Category Archives: Electroacoustic

musica elettroacustica

Mortuos Plango Vivos Voco

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Jonathan Harvey: “Mortuos Plango Vivos Voco” (1980) for concrete sounds processed by computer.

Born in Warwickshire in 1939, Jonathan Harvey was a chorister at St Michael’s College, Tenbury and later a major music scholar at St John’s College, Cambridge. He gained doctorates from the universities of Glasgow and Cambridge and also studied privately (on the advice of Benjamin Britten) with Erwin Stein and Hans Keller. He was a Harkness Fellow at Princeton (1969-70).

An invitation from Boulez to work at IRCAM in the early 1980s has resulted in eight realisations at the Institute, or for the Ensemble Intercontemporain, including the tape piece Mortuos Plango Vivos Voco, Ritual Melodies for computer-manipulated sounds, and Advaya for cello and live and pre-recorded sounds. Harvey has also composed for most other genres: orchestra (including Madonna of Winter and Spring, Tranquil Abiding and White as Jasmine), chamber (including three String Quartets, Soleil Noir/Chitra, and Death of Light, Light of Death, for instance) as well as works for solo instruments.

analyzed by Pierre Boulez

Marco Stroppa: the video

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After the Marco’s master, I publish here the link to the IRCAM video about his works for solo instrument and chamber electronics.

Here you can find excerpts from …of silence, hist whist and I will not kiss you f.ing flag. You can also see Arshia Cont, the creator of the astonishing score and tempo following software Antescofo.

I already posted this link on Dec. 12 2009, but now I point out again because here the students can see some applications of the systems that Marco described in his lecture.

In any case, the video is very interesting.

Mixtur 2003

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Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Mixtur 2003 (Forward Version)”
for 5 orchestra groups, 4 sine-wave generator players, 4 sound mixers, with 4 ring modulators and sound projectionist

From the Musica Viva Festival
Bavarian Radio Orchestra, Lucas Vis
Recorded January 27, 2008
Muffathalle, Munich

The essential aspect of MIXTUR is, on one hand, the transformation of the familiar orchestra sound into a new, enchanting world of sound. It is an unbelievable experience, for example, to see and hear string players bowing a sustained tone and to simultaneously perceive how this tone slowly moves away from itself in a glissando, the pulse accelerates, and a wonderful timbre spectrum emerges. Orchestra musicians are astonished when they hear the notes they play being modulated timbrally, melodically, rhythmically, and dynamically. All shades of the transitions from tone to noise, noise to chord, from timbre to rhythm and rhythm to pitch come into being from such ring modulations, as if by themselves.

Finest micro-intervals, extreme glissandi and register changes, percussive attacks resulting from normally smooth entrances, complex harmonies (also above single instrumental tones), and many other unheard-of sound events result from this modulation technique and from the variable structuring.

Secondly, the ring modulation adds new overtone- and sub-tone series to the instrumental spectra, which can be clearly heard, especially during sustained sounds in MIXTUR. Such mixtures do not occur in nature or with traditional instruments. Through these mirrored overtone harmonies, one is moved by alien, haunting sensations of beauty, which are completely new in art music.

Only such renewal in how music affects us imbues new techniques with meaning.

— Karlheinz Stockhausen

From ANABlog

Torment of the Metals

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coverThe sound of Akashic Crow’s Nest begins with the use of an image synthesizer which turns very long photographic images into audio output, in the manner of a piano roll. The initial part of composing this music is thus designing the picture. For this latest project, the first audio output is converted to midi and run through a different softsynth, before being subjected to a battery of effects to get to the sounds you hear on this album.

Download from Webbed Hand Records

Excerpt:

Interlace

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The English netlabel INTERLACE devotes to concerts featuring free improvisation, live electronic music, interactive composition, and, of course, a mixture of it all. It is a continuous series of concerts aiming at 3 or 4 times per year.

Excerpts from the Interlace archives: three improvisations from the concert dated 18 July 2009

PLOrk

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The Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) is a visionary new ensemble of laptopists, the first of its size and kind.

Founded in 2005 by Dan Trueman and Perry Cook, PLOrk takes the traditional model of the orchestra and reinvents it for the 21st century; each laptopist performs with a laptop and custom designed hemispherical speaker that emulates the way traditional orchestral instruments cast their sound in space. Wireless networking and video augment the familiar role of the conductor, suggesting unprecedented ways of organizing large ensembles.

In 2008, Trueman and Cook were awarded a major grant from the MacArthur Foundation to support further PLOrk developments. Performers and composers who have worked with PLOrk include Zakir Hussain, Pauline Oliveros, Matmos, So Percussion, the American Composers Orchestra, and others. In its still short lifetime, PLOrk has performed widely (presented by Carnegie Hall, the Northwestern Spring Festival in Chicago, the American Academy of Sciences in DC, the Kitchen (NYC) and others) and has inspired the formation of laptop orchestras across the world, from Oslo to Bangkok.

“Connectome” Performed by the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) (Director Jeff Snyder), PLOrk[10] concert, May 3 2017 Composition: Mike Mulshine Neuron model audio synthesis: Jeff Snyder and Aatish Bhatia Projection: Drew Wallace

Other multimedia materials here.

140 chars of music

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A twitter. An SMS. That’s the challenge. Writing a piece of electronic digital music using only 140 chars of code.

It started as a curious project, when live coding enthusiast and Toplap member Dan Stowell started tweeting tiny snippets of musical code using SuperCollider. Pleasantly surprised by the reaction, and “not wanting this stuff to vanish into the ether” he has recently collated the best pieces into a special download for The Wire‘s online readership here.

Of course, to satisfy such a constraint, you need a very compact programming language and SuperCollider is the best choice (see also here). It is an environment and programming language for real time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition. It provides an interpreted object-oriented language which functions as a network client to a state of the art, realtime sound synthesis server.

SuperCollider was written by James McCartney over a period of many years, and is now an open source (GPL) project maintained and developed by various people. It is used by musicians, scientists and artists working with sound. For some background, see SuperCollider described by Wikipedia.

You can listen to all the pieces or download the whole album on this page and also look at the code snippets here. Note that many of these pieces are actually generative, so if you have a working SuperCollider environment and re-run the source code you get a new (i.e. slightly different) piece of music.

Some excerpts:

The artists notes are here.

Construction in Space

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“Construction in Space” (2000) by Olga Neuwirth for 4 orchestra groups, 4 solists and live electronics.

Anthèmes 2

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Anthèmes 2 (1997), by Pierre Boulez, has evolved from Anthèmes, a substantially shorter piece for solo violin.

Andrew Gerzso has for many years been the composer’s chief collaborator on works involving live electronics and the two men regularly discuss their work together. He describes the way in which all the nuances in this nucleus of works were examined in the studio in order to find out which elements could be electronically processed and differentiated. As a result, the process of expanding these works is based not only on abstract structural considerations (such as the questions as to how it may be possible to use electronic procedures to spatialize and to merge or separate specific complexes of sound),but also on concrete considerations bound up with performing practice: in a word, on the way in which the instrument’s technical possibilities may be developed along figurative lines.

As a result, Anthèmes 2 provides us with both an analysis and an interpretation of Anthèmes: it is a text in its own right and the same time a sub-text of the earlier piece.

[notes from the CD]

Speaking of Music: Pierre Boulez

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February 16, 1986.

Charles Amirkhanian interviews Pierre Boulez and Andrew Gerzso as part of the Speaking of Music series. Boulez discusses the pros and cons of microtonal music, spatial music, as well as delving into the technical details of his latest work, “Répons”.

From Internet Archive