“rar-e-fac-tion : A decrease in density and pressure in a medium, such as air, caused by the passage of a sound wave.”
it’s rarefaction time! doesn’t have quite the same ring as “it’s Miller time ™”, now does it? nevertheless, the sound wave we’ve been working on furiously for three weeks has passed, and the time has come to decrease pressure. this typically involves at least one business day of nonstop tomfoolery – in this case the production of a Downright Silly Audio Remix of what we’ve just finished - followed by a night of heavy drinking and falling down.
then it’s time to sober up, wipe the giggle-tears away, and start up the next sound wave. ah, the physics of sound. :)
for the past 15 years i’ve been lugging this here “instruments” folder from machine to machine. it is exactly what it sounds like – the repository for all the digital instruments i’ve accumulated over the years. it had grown unchecked, without any kind of housecleaning, until today when i decided to see if i could do away with some of the seldom-used or redundant things in there.
hoo boy.
now that i’ve got a corporate sugardaddy buying my music libraries for me – and lots of them – i probably could’ve just nuked the whole thing from orbit, just to be sure. but instead i trolled through all of it, thinking surely some of it must still be useful.
hoo boy.
so many formats from yesteryear (sample cell, akai, gigasampler), so many half-finished home-rolled instruments lying around as raw .wav files (glitchcore drumkits, turntable scratches), so many sounds found online and painstakingly downloaded, categorized, and standing at the ready…and virtually none of it worthy of preservation. how many “hi quality acoustic piano” instruments with a total sample size of 2 MB do i need? precisely zero, methinks.
why didn’t i stop collecting drumkits after the first 1,000 or so? god only knows. i’ve been some kind of instrument hoarder, never jettisoning anything for fear that someday, one of these days, any day now, i’ll finally need that electric banjo that i got as a gift-with-software-purchase back in 1995 (even though the damn thing is a “SoundFont” ™ soundbank).
my computer is actually lighter now. i feel it.
i just finished listening to John Carmack talk tech for 75 minutes. here are the facts:
- the man is dizzyingly smart.
- i understood exactly three minutes of his talk.
- he didn’t mention audio.
- none of the above comes as a surprise.
ah how far we’ve come. check it out – the cutting edge of computer music, circa 1992. what started as just another internet funny turned into a bit of a misty-eyed walk down memory lane, as footage of NeXT machines surfaced around the 13-minute mark…and then that kooky conductor / controller thing demo’d by Max Mathews.
the computer music lab where i did my undergraduate & graduate work was stocked with NeXT rigs, and included that controller amongst its music-making toys. while i never had much use for the latter, i sure used the shit out of the former. that 25 MHz supercomputer was my first digital audio workstation. despite having access to a bunch of macintosh machines with digital performer and other audio software, i gravitated to the NeXT and it’s command-line / script-based approach to music making and sound manipulation. now that i think about it, that choice right there determined a *lot* about the electronic musician i would be over the ensuing 17 years.
what i loved about the NeXT was the ability to escape the confines of traditional music making and really do anything i wanted with sound. if i could think it, i could probably do it. the downside was the “ease of use” issue (nope), and the “preparation for making music in a non-academic setting a.k.a. the Real World” thing (double-nope).
nevertheless, i even bought one of the darn things for myself. it was my first DAW for a year or so until i finally got a PC and was reintroduced to things i had sidestepped in school, like MIDI, commercial audio software, and how normal people use computers to make music. this was (not coincidentally) around the time i started working in a commercial environment, making music & sound effects for online games. needless to say, i could no longer count on obscure unix-based scripting languages as my primary compositional tool.
p.s. i just ordered this. yes, i’m that guy.
p.p.s. if nothing else, jump to 24:30 in that video for instant hilarity, if you think early 90′s business execs in pink dress shirts scat singing is funny. i know i do.
today’s challenge: to sit down at the piano and just go with what sounds good…and not worry about the validity or cleverness of the theory behind it.
chord progressions & voicings that defy neat categorization? so what. voice leading & parallel motions that make me cringe? suck it up. mapped out key centers & structural logic? eat me. don’t think, just play. and if you like it, keep it.
that’s a lot harder for me than it should be, and i wish it weren’t. after all the book learnin’ i’ve had, it’s hard to just turn it off. but theory is supposed to be a means of explaining *why* something is bitchin’, not step-by-step instructions for *how* to make something bitchin’, right? i can sit here all day reverse engineering Bach or The Beatles, and it will help me understand their particular genius. but they didn’t write the music with all that analytical mumbo-jumbo in mind. it was, “if THIS follows THAT, then THAT follows THIS…well that sounds bitchin’!”
there’s a scene in hearts of darkness where Francis Ford Coppola is coaching a famously whacked-out Dennis Hopper, and Coppola says “if you *know* your lines, then you can forget ‘em”. when Hopper protests that this is what he’s trying to do, Coppola calls bullshit since Hopper hasn’t read his lines in the first place. :)
i’m not sure what that’s got to do with anything, except that mantra neatly sums it up: learn your lines, then forget ‘em. learn music theory, then “forget” it. easier said than done.
as i was prepping to do a “humanization pass” on a bunch of midi orchestra stuff today (ya know, meticulously tweak all that lovely rigid data in a valiant/vain attempt to make it sound like people playing), my thoughts turned to a comment i read in some composers forum back in the 90′s.
