SET ARPEGGIOS TO SEMIOTIC STUN

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'

DECODING THE NOW: Modern Art, Mashups & Memes

I recently came across an online forum whereby one contributor to the discussion inquired, "Why is modern art so boring?" It was a hypothetical and perhaps subjective 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.

The phrase, 'modern art', itself goes undefined, but I will accept it to mean not only those works produced from the 1860s to the 1970s, as the phrase formally suggests, but rather inclusive of a casual survey of the contemporary western art scene in its entirety –art and artists, and inclusive of all mediums –i.e., what's happening right now.

The question itself also recalls a similarly provocative argument that I heard from one composer that, "There are no good Jazz musicians anymore."

I might say the same thing about Disco singers. However, although many people would presumably accept that statement as simply hyperbole,  if I were a Jazz musician who had devoted my life to this art –and 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, personal offense.

So, obviously modern art is not boring. The real question is what cultural or societal factors would bring someone to think that it is? It might be that anyone north of thirty is simply jaded –not because of their age, but because they personally experienced some of the variety provided by the Twentieth Century. During that era fashions changed rather radically throughout every single decade from 1915 to 1995, 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. And then came along the Internet, all but transposing our obsession with production, with disruption and its consequences.

It's an irony that at about the same time our tools for communication began rapid evolution, what we once called our culture appears to have stalled. Technology itself will certainly contribute to another general life frame, but in the meantime, we're all trying to balance the zeitgeist beneath us.

And somehow, I think, we may have gotten stuck in the eighties –myself included. I say this because I sometimes get the sense that although language and design evolve at light speed, content in its substance and form remain stagnant. Not to say there is nothing new that can be said employing classic and classical forms, but if there is, why isn't anyone doing so? To put it another way, so what if the bricks have chips in them, if we're still using them to build Tudor styled mansions. Or was that the dream we aspired achieve to all along? At any rate, here he are at the dawn of a new century trading our dollars for Greco-Roman Pavilions furnished with flat screen TVs, in order to watch shows about decorating Greco-Roman Pavilions with flat screen TVs.

–No wonder we're bored.

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.

Imagine, entire bridges and buildings are for the taking! Tag it, shoot it, share it and revel in your fame. Maybe that's why modern art feels boring – because when faced with an interactive interface, we are still relegated to being consumers, not creators, which is what we want to be, and what we do  become, when at the very least, if we can't paint the Mona Lisa, at least we can take a picture of it.

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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 Boom Box Effect

Earlier this year I posted a series of articles discussing the dynamic relationship between branded sound opportunities and silence.

In Silence Please, for the Soundtracks of Our Lives, I wrote:

"We're in such a rush to score the whole world that it's easy to forget that arranging opportunities for SIMPLE QUIET or shaping RELATIVE SILENCE may actually prove the most intelligible means for creating a platform to communicate with audiences, customers and users. One reason for that is that more and more of us are bring our own sonic branding with us, principally in the way of customized playlists.”

Media, omnipresent even a decade ago, still had not quite reached the interruptive tipping point as it has in recent years. Media is exponentially more pervasive and invasive than it was in the recently faded Twentieth Century.

We know from studies of physics that when sound waves collide, the result is interference.

Consider the following laws of acoustics (source):

* Sound waves that are exactly in phase add together. The result is a stronger wave.
* Sound waves that have varying phase relationships produce differing sound effects.
* Sound waves that are exactly inverted, or 180 degrees out of phase, cancel each other out. The result is silence.

[For a quick primer on sound, visit this link: Sound Primer]

Now consider the case of the Boom Box:

If in 1987 I walked down the street carrying my boom box playing one song, and you were walking in the other direction, coming towards me and carrying your boom box playing another song, the result was noise. That's because the music didn't sync, didn't share the same key, followed a different structure, played on a different beat. In fact both songs lost entertainment value because the sum of their sounds created cacophony. Would that Boom Boxes automatically beat matched when they were in proximity of each other, but they don't.

That's what I call The Boom Box Effect –the collision of sounds (that don't cancel each other out) in a given human habitat.

Today a lot of brands suffer another kind of Boom Box Effect.

At any given time we are bound to our electronic devices as if we were outfitted with law enforcement tracking devices (and we are). Between incoming calls, text messages and alerts to our PDAs and mobile phones –not to mention our proximity to other people's media platforms– there isn't a single urban environment where our ears and our brain do not wage a daily war against the bombardment of random information.

Because of the density of any urban environment there is no escape. You can't leave the room, because everywhere else is swimming with just as much distraction as the present environment.

This may in fact be one reason why the iPod or other digital music playback devices have become ubiquitous, their popularity being a side effect of necessity. Besides their obvious function of permitting us to carry entertainment assets with us on our respective journeys, these devices also provide a filter from unwelcome incoming sensory data.

In effect, they help combat stress and insanity caused by the boom box effect.

