Today marked the beginning of an epic adventure.

David, Juan (Jay), Gaby (Gabrielle), Anthony, Sienna, Jori, and Laura have devised a truly incredible movie treatment involving pillow monsters, snow, and (of course), music.

Backing up, class started with a conversation about the Media Lab for those who were new to the space. We looked at the Media Lab website, and checked out current and past Media Lab student projects, including work from the Experimental Music class and the Different Trains classes.

From there we started talking about narrative, and elements of narrative including:

– setting
– plot
– conflict
– characters
– point of view

We next watched some music videos, including Black Leaf’s The Cave Singers and Math the Band’s Four to Six. We talked about narrative (and a lot of other things) relevant to these videos, and then looked up some music on the Free Music Archive to see how the videos looked with music that had a different feel than the original soundtracks. We also looked at a simple home movie, Friday I’m in Love, as a way to talk about something that was shot almost exclusively in one location yet still held our interest.

We also checked out this awesome video, Birds on the Wires, which helped us think a little abstractly, and then the more literal Peter and the Wolf, in which we saw different instruments and sounds representing specific characters in a narrative.

After that we collectively wrote a kind of secret and very awesome plot for a movie we’ll be making – and scoring – as a class. Stay tuned to see how the project progresses!

After many weeks of rehearsal, the Cage Centennial Concert at the Arsenal finally arrived.

In the words of one concert-goer:

“I’ve never attended a show of this type of music, or sound art, or whatever it is referred to as. It mostly had the same effect on me as meditating – forcing me to confront uncomfortable thoughts or acute self-consciousness. It was very different than listening to it recorded. I was really effected by the one with four or five percussionist around room, and the one with the guy reading cage writings and kids eating carrots and cereal and people playing checkers. Those kids were cool.”

Thanks to Laura and Mark Cetilia for organizing the show!

Last week we talked about a composer named John Cage. We watched some videos about him and looked at scores he composed and got a feel for how he is as an artist. He’s famous for “reinventing the musical playing field” (Malachy).  We tried some of his scores in class together because we have been invited to perform at the Arsenal on March 23 as part of a Cage Centennial concert.

This week we planned our performance. We picked durations for each of the scores we will perform by picking dominoes out of a pile. The numbers on the dominos told us for how many minutes we would perform each score.

We are most excited for eating cereal and bringing skateboards to the stage!

(more…)

We started to work on a new project.

First, we sat in a circle and made a recording of our voices.

Then we each took this recording to make new pieces, using LogicPro.

Here are the 6 directions for the piece that we made:

1. The length of the piece will be no shorter than 1 minute & no longer than 3 minutes

2. No use of pre-made (by someone else) sounds

3. Use at least 3 different sounds, including 1 new live recording

4. Make this piece “rhythm/beat oriented”

5. Include at least 1 peak point in the piece

6. Don’t loop everything, but repeat something

And here are the pieces!!!

Aiden – [audio:http://www.communitymusicworks.org/medialab/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/swagaiden.mp3|titles=swagaiden]

Brandon – [audio:http://www.communitymusicworks.org/medialab/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Brandon1.mp3|titles=Brandon1]

Emily – [audio:http://www.communitymusicworks.org/medialab/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/EmilyC.mp3|titles=EmilyC]

Liam – [audio:http://www.communitymusicworks.org/medialab/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Liam-pizzicatto-21312.mp3|titles=Liam pizzicatto 21312]

Malachy – [audio:http://www.communitymusicworks.org/medialab/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/ChickenNuggetsBySnakeSquadMalachyH.mp3|titles=ChickenNuggetsBySnakeSquadMalachyH]

Today we had a class of vocal & instrument improvisation with a local composer/musician, also a leader of the women’s choir group Assembly of Light Choir, Chrissy Wolpert.

Chrissy started the class with voice warm up.

“As loud as possible”

Then we sang a round: “Ah Poor Bird”

After the warm up, Chrissy took us into the Media Lab where she set up microphones with effect pedals. Each of us got a microphone, and experimented with vocals (singing, talking, whispering, making funny and unrecognizable sounds) with different effect pedals such as distortion, octave, reverb, echo. We also tried to sing “Ah Poor Bird” again through the pedals.

Then Chrissy introduced us to a loop pedal. Everyone separately recorded 3 seconds of vocals and ended up with layers of vocal loop recording. We did this a couple of times – one of them turned out to be all speaking words (which sounded like a poetry reading battle), and another one turned out to be a tower of complex harmonies.

After that, we were introduced to contact microphones.

We each got one homemade contact microphone, which we first taped to our throats and then taped to our instruments. Contact microphones are much more sensitive than regular microphones because they directly attach to the sound-making object and delicately pick up all the vibrations made.

