Game, Set, Bleep, Bloop...

Environmental sound has been used as long as man has been creating music. Drums mimic heartbeats, mutes on horns mimic voices, everything from the demons of hell (Saint-Saens Danse Macabre) to typewriters have been invoked or actually produced to flesh out scores and performances.

The industrial music genre looked at sound as part of our environment and turned it's eye and ear to themes such as our growing reliance on machinery and the dehumanizing effects of mechanization. With the advent of samplers and sequencers the tools for working with environmental sound not only grew but became more affordable and, therefore, more democratic. Today Children's toys do this for a few bucks and anyone with a smart phone can capture sound, manipulate it, and toss their completed work into a song or ringtone. 

And as you use that smartphone, or browse your web on your computer, tablet, or laptop  advertisers and business are scanning your searches, clicks, and choices and feeding that data into algorithms that help them predict patterns, sales, market trends and more.

So really, it was only a matter of time until a player in the data business decided to co-op the themes of man/machine and  use art to display their wares. Enter IBM, The US Open Tennis Match, and a pile of analog synths. A nice touch being many of these are classic analog modulars from a different place and time including an EMS Synthi and Arp 2600. 

James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem  teamed up with Tool designer Patrick Gunderson and his team to come up with an interactive self generating program that would take raw data from the tennis match in real time (Serves, scores, faults, player names, etc) and then synthesize that to controller data which would then be fed to Murphy's collection of instruments. A good overview is provided by FastCoCreate.Com here:  http://www.fastcocreate.com/3035202/the-sound-of-tennis-how-ibm-and-james-murphy-made-music-from-the-us-open

Interactive Data interface for Instruments

All the matches are uploaded on this site: http://www.usopen.org/en_US/sessions/ . The results sound like pings, whirs, and percussive yelps rather than mainstream beats or melodies but if you skip around and listen to different games you can hear distinct themes and sounds emerge.  For those with less  avant tastes apparently some of the music will be edited and remixed for an upcoming album based on the results. For those who want an immediate fix however, try this match between Serena Williams and Varvara Lepchenko
http://sessions.usopen.org/#!/match/WS301

Serve on!

And now I shall say nothing more...

I recently came across an interview with actor Bryan Cranston where he commented on fame vs: acting. Among other insights he said that ever since he was 25 he had been making a living -  as and actor-  without ever having to do anything else. As far as he was concerned that was the pinnacle of success. The fact that he could continue to do what he loved made all other factors (fame, money, even recognition) irrelevant.

Many  artists don't make a living doing what inspires them, yet they continue all the same. There certainly are as many factors for this as there are people. In some cases artists don't even try to make a living or get paid for their "work. In others, attempts to do so don't work out. In almost all the cases where someone continues to create- with or without external encouragement - it's because they truly get their reward from the process itself.  It didn't need to be labeled and commodified but the whole "outsider art" movement is based on people with little or no formal training who create, seemingly in a vacuum, simply because they feel inspired to.

Then there are true artists like Eliane Radigue. She has formal training but it didn't come easy. She was a pioneer that most people never heard of . She knew exactly what she heard in her "mind's ear" and set out with her tools and determination to make it a reality.

I came across this fantastic documentary of her recently and believe it not only illustrates the intricacies of using a modular synthesizer (in this case the Arp 2500) but also show how these boxes are instruments and how and artist creates with one.  I've often used the terms "aural sculpture when trying to explain how modular synthesists  carve an piece from various sounds and sequences so I found it especially refreshing to see Mademoiselle Radigue mention the building of her sound is literally done in pieces within a frame of sound "like an architect who needs a scaffolding". She also explains that she uses scores and timing to perform her pieces. So much electronic music is done free form and improvised we tend to forget one can approach it with the same discipline and skill set as a classical composer.

Radigue describes taking months or even years to create a piece painstakingly building and taking away elements until it matched the piece in her head. She mentions how she spent ten years away from electronic composition and then when she returned she took another three months throwing out every conventional sound she knew until a tiny scrap of sound came to light and then, Voila! she built on that.

This kind of dedication (some might call obsession) can be found among all cultures and generations of artists. We are fortunate to have such an eloquent example to learn from and, most of all, enjoy.

#Firstlove Arp Odyssey

The first synthesizer I ever saw was in Jr high school in the late 1970s.  It was an Arp Odyssey in music class and the teacher was Charles Terry. To say, in retrospect, he was ahead of his time doesn't do service to the man, I will forever be grateful to him for thinking it was a good idea to show a bunch of fidgeting pre-teenagers what an analog oscillator was and what sample and hold did.

He also played us some "Moog" records including one that was an all instrumental version of The Beatles. I was so damn sheltered and green I actually thought that WAS the Beatles at the time and remember him kindly telling me, no, the Beatles were something else quite entirely. I didn't care, I wanted to hear more of the "Moog" album.

(I'm going to guess and say it was probably this Dick Hyman recording but honestly I have no idea:)


After school band students could use the sound proof practice rooms to rehearse in.  I played clarinet so I used my guile to make sure I was around when the synth was out. Eventually I just asked if I could play it and, God bless his soul, he set it up and let me go to town. I didn't have the first clue what those sliders and switches did and at times there was NO sound and other times there was an INSANE NOISE but, again, it didn't matter. I was mesmerized. Never in my short life had I heard - let alone seen - anything like that before. If I knew what it meant back then I would say I was intoxicated by that magical machine.

Why am I reminiscing this week about the good old innocent days of sliders and filter sweeps? Well Korg (a Japanese company)  has announced they are reissuing the original Arp Odysessy this year and even pulled in David Friend. Friend, along with Alan R. Pearlman (the A.R.P. in ARP), was one of the founders of the company and worked on the Odyssey design.  As far as I know this is the first time a foreign modern company is reissuing a classic American synthesizer. It just sounds insane but this is the same Korg that brought back their own more obscure MS20 last year. It's kind of a dream come true for synthnerds.

The Press release is here:  http://www.korg.com/us/news/2014/0217/

I've written about analog reissues and new synths in this blog before. Hell, I bought a Novation BassStation2 last year and even used it live over some of my trusty vintage pieces due to it's memory, midi sync, and internal arpeggiator. The past month music forums and mailing lists have been flooded with Uber Hype by Roland about their new not-analog-but-the-next-thing synths that are supposedly based on the classic TR808, TR909, and TB303 line up from the 80s. For an intriguing write up of the old "Analog Vs: Digital" question readers may be interested in checking out this post by Geeky Disco which I found somewhat refreshing: http://geekydisco.tumblr.com/post/76988292224/analog-vs-digital-hardware-vs-software-revisited.

But these debates, discussions, and diatribes all pale in comparison to what the reality is here:  In a few months the first electronic instrument that started a life long sound obsession will be seen again in the wild. I don't know if Mr. Terry knew what he started and in this day an age of taking music classes out of schools it might not seem like such a big deal but, well, you're reading these words because over 35 years ago a creative teacher showed a child something new. Something different.

Something Amazing.

Enough of us remember such moments and the sounds that came with them to convince an industrial giant decades later to bring it back so new generations can experience that  magic all over again.

Bleep on kids.

 Really...  Bleep ON.