Jonathan Savage

As part of our research group at MMU, we were asked to think about some interesting reading which could form the basis for a reading group. My thoughts returned to a paper by my friend and colleague John Bowers – Improvising Machines. You can download it from here.

This paper explores issues related to the improvisation of electro-acoustic music from musicological, aesthetic, practical and technical design standpoints. It contains three chapters. Chapter 1 is a survey of what it means to be an improvising musician. John traces back into musical history and gives his own take on how the performance practice of electro-acoustic musicians has evolved.

Chapter 2 contains an lively account of various musical performances John has given in Ipswich, Stockholm, London and Norwich. He reflects of these through his ethnographic account and draws some interesting issues together at the end of the chapter. This would also be good reading to understand John’s own artistic practices and how these have informed his design principles.

In Chapter 3 John writes about the human-computer interface within his work as an improvising musician. He argues that principles of ethographically-informed design should inform the development of new instruments (tools) for improvisatory practice. The middle part of the chapter is fairly technical but persevere here. Some of the audio accompanying this can be found at http://www.ariada.uea.ac.uk/ariadatexts/ariada4/index4.html for those that are interested.

I believe that John is one of the most interesting and provocative thinkers in respect of musical practices with new technologies. But his paper raises issues for many of us engaged in education. It informs questions such as:

How can the design of educational tools (in the widest sense) be informed by, and built on, processes of ethonographically informed design? and:

Within artistic practices (and I’d included teaching within this), how can an ethonographic approach to the documentation of human/computer interaction help us produce examples of effective practice and facilitate the building of these skills in our own work and those of our students?

I’ll leave it with you to see what you make of it! Happy reading.

I don’t know if you like watching Heroes on BBC2? Anyway, following last night’s episode there was a great feature on how the music for the series has been created. You can find it here (for a week or so) on the BBC iplayer.

The notes which accompany the programme say: “The soundtrack to Heroes has been as distinctive and diverse as the Heroes themselves, and this week Heroes Unmasked joins composers Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman at their studios in Los Angeles to hear how their musical magic is created. Having once been part of Prince’s Revolution, Wendy and Lisa have become highly regarded composers and performers in their own right, and from day one on Heroes they have engineered a sound that is that is both epic and ethereal. In an exclusive interview and behind the scenes access to the process behind their compositions, Wendy and Lisa reveal their inspirations behind the music of the series, and their excitement at being so key to the Heroes team.”

I found it a fascinating account of how, amongst other things, live music and improvisational practices inform compositional choices. It also reminded me how diverse the working practices of professional composers are. There is some great footage here and it is a wonderful teaching resource.

Thanks to Adam for spotting this. Daniel Levitin has published a new book this year. The World in Six Songs looks really interesting and I’m looking forward to receiving my copy from Amazon in due course. In the meantime, I’ve read a couple of interesting and critical reviews. This one, from the Science Blog, was helpful; as was this one, from the New York Times. For those of you that are wondering what the six songs are all about, this short quote will give you a taster as to structure of Levitin’s book:

Through a process of co-evolution of brains and music, through the structures throughout our cortex and neocortex, from our brain stem to the prefrontal cortex, from the limbic system to the cerebellum, music uniquely insinuates itself into our heads. It does this in six distinctive ways, each of them with their own evolutionary basis…

Each of the six distinctive ways receives a chapter within the book. Intrigued? I was.

We always used to plug Finale Notepad as a free and well-equipped music notation software package. Unfortunately, Make Music have decided to charge for this product (only $9.95 though). So, what are the freeware alternatives that could be used on either Macs or PCs. One good looking alternative is MuseScore. This was mentioned recently on MusTech.net and there is a good review there. There is also a good comparison between Notepad and MuseScore here by David Bolton. So, thankfully, there are still open source solutions for a world dominated by Sibelius and Finale.

Unfortunately, there is no Mac install package, so you’ll have to revert to the Linux version at the moment.

My wife found me this excellent book about music and the brain by Daniel Levitin. Levitin was a record producter and musician who now works as a neuroscientist. It is a fascinating account of how your brain responds to music, as a ‘passive’ (wrong term) listener or active performer or composer.

There are numerous points of departure for the music educator and perhaps I’ll follow up a few of them in future posts. One chapter (Chapter 7) about musical talent and expertise caught my eye. It reminded me of the very well established research findings about how long it takes to become an ‘expert’ musician (or professional sportsman, writer, chess player or even master criminal!). The answer is 10,000 hours over ten years (that’s approximately 3 hours practice a day) as early as possible in one’s life. Levitin explores this notion (both arguments for and against) and provides some interesting evidence about memory and how it is formed in the early periods of one’s life. Fascinating stuff.

This looks fantastic! A Korg MS10 synthesiser on the Nintendo DS. Thanks to the Music Thing for highlighting this one. It has two synth engines, a drum machine and a six track sequence. Welcome to stylus music! Perhaps that should be stylus music version 2 for those of you that remember the orginal stylophone?

Anyway, watch this video and be in awe …

My good friend Jason and I have been co-writing a Year 7 unit of work on sound poetry for a major music technology company. It has been great fun learning about a new musical practice (for me at least) and exploring some of the history of this innovative art form. Whilst we were collaborating on resources, Jason reminded me about the great UbuWeb site. In particular the collection of sound files found here is truly staggering and represents a fantastic resource for any musicians or educators interested in experimental music (of all types). This is what the UbuWeb people say about it:

Originally focusing on Sound Poetry proper, UbuWeb’s Sound section has grown to encompass all types of sound art, historical and contemporary. Beginning with pioneers such as Guillaume Apollinaire reading his “Calligrammes” in 1913, and proceeding to current practitioners such as Vito Acconci or Kristin Oppenheim, UbuWeb Sound surveys the entire 20th century and beyond. Categories include Dadaism, Futurism, early 20th century literary experiments, musique concrete, electronic music, Fluxus, Beat sound works, minimalist and process works, performance art, plunderphonics and sampling, and digital glitch works, to name just a few. As the practices of sound art continue to evolve, categories become increasingly irrelevant, a fact UbuWeb embraces. Hence, our artists are listed alphabetically instead of categorically.

Fantastic, and all open source (of course).

I’ve always thought that cooking is a great metaphor for musical composition. As such, it was fun when my son showed me the following You Tube video which features a fantastic beat box artist mixing together his ‘musical’ composition. Videos like this have great educational potential and I reckon it would engage most classes at Key Stage 3 (and beyond). Just a shame that many schools miss out on stuff like this because of their highly restrictive internet use policies. Anyway, enjoy it here:

There are some great collections of free sound effects and loops available on the web. I have always liked the Sound Transit site which has some great collections. Miikka has posted recently about the SoundSnap site which has a massive collection of user-generated sample content in all kinds of categories. Something there for everyone!

While I was thinking about developing new ways of performing with technology in relation to my last post, I remembered that the DubDubDub performance that we organised at the 2006 DPR conference is now on Google Video. Thanks to Chris for organising that one. It was a fun experiment in using internet live audio and video as part of a musical performance that incorporated a classical string quartet (from MMU/RNCM) and MCs from Egerton High School. Jason Butcher and I have written a paper about it which I’ll post on our new Moodle site shortly. Anyway, here’s the performance: