If we were to put a moratorium on creative arts – that is, if we were to actively stop the creation of “new” artworks across disciplines – for a full generation, 25 to 30 years, what would be the result? How would the creative spirit thrive during that interstice? Would people create works subversively? Would the populace that survived the silence awaken with a deeper appreciation and understanding of dance, or art music, or poetry, or sculpture? Would we forget how to create? Would we forget our techniques? What of the children born during the silence – how would they cope? How would they be able to reinsert themselves into the world of artistic creation? Would they be startled or appalled at the idea of people freely expressing themselves through scores or canvases? Would we subsist on previously-created works for a full generation? If so, how is that truly different from the mainstream artistic world as it is now? What would happen to pop music? Would we enter a new Renaissance period where years of ideas accumulated creates a driving push into The Next Phase of creation? Or would we go backward?
Is there such a thing as a musical avant-garde anymore? Have we succeeded in shocking everyone into complacence, or is cultural literacy that advanced and uniform – that is, has a critical mass of understanding been met? I find it difficult to believe that either is true, but this creates a dangerous cosmic interplay of relativistic thought. A soybean farmer in Arkansas may never have heard of Xenakis or Lady Gaga – would either matter to him or her? Do we enter the dark chambers of "it’s new to you but not to me, and that’s acceptable"? Gravely seriously, though, what constitutes the New in music – other than having been just composed?
Is the term “experimental music” anymore just a marketing gimmick or a way to appeal to an already self-selected audience of cognoscenti, the pretentious, and/or gallery-hoppers? When we parse the semantics of "experimental," do we end up with the unified pluralism that all new music is in some way experimental and we need some degree of musical literacy to label something truly Experimental or more in line with Conventional models? Should we rather just make way for history and deem Experimental Music its own subgenre from the mid 1950s until the early 1980s when “experimental” veered into (or was concretized as) Performance Art?
26.8.10
21.8.10
They never taught me how to focus
Throughout graduate school -- the part of it where I had direct, weekly, and human contact with my mentors -- I was encouraged to have one main project on my docket at any given time but to dabble and keep working on sketches and other works-in-progress. One composition instructor actively challenged me to write as much as possible and find ways to write material quite different from the primary endeavor for the month / term. Retrospectively, this was to force me into modes of thinking to divorce my first responsibilities from any other ideas or brainstorms and to collect a back-catalog of sketches I could use for other, later projects without being tempted to work on too many things at once.0
If I were a visual artist, there is no conceivable way I could have just one easel set up in my studio; no conceivable way for me to keep simply trucking away upon one idea. Part of this is a long-standing problem I have with artistic patience. Part of this arises from the high lack of feedback necessary to younger composers on works of music: it doesn't necessarily matter how it looks, and if I'm composing a work for large forces, I don't get the luxury of hearing whether some element "works" until rehearsals -- or in the case of some dormant, unperformed works, not at all. Part of this also stems from my natural knack to be engaged in many activities at once, despite my quiet and easy-going (typical) behavior,1 a curse from being a "Jack of all trades" personality.
How soon I forget the lessons of past instructors; how soon (and for the past 15 years) has this become a perfect storm.
Many years ago I was relatively prolific. In 2008, by contrast, I didn't finish a single piece I was composing.2 I finished (I think) four pieces last calendar year. While I would love to become more like Villa-Lobos and less like Henri Duparc in terms of compositional output (minus the "Frank O'Hara syndrome" of not revising anything), I don't think it is going to come to pass any time soon.
At last count, I have sketches for nearly 20 pieces in my notebook, most in the very early stages with only a few measures. Some works have several pages of notes, but all rather rudimentary -- and I get into a habit of criticizing and analyzing my sketches (my sketches, for crying out loud!) and putting them aside after I've made my dour notes and changes and called into question what it is I'm doing. I have pieces that I know must take priority: an orchestral work, a wind ensemble work, a few chamber works. I have older pieces in various states of "completion" that need to get revised before I foist them upon an unsuspecting performer or choral director -- that is to say, I want them up to my standards: right now, they're not, and I hate putting my name on something inferior, much less opening myself to criticism for it.3 I have a commission for a saxophone orchestra piece I seriously need to get started on.
But all the possibilities seem endless and too tempting.
And too crippling.4
And I wonder how much of a composer's "voice" is bound up with how many pieces she is working on at one shot, how many ideas are on back burners yet sneaking in...
A lot of my old sketches came about as sporadic, or better impulsive, attempts to capitalize on an upcoming conference, contest, or performance call. (Case in point: I have a cello-piano piece sitting 10% finished in my notebook, a sketch I haven't looked at in over two years) I realize, of course, this is a foolhardy approach to writing. But with so few people asking me to compose works for them, and with a lot of time on my hands, this is the ultimate result: a lot of aphorisms when there should be a philosophical exegesis; charcoal sketches when there should be a 20'x80' mural. This is also due to the fact that my catalog, while quite large in some respects, leaves out some standards and staples: I have one standalone orchestral piece; I have no string quartets or quintets; I have no Pierrot-like ensemble pieces; I have no percussion-only pieces; my piano-and-instrument catalog is fairly thin; most of my chamber music has odd or non-standard instrumentations (bassoon, tenor saxophone, and bass clarinet, for instance, or trombone and violin). So, submissions to things come and go and I scramble. Sometimes I succeed in completing a work (my clarinet quintet -- didn't win the prize I submitted it for, but it's a good piece, still waiting on a performance); other times, like the aforementioned cello-piano work, I get caught up with other pieces, with life, with people, and that October 1st deadline quietly eludes me.
So, I don't know what to do. I don't know how to focus on writing just one piece at a time. Something has been lost in mental translation since the days of composition teachers hovering over my work; something has been amplified in the liberty I've received as a free-lancer; something is missing in the fact that I don't have the immediate resources (peers on a performance faculty at a music school, to wit) to run a piece by someone and get their response. I do have Facebook and all and I occasionally post my scores or send scores to acquaintances and friends -- but there's a frustration level there, as well, in that I rarely get feedback, or at least critiques beyond the topical (of course, many of my friends are busy with spouses, jobs, careers, and the like, so I can't blame them for letting a solo trombone work, for instance, fall through the cracks). I have no ideas on how to focus and I'm left with basically the notion that writing as much as possible as quickly as possible couldn't feasibly include sticking to one work at a time.
I'm dating my music, perhaps. Moving back and forth between sketches, getting somewhat familiar with them, but not profoundly so, and not committing to any singular entity. I did manage to do so with my dissertation and a few other larger works, but those were important works for deadlines or merit. I guess I used those pieces, then. But then, perhaps -- if we extend this gruesome analogy further -- I'm nothing more than a man-whore of composing. And all composers, then, probably fit into this scheme, of moving on from piece to piece after various levels of intimate understanding of each musical world. We're a lascivious, insatiable bunch.
All of us, except maybe Henri Duparc.5
0. This was supposed to be a chronicle of what works I'm attempting to create; instead, this happened. I'll keep this instead.
1. No, really. It's true. My natural demeanor is very quiet, borderline-boring, and not easily provoked. Wasn't always so, to be sure.
2. Admittedly, I started a few pieces in 2008 that I finished in 2009 or am still working on; I also dedicated a fair amount of time to updating and revising some pieces, and I also had this thing called a dissertation (and, at the time, a serious romantic relationship -- despite the discussion above, the two were not mutually inclusive) that took up a lot of my time.
3. As it stands, I have difficulty taking existing works and extracting new pieces from them. I know it would increase my exposure and performance chances, but I'm on principle opposed to taking a movement out of a work to make it stand alone. I also don't relish the idea of more work or finding errors or rehashing old blunders. I should probably change this perspective.
4. cf. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
5. Henri Duparc was a French composer who, along with Samuel Rousseau, Chabrier, Massenet, d'Indy, and Franck, represents the French late-Romantic and post-Romantic traditions (prior to Debussy/Ravel). Despite his lasting reputation, or maybe causative of, his output is one of the smallest and paltriest of any "established" composer. Villa-Lobos, on the other hand as we all know, wrote what seemed like a piece a week -- he himself admitted that a lot of the hundreds of works he cranked out were not very good. Frank O'Hara was a poet who, while I adore his work, could have stood to reread a lot of his poems.
