CRITICAL NOISE

Systems and Music

noreply@blogger.com (Terry O'Gara) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 06:31:00 +0000

While browsing Quora, I stumbled on and became intrigued by the following query:

"What are some systems we live with today that were designed for a world of the past?"

For me, fascinated by schema and inspired by the idea that ancient patterns influence modern lives, well of course my mind set off in a million different directions. And if you're anything like me, you've created a long list of possibilities before you stop and ask yourself, "Wait, what's a system, anyway?"

Explanations abound, and Wikipedia, of course, offers a reasonable answer, which you can read for yourself by clicking this link: SYSTEM.

But in fact different professionals relate to the word 'system' in highly individual ways. Nevertheless, I think we can distill a variety of perspectives into the following clunky definition.

A system is an interdependent group of things, rules or concepts, which taken as a set, form a pattern, a single organization or a unified interconnecting network.

This already unwieldy definition only increases in complexity when we realize that sometimes the tools we use in the implementation of systems are systems or the products of themselves. Indeed, systems are often nested one within another, as a cell to a body, or an ocean on a planet. Likewise, a particular procedure using certain equipment might itself be considered an equipment or process dependent system, if we can define process as an operation within a larger framework of interactions that compose a system. Perhaps it's a bit like quantum mechanics. Definitions may change with scale.

But what I find particularly fascinating is how the query applies to musical instruments because modern musical instruments represent not simply tools, or the products of systems, but system specific tools. In this way, a piano, for instance, is very different than a hammer, which can lend itself to a (wider) variety of systems.

And it may be that the more complex the tool, the more more system specific it is, or that tools, once assuming an arbitrary level of complexity are best thought not as tools but as machines, if we can put machines (and instruments) into another (also arbitrary) category.

Either way, I stumbled when some people answered the query by suggesting that certain systems, such as piano keyboard organization, were anachronistic systems simply because they were complicated to learn or implement.

This one really threw me because I've long thought that the piano proved an example of technology that one needn't improve upon. In fact, I've long used the piano, and by extension the keyboard, as an example of a system from a prior age that continues to serve us well today. It also strikes me as a perfect example of a system embodied in a machine, i.e. the tool is the system made physically manifest. But here was a gentleman arguing it was a jerry-rigged device with too many key signatures to learn (or rather, that each key required a different physical execution).

Well, if it suits you, you could do as Irving Berlin did and outfit your piano with a lever that permits the player to memorize but one pattern, C or F# major say, and then essentially stick shift into the more difficult fingerings. Or, if electronics suit you, you can simply press the transpose button on your electronic keyboard.

However, if there were a musical instrument that I thought might seem out of date, I might suggest the pipe organ. Not because I think pipe organs sound old fashioned (I think they sound great), but because the primary function of many 'stops' and pipes of these behemoth instruments are intended to mimic other instruments. As a result, we might, some centuries later, suggest that because the synthesizer presents us with more sound in a smaller package, the pipe organ might now be considered an anachronism when compared to a modern synthesizer. (Although, personally, I'm not yet ready to replace every pipe organ with a MIDI keyboard, no matter how stunning current sampling or modeling technology.

Yet another instrument that might tempt my vote as fabricated upon an obsolete system is the guitar. Five strings are tuned in perfect fourths while one remaining string is tuned by a major third. This system of tuning is made all the more peculiar when compared to other string instruments, which are tuned by fifths. Coming from a violin background, I imagined the original guitar makers to be simultaneously brilliant craftsmen, able to bend wood and hammer frets, and yet somehow incapable of understanding a concept as simple as an ascending Circle of Fifths.

Because it is that one string tuned by a third that always throws a wrench into the advancement of every beginning guitar student. Not to mention that the matrix-like quality of a fretboard requires those dedicated to learning the instrument to navigate a seemingly endless number of patterns for any given key.

Oh, but were learning the guitar simply a matter of memorizing the position of 12 keys. Instead, a scale, which is a perfectly linear thing on a piano (up and down), stretches out in every single direction on a guitar –up, down, left, right, diagonal this way, diagonal that. In fact, one can even ascend a scale while descending on the fretboard and vice versa, which would feel a bit to a pianist like playing the high notes in the bass register.

Start anywhere: Go anywhere. It's a recipe for both free improvisation and madness.

But see, yes, it's madness, but it's just that kind of madness that turns out to be quite fun. And once one has accustomed oneself to navigating the fret board with some ease, it becomes quite evident that your television remote notwithstanding, simplicity is not always an improvement when it comes to the arts.

Certainly, simplicity is paramount to utilitarian activities. And the simplicity provided by toy or electronic instruments might enable a layman or beginner to feel immediate enjoyment as a music maker, and that's always good thing.

However, as Music theory and the machines we call instruments collectively represent a complex system for communication, the system provides users infinite possibility, and like language, mastery necessitates environmental access from a young age, prolonged study and intense pursuit, i.e. practice, practice practice.

Fortunately, mastery (of music, language or any other thing) is not required for clear communication, professional success, spiritual enlightenment, personal fulfillment, securing a mate or the enjoyment of most common social interactions.

In this regard, one might think of the art of teaching a subject, such as music, as not so much presenting a set of rules or processes, but as a systemic flow which one must approach at just the right place in order to gain successful passage. A bit like merging onto a highway. After that, speed, complexity and fluidity of execution are eventualities (in the persistent and enthusiastic student).

It might also be noted that some systems are eliminated on the basis of taste alone, rather than issues of functionality. For instance, tuning technology has allowed steel pan makers to create instruments which sound with a more accurate pitch center than their predecessors. However, to my ears the slightly imperfect steel drums of yesteryear sound more magical. It may be that in the quest for perfection we lose a bit of magic, and I'm not convinced that's always a good thing.

Beauty and simplicity are sometimes used as synonyms, and I think this is a mistake. Presented as such, simplicity is very often an experience as related by an observer or audience member. But for the performing artist, Beauty is generally produced by the control of a complex network of nuance and patterning. And in regard to music especially, any expression within a work that presents as beautiful often appears as such within a context designed to evoke an emotional response in a listener.

So while audiences may judge musical systems as effective based on a notion that the results are beautiful and therefore simple, but whether such systems are effortless to operate is another matter altogether.

In fact, when it comes to systems in music –and as to whether some systems we live with today which were designed for a world of the past, might or might not be anachronisms– I'm inclined to believe that that it is simple systems are likely to wear quickly and fade from our lives unless they acquire a level of complexity which transforms them from 'tools' into 'instruments', which in the hands of an artist, become capable of transforming theory and momentary impulse into timeless communication.

Sound of the Year: 2011: The Cry for Freedom

noreply@blogger.com (Terry O'Gara) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 06:00:00 +0000

The Critical Noise 2011 Sound of the Year is:

The Global Cry for Freedom and Fairness

You have a dream.
You have a voice.
Will the world hear it?
Or will you suffer in silence?

From Arab Spring to American Autumn, the meek, the poor, the downtrodden, have used the media in a way once reserved for those with access to elite connections and expensive broadcast channels: as both a megaphone and a weapon. And in so doing, they may or may not have won relief from daily tyranny, but they have increased global awareness of unjust governments and unfair markets.

They have been heard.

People of modest means have found strength in unity, and in so doing, have thrust themselves upon the world's stage, often eluding velvet ropes and manacles along the way. But many have also been arrested or died tragic deaths.

They will not disappear. They will not die in vain.

This chorus of discontent has compelled the powerful to listen, and the effect has caused nothing less than a tectonic shift of the global political and economic paradigm.

Indeed, tremors can still be felt. Without a doubt, they will resonate for years to come.

But although the cries of any given group of individuals were not always in unison, they were always identifiable as a collective appeal for Human Rights and dignity –for equal opportunity and a democratic ethos – to be distinguished from the law of the jungle and a sometimes predatory economic system that has for far too long passed as politics and business as usual.

Therefore:

The Critical Noise blog congratulates those who have won their freedom; and wishes continued support for those still fighting for their dreams (and as often our own); and extends our prayers to all who have summoned the courage to add a voice to what has been both a communal and a transnational chorus of voices using the power of sound and media to change the world.

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Sound of the Year: 2010 – The Vuvuzela

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Photo Credit: The London Evening Post

Yes, We are Updating the Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Terry O'Gara) — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 14:51:00 +0000

After a brief experiment with Blogger's new dynamic layouts, the Critical Noise blog has returned to its original simple layout. There might be yet another color palette update in the near future, but otherwise, no major redesigns until next year.

Beasts and Beats: Does the Cosmos Sing?

noreply@blogger.com (Terry O'Gara) — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 06:05:00 +0000

We call the chirps and calls produced by birds 'song' but little of it resembles music to me. That said, I'm deeply fascinated by the communicative sounds of birds and other animals, nonetheless. We might say this so-called bird song collectively resembles musical sound, but only in so far as speech and syntax is musical, no?

I think it more fair to say that though we might perceive bird vocalization as song, whether or not it is intended as such is still a mystery (at least, to me) –that is, do birds distinguish between speech and music?

In my own observations of various birds, I've identified warning calls, feed-me chirps, mate-with-me cooing and sometimes even beautiful, melodic utterances that seemed voiced simply for the self satisfaction of the bird itself. But whether or not such vocalizations by birds or any other animal was conceived as entertainment for a given bird's own pleasure is beyond my capacity to identify it as such.

Is the cicada actually singing, or is it more likely the cicada is simply communicating his desire to attract a mate? Maybe we should classify all activities, produced with the intention of resulting in sex, whether by human, animal or insect, as music?

When a dog whines along with an aria, can we say he or she is actually accompanying the tune? Does our music hurt their ears, as it sometimes appears to do? And yet, sometimes they seem to enjoy it to. It's as if dogs enjoy expressing their pain. Would it be too far afield to suggest dogs have a natural inclination to sing the blues?

Are the hydro acoustic sounds produced by whales and dolphins songs? If so, might one also reasonably ask if SONAR is song, produced by a chorus of instruments which include in their ensemble a signal generator, a power amplifier, an electro-acoustic transducer and the echo response produced by the ocean floor.

As for the origin of rhythm, we might equally argue that the beating human heart or the Circadian Rhythm forms the basis for all music, but if rhythm is fundamentally defined by regular mechanical movements, then does that make solar system a musical instrument? What about a mechanical engine? A car, for instance? Certainly the locomotive inspired much music after its invention, but is the train itself a musical instrument? Can we write a sonata for violin, clarinet and Amtrak?

Some who study Zoomusicology do argue animal vocalizations do fall under the category of music. I think it depends on whether a specific animal is singing or speaking, just like humans? But certainly, animals respond to man made music in different ways.

And in the case of SONAR and synthesizers, we do recognize that machines are capable of making music, but in those cases, the machines are actually modern instruments, manipulated by human operators.

In the case of synthesizers, I don't for instance, recognize the emissions of a random tone generator as music, but I do recognize their possible use as an element in creating purposefully designed music.

Does that mean works created entirely by random means, such as by choosing pitches based on a roll of the dice, or by some algorithm, are not music? I think of such works as musical games. The question is whether or not the result of a game based on random choices can be considered purposeful.

Which is not to say we should deny ourselves fun. In fact, purposeless activity can be as restorative as it is playful. At the same time, I think it is useful for professionals to distinguish between purposeless play and purposeful performance. The actors in a theatrical performance are not really playing. Likewise, musicians might be said to play an instrument, but it might be more accurate to suggest they're actually working an instrument.

Granted, you see and hear something like this video, and you think, maybe these birds are indeed singing, and also, possibly engaged in some kind of dance, too? It is certainly a performance of some sort, but is it art?

Does the cosmos sing? Are animal vocalizations song? Such vocalizations don't fall on my ear as song. To me, they resemble language, and while language might be a component of song, and linguistic techniques have long been used to analyze musical works, I personally don't think the spoken word (or the bird call, dog bark, etc) is by itself musical in nature. And yet a modern composer or sound designer with a sampler can take any of these sounds and incorporate them into a musical work.

But by themselves, in their original context? Well, if we choose to ignore intention, then perception is everything. After all, many things which are not musical in origin might indeed be music to one's ears.

The Changing Role of Sound in Branding

noreply@blogger.com (Terry O'Gara) — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 23:17:00 +0000

Please check my most recent essay on the evolution of sonic artistry at SEMIONAUT.

From Musical Score to Critical Noise: The Changing Role of Sound in Branding

Semionaut is an online magazine & knowledge resource offering insight into culture, media, creative industries, and brand strategy. Its publishers, editors, and contributors are professionally involved in the application of semiotic and cultural analysis to brand communication and design issues.

I have to admit being very happy to have been able to make a contribution to one of my favorite online journals, and I hope that after reading my article, Critical Noise readers will also check out the other articles on Semionaut. They're all quite fantastic.

Commemorative Video: Gotham Artists – 911

noreply@blogger.com (Terry O'Gara) — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 16:29:00 +0000

I made a commemorative video for the Gotham Artists project I participated on in 2001, in the wake of 9/11.

The song '911' was recorded In Memoriam October 3, 2001 with a 'We Are The World' spirit and the sincere desire to provide comfort and consolation to our then wounded city and country, and if it were possible, to help heal the world (and our own souls, too), though music.

The memorial video was created Summer of 2011 to acknowledge the Ten Year Anniversary of the September 11, 2001 Attacks on America.

A lot of wonderful New York Metro musicians and audio professionals contributed to this track. Please check it out & share.

Editing images is not one of my favorite tasks, but over the years I've been contacted by a number of fans who follow a few of the musicians featured on the track to create a video. And since I couldn't manage to interest any colleagues in editorial to make something for us, I did it myself. And as it turns out, an amateur work this cut may be, but in the end I'm actually glad I did it myself, because it was nice to reconnect with the work, and of course, it took me back to the day, so I experienced a bit of catharsis.

To learn more about the history of the tribute song, read the following article I published to this blog on Monday, September 11, 2006: Gotham Artists

Gotham Artists: Drums: Joe Bonadio. Percussion: Erik Charlston. Electric Bass: Will Lee. Keyboards: Charles Giordano. Electric Guitar: Larry Saltzman. Strings: Sandra Park, Jungsun Yoo, Sarah Seiver, Eileen Moon, Krysztof Kuznik, Ann Kim. Singers: Craig Chang, Tod Cooper, Jo Davidson, Jenny Douglas-McRae, Tabitha Fair, Morley Kamen, Gary Morris, Jenni Muldaur, Jason Paige, Sophia Ramos, Eugene Ruffolo, Stephen Scarpulla. Singers contracted by Valerie W. Morris, Val's Artist Management. Strings and Orchestral Percussion contracted by Sandra Park. Composed Produced by Terry O'Gara. Arranged by Tony Finno. Engineered & Mixed by Michael Sweet. Asst. Engineer: Steve Schopp. Special Thanks to David Crafa who generously helped us with studio time and resources. '911' was recorded and mixed 10/03/01 at The Cutting Room Recording Studios/NYC. Mastered by Larry Lachmann. Original CD Art & Promo Design by: Amy Taylor/Exec. Prod., Jason Sienkwicz/Designer. Video edit by Terry O'Gara. All images not in the public domain remain the property of their respective copyright owners.

BEYOND SOUND: What is Music?

noreply@blogger.com (Terry O'Gara) — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 06:11:00 +0000

Near the beginning of my career I participated in the development of a 1.25-second connection tone for AT&T Long Distance. 1.25 seconds doesn't provide enough time to deliver a story, but it suffices for a mark –a carrier of data– and it is therefore fully capable of conveying a message, branded or otherwise.

But can an audio mark also be considered a work of music?

It begs the question: What is music?

At one level, anything that can be described to exhibit wave like motion might be considered music. Others go a step further to define music as a subset of sound by limiting it to those sounds or collections of sounds which are organized.

As a sophisticated example of organized sound, the answer is yes, an audio mark is music.

But as a mere signifier, the answer is no. It's like asking if a STOP sign is a sentence.

DEFINING TRADITIONAL MUSIC

I'm of the dual opinion that 1) all movement describes musical activity, but also, 2) that the sensory experience which we commonly describe as music is more than simply organized sound (as Edgard Varèse and others often regard it).

