2.
He tells me that every scale has a shape
and I have to learn how to hold
each one in my hands.
At home I practice with my eyes closed.
C is an open book.
D is a vase with two handles.
G flat is a black boot.
E has the legs of a bird.

3.
He says the scale is the mother of the chords.
I can see her pacing the bedroom floor
waiting for her children to come home.
They are out at nightclubs shading and lighting
all the songs while couples dance slowly
or stare at one another across tables.
This is the way it must be. After all,
just the right chord can bring you to tears
but no one listens to the scales,
no one listens to their mother.

4.
I am doing scales,
the familiar anthems of childhood.
My fingers climb the ladder of notes
and come back down without turning around.
Anyone walking under this open window
would picture a girl of about ten
sitting at the keyboard with perfect posture,
not me slumped over in my bathrobe, disheveled,
like a white Horace Silver.

5
I am learning to play
‘It Might As Well Be Spring’
but my left hand would rather be jingling
the change in the darkness of my pocket
or taking a nap on an armrest.
I have to drag him into music
like a difficult and neglected child.
This is the revenge of the one who never gets
to hold the pen or wave good-bye,
and now, who never gets to play the melody.

6.
Even when I am not playing, I think about the piano.
It is the largest, heaviest
and most beautiful object in this house.
I pause in the doorway just to take it all in.
And late at night I picture it downstairs,
this hallucination standing on three legs,
this curious beast with its enormous moonlit smile.

From The Art of Drowning by Billy Collins

It reminds me a little of those rendered music machines, except these don’t suffer from that flat 3D rendering & MIDI sounds…

Promo fiesta 1er aniversario de Pendrive Records
Video made by VISITOR

Beautiful work by Clemento shot on a Canon 5DmarkII with an MP-E 65mm lens (those tones near the end sound like a Sugur Ros track, no?) but the ultimate macro sound project has to be the brilliant French film Microcosmos by Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou. I remember seeing it at a Film festival screening many years ago & you are literally so immersed in the world of insects that when a dung beetle finally got its tiny ball of dung up & over an epic precipice, the entire audience burst into applause! And then laughed… But such an amazing soundtrack, with the most intricate foley…

So thanks to a well researched but slightly random, instinctive visit to Naoshima, I became a fan of Tadao Ando and continued to locate & experience as much of his work as possible, while also researching & learning about other great architects…. But a conversation with a friend has stuck with me, dating back to soon after that first discovery at the Chichu Art Gallery on Naoshima. I was ranting about the experience & she quietly explained her theory about how art galleries are like churches for the non-religious. Wow! But of course they are! The reverential quietness & respect for both your surroundings & the other visitors. The exhilirating sense of stillness & enlightenment after you leave – it all made sense. But so I started thinking; are sound & music studios actually temples?

I’ve ranted before on this topic & I won’t repeat myself – you can read here and here, but I will continue to write about it because it is a never ending process; evolving the ideal sonic temple..

While I love the highly refined ideas & execution of architectural minimalism there is the issue of practicalities. Whenever I look at “lifestyle” magazines I always wonder: where is all their stuff? Where are the books, the records and the tools that let people be creative? One answer seems to be hinted at in the hilarious site unhappyhipsters but as far as studios go it begs a specific question. The only real path to minimalism is to attempt to do everything in the box ie in a computer, because then the messy clutter can all be nicely put away on your hard disk & lovely minimalist order is restored… Years ago I might have believed that but not now. If you want to play analogue synth, no softsynth will suffice. If you love the idiosyncratic tones of a space echo, no plugin will satisfy. And you only have to be in love with an acoustic instrument to know that no sample library even gets remotely close to the experience of making music in the real world with that instrument. We need the clutter, in fact we love the clutter!

So its about finding a balance, and that also is a constantly evolving process. But as I discovered back in Naoshima, the space around you does influence you, constantly and in hindsight I was naive to not always be truly aware of that fact. And I wasn’t totally unaware. Back when I was a university dropout I rented an unused modernist church in the middle of Christchurch – the big room even had a tap in the corner (presumably for holy water?) but I specifically remember what a great place it was for music because of the high ceiling height & the light. Many great parties & jams were had in that space!