If I were a visual artist, there is no conceivable way I could have just one easel set up in my studio; no conceivable way for me to keep simply trucking away upon one idea. Part of this is a long-standing problem I have with artistic patience. Part of this arises from the high lack of feedback necessary to younger composers on works of music: it doesn't necessarily matter how it looks, and if I'm composing a work for large forces, I don't get the luxury of hearing whether some element "works" until rehearsals -- or in the case of some dormant, unperformed works, not at all. Part of this also stems from my natural knack to be engaged in many activities at once, despite my quiet and easy-going (typical) behavior,1 a curse from being a "Jack of all trades" personality.
How soon I forget the lessons of past instructors; how soon (and for the past 15 years) has this become a perfect storm.
Many years ago I was relatively prolific. In 2008, by contrast, I didn't finish a single piece I was composing.2 I finished (I think) four pieces last calendar year. While I would love to become more like Villa-Lobos and less like Henri Duparc in terms of compositional output (minus the "Frank O'Hara syndrome" of not revising anything), I don't think it is going to come to pass any time soon.
At last count, I have sketches for nearly 20 pieces in my notebook, most in the very early stages with only a few measures. Some works have several pages of notes, but all rather rudimentary -- and I get into a habit of criticizing and analyzing my sketches (my sketches, for crying out loud!) and putting them aside after I've made my dour notes and changes and called into question what it is I'm doing. I have pieces that I know must take priority: an orchestral work, a wind ensemble work, a few chamber works. I have older pieces in various states of "completion" that need to get revised before I foist them upon an unsuspecting performer or choral director -- that is to say, I want them up to my standards: right now, they're not, and I hate putting my name on something inferior, much less opening myself to criticism for it.3 I have a commission for a saxophone orchestra piece I seriously need to get started on.
But all the possibilities seem endless and too tempting.
And too crippling.4
And I wonder how much of a composer's "voice" is bound up with how many pieces she is working on at one shot, how many ideas are on back burners yet sneaking in...
A lot of my old sketches came about as sporadic, or better impulsive, attempts to capitalize on an upcoming conference, contest, or performance call. (Case in point: I have a cello-piano piece sitting 10% finished in my notebook, a sketch I haven't looked at in over two years) I realize, of course, this is a foolhardy approach to writing. But with so few people asking me to compose works for them, and with a lot of time on my hands, this is the ultimate result: a lot of aphorisms when there should be a philosophical exegesis; charcoal sketches when there should be a 20'x80' mural. This is also due to the fact that my catalog, while quite large in some respects, leaves out some standards and staples: I have one standalone orchestral piece; I have no string quartets or quintets; I have no Pierrot-like ensemble pieces; I have no percussion-only pieces; my piano-and-instrument catalog is fairly thin; most of my chamber music has odd or non-standard instrumentations (bassoon, tenor saxophone, and bass clarinet, for instance, or trombone and violin). So, submissions to things come and go and I scramble. Sometimes I succeed in completing a work (my clarinet quintet -- didn't win the prize I submitted it for, but it's a good piece, still waiting on a performance); other times, like the aforementioned cello-piano work, I get caught up with other pieces, with life, with people, and that October 1st deadline quietly eludes me.
So, I don't know what to do. I don't know how to focus on writing just one piece at a time. Something has been lost in mental translation since the days of composition teachers hovering over my work; something has been amplified in the liberty I've received as a free-lancer; something is missing in the fact that I don't have the immediate resources (peers on a performance faculty at a music school, to wit) to run a piece by someone and get their response. I do have Facebook and all and I occasionally post my scores or send scores to acquaintances and friends -- but there's a frustration level there, as well, in that I rarely get feedback, or at least critiques beyond the topical (of course, many of my friends are busy with spouses, jobs, careers, and the like, so I can't blame them for letting a solo trombone work, for instance, fall through the cracks). I have no ideas on how to focus and I'm left with basically the notion that writing as much as possible as quickly as possible couldn't feasibly include sticking to one work at a time.
