Bone music
In post WWII Soviet Union, during the anti-cosmopolitanism campaigns, jazz was banned since it was considered bourgeois music by the communist ideologies of Stalin. Music was viewed as a threat and only classical and traditional Russian music was allowed, including folk and Gregorian music. Jazz and rock and roll considered as the enemy.
In 1932 Stalin founded the Union of Soviet composers (USC). Musicians looking for financial support would be obligated to join the party, when they wanted to release music it had to be reviewed by the government. The USC had total control of the artistic direction of new music. This was based in the principles of “socialist realism”. A style of art that portrayed socialist values. It showed human flaws in a realistic way and exposed the dilapidated conditions the lower class were living in. Artists would get sent to the gulag if their work didn’t represent the values of communist art.
A sound engineer from Poland, owned a Telefunken recording device which worked as a recorder for vinyls. Since western music was illegal in Russia, he had his own shop where he sold records which were not permitted to be sold in at the time such as tango, jazz and rock and roll music. Pressing vinyls were costly and difficult, so he begun to go to hospitals once they have closed and bought nearly expired X-rays from the hospital that they got rid of because the material was highly flammable, they would take this material and use it to record music through the Telefunken gramophone. People in Moscow started hearing about this technique and it rose in popularity. So, during the night time, people would hide records in their clothes and sell them to music lovers in dark alley ways. That was the only way people had access to western music as well as music the USR branded as illegal.
The soviet government soon started to find out about this, and sent producers of the records to gulags.
I found this particular story really interesting because nowadays with technology, we are able to access all music and any music we want within a couple of seconds with our phones. I think it is interesting that people had to go through illegal means to listen to music in a repressed society. I think it shows us how even the government wanted to restrict art, people still find a way to connect and find it even if its in a different language or from a different world. that shows how people use art to escape their pain and repression. it makes me more grateful about the abundance of music that is made available for us in this day.
Sound Walk
On the 6th of November 2020, we went to South Bank. We went on a sound walk with José to Forest Hill. When I just got there, I met a couple of Sound Arts students from my course for the first time. José then explained to us the experiment: one person to be blindfolded, and the other guides the blindfolded person with a stick. we then walked through the park. when i first heard about what we were gonna do, i felt nervous because i did not trust the person i was going to be led with while i was blindfolded. I was surrendering my main sense and allowing a random stranger then to essentially be my eyes. At first, i was focusing on being in control of my body and surroundings, not giving my partner my full trust. but slowly, i started to let go and blended in with my surroundings. i started to accept that i didn’t have control in that moment. I think that when I accepted that, i realized that i was able to hear the sounds around me different. i felt moredifferent. i felt how the sun was on my skin. how the rocks felt beneath my feet. the sounds around me from naturw and people moving ariund me started to feel more abstract and amplified in a way because every time i hear a sound, there is a physical visual attached to it. but in that moment, i had to let go and i felt a huge sense of peace and complete relaxation. it was like i could hear in HD mode, and the panning and movement of the sounds became clearer. my trust to this person that was guiding me solidified.
After that, i just felt pure happiness. so relaxed. all my bad thoughts disappeared for a bit. my body felt light, my head felt clear. i was at peace. i had gained a different understadning of sound and how it can affect the spirit of a human being. this has been one of my favourite classes, ever. That being said, in this experiment, I learnt about the substantiality of connecting with nature through sound and trust.
Human beings strive so hard to be in control and we idolize people in control and power. We rarely ever understand how to let go of ourselves; when in a world that moves so fast and sporadically, we should accept that we will never be in full control of our minds and surrender to the beauty in chaos.
Generative and ambient music
In the early 19th century, French composer, Erik Satie, created the term furniture music. It is defined as minimal music with the intention of creating atmosphere and to be played in the background. It was composed in a minimalistic and repetitive way using the flute, clarinet, strings and trumpets.
Brian Eno, a renowned British composer, producer and musician founded generative music. I remember reading about a story about him in a hospital which led to the inception of the ambient genre. It goes that Brian Eno was listening to 19th century harp music but he could not turn the volume up and listen the piece clearly. Because of that, he found out that the sounds of the open window in his ward and the song blended beautifully, creating a new sonic experience. He noted that the notes and the harp were just loud enough so he could hear it combined with the rain. Thus, Brian Eno created Discrete Music which he released in 1975. He recorded some sequences with an EMS Synthi AKS onto two tape machines, generating tape echo. The next day, he played the track on half speed and realized it sounded even better. After the release of the album, he created a series of four albums entitled Ambient. In his series of albums, he used keyboard synthesizers, vocal harmonies, drone guitars and an extended series of electronic processing. The idea of this series was to create music that was ever-evolving. Eno describes ambient music as “music that can be interested as it can ignored.”
Furthermore, to create this evolving texture, he used loops that had different lengths which are composed in a modal way. He uses this technique so that even though the music is random, it is harmonious.
Today, generative music is known as a term popularized by Brian Eno to describe music that is ever-changing, and that is created by a system. A program called SSEYO was created in 1995 which is a system where the machine creates random values and the user creates rules and limitations for the machine. This creates random sequences and with those limitations, you create the piece.
“You create the input but not the result” – Brian Eno
Nowadays, to create generative music, there are a plethora of ways one can approach it. There are modular synthesizers, Ableton live, Reaktor, even iPad apps. There are also a myriad of tools one can use such as turing machines, sequencers, sample and hold. They are all used to create random melodies or rhythms and are combined sent to a quantizer, which limit the frequencies created by these machines to produce harmonious results. My approach is to utilize very little notes on a certain scale which makes it less likely to sound dissonant and evokes a melodic phrasing, like in modal music. In Eno´s case, he plays different loops for different durations. For example, he has a recording of a synth playing one note that lasts 8 bars and a loop of a recording of a drone guitar with reverb and modulation in the EQ, and a melody played with a steel guitar which is 12 bars long. The result? A phasing that is common in minimalist music found in the works of Philip Glass or Steve Reich.