The problem I have with Varèse's definition is that it lacks recognition that 'organization' does not simply describe intent but also impression, and sometimes impression is a false construct. So, instead I attribute the following characteristics to that which we call music by traditional standards:

• Purposeful design (whether 'composed' or 'improvised')
• Deliberate execution (demonstrating mastery of dynamics and phrasing)
• Unified by sustained control of coherent pitch and rhythm
• A specifically timed sequence of sound

So, what happens if non-musicians decide whatever it is one is playing is not music. Well, it happens all the time: if the consensus judges your art is noise, then it's noise (until such time as the audience decides otherwise). As Varèse points out, the audience will call anything new 'noise'. And so what if it is?

This is not the definition you'll find in Webster's, but it works for me.

MUSIC VERSUS ACOUSTIC ECOLOGY

The purpose of the above described filter is not to provide a megacosmic definition music, but rather just the opposite. And the purpose of this limitation is to control the focus and scope of specific conversations by eliminating those random or otherwise atmospheric emissions that we perceive as music, even if we can describe them as musical.

One of the most profound musical experiences of my life occurred while walking though a patch of forest and hearing a cricket apparently synchronize in concert with birdsong, a brook and indeed, what seemed to me all of of nature. But I would not define the composite as music, although it was certainly music to my ears. First, it was only my impression that my experience of the sound was organized, but as to whether it actually it was or not, one can't say.

Language, for another instance, is also organized sound, but I generally eliminate language from my definition of music, although that may only be the result of a sonic bias. I'm certainly open to any argument that includes the spoken word as evidence of music. Personally, I feel as though I experience a different psychology when I sing than when I speak.

What about rap?

Rap and other metered or otherwise poetic verse also feel different to me than either 'regular' speech or sung lyrics. I recognize rhythm devoid of melody as music, but I also stipulate that song requires melody.

Certainly, there are tonal languages which one might perceive as more musical than other languages, such as Mandarin. But lacking recognizable phrasing, non speakers might equally perceive a conversation as impenetrable gibberish as they might discern musicality as a result of pitch differentiation. Regardless, is there anything one might call melody produced by the vocalization of tonal languages during common conversation?

It would be interesting to me if a person who raps in English and who claims his or her craft is essentially musical in nature would also agree that the 'simple' act of speaking Mandarin is even more so. Anyone? No doubt, there are many examples of rap and song blends.

Not to say rap is not music, because a rap within a hiphop context most definitely is. However, a sung lyric without harmony is still a song, but whether a rapped lyric without a musical accompaniment is still music, I'm not so sure. What is poetry in relation to music? Is a poem music? Is it important that a rapped lyric be thought of as music instead of poetry? Yes? No? And if so, why?

Ultimately, music is everything and anything we designate it to be, but people still draw lines and make divisions, and I'm interested in the rational behind the why.

Then there are those who wish to dispense with genre, who claim there is only good music and bad music, but in my experience what people mean by good music is only the music they like.

MUSIC VERSUS MUSICALITY

For the casual listener of traditional music, my guess is music need only exhibit a steady beat and a sing-able melody.

By the full standard, the 1.25-second ATT mark (or any such mark) may be wrought of music, but it is not a work of music. Though purposeful in its design, it lacks phrasing, existing within a time frame in which phrasing is irrelevant, except at a micro scale. Music must exist at scale, and by that I mean, at the scale of human intelligibility.

The audio mark is therefore better described as an utterance, like a burp, even if it is one meant to announce the presence of a branded service.

Indeed, such utterances are better understood as a unit within a category of elementary particles (Quantum Audio) that serve as building blocks for music. As an example, few would consider a pitch or even a short sequence of pitches (motif) music, much less a musical work, even if we recognize the capacity for both pitch and motif to blossom into music. This limited definition does not invalidate the power of the audio mark. I never cease to be surprised by how much information a deftly constructed mark can convey.

Both 'Hello' and 'Help' are also utterances (and audio marks of the highest caliber), and both capably increase one's significance in the presence of others who happen to be on the receiving end of either message.

POP GOES THE RADIO

That organized sound should within its organization also demonstrate phrasing and dynamics happens to be a contentious idea in some circles. Indeed, music being a medium from which we create experience, communicate ideas and alter perception, it should not follow any dogmatic rule. The laws of physics yes, but someone's subjective aesthetic? No, not unless you want to become an expert in a particular style, of course. Regardless, the point is, the absence of either phrasing or dynamics is often the very reason many may snub both highly polished commercial works and their polar opposite: aggressively performed amateur pieces.

Over quantization, correction and processing –or just banging the drum loud all the time– might be suitable activities towards producing various examples of audio craft, but employed with a heavy hand or jaded ear and a track can be drained of all its musicality, not to mention humanity (which may be the key to understanding and defining 'what is music' in the first place).

Although it may be that while some consider such commercial pop works unmusical or unsophisticated because they lack sublimity, others might be stimulated by the way these constructions provide an uncluttered platform for meaning produced by words or sonic symbolism.

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF MODERNISM

That some will find the idea that music must employ a sing-able melody will also no doubt strike others as an offensive, restricting or even heretical idea.

However, no doubt, it is one reason why a lay audience might categorize a modern symphonic, jazz or self defined noise piece as unlistenable or unbearable. Because while any of these forms may present a tapestry of harmony or rhythm, and though its performers may exhibit immense musicality, without a sing-able melody to unify a given work, these compositions sound like amalgams of disparate sonic elements to a casual listener, rendering them a pleasurable experience only to the fan.

'Wait, no melody?', the Einsturzende Neubauten or Igor Stravinsky fan replies, 'there's melody all over the place!'.

And yet, to a non-fan, strident strings or a given anvil solo on a post industrial track sound only like noise, which may be the performer's intention (no doubt), but nevertheless and otherwise torturesome to many other listeners.

The ears can't even begin to approach it; the mind not given a chance to assimilate it.

Similarly, a saxophone solo on within a modern jazz context doesn't sound like a melody to many people. It sounds like an incomprehensible sonic emission.

By contrast, there are also audiences bored with same old, same old, who find melody old hat, so last century and all that, and these persons crave a sonic experience composed of disparate elements that find cohesion in a single idea.

Maybe you are one of those people?

MUSIC IS EVERYTHING IS MUSIC

Personally, I have varied tastes. There are plenty of recordings I enjoy that present as either mono dynamic walls of commercial sound, as noise and as waves of non melodic harmony adorned with 'sonic emissions'. I am equally happy with a gourmet meal as I am with an apple and cheese. And as with some food creations, I enjoy a bit of over processed music, too, from time to time. For me, variety is the spice of life.

But I'm also okay with the notion that such works deliver a different audio experience than traditional works of music.

And whether or not every form of sonic expression is music, so what, if it is nevertheless intended as a genuine attempt to communicate an aspect of one's soul, and whether or not that expression is made manifest as a Rite of Spring, a Tanganyika Strut or a Rage Against the Machine. So much the better if you find yourself entertained or elevated or whatever else it is you draw from the magic of a given aural experience.

Yet for some reason, too, it seems important to many sonic artisans of disparate crafts that each be considered a musician. Is a guitar player a musician? A trumpet player? A drummer? Most people say yes. Is a DJ or sound designer a musician? The answer isn't so universal.

More interesting (to me) than whether or not a turntablist who uses the combination of old vinyl and modern decks as a percussion instrument, is to ask whether or not the violinist who uses a strange mix of nineteenth century spruce, horse hair and animal gut to make unearthly sounds is also a musician?

Or is the sound designer who purposefully creates an aural experience with which we can discern a mastery of such things as dynamics, phrasing, timing and pitch, –is he or she a musician? (Varèse called himself "not a musician, but 'a worker in rhythms, frequencies, and intensities'." Sounds a lot like a sound designer to me.)

Is it the instrument in your hands that makes one a musician or what you do with it?

And if a composer is responding to a dancer (or other moving image), who is actually designing the musical work? The person making the sound? Or the person directing the placement of sound?

And what is happening when we recall or compose music using only our imagination, no instrument involved but our brains?

Does music even need sound?

The dancer who draws elegant phrases or who otherwise punctuates space without a pianist or drummer in the room understands that music exists as much as a directed feeling or thought as it does an audible wave.

MUSIC BEYOND SOUND

In fact, the definition of music Varese claims to have preferred (other than his own) was one proposed earlier by Polish philosopher Józef Maria Hoene-Wronski who suggested music is "the corporealization of intelligence in sounds", which I find actually more accurate when we eliminate the last two words, so that the complete phrase is limited to "the corporealization of intelligence," with the desired net result, of course, that one masters one's art and instrument.

But whether that instrument is a cello or a conga; whether you pluck strings or turn knobs; whether or not you even make a sound at all is secondary to what music is. Music is in your brain, not your hands. Although if you've got hands, by all means, use them.

Having rhythm, for instance, has far greater applications than simply being able to blow or beat or bow in time. Surgeons and athletes (and lovers) use rhythm as performance tools. Who says what the surgeon or athlete or lover is doing is not music but a response to music? So is playing in a band, but that doesn't diminish the musicianship of any member of the band.

It may be that your listeners become your collaborators in a derivative work the moment they use your music as a platform with which to create something else -and I don't mean another musical work. I mean, anything at all.

And then there will be those who argue whatever sonic emission they produce from whatever orifice suffices for music, and as it happens, if I am locked into not examining one specific aspect of sound, I tend agree with them.

Marshall McLuhan famously said (among other things), "Art is anything you can get away with." But the truth is, the answer to the question, 'What is Music?', changes with context, and it may be that context itself exhibits conceptual wave like characteristics.

Isn't it interesting that if I have steel, and I build a car with it, I can say that I have steel and I have a car. But if I have music, and I construct something with it, I still call the end product music.

I don't accept that music is one thing possessing a given absolute form –or even that it necessarily may be limited to sonic manifestations. Rather I believe music to be nothing less than a conceptual medium capable of being shaped into many different things and infinite forms for as many different purposes (even non musical forms and purposes!)

So what is music?

In the widest sense of the word, music is, indeed, whatever it is we want it to be.

SET ARPEGGIOS TO SEMIOTIC STUN

noreply@blogger.com (Terry O'Gara) — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 06:06:00 +0000

One of my favorite works from the Baroque era is the Sonata No. 1 in G minor for solo violin, by Johan Sebastian Bach. And one of the things I admire about it is that when the Presto section is performed, it not only serves as a means to display a given musician's technical mastery, but that even when played at half time or quarter time, the sequence of notes create the illusion that this work can go on forever. In this way the score sometimes strikes me as containing a secret code for perpetual motion, much the same way some believe the Bible has embedded within it a Torah code or Rapture mathematics.

J.S Bach: Sonata for solo violin No.1 in G Minor, Presto BWV1001

Another particularly brilliant aspect of this work is that while it presents itself as a series of broken chords, Bach has so conceived the pitch sequence that our ears are given to an aural illusion of transcendent melody floating upon a driving harmonic engine. Although not an ostinato , this effect reminds me how repeating patterns can fall upon our ears as both a linear sequence, or as an underlying dimensional sonic color, and sometimes both.

Here is another example:

J.S Bach: Prelude No. 1, C Major, BWV 846 [v03]

While Bach's Prelude No. 1, C Major (1722) is beautiful on its own, I think I actually derive more pleasure from a derivative work composed nearly a century and half later by French Composer Charles Gounod. Gounod essentially superimposes a new and original melody of his own upon Bach's piece, resulting in the equally evocative 'Ave Maria':

Charles Gounod: Ave Maria

Is Gounod's 1859 score for 'Ave Maria' evidence of the first mashup? One would like to think so, and that Gounod, perhaps, represents an early precursor to the likes of Armin van Buuren, Fatboy Slim, P. Diddy and other sample based composers and DJs, and that with 'Ave Maria', he thereby paves the way for hiphop and trance which would come only another 150 years later.

But the fact is, the way Gounod appropriates Bach is not so uncommon as one might first think. Inspiration often works like this, with new melodies blossoming forth from the fertile harmony of another work. Why should that be any surprise, really? Music has the power to inspire not just new activity, new love and new ideas, but also new music as well.

As it happens, it's works such as this Bach/Goundod collaboration that lead me to think that the genius of the modern minimalist, Phillip Glass, is that he, like Gounod, appears to have taken a Baroque convention and expanded on it. But whereas Gounod adds an ethereal top coat to the Baroque harmonic vehicle, Glass finds pleasure by discovering new and inventive ways to let the engine itself run on to infinity.

As such, I either hear more commonalities in Glass' work with 18th Century music than I do with the works of any of Glass’s modern contemporaries, or I simply enjoy searching for them. This includes other minimalist composers such as Steve Reich or Terry Riley, –or even Ravi Shankar, whose work Glass has indicated as a strong influence from his time working for him.

Philip Glass: Glassworks

Of course, neither Bach nor Glass (or Gounod for that matter) are the only composers who trade in repeating patterns. Most conventional music, whatever the genre or cultural heritage, is built upon repeating patterns. But great composers all share a similar knack for altering repeating harmonic patterns so as to create stylistically individual and recognizable works.

Another thing that makes both Bach and Glass so interesting to me is that both composers capably produce the effect of motion though space.

If Glass is cinematic, Bach is compelling. But both are a bit of the other, actually, even if the latter predates the invention of film by a century and a half.

I like to imagine that the German composer was no doubt #soundtracking to his own tunes while he walked the streets of Leipzig way back in 1730. Who needs a radio or an iPod when your own brain gives birth to terabytes more music on a Sunday than most people have contained on a circa 2010 portable playback device?

And because Bach and Glass are both particularly compelling and cinematic, commercial media producers often turn to these composers and their works –and even to the suggestion of their works– for inspiration. Either Glass' influence runs deep, or media producers like to sync to nothing better than the haunting kineticism produced by reloading arpeggios, and they like it the way some people enjoy hiphop, on EVERYTHING.

But why? And why and how could this technique have so many applications?

I think it happens something like this:

Repeating patterns act upon brain cognition in at least pertinent two ways. First they demand our attention, initiate beta waves in the brain and thereby produce a feeling of alertness. The result is increased sensory sensitivity and a heightened level of aural awareness. Our ears once open, our hearing then becomes ready to tune into any incoming information, and our minds prepared to focus any subsequent message.

However, left unabated, our senses in very short order attenuate to the pattern. Our brains then produce alpha waves, and we relax. The pattern then becomes transparent, and we give in to the music.

An adept composer or songwriter recognizes when this shift occurs and at this point will introduce a lyric or melody. Another kind of sonic artisan might introduce a message, or signal a shift in story structure. Still another kind of composer, one concerned with mediation or healing, might signal no such thing at all, and simply let the power of the pattern continue without interruption or transformation.

In effect, repeating patterns in music trigger nearly simultaneous ratios of alertness: calmness, focus: receptivity.

I imagine it's the musical equivalent of smoking a post coital cigarette.

Synced to pixels, it's as if the moving image has been charged with both perpetual motion and perpetual emotion.

In this regard, it might even be said that the repeating pattern represents the perfect carrier of semiosis in media, movies and not to mention not-so-subliminal messaging –any content platform, actually.

In fact, I think it possible that no idea (or motif or message) is too majestic or too scant that it can't be capably delivered upon the undulating wave of a recycling sequence or arpeggio.

Such is the power of the pattern.

I. Michaelson: Google Chrome 'Dear Sophie'

M. Montes: Starbucks 'Vote'

PATTERN RECOGNITION IN AUDIO

noreply@blogger.com (Terry O'Gara) — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 04:57:00 +0000

For the purpose of this article, I'm going to define 'pattern' as a series of repeating sets, with each set containing at least one thing or concept that act or are positioned according to an identical and recognizable logic, so that the sets might said to share a corresponding relationship with one another.

(Click the link the following sentence, however, if you'd like to read a more formal definition of the concept from Wikipedia.)

A linear pattern can be defined as series of points on a graph (or notes on a staff), but a pattern that expresses itself across several different platforms can seem to resist linear graphing, because it is assembled from a matrix of multidimensional data. Even more difficult if one platform is exists in a the physical world, and the other is a conceptual platform manifest in our brains.

PATTERN RECOGNITION

For instance, if we watch the weather or the stock market, we arrive at a specific numeric value on a daily basis, the temperature or the Dow. We can then plot that value on a graph and over time analyze the graph for patterns. But we cannot extrapolate what it means to experience a drop in atmospheric pressure or the market from a mere number.