I'm dating my music, perhaps. Moving back and forth between sketches, getting somewhat familiar with them, but not profoundly so, and not committing to any singular entity. I did manage to do so with my dissertation and a few other larger works, but those were important works for deadlines or merit. I guess I used those pieces, then. But then, perhaps -- if we extend this gruesome analogy further -- I'm nothing more than a man-whore of composing. And all composers, then, probably fit into this scheme, of moving on from piece to piece after various levels of intimate understanding of each musical world. We're a lascivious, insatiable bunch.
All of us, except maybe Henri Duparc.5
0. This was supposed to be a chronicle of what works I'm attempting to create; instead, this happened. I'll keep this instead.
1. No, really. It's true. My natural demeanor is very quiet, borderline-boring, and not easily provoked. Wasn't always so, to be sure.
2. Admittedly, I started a few pieces in 2008 that I finished in 2009 or am still working on; I also dedicated a fair amount of time to updating and revising some pieces, and I also had this thing called a dissertation (and, at the time, a serious romantic relationship -- despite the discussion above, the two were not mutually inclusive) that took up a lot of my time.
3. As it stands, I have difficulty taking existing works and extracting new pieces from them. I know it would increase my exposure and performance chances, but I'm on principle opposed to taking a movement out of a work to make it stand alone. I also don't relish the idea of more work or finding errors or rehashing old blunders. I should probably change this perspective.
4. cf. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
5. Henri Duparc was a French composer who, along with Samuel Rousseau, Chabrier, Massenet, d'Indy, and Franck, represents the French late-Romantic and post-Romantic traditions (prior to Debussy/Ravel). Despite his lasting reputation, or maybe causative of, his output is one of the smallest and paltriest of any "established" composer. Villa-Lobos, on the other hand as we all know, wrote what seemed like a piece a week -- he himself admitted that a lot of the hundreds of works he cranked out were not very good. Frank O'Hara was a poet who, while I adore his work, could have stood to reread a lot of his poems.
Labels:
2010,
composing,
post-structuralist dodderings
18.8.10
Slowing the Phenomenon Down
I come quietly out of the still and silence of the shadows to ask the eternal question:
who the hell cares if someone slowed down a Justin Bieber song 800, or 900, or 1327 per cent to turn it into an "ambient" piece of music?
The more important question, here, is:
why is this a fad? why has this, in the past few days, received more Internet-based attention than the BP Saga or the horrendous natural atrocity at work in the flooding of Pakistan?
The obvious first criticism from you, then, is: "well, you're giving it attention." That may be true, but I do so without hesitation and without any artistic credence. I have also not listened to this super-slow version simply because I not only know what it would sound like, but I know precisely the technique used to change the duration (without reading about it other than seeing it exists or listening to it).
My criticisms are fairly straightforward, and I blame you, the Internet-loving public, for making this a much bigger deal than it ever needed to be.
The technique (well, the primary technique) used to slow down (or speed up) a sound without altering pitch and without radically altering timbre is a little gem known as phase vocoding (pvoc, for short). I won't get into the heavy mathematical fundamentals of it, but pretend for a minute that a sound is a series of pictures. Let's say a one-second sample of my voice can be divided in 1,024 discrete windows, and each window records three things: the pitch spectrum (the amount of energy present at a series, in this case harmonic in design, of frequencies); the intensity (or volume, which is dependent upon the amount of energy in the pitch spectrum); and, the physical location of my voice: since my voice moves in a continuous wave, each of the 1,024 windows will capture whether my wave is in a positive or negative phase. What pvoc does is take measurements of the information in windows 0 through 1023. Depending on what I want the algorithm to do, pvoc takes the information in window n and compares it to window n+1 up to n+n and compares each window to each other. When I want to, let's say, slow my voice sample down but retain the pitch, pvoc looks at window 0 and then window 1, retains the frequency information as much as possible as well as the intensity information, and using the location of the wave's phase as a guide, inserts x windows in between old windows 0 and 1, overlapping the windows as to prevent discretion and render the new, lengthened section as continuously as possible to provide the illusion of continuity. If I want to slow down a sound and change its pitch, it's a lot easier: I just change the frequency information proportionally, phase values remain the same, and my voice an octave lower, therefore (unless I constrain it otherwise), becomes a sample twice as long.
