Tone Matrix

April 13, 2011
Stacey Mason

Andrè Michelle’s ToneMatrix is a fun little interactive, musical grid . Though not as visually stunning as some of Brian Eno’s work , ToneMatrix invites a different sense of fun and creativity, perhaps brought on by the constraints of the grid.

Clicking on a square adds a tone to a repeating rhythm. The more squares you click, the more complicated the beats become. At first I clicked randomly, then I clicked wildly, then I endeavored to draw interesting things. After drawing a couple of simple shapes and then a panda, I decided that I preferred the sound of non-symmetrical pictures and took great delight in defacing the poor

Michelle has an interesting portfolio of other work, some of which is available for download in the Apple store.

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End of Music History

End of Music History

March 1, 2011
Stacey Mason

In a lecture last fall, Tom Service explained that the end of music history was upon us. Music has been exhausted: there is nothing new to be discovered, nothing is unique, and on top of all of this, you can’t make a living from it. Nobody enjoys listening to “New Music,” and the crowd interested in such works has conditioned itself on the fact that the more unpleasant a piece is, the more sophisticated and “modern.” Music is at the peak of its own destruction.

The scene: the South Bank Centre, new music's concrete-bound HQ in London; the performers: let's say, the London Sinfonietta; the occasion a concert that includes a new piece by a vaunted young composer. Now, one of the extraordinary things – and the first that would strike any newcomer to the scene – is that the audience which has turned up by for a world premiere by much-feted composer X, touted as one of the big hitters of new music, someone who everyone agrees is important for the potential future of the art-form and therefore, at some distant level, for world culture – is so vanishingly tiny. The numbers of empty chairs far outnumber the bums on seats at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, and there's an atmosphere of - well, there isn't really an atmosphere of anticipation at all, as one of our great composer-conductors shuffles onto the podium to conduct the Sinfonietta, in this supposedly epic premiere. The audience's response to this 20 minute work for one-to-a-part ensemble is as tepid as the composer's bows are awkward; her gestures to the players are charmingly unschooled, and her looks to the audience of a combination of bewilderment and pleading please-like-me naivety.

Well, sort of.

The classical music business is in transition just like every other art. Service urges young composers to forget the old models of composing grand pieces on high-profile commissions and performing them before a bored audience who would rather hear the stuff they know anyway.

My sense is that many young composers now realise that the game is up, that the conventional paths to fame and, er, fortune in contemporary classical culture just aren't worth the candle. Instead, they're better off on their own, not least because their music doesn't fit the line-ups of an orchestra, or even the 1 to a part ensembles of the Sinfonietta, or the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, or Liverpool's Ensemble 10:10, or Manchester's Psappha – a line-up and repertoire whose time has probably also come, has also become a living history more than something genuinely contemporary
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H. G. Wells

H. G. Wells

January 11, 2011
Stacey Mason

H. G. Wells proposed a global, collaborative encyclopedia in The World Brain. He presented a series of BBC radio broadcasts in the 1930s and ‘40s, some which are now available online in the BBC archives. Wells discusses a number of topics, ranging from politics to the history of the printing press. You can also browse an archive of his letters.

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Isle Of Tune

Isle Of Tune

December 22, 2010
Mark Bernstein

Isle of Tune is a clever Flash-based music sequencer uses cars to represent voices, and roadside scenery to represent sounds. An intriguing musical toy, this is also an interesting example of a playful interface that could generate intriguing new ideas.

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Wagner’s Music

Wagner’s Music

December 9, 2010
Mark Bernstein

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David Goldman asks why we can’t hear Wagner’s music. First, modern performance either subvert opera or bathes the work in special effects. But, more deeply, movie music of the 20th century makes the effects of the late 19th seem familiar and safe. An interesting, detailed, and accessible musicological argument grounds his exploration of what Wagner set out to do, and why.

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Papa Sangre

Papa Sangre

August 3, 2010
Stacey Mason

Entering the Palace of Bones from Papa Sangre on Vimeo.

A while ago I mentioned how interesting audio hypertext might be. In my recent locative narrative research, I found Papa Sangre, a fascinating audio-only locative mobile game by Somethin’ Else . By utilizing our ability to determine which direction a sound is coming from, Papa Sangre invites players to navigate an invisible landscape and avoid terrible creatures on a quest to save the a loved one.

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Faulkner

Faulkner

July 26, 2010
Stacey Mason

New online recordings of William Faulkner discussing his work have been posted by the University of Viginia. The archives contain around 28 hours of readings, interviews, and student questions from 1957 and 1958 when he was UVA’s Writer in Residence. The site also features essays, articles, and photos of the writer.

A recent article in Newsweek reveals the potential importance of the recordings. Quoting from Faulkner in the University, Malcolm Jones shows how transcriptions of Faulkner’s thoughtful drawl can’t quite capture his answers.

Faulkner: Not at all. I was trying to talk about people, using the only tool I knew, which was the country that I knew. No, I wasn’t trying to—to—wasn’t writing sociology at all [audience laughter]. I was just trying to write about people, which to me are the important [. . . ]. Just the human heart. It’s not—not ideas. I don’t know anything about ideas, don’t have much confidence in them.
What I couldn’t do, reading that book, was hear how he said what he said. There was no intonation, there were no pauses, there were only the words on the page, and while I devoured them, that was as far as I could go […] I didn’t know what I was missing. Now I do.
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IF Reading

IF Reading

April 7, 2010
Stacey Mason

Recently, MIT hosted a Purple Blurb event which showcased interactive fiction writers Jeremy Freese and Emily Short.

