Image © Peter Whincop 2011.
Today I’m learning a kindred spirit to see-plus-plus: to code piano the Terry Riley way*.
Specifically, to understand the distribution and tagging of chunks in audio files; as the book says, to find the data that is not audio. There apparently can be, in RIFF-WAVs and AIFFs, any amount of junk, which therefore needn’t be junk. I wonder if the format was invented that way?—like our genome, though not designed—having the so-called garbage genes (which at least some evolutionary scientists believe are part of some imperative, not vestigial, nor accidental or superfluous). So I have taken out Richard Boulanger and Victor Lazzarini’s book (they edited it, almost 900 pages long plus a DVD of code), The Audio Programming Book from the fabulous music library at the college we teach at. I know I have a guardian angel, kind of on a rotating basis. Yes, that book in brimming, a font of wisdom; we can be composer/coders, or musicians, to learn so much. And everything, after all is said and done, says a little something about how the mind works, so reading it reaches untold depths; it also probes the history of synthesis and ways of coding, from Music V to MaxMSP or SuperCollider. Assembly language to C completing full circle back to assembly. One of the editors also edited The Csound Book. Need I say more than the fourth preliminary chapter/foreword text:–
The Csound Book is not meant to be “read“ from cover to cover. Although I have organized the chapters into thematic sections such as SOftware Synthesis, Signal Processing, Programming, Composition, MIDI, and Real-time, the material in each section does not necessarily progress from beginning to advanced. The best way to “read” The Csound Book will depend on your level of experience with synthesizers, signal processors, and computers. I assure you that there is something for both the beginner and the expert in every section, but given the breadth and scope of what is covered here, it is quite easy for beginners to lose their way. Below, I have outlined several of the paths I take with my students at....
(I plan on writing a detailed review of the two tomes: they are encyclopedic, and have forged new mechanisms for those omnipresent, prescient, and wonderful sciences, the sounds of the music technology helps us control, record, synthesize, modulate. Just waving the brain-flag for must-reads. Not that I am one for such excitement, might I add “fervently.”)
And they are both honest titles. I have a book called Writing your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day, which, a little into the first part, the author fesses up, and here I quote C. B. Delaney, in the official Amazon review section, “That’s too good to be true! Okay, author Joan Bolker admits she gave her book the title Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day to get the reader’s attention. And she admits that it’s unlikely you’ll actually finish a dissertation at that speed. As she tells her clients, however, a mere 15 minutes is much better than no writing at all when they’re stuck.”
Hence my blogs. They’re all about made up scenarios, not about fashionistas and soccer moms (although I like nice clothes, football, and my mother, this book is quite an anteater to that sucky concoction), and who knows if there is >strong<enough sanity squeezed between the bilge of glib digital seizures in my live blogsss.
And I think that UHU is a type of glue, a joke to keep chunks in certain (all?) file formats held together despite the strain caused by a bulge of data fat. Chew on that. I don’t know if 00010 01001 01110 00001 10010 01001 00101 10011 are the same.
*In C. Thanks, mnemonic cop. That make me catch up, know a lot. But is the composition really that aleatoric? Or has it been treated more as a (ongoing) fixed state than it should be?
When P taught at Harvard (as a TF = TA) he had (Peter here) a brilliant student named Richie Williams. I knew on the first minute of class, when we were selecting students—a class of 12 from 59 applicants! In Ivan Tcherepnin’s old teaching studios—that Richie should join us: he was a VES (Video, Et Setera... no, Visual and Environmental Studies department, really video/animation/film/photography/printmaking... art school stuff, in two of the nicest buildings on campus—Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, and H. H. Richardson‘s Sever Hall with two whispering arches) concentrator (major, main part of degree). He mentioned he wanted to make video feedback, and he was wearing pink socks with flowers on them.
A definite, as an aging friend (but aren’t we all?) used to say, champion (though I mean it in a positive context, and it stands up to the truth by any standards, also what that sweet angel used to say). That feedback thing: I designed a module composed of entirely of feedback performance for my beginner electronic music class. Two people, just two people (not one, not three, ...), stayed after class, six semesters apart, one on the first week, and the other on the fourth, to ask me what “feedback” is. An academic generation apart, yet... did they know each other? By any standards, the answer is no. But with these two, standards are lowered. This is no comment about knowledge, ability, or innate faculty, but on character: males are different from females when it comes to asking about feedback. Don’t ask.
Richie’s final composition in MUS 167r (Electronic Music Composition) was a version of In C... but in an electronic music class, in the “digital” second semester? His was to use all the small piano practice rooms in the basement of Paine Hall, the largest part of Harvard’s music department, each piano having a chunk of his version of In C and a pen if we wanted to alter the notes. We would then wander around, playing his piece for 10 minutes. Very much fun, amazing results. And there were parts in between our little stabs at playing piano—walking, talking, discussing the nature of the world—then back to another chunk of sound.
Digital? Pianos require fingers for his piece, he said.
