Sounds of the system: the emancipation of noise in the music of Carsten Nicolai

2008 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Collis
Keyword(s):  
Information Theory ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sound Source ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Structural Features ◽  
Acoustic Properties ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
Audio Technology ◽  
Functional Aspects

AbstractIn contrast to general perceptions of noise as undesirable audio phenomena, consideration of the objective acoustic properties of ‘noise’ and the functional aspects of noise in Information Theory are used to show how, rather than an impediment to communication, noise can aid in increasing communication. A review of noise in music of the twentieth century and beyond shows how this has become increasingly understood by composers, and that the greater use of noise as a sound source has arisen out of developments in audio technology. This article argues that the music of Carsten Nicolai (alva noto) represents a consolidation of this process. The Autorec CD and the track Impulse are cited as examples of how noise is used as part of a new practice in electronic music. By looking at the structural features of the cited musical examples, it is seen how this new practice follows neither the electroacoustic nor the commercial dance music mainstreams but manages to synthesise references to both traditions.

Electronic Inspirations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Iverson
Keyword(s):  
Information Theory ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Magnetic Tape ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Laboratory Culture ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Sine Tone ◽  
Cultural Healing

Cold War electronic music—made with sine tone and white-noise generators, filters, and magnetic tape—was the driving force behind the evolution of both electronic and acoustic music in the second half of the twentieth century. Electronic music blossomed at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR [West German Radio]) in Cologne in the 1950s, when technologies were plentiful and the need for cultural healing was great. Building an electronic studio, West Germany confronted the decimation of the “Zero Hour” and began to rebuild its cultural prowess. The studio’s greatest asset was its laboratory culture, where composers worked under a paradigm of invisible collaboration with technicians, scientists, performers, intellectuals, and the machines themselves. Composers and their invisible collaborators repurposed military machinery in studio spaces that were formerly fascist broadcasting propaganda centers. Composers of Cold War electronic music reappropriated information theory and experimental phonetics, creating aesthetic applications from military discourses. In performing such reclamations, electronic music optimistically signaled cultural growth and progress, even as it also sonified technophobic anxieties. Electronic music—a synthesis of technological, scientific, and aesthetic discourses—was the ultimate Cold War innovation, and its impacts reverberate today.

Regarding Electronic Music

Tempo ◽  
1966 ◽  
pp. 2-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aurelio de la Vega
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
The Other ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
Electronic Medium ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
Long Time

For a long time now—long when we consider the quick, changing time-scale of our days—electronic music has been with us. The public at large usually remains cold, confused or merely dazed when faced with any new aesthetic experience. Critics, musicologists and the like still seem, as usual, to be unable to predict what will happen to this peculiar, mysterious and often anathematized way of handling musical composition, while many traditionally-minded composers consider it a degrading destruction of the art of music. On the other hand, the electronic medium seems to attract a long, motley caravan of young, inexperienced and often unprepared ‘beatnik type’ self-titled composers, who believe that the world began yesterday and that you only have to push buttons and prepare IBM cards to obtain magical results. Probably not since Schoenberg proclaimed the equal value of the twelve semitones of our sacred but by now obsolete tempered scale has twentieth-century music been faced with such a bewilderment.

scholarly journals Failed Histories of Electronic Music

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 150-160
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
The Third ◽  
Electronic Sound ◽  
Experimental Laboratory ◽  
Historical Centre

This article counters the canonical histories of electronic music that traditionally begin with Cahill’s Telharmonium and find their historical centre in the activities of the Paris and Cologne studios of the mid-twentieth century. The concept of ‘failed histories’ is introduced here with three important examples. The first chronicles the career of electromusical innovator Johann Baptist Schalkenbach (1824–1910). The second example examines Britain’s earliest electronic sound performance in 1895, signalling a rupture between electromusical bombast and the detailed, quiet work of the experimental laboratory. The third episode looks at the wireless oscillation outrages of the 1920s and 1930s, where electronic tone prematurely trespassed upon musical culture. Taken together, these failed histories offer an alternative narrative of electronic music finding its voice (and losing its voice) in turn-of-the-century Britain.

’Garde ici et ’garde lá-bas

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jared Snyder
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Native American ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
The Core ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of

This chapter explores the history of the Creole accordion. Black Creoles in Louisiana have created their own, distinctive accordion music adapted from French, Native American, and African cultures. While Creole musicians in the early twentieth century were often hired for Cajun dances, where they played Cajun dance music, at their own gatherings they played a uniquely Creole repertoire that drew from the African American blues—a repertoire later developed by accordionists such Clifton Chenier and Boozoo Chavis. Zydeco, as this music eventually was labeled, has become a symbol of Louisiana Creole culture. It is argued that despite the pressure on modern zydeco bands to adapt to the demands of the music industry, the traditional accordion and rubboard remain the core instruments, and zydeco accordionists keep playing in a distinctively Creole style.

