A 40-minute documentary on Brian Eno from 1989, directed by Duncan Ward and Gabriella Cardazzo

This project by Kouichi Okamoto is genius! 504 musical box movements which each play only a single note… imagine spatially what it must sound like in real life!!

> More on Neil Young, high(er) definition sound and mind melding with chickens (actually, I made up that last bit)

> For anyone who rides a bike in traffic, meet The Hornster – a 178-decibel problem solver!

#imaginary_DJ_meme? #oh_dear

> “The goal is not ‘perfect’ acoustics, but rather variable acoustics for different applications….” – check out this mechanical ceiling that can be tweaked in real time (thanks for tip Steve)

> Call for sound memories – must be hand written and sent via snail mail for this installation

thanks for the tip Rene

> Serious question: when was the last time you did something that scared you? I can’t remember my last time but I do now know the next time as I’ve agreed to do a local pecha kucha – my subject: Music in the key of sea. Thankfully I still have 2 months to prepare for it…

The title of this post made me laugh – it is one of the straw men arguments described in The Guardian in an article about the Five Myths of Contemporary Classical Music – its worth a read & I only use the straw man description not because I necessarily disagree with anything they say, but rather that in my case at least its a slightly pointless debate. In my youth I had no real interest in classical music – contemporary or not, and its only as I grew older & a little more open minded that I started to appreciate the different styles & approaches and slowly found individual composers that appealed to my sensibilities. You can lead a horse to water etc just as you can load as much music on someones iPod as you like, but they will only actually engage with it as and when they are ready to. And as with anything outside the mainstream, many aren’t – you only need to turn on a TV set to appreciate that an awful lot of the mainstream media is absolute mid rotting dreck….

But the flip side to that concept is that for every Bjork fan who hates classical music, little do they know that eg Arvo Part has obviously been a big influence on her as a composer. So even if the sheeple aren’t ready to investigate such high brow music (and may never be) they may well already be enjoying its influence… And of course film scores are also a means by which classical, orchestral and even otherwise avante garde music is snuck into their waking lives. In fact for anyone who does not have any direct interest in classical music, their most likely exposure to orchestral music will likely be via film scores…

So theres no conclusion, other than that I do like me a squeaky gate – whether its actually just a squeaky gate, or its a description of a piece of music that made me smile….

Also linked from that Guardian article is another Contemporary classics: what are the composers’ favourite works?

And lastly, from the comments to my previous post about slowed down bird recordings, sincere thanks to Lee for the tip of this incredibly beautiful piece of music:

Slow Motion Blackbird – realized By Chris Hughes based on Steve Reich’s Slow Motion Sound, the original score reads: “Gradually slow down a recorded sound without altering its pitch or timbre”

This is the most beautiful piece of music that I have heard all week!

Aren’t both the melody/intervals and the tonality simply gorgeous?
I didn’t make it, I recorded it & slowed it down to quarter real speed, denoised it a bit & cut some of the blank space out between phrases….

This is the original recording:

And another bit of recordings from similar location – Karamea on the West Coast of the South Island, from January 2011… first at real speed then slowed way down….

Its fascinating on a few different counts: first the complexity of the phrasing but almost weirder is the decay – the slap delay/verb tail which you just do not notice at real speed….