Caesura 160 // Score
on scores, plots, and other visualizations
Hello!
This is issue 160 of Caesura Letter, a weekly/monthly/occasional/yearly newsletter where I send out some thoughts and five-ish links relating to music and adjacent areas, usually with a focus on tools, technology, history, and electronic-oriented genres.
As always, I encourage you to send relevant stuff you are reading, working on, or just generally obsessed with. Or just say hi. It’s encouraging to know that somebody’s on the other end of the line.
Getty: The scores project
a sample:
Title Music for Piano No. 4 (for David Tudor) Maker Toshi Ichiyanagi (Japanese, b. 1933)
Date December 1960
In Music for Piano No. 4, all sound events must be sustained with silences interspersed. Aside from the cryptic suggestion that “no attack should be made,” the performance otherwise remains indeterminate.
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Live graphic scores in Ableton Live
Have not tried this, but it looks like an interesting hybrid of visualization and scoring.
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are.na - experimental scores
I think of are.na as a strange and kind-hearted cousin slash mortal enemy of IG. I found the Getty collection above via the search string linked here.
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Graphical GROOVE: memorial for the VAMPIRE, a visual music system
stumbled on more pioneering historical work from Laurie Siegel:
“Once upon a time there was a computer music system called GROOVE (Generating Realtime Operations On Voltage-controlled Equipment, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey) which outputted in the realm of sound, and was a wonderful and still-unique tool for the composition thereof. At that time a then-young composer who was using GROOVE for music got the harebrained idea that if she made a few minor changes here and there she could use it to compose images as well. This she did in 1974-6, and though the untimely demise of the system prevented creation of much documentation in the form of aesthetic works of its output, the system did function sufficiently to make some description worthwhile. While it is true that the mid-1960s DDP-224 computer on which GROOVE became a VAMPIRE (Video And Music Program for Interactive Realtime Exploration/Experimentation) was a massive room-sized computer, it has by now long been eclipsed in power by the constantly improving home computer. It is worth describing the concepts involved in part because there are by now many small computers capable of emulating its musical methods. Besides, I had a deep personal relationship with that computer, and wish to commemorate it. Here then follows the tale of Graphical GROOVE, aka the VAMPIRE.”
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bandcamp sweep
I’ve been digging on the bandcamp ‘vinyl’ discovery page, filtered for electronic+ambient+minimal
Some highlights from the week:
Hybrid Dub
by R.Hz
MÚSICA PARA EL FIN DE LOS CANTOS
by Iury Lech
Mana
by Kalia Vandever
Spoel
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That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading!
-Matt
PS: Pre-order Loss Function, out June 13. XMASEVE is out on streaming now. Give it a save or a share if you can!
ArtCoda: once again entering my seasonal obsession with plotter art:
I am listening to your band camp rec of hybrid dub- I like it so far! I discovered a track at a dance studio that I'm very into currently- Soul Chain by Ori Lichtik. (It really has to be loud though or it doesn't work.) Also last week I went to an Algerian music and dance performance at City Lore Gallery, which was incredible, so I've been grooving to a fair amount of Raï ever since!