Likewise, a notated melody conveys information about a series about pitches. In this regard it is like any other pattern plotted on a plot/staff. But melody may also present itself as a carrier for emotional or semiotic content, and it must be performed if it is to be properly understood, decoded and (hopefully) replicated by listeners.

So it may be said that while a plot capably presents data, it is a poor delivery platform for experience. However, one reason why plot analysis remains intriguing is because by identifying and studying patterns we might learn how to reverse engineer an experience, the way a musician interprets a score in order to convey something about the human condition for a given audience.

So, really the identification of patterns in audio must be expressed as more than a series of sounds that share some relative relationship. We must also inquire as to patterns which evoke an emotional response. It sounds difficult to do, but in fact, musicians, composers, beat makers, songwriters and sound designers do this everyday, albeit with varying degrees of awareness.

MEMETICS + SEMIOTICS

In musical memetics, we analyze a work in order to identify patterns which lend themselves to such reproduction. A series of two or three notes sharing a particular intervallic and rhythm structure can describe a motif; a motif being a repeated meme throughout a given work, and which if it is successful is also scattered throughout or embedded in the culture.

Memes suggest a relationship to biology. Yet, in specific regards to the application of memetic theory to sound, sound predates biology. It is pre-biotic and pre-linguistic. What is new is for an organic sensor to respond by triggering an emotional reaction to this incoming data set. And also, our capacity to organize it in a cognate way no animal before us seems quite capable of doing, the infinite sounds of songbirds notwithstanding. This is to say, we understand how to charge sound with both feeling and meaning.

I sometimes think that if a dog's ignorance of our language is indicative of what some define as a diminutive cognitive ability, then what does inability to understand what dogs say, say about our own brains?

This still young study of music memetics suggests an expanded study of motif, which when combined with a knowledge of semiotics, appears to promise a deep, sophisticated tool kit for the sound designer interested in using audio as a carrier of symbolic data, and not just as a confirmation of an onscreen event.

ZOMBIE MAKING MEMES

I think we should not remain content, however, to accept 'meme' as synonymous with 'idea', as is often suggested. Because, what would be the point? By this definition every point on a graph is a idea and a meme, and how does that help us?

Nor should we accept that a meme is simply an idea that replicates, and therefore one memetic structure shares equivalency with another. In other words – all viruses exhibit viral properties, and so what, unless they somehow impact our lives in a significant manner. For as it happens, some viruses pass through our bodies without our ever knowing of their presence, while others will kill you.

The fact is all ideas once ignited into a network spread, and by that definition every single word, every letter is a meme –is a replicating idea. Maybe so in the broadest sense, but that knowledge alone will not necessarily help us achieve creative assets that reach and engage a broad audience.

It may not even be correct to say that an idea is appropriated, because a brain once exposed impresses upon itself real, physical and structural changes to the brain matter itself. So, it may be truer to say that ideas appropriate humans.

Far be it from me to suggest that your ideas are not your own, but in fact, that might be exactly the truth.

Perhaps the key is to investigate whether an idea appears to be replicated or is replicating. What is the distribution method? Is something popular because people know about it, or do people know about it because it's popular. These are purely a semantic questions because, ultimately, all ideas spread in much the same manner, from one human to another.

IDENTIFY THE PATTERN: IDENTIFY THE MEME

More to the point, by asking such questions we are reminded that before we advance further, we will need to limit our definition of meme to certain, mutually agreeable, parameters. In music, it needs to be defined as more than just a single note. But as Richard Dawkins, the originator of the concept even inquires, is a meme an entire work, or a portion of a work? Is it a hit song or just the hook? Can it be a cadence?

In this practice, I suggest we identify a meme as a thing, a fully formed construct, formed from more than one idea (or point), and which together can be said to behave like an earworm. This notion suggests not a single impulse, but a fully mapped pattern composed in such a way that it distributes culturally relevant data and concludes where it begins, forming a cognitive loop.

That is why some do say a meme is simply an idea that wants to replicate, and leave it at that, because we perceive the thing as replicating within our own brains as though by some sort of self generating cognitive cell division.

However, in the system proposed here, the pitch center 'A' 440 may be considered an idea that has been replicated, while the melody for Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (or the hook of any popular song) is a meme.

QUANTUM AUDIO: SMALLER THAN A MEME

From catch phrase to catchy melody, memes are generally linear in our perception of them. Those involved expanding the field will no doubt attempt to invent theories that establish memes in texture, timbre and dynamics. But I think that such pursuits describe another branch of study, belonging to Quantum Audio, because texture, timbre and dynamics color the meme, but are not distinct patterns that follow and independent and individual trajectory. That is, patterns they may be, but they are entirely dependent on a carrier.

Without a melody or readily apparent pattern to shade, they do not exist. They could said to find a parallel in inflection, and are therefore akin to sub particles, or behaviors, perhaps more closely related to internally manifest, God-made, or Nature-made, archetypes than the externally man made concepts we call memes.

So, for the purposes of Quantum Audio Theory, a meme represents a small cohesive compositional unit, but not the smallest musical unit, examples of which include note and pitch, even if such units are the result of a replicated and much used concept. Music itself will be said to represent a man-made, organized means of communication while any given work a single sonic event, the same way 50,000 words can be identified as a book.

FROM MEMETICS TO MULTIMEDIA

One might reasonably argue that just because something can't be seen without a microscope (or telescope) doesn't mean it doesn't exist. This is true, but it is equally true to suggest that such things lack cultural significance, although their discovery and replication of that knowledge might indeed be the result of an external cultural impulse to explore or investigate.

The bacterium Yersinia pestis is not a meme.
But the pattern of habits that allowed the Plague to spread through Europe is.

A love for the music of Beethoven (or Coltrane or Julie Feeney) is not a meme. But the hook or motif that seems set to psychologically irresistible internal repeat, leaving ecstatic holes in your brain is (although certain, obsessive ways by which admiration and fandom is made manifest might indeed be defined as memetic).

–With one important caveat:

MEME, EARWORM OR BOTH?

If we further narrow the definition of meme as only popular phenomenon that serves as the smallest carrier unit for cultural information, then we must expand our notion to include not mere melodies, but melodies that deliver according to that rule. Thus a hook may be quite catchy, but not contain enough information to be a substantive cultural carrier. Indeed, many melodies appear culturally neutral.

To put it another way, a given melody is equally capable of sounding like nursery rhyme as it is a section of a work of Heavy Metal. Thus we may conjecture that what any single, linear melody expresses is not necessarily inherent to the pitch pattern sequence, but the result of an individual Quantum Audio overlay.

And regardless of Quantum Audio overlay, an earworm, for instance, might say nothing of its point of cultural origin, but that doesn't stop your brain from repeating the thing over and over again with a kind of memetic madness.

Apart from memes, Quantum Audio particles, therefore, represent information carriers smaller than a meme, of sentient or inanimate origin, regardless of their capacity to be copied or self replicate (though note that units of inanimate origin have their meaning projected upon them by yet to be understood biological processes). And however minute these structures they may be, they nevertheless present us with a valuable area for analysis, if our goal is the creation of content, such as sonic branding, for instance, which is intended to scan along a 'multi dimensional', multi platform, mixed media matrix.

* * *

Photo Collage by Terry O'Gara

DECODING THE NOW: Modern Art, Mashups & Memes

noreply@blogger.com (Terry O'Gara) — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 22:16:00 +0000

I recently came across a online discussion whereby one semiotician inquired, "Why is modern art so boring?" It was a hypothetical and fuzzily defined premise at that, but I still thought the question intriguing and wanted to take a stab at answering it. That is, its very open-endedness presents us with an entertaining intellectual challenge, even if the answer we arrive at will be every bit as open-ended as the initial query.

And it's certainly ironic, I thought, that someone who trades in signs for a living, thinks modern art is boring.

The phrase, 'modern art', itself goes undefined, but I will accept it to mean not the works produced from the 1860s to the 1970s, as the phrase usually denotes, but the contemporary western art scene –art and artists, inclusive of all mediums –i.e., what's happening right now.

It's actually a provocative question, which may be one reason why I'm attracted by it, and it reminds me of another recent debate swirling around a statement by one composer who said something to the effect that, "There are no good Jazz musicians anymore."

Well, I might say the same thing about Disco singers, and if I believed it, I would probably think the statement a throw-away line, or simply another over-enthusiastic if ultimately banal claim. But if I were a Jazz musician who had devoted my life to this art –now my art– and especially if I considered myself at the top of my game, then upon hearing that someone had said that there were no good Jazz musicians, I would take real offense. So, when someone says modern art is boring, I wonder how one can possibly answer that question without presently riling someone who has given their life to the pursuit of their craft, regardless of whether or not it is successful, according to anyone, by any measure.

Obviously modern art is not boring. The real question is what cultural or societal factors would bring someone to think that it is? That said, while I don't necessarily agree with the premise, I do understand the sentiment, because, you know what?

For anyone who is north of thirty, you probably have the feeling that you've seen (and heard) it all before. Some will say that it has always been like that, but I'm not so sure. In the Twentieth Century, fashions changed rather radically throughout every single decade from 1915 to 1985, ushering in cultures, economies, living standards and shiny new things to try and buy, the likes of which had never been seen or experienced in the prior ten thousand years.

So, it's an irony that at about the same time our tools for communication began rapid evolution, our culture stalled. And somehow, I think, we've gotten stuck in the eighties –myself included, perhaps. I get the sense that language and design continue to evolve at light speed, but the form of content itself feels stagnant. So what if bricks have chips in them, if we're still using them to build classic colonial homes and French Normandy or Tudor styled mansions. Or is that the dream we aspire to now? Greco-Roman Pavilions with flat screen TVs?

No wonder we're bored.

WASH, RINSE, REPEAT

Sometimes I feel it's as if western culture has been on a wash, rinse and repeat cycle ever since Sade, Sonic Youth and Spandau Ballet ruled the charts. We have nifty new smartphones that can do a million amazing things, but western culture has been on hold since the Reagan/Thatcher era.

Maybe 'hold' is not the right word, because we aren't frozen in 1985. What's happening is the entire last century is suddenly present, and demanding equal space/attention/value with everything else. Whereas once we lived serial lives, now all fashions co-exist. Every color is color of the year; every hemline is in; everyone is doing and wearing and tapped into everything. Or as my friend Hal Cragin puts it, "Everything is happening at once."

And just coincidentally, on a 2006 blog entry actually titled, 'Everything is Happening at Once', then Sun Microsystems Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Gregory Papadopoulos has written, "…the technology constants change rapidly (faster, smaller, cheaper), but the rate of change for organizing principles and architectures are glacial."

These are not necessarily competing observations, and in fact, together they identify one reason why we may feel stuck. We must not have really figured out what to do with the all this new technology yet, because we're not doing much more with it than remixing the past. Suffice to say, we have eclectic tastes, if not necessarily original.

Trends, as they go, don't necessarily signal the ascent of something new anymore, but rather only something popular, and often even more accurately, something returning to popularity. and that's an interesting distinction.

The way we experience trends has changed, too. We don't actually experience them personally, we link to them from the other side of the planet and then share our finds with our friends, who may or may not actually be, you know, real friends.

This kind of activity is practical if our main point is research, or if we want to tap in or become a hub for a perpetual feed of self identified crowdsourced, niche-defined mass entertainment, and to that extent, we've certainly succeeded. This has been boon times for porn, of course, and content has never been in greater demand, but maybe not so good for Art with a capital 'A', though.

REALITY OR REPRODUCTION

We may be awash in great industrial design, but I wonder how many people today actually experience a painting with their faces so close to the canvas that it can be appreciated not simply as a two dimensional image on a screen, but as the 3D object it actually is?

Because at such scale, image is incidental. Instead, we become aware that the thing can be appreciated for its texture as well as the image it projects. This is an important note, because it is in that very texture, in the evidence left behind by the application of paint, that we can experience an artist's effort, energy and humanity. It is, to put it another way, the blood left behind at the crime scene.

A parallel circumstance exists in music. There are substantial numbers of people who rarely experience music live. For them, music is experienced as a recording. Even many so-called live events may actually be more accurately described as live presentations of pre-recorded material. The result is that we've produced in ourselves a population that considers the product of art to be some perfect thing, when in fact, its real power is in it's ability to communicate something about our humanity.

What is 'Style', anyway, but the sum composite of perfectly executed imperfections from a given performer?

I can imagine that one day the act of looking at a painting will come to mean all of the following as a simultaneous action:

• Looking at a given painting
• Listening to a playlist or pre-recorded narrative
• Watching a multimedia display
• Taking a picture of the given artwork
• Posting the image to the web
• Alerting all our social networks that we are presently admiring art

Or will we instead choose to take our time sauntering through World of Warcraft galleries, content to linger in the cloud for hours, just so long as we don't actually have to leave the house?

Don't laugh, because actually, we are already there.

So, if our main experience of art is only via reproduction on a screen, it may seem to lack something. Or if our main experience of art is flipping through an online gallery, it may be that art in the flesh, however original or brilliantly executed, simply doesn't move fast enough (to move us). Or if we have all suddenly evolved into astute, design minded visual thinkers, then maybe we're simply jaded with this avalanche of image –screens and logos everywhere, even in one's pocket!

Certainly there are new artists doing new things, even old artists doing new things and artists and non-artists alike doing interesting things. But on the surface it also feels like many of those things are additions to an existing cultural repertoire, not a radical evolutionary shift.

Thus it bears mentioning, the digital divide is not simply an economic one, nor does it always favor the wired.

THE MP3 REMAINS THE SAME

Today the tools of creation and distribution have not only changed, they've made it easier for anyone to enjoy the act of making art on a level that would have been simply impossible or unaffordable a decade before. And we enjoy a plethora of digital devices with which to create, communicate and distribute our collective brilliant inspirations.

I think most will agree that Andy Warhol was right when he postulated in 1968 that "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." –Except of course, the real time frame is the 1.5 seconds it takes 15 million 'followers' to read your 'tweet'.

But to this observer, the content being pushed through the pipes remains traditional in almost every aspect.

Granted, the integration of game theory into many heretofore non game platforms is an interesting movement, as is nonlinear and hyperlinked story telling in both advertising and entertainment platforms. But if we narrow our focus to the so-called fine arts, then why is it that even art which calls itself experimental or Avante-garde is not so different from the experimental or Avante-garde created more than a half century before? With a few notable exceptions, modern dance, for instance, is no more modern than the 'modern dance' of Hanya Holm, Anna Sokolow or Alwin Nikolais.

Perhaps one day this word, 'modern', will only refer to the hundred years spanning the middle of the 19th Century to the middle of the 20th Century. Or we may have just begun the Modern Age, which in that case, we have a century or more, and maybe a another millennium before its played out.

And that may be a more accurate prediction, because as of right now, we have a hard time shaking it off.

FROM PRINT TO PIXEL

Consider, also, that even major advances in film making address the technology of capture and perception, but story experience itself has remained largely unchanged for nearly a century. Sorry, but even print to pixel is still a minor advance compared to the quantum leap from stage to screen.

True, film makers oft transfer traditional stories into movies, but the scale of the screen and the portability of the cameras allow for radical perspective change. Smaller screens projecting material from ever more portable cameras do grant wider access to the filmmaker, thereby providing a broader social context, but they can also produce a simultaneous effect of putting blinders on the viewer. Yes, now you can participate in the revolts in North Africa from the comfort of your home, and even pause to brew a pot of tea, but how is that going to help you cross a busy street in London, or Madrid, when your nose is in your phone?

No doubt activists are using technology to dramatically change their social and political circumstances. Not to mention that the disabled now have powerful tools with which to interact with worlds once beyond their physical reach. But equally interesting is how an exponentially greater demographic is choosing an alternate route to the future, that of the urban technologist (or technologista). This person's idea of participation and engagement is limited to a text exchange, and rather than experience the world firsthand, he or she would rather observe it at the comfortable distance provided by a lens.

TAG IT AND IT'S YOURS

If it sometimes feels as if modern art collectively lacks the necessary stimuli to trigger excitement in a presumably jaded and increasingly selective audience, perhaps it's because we in the West live not in an age of Artistic Discovery –despite the new tools at our disposal (and presumably new ideas in the air)– but rather an the age of Autistic Discovery, "...characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, and by restricted and repetitive behavior."