there was this guy – a bit of a blowhard, posted way too often, puffed his chest out like some kind of pro yet clearly wasn’t…you know the type – and one day he made a rather memorable claim. the discussion had turned to techniques for humanizing your midi performances, making them more lifelike. he boasted that with enough time, he could tweak his shit so expertly that the results would be *indistinguishable* from the real thing. as in, “i bet you can’t tell the difference between Bernstein conducting Beethoven’s 9th and this here Baytoven_9.mid file i made here”.
that’d be a pretty tall order in 2009. that’d be impossible in 1999. so this guy was either a) outright bullshitting, b) had never actually heard a live orchestra before, c) had heard a live orchestra before, but had some kind of hearing (or brain) damage, or d) all of the above.
everytime i nudge a midi velocity this way or that, i think of that guy. and i remind myself that whatever it is i’m working on…it’s just a demo. it will always be just a demo, until it gets under the fingers of some real players.
p.s. go on. watch the whole thing. the final movement of Beethoven’s 9th, performed in Berlin, in celebration of the reunification of Germany back in 1989. yeah, the audio is a little off, and yeah half the youtube comments are an argument for forced sterilization, but i can ignore all that. maybe it’s because i’m a lapsed kraut, or maybe because that’s just such a fucking great piece of music, but by the end of that sucker my spine is thoroughly chilled and my eyes are glistening.
on today’s to-do list: needledick some narration (tweak the timing, de-click, transparently compress), record some incidental voice (quiet on the set, please…), and do a final music/sfx/voiceover mix for this video we’ve been working on. needs to be done by tomorrow. right. let’s go.
hey, that’s weird…how can all these dudes in hardhats be right outside my windows when my windows are 30 feet off the ground? oh right, they’re on scaffolding. wait…wha…?
JACKHAMMER-JACKHAMMER-DRILL-DRILL-talk-talk-laugh-JACKHAMMER-HAMMER-HAMMER-SCRAPE-talk-laugh-laugh-DRILL-DRILL-DRILL-JACKHAMMER-DRILLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL…
oh god.
…LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL…
oh god. i guess the narration is good enough as-is. i guess we’ll record the voice in another room, at another time. and i guess we’ll do the final mix tomorrow morning, hours before we have to turn the thing over. revised to-do list: find advil, go home early.
another in my continuing series of useless epiphanies: scoring video is a bit like the crisis of tonality in the latter 19th / early 20th century. the hell you say! well, that’s what it reminds *me* of.
so, you know, like, when diatonicism got stretched to the breaking point and did in fact break for some people, folks started looking around for things other than centuries-established tonal relationships to serve as a framework for their music. and one of those solutions – one that i thought was sometimes a cop out – was to suspend music from extramusical structures: appropriate some particular text, painting, sculpture, etc. and use that to guide your hand when making compositional choices. (the end game for this is stuff like john cage deciding that the knots in a piece of plywood were a sufficient score for an entire improvised “composition”. let’s see me try and collect a paycheck doing *that*.)
so…must i have awareness of that extramusical element to understand the music at hand? was said element just a compositional crutch? is there such a thing as truly “pure” music? DOES ANYBODY REMEMBER LAUGHTER?
good lord i digress. what the hell was i…video. scoring video. so, i’m writing this piece that i would’ve never conjured out of thin air, without this video to shape its every musical feint and jab. one could argue that it wouldn’t even make sense without the video it accompanies. in place of organic internal logic, we’ve got…some kind of crazy exoskeleton from which strange musical bedfellows are suspended. so the whole endeavor ends up being more of a problem-solving exercise than anything else. a *fun* exercise, but a challenge nonetheless.
i wonder if the take-away here might be an expanded sense of what constitutes an acceptable juxtaposition, and not just the satisfaction of having solved yet another rubik’s cube. i bet if i do enough of these things naked city will start to sound pretty normal…
recipe for a succesful all-nighter: every hour = 50 minutes of work + 10 minutes of mandatory adultswim.com break. or substitue the following, if desired.
nothing like a fire drill to turn a bunch of co-workers into an actual team. not a “team” in the offsite-corporate-retreat-let’s-all-catch-Ted-as-he-falls-backwards-into-our-arms sense. i mean in the sense of everybody hunkering down and completely busting ass cuz you know the guy on either side of you is doing the same, and everything the guy on the left is doing directly affects your work, which in turn affects everything the guy on the right is doing. and it’s going to take all of you sustaining that interleaved intensity to pull it off. and you’re loving every caffeine-fueled minute of it.
like last week. a handful of us are given one of those “the company is counting on you / you’ve got until next week” kind of tasks. (right around the same time my rig exploded. did i mention my rig exploded? i think i did.) so at the beginning of the week we’re having formal meetings, offering our thoughts in carefully measured speech, refering to one another by our christian names…ya know, generally acting Professional.
by the end of the week we’re in each others’ offices more than our own, bringing each other mcdonald’s in the middle of the night, freely calling bullshit on things we disagree with, refering to each other as “fuckstick” with a grin…ya know, generally acting like a well-oiled machine firing on all cylinders. the camaraderie of the trenches, i suppose. a common cause of Great Importance + sleep deprivation + gallows humour = new BFFLs.
i have to say – human resources guidelines be damned – nothing cements a team quite like the freedom to address a co-worker as “fuckstick” no matter where they are on the org chart and payscale in relation to you. ’tis a many-splendored thing.