Sounds complicated. It isn't. Not by a mile. It's one of the easiest things to do with any audio editing software, and one of the stand-by techniques for soundscape artists. As an electroacoustic composer, it's one of my top three processes when I'm sculpting sounds and out of ideas. The famous Mac audio processing software SoundHack -- so famous that it's been around since Mac 8.1 and has been free for over a decade -- is nothing but a pvoc processor with additional features. Sony's SoundForge suite has over 20 options of pvoc processing. Cross-platform, free audio editing software Audacity has a respectable pvoc processor built-in. Hordes of composers/programmers make objects for pvoc for MAX/MSP, pd, jMAX, and CSound just to tweak and alter the method behind the pvoc madness. Anyone with an Internet connection, Adobe Reader, and a few minutes of time to learn the mouse clicks and a few dozen more to wait for the file to render can do this. Computer music composers have been using the technique for 25 or more years, but we don't stop there.
This easily segues into the next realm of contention: could it be a little more obvious? Justin Bieber is an insipid, cheap target, and using as unsophisticated a formula as slowing the song down to lampoon Bieber-Lieder is equally obvious and cheap as a means to transform the song into something else. The end result may be something trippy or not necessarily identifiable as Bieber-songs, but it is fundamentally the same. Congratulations, Internet-fame-seeker! You've taken a six-inch-long fruit rollup and made it 18 inches long! (And we say fame isn't phallic. Ha!) On a deeper level, if such can be said, "Bieber's" "music" (look, even I'm a satirist! Hah!) represents the epitome of the mechanized, the zenith of a cultural industry: an androgynous boy, barely pubescent, singing songs from someone else's brain and pen about love and loss and whatever it is 12-year-olds get gaga over these days. He is a product to be consumed, a marketable commodity to be bought and sold, a totem of profit, an icon of the emptiness of a popularized culture where the target demographic doesn't fully grasp the nature of the messages of the songs yet has lucre endowed by liberal-guilt, allowance-granting parents who don't care about the message so long as it quietly remains within the confines of good taste, moral and political authority, and renounces hazardous independent inquiry, fomented and fostered by a central doctrinal authority (the record company) to capitalize as quickly and as profoundly as possible. Cultural daguerreotypes like Bieber -- those icons that will fade over time and be forgotten -- are easy targets for the antipathy-filled section of the dichotomized audience; note the recent "vote" to send Biebz to North Korea to tour. So, it bothers me on an intellectual level that the perpetrator of SLOW BIEBER did not attempt to, I don't know, rework Breitbart interviews or selectively edit a Lady Gaga song -- or something less in the crosshairs. But then, the obviousness is the capitalizing point: the only reason to satirize Biebz in this way is to gain notoriety from notoriety. Which in itself is lazy as it manifests a desire to be heard, a desire to paradoxically rise above the fray of commonality simply by engaging the most common, the most prevalent, the easiest target. Furthermore, if something truly novel or radical was supposed to be the end result of this experiment, then surely the purveyor of snail-justin-music could have taken more artistic liberties and chopped up the piece and processed it and made something out of a cultural nothing. That would have more cultural resonance and much more lasting power in intellectual terms.
Avey Tare, one of the members of the hipster-icon band Animal Collective, released an album a few years back with his wife -- a former member of Mum -- that was recorded and produced linearly: that is, "left to right," or, otherwise, normal. In post-production, the entire album -- each track (well, each soundfile) -- was reversed. The album was released like this. It sold horribly. Even the hipster completists buried or sold or dismissed themselves from this endeavor, and when the hipster crowd thinks something pretentious, WATCH OUT CHICAGO! The entire album in reverse. Again we have a paradox: pretentious as hell (what are they trying to say? that we're approaching music all wrong?), or is it just cheap? Reversing a sound file is probably the easiest digital audio manipulation one can make. Hell, a person doesn't even need a computer to do that: push the record backward or play-rewind a tape (remember those?). It's not novel. It's not smart. It's simple. Simply simple. And that's all there is to it.