Indeed, in this way it is also an exciting age of rediscovery and recycling, which a future historian might one day point out paralleled a tandem growing awareness and social movement that called for the recycling of our entire environment.

But whereas once art was the product of recombinant processes, now we simply copy and paste, sample and loop, layer and remix. Or if we are really clever, we establish where points A and B are on a graph and then we take credit for the space between.

We tag a wall, for instance, and it is ours.

Entire bridges and buildings are for the taking!

WHY ART IS LIKE SEX (OR SHOULD BE)

I don't accept the oft held notion that making art is just expressing an idea or making stuff (except within a pedagogical context). I think making Art is like having Sex (or should be). But in this I mean, "the process of combining and mixing genetic traits".

And if that's the case, then what's the implication of a society where the term is more commonly thought of as a solitary practice one does in the loving company of one's computer? Or executed as a fleeting hook up, whereby we are not so much hoping to 'combine and mix our respective genetic traits', but instead simply enjoy a momentary mash of external body parts?

Obviously, there are those who are using new media tools and concepts to create new and interesting artworks. But it is also interesting to note that the trend (or movement) which has currently captured the widest public attention is the one that parallels contemporary notions of coupling. Of course, I'm talking about the Mashup, and the more I look and listen, the more I notice how this activity resonates in every aspect of our culture.

By now, most people have heard of Moore's Law, which states the number of transistors that an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. And if we have thought at all about that statement, we might have realized that as chips are getting faster, all this power will have (is having) an increasing effect on our collective ability to process information.

Some say we are evolving. Others say we are losing our ability to concentrate. Neither statement is completely false nor true.

Regardless, I cannot help but wonder how the onslaught of a self-prescribed sugar drip of disruptive information is impacting art, artists and audiences. And it should be obvious by now what the future holds:

Modular all-you-can-eat works that present a buffet of images within a single frame remixing everything the artist has ever googled in a lifetime for audiences who select and simultaneously consume multiple works layered one upon the other, synced to a playlist, compressed to a thumbnail, and arranged in such a way that the entire experience can be enjoyed as a secondary or tertiary activity, like while running on a treadmill, for instance, or like while talking or texting while running on a treadmill. This technology has existed since the 1920's (it's called 'Television'), but it will seem absolutely revolutionary streaming out of our smartphones, because additional plugins allow us to connect with the real world which we are otherwise intent on ignoring. Not to mention that it won't be the only screen in the room competing for our attention. And not to say that it won't be enjoyable. We won't be able to take our eyes off of it.

Or will we indeed walk into a real gallery or museum only to be faced with rooms full of blank canvases whose content can only be seen once you hold your iPhone up to them? Even if each canvas represents the work of a single artist, isn't our perception of them through the lens of an electronic device, itself also a manifestation of the mashup mindset?

At which point we might then very well lament the good ol' slow days, but who would want to return, really, when you can now carry the entire Louvre around in an app?

Here's the Mona Lisa for you –Enjoy!:

AN 8-BIT FLASHBACK

Let's get this out of the way, first thing: Things were not better in the old days. Make no mistake, my iPhone circa 2011 is way more cooler than my TRS-80 circa 1979 (though I still wish I had it), and my iPad does so much more than an Etch A Sketch. But one thing I sometimes miss, is a world in which songs were not slammed together in the titillating Celebrity Deathmatch we call the mashup.

Yes, mashups are fun, entertaining, –a bold new art form, perhaps.

But have you noticed, the mashup is not just a technique or medium, but in fact a mindset which has produced a transformative effect on the way we measure the value of objects which otherwise serve no utilitarian purpose. I know that in and of itself sounds rather negative, but of course, I'm talking about Art.

For instance, if you are old enough, or have some understanding of the history of computer assisted composition, recall that prior to the turn of new millennium, music composed with, on, or by computer was far more original by any subjective measure than that which is produced today with Digital Audio Workstations which arguably offer far greater means of expression for their operator/ programmer/ composers than the room sized chips of past.

What I mean by this is that early computer music composers were more interested in seeing what they could do with these machines to produce that which had not been done before, and I don't mean sending untrained singers up the pop charts. Contrast this with today's music producer who employs computers not so much in the execution of something different, but in the mashup and remix of the 'pre-existent'. And it is this activity that is in fact the primary and popular trend in both the popular and fine arts alike at the present.

We don't even have to go as far back as Max Matthews or Morton Subotnick; or confine ourselves to the halls of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center; or IRCAM. Even the 8-bit music of Pac-Man for instance, whether you think it amusing or annoying, simple or cheesy, and lacking a sophisticated polyphonic tapestry, nevertheless embodies –if we may say that about sound– originality.

Pac Man Arcade Game Play

Contrast that with the fact that some 30 years later, we might amuse ourselves not by creating something equally original for our time, but rather by replicating the sound of 30-yr old 8-bit compositions, only we're doing so on our tricked out ProTools systems.

At least chip tune composers using 1980s-era technology, embedded with SID chips, can now be found creating new original works, and many have become micromusic virtuosos of this technology.

Rymdreglage - 8-bit trip

Arguably, some of this originality is born of limitations. Except that now we live in age with few and possibly no limitations.

But what if originality is actually the child of limitation?

Uh oh.

RECOMBINANT COLLAGE VS. IN VITRO MASHUPS

Let's for a moment accept the old fashioned premise that traditional artwork, whatever the medium, falls into two categories:

ORIGINAL or DERIVATIVE

The following melody represents an original creation. It is not the result of a found sound, a recorded sample copied and pasted off a long forgotten B-side, or a well reiterated meme there for the mere replicating. Rather it is a wholly unique and original (though not completely alien) communication conceived via some combination of mysterious inspirational and biological processes which we still don't understand, but it is seemingly composed out of the synaptic ether from the singularly sophisticated brain of one brilliant composer:

Isaac Stern performs Bach Sonata No. 1 in G minor, BWV 1001 Fugue

And so was this melody:

Britney Spears performs Max Martin Baby One More Time

But this I'm not sure about:

Consider Girl Talk's latest album ALL DAY, which samples and posits each of its 372 sampled riffs, procured from a repertoire of previously recorded and popular hit songs, is an instantly recognizable hook.

Girl Talk - This is the Remix

ALL DAY is superbly fun. Indeed, it's like mainlining crystalline ear candy or some other highly addictive central nervous system stimulant, but does it represent something new? And to my ear and aesthetic, it exemplifies the latest post millennial model for presenting existing art works –all at once, sort of like bubblegum memetics or flashmobbing music. But I'm not sure the samples represent small enough microstructures that one could say the work was composed by Girl Talk. Rather, more factual I think to state that ALL DAY stretches the boundaries of the curator's craft and is more aptly considered an experimental and Experiential Playlist created by Girl Talk.

Of course, the same can be said of Kutiman's JUST A LADY, composed by editing several different video clips into a montage and layering their respective audio tracks so that they sync into a composite unified whole. JUST A LADY may or may not be a new work, or even a derivative work. To me, it is closer to representing the experience of walking into a room where more than one sonic artist is performing, and their respective performances (10 to be exact) just happen sync. This is what 5.1 Surround Sound sounds like when it's squished into a compressed A/V file. And quite elegantly, actually.

Kutiman-Thru-you - 07 - Just a Lady

BLURRED BOUNDARIES

There are several works in the Kutiman oeuvre, and together they remind me very much of Darren Solomon's interactive 'In Bb', which may either be a composition or an electronic game; John Cage's Music of Changes (1951); Nam June Paik's Düsseldorf matrix 1995 Swatch installation; and even the Brian Eno and David Byrne collaboration, 'My Life in the Bush of Ghosts', among many other such works created, constructed or composed over the last fifty years.

Nam June Paik: installation Düsseldorf matrix 1995 Swatch

Present distribution platforms may be revolutionary, but our experience of all the above mentioned works is similar to some degree. I think it interesting, though that the Byrne/Eno cycle is the only one which offers a memorable audio experience. Whereas Solomon's 'In Bb' is a fun interactive device, the content itself is forgettable, maybe because each A/V asset is not the result of Solomon's singular inspiration, but the result of crowdsourcing. Paik's audio is simply incidental, and Cage, one suspects, simply wants to be appreciated for his theories. But of course, that is the point of much 'modern art'. What the artists want us to remember is the concept. Neither sound nor object is the thing, it is the blurred boundaries, and that is an intangible.

So if one is simply trying to appreciate a thing for itself, then no wonder it eventually strikes one as boring. Conceptually, however, all three composers –Solomon, Paik and Cage– have produced utterly fascinating works. It's when we actually listen to them that our attention wavers.

In fact, it may appear as if we are making Art where content doesn't matter.

In this aspect all Conceptual Artists share a common motivation with all mashup makers. And since mashups have gone mainstream, there now are a lot of people disseminating interesting ideas using otherwise incidental art as a means of distribution.

What amazing intellectual heights our species has reached! It's stuff like this that separates us from apes, and thanks to INTEL and others, we can frickin gorge ourselves on it.

RAUSCHENBERG OR RIP-OFF

The mashup is sometimes presented as synonymous with collage, but in fact the two concepts differ in intention and produced effect. Collages ala Rauschenberg are created from deconstructed or found elements, which once combined do not for the most part bring attention to their source/s, but rather present the viewer with a new image, much the same way a child is not a copy of his or her parents, but a synthesis and then also, something new, as this work, untitled "combine," (1963) so adeptly illustrates:

Whereas the mashup is not really born of synthesized concepts, but rather any given mashup represents a recontextualization of pre-exisiting concepts within a single 'frame'. It's purpose is not so much to advance, but to reflect; not to break down beyond recognition and recombine into a new form/s, but to layer existing elements in a manner that comparison is forced. The mashup itself does not present itself as something new. But its curator/creator hopes it will inspire new thinking.

As it happens, Rauschenberg was also a trickster and often revealed a sublime conceptual side to his craft, which doesn't necessarily support my argument, but it's a worthwhile look if you haven't seen it before:

Robert Rauschenberg - Erased De Kooning

It may be that one day we think of Rauschenberg not as a prominent 20th Century American artist, but as the Father of 21st Century Art.

TO FRANKENSTEIN OR RE-ALIGN, THAT IS THE QUESTION

If you accept my premise, mashups are always derivative by definition, as they are by nature always constructed from pre-existing works, be they text, graphics, audio, video, animation, etc. But it would be hard to argue that this work, 'Blue Nudes' by Henri Matisse (1952) is derivative (except of the life model on which it is based). Though it is a collage, it is not a mashup. Like J.S. Bach or Max Martin, BLUE NUDES represents an original expression made manifest.

It's easy to think mashup is a synonym for collage, but in fact the two concepts differ in produced effect. Collages ala Rauschenberg are created from deconstructed or found elements, which once combined do not for the most part bring attention to their source/s, but rather present the viewer with a new image. Whereas the mashup's purpose is often just the opposite, not to combine beyond identification, but to layer in a manner that comparison is forced.

Collages are Frankenstined together from recycled bits of other works, and then given a new life. Mashups, on the other hand, represent not reanimation but a realignment of the original corpses, wheatpasted up on the wall and one laying or metaphorically 'beatmatched' next to the other, with the purpose of illumination. Conceptual art was always interesting but was it ever exciting?

Whereas the traditional artist would, say, sculpt oolitic limestone into The Venus of Willendorf, the modern artist takes the The Venus of Willendorf, positions her next to an Enoch Bolles Pin Up, and then sign his name to the composite image:

Venus Versus Venus, by Terry O'Gara (2011)

BROOKLYN, BERLIN, BICYCLES AND BETA

If we are already familiar with the statue and the pin up, then the recontextualization may be interesting, strike us as novel, and even be something we Twitter about, and it may even be art – but it is not art in the way we have long considered it. But in our brave new world, whether it is, or isn't art is actually besides the point, because the point of the thing is not to be judged as a work of art, but as a lens on our personal relationship with the culture, to demonstrate a new way of seeing, or hearing, or sensing in any capacity. See, the thing itself is incidental. All the value is loaded in the idea. And if you find it instantly forgettable, it's because ideas by themselves are like balloons: pretty, color, things, that eventually lose gas if they aren't first popped by the next new thing.

But is it okay to appropriate other people's works of art?

No, not without credit, but then it doesn't really matter, actually, because everyone is doing it. The digital medium has democratized art, and the most popular mode of expression is remixing other people's yellow-around-the edges objects into our own cutting edge, cut and paste 'new' ideas.

See, we are not simply citizens anymore, bound by the rigid rights and responsibilities of the state, we are something more than that. We are DJs.

–With the immediate result being an Internet powered global explosion of 20th Century memes into 21st Century culture. It begs the question: if we are so immersed in the past, then are we actually living in the present? The effect from all this stimulation is titillating, that's why we tweet each new trending fact, not because we think no one else reads the New York Times or the Daily Mail, but rather to make it clear to everyone else plugged into the zeitgeist, (all together now) "Look, my brain is infected, too!"

And it's also a bit like spending hours and hours learning how to manipulate a video game? Sure, maybe you are learning a new skill set that will be useful when you have to navigate your X-wing fighter at light speed to find just the right position to take out a Deathstar and save mankind, or maybe it's just a huge waste of time? Or maybe you've spent so much time taking out Deathstars that simply standing still in order to appreciate someone's subtle application of dirt on canvas, knife to wood, chisel to stone, etc –it all lacks an bit of iThrill that you now require to enjoy anything? It's a possibility, yes?

Even otherwise young and healthy Brooklyn based digerati, though their thumbs appear to text in the 21st Century, their brains remain soaked in 20th Century popisms. Will it take another generation before we can begin living in the future? In fact, it may be more accurate to say that our future is not in nineteen year olds or even nine year olds but in nine month olds.

Imagine then how it feels to be over forty and suddenly realize that not only have you been living in The Matrix all this time, but that you're actually the BETA version.

In real life, however, you hit forty, and realize that's what your twenties were –beta. Only today, it may be that our entire culture is twentysomething (in nation years).

President John F. Kennedy is noted for declaring in a 1963 speech that "Ich bin ein Berliner". Except that today, in 2011, he might well have declared, "We are all 25."

The proof is in the tweets.

HERE'S THE RUB

MASHUP VS COLLAGE

With Art, one dose can last a lifetime. It's like being inoculated from stupidity, but of course, it doesn't always work. Consider for instance how smart you usually are, and then consider the hot laptop resting on your lap.

Granted the line between mashup and collage is as fine as the one between medication and meditation, especially in the areas of graffiti, remixes and digital photo manipulation, all three of which are exercising tidal forces on our culture. But for the purposes of this discussion, mashups deconstruct; their aim to direct viewers to compare and contrast, the medium is not so much paint or pixels but context.

Collages, on the other hand, combine and construct, rendering source material obscure or irrelevant. Rauschenberg's Riding Bikes (1998) simply posits two bicycles side by side, but the effect is unique in every way imaginable, so much so that it we easily forget that we are looking at bikes.

Mashups shout: 'Look at this!'

Collages, ask: 'What am I looking at?'

In direct contrast, consider this next video, apparently produced for the sole purpose of comparing and contrasting one rock band's music and hairstyle with another rock band's music and hairstyle:

The Final Teen Spirit Mashup (Nirvana vs Europe) by Wax Audio

But of course, we enjoy layered media, don't we. A symphony, for instance, might be composed of a simple melody, but arranged for an orchestra, it demonstrates one pinnacle of human intellect. What's different today is that much music in the past was the construction of one mind. whereas today, layered mashups find their final form as the result of a division of labor. This activity, in and of itself, is not new in the commercial arts, but it represents a dynamic new trend for the fine arts.

My immediate inclination is to say that either Jeffery Koons or Damien Hirst (who are both known to work with teams) initiated this trend, though I know the process goes back centuries, and possibly millennia. It is curious to note that at least one thing we learn from Hirst, Koons and even DJs spinning wax in Ibiza, is that when art is presented as the effort of many, whether crowd sourced, remixed or mashedup, the originating or 'actual' artist/s themselves are relegated towards increasing obscurity, because the final work is said to belong to the curator/creator.

The Physical Impossibility of a flower from a Balloon
by Terry O'Gara (2011)

DERIVATIONS VS ORIGINATIONS

Contrast again mashups (of any medium) with traditional art. I don't mean pre-Impressionist works. Traditional art, for our purposes is simply that which is born from unique, recombinant conceptual material. In the creation of traditional art, the artist's progeny grows to maturation from a mutated meme into a wholly original work.

