music
The job of art is to chase ugliness away
I would want to be in that darkness
A haunting, syncopated music
Silence
A Book by John CageOur Comrade The Electron
A Talk by Maciej CegłowskiSonic architecture
An Article by Daisy AliotoBrian Eno is well-represented in iOS. His other apps like Bloom, Trope and Air invite listeners to touch the screen to make their own composition. Reflection ($30.99) is different, there is no interaction for the listener. The interface has three buttons: a pause button, a sleep timer, and AirPlay. Reflection produces endless permutations of Eno’s 2017 album, an hour and five minute long title track.
“Just calling it an app is akin to saying Falling Water is just a building,” writes one app store reviewer. “I would not call this an app,” agrees another, “Between the music and visuals it’s more like sonic architecture.” The visuals consist of slowly morphing rectangles that only seem to change in the split second you look away from the screen.
Don’t Play It Like the Flute
An Article by Matthias OttDon’t play it like the flute. Play it as if it was the wind whistling through the desert dunes.
No matter what you love to create, there is something to be learned from the way Hans Zimmer approached the Dune score. We are all striving to create work that is novel, innovative, memorable, and inspiring. To get there, however, we tend to focus on getting things right, on avoiding mistakes, on “being professional”. Yes, it is important to have the commitment, dedication, and attention to detail of a professional. But being right? That will only take you so far. What is much more important is to approach the problem in front of you with curiosity and an open mind. With an urge to explore what can be found beyond the ordinary, beyond the right way of doing things. If you want to create something that nobody has come up with yet, it is important that you try out all the crazy ideas others are afraid to try, that you build prototypes, improvise, and freely play with the materials and the technologies you have at hand.
Music and Imagination
A Book by Aaron CoplandThe Gifted Listener: Composer Aaron Copland on Honing Your Talent for Listening to Music
An Article by Maria PopovaThe poetry of music, Copland intimates, is composed both by the musician, in the creation of music and its interpretation in performance, and by the listener, in the act of listening that is itself the work of reflective interpretation. This makes listening as much a creative act as composition and performance — not a passive receptivity to the object that is music, but an active practice that confers upon the object its meaning: an art to be mastered, a talent to be honed.
Enjoying the garden together
A Quote by Brian EnoAnd essentially the idea there is that one is making a kind of music in the way that one might make a garden. One is carefully constructing seeds, or finding seeds, carefully planting them and then letting them have their life.
What this means, really, is a rethinking of one’s own position as a creator. You stop thinking of yourself as me, the controller, you the audience, and you start thinking of all of us as the audience, all of us as people enjoying the garden together. Gardener included.
tree.fm
A WebsiteTune Into Forests From Around The World. Escape, Relax & Preserve.
An audio professional's take on vinyl
An ArticleThe analog-digital debate in audio is a longstanding one, and while it is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon, I thought I might be able to offer some background as a longtime audio professional and musician. Recordings are a beautiful mix of technical and aesthetic concerns, and this post will attempt to tease out how to navigate these two framings of music recording, especially with regard to the often-oversimplified distinction between analog and digital recordings.
In Conversation With...
A Dialogue by Trent ReznorThe Microsoft Sound
A Quote by Brian EnoThe thing from the agency said, "We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional," this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said "and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long."
I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It's like making a tiny little jewel.
In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I'd finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.
last.fm
A Profile by Nick TrombleyI've been tracking my listening habits with last.fm since I was in high school. As I'm about to turn 30, it's nice to be able to look back on almost my entire adult life – to see how I've changed and how my tastes have changed with me.
Interaction of Color
The deception of color
In order to use color effectively it is necessary to recognize
that color deceives continually.What counts here – first and last – is not so-called knowledge
of so-called facts, but vision – seeing.Practice before theory
Instead of mechanically applying or merely implying laws and rules
of color harmony, distinct color effects are produced
– through recognition of the interaction of color –
by making, for instance,
2 very different colors look alike, or nearly alike.The aim of such study is to develop – through experience
– by trial and error – an eye for color.
This means, specifically, seeing color action
as well as feeling color relatedness.As a general training it means development of observation and articulation.
This book, therefore, does not follow an academic conception
of “theory and practice.”
It reverses this order and places practice before theory,
which, after all, is the conclusion of practice.50 reds
If one says “Red” (the name of a color)
and there are 50 people listening,
it can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds.
And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different.Not the what but the how
Our concern is the interaction of color; that is, seeing
what happens between colors.We are able to hear a single tone.
But we almost never (that is, without special devices) see a single color
unconnected and unrelated to other colors.
