In Garret Keizer’s The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want, Keizer examines the social and political impact of noise. Noise is a touchy subject on this blog (and most of the blogs in the awesome links section to the right). Personally, I don’t really believe in noise. I believe in obnoxious and unwanted sound, but I follow Cage in subscribing to the notion that sound and music are equivalent. In other words, all sound is music.

Nevertheless, Keizer pulls back the cover on some interesting effects of noise.

To say that noise is a relatively weak issue because it is less momentous than world hunger or global climate change is to make an incomplete statement. Noise is a weak issue also because most of those it affects are perceived, and very often dismissed, as weak. The ones who dismiss them, in addition to being powerful, are often the ones making the noise.

In using the word weak I am not referring to personal capabilities, to someone’s IQ score or muscle mass, though these factors may come into play. I am thinking rather of a person’s social standing and political power. Make a list of the people most likely to be affected by loud noises (though not all noise is loud), either because of their greater vulnerability to the effects of loud sound or because of their greater likelihood of being exposed to it, and you come up with a set of members whose only common features are their humanity and their lack of clout. Your list will include children (some of whom, according to the World Health Organization, “receive more noise at school than workers from an 8-hour work day at a factory”), the elderly (whose ability to discriminate spoken speech from background noise is generally less than that of younger contemporaries), the physically ill (cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, for example, are often more sensitive to noise), racial minorities (blacks in the United States are twice as likely, and Hispanics 1.5 times as likely, as whites to live in homes with noise problems), neurological minorities (certain types of sound are especially oppressive to people with autism), the poor (more likely than their affluent fellow citizens to live next to train tracks, highways, airports), laborers (whose political weakness has recently been manifested in weakened occupational safety standards), prisoners (noise, like rape, being one of the unofficial punishments of incarceration), members of the Armed Forces (roughly one in four soldiers returning from Iraq has a service-related hearing loss) — or simply a human being of any description who happens to have less sound-emitting equipment than the person living next to her (who might for his part have car speakers literally able to kill fish) and no feasible way to move. [1]

It makes me wonder about how noise might interact with musical creativity. Do those of us who make electroacoustic music have a different response to noise? Does noise shape our perception of music?

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/books/excerpt-the-unwanted-sound-of-everything-we-want.html

Today The Guardian brings us details on Michael Zev Gordon’s new piece, Allele. The piece uses the human genome as source material and is being debuted on July 9.

It’s been a delicate path to tread, and my approach has been shaped by seeing genes as simultaneously physical matter and things of extraordinary wonder. Humans share more than 99% of our genetic material. But every so often in any gene, at known points, or “polymorphisms”, tiny differences in genetic structure occur between groups of individuals. The different forms of the gene at these points are called alleles – and specific aspects of our individuality are influenced by particular allelic combinations. The scientific research has involved comparing certain alleles in musicians with those in non-musicians. The driving, expressive impulse for my piece has been to highlight these miraculous variants.

It took me time to get my head around the science involved. Things crystallised when I began to map a segment of common sequence leading up to my chosen polymorphism – A, C and A on to the same musical note-names; then T – “ti’ in the doh-re-mi solfège system – on to B, and so on. Adding a supple rhythm, I arrived, to my surprise, at something that sounded quite like plainsong: it became the initial gesture of the piece.

Other, pragmatic factors were formative, too. We had to decide who the performers would be. It was a starting point for the project that I would use their specific DNA data in my work – we were drawn to the image of “singing one’s genes”. That led to a multipart choir, and, inevitably for me, the model of Thomas Tallis’s 40-voice motet, Spem in Alium. The common linguistic root of Alium and Allele – the other – was not lost on us either.

A re-destruction of the Dutch national anthem, meant to be performed at Hacking At Random 2009 for Bits of Freedom, the Dutch digital rights organization. Unfortunately I got sick and couldn’t attend, but this is the video of the rehearsal. The software is Defmon, and you can’t copy it. Wuao wuao wuao wuao wuuuaaaooo. Not so much improvisation in this one, except for the trashy solo at the end, but I’ll post more of those things later on. [1]

Via Digital Tools

[1] http://goto80.blipp.com/defmon-bits-of-freedom

As part of Make Music New York, six percussionist performed Persephassa, by Iannis Xenakis, on boats in Central Park Lake. It was an interesting interpretation of a rarely performed piece. The piece is rarely played, in part because of the unusual spacing of the ensemble. The six percussionists must sit in a hexagonal formation around the audience.

Electronic musical instrument guru Tim Kaiser hardly needs an introduction. Since he began posting his homemade instruments, he has been a popular feature on the electronic music blogs. Here he is performing live in Cincinnati last December.

Via Matrix

This fun installation was created by artist Blair Neal, who cobbled it together using Max.

A demo/walkthrough of my installation entitled ‘Color a Sound’ which was set up at RPI’s West Hall Gallery 111 for the month of April 2010.

The interaction is meant to be very simple and playful, hence the major scale. It would be much more difficult for someone to walk up and have fun with a chromatic scale. Like any instrument, one would have to spend a lot of time to make a composition worth listening to and this is just a demo of the sonic abilities/responsiveness.

Via Rekkerd

Eric Archer presents an interesting drive around New York City, where light is being translated into sound.

Here are some experimental recordings I’ve made with the Lumicon sound camera, which detects modulated light and transforms it to analog audio. I’m having a great deal of fun exploring the city with this device. Its like eavesdropping on a world of sounds that were never intended to be heard.

Via MAKE

Black Allegheny is one of the first albums made up entirely of swarm generated music. The album was created using a swarm-controlled sampler called Becoming, which was programmed by the composer.

Becoming is an algorithmic composition program written in java, that builds upon some of John Cage’s frequently employed compositional processes. Cage often used the idea of a “gamut” in his compositions. A gamut could be a collection of musical fragments, or a collection of sounds, or a collection of instruments. Often, he would arrange the gamut visually on a graph, then use that graph to piece together the final output of a piece. Early in his career, he often used a set of rules or equations to determine how the output would relate to the graph. Around 1949, during the composition of the piano concerto, he began using chance to decide how music would be assembled from the graph and gamut.

In Becoming, I directly borrow Cage’s gamut and graph concepts; however, the software assembles music using concepts from the AI subfield of swarm intelligence. I place a number of agents on the graph and, rather than dictating their motions from a top-down rule-based approach, the music grows in a bottom-up fashion based on local decisions made by each agent. Each agent has preferences that determine their movement around the graph. These values dictate how likely the agent is to move toward food, how likely the agent is to move toward the swarm, and how likely the performer is to avoid the predator.

Yes, this is my new album! Thanks for reading and listening!

On CDM, with a great comments thread

On Make Online

Swarm Sampler On MatrixSynth

On Noise for Airports (a great intellectual music blog!)

On Califaudio