Forum - Semester 4 - Week 7

Presentations

This week was “our” chance to present what we had done. Like always, I did something the very last minute and played the tune in the forum; a 6/8 dance tune in which I had incorporated the use of Max, REASON, and other stuff. I thought of the track as pretty bad but apparently it was not as awful as I thought. I leave the rest of the feedbacks to other blogs of other students..Edward presented his work of last semester in Max. Despite the fact that there was no sound, I liked his idea of associating vision and sound. Unfortunately there would be no more Pink Floyd concerts (Richard Wright passed away) but if there were anything similar, I think Edward can potentially take a role in that.
Freddie and Doug also presented their Max projects. Finally seeing Freddie’s controversial patch –controversial because of the use of boobs! In the patch- was pretty nice; again it was the idea rather than the process, which fascinated me more.
In my opinion, Doug with his patch projected the most practical –or pragmatic- approach; he actually built up something that can be used to educate people! Yet again the issues with sound and computers stood on his way and he had to deal with some unexpected problems to show his work.


Rooster. Walls of The Wild. http://www.wallsofthewild.com/rooster.htm (Accessed 14/9/08)
Stephen Whittington. "Music Technology Forum - Week 6 - Negativland." Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 11/09/2008.

Forum - Semester 4 - Week 6

What would you feel like if you heard this?

9 sounds, 9 emotions; maybe 9 lives too. The "objective" was to listen to 9 sounds each representing a particular emotion. The point was that each individual playing the sounds -or rather who has chosen the sounds- has had a different perception of each sound. In simpler English the way different people perceive different sounds is unlikely to be 100% identical; and we examined it.
Like most of the times I had not done my job and again like most of the times I opted to improvise (bloody self-confidence!)which according to Stephen turned out to be a dodgy experiment. Let's say it failed, which by itself is a valid result for an experiment.
Anyway, what I did was to speak in a language unknown to the rest of the class; Persian. I tried my best to embed emotions and deliver my message via the tonal projection of whatr I was saying. Surprisingly, it actually worked few times; which would possibly confirm the justification of such experiment. Back to the main issue, the "sound-and-feeling-testing"; the idea was apparently derived from the Indian perception and sacredness of sounds. I personally -as a materialist- am not sure if such definitions of sound and imagining "souls" for sounds would make sense or not but I admit that there definitely is "something" about the effects of sounds on us; probably music therapists know much more about this.
Isn't music therapy a relatively new-born idea? How about discussing that in forum?

References:

Saraswati, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saraswati (Accessed 8/9/8)

Stephen Whittington. "Music Technology Forum - Week 6 - Negativland." Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 04/09/2008.

Forum - Semester 4 - Week 5

Negativland.

Stephen's favourite thing was a video of an "anti-copyright and stuff!" group called Negativland.
Everyone else in his blog is writing about who they are, so as a bit of difference, I will focus on what I got out of getting acquainted with these people. The most "crucial" and -since Stephen likes to use this word- "provocative" aspects of the video was that apparently many people would get "offended" by seeing their heros, being actors, singers, politicians, or prophets being teased and satirised. There is a long story -certainly more than 200 words- about why and how people are not tolerant, and this is directly related to the Negativelad. However, I hereby admit that it needs a lot of guts to challenge people's perceptions and manipulate the way they want to portrait their beliefs.
The Negativeland's work titled "Christianity is Stupid" was apparently the most controversial part of their works. In my personal opinion, it actually was a pretty weak work of art; but the name and the refrain "Communism is Good" (which was also pretty comic) caused the offence and controversy. I think of their way of expressing their opinions as similar as Richard Dawkins; good ideas, bad -or rather agressive- projection.
Anyway,.. Stephen's "provocative" favourite thing was pretty nice, a bit surprising too...
PS: Negativland has a lot more in the sense of music and art; but I just chose to talk about this aspect of their works...

References:
Stephen Whittington. "Music Technology Forum - Week 5 - Negativland." Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 28/08/2008.

Forum - Semester 4 - Week 3

First Year Students' Presentations

It was a good feeling looking at the works of some people creating music under the same consequences as we were last year. Their perceptions and motives were more or less the same, so were the expectations. Nevertheless, as the nature of music and particularly Musique concrète (the genre in which most of the students were presenting their works) once again we got acquainted with new ideas, approaches, concepts and perceptions; great for me.
Funny enough, the first year students sound like thinking the same way that we (at least I) used to last year, and I assume that they would project the same change and evolution of ideas as they continue; if!
I won't go through each piece; my main interest is the overall change -of attitude- in them, us, and others. Like always there was this big subject of "what is music" which I am tired of touching again; however, the good news is that it seems like the appreciation for avant-garde art -in this case Musique concrète- is growing. I guess we would have a huge leap in the amount of knowledge we gain in uni if we had more subjects on for example something like this:
"How to Recognise, Deal with, Appreciate and Like Something New which Might Look Unattractive us at First”...

References:
Stephen Whittington. "Music Technology Forum - Week 3 - First Year Student Presentations." Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 14/08/2008.

Forum - Semester 4 - Week 2

This week's Forum session "My Favourite Things" was presented by David Harris.
David talked about his collaboration with the quartet Grainger in a three-concert series in 2008.
For some reason -which I didn't really understand- we were ought to follow the scores for the pieces; I lost both music and the scores at the end though.
His composition "Terra Rapta (Stolen Land)" was a piece dedicated to the story of the stolen generation of Australian Aboriginals (or maybe to the individuals themselves,..) which I found well-sounding; yet, not one of my "Favourite Things"...
David’s approach to naming his work was pretty interesting for me. Why Latin, exactly? I have the same issue too, when I want to name my tunes, I tend to come up with something as weird as possible but at the same time I can just think of simple things. Is the best way the use of non-English languages?
Following that, he played another piece of the concert series originally by Schubert which -as far as I observed- bored a considerable number of Music Tech students; a phenomenon which made Stephen comment on David's intentions as "provocative".
I have referenced to some stuff about Harris’ concert that I found on the internet.

https://www.qtix.com.au/show/Grainger_Quartet_Darkness_Light_08.aspx
http://www.graingerquartet.com/

References:
David Harris. "Music Technology Forum - Week 2 - My Favourite Things." Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 07/08/2008.

Forum - Semester 4 - Week 1

Audio / Music listening Culture (or why people are listening to what they are listening to and why they do it the way they do it!)
The evolution of music technology has had its significant impacts on the way music is perceived by public. The topic of this session was the pros and cons of this phenomenon.
According to Stephen, Walkman -as a symbol of this revolutionary change- has acted as a device to provide a "movie soundtrack" for "people's lives"; however, I personally often wonder (for example) "... how bizarre it is that walking in streets at 2 o'clock after midnight is accompanied by some psytrance music"! maybe my life doesn't have a conventional soundtrack.Other opinions which popped-up suggested ideas such as "headphones have provided an extent of isolation-from-outside-world", "technology has increased the quantity of listening to music and has decreased its quality", etc...
Like many forum sessions, discussions eventually went all over the place and a whole lot of various issues arose again; my problem is that noone seems to comment on anything respecting the fact of these issues being "subjective". Because something on Triple J has become famous doesn't mean that "Radio is the way..." or such judgements. I think things radically differ in different places; if we are to observe these issues, we need to have a more open mindset and avoid issuing transcriptions for the entire globe; especially when our personal experiences are limited to few communities.

Stephen Whittington. "Music Technology Forum - Week 11 - Audio Culture." Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 31/07/2008.