All of which is not to say that individual, multiple sounds layered atop one another can't work together. They most certainly can, and frequently do in any single harmonized chord, or series of chords. They also do in any cohesive and unified music composition. In fact, they work well together in any unified experience - be it a song, a film score, a retail environment or a theme park venue.

Casinos present wonderful case studies of environments where the combined sum of noise making machines do not contribute to chaos at all, but rather create positive, hopeful excitement.

Yet, this is still not the case in most urban environments where people are often expected to live, work and inhabit daily. One simply can't expect your client's competitors to tune their brands to your client's brand.

Or can we?

Does the loudest voice get the most attention? Near term, probably. It's hard to ignore a cry for 'help', for instance. But long term, if we hear enough of them, we become immune to such cries, especially if they don't deliver honest results (e.g. See: The Boy That Cried Wolf).

And yet given today's technologies, maybe it's now possible to create communications that are capable of being delivered regardless of competing distractions?

So that instead of our circa 1987 Boom Boxes fighting with each other for available audio space and attention, –making it impossible to hear either song–, we simply broadcast our message using 2017 'Boom Pods' that automatically eliminate defined noise; but also beat match, pitch correct and remix colliding transmissions, with the result being a perfectly blended Green Sound music mashup capable of allowing us to clearly and legibly hear both informational and utilitarian messages, musical melodies and overlapping sets of sonic memetics simultaneously, sans interference –PLUS whatever other audible elements happen to inhabit the environment– not to mention in perfect groovy harmony –and at a volume that won't wake the babies passing by in carriages pushed by their mothers or fathers.

Because, fortunately or unfortunately, silence is not an option.

* * *

Photo Credit

It’s a Cut and Paste World

From Photoshop to ProTools: We live in a Cut and Paste world.

Modern music making tools –synthesizers, samplers and digital audio workstations– draw a striking parallel to cameras, scanners and software applications such as those provided by Adobe; Illustrator and Photoshop for instance.

Think of a camera or scanner as samplers, and Photoshop a Digital Workstation for its ability to manipulate, enhance and process media elements into a composite whole.

One interesting side effect of modern image and audio production tools is that their use often allows amateurs to create images or sound works that are as entertaining and engaging to behold as those produced by a master artisan.

Some argue audio samples and their use by electronic musicians cannot even be described as a legitimate art. [The Artistic Legitimacy of Electronic Music]

Consider, though, the photographer who captures an image. You might say he samples it. He may present it later unadulterated, as a journalist might, or manipulate it into a unique photo collage. Who would deny the photographer his claim to art? Not I. After all, the camera didn't take the picture, the photographer did!

I've come to consider samples in the same vein I think of stock photography: Convenient and useful when producing commercial art under a deadline and limited budget; or as source material for a collage.

Being a Rauschenberg fan I absolutely consider the art of collage to be Art with a capital 'A', and I think of it is every bit as substantial as masterwork paintings, sculptures, or any other kind of work.

I tend to think of every human action as resulting in art, too, but I'll leave that one for another blog entry.

Not everyone feels the way I do. Some will argue that a collagist begins with found elements, and beginning with 'something' therefore makes one's job 'easier' than say, a traditional painter who they will argue must create an image from scratch, –'out of nothing' so to speak.

But master collagists aren't simply reproducing verbatim the existing works of others and then offering exact reproductions as their own original works of art. Rather, they modify and manipulate images into something new; they may certainly build on existing images by adding their own original enhancements, too; but what I find really intriguing is how they create new context around existing media that somehow transforms them by transforming the very idea of them.

The result can be extremely engaging and intellectually sustentative, and otherwise engages a viewer to an equivalent degree as would the original source/s, and perhaps even more so.

One could argue that curators and people who frame pictures do the same thing. Well, there is art in that, too. Oh, I hear a collective groan out there, but consider this:

In a very elemental sense art is nothing more than the presentation of one or more ideas whose juxtaposition against one another serves to communicate a composite concept. The addition of a frame to an artwork often serves to underscore, emphasize or otherwise enhance the artist's original communique by demanding that one focus on the presentation itself, at the exclusion of other concepts competing in the space. Examples follow: A frame around a picture; a stage in a theater; a movie or television screen; or even the civic space around a city sculpture. Anyone who is a fan of dance or drama has experienced the marked difference of watching the same choreography or play performed in a black box contrasted with under a proscenium arch.

A curator selects several complete works as his or her palette. Using the exhibit space itself as the 'frame', their juxtaposition against one another implies a connection, or causes us to create one. The curator's work results in the transmission of a new communication. Perhaps it is an idea about the works themselves, –their relationship with one another. Or perhaps once completed the display conveys nothing about the works themselves, but rather uses the collective artworks to deliver some sort of unified social commentary.

Hip Hop artists, for another example, use loops to frame samples, and may juxtapose samples from various sources within a single musical work. The individual samples themselves may be unmodified by the musical collagist, but their inclusion within one single work changes the context by which our brains consume them. The result is a transformation of the original communication into something new and if not wholly different, potentially and substantially original in concept.