Colors present themselves in continuous flux, constantly related to
changing neighbors and changing conditions.As a consequence, this proves for the reading of color
what Kandinsky often demanded for the reading of art:
what counts is not the what but the how.Scotopic seeing
The sensitivity
and consequently the registration of the retina of an eye is different
from the sensitivity and registration of a photographic film.Normally, black-and-white photography registers all lights lighter
and all darks darker than the more adjustable eye perceives them.
The eye also distinguishes better the so-called middle grays,
which in photography are often flattened if not lost.This shows what a higher key in light can lose in photography.
The greatest advantage the eye has over photography
is its scotopic seeing in addition to its photopic seeing.
The former means, briefly, the retinal adjustment to lower light conditions.Disliked colors
We try to recognize our preferences and our aversions –
what colors dominate in our work; what colors, on the other hand,
are rejected, disliked, or of no appeal. Usually a special effort
in using disliked colors ends with our falling in love with them.Color intervals
The tune of “Good morning to you” consists of 4 tones. It can be sung
in a high soprano, a low basso, and in all in-between voices, as well as
on many levels and in many keys. It can be played on innumerable instruments.In all possible ways of performance, this melody will keep its character
and it will be recognized instantly.Why? The intervals of the 4 tones, that is, their acoustical
constellation (again comparable with a topographical relationship),
remains the same.Although it is not common practice, one can also speak of intervals
between colors.
Colors and hues are defined, as are tones in music, by wavelength.Any color (shade or tint) always has 2 decisive characteristics:
color intensity (brightness) and light intensity (lightness).
Therefore, color intervals also have this double-sidedness, this duality.Time and space
Tones appear placed and directed predominantly in time from before to now to later.
Their juxtaposition in a musical composition is perceived
within a prescribed sequence only.
Horizontally, the tones follow each other,
perhaps not in a straight line, but of necessity in a prescribed order
and only in 1 direction – forward.
Tones heard earlier fade, and those farther back disappear, vanish.
We do not hear them backward.Colors appear connected predominantly in space. Therefore,
as constellations they can be seen in any direction and
at any speed. And as they remain, we can return to them repeatedly
and in many ways.
This remaining and not remaining, or vanishing and not vanishing,
shows only 1 essential difference between the fields of tone
and color.The accuracy of perception in one field is matched
by the durability of retention in the other, demonstrating
a curious reversal in visual and auditory memory.A cook with taste
Observe the interior and exterior, the furniture and textile decoration
following such color schemes, as well as commercialized color “suggestions”
for innumerable do-it-yourselves.Our conclusion: we may forget for a while those rules of thumb
of complementaries, whether complete or “split”, and of triads and
tetrads as well.
They are worn out.Second, no mechanical color system is flexible enough
to precalculate the manifold changing factors, as named before,
in a single prescribed recipe.Good painting, good coloring, is comparable to good cooking.
Even a good cooking recipe demands tasting and repeated tasting
while it is being followed.
And the best tasting still depends on a cook with taste.Flexible imagination
By giving up preference for harmony,
we accept dissonance to be as desirable as consonance.Besides a balance through color harmony, which is comparable
to symmetry, there is equilibrium possible between
color tensions, related to a more dynamic asymmetry.Again: knowledge and its application is not our aim;
instead, it is flexible imagination, discovery, invention – taste.Does it have color?
Whether something “has color” or not is as hard to define verbally as are
such questions as “what is music” or “what is musical."The Weber-Fechner law
Exponential increases in physical stimuli produce linear perceptual increases.
Thinking in situations
Naturally, practice is not preceded but followed by theory.
Such study promotes a more lasting teaching and learning
through experience. Its aim is development of creativeness
realized in discovery and invention – the criteria of creativity,
or flexibility, being imagination and fantasy. Altogether
it promotes “thinking in situations,” a new educational concept
unfortunately little known and less cultivated, so far.Not of method but of heart
In the end, teaching is a matter not of method but of heart.
The teacher actually is right and always will gain confidence
when he admits that he does not know, that he cannot decide, and,
as it often is with color, that he is unable to make a choice
or to give advice.Besides, good teaching is more a giving of right questions
than a giving of right answers.Results of a search
This book presents results of a search, not of what is academically called research.
In addition to the dedication of this book, I should like to state that my students in color have taught me more color than have books about color.
Simple forms
The concept that “the simpler the form of a letter the simpler its reading” was an obsession of beginning constructivism. It became something like a dogma, and is still followed by “modernistic” typographers.
This notion has proved to be wrong, because in reading we do not read letters but words, words as a whole, as a “word picture.” Ophthalmology has disclosed that the more the letters are differentiated from each other, the easier is the reading.
Without going into comparisons and the details, it should be realized that words consisting of only capital letters present the most difficult reading—because of their equal height, equal volume, and, with most, their equal width. When comparing serif letters with sans-serif, the latter provide an uneasy reading. The fashionable preference for sans-serif in text shows neither historical nor practical competence.