Salvador Dali on ‘What’s My Line?” via
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Archive for May, 2007
I just came across this interesting project via Alex Ross’ quality blog. I love the idea of turning the sounds around us into some kind of reconstructed music in real-time, but I guess I find the result of this project kinda cheesy, like a backing texture from any run of the mill IDM release.
I’d like a device like this to incorporate some other settings where you can give the machine an idea of the mood you’re in or you’d like to create, the weather conditions and so on. If these were tied to musical and processing factors the device might offer some musical depth and interest, rather than just the one trick pony of turning sounds into music. I think the device would require some additional processing in the form of an Eno style delay chain, or some more advanced slice/verb processing. Whatever the case, the idea of taking the unconsidered sound of our cities and making something out of it is great. If we all became synesthetic for day, and could see all we heard in our cities, we’d all be reaching for our aural shades quicker than you can say synesthetic.
Just put some photos that I took during Fox and Pateras’ rehearsal and show last night up here. Both shows went really well and Anthony got a really great reception for his piece. When you look back at how much effort and organization it took to perform a ten minute work, it can generate a lot of mixed feelings. From my end of things it was at least a week or more of work to pull it all together, and tons time more for Anthony to write the work, copy the parts, etc, etc.
The show was also recorded and broadcast on ABC FM. I’ll be keen to have a listen back to it later and see how the reinforcement came across in the recording with the acoustic sound of the ensemble. I hope some of you were able to make it down, it was a great night and there should be more of it in Melbourne.
