly, you can do it silently, making it really attractive to a live performer. There’s an arpeggiator as well as 8 synth knobs to change parameters of midi information. The Force comes with 2 GB of RAM. You can save your files as samples or projects. The Akai Force looks to be one of the most advanced midi controllers of 2019. It is a bit of a dime drop, for 1,299 Euros. This means it might not be practical for most people with a DAW and sounds they love, but may attract the performer or producer who wants to get away from the computer and develop a new workflow. 

Roland SP 404

In the midst of my search for the right gear I found myself drawn to the Roland SP 404. Right now, my setup is limited to my MASCHINE MIKRO, laptop, and instruments. The music I typically perform is in a band setting, making garage indie rock, however now I’ve been trying to venture into performance with electronics. I have quite a few lo-fi hip hop and indie tracks which I’d like to perform electronically without accompaniment. I’ve been paying close attention to artists such as Home Shake and King Krule, two major inspirations of mine, who use the Roland samplers in their performance. I’ve also drawn quite a bit of inspiration from JPEGMAFIA and Death Grips, in their outrageous use of samples and am seeing that I can obtain a similar sound using the SP 404.From using the SP 404,  I expect to achieve a different mind set I terms of producing producing music. SP 404 comes with several different filters which can be applied to any sample or track. Some of these include Glitch effects, frequency sweeps, saturation, and other filters that can be applied on the fly during a performance. The SP 404 would allow me to take my lofi tracks and then trigger samples over them. Also I'd be able to play the tracks in real time by recording and looping drum tracks and the quantization on the SP 404 allows you to play all of the loops and samples back in real time. I think it would also give my performances more depth, being that I can throw DJ mixes and filters over the tracks in real time.