carmen of the spheres

Very interesting take on the Harmony of the Spheres by Greg Fox here. A blurb from that page if you need any more enticement:

"This is (finally) the brand new early August 2006 work by Greg Fox, a first response to Edward O Wilson's "Consilience", Richard Dawkins' "Unweaving The Rainbow", Jared Diamond's "The Third Chimpanzee", Steven Pinker's "How The Mind Works" and most importantly Susan Blackmore's "The Meme Machine". All of these books deal (among other things!) with the relationship between art and science, between art and human nature, art and the world. "




The piece derives pitches from the orbital periods of the planets (using the idea that halving or doubling a cycle produces an octave down or up respectively). Of course that alone will only give one a fundamental frequency: I think he settled on sine waves for the realization.

perfume for the month of may

What better way to begin the merry month of May than with some tunes from Perfume? Here are links to 2 different tunes from different points in their career...

sweet donuts
(2003)



one room disco
(2009)

Used daily your overall mood will be improved!

tone matrix online synthesizer

Here's a cool little online sine wave synth.

It's very visual: just click in the grid where you want your sound to go and listen to the results. So you don't have to think like a musician: in fact you can just try to make pictures and hear what happens. You can also think about how symmetric your visual patterns are and how that affects the music produced (it seems to me that asymmetric patterns are more interesting, probably because they repeat so fast that symmetry is achieved that way).

The notes constitute a D major pentatonic scale, by the way, which means that it's this collection of tones:

d, e, f#, a, b, d...

You can also figure that temporally the 16 steps give you something like 16 sixteenth notes, or 4 quarter notes. If you look at it like this the quarter notes are coming by at M.M. 120.


Extremely fun.

perfume's monochrome effect

If you happen to watch American Dad! and caught the episode May the Best Stan Win (season 6 episode 12) you'll recall that Cyborg Stan put a cd in the car stereo and told Francine that the music was "Japanese funk" and that everyone in the future loved it (this happes at around 10:47 in the episode). The tune is actually by a group called Perfume and the song is called Monochrome Effect. It is worth sharing:

youtube clip

(the embed function on this one has been 'disabled by request').

The video itself is what I could only describe as 'very Japanese', and the song, in addition to being as catchy as catchy can be (and does kind of give a shout out to the Yellow Magic Orchestra), is brimming with spirit to the point of being ultra-life affirming. As good as J-Pop gets...

xenakis

"Music is how feelings sound." (anonymous)

Iannis Xenakis' Orient-Occident (1960) is not really a hard piece to experience. It's really visceral. This is not the sort of music that has a melody -- and perhaps to many, many [most] people it is on the fringes or beyond of music.

I think on the contrary that it is music (duh), and that it's mainstream music. If we reflect for a moment on the anonymous quote above we should recognize that there are many, many feelings, and that they cannot all be expressed by tonal harmonies as organized by 19th century composers, or by bop lines or wonderful J-pop melodies. In fact every time music 'expands' we will be ever closer to expressing the full range of human emotions.