And sometimes, a meme is not even involved, and we are presented with the artistic treasure of a true soul diver who has descended into his or her psyche and returns from pituitary depths with archetypal treasure. And in this category we will also include the ocular seer who simply, but also superbly, captures wisps of our external world and presents them in a way that pleases the senses and strikes our fancy.

But here we are: we live smack in the middle of an age when Derivations have proven more popular to those who can afford nifty new media than 'Originations'.

It's as though it's not enough that something may be new or unique or original, or even simply decorative. What we're really interested in, is a Celebrity Deathmatch between competing ideas. And make no mistake, while many of us are at least delighted by the expression of ideas, others are just in it for the fight.

DIGITAL DADAISM

This Digital Dadaism reminds me also of Duchamp's 'Readymades'. For some, Duchamp's Fountain (1917) "is the most influential work of art of the twentieth century".

Whether it is or isn't, it's interesting to note that a man named Duchamp created nothing and became celebrated for it, and if that doesn't characterize our age, what does?

His genius, if you will, was not in the creation of a new object but in its 'recontextualization'. Or as it has been argued: What makes Duchamp an artist and the urinal his creation is that he "created a new thought for that object."

Yet, if the urinal is a work of art (I think it is), then the fact that Duchamp tagged it (with the name "R. Mutt") does not make him the artist, or even an artist, but a curator with a sense of humor. If that was not the case, then I know a kid in Brooklyn with a spray can who owns a train.

To compound things, what if you photograph the thing, what have you got then? Another original work of art? A copy? A representation? And what if I print the photograph to a T-Shirt and I only make one shirt. There are many 'Fountain' reproductions in the world, so if I only have one T-Shirt, what becomes the more valuable thing, the original or the derivative?

What Duchamp has done, really, to use modern parlance, is that he 'sampled' an object, and in the process demonstrated that industrial design could be and should be considered Art. Therefore the real artist of 'Fountain' is –MUST be– the actual designer/s of the thing, and his or her or their name/s appear lost to history (and/or to the Bedford Ceramic Urinal Manufacturer files).

As it happens, Duchamp's original 'work' was accidentally thrown out with garbage but authorized forgeries exist in museums all over the world, and we couldn't be happier about that, because we don't need the original nothing Duchamp didn't create, when we have something even more valuable and interesting to 21st Century audiences: a reproduction.

Not to mention, this circumstance makes my one-of-a-kind T-Shirt worth a million bucks.

A GOLDEN AGE OF ENTERTAINMENT

So, no surprise, right, that today's TV/PC and possibly Adderall enhanced human chooses this exercise –COPY AND PASTE– to exemplify the height of new media/ new millennium creativity. And why not, when the process is democratic and damn fun to boot, even if the results inconsequential (and even profitable)? Art (With a capital 'A') has had its golden age; maybe this moment (right now) is a Golden Age of Entertainment? I think it is.

And yet, even if that is the case, then you still have to ask: If everyone is doing it, how special can it be?

The answer?

Only time, critics and copyright law will tell.

OUR EVOLVING CULTURAL ECOLOGY

Finally, this all brings to mind the word ECOTONE

Ecotone is formed from a combination of 'ecology' and 'tone', meaning a place where ecologies are in tension, and is meant to indicate transition areas between two adjacent but different plant communities.

It strikes me that global culture can also be said to be at present an ecotone, and largely because of the introduction of digital tools. We have not quite moved from one century to another however, and we have not quite adapted to these new tools at our disposal. But as such, we stand at the cusp of another great adventure, and all we need to do is not let ourselves get bogged down in remixing past works when absolutely original things are still to be conceived, whether with rubber bands and paperclips, or Adobe Photoshop and CSS+.

And it may very well be that new forms emerge from old tools.

PUT DOWN THE REMOTE AND PICK UP THE KALIMBA

There are still many new and innovative works to be composed on piano, kalimba or yanqin, and novel gestures to be communicated by ballet, for instance. A healthy human body does not require an upgrade. The violin can't be improved upon, nor the paint brush, and there is not a single machine on the planet that will ever weave the kind of magic that a mere child can conjure with smile.

We know ourselves, as artists, that whether made from twigs or pixels, clay or light, or our own bodies and voices, that regardless of result, Process will always be exciting to us. So, if audiences appear collectively blasé, and they frequently do, then maybe we might use the new communication tools at our disposal to 'mashup' the audience with our own lives. In this way we invite them into a mutually shared experience. We witness a fair bit of that already, and naturally I think that is a good way to go.

In the meantime, it is also fair to ask if it is art that is boring or the audience that is bored. Is someone disinterested because of external or internal factors?

I recall how as a little boy arriving in the United States having spent great swaths of my childhood without television, how I found even the most poorly made commercials deeply entertaining. Perhaps, in the last twenty years we've assimilated so many new technologies that our brains have learned to demand an accelerated diet of novel stimuli on a regular basis? Will we one day say, 'there's nothing interesting on the Internet?' Hasn't that happened already? If that's progress, it also strikes me as a kind of sad atrophy of our cognitive ability to appreciate the single frame, a single object, a still life, a captured moment, whether in Tempera, stone, vinyl, sand, glass, clay or even as a digital media file.

Racing through an online gallery so that a thousand images dance by like a single work of stop motion animation may seem an increasingly comfortable way to absorb visual information, but I think in order to deeply appreciate a single, static work of art, one must pause and linger, for there is another dimension at play in the sensory reception of art. And that is the notion of Time. Giving a single work our attention and our time can mean the difference between real experience and mere observation.

So it may be that if we still hope to sustain an interest in traditional media methodologies, which I think is a cultural imperative, then one might actually have to stop the feed, break the screen and step back through the shattered shards of so-called social media, if only to revel for a faintly reminiscent moment of what it means to be present in the proximity of visceral, physical, human expression –and to feel again how thrilling Art is, that it might even transform your life, if you let it.

And why would anyone want to do that?

Because we're still human.

*

The image that leads this article is the West African Adinkra Symbol, 'Nkyinkyim' which is a symbol of initiative, dynamism and versatility. The original image can be found at Adinkra.org, which allows use of African symbols at no cost for non-profit uses. The image of the cat in the car is from puntabulous.com. The Image of the saluting woman was sourced from disassociated.com, and was used as a promotional image for the Paste-Modernism 2 charity auction for Queensland flood victims. 'The Physical Impossibility of A flower from a Balloon' is composite two works: The shark image is from the Damien Hirst work, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991); the image of the balloon sculpture is of a Jeff Koons work: A flower from a balloon (Purple) (1995-2000). All other images presented here are provided for the necessary purposes of illustrating points of this essay.

Creative Director/Music: Job Description

noreply@blogger.com (Terry O'Gara) — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 14:56:00 +0000

Advertising agency HUGE is looking for a Creative Director for their LA office, but that's not the point of today's piece. The reason I bring it up is because I couldn't help but notice that the skill set required in order to be a candidate for such a position far out paces that accepted for an equivalent position in common commercial music production. Too often we find the person in charge of a music production environment is a musician with some ProTools chops or the guy with the biggest music collection on his hard drive. That's fine if you're an individual artist writing songs in your bedroom or garage. But it's maybe not the greatest tool kit if you're commissioned with leading a team in the production of audio for a multi-spot TV commercial campaign, a theme park venue or retail installation, network packaging or a million dollar online experience.

I first recognized this point at the beginning of my career, when I was lucky to be working on projects personally helmed by the likes of Ralph Ammirati and Tom Nelson (AP&L), Ron Lawner (Arnold Worldwide), Lee Hunt and other notable creative executives and producers. With access to this much talent I began to model my own professional tool kit by taking my cue from my agency counterparts, and this has served me well.

I’d like to suggest that everyone producing music for media today aspire to this possibly stratospheric level set by our most successful clients –not necessarily other music producers, but typically CDs and EPs at agencies and entertainment companies. They represent both time tested and the most progressive standards for vision and process, while us music and audio oriented cats can provide the ears.

And by this I mean, not just access to Twitter and a wide knowledgeable reference of trending pop artifacts –although that's important, too– but a particularly deep understanding into non-verbal and non-visual communication.

For me this means some understanding about music brain cognition, music memetics, symbolic data distribution and how current theories might apply to media composition. But there are many other topics to draw from which might appeal to one's personal interest and which might serve to enrich one's work creating deliverables for both story driven media and branded audio assets.

To this end, I've re-published the Huge Creative Director job description below, modifying it in order to define the minimum standards that I think we –music, sound and audio professionals in leadership positions– should accept from ourselves.

JOB DESCRIPTION: CREATIVE DIRECTOR/MUSIC

The Creative Director/Music is responsible for developing original music design concepts and approaches, overseeing multiple projects through execution, and managing a team of composers, sound designers and other creative and technical personnel under them. The Creative Director/Music will also contribute to the development of audience experience and marketing strategies; drive the collaborative efforts of the project’s creative, production and technology teams and inspire sonic artisans in all areas of expertise to exceed expectations. The Creative Director/Music is also responsible for managing the client relationship for all things related to creative.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Develop and deliver thought leadership and audio solutions that strengthen clients’ market distinction and leadership position
• Responsible for conceiving, articulating and defending conceptual and directional choices
• Promote continual creative improvement and actively contribute to a culture of innovation, excellence and accountability
• Conceive music design solutions that fulfill strategic business objectives
• Grow new business and develop solid client relationships
• Responsible for inspiring and motivating creative teams and serve as overall creative lead and manage creative teams on and across major engagements
• Direct all phases of creative work from concept through production
• Responsible for cultivating external relationships in both the traditional and new media music space
• Responsible for mentoring and leading junior creative staff through critique of their work to maintain consistent creative quality and award winning work
• Manage the creative staff, as well as helping to review staff members’ performance
• Accountable for developing and directing creative work of the highest caliber with their team
• Participate in many new business development efforts, including giving presentations and leading creative teams

REQUIREMENTS/QUALIFICATIONS:

• Demonstrated award-wining creative ability
• Demonstrated ability to translate strategic vision and marketing objectives into tangible project deliverables.
• Proven ability to balance multiple projects with differing and aggressive timelines, deliverables, and expectations
• Demonstrated understanding of branding, marketing and business strategies.
• 6-8+ years experience in a creative leadership role
• Understanding of both linear (cinematic) and non-linear storytelling
• Understanding of messaging through music, sound and other symbolic data
• A strong working knowledge of interaction design, venue experience, brand development, and the entire creative development process for film and commercials, from concept through postproduction
• Recognized expertise in one of the following: advertising, identity, memetics, semiotics, critical theory, linguistics, network theory
• Recognized expertise in at least one musicological topic of study and application
• Strong knowledge of both Western and non-Western genres of music
• Wide interest in following trending music categories
• Proficiency in at least 1 traditional musical instrument
• Proficiency in both traditional audio production skills/tools/processes and Pro Tools and/or other DAW systems
• Experience dealing with musical content licensing and contracting
• Advanced experience managing the creative development process in a client-services environment
• Comprehensive awareness and interest in new platforms and technologies
• Strong ability to provide clear creative direction and provide timely and helpful feedback to improve creative processes to keep work on budget and schedule
• Excellent presentation skills and communication abilities at all levels of both internal and client organizations
• Strong ability to prioritize work and resources across engagements based on short and long-term needs
• Proven leadership skills with experience guiding both large teams (10+) and music ensembles (quartet, band, orchestra, etc)
• Proven mentoring, supervisory, and team-building skills
• Live Performance experience a plus

* * *

FYI: Here's the original description:

Creative Director at HUGE Inc. in Los Angeles, CA

Job Description
The Creative Director is responsible for developing original creative design concepts and approaches, overseeing multiple projects through execution, and managing a team of designers under them. The Creative Director will also contribute to the development of digital and marketing strategies, drive the collaborative efforts of the project’s creative, user experience and technology teams, and inspire teammates on all levels to exceed expectations. The Creative Director is also responsible for managing the client relationship for all things related to creative.

Responsibilities:
• Develop and deliver thought leadership and creative solutions that strengthen clients’ market distinction and leadership position
• Responsible for articulating and defending conceptual and directional choices
• Promote continual creative improvement and actively contribute to a culture of innovation, excellence and accountability
• Conceive and create experience-oriented design solutions that fulfill strategic business objectives
• Grow new business and develop solid client relationships
• Responsible for inspiring and motivating creative teams and serve as overall creative lead and manage creative teams on and across major engagements
• Direct all phases of creative work from concept through production
• Responsible for cultivating creative online strategies
• Responsible for mentoring and leading junior creative staff through critique of their work to maintain consistent creative quality and award winning work
• Help Creative Director manage the creative staff, as well as helping to review staff members’ performance
• Accountable for developing and directing creative work of the highest caliber with their team
• Participate in many new business development efforts, leading creative teams

Requirements/Qualifications:
• 6-8+ years experience in a creative leadership role (at least 3+ years digital agency environment)
• A strong working knowledge of interaction design, user-centered experience design, brand development, digital marketing and the creative process
• Recognized expertise in one of the following: advertising, collateral, identity, and interactive design
• Advanced experience managing the creative development process in a client-services environment
• Comprehensive awareness and interest in new platforms and technologies for the digital channel (e.g. Flash, Flex, Ajax, etc.) and related mediums
• Strong ability to provide clear creative direction and provide timely and helpful feedback to improve creative processes to keep work on budget and schedule
• Excellent presentation skills and communication abilities at all levels of both internal and client organizations
• Strong ability to prioritize work and resources across engagements based on short and long-term needs
• Proven leadership skills with experience guiding large teams (10+)
• Proven mentoring, supervisory, and team-building skills
• Online advertising experience a plus

HUGE is an equal opportunity employer (EOE). We strongly support diversity in the workforce.

HUGE (www.hugeinc.com)

One Word: Memetics

noreply@blogger.com (Terry O'Gara) — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 14:00:00 +0000

A big Spring shout out from the CRITICAL NOISE Aural Intelligence Blog to say thank you to all its readers for making CRITICAL NOISE The #1 Music Memetics Blog in the world.

Apparently there are a few others out there as deeply interested in the interstices of music, message and marketing as I am.

So, after ten years in the making, it's nice when someone points out that you've reached the top of Mt. Google writing about a subject you devote a lot of time and study to. It gives one reason to pause, reflect and imbibe. So, cheers! It is Saturday, after all.

In related news, congratulations again to the UK's Annalisa Kumi for her popular and deeply interesting SAE thesis on the subject: AN AD FOR ADVERTISERS: SONIC BRANDING AND THE EVOLUTION OF MUSIC IN ADVERTISING. I first mentioned her paper on my twitter feed, but lately I've noticed it's been the 2011 consistently #1 ranked site on the topic of Sonic Branding. Hooray for her and maybe she should think about starting her own consultancy.

I'm simply happy that my own 2001 article on Sonic Branding, BRANDING WITH AUDIO can be counted as one of her sources.

More recently: If you haven't already, please check out the March 25, 2011 SHOOT magazine for my article regarding the decline of traditional scoring and the ascent of Music Design in television advertising ( SOUND: MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER). SHOOT is the nation's leading resource of its kind providing news and information to and about "creative and production decision-makers at ad agencies, and executives & artisans in the production industry", and it's honor to have an article published in a nationally distributed journal.

In the meantime, back to our regular programming, but first, to paraphrase a famous line from the film THE GRADUATE:

One word: 'Memetics'.

MAN WOMAN MUSIC MEME

noreply@blogger.com (Terry O'Gara) — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 05:52:00 +0000

Commercial music composition for advertising, film and other media is often created from a model, sometimes called a ‘scratch’ or ‘temp’ track. But even music created for purely 'artistic purposes' conforms to the dictates of external format. II–V–I, anybody? IV–I? Are you going to stay clear of two of the most popular chord progressions because they've been used before? Probably not. It would be a bit like saying one is going to embargo vowels because the letters 'a', 'e', 'i', 'o' and 'u' all represent phonetic clichés. We don't even abandon real clichés because despite their lack of originality, they may still nevertheless represent a truism. At the very least, they may be employed as useful shorthand in our daily and informal communication.

For purposes of media commissions, modeling can be extremely useful for many reasons –direction and budget estimation to name two. That said, the practice also comes with an inherent possibility of producing a mediocre derivate, not to mention risk of plagiarizing the source, whether by inadvertent or intentional action.