So being much more aware of the kind of space i want to be able to create in, its really interesting to see what other people have arrived at to meet their creative needs. The LA Times recently had an article & photo series featuring will.i.am’s (The Blackeyed Peas) new studio – obviously budget wasn’t an issue, but still…

CheeWee Ong who hosts the Leave Luck To Heaven blog often posts photos of studios along with many other examples of beautiful design, but he has also recently started an Emberapp site to archive just the studio photos – check it out here and a great example from his collection:

I also came across this intriguing DIY project on the Tiny House blog: a portable studio being built on the back of a trailer! I couldn’t find any photos of the completed tiny studio, but what an intriguing idea. I could think of a lot of great places to park that solar powered trailer!

A great resource for practical studio building advice is this forum run by John Sayers who builds sound studios for a living. His work ranges from the high end, to this studio built into a shipping container – check this thread to see photos of the completed studio.
Its great to have access to someone as knowledgable & experienced, as for example when you come across seemingly related posts on other sites such as this one: 10 seriously cool workplaces you realise none of those ten look like somewhere you would make music in. A sonic temple is a unique workplace!

The Black Ark – Lee Scratch Perry’s studio

Updated (thanks to the commenters below)

 

Hans Zimmers studio (photo credit)

Amsterdam Mastering studio (photo credit)

Sound Editing Finalists
Avatar: Christopher Boyes and Gwendolyn Yates Whittle
The Hurt Locker: Paul N.J. Ottosson
Inglourious Basterds: Wylie Stateman
Star Trek: Mark Stoeckinger and Alan Rankin
Up: Michael Silvers and Tom Myers

Sound Mixing Finalists
Avatar: Christopher Boyes, Gary Summers, Andy Nelson and Tony Johnson
The Hurt Locker: Paul N.J. Ottosson and Ray Beckett
Inglourious Basterds: Michael Minkler, Tony Lamberti and Mark Ulano
Star Trek: Anna Behlmer, Andy Nelson and Peter J. Devlin
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen: Greg P. Russell, Gary Summers and Geoffrey Patterson

Score Finalists
Avatar: James Horner
Fantastic Mr Fox: Alexandre Desplat
The Hurt Locker: Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders
Sherlock Holmes: Hans Zimmer
Up: Michael Giacchino

With the Oscar finalists being announced tomorrow morning which films are your picks for best Sound Editing? Sound Mixing? Score? Here are the picks from Indiewire:

Best Sound Editing
1. Avatar
2. Star Trek
3. The Hurt Locker
4. District 9
5. Up

Best Sound Mixing
1. Avatar
2. Star Trek
3. The Hurt Locker
4. Transformer: Revenge of the Fallen
5. District 9

Best Original Score
1. Avatar
2. Up
3. Star Trek
4. The Informant!
5. A Serious Man

And from the In Contention site: Best Sound Editing part one and part two plus Best Sound Mixing part one and part two

I went & saw Avatar in 3D this morning – technically it was obviously very complex but as a film I was rather underwhelmed with the one dimensional characters & totally gratuitous violence, but those faded into insignificance when compared to the overall themes of the film which made me queasy, and not in the way as obviously intended. Game changing? Not in my opinion. Re-inventing cinema? Not even close. But what really struck me was that now, half a day later I struggle to really re-engage with anything from the film, and yet a ’small’ film I saw over a week ago has still got me thinking about it. Sorry Mr Cameron but Kim Ki Duks Birdcage Inn 1, Avatar 0. But I guess Avatar will pick up best VFX for the monumental work done by WETA… My picks? I’ll be loyal to the locals & cross my fingers for District 9 for both sound editing & mixing – not to be parochial but because D9 had such a memorable soundtrack with a lot of original ideas beautifully woven into it. The other contender in each category for me would be Up for sound editing and Star Trek for mix. And for Best Film Score I loved Carter Burwells work on A Serious Man…
And you?

Solar rework is by Flight404 as a test for visuals generated in real time… The audio is taken from WNYC’s RadioLab Podcasts, which coincidentally I was tipped off to by a Swedish sound designer who visited my studio a week or so ago (thanks Carl!) – check out the RadioLab podcasts as they are beautifully created with some very clever sound design…. The episode that the above video borrows its audio from is titled What is music? How does it work? Why does it move us? Why are some people better at it than others? In this hour, we examine the line between language and music, how the brain processes sound, and we meet a composer who uses computers to capture the musical DNA of dead composers in order to create new work. We also re-imagine the disastrous 1913 debut of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring…through the lens of modern neurology.

Radiolab also have a blog here