The Music at MIT Oral History Collection has two video interviews with Barry Vercoe of Csound fame dated August 19, 2011 and April 24, 2012. They are also available as PDF transcriptions.
Hz #19
In the latest issue of Fylkingen’s journal Hz you will find an article of mine, Electronic music archives in the collection of The Swedish Performing Arts Agency. It is a translation from the Swedish original (which contains a few more pictures) from Dokumenterat no. 45. This text supersedes my earlier post on Swedish EAM archives, although the latter has some additional info.
Thanks to Sachiko Hayashi, the editor of Hz, who also contributes an article to this issue, A brief historical overview of Fylkingen’s journals. Thanks also to Isabel Thomson, who checked the translation.
The other articles in Hz #19 are:
- Martyn Hudson: What, am i hearing light? Listening through Jean-Luc Nancy
- Florian Cramer: What is ‘post-digital’?
- Michael Betancourt: Critical glitches and glitch art
- Edward Picot: Mixing it: 12 remixes by Michael Szpakowski
- Laura Plana Gracia: Landscapes {soundscapes: Dronestrikes on Saturn
- Ben Grosser: How the technological design of Facebook homogenizes identity and limits personal representation
- Aymeric Mansoux: My lawyer is an artist: Free culture licenses as art manifesto
- Robert Spahr: Cruft: art from digital leftovers
- Alan Sondheim: Outline for a talk on blank that can’t be given
- Kevin Logan: Rolling stones gets me no satisfaction
- Gx Jupitter-Larsen: Ordinarily nowhere
Journals
Electronic Music Review, published in 1967-1968 and edited by Reynold Weidenaar and Robert Moog, is freely available at UbuWeb. The entire issue 2-3 consists of Hugh Davies’ Repertoire International des Musiques Electroacoustiques/International Electronic Music Catalog.
Brazilian electroacoustic music journal Linda has released its first bilingual edition. Amongst other articles, it contains an interview with Swedish composers Jens Hedman and Eva Sidén.
The Samson Box and other stuff
The latest issue of Computer Music Journal is devoted to CCRMA’s Samson Box real-time digital synthesizer, which was used in over 100 works from the late 1970s and early 1980s. One of them was the soundtrack to NASA’s Mars in 3D film, which has been restored and released on Blu-ray recently. The score was composed by Michael McNabb and Bill Schottstaedt. There’s an article on the restoration process, and the emulator used to recreate the Samson Box for the project is on GitHub. The film is available on Youtube.
I’ve written an article in Swedish on the archives related to EAM available at Statens musikverk (Music Development and Heritage Sweden). One can find it in Dokumenterat, no. 45. (There’s also an older related blog post in English.)
Swedish composer Ragnar Grippe talks about his music from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and the 2010s.
Another Sten Hanson obituary by Kristoffer Westin (in Swedish).
The proceedings of SMC2013 (The Sound and Music Computing Conference, Stockholm 2013).
A 380-page report from the EU project COST (Cooperation of Science and Technical Research) Action TD0804 Soundscape of European Cities and Landscapes. The COST Soundscape project involves cultural, social and psychological as well as scientific aspects. In the report’s abstract, the researchers conclude:
Reducing sound level, the focus of EU environmental noise policy, does not necessarily lead to improved quality of life in urban/rural areas, and a new multidisciplinary approach is essential. Soundscape research represents this paradigm shift as it involves not only physical measurements but also the cooperation of human/social sciences (e.g. psychology, sociology, architecture, anthropology, medicine), to account for the diversity of soundscapes across countries and cultures; and it considers environmental sounds as a ‘resource’ rather than a ‘waste’.
Musicainformatica, a computer music blog by Alex Di Nunzio.
The Big MAT Book by Steve Travis Pope, courseware for multimedia engineering and audio software and hardware.
Some links
R.I.P. Sten Hanson (1946-2013), composer, performance artist and poet. Ulf Stenberg remembers Sten in Tidningen Kulturen (Swedish only).
Flossmanuals has online manuals for Ardour, Audacity, Chuck, Csound, Fluxus, and Pure Data.
Musica/Tecnologia’s latest issue is dedicated to the phase vocoder.
An International Archive of Sound Art.
The Montréal Sound Map.
Sound and wave animations from Music Science at UNSW.
The Musical Acoustics Research Library (MARL) contains digitised archive documents in musical acoustics. There are early papers and correspondence by James Beauchamp, Max Mathews, and Jean-Claude Risset, e.g. some documents pertaining to Rissets research on trumpet tones.
Various stuff
The new issue of Fylkingen’s Hz journal (#18) contains several articles on sound art and electroacoustic music.
Uncollectable – April 2013 issue of ArteEeast journal covers Middle Eastern sound art.
Data Garden “is a journal, record label and events producer encouraging the discovery of electronic music through the windows of history, science and community.”
Kunstradio – a Zürich sound art radio station.
Le Perce-oreilles – French sound art archive and web portal.
MIR
George Tzanetakis has uploaded a 30 minute presentation with an overview of music information retrieval (MIR). It contains a good introduction to Fourier analysis and STFT. (On the same site, there is also a 18 minute tutorial by Meinard Mueller on chroma features.)
Tzanetakis’ presentation spawned a small discussion on the MUSIC-IR list about the origins of the term MIR. The earliest use seems to have been at Princeton in the 1960s for a software package used in research on Josquin by Michael Kassler et al. (See Kassler, 1966, “Toward musical information retrieval”, Perspectives of new music, vol. 4 (1966), no. 2, p. 59-67).
Before ISMIR started in 2000, some of the work on MIR was published in Computer music journal and the International Computer Music Conference proceedings (a search for retrieval results in about 370 matching papers from 1975 onward).
Some online journals etc.
The Experimental Music Yearbook “is a repository for composers, performers, and the public to glean the methods and styles of various artists working in the experimental music tradition”.
Surround journal.
Ars Acustica – Audio Art – Klangkunst. Issue 4 (October 2012) of Act. Zeitschrift für Musik & Performance.
Sound art in Kunstjournalen B-post
The latest issue of Kunstjournalen B-post, a Norwegian magazine on contemporary art, is devoted to sound and sound art. Most of the texts are available both in scandinavian languages and english.
The contributors are Anne Marthe Dyvi, Espen Sommer Eide, Mahlet Ogbe Habte, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Brandon LaBelle, Jørgen Larsson, Sissel Lillebostad, Trond Lossius, Nicholas Møllerhaug, Anne Hilde Neset, María Andueza Olmedo, Finnbogi Petursson, Carsten Seiffarth, Karen Skog, Roar Sletteland, Maia Urstad and Jana Winderen.
eOREMA journal
“The eOREMA journal is a peer-reviewed scholarly arm of the OREMA (Online Repository for Electroacoustic Music Analysis) project (www.orema.dmu.ac.uk) that focuses on the analysis of electroacoustic music. The eOREMA journal will be an open access publication platform that accepts both articles that discuss analytical methodologies and analyses of electroacoustic music compositions in the broadest sense (which can range from acousmatic music to installations and electronica). We encourage both new and established researchers to contribute.”