This begs the question:

Can a copy ever equal or surpass the original?

Or can it even just simply exist as an enjoyable and entertaining alternate to the source from which it is born?

Naturally it depends how one defines 'copy'. In the present case we mean a derivative work, but not necessarily a variation on a source as the word is commonly used, especially in a pejorative sense. Rather, our definition of Derivative is more closely aligned with the way the term is used in mathematics, being "a measure of how a function changes as its input changes..."

Anyway, the answer as it turns out is an unequivocal 'Yes'. And as a matter of fact, it happens all the time. For instance, take The Beatles, relative to every other single band that followed them, and which claim the Fab Four as a direct inspiration. Or at the other end of the audio spectrum, take free form jazz and ask yourself how free it actually is once you understand 'the rules' players employ that enjoy expressing themselves within that format. Free it may be, but complete and unintelligible audio anarchy, rarely, which it would have to be, of course, if it actually were free.

But how then is it possible that the collective works of any specific genre can claim originality from one other when they might all be formed from the same creative building blocks?

Thousands of blues songs, for instance, share nearly identical melodic licks without one being considered a copy or infringement of another. Compare Texas' Lightnin’ Hopkins’ “Baby Please Don’t Go” to Chicago's Muddy Waters' “Mannish Boy.” Each work is wholly original even if both remain identifiable as blues based. So, the two tunes can't be completely unique; they must share some commonalities –those things that make these blues a uniquely American blues, despite regional idiosyncrasies, and not, say Central Asian khuumii, which is also, arguably, a blues of another independently formed and Asiatic kind.

Similarly, ‘Simple Simon Met a Pie Man…’, ‘Johnny had a little Dog…’, ‘Yankee Doodle went to town…’, when sung, do not possess identical melodies, but all three share strikingly similar musical DNA making each immediately recognizable as a children’s song.

I have often asked myself: When a group of works share they same style, what does that mean?

Likewise, when comparing two works that share creative building blocks:

Where does originality end and plagiarism begin?

–A lot closer in music than in prose, I imagine, for while the adoption of one unacknowledged sentence maybe considered intellectual theft by most who learn of it, the appropriation and practice of an entire catalog of licks and executions by those who love a certain genre is arguably what makes a given popular musician one kind of stylist and not another.

That said, there is a practice today, among mash up artists to layer one popular musical work over another. The resulting audio collage can generate a potentially new musical experience, but it is as often implemented as a kind of postmodern Critical Theory litmus test, in order to demonstrate, arguably, the bereft inspiration of one artist or another.

But the truth is, unlike language, music's combinations are limited. That's not simply my opinion, by the way; that's actually the way the math works out.

The Math of Originality

How many words are there in the English language?

As of this writing, the English language hovers at around one million words, and its speakers might generate new words every day (although what eventually makes it into the common lexicon is another story).

On the other hand, the Key of C contains 7 notes. Likewise the Key of G. And there are only 12 major and 12 minor keys to work with. Naturally, there are various ways to define or modify a key, so that one might reasonably suggest that there are more than 12 options available to us. Regardless, barring the wholesale adoption of a completely different theory of music in the west, then the melodic permutations –however you define them– are not endless, especially when we limit potential combinations to useful combinations, and then further limit those results to pleasing combinations.

So, guess how many notes are contained in the twelve-tone system of equal temperament employed in the composition of every single musical work in the western canon in the last 300 hundred years?

Well, that would be 12, because this widely used system of which we are long accustomed divides the octave into exactly 12 parts.

Useful Musical Combinations

Granted, octaves repeat at higher and lower frequencies, so that a grand piano (and the cumulative range of all musical instruments) generally affords us about 8 octaves of pitch choices. On a piano, that adds up to 88 piano keys. Therefore, allowing for repetition of any given note, we have at our disposal over a billion melodic combinations, which almost sounds like the number of melodies out there to be conjured up is infinite.

But if we relegate all similarly named notes equal value regardless of frequency, and ignore repetitions or eliminations, then there are just less than five hundred million musical permutations allowed. By this I mean, we say C1, C2, C3, etc and C1-C1, C2-C2, C3-C3, etc all serve to indicate the same note, C, so that a given sequence of pitches –a melody– composed from a chromatic scale and then transposed in parallel fashion to another key or octave can not be considered wholly unique from the original melodic placement.

Similarly, 'Pop Goes The Weasel' is still Pop Goes The Weasel' whether it is performed in C at the lower range of a marimba or whether it is played in Bb at the upper range of a trumpet, and regardless of what harmonic choices might support it, and not two or more distinct melodies.

Granted 500 million options is still a pretty big number, but when was the last time significantly large populations chilled out for any substantial length of time to 12-tone compositions? Or even a room full of people? Right, on a historical time line that begins in 1700 and stretches to infinity, the answer is closer to never than most fans of Serialism would care to admit.

More commonly, the music of the masses as it has been composed in the west for the last 300 years is produced by various arrangements of the diatonic scale, being the 7 distinct notes which express a common key. These seven notes can be considered the most 'useful' pitch options available to us because audiences generally find them pleasing, and the number of permutations they provide is just over 5000.

Personally, I would be quite surprised to learn if four or five hundred years after the invention of the equal temperament system, not each and every 7-note combination had been employed already. In fact, I think it's closer to the truth to assume that prolific composers and improvisational musicians cycle through every single one of these combinations on a rather frequent basis.

So, obviously, musicians appropriate from one another –and themselves!– and they do it all the time, not to mention every single time someone takes a solo. In fact, they have no choice in the matter, or there would be no music. Such sourcing and re-arranging of pre-existing elements does not indicate a meager imagination, because in the hands of a capable talent other parameters come into play which allow for infinite variability, prominent among them being 'Time' and 'Feeling'.

And in fact, it is also by this process that styles and genres are born and also how traditions stay alive.

Which is not to say originality can never be achieved, but generally what we strive for when we compose a new work in an existing idiom is a new expression born from familiar materials and performed within an existing set of rules, conventions or framework, and not something sprung out of a new theory (unless that is our task, and if it is, well, good luck winning mass appeal (or even a single client) with that). It is hard enough to get people who live on opposite sides of the same planet (and sometimes even the same couch) to appreciate, much less enjoy, each other's music.

And God help the drummer attempting to hold on to his or her so-called trademark beats, because each nifty new rhythm will without a doubt become the bed of every single Jamaican pop song by next summer’s end, and not a judge on the planet will hear evidence, complaint or accusation of intellectual property theft.

Beats, once born, belong to everybody. Not always melody, though.

Generating Clones or Producing Original Kindred Works?

Whether literally or intuitively, media composers face a similar issues whenever they subject a temp track to analysis. For them, the question is not how to clone a copy, but how to reproduce a kindred work.

Producing Original Kindred Works from analysis of a model is a process that requires one to determine the musical DNA of one given piece, and then to combine it with DNA of one's own. Not to simply find inspiration not from another composer’s thematic ideas, but to draw from a mish mash of archetypal, interstitial, semiotic, memetic and bio-musicological microstructures (audio units smaller than a motif) inherent in what we define as the model.

And then once identified, to synthesize these ‘structures’ with one’s own unique content and concepts, so that the result is in fact a wholly original work, derivative only in so far as one may say, they share the same style or ‘parent’ creative, that one piece was the inspiration for another, and confidently leave it at that.

By using terms like 'mish mash' and 'parent', I mean to imply that a kindred work is never composed via the asexual replication of source material, but by combining bio-memetic material from two different and unrelated sources, and then allowing for intelligent design and development.

A man and woman meet and form a child. Similarly, one composer or artist assimilates another composer’s or artist's ideas and yields not a copy but a wholly unique and separate work.

Afterwards we do not say a child (assuming it is not an unauthorized clone) is ‘a rip’ or ‘ripped off’ from either parent. More correctly we recognize that although both works, parent and child, are created from the same basic, elementary particles, that the child is capable of being as wholly original unto itself as its parent/s.

So, when faced with a temp track, what is it that we look for in our musical analysis?

A classical theorist might examine chord progression and melodic direction. But that kind of surface analysis can only ever yield a reproduction. Our purpose is different, not to appropriate a well executed concept in order to create a parallel work, but rather to create another original work that produces a parallel feeling. And in order to do that, our first task will be to identify a given work’s artistic and sonic DNA so that we might then combine it with our own, and thereby fulfill both a client's commission and yield our own contributions to the repertoire, and perhaps in the process also produce a work that will inspire someone else to make another piece of music.

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Photo Collage by Terry O'Gara.

Synonym, Metaphor and Inflection in Music

noreply@blogger.com (Terry O'Gara) — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 06:57:00 +0000

Recently I've suggested a new musical analysis I call Quantum Audio, which depending one's perspective, can resemble both genetic information and the search for behavioral analysis of sub atomic particles. Either way, Quantum Audio refers to the identification and analysis of small sonic elements, which when artfully combined can be said to be the building blocks of effective musical memes and signifiers.

Two major particles I listen for in musical works are Sonic Synonyms and Musical Metaphors. These are sounds embedded with meaning, or which trigger a common reaction in a given demographic.

Why does thunder, for instance, inspire fear? Indeed, what of sounds for which there is no human performer, only a natural act? A million ways for thunder to clap, and yet each one sends you running for cover. Is this reaction spontaneous, triggered by a certain range of frequencies, or is it the combined result of volume and perception of proximity? Or is our reaction triggered by other variables known or unknown?

And is the reaction genuinely spontaneous, culturally learned, or is it the result of instinctual programming. In short, has a physical pattern triggered a biological pattern, and is there a way to deconstruct this cognitive activity so that we might later reproduce our patterning which sound little like the source but trigger a similar reaction, as a means to deliver data rich audio? For now, it’s not important to know the real answer, or even if there is an answer, but it is important to consider the question.

Actually I think that most adept musicians understand ‘thunder’. The proof being that many a musician can create a facsimile of the sound on his or her given musical instrument. But in addition to mimicry, can we actually identify those sonic particles which whether separately or together produce the thunderous effect. In this manner, we might skim one effect from the other; power from fear for instance. The result being identifiable, isolated components we can integrate the effect in our own musical designs, much the same way we now layer one voice over another.

Of course, we already do this to some degree; for instance:

What makes one ascending string line sound majestic and another feel embedded with dread, although both might share the same sequence of notes in the same key?

As a young producer one of my first assignments was to serve in the capacity of line producer for the production of the Columbia Pictures audio logo. At the time, it struck me how this beautiful and grand work, conceived to produce anticipation in the audience for a forthcoming entertainment, might well teeter from anticipation to suspense, if only the tempo was pushed a few clicks forward, and the strings agitated by a degree.

I’ve heard that the Chinese language has many words or phrases that seem identical but in fact can mean different things depending on inflection alone. And of course, the same can be said about music.

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Photo Collage by Terry O'Gara.

Sonic Branding with Sub Atomic Audio

noreply@blogger.com (Terry O'Gara) — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 06:42:00 +0000

Quantum Audio describes a variety of micro structural units of audio transmission which may be collectively described as scale conveyors of symbolic data.

Readily observable examples of Quantum Audio elements include Meme at the upper range of scale, which is itself composed of at least four key elements: Semiotic Signifiers (a specific cultural expression of Archetype), Audio Archetypes (a plastic, primordial and universal concept), Nuance (representing both the physical expression of data, and often a unique data unit itself), and Artifact (often unintentional and resulting from mechanical manipulations, but sometimes capable of a performer's control).

And it may be said that as Archetype (Organic) inspires Signifier (Designed), Nuance (Intentional Communication) can be said to produce Artifact (Collateral Communication).

Obviously we are expanding definitions a bit in order to express newly identified phenomena. Therefore, it is natural to ask if Quantum Audio particles are 'real', or if this investigation is merely an intellectual exercise? As it turns out, this is akin to asking if light is composed of particles or waves, because the answer is both, depending on one's method of observation.

Quantum Audio describes what have heretofore been considered intangible concepts. However, we may nevertheless identify and re-define certain notions as observable 'elements', and we do this by acknowledging the very real impact they leave on an audience. Indeed, the measurable result of this collective phenomena can be found in the production of identifiable and undeniable bio musicological reactions in listeners who share a common cultural context. This is to say Quantum Audio elements produce real psychophysiological changes in brain activity, the way we might expect any external or environmental influence to do.

In this paradigm, the motivic Meme will stand for the equivalent of a musical molecule. Next, the building blocks of music long identified by traditional music theorists we will serve as audible atomic structures. But our study primarily concerns itself with even smaller elements, including Archetype and Signifier, as mentioned before, which despite their diminutive scale nevertheless gently impress upon listeners (who share a common cultural context) observational emotional markers, and thus can be said to capably convey symbolic data in the form of audio, which we now designate as Quantum Audio Components or particles.

For instance, it is Quantum Audio that provokes an emotional reaction from even a single beat of music, or any short snippet of sound. Devoid of melodic information or even a rhythmic pattern, this audio 'unit' might not even be said to be music (except on a quantum scale), but our senses tell us it nevertheless remains an entirely capable platform for communication.

What is this then? A burst? An edit? An expression? I think 'Gesture' is a good word, but whatever it is, it is not the word in a sentence, but it is perhaps the syllable in the word, whether verbalized or printed, so infused with emotive or contextual potency that one brief utterance alone may require no further support or enhancement.

Oh?

Exactly.

The application of Quantum Audio data is also what distinguishes the sound of a Rock Guitar from one that is merely amplified, independent of what kind of music is being performed. EFX units may be said to bathe source sounds with Quantum particles. Some may call this nuance; others may label it an algorithm. Either way, what is clear is that emotive quality appears rarely the result of one component, but rather more likely produced by a matrix of controlled minutiae.

Likewise, Quantum Audio data allows the carrier signal to 'push' symbolic data, either independently or in conjunction with melody. And it is these triggers that produce a resulting emotive impact on the listener, whether the musical expression is a full length work or a single beat. A capable musician or music designer can inflect/suggest a variety of 'meanings' on the same melody or audio design construction, transforming the material at hand into any number of rich and differently textured messages.

Interestingly, Quantum Audio is also that which allows listeners to identify one performer from another, creating a fundamental feature of sonic ID or audio branding design.

While not occupied with the natural world, the application of Memetic theory is a good starting point for anyone interested in Quantum Audio. The Memetic premise challenges us to deconstruct any communication until we can at last identify within it what might be called a ‘fundamental pattern’, that is, the smallest unit of cultural transmission capable of being replicated. (For more about music and memes, read: Music Memetics, 1 May 2010)

As with genes, memes follow biological laws –in fact memetic theory parallels genetic theory. But Quantum Audio components, like quantum particles, behave differently, as we have established, depending on how they are observed. Which is to say, while we might find universal agreement in the underlying Archetype, the Signifiers they inspire will likely mean different things to different groups (or nothing at all), depending on local definitions, cultural perception and demographic norms.

Unlike memes, which we can more rightly say are composed of Quantum Audio Components, Quantum Audio itself does not form 'a fundamental pattern', nor do such particles lend themselves to replication. No one hums a Quantum Audio Component, for instance. Rather, it is the assemblage of such elements into an audible matrix that create the potentially (and hopefully) exponentially, replicating musical gene/meme. They are the stuff from which patterning is made, and on the sublime and oft-seeming sub sensory level.

WHY ‘QUANTUM' AUDIO?

In physics, a quantum is the minimum unit of any physical entity involved in an interaction, and because this study conducts itself with the examination of musical microstructures, we borrow 'quantum' as a loan word.

Speaking of musical microstructures, an early inspirations for this inquiry arrived as a result of studying bowed stringed instruments as a child. Unlike a piano, or software instrument, a violinist must first spend many days, weeks, even months learning how to produce a suitable tone before they can hope to produce anything that resembles 'music' as the term is commonly understood. The result of such rigorous application is the development of an acute awareness, and the ability to control both musical and non-musical resonances, which produced in tandem as successive and overlapping sounds, and generated at what might be described a frame-rate scale, when mastered and summed, finally serve to create a single satisfying tone.