John Cage has a piece going on in Germany. No surprise, even if he's been dead almost 20 years. But this piece is set to last hundreds of years. It takes place in an isolated cathedral in rural Deutschland, and it's for organ; it took almost ten years to fill the bellows, and the piece is on its second pitch out of dozens; it's been sounding for over four years. What the hell was Cage thinking, you may wonder? First of all, let me state that I hate invoking Cage: he's become the posterboy and the de facto excuse for a lot of what gets the third degree in the world of art music, but I have to do so here as it's quite relevant. Cage was a Zen Buddhist who was taken with the idea of reveling, for the fun of reveling, in the world of sound per se. Everything we do is music, he once quipped. This reification and devout love of absolute slowness and meditativeness guided practically all of his catalog. Cage may or may not argue for Langsammer-Bieber's status as a true piece of art; my feeling is that he wouldn't -- despite the concepts of chance and chaos playing into his compositions, it's difficult to imagine he would support naming something "art" using pre-existing material and pushing one solid button and only one to make it different. Even Brian Eno did more than that after he quit Roxy Music.
Hell, even naming Lento-Justin-Canto "ambient" is a slap in the face to the electronic music tradition. Ambient music -- Eno hated having it called that as it became a catch-all for all drone music played late at night on college radio stations -- still has craft, still has direction, still has workmanship and design, still has musicality that results from a number of techniques and approaches, not just one. Setting a variable and pressing "Go" erases all of that. So: in a similar vein, I'm Xeroxing Mona Lisa. I'm not even painting a fake, stroke by stroke, or taking a really good digital image and rasterizing it and retouching it and printing it on fine, aged linen. I'm taking her by her absent eyebrows, plopping her on the duplicator, pressing "Go", getting the blurry, black-and-white afterimage, and putting it up for all to see as a profound reworking.
Just to prove this point, here's a song or two that I've slowed down using pvoc in two of my free editing programs. I loaded the files and pushed a button. I didn't change the trajectory of the work. I didn't make anything new. I'm not adding commentary to it. I'm not saying "the only way to listen to these, heh heh, is to listen to it super slow like you're super baked! I'm not trying to make people marvel at technology -- which, if people marvel at this, as democratized as we are in terms of access to and understanding of digital media and how it's made, they may as well marvel when they turn on a light switch. All I did was slow them down. Can you figure out what they are? Does it matter? Does it provide any new commentary or knowledge about the pieces? Does this create a new narrative? Have I simply injured a boatload of electrons and wasted electrical current making these files? Only one way to know for sure!
first sample
second sample
As a final word, no, I am not angry I didn't think of this first. I didn't want to think of this first. I want to think of important things first. And as far as pvoc goes, I've been using the algorithm in my pieces since before J-Biebz was born. Yep.
*****
[DATELINE] The World, 17 January 2011
I have, in the past 24 hours, learned that there is a SEQUEL to this brainless, formless juggernaut:
The Jurassic Park theme, slowed down 1000 times.
Really? Is this all it takes to captivate listeners, the public, and stoners? It's bloody annoying to learn - again! - that such insipid and bland things are being touted as "awesome" or even a "sonic experience."
Go turn on a vacuum cleaner and let it run non-stop for 45 minutes. You'll get the same effect/headache.
who the hell cares if someone slowed down a Justin Bieber song 800, or 900, or 1327 per cent to turn it into an "ambient" piece of music?
The more important question, here, is:
why is this a fad? why has this, in the past few days, received more Internet-based attention than the BP Saga or the horrendous natural atrocity at work in the flooding of Pakistan?
The obvious first criticism from you, then, is: "well, you're giving it attention." That may be true, but I do so without hesitation and without any artistic credence. I have also not listened to this super-slow version simply because I not only know what it would sound like, but I know precisely the technique used to change the duration (without reading about it other than seeing it exists or listening to it).
My criticisms are fairly straightforward, and I blame you, the Internet-loving public, for making this a much bigger deal than it ever needed to be.
