The Field Guide

ASAC Presents A River of Drone

Holland Hopson — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 21:01:50 +0000

The Albany Sonic Arts Collective celebrates their one-year anniversary with a 12-hour continuous live drone performance on Saturday Nov. 22 12pm-12am!
A RIVER OF DRONE
Saturday 11/22
12 Noon til Midnight
Upstate Artists Guild
247 Lark St.
Albany NY
Free

Performers will include: Eric Hardiman, Ray Hare, Holland Hopson, Jason Cosco, Mike Bullock, and Linda Aubry Bullock. Video projections/installations will also be presented.

Dry Erase Appliance Surfaces

Holland Hopson — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 14:00:05 +0000

Looking at the white expanse of our refrigerator covered in magnets and memos and shopping lists…it came to me: Why not make appliance surfaces that work with dry erase markers?

Stockhausen Hauntings

Holland Hopson — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 15:51:16 +0000

Karlheinz Stockolantern

Here’s an amazing Halloween tribute to the late Karlheinz Stockhausen (22 August 1928 - 5 December 2007) from friend Shawn Feeney. It’s also featured on Wired.com Readers’ Best Geek-o’-Lanterns.

Banjo Salad Surgery

Holland Hopson — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 18:53:14 +0000

Banjoist Eddie Adcock underwent surgery to treat a tremor in his hand and played the banjo throughout. The video is bizarre as one would expect, but the idea seems perfectly reasonable to me: musical instrument as mind/body feedback sensor. It’s precisely why I play the banjo.

Thanks to Chris Mann for sending this story my way. Check out Mann’s online audio combinatrix at http://www.theuse.info.

Where I’ve Been Hiding Out…

Holland Hopson — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 18:39:09 +0000

I’ve been busy as Opening Coordinator for the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center. We’re two-thirds of the way through the grand opening, so I’m finally finding some time to breathe.

ECFA: Der Wald in Monk Mink Pink Punk

Holland Hopson — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 02:14:24 +0000

ECFA

Josh Ronsen’s Monk Mink Pink Punk strikes again with issue #15 including a review of ECFA’s Der Wald. Selected quote: “a living handshake”

Read more about “Der Wald” here and here

ASAC featured in Times Union

Holland Hopson — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:50:37 +0000

Danielle Furfaro of the Albany Times Union has written a profile of the Albany Sonic Arts Collective. Read it here.

Tele-Morphosis

Holland Hopson — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 01:57:24 +0000

I’ll be playing soprano sax in another telematic performance on Thursday August 28 @ 2:00pm. This one is part of the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) in Belfast, Northern Ireland. It’s an improvisation called Tele-Morphosis directed by Pauline Oliveros that features performers from Stanford, CA; Troy, NY; and Belfast, Northern Ireland all connected together in real-time. I haven’t seen any info re: streaming of the performance, but if I do I’ll certainly post a link.

One 4 One on 8/4/8

Holland Hopson — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 01:26:11 +0000

I’ve just added a new album on amiestreet.com. One 4 One is a live recording of interactive electronic music from a performance at the Impulse/Response series in Troy, NY. The title of the album is a play on the direct, one-to-one relationships between performer and computer that I was deliberately avoiding. Plus, the performance took place on January 4, 2001, hence the title. Every 390 days since (give or take) I’ve been meaning to do something with the recordings. Luckily I got around to it before 2013. (Drop me a line if you figure that one out and I’ll send you a special little something.

Check it out on amiestreet, or listen to the tracks below.

The Shape of Music: Lumpy (and I like it that way)

Holland Hopson — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 18:56:25 +0000

It may be old news now, but Seed Magazine has published a piece called The Shape of Music that describes two mathematicians’ attempt to represent the multi-dimensionality of harmony and melody using “the geometry and topology of what mathematicians call ‘quotient spaces’ or ‘orbifolds.’” The author does a commendable job of making these and other mathematical ideas approachable for the average reader (unordered sets, anyone?) , but does a pretty awful job convincing me, at least, that the result is meaningful in any musical way.

Here’s a section discussing major chords that opens up some of the problems of this type of analysis.

“These harmonies occupy the center of our musical spaces, and are thus able to take effective advantage of its non-Euclidean twists. Remarkably, in the 12-tone system of notes, these are precisely the chords that Pythagoras identified almost 2,500 years ago: the chords that sound intrinsically harmonious. Far from arbitrary or haphazard, scales and chords come close to being the unique solutions to the problem of creating two-dimensional musical coherence. Contrary to the hopes of generations of avant-garde composers, it follows that the goal of developing robust alternatives to tonality may be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.

The shapes of the space of chords we have described also reveal deep connections between a wide range of musical genres. It turns out that superficially different styles–Renaissance music, classical and Romantic music, jazz, rock, and other popular forms–all make remarkably similar use of the geometry of chord space. Traditional techniques for manipulating musical scales turn out to be closely analogous to those used to connect individual chords. And some composers have displayed a profound understanding of the higher-dimensional geometry of musical chords. In fact, one can argue that Romantic composers such as Chopin had an intuitive feel for non-Euclidean higher-dimensional spaces that exceeded the explicit understanding of their mathematical contemporaries.”

First, there’s the wholly appropriate invocation of Pythagoras; this is, after all, an article about music and mathematics. But there’s no recognition that Pythagoras’ simple whole number ratios which produce consonances (octaves, perfect fifths and fourths, etc.) no longer exist in most music heard today. Thanks to equal temperament tuning, the predominant mathematical concept which most composers “intuit” is actually the twelfth root of two–a number Pythagoras would have found abhorrent. It seems our notion of consonance has more to do with cultural norms than mathematical underpinnings. Which turns out to be a better explanation for why “Renaissance music, classical and Romantic music, jazz, rock, and other popular forms” all share a common approach to harmony and melody.

And that brings up another area where this analysis goes off the rails: it defines a huge practice in a limiting way and then uses that definition to justify why the rest of that practice isn’t valid. Paradoxically, this is a kind of logic shared by so many of those “generations of avant-garde composers” to which this article pays backhanded tribute. Schoenberg’s 12-tone technique comes to mind as a mathematically sound system for making music (pitch class sets, anyone?). But the system alone doesn’t ensure the resulting music is great; neither does it invalidate music produced by other means.

The author concludes the article with a mention that the same geometrical analysis is being applied to economics. I imagine they’re on to something here. Maybe they’ll discover that the market has an intuitive feel for non-Euclidian higher-dimensional spaces, too

Pi is such an ugly number. How could circles be so beautiful?