Years ago I even wrote an essay describing my fascination with the process of coaxing a usable tone from the various members of the string instrument family, and as thorough as I might have thought myself at the time, it's probable that I was still incomplete in my description of the process. (Contact: The Character of Sound)

One may argue a pianist must also learn ‘touch’, or that the operator of a digital instrument must also acquire technical skills necessary for modulation. But neither is responsible for their respective chosen instrument's tone. The sound of a violin is not the sound of the instrument itself. Don't believe me? Pick up a violin and bow and tell me if you can produce anything that resembles what we commonly think of as a the sound of a violin.

Unless you already have a a degree of competency with stringed instruments, or you think violins generally sound like screeching birds, the answer is probably not. Rather, the pleasing sound, timbre or wave form capable of being produced by a violin –as we commonly think of a violin sound– is that of a violinist engaging with a deceptively complex mechanism that he or she has mastered, and which he or she has formed a symbiotic relationship with. Contrast this with the sound of a piano -or an organ, or a harpsichord– which requires interaction with an interface, but little that might be regarded as actual symbiosis. Thus the sound of a piano –its essential timbre– is always the same regardless of who is pressing down any given key.

It is perhaps like the difference between flying a kite and using a hammer.

To be clear, we are limiting this discussion to the production of tone in the singular, not the full or even partial performance of a musical work.

Granted, the sounds generated by a synthesizer may be modulated in realtime by the electronic musician. And no doubt we can recognize an interface as a tool, the computer itself a collection of tools. That some are masters of this kit should therefore be a given. But it would be an over simplification to state that electronically generated sound is produced as a result of symbiois between man and machine.

This is not to disparage any single kind of musician. I've been a fan of the synthesizer and an electronic and computer musician for thirty years. And perhaps it is for this reason that I can easily recognize that one of the main reasons such instruments enjoy wide and current popularity is because aspiring musicians can get right down to the business of making music without first spending years training their ears and their bodies to work in tandem in order to develop the bio mechanical skill-set necessary to creating a reasonable steady state tone, much less actually make music. In short, perfection, in this instance, does not necessarily require practice.

It's important to recognize this fact, because it is only by the deft integration and application of sound that an audio designer can endow an otherwise sterile set of patches or samples with a gesture that causes his or her composition or construct to suddenly resonate with thrilling humanity, and therefore actually 'touch' people, which one assumes is always the desired result.

As a result, it's worth mentioning that a violinist's relationship with tone is never steady state. String players do not trigger a 'patch' or a sample, and so organic tone is never one static thing, but rather the summed event experience composed of many elements (some imperfectly made) and made manifest over a given time-line by a constantly changing and potentially infinite number of variables, controlled only by the fingertips, and the brain, of course –indeed the entire anatomical structure. This is to say that a violinist's tone is produced by his or her entire body literally working in concert with instrument and bow.

Another way of looking at it is to say that Tone, deconstructed, is not simply the pitched 'musical' or sonic focal point which listeners train their ears on, but includes an infinite number of peripheral, evolving musical sounds plus non musical 'Artifacts', which together produced and controlled by a performer in real-time over a given timespan, serve to enhance each subsequent pitch center with suggested emotive feeling or symbolic data.

To the trained and untrained ear both, Artifacts, in and of themselves, are rarely considered musical, but summed with tonal information, they create Expression, and as such they often prove to be the very reason we feel the way we do about a given performance.

Obsess upon a given Artifact, however, and the sounds of fingers scraping steel, the clacking of keys, the singer's quick inhalation (to name just a few examples) become annoying. But attempt to perfect a recording by eliminating such sounds altogether and we find that what we are left with is sterile by an inhuman degree.

Another fascinating –and easily observable– example of Quantum Audio at work is in the oft heard radio contests that ask listeners to identify a work based on a short clip. These bursts of sound may be as short as a single beat, or even smaller. Yet, regardless of whether one is familiar with the source track, or even if one can't identify the source of the edit, these short snippets nevertheless reveal themselves as fully capable of triggering any number of cognitive reactions, from emotion to memory to inspiration.

At any rate, it is clear that fundamental sonic elements, which we can identify as (micro) Gestures capable of conveying (meaningful) Expression –or Message– and which we collectively call Quantum Audio, is worth continued investigation, especially if one is engaged in the delivery of symbolic data for the benefit of a commercial client, such as in the production of sonic branding, or for some other utilitarian purpose.

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Photo Collage by Terry O'Gara

Mash-Up for the Masses

noreply@blogger.com (Terry O'Gara) — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 19:47:00 +0000

In an interactive feature titled, The Recombinant DNA of the Mash-Up, the New York Times offers a neat summary of the last hundred years of audio collage.

It reminded me how current technology now allows even the least musical of us to enjoy the feeling of making music, exactly because neither triggering nor even beat matching samples requires any dexterity or talent (given the right software).

Of course, there are varying degrees of electronic artistry, but many programs find popularity precisely because anyone can begin combining samples and 'making music' without any training whatsoever.

But what I find interesting, is that even with such immediate magic at our disposal, many would still prefer it if someone else chose the loops and pushed the buttons.

Sidestepping the notion of DJ as musical curator, why is that?

Maybe it's like choosing a designated driver? Most people can drive, but once you and your friends decide that you're going to spend the night mainlining one pure pop hook after another, fueled by a potent mix of rap and rhythms, it's simply more prudent to let someone else get behind the wheel –or laptop– and do the actual driving, and generally direct all the madness for the entire evening so that everyone else can safely reach peak ecstasy as they bump and crash and spin around the floor, and into each other, searching through movement and spirit for the joy that comes with surrendering oneself to a collective sonic singularity.

Quantum Audio: Post Modern Post Noise

noreply@blogger.com (Terry O'Gara) — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 10:39:00 +0000

It seems apropos that on the first day of a new year to make a resolution for the future. I would like to make such a resolution on behalf of staid Music Theory, which is I think in need of some new threads to follow. Mine is merely the opinion of a commercial music producer, but I arrive at this opinion based on the increasing necessity by which commercial works are judged not just on thematic development, but on their ability to communicate symbolic data.

Certainly, I'm not the first to suggest updating the core curriculum. Others before me have sought, developed and presented new methodologies for analyzing traditional music, e.g., the application of linguistic analysis to a given composition. Indeed, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music by Fred Lerdahl, Ray Jackendoff and Ray S. Jackendoff have had me pondering this and related topics for over twenty years. Along the way it occurred to me that while there are several approaches on the table, a common realization amongst many musicologists is that there is more to music than just the music itself.

Therefore, it seems to me, that at the same time we expand our meaning of Music Theory, we must also expand our meaning of Music. And it may also be that Composition itself is a limiting word, because so much of what we do in commercial audio is better described as Design.

Yesterday’s Music Theory parcels musical from non-musical sounds. However, today’s music designer doesn’t draw the same distinction. Likewise, today's Music Theory limits itself to the analysis of harmonic constructions, whereby a pitched note is like an atom, and a motif a complex molecule. But anyone commissioned with the design of a sonic brand understands even smaller particles exists, and they must possess some significant value because their deft placement produces increases the effectiveness of a given communication.

Traditional music analysis continues to be useful, but modern music designers will often expand their knowledge base by cobbling together a kind of personal post modern, post noise philosophy. By doing this, they form an individual understanding of how to communicate Concrete Information with Abstract Sound. The result is a skill set which allows one with some confidence to code commissions with inherent semiotic DNA in order for to maximize the efficacy of a given transmission.

By ‘inherent’, I don’t mean that a given sound is inherently imbued with any meaning at all, but that human cognition endows certain sound classes a specific meaning, but only after a collective audience has agreed to a shared definition of a given sound, collection of sounds or sonic experience.

Do you know what Happy and Sad sound like?
Do you know what Spring and Autumn sound like?
Do you know what Victory and Defeat sound like?
Do you know what Sadness and Anger sound like?
Do you know what a Chase or Love Scene should sound like?

Of course you do.

But what does Nokia sound like? Or General Electric? Or Ikea? Pick any brand. It's when we are faced with such a commission that we begin to form an art (and possibly a science) out of what may have once been executed by a natural impulse or guess work. Which is to say we form a technique, which is never present without a theory to support and direct it.

Choose a friend or family member: What do they sound like? How do you filter his or her traits and attributes in order to choose the ring tone to alert you to their incoming calls? –Yes, that too is branding! Do you do this by feeling or analysis?

Some musical professionals already do employ musical symbology, especially those who create movie scores, primarily as a means to enhance story, but still, mostly only at the motivic level. Otherwise, this art is not common, and more media composers –especially those in advertising and branding– would do well to begin exploring and implementing their discoveries.

My own ongoing study enters its thirtieth year and synthesizes relevant data from a variety of extra-musicological sources including: linguistics, semiotics, psychology, cultural theory, environmental sound and more recent findings produced by the study of memetics, which altogether have produced in me a nearly formalized bio musicological understanding of sound that I have taken to call ‘Quantum Audio’.

Quantum data suggests –as with quantum physics– an understanding that the world exists on at least two scales: Macro and Micro.

Let us agree for the purposes of this article that 'Macro' suggests the construction of traditional harmony and melody. Pitched notes are its atoms and motifs its molecular structures.

'Micro', then, as it applies to Quantum Audio, is the examination of sonic particles, both musical and non musical, whether initiated by man, machine, nature or created as an effect, or existing as a residual 'after glow'. Whatever category they fall into, they are always smaller than a motif, rarely longer than a note, but they are nonetheless significant because by tiny, almost imperceptible means, they shape our experience of a given musical or sonic work, signaling to us whether or not what we are hearing is a message or something else. In fact, their impact might be said to delineate the difference between whether or not we recognize incoming audio data as general information as informative audio.

If we are to become experts of 15-second 'messages', 5-second stings, three-second bumps, two-second logos and 1-second long (or less) navigational tones -and it is clear that we have to be– then it goes to reason that those who aspire to creating the most efficacious music design must begin analyzing music on a micro level, much as composers have long done at the macro level.

While it may strike some as gibberish, others will find that once one approaches the art of music design as the skill of assembling and embedding symbolic data, rather than, say, simply pasting sound to picture, or developing thematic support to enhance narrative, one actually does arrive at a different musical or otherwise sonic result –and some might even think an expontentially more potent communication– than one would have otherwise.

Sound of the Year: 2010 – The Vuvuzela

noreply@blogger.com (Terry O'Gara) — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 12:29:00 +0000

In the June 29th entry to his blog, Afrika Aphukira, Malawian writer Steve Sharra provides interesting sociological insight into Africa's football culture, and more specifically, the regional relevance now afforded Ghana, given their triumphant performance at the 2010 World Cup.

But for me –a music theorist living on the edge of America– the most thought provoking part of the piece is when Sharra indicates that the sound rising up from Royal Bafokeng Stadium might actually be more than just the usual crowd applause. A victory cheer was certainly in order: Ghana's national soccer team defeated the US contingent only three days before Sharra published his article. But perhaps this noisy, euphoric sound, he suggests, also represents a fanfare for a new African century.

Shara writes:

The more compelling story worth telling about the global tournament in South Africa this year has two sides to it. First is the story of what Ghana’s triumph symbolizes, at the center of which symbolism is Africa’s past and future. This symbolism is embodied in the vuvuzela, the cheering trumpet. Riding on the success of Ghana is also the story of how the 2010 World Cup has thus far proved wrong most of its critics, detractors, pessimists and doubting Thomases. The vuvuzela, much like Ghana’s Black Stars, has beaten odds to become more than a cheering instrument. It has now attained the status of an African metaphor for the unacknowledged ways in which Africa determines particular discourses at the global level. There are three narratives intertwined here. First, Ghana is carrying the hopes of the continent, and the larger Pan-African world. Second, this tournament has been remarkable for the bigger presence of players of African descent in many of the teams, especially those from Europe and Latin America. Third, the phenomenon that has become the vuvuzela takes on a significance that elevates the symbolization of Ghana’s performance thus far, as well as the widespread presence of African influence in the ancestry of the players on the field."

Then Shara points us to the June 24th Mail & Guardian Online’s Thought Leader blog, where Sarah Britten quotes The Financial Times' Peter Aspden as saying (of the vuvuzela):

“It is a joyous, life-affirming sound, of a nation entranced in pride and celebration, and expressing it through its own culture.”

That is, however, an observation that actually falls short of Shara's premise, because suddenly we realize that the vuvuzela is no longer merely the sound of 'its own culture'. To be precise, the vuvuzela's caterwauling wail has achieved nothing less than transcended culture and even transcended soccer to become the sound that defines our times.

Of course, it might be that the vuvuzela was simply the loudest (or most annoying) sound of 2010. I understand that comment, but I still think it the most significant sound of 2010.

Beating out pop songs, jingles and a seemingly infinite ensemble of machine made voices: What other sound was bigger, brasher, more memorable or more memetic? And what other sonic branding mnemonic has ever proved more easily capable of representing all these things: 1) a major multinational sporting event, 2) the sport itself and 3) both the country and the continent that hosted said sport's biggest game in the last four years?

And that's why I nominate The Vuvuzela as The Sound of the Year.

Not to mention that what the vuvuzela has come to represent is not simply a single moment in sports history, but also a moment in our collective global history. And this moment sings out with a distinctive, jubilant and multinational voice.

Did you ever ask yourself if music was powerful enough to unite the world? Well, it is, provided one sings one's chorale (or blows a horn) around a football pitch.

I have thought often whether a narrative history of the world could be written from the perspective of one one era-defining sonic moment to the next. And as of this very moment, I'm absolutely certain that it could.

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To read The Vuvuzelization of world football: Ghana & the real story of SA2010 and other thought provoking pieces by Mr. Sharra, click the link.

Photo Credit: Image by Caldwella, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Story/Message Theory

noreply@blogger.com (Terry O'Gara) — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 10:51:00 +0000

Story/Message Theory defines traditional Story construction as Narrative followed by Message, and further suggests that for distracted audiences, flipping the model might prove more effective as a means to inviting focus and attention.

For those old enough to remember, once upon a time, a rapt audience would sit and listen to an entire Story, from beginning to end, regardless of how long it took, regardless of the fact that the only thing that awaited them at the end was some basic principle or lesson it purported to deliver. In fact, one listened to stories, not for the sake of entertainment value alone, but in order to learn something useful.

Since the dawn of man, stories have followed the same model:

Narrative (N) followed by a lesson, a general truth, a rule of conduct or a maxim, all of which I consider synonymous with one another, and which I identify collective by another neutral and generic term: Message (M).

As an example, let's draw our analysis to the traditional thirty-second TV commercial as an opportunity to convey a Message, and call this unit 'Story' (Story=S).

Typically, thirty-second spots are constructed so that the first twenty to twenty-five seconds of the work contain a compelling conflict, which is then resolved in the final five to ten seconds with a simultaneous product or service reveal (The Message). In case it’s not completely obvious, the intent of commercials is to fulfill a Marketing Objective.

For the purposes of this explanation: Marketing Objective, Maxim and Message are also synonymous with one another.

Thus:

N+M=S

This is as true for movies and modern television commercials as well as for folktales, myths or biblical parables.

Examples of a traditional maxim might be:

'What's good for the goose is good for the gander.'
'He who hesitates is lost.'
'Look before you leap.'

Examples of contemporary maxims are:

'M&Ms melt in your mouth, not in your hand '
'Always Coca-Cola.'
'Just Do it.'

Accounting for time (X), we might also write the equation as:

NX+MX=SX(FO)

So that a thirty-second spot might be written as follows:

N25+M5= S30(FO) [Fulfilled Objective]

What is interesting about traditional construction is that the difference between short and long Story formatting lies wholly on the length of the Narrative: Message is never abbreviated. So, if your purpose is to tell a Story in order to say something, you had better leave room for that, no matter how transparent your characters or how thinly drawn your Narrative.

And this is true whether one produces a three volume novel, a two hour movie, a half hour sitcom or a sixty second commercial. All must terminate with Message fully stated, regardless of whether the various Narratives are concluded in a few sentences or a few hundred thousand.

But if we flip the traditional commercial on its head, and lead with Message, a new paradigm is formed:

M+N=S(FO)
[FO=Fulfilled Objective]

Though practically speaking, execution would more closely resemble:

M+N+M=S(FO)
(See Image)

–Nothwithstanding the fact that this construction is clearly difficult to achieve in an abbreviated fifteen-second spot, though such spots still attempt to follow traditional modeling:

N10+M5=S15
(I think it's safe to assume that 'FO' is always implied whenever we see 'S'.