The technique (well, the primary technique) used to slow down (or speed up) a sound without altering pitch and without radically altering timbre is a little gem known as phase vocoding (pvoc, for short). I won't get into the heavy mathematical fundamentals of it, but pretend for a minute that a sound is a series of pictures. Let's say a one-second sample of my voice can be divided in 1,024 discrete windows, and each window records three things: the pitch spectrum (the amount of energy present at a series, in this case harmonic in design, of frequencies); the intensity (or volume, which is dependent upon the amount of energy in the pitch spectrum); and, the physical location of my voice: since my voice moves in a continuous wave, each of the 1,024 windows will capture whether my wave is in a positive or negative phase. What pvoc does is take measurements of the information in windows 0 through 1023. Depending on what I want the algorithm to do, pvoc takes the information in window n and compares it to window n+1 up to n+n and compares each window to each other. When I want to, let's say, slow my voice sample down but retain the pitch, pvoc looks at window 0 and then window 1, retains the frequency information as much as possible as well as the intensity information, and using the location of the wave's phase as a guide, inserts x windows in between old windows 0 and 1, overlapping the windows as to prevent discretion and render the new, lengthened section as continuously as possible to provide the illusion of continuity. If I want to slow down a sound and change its pitch, it's a lot easier: I just change the frequency information proportionally, phase values remain the same, and my voice an octave lower, therefore (unless I constrain it otherwise), becomes a sample twice as long.
Sounds complicated. It isn't. Not by a mile. It's one of the easiest things to do with any audio editing software, and one of the stand-by techniques for soundscape artists. As an electroacoustic composer, it's one of my top three processes when I'm sculpting sounds and out of ideas. The famous Mac audio processing software SoundHack -- so famous that it's been around since Mac 8.1 and has been free for over a decade -- is nothing but a pvoc processor with additional features. Sony's SoundForge suite has over 20 options of pvoc processing. Cross-platform, free audio editing software Audacity has a respectable pvoc processor built-in. Hordes of composers/programmers make objects for pvoc for MAX/MSP, pd, jMAX, and CSound just to tweak and alter the method behind the pvoc madness. Anyone with an Internet connection, Adobe Reader, and a few minutes of time to learn the mouse clicks and a few dozen more to wait for the file to render can do this. Computer music composers have been using the technique for 25 or more years, but we don't stop there.
This easily segues into the next realm of contention: could it be a little more obvious? Justin Bieber is an insipid, cheap target, and using as unsophisticated a formula as slowing the song down to lampoon Bieber-Lieder is equally obvious and cheap as a means to transform the song into something else. The end result may be something trippy or not necessarily identifiable as Bieber-songs, but it is fundamentally the same. Congratulations, Internet-fame-seeker! You've taken a six-inch-long fruit rollup and made it 18 inches long! (And we say fame isn't phallic. Ha!) On a deeper level, if such can be said, "Bieber's" "music" (look, even I'm a satirist! Hah!) represents the epitome of the mechanized, the zenith of a cultural industry: an androgynous boy, barely pubescent, singing songs from someone else's brain and pen about love and loss and whatever it is 12-year-olds get gaga over these days. He is a product to be consumed, a marketable commodity to be bought and sold, a totem of profit, an icon of the emptiness of a popularized culture where the target demographic doesn't fully grasp the nature of the messages of the songs yet has lucre endowed by liberal-guilt, allowance-granting parents who don't care about the message so long as it quietly remains within the confines of good taste, moral and political authority, and renounces hazardous independent inquiry, fomented and fostered by a central doctrinal authority (the record company) to capitalize as quickly and as profoundly as possible. Cultural daguerreotypes like Bieber -- those icons that will fade over time and be forgotten -- are easy targets for the antipathy-filled section of the dichotomized audience; note the recent "vote" to send Biebz to North Korea to tour. So, it bothers me on an intellectual level that the perpetrator of SLOW BIEBER did not attempt to, I don't know, rework Breitbart interviews or selectively edit a Lady Gaga song -- or something less in the crosshairs. But then, the obviousness is the capitalizing point: the only reason to satirize Biebz in this way is to gain notoriety from notoriety. Which in itself is lazy as it manifests a desire to be heard, a desire to paradoxically rise above the fray of commonality simply by engaging the most common, the most prevalent, the easiest target. Furthermore, if something truly novel or radical was supposed to be the end result of this experiment, then surely the purveyor of snail-justin-music could have taken more artistic liberties and chopped up the piece and processed it and made something out of a cultural nothing. That would have more cultural resonance and much more lasting power in intellectual terms.