Freese read from Violet, an interesting interactive fiction told in the voice of the protagonist’s girlfriend. She entreats you to write a thousand words of your dissertation, overcoming obstacles of procrastination that seem to keep popping up.

Short read from Alabaster, a work that experiments with a collaborative process of IF creation. You are the huntsman. You are traveling into the forest with Snow White. You intend to kill her. Is she as innocent as she seems, or is there more to the story than we know? The player interacts with Snow White, asking her questions to glean bits of information.

I had never been to an IF reading, and I must say that the experience is very different from reading the work at home, or even watching it played. The readers read the text while an “interactor” manipulated the software, typing in commands to ensure that no time was wasted. Thus, the audience did not get to experience the pleasure of solving the puzzles, but instead was privy to easter eggs and areas of the text that they might otherwise have missed. The format also allowed for showing lots of the text in a brief session.

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Hearts, Keys, and Puppetry

Hearts, Keys, and Puppetry

January 22, 2010
Stacey Mason

BBC Audio has released Neil Gaiman’s Twitterfiction, “Hearts, Keys, and Puppetry.” The story is splendidly narrated by Katherine Kellgren, bringing the characters and action to life. (Here’s a Mark Bernstein review of another Kellgren audiobook.)

I have to admit, I was surprised at how good this was. The re-mediation is a suprise, moving from Twitter to voice is not an obvious choice. I expected to hear many different voices pulling the narrative in different directions; I expected the sentences to feel short and staccato. I expected to be driven to distracted. And I didn’t realize I expected any of this until I found that it wasn’t there. The story is immersive, with much credit given to Kellgren’s narratiom. There were a few moments which would occasionally remind me that the work was written over Twitter, with sentences like “Then Sam couldn’t believe what happened next.” But the story is fun, and it made my long and chilly commute much more enjoyable.

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Miracle in July

Miracle in July

December 9, 2009
correspondent: Sebastian Stephenson

The Miracle in July is a fiction blog that incorporates music and images into its text in an interesting way. Rather than just including images in the text body, Michelle Anderson hides the images behind links, allowing the reader a sense of exploration and discovery. More importantly, however, her use of music is unique: she places links in the narrative that begin or change the background music to enhance the mood of the story.

Sometimes this technique proves awkward, as when she includes the name of the song to link in the text, which often has the same effect as having characters recite the title of a movie . It does, however, reveal some interesting ways that this could be done very effectively. Music could pace the narrative—that is, it could be used to demonstrate the passage of story-time or to exaggerate inconsistencies between story time and real time.

Starting a song just as you begin a long and detailed description of a brief encounter which actually takes very little story-time (narratological deceleration), and trying to time it so that the clip ends as you finish reading the passage, could be used to good effect. Everyone will read at different speeds, but I can’t image more than several seconds of difference.

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Allosphere

Allosphere

December 2, 2009
Stacey Mason

The California NanoSystems Institute at UC Santa Barabara has been researching interactive environments for research and artistic expression since 1997. Their efforts have yielded the Allosphere, a 30-foot diameter sphere built inside a three-story cube. The Allosphere was built to be anechoic, minimizes all background noise and light-interference, and contains thousands of speakers to create an immersive interactive experience.

The Allophere’s project website speculates some of the possible uses for such technology:

Scientifically, it is an instrument for gaining insight and developing bodily intuition about environments into which the body cannot venture: abstract, higher-dimensional information spaces, the worlds of the very small or very large, and the realms of the very fast or very slow, in fields ranging from nanotechnology to theoretical physics, from proteomics to cosmology, from neurophysiology to the spaces of consciousness, and from new materials to new media.
Artistically, the AlloSphere is an instrument for the creation and performance of avant-garde new works and the development of entirely new modes and genres of expression and forms of immersion-based entertainment, fusing future art, architecture, music, media, games, cinema, and more.

The project, which recalls Cave Writing project at Brown, is ongoing; designer Professor JoAnn Kuchera-Morin and her colleagues are working on the computing platform and interactive display portions of the sphere.

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Eno releases Trope

Eno releases Trope

September 25, 2009
Stacey Mason

Brian Eno has introduced his new app for the iPhone and iPod touch, Trope. The new app is a follow-up to Bloom, an application that would create different sounds and images when the user moved her finger around the screen. Eno explains,

“Trope is a different emotional experience from Bloom—more introspective, more atmospheric. It shows that generative music…can draw from a palette of moods.”

The blend of music, visual art, and user interaction make this a very interesting app—more interesting when you ask how we should think about or critique this type of art.

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New Classical Music

New Classical Music

September 24, 2009
Stacey Mason

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project is dedicated to the recording and performing of new orchestral music from the 20th and 21st centuries.

Often even the experienced concert-goer will complain that these pieces are strange, experimental, disjointed, or hard-to-understand—many of the same complaints that plague new media. What struck me about the project was the unusual critical and commercial success the group seems to be enjoying from playing these pieces. In a time when music CDs are tough to sell, and the enterprise of classical recording seems almost at an end, BMOP has launched an ambitious, award-winning (and apparently profitable) catalog of new works on CD (some downloadable from their site for $0.99), including John Harbison's ballet Ulysses and Gunther Schuller’s Journey in Jazz.

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New Media Crisis of 1949

New Media Crisis of 1949

September 23, 2009
Stacey Mason

In the Wall Street Journal, a great article by Terry Teachout on The New-Media Crisis of 1949 which details the decline of network radio. The music, television, and print industries should be taking notes. Sentimentality won’t save a medium, and those who embrace the new form tend to be more successful. Thanks. George Landow!

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