When Marketers HEAR Double

In the November 28th issue of the Wall Street Journal, Emily Steel reports in an article titled 'When Marketers See Double', on unwitting overlap by advertisers who coincidently choose the same photo for parallel running campaigns. One notable example given is when Bank of America and Key Bank, the article points out, both chose the same ‘heart warming’ image of father and daughter hanging over a laptop.

Consider this example presented by the Wall Street Journal, and culled from the US BankCorp and Travelers respective Websites:


It occurred to me that this phenomenon is even more prevalent in the music and sound design we hear on TV and Radio commercials, and sometimes embedded into the soundtracks of the productions themselves.

One reason for this is the convenience afforded by MUSIC PRODUCTION LIBRARIES. Production libraries are collections of prerecorded music created specifically for use as audio companions to visual material, such as film and TV. Often cheaper than commissioning an original score, media producers also like production libraries because licensing is a snap. Like stock photo libraries, the contents in a music production library are rarely licensed for exclusive use, meaning someone else can come along and use the same track for their TV show, movie, commercial, et al.

Another source of recycle sound is the increased reliance by composers and sound designers on SAMPLES.

SAMPLES –as is commonly known– are short audio recordings, which are then often used as fodder for composers and sound designers. Sometimes samples are recorded from existing works: That's how The Meters and James Brown became embedded into countless Hip Hop tracks.

But most often samples are recordings of instruments (or ensembles) playing singular notes (or short rhythms) in every style, and then compiled into a 'library'. The samples are typically arranged across a keyboard making it easy for anyone to summon up a string orchestra with the push of a button.

Other common libraries include Loop libraries, which contain a measure or more of a rhythm track. Re-recorded and looped in a composer's computer, the loops become the basis of what one hopes is something otherwise original.

Or as ILIO –makers of the Vienna Strings Library– likes to say: "Virtual Instruments, Sample CDs and CD-ROMs, Loops, Sounds, Software and Tools for the Modern Musician."

Although, I think modern has nothing to do it with it: Samples –notwithstanding the fact that they can be quite effective– are just way cheaper than hiring a sixty piece orchestra for a demo.

As it stands, there are so many sample libraries today, that every instrument, in every configuration has been recorded. Need a Stradivari violin, cello, oboe, didgeridoo? No problem. Need rock guitars? –A techno loop? –A hip hop beat? Simply Add to Cart and proceed to Check Out with a valid Credit Card.

There are also libraries that cover the gamut of sound effects. Everything from car drive-bys (for every model manufactured) to 'ambient' or 'atmospheric' FX that call up specific genres, like, 'scary', for instance.

The result of this trend in using samples for every audio event in a music or sound design track is that we –the audience– are hearing the same sounds over and over again. For those of us with any kind of aural intelligence, an hour watching television can drive you batty as you hear –yet again– the same sound used in a ten year old X-Files episode recycled for the millionth time in a video game or a commercial, and now in the show itself.

It’s as though every soundtrack composer and sound designer on the planet is now drawing from the same pool of pre-recorded stock sounds. –And you know what? My ears tell me that they are.


stock, photography, samples, sound effects, music production

The Lizard King

Capped off my first performance at CBGB's 313 Gallery with the following original song, The Lizard King.

The song itself is partly inspired by Jim Morrison and partly the product of chance. Each individual line –and the odd couplet– in the song once belonged to another song I'd written over the previous 20 years.

While sitting at my desk in 1998, waiting for inspiration to hit, I stared down at my feet, and among the scattered pages of lyrics I picked out a line here, a line there. It began as a lark, really. But the result was a unified composition which incredibly makes some kind of sense. I guess today we'd call it a mashup.

Also the product of synchronicity, the choruses each begin with an allusion to the Virgin Mary ('Dolores Our Lady of Sorrows', 'Lolita' and 'Ave Maria').

Somehow, it all just works.


The Lizard King
By Terry O’Gara
©1998

And so the lizard king will not return
And we will never know
And we will never learn
What never was will never be
I guess I was one of those that never did believe

In anything, in anything but myself
And I don’t want your help
I know all I need to know of love
And that’s enough
I want to feel the pain
I think it’s better this way

Dolores Our Lady of Sorrows
Was seen at a truck stop in Ohio
But you had to stand on the outside looking in
Well isn’t that typical, hypocritical
But we all gave up a hymn

Singing ‘Holy, Holy
Never let go of me’
And ‘Save me, save me’
From the fric and the frac
Oh if only I believed
In all of this crap

Lolita Our Lady of Toenails
Sits in the grass while I sip my cocktails
Shivinanda says sit still and focus
But I twitch like a hundred thousand locusts

Meanwhile a rock’n’roll angel eats her cocoa puffs in heaven
While a video camera swallows your every move
Desperately you search the house for meaning
While she sits alone in her room

Ave Maria Oh baby
Ave Maria my love
How is it everything we put our faith in
Couldn’t save us in the end

And so the lizard king will not return
And we will never know
And we will never learn
What never was will never be
I guess I was one of those that never did believe–

In anything.