Avey Tare, one of the members of the hipster-icon band Animal Collective, released an album a few years back with his wife -- a former member of Mum -- that was recorded and produced linearly: that is, "left to right," or, otherwise, normal. In post-production, the entire album -- each track (well, each soundfile) -- was reversed. The album was released like this. It sold horribly. Even the hipster completists buried or sold or dismissed themselves from this endeavor, and when the hipster crowd thinks something pretentious, WATCH OUT CHICAGO! The entire album in reverse. Again we have a paradox: pretentious as hell (what are they trying to say? that we're approaching music all wrong?), or is it just cheap? Reversing a sound file is probably the easiest digital audio manipulation one can make. Hell, a person doesn't even need a computer to do that: push the record backward or play-rewind a tape (remember those?). It's not novel. It's not smart. It's simple. Simply simple. And that's all there is to it.
John Cage has a piece going on in Germany. No surprise, even if he's been dead almost 20 years. But this piece is set to last hundreds of years. It takes place in an isolated cathedral in rural Deutschland, and it's for organ; it took almost ten years to fill the bellows, and the piece is on its second pitch out of dozens; it's been sounding for over four years. What the hell was Cage thinking, you may wonder? First of all, let me state that I hate invoking Cage: he's become the posterboy and the de facto excuse for a lot of what gets the third degree in the world of art music, but I have to do so here as it's quite relevant. Cage was a Zen Buddhist who was taken with the idea of reveling, for the fun of reveling, in the world of sound per se. Everything we do is music, he once quipped. This reification and devout love of absolute slowness and meditativeness guided practically all of his catalog. Cage may or may not argue for Langsammer-Bieber's status as a true piece of art; my feeling is that he wouldn't -- despite the concepts of chance and chaos playing into his compositions, it's difficult to imagine he would support naming something "art" using pre-existing material and pushing one solid button and only one to make it different. Even Brian Eno did more than that after he quit Roxy Music.
Hell, even naming Lento-Justin-Canto "ambient" is a slap in the face to the electronic music tradition. Ambient music -- Eno hated having it called that as it became a catch-all for all drone music played late at night on college radio stations -- still has craft, still has direction, still has workmanship and design, still has musicality that results from a number of techniques and approaches, not just one. Setting a variable and pressing "Go" erases all of that. So: in a similar vein, I'm Xeroxing Mona Lisa. I'm not even painting a fake, stroke by stroke, or taking a really good digital image and rasterizing it and retouching it and printing it on fine, aged linen. I'm taking her by her absent eyebrows, plopping her on the duplicator, pressing "Go", getting the blurry, black-and-white afterimage, and putting it up for all to see as a profound reworking.
Just to prove this point, here's a song or two that I've slowed down using pvoc in two of my free editing programs. I loaded the files and pushed a button. I didn't change the trajectory of the work. I didn't make anything new. I'm not adding commentary to it. I'm not saying "the only way to listen to these, heh heh, is to listen to it super slow like you're super baked! I'm not trying to make people marvel at technology -- which, if people marvel at this, as democratized as we are in terms of access to and understanding of digital media and how it's made, they may as well marvel when they turn on a light switch. All I did was slow them down. Can you figure out what they are? Does it matter? Does it provide any new commentary or knowledge about the pieces? Does this create a new narrative? Have I simply injured a boatload of electrons and wasted electrical current making these files? Only one way to know for sure!
first sample
second sample
As a final word, no, I am not angry I didn't think of this first. I didn't want to think of this first. I want to think of important things first. And as far as pvoc goes, I've been using the algorithm in my pieces since before J-Biebz was born. Yep.
*****
[DATELINE] The World, 17 January 2011
I have, in the past 24 hours, learned that there is a SEQUEL to this brainless, formless juggernaut:
The Jurassic Park theme, slowed down 1000 times.
Really? Is this all it takes to captivate listeners, the public, and stoners? It's bloody annoying to learn - again! - that such insipid and bland things are being touted as "awesome" or even a "sonic experience."
Go turn on a vacuum cleaner and let it run non-stop for 45 minutes. You'll get the same effect/headache.
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