What a class! Possibilities of finding different ways of sound making, even on the same instrument, seems to be limitless. Our experiment with sounds and music making never ends. Big big thanks to Chrissy!

Listen to some samples of what we made here:

[audio:http://www.communitymusicworks.org/medialab/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/1_9_12-634-PM-Voice-Memo.mp3|titles=1]
[audio:http://www.communitymusicworks.org/medialab/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/1_9_12-635-PM-Voice-Memo.mp3|titles=2]
[audio:http://www.communitymusicworks.org/medialab/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/1_9_12-720-PM-Voice-Memo.mp3|titles=3]
[audio:http://www.communitymusicworks.org/medialab/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/1_9_12-725-PM-Voice-Memo-1.mp3|titles=4]
[audio:http://www.communitymusicworks.org/medialab/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/1_9_12-725-PM-Voice-Memo.mp3|titles=5]
[audio:http://www.communitymusicworks.org/medialab/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/1_9_12-727-PM-Voice-Memo.mp3|titles=6]

Today we started our experiment with chance music.

In chance music (also called aleatory/aleatoric music), some element of the composition and/or the performance of the piece is left to chance.

For a starting piece, we made a simple system which is a list of musical notes that are picked based on our birth months. There are 12 different notes in a chromatic scale and 12 months in a year, so we numbered the 12 notes then picked everyone’s birth month number notes. Then the performers (2 people this time) played their instruments using this list of notes. The performers were composing a piece as they played together, only using those picked notes, and all the rest of elements of music including rhythms, range of the notes, duration of the notes, space between notes, dynamics, mood of the music.. etc. were completely up to the performers.

Then we each made a graphic music score (a graphic score is a score that’s not only written in modern musical notation). There was no rules or directions to make these scores, except they were made on a piece of paper, and they were for musical pieces. Things we used to make graphic scores included drawings, words, numbers, maps, and scraps of pictures from a magazine.

 Rolling dice to pick notes

 

Then we had a curious performance of the pieces we just made.

“For Imitated Banjo & Viola, created by voices” by Aiden S.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Performed by: Liam & Malachy H. [audio:http://www.communitymusicworks.org/medialab/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/aidens.mp3|titles=aiden’s]

“A map for a conversation of 2 people” by David Lee

watch?v=HK-H10nx0u0&feature=youtu.be

Sakiko also brought in a 4-track recorder, and we took turns recording ourselves (creating multi-track compositions). Here’s a photo of us working together on a track:

We have been working on our music individually in the last 4 classes, using our field recordings from Day 1. Here is what we did in our fourth class:

1. Went outside to get field recordings
2. Edited those field recordings in the music program LogicPro
3. Started to put together those edited recordings, and as we put them together some of us recorded additional sounds like voices, instruments, hand clapping etc. in the lab.
4. Kept working!

The results are here!

Aiden S [audio:http://www.communitymusicworks.org/medialab/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Aiden2.mp3|titles=Aiden S]

Brandon L  [audio:http://www.communitymusicworks.org/medialab/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Brandon.mp3|titles=Brandon L]

Gabriel V [audio:http://www.communitymusicworks.org/medialab/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Gabriel1.mp3|titles=Gabriel]

Malachy H [audio:http://www.communitymusicworks.org/medialab/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/MalachyField.mp3|titles=Malachy H]

Sofie L [audio:http://www.communitymusicworks.org/medialab/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Sophie.mp3|titles=Sofie L]

Today was Halloween. We – as a Media Lab Experimental Music Division – were delighted to take this occasion and explore spooky sound making. Our featured instrument was theremin.

Today’s listening inspirations were clara rockmore, the soundtrack from  “the day the earth stood still”, “free music No.1 (for four theremins)” by Percy Grainger and Jimmy Page’s theremin solo in Led Zeppelin’s “whole lotta love”. After listening, we built a simple theremin from a theremin kit (big thanks to Hopkins family for generously letting us play with this!):

We took that theremin outside with 2 other mini theremins to make sound effects for our trick or treating!

Accompanied by the sounds of theremins, we walked around the Armory neighborhood, passing and greeting other ghosts and ghouls on the street. We visited houses, got a bunch of candy, and then went back to the Lab.

We started our Experimental Music class this week working with Sakiko Mori, a local composer and performer, and are very excited for a semester of experimentation!

At our first class, we listened to some field recordings of animals in the wild by Chris Watson and some recordings on the Sublime Frequencies label. We also listened to The Books and Matmos. We also listened to Trevor Wishart’s album Machine.

We then learned how to use audio recorders and went outside to do some field recording of our own. After exploring the neighborhood we came back into the Media Lab and transferred our files to the computers. We are excited to start making music with our recordings next week!

The Nelson String Quartet serenade!