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut suggested writers of short stories start as near the end as possible. But what does it mean to begin a Story fifteen seconds before its conclusion, even if we take into account the additional magic and time manipulation the moving image affords us?

It's as if you began the biography of a great man or woman with his or her funeral and never got around to explaining the importance of this figure:

Once Upon a Time,
[Insert Name of Great Historical Figure],
May He/She rest in peace.
The End.

So at what point, it is fair to ask, does the semblance of Story disintegrate as a result of brevity? And can Message alone be an effective tool at fulfilling a marketing objective as the traditional model of Narrative + Message?

We know from direct experience that twenty or twenty five seconds is quite enough to panic housewives that their marriages are on the cusp of dissolution lest they figure out a way to make their whites whiter, and that within another five or ten seconds we might provide them with a relationship saving bleach. –Hence, the thirty-second spot.

But while fifteen-second commercials modeled on a tradition construction may or may not work (as a means to fulfilling a marketing objective) what’s interesting is the following is also true:

M=FO

i.e.:

(Successful) Delivery Alone of Message = Fufilled (Marketing) Objective

And it may be that this model also proves more effective than trying to squeeze Narrative and Message into a fifteen second pitch.

Because it’s not that people lack patience for stories (though it may seem that way to content makers), but that given the multitude of distribution channels, a rapt audience is no longer guaranteed. So, people have lots of time for stories. They just don't have time for yours.

Narrative, it turns out, is no longer the bait (and should never be conceived as such) for Message, but rather needs to be shifted in time and purpose, and possibly space (from print or TV to Interactive Media), as a reward for responding to introductory signification.

Fortunately there are already some pretty good examples of this.

Take the word 'Help', for instance:

The word 'Help' never comes at the end of a Story. If anything, 'Help' is the first word of a pretty gripping Story.

No one says, "La, I was walking down the street, minding my own business, humming a little song, when I got hit by a car, and now I'm hurt badly, in a great deal of pain, I might even be dieing, and oh, by the way, I need your help."

To the contrary: If you want help, it’s the first thing out of your mouth, and you must deliver the word with a rather convincing and compelling cry, all in caps so to speak: 'HELP!'. And only then, if your audience is suitably compelled, do they run to your assistance, at which time you can be sure that they will then listen to the details of your Story, and with full and complete attention, senses overloaded, highly alert, highly receptive and definitely interested.

'HELP!' It turns out, is a perfect advertisement.

Another good example is the Elevator Pitch:

A Pitch is not designed to be a story. A Pitch is designed to gather interest in a story. And one only need look at Wall Street or Silicon Valley to find evidence that well designed pitches can easily grow into million and billion dollar stories.

And because traditional ads in the modern world can't be relied on to motivate consumers to action (because they're too easy to ignore), it may be that a Message-Lead/Narrative-Follow will prove to be an exponentially more effective advertising model than the traditional construction (at this time).

If this sounds conventional enough, in fact the convention has been to provide context first (Narrative), followed by Message, in hopes that a viewer will actually pay attention to the Narrative long enough to have the Message engraved into their awareness. Unfortunately, given choice, this is not the way modern audiences behave.

Message-Lead/Narrative-Follow:

Consider a campaign designed to appeal to soccer fans. A Story that begins with a young klutz and which then tracks his or her progress and transformation into World Cup champion might work well as long format movie entertainment, but the same story would be rather to difficult to pull off as a fifteen second spot.

If we do as Vonnegut suggests, and start as near the end as possible, we will have to eliminate much of the journey. Now, a sixty second spot, if it is within our budget, although abbreviated, would still allow us to deliver a satisfying Story. However, if our audience is simultaneously distracted by other media, we may lose the desired demographic before we have a chance to present it with an attractive semiotic.

Therefore, it may be, that the best way to fulfill our marketing objective is to flip the traditional model, so that we lead with the image of a soccer player, or even a jersey and a pair of cleats, thereby capturing focus, which we can then either reward immediately with narrative, or alternately cue details for a time/space shift to another medium where interested parties might even be eager to spend more time, and enjoy a longer telling of our Narrative.

Thus, by leading with symbolic data, we inspire interest and desire in Narrative, where upon delivery, every major connection strategy –Marketing Objective, entertainment value and Story– is fulfilled and concluded, and perhaps even extended.

And, of course, by Time Shifting Narrative, we no longer have condense or compromise Narrative. In fact, we can expand it, and even do so across multiple consumer touch points, so that we can now employ a non linear marketing strategy whereby S=M+N1+N2+N3...

Arguably, Pop Stars put this theory to the test every time he or she front loads a song with a hook. But I wonder if sonic artisans applying craft to the moving image might also be able to apply the theory when designing audio treatments composed for traditionally constructed media, and with what results?

VUVUZELAS AND V-TWIN ENGINES

noreply@blogger.com (Terry O'Gara) — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 09:14:00 +0000

In Luigi Russolo’s seminal work, THE ART OF NOISES –first published in 1913-– the Italian painter and Futurist proposed that: "For many years Beethoven and Wagner shook our nerves and hearts. Now we are satiated and we find far more enjoyment in the combination of the noises of trams, backfiring motors, carriages and bawling crowds than in rehearsing, for example, the ‘Eroica’ or the ‘Pastoral’.”

In fact, “…We are therefore certain that by selecting, coordinating and dominating all noises we will enrich men with a new and unexpected sensual pleasure.’

Today, many still distinguish between sound and musical sound, but if film production and the tape recorder did not erase that distinction, the sampler certainly has.

As for Russolo, he wasn’t simply suggesting this would be an interesting pursuit, he thought it a necessary and inevitable musical evolution:

“…Futurist musicians must continually enlarge and enrich the field of sounds. This corresponds to a need in our sensibility. We note, in fact, in the composers of genius, a tendency towards the most complicated dissonances. As these move further and further away from pure sound, they almost achieve noise-sound. This need and this tendency cannot be satisfied except by the adding and the substitution of noises for sounds…”

Over the last century, our ears have indeed grown accustomed to the sound of the industrialized and now post industrial soundscape. That a sampled beat might be sourced from one machine, processed in another device and finally performed from yet another is not just no longer a novel idea, but in some genres, de rigueur.

But what Russolo did not foresee is that when we have at last subjugated noise –when we actually become masters of it; when we learn to enjoy it; dance to it, and even to sing along with it– that it no longer retains its shape as a continuously surprising cacophony, which is what he longed for. Nor could he predict that this so-called art of noises might perhaps reach it’s highest apex in the repetitive and musical looping of something we call hip hop.

But I think that he would be very pleased to know that noise-sound instruments, which he called ‘intonarumori’, would one day underscore the global zeitgeist. For evidence of that, tune one’s ears no further than to the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa. Because it was then and there that FIFA President Sepp Blatter noted that one ubiquitous intonarumori in particular, the vuvuzela, contributed much to the "…noise, excitement, dancing, shouting and enjoyment" of the event.

But could Russolo have possibly imagined how well the art and conquest of noises might lend itself to the art of sonic branding?

For today, not only have composers learned how to integrate noise into what we now might consider relatively conventional musical compositions, but they also routinely use an assortment of analog and digital intonarumori in the creation of varied sonic designs, whether for score, device application, venue installation or audio mark. Not to mention the now common use of conventional instruments employed in unconventional means, producing controlled noise for color or effect.

Amazingly, along the way, audiences have also simultaneously developed the ability to intuit non-verbal messaging from these noise-built audio constructions.

A roar of a Harley Davidson V-Twin engine, for instance, is not just the distinctive sound emitted from a particular motorcycle, but it also signals the drive, power and freedom felt and projected by the owner of the vehicle.

Our ears, it turns out, are capable of decoding multiple layers of semiotic and emotive meaning from a single sonic event, even from a single beat.

Consider that whatever its construction, a sonic logo is nothing less than a carrier for symbolic data. And not unlike a small work of origami created from a torn page of a scared artifact, once unfolded (and translated or decoded using common cultural assumptions), it will reveal a world of meaning within it. Similarly, no matter how fastidiously edited, a mere sliver of sampled pop music from our youth can transport each and everyone of us back through time and space.

Interestingly, no matter how much our current compositions resonate with Russolo’s noises, nor how accurate his vision of the future; and despite our synthesizers, samplers, or the zeitgeist and the vuvuzelas; neither the kalimba nor the violin has become obsolete. This I find a particularly profound topic for further consideration. Not to mention how the guitar itself has also performed a neat trick by evolving into a hybrid sound design tool, capable of serving as both traditional instrument and electronically processed noise-maker.

It is all, somehow, music to our ears.

* * *

Photo Collage by Terry O'Gara

Kids Today: Music Today

noreply@blogger.com (Terry O'Gara) — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 02:44:00 +0000

When we I was growing up (Gen X), I would never dream of listening to the same music my parents listened to. So I'm always surprised to find kids today listening not only to what their parents listened to when they were teenagers, but to learn that it's not uncommon for them to also listen to the music that their grand parents love.

And I make this observation not to besmirch young people today, either. I have been fortunate enough to have had a couple of very bright children as students and I think they are as good or better as any generation. With any luck, they will save us from national debt and invent flying cars that run on air. Not to mention that thank God we are producing eight year olds who intuitively understand the intrinsic value of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd.

I think the simple fact is, the latter half of the 20th century was a golden age in pop music, where songs were both entertaining and socially relevant –a common enough circumstance in Africa and the Caribbean, but otherwise rare in the Western world. Honestly, I wish I could have contributed to it, but I didn't, or I couldn't, or they wouldn't let me, or insert your favorite excuse here, and now it's over.

And today, in it's place, circa 2010, we live in an new age where music is oft relegated to a utilitarian role.

Hi, just arrive? Welcome (Cue The Beatles).

This circumstance is good for tunesmiths licensing works to electronic games and advertising campaigns, but not so good for artists trying to ignite (or simply participate in) a revolution.

So, yes, there are still great songwriters today, but does one of their tunes fit on my fitness workout playlist? Will it help sell a car? Will it lead to interest from EA Sports? Does it work as a cue for a Television drama?

Well, it had better, because that is the criteria now.

A Recitative for Data

noreply@blogger.com (Terry O'Gara) — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 05:43:00 +0000

Why does the music supporting various pharmaceutical spots so often sound similarly conceived? Whether comforting and organic, or pulsing and electronic, or as often is the case, a combination of the two, most of it belongs to a genre that I like to call Pharma Fusion.

On the surface, it's obvious why Pharma Fusion sounds the way it does: The music is clearly audible, but simultaneously and intentionally transparent. This allows for important medical information, including proper usage, input schedule and possible side effects –not to mention brand messaging– to be made perfectly legible.

The end result is bit like delivering the voice over as though it were printed in big type on a label.

Indeed, a critical commercial music production skill is understanding how to produce audio that doesn't jingle or enhance so much as it serves to support a voice over delivery containing factual content (or in the case of film, scoring around dialogue).

But for the composer or the sound designer working on these TV and Radio commercials, the process can also seem counter intuitive. The reason being that a score's function in a marketing context is ostensibly that of being the musical component of a sales pitch. But that's not really the case here. Notwithstanding an aural lift for applicable brand identification, good Pharma Fusion doesn't push, doesn't persuade. Like a mother singing to her child, it simply carries a message of experience, safety and hope.

And hopefully, these things are true.

After all, one wants to believe one is playing a creative role in the announcement of a potentially life saving or life enhancing drug, by using music to produce and amplify clarity.

As for the music design process itself, it helps to understand pulse. Whether intentionally or intuitively, so many of these scores use the human heart beat as a rhythm bed. But I also think it's a bit like knowing how to produce a recitative for data.

Noise and Jazz

noreply@blogger.com (Terry O'Gara) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 05:01:00 +0000

In 1913, Italian Futurist and Noise visionary, Luigi Russolo (1885-1947) laments that he is weary of ‘Eroica’, and so he dreams up a new concert music created by machines that echo the sounds of the Industrial Age.

But what did he think of ragtime, and its syncopated rhythms inspired by the intersection of African Culture, urbanization and the Industrial Revolution? And then afterward when it spawned a million new modern musical memes under the auspices of a then embryonic ‘jazz’ form?

Or did the author of The Art of Noises tune his ears only to the symphony hall and so was thereby disinclined to listen to the popular music of the day? Did he not hear in it some of the musical machinations he heard in his head, simply because the format did not suit his aesthetic?

Or if he heard it, did Russolo hear in American popular music only hysteria, or burgeoning vulgarity, as many critics at the time did, and none of what made this new music so utterly modern, compliments a sometimes bawling tonality and often propelled by the backfiring rhythms of an increasingly post agricultural society?

Even if he may not have paid much attention to the jazz of his day, I wonder what would Russolo would have made of John Zorn, who's Avant-garde project, Naked City, is one of my all time favorite albums and listening experience? Or German experimental industrial ensemble Einsturzende Neubauten? Or even electronic musician Dan Deacon, who is a master of circuit sourced chaos?

Would he think them kindred spirits? However alike or different in practice from his original vision, I think he would.

* * *

Photo Collage by Terry O'Gara

Speaking of Stimulation

noreply@blogger.com (Terry O'Gara) — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 19:01:00 +0000

"Those who would mould public opinion must take due account of the relative effectiveness of eye and ear modes of stimulation, and particularly those modes of such vast and rapidly growing proportions as the screen, the radio and television. What effects are these comparatively new instruments of entertainment, of instruction, of propaganda, of culture exerting upon society. To which of these new tools of communication are people attending most readily? Are people remembering what they see on the screen and hear on the radio? Which do they remember better? And what do we expect from television?"

– From Eye vs. Ear in Moulding Opinion (The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 3, Jul., 1937), by Frank R. Elliott,

Holy Cow! 1937!

We haven't even fully answered –much less assimilated– the original question and here we are now, grappling with the effects of intercontinental travel, cable television, satellite communications, MTV, Reality TV, the 24 Hour News cycle, a thousand channels to choose from and a set top digital video recorder to capture it all, not to mention personal computers, portable media players, mobile phones, smartphones, smart missiles, first person shooters, video game consoles, causal games, social games, massively multiplayer online role-playing games, texting, sexting, tweets, blogs, apps, email, social networks, the erosion of copyright, the end of privacy and the emergence of globalization, ubiquitous branding, guerilla marketing, environmental installations, product placement, branded coffee sleeves, ad-wrapped buses, digital signage, desktop publishing, instant messaging, chat rooms, online forums, streaming video, beat matching, pitch correction, loops, samples, plugins, hyperlinks, passwords, adwords, broadband, cloud computing, databases, floppy discs, laster discs, compact discs, hard drives, flash drives, backup drives, global positioning technology, Internet search, Silicon Graphics, silicon implants, collagen lips, avatars, Unix, Intel, AOL, Apple, IBM, Windows, Photoshop, MySpace, cyberspace, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, jpegs, mp3s, movs, office docs, dot coms, hook ups and STDs, slow motion, stop motion, 3-D, P2P, Hi-Def, holographic, motion graphic, closed captioning, closed circuit, open source, outsource, sound bytes, ringtones, podcasts, viral vids, keywords, metatags, 'I Like', 'Friend Me' , friends with benefits, wiki this and wiki that, free content, cross border discontent, hacking malcontents and porn, porn, porn just about anywhere and everywhere you look.

Gee, is it any wonder that the last decade has been characterized by attention deficit disorder, Adderall, crystal meth and serotonin reuptake inhibitors? Ha, and fasten your seat belts because this ride has only just begun.

And it makes me think that given the sheer number of stimulants available –media and otherwise– we live in a day in age when it may never be too early to teach our children patience, yoga, zen, and other skills necessary to sometimes sitting still and doing absolutely nothing at all.

Dial C for Coda

noreply@blogger.com (Terry O'Gara) — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 03:41:00 +0000

I was cycling though some of the musicology blogs I like to read from time to time and was surprised to learn one of the most popular in the field, Dial M for Musicology, has closed up shop after a four year run.

That's a real shame for those of us who rely on such blogs to feed our own knowledge base, so I'm sorry to see it go. But if this is the first time you've heard of Dial M, you're in partial luck, as the archives will apparently remain online for a still undetermined length of time.

In the meantime, thanks to Phil Ford and Jonathan Bellman for the good reads. Mission accomplished, as they say. There are flowers waiting for you in the wings, and a limo for each of you is waiting outside with a well stocked mini bar.