The processing of sounds is as important as the sound itself. Common effects used are ring modulation, reverb, delay, s and other effects. To create this slow evolving modulation, it is common to use LFOs, envelopes, randomizers, sequential switches, probability and chance.
I made this piece a few months ago (which was also my first attempt at generative music in Reaktor) with references from Brian Eno and the aforementioned techniques and strategies. The goal of this was to create a moving painting with my sound and to replicate a transcendental experience I had while listening to Brian Eno´s Discrete Music when I was in the middle of a forest in Berlin. I distinctly remember visualizing that instead of music playing from the speakers, the trees and grass were singing in front of me and everything seemed connected to one another at the moment. The experience showed me how ambient music can enhance any atmosphere. It simply can be played in the background on any occasion and it melts into, then enhances the surroundings and emotions of a room or place.
Granular Synthesis
This is an experiment I performed with a Granulator II using different layers of the same sound, each transposes to a different note which creates a lush and expanded chord. I extracted the sample from YouTube and its an audio of a young Russian choir. I applied layers of modulation on the track so that it sounds as if it is evolving. On top of that, I also included percussions and drums.
This type of synthesis follows the principals of sampling. The audio is to be divided into really small pieces of 1 to 50 ms, also known as grains. You can engineer grains to move between each other with an LFO which then creates different shapes. If you make the grains spread, a thicker sound is achieved.
I like using the Granulator II from Ableton which was designed by Robert Henke as it gives me full autonomy to construct big clouds of atmospheric landscapes. I also like its versatility, because I am able to add any sound into this instrument, completely changing it while achieving interesting waveforms.
“All sound, even continuous musical variation, is conceived as an assemblage of a large number of elementary sounds adequately disposed in time. In the attack, body, and decline of a complex sound, thousands of pure sounds appear in a more or less short interval of time” – Iannis Xenakis, Creator of the granular synthesis
Dawless Jamming
Synthesizers have been around since Leon Theremin invented the famous theremin in the 1920. A couple of new synths also emerged in the market through the years like the Electronium. But it was not until 1964 when Don Buchla released the Buchla 100, which included a sequencer. The moog modular was introduced a couple years after.
In 1960s Germany, a new form of avant-garde rock known as Krautrock was introduced to the music scene. These musicians were using multiple modular synths clocked by CV and gate.
The first digital synth was the synclavier released commercially in 1977. Then in 1983, the classic DX-7 came out, which was popular amongst many musicians such as Talking Heads. The DX-7 was an FM synth with many presets for people that were not interested in designing their own sounds and it quickly became the sound of the 80s.
In 1981, the MMA launched the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI). MIDI allowed synthesizers to communicate with each other and play at the same time. This was communicated through just one simple cable, allowing the drum machines and synths to send gates to each other and play at the same tempo. This was a reflection of how many big companies like Sequential Circuits, Roland, Yamaha and Moog wanted their synthesizers to talk in the same language.
Today, we still use MIDI. We can even send MIDI through a USB cable, which provides synths and computers to communicate with each other and play synchronously.
You can have as many synths, drum machines, samplers and modular synths that all talk in the same language and make music without a computer. It works in a way that requires a mixer where you can control the gain, EQ, panning and have sends and returns. The setup also requires a brain, and it has to have a sequencer which the brain uses to send the main clock to the other synths.
I prefer this setup because it is hands-on and gives me full autonomy over every parameter. There is a raw and physical connection with the instrument and gives it a human element. When you use Ableton, you are guiding yourself with things you see on the screen. But with a synthesizer, your ears become your guide. In conclusion, I personally think that the instrument´s limitations force me to become more creative as a result, instead of falling down a loophole of having endless possibilities on a computer and evidently makes my work more unique to my own sound.
Introduction to electronics
When I was 15, I developed an interest for making beats on my computer using Ableton Live. Since I had a lack of musical theory knowledge at the time, I begun sampling sounds from the internet and manipulating them. It was amazing. I found it really interesting how a piece of audio accessible by anyone on the internet could be manipulated into something that sounds so personal and different to me. I made something that was not, my own work. With more experience and time, I grew tired of sampling sounds that were not my own. And… that is how I got into synthesizers.
From the get-go, I was drawn by the hardware. My first synthesizer was a Volca Keys. At first it started out just a hobby but then I wanted to go deeper into sound creation.
So, I found modular synthesizers, I got a Semi Modular Synth. I liked it because then I could change the existing circuit of the synth. And I begun envisioning owning and designing my own modular case. This also was the same time where I started getting interested in techno music.
Right after high school, I moved to Berlin for university to study music production. It was in Berlin that I fully experienced the real scene of techno and rave culture. I also experienced techno without the use of a computer. When I went to my first techno rave, it was ephemeral. I witnessed an artist replicating the energy of the room with sounds in real time and in that moment. There were moments in the performance which were completely improvisational. Goosebumps all over. I felt that the musician was establishing an unspoken connection with the audience.
Attending so many live electronic concerts made me realize that so many people misunderstand it. Most people think that it is just repetitive music with no essence. I always reference this quote by Bjork: “people think that electronic music has no soul, but if it doesn´t it´s because no one put it in there.”
There are moments where I have been hypnotized by the same loop for 10 minutes. And after creating this tension, the DJ drops a simple syncopated hi hat pattern, and just that simple addition to the sonic environment can cause the greatest feeling of euphoria. Having experienced this, I decided to buy a drum machine and I have been practicing live sets ever since. I am excited for the lockdown to end so that I can showcase my music and perform before in front of crowds on huge sound systems in London.