As you know, our final concert, Sound Art Forum, is this weekend, Saturday the 1st at 3pm in Room B20 (across the hall from our normal lecture space).  As we have discussed, I would like you to produce a short piece for performance/showcase.  This can be an expansion of another track from the semester, or an entirely new one.  Adapting a studio piece to live performance can be a nice to to breath new life into it, literally.

On Thursday I will want to know what equipment you need for your performance.  This could be anything from CD or laptop playback of a premixed track to a specific piece of gear or software.  This will help us organize the concert and execute your piece more smoothly.

In addition, I would ask that you supply me with a title for the piece for the "program" (we can talk more about what I have in mind on Thursday).  I will ask each of you to introduce your piece briefly (!!) at the concert just before it is played.  This is instead of a printed program note and makes the performance more personal and interactive.

If you have any questions or concerns, technical or artistic, please let me know as soon as you can.  The concert poster is attached (11x17 and 8.5x11)!  I will be making copies but if you have the means, feel free to print and post them around campus.

P.S.  Following the concert I will have pizza for everyone (Nines?).  We will make the order during an intermission.  I hope you will be able to stay briefly after the show to eat and talk to your colleagues about their work.

Hi
I was wondering if anyone would let me borrow their bass guitar over the break, or even just one day. Preferably a four string, with frets. I wanted to record some stuff for the upcoming performance. Please email me (smm95) if you will let me borrow it, I will take care of it as if my own.
Thanks,
Sara

Hi everyone,

    I wanted to say this in class, but we ran out of time.  I really liked the fact that minimalism and the way that "Come Out" and "I'm sitting in a room" play with the fundamental idea of human voice and speech as a much more complicated instrument that we can imagine.

    I think one thing that is common between the two  pieces is the way that we see a break down of one's normal, natural voice, into it's basic (one may say, cellular) musical components.  The way the music plays around with things such as sound of breath and consonant annunciations (having the tick tick in "Come Out" sound like a beat, although it's just the sound of a sample annunciating a "Th" sound, for example).  Or the way that Lucier shows his voice as a pattern of more complex waves and tonal complexities.

   We might think of it as "degenerative" music, in a way- because we are seeing a breakdown of sound to simple, yet complex(?) forms.

Mike Tedesco

In lecture today we discussed repetition broadly and I introduced you to several pieces, including Eric Satie's (in)famous Vexations.  I have attached a Reason "performance" of this piece, all 840 repeats ready to play.  Notice that the file is very small, under 1 MB.  If I exported all 3360 measures as audio, it would fill a small hard drive ;) 

I invite each of you to experience this piece for yourself,  the whole thing takes around 20 hours.  You can also export the MIDI file and play it on your home system (with notably bland General MIDI sounds).  For other non-piano versions of the piece, including several remixes and re-imaginings, see ubuweb here:

http://www.ubu.com
(for those who saw guitarist Alan Licht when he performed here last month, be sure to catch his guitar and voice rendition found about half way down the page)

A manuscript of the score can be found here:

Vexations manuscript

I have also attached a PDF score .

And, of course, John Cage's description of the performance:

Cage Letters on Vexations perfromance

The course signup site appears to be down.  CIT has been made aware of this and is working to correct the problem.  I'm very sorry for the inconvenience. 

In the mean time please be courteous to student trying to access the studios, the honor's system prevails in situations like this.  If you had signed up for times you can still attend your slot.  If you had not, you may be out of luck until the server is back online.  You are, as always, welcome to stop by CEMC with the intention of finding an empty studio but preference is given to students who signed had already out the timeslot.  Here too, the honors system is required.

Thanks for your help.

As an aside to Eric's format request I wanted to point out another small issue students have had with web attachments.  There are several ways to attach files to a blog entry, the two main ones being "Attach audio files" and "File attachments" (see below).  The former is for audio formats such as wav or mp3 (these will show up with a little play button).  The latter is for everything else, anything you want to see listed at the bottom of your message as a downloadable file (.rns, .doc, .pdf, etc)...in other words just like email.

This image shows how they appear when you are creating a new entry:

Using the vocoder and subtractor to put Paul Verlaine's Chanson d'Automne in the proper mood.

I like the vocoder.

Well after a bit of messing around, I found a very nice deep almost ambient sort of sound and seeing as how Halloween is upcoming, I made a strange take on the classic Toccata & Fugue.