Blog Post, Number Three

So I've been noticing the posting on my blog is far more sparse than the postings on other blogs. I'm going to start listening to more music now.
I was surprised to learn that Techno and House were fairly unrelated today - I had always thought that the two sounded similar, and that they shared a common history such that Techno developed out of House. I'm going to have to start looking for more differences between the two. That said, one thing that disappoints me about techno is the sheer repetitive nature of it - for every piece of good music, there are countless derivative tracks. I suppose this is true of every style of music in existence, but it just seems more pronounced to me in Techno (and House, I suppose) due to the already minimal instrumentation and repetitive nature of these tracks. A salient example I remember from some years ago was when I listened to the other tracks on the album with "Sandstorm" on it. Everything else sounded like Sandstorm, but worse (with one exception, which just sounded like Sandstorm).
I took a look at the "electronic music guide" displayed in class one day. Somewhat biased (especially towards Trance, but that seems at least partially justified, as he dislikes the glut of derivative tracks), but informative in at least showing how many genres there are (although several sounds very similar, and many labels were probably invented by the artists in their desire to differentiate themselves). Also, the samples on the site are very useful.
The classification of songs in Pandora as possessing "disco-influenced rhythms" now makes more sense that I recognize what the defining features of a disco rhythm are and are not. In particular, the TB-303 and TR-909 heavy sounds that I thought characterized disco applied more to House, and in fact Disco used plenty of non-synthesized instruments as well. Thus, it now makes sense songs from other genres (particularly rock genres) can still be heavily influenced by Disco, and have been labeled in Pandora as such. I have been noticing the syncopated, hi-hat-on-the-upbeat Disco rhythm in a lot more songs now, even from otherwise unrelated genres. It surprises me how much of an influence the Disco beat has had on other styles of music, even though Disco music itself is rarely heard today and is often called "dead".
I'm somewhat surprised by the long delay between Kraftwerk and the widespread emergence of Techno. All the technology necessary for the Techno sound was available from their time, yet other electronic artists continued to use non-electronic instruments for a long time and gradually phase them out. When I first heard Kraftwerk, I remember being surprised by how long they had been around - I didn't know that they started the techno music, and that it started well before 1980 (around the time I thought the "Techno" genre first started developing). All the same, the desire in the video to do away with keyboards and control instruments from a lapel device didn't seem too feasible - it would look flashy, but the range of control would probably be far limited (or else look like a keyboard or a drum pad wired to a suit). Since the range of control would be limited (not too unreasonable an assumption, given the keyboard/piano is about the least space needed to assign every note to a separate key), the "live" quality of playing would be diminished. The next logical step would be to just automate the music entirely, making "live" pointless.

Radial Dance Loops

Contrary to what I expected, I did not drastically increase the tempo for any of my dance loops.

Some Thoughts on Musique Concrete and Electronic Music Notation

One thing that surprised me recently is how we had spent several lectures discussing music created by physically manipulated external sounds only. When we began discussing synthesis on Wednesday, it hadn't even occured to me that we had not touched the development of synthesis for quite some time and had dealt purely with musique concrete and its offshoots. I had previously not recognized this dichotomy between synthesis and manipulation of existing sounds before, and now it somehow seems obvious.
I feel that often during the early development of electronic music, listenability was sacrificed in the name of creativity. This was usually worthwhile and interesting (pieces that come to mind are the breathing piece, whose title I cannot recall, and Come Out by Steve Reich), but was often overdone just as often as not (for example, the piece It's Gonna Rain by Steve Reich, which did not add much from Come Out, and the helicopter orchestra piece, where I found the almost-random screams coming from the quartet unintentionally hilarious, a reaction I don't think the composer intended). Of musique concrete, the pieces I enjoyed most are I am Sitting in the Room by Alvin Lucier and Visage by Luciano Berio, the former for incorporating the medium into the piece itself and the latter for showing the diversity of sounds generated by human speech possible.
I find the attempts to notate electronic music, particularly Stockhausen's Studies, fascinating. In particular, the notation video for the Studie we saw in class was far more visual than standard music notation. While standard music notation does somewhat allow the reader to determine the form of the music to a slight degree by sight alone (through vertical pitch shifts and horizontal density changes), most readers will need to pay more attention to determine what the music actually sounds like. By contrast, the notation that we saw for the Studie was highly visual, and it appeared to be trying to let the reader be able to parse the music left to right and construct a highly accurate model in his or her head in real time. Though I don't think such notation will ever live up to that ideal, alternate forms of notation seem to be very useful in the realm of electronic music, including current ones such as piano rolls.

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