The Scale of Production in Western Economic Development: A Comparison of Official Industry Statistics in the United States, Britain, France, and Germany, 1905–1913

1996 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janice Rye Kinghorn ◽  
John Vincent Nye
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Industrial Development ◽  
Census Data ◽  
Plant Size ◽  
The United States ◽  
Structural Features ◽  
German Industry ◽  
Concentration Levels

We use census data and information on large firms to generate descriptions of structural features of Western industry around 1906. We find that although the United States conforms to existing stereotypes, most other nations do not. German industry stands out as having the smallest plants and firms and the lowest concentration levels both in the aggregate and when grouped by industrial classifications. Equally startling, French levels of plant size and concentration are comparable to those of the United States. We speculate on the importance of these results for rethinking the traditional analysis of industrial development in the early twentieth century.

Embodying Musical Space

2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 ◽  
pp. 132-139
Author(s):  
Stephanie Schroedter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Music ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
Body Movements ◽  
Dance Movement ◽  
Dance Studies ◽  
Musical Space ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
New Interactions ◽  
And Training

The epoch-making dance reforms of the early twentieth century did not only lead to new dance techniques, styles, and movement concepts, but also to an intensive search for new dialogues between music/sound and dance/movement. These new interactions were notable for their reliance on pre-existing music that was usually not intended for dance. Analogous to the choreographers' search for new movements in new (sound) spaces, composers looked for a new physicality of sounds (musical gestures), as well as for new spaces inside and outside of these sounds. Following these mid-twentieth-century developments, choreographers have increasingly chosen “new music” for their creations—compositions beyond the classical repertoire. In my paper, I will explore the choreographic possibilities of “new (non-dance) music” by comparing two examples: Bill T. Jones' solo danced to Edgar Varèses' Ionisation and a solo created by Martin Schläpfer using György Ligeti's Ramification. These examples will serve as case studies to argue for my concept of “kinesthetic listening,” which can be applied to a more general approach to discussions of the embodiment of music. This concept includes not only the perspective of the choreographer and interpreter/dancer, but also the perception of the spectator/listener. As a precondition, music/sound is understood as movement: an audible but not visible, rather an imaginable/imaginary movement that can (but need not) interact with body movements. Body movements/dance, in turn, can interact with music according to different choreographic strategies. To analyze these choreomusical dialogues, a special combination of (and training in) listening to and watching movement is required—informed by models of analysis from musicology and dance studies as well as from phenomenology and cognitive sciences.

Milan's Studio di Fonologia: Voice Politics in the City, 1955–8

2016 ◽  
Vol 141 (2) ◽  
pp. 403-443
Author(s):  
Delia Casadei
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Luciano Berio ◽  
Human Voice ◽  
Political Modernity ◽  
The City

ABSTRACTThe Studio di Fonologia Musicale of Milan, Italy's first electronic music studio, opened in 1955. Housed in the national broadcasting (RAI) studios in Milan, the studio was founded by two celebrated Italian composers: Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna. The institution is often remembered nowadays for being the first electronic music studio to focus its activity on the human voice. As I argue, this focus was not only of an aesthetic nature, but rather reflected long-standing political and intellectual conceptions of voice, speech and public space that were rooted in Italy's early days as a republic, and in mid-twentieth-century Milan as the flagship city for this newly achieved political modernity.

Schaeffer's Values, Henry's Monsters and Orchestral Noise Reduction

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-91
Author(s):  
Jeffrey DeThorne
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Noise Reduction ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Reduction Process ◽  
Electroacoustic Music ◽  
Musical Aesthetics ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
The Face ◽  
Historical Tradition

If nineteenth-century aesthetics distinguish between distinct, colourful French instrumentation and doubled, equalised German orchestration, this distinction softens when the ‘New German’ orchestration of Wagner and Strauss exploits individual instrumental colours before dissolving them into massive orchestral sonorities. Similarly, if early French electroacoustic music counteracts the meta-serialism of early twentieth-century German electronic music, Pierre Schaeffer's Traité des objets musicaux combines his early anecdotal Noise Studies with a noise-reduction process into a new, rather German aesthetic of electroacoustics. In search of musical objects through a reductive, analytical listening (entendre), Schaeffer's neutralisation of anecdotal noises into musical objects is analogous to New German orchestration's neutralisation of individual orchestral colours in order to synthesise new orchestral combinations. Although this orchestral synthesis is different from the analytical probe for new valeurs involved in entendre, the separation of the noise from its residual signification are fundamental processes within both nineteenth-century orchestrational and twentieth-century electroacoustic musical aesthetics. If our current understanding of electronic music aligns Schaeffer and Pierre Henry wholly with modernity and its putatively radical and self-conscious break with Berlioz, Brahms and historical tradition, this article suggests that an essential underlying continuity in the French-instrumentation/German-orchestration binary persists even in the face of the decline of the musical and cultural traditions that created and sustained them.

scholarly journals KREATIVITAS ARI WULU SEBAGAI DJ DALAM EDM (Electronic Dance Music)

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanolda Gema Akbar
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
Electronic Dance Music ◽  
Normal Place

ABSTRACT EDM is an electronic music that is rising in popularity in the present era. This phenomenon that led to the birth of a young DJ, and also gave birth to a big festival with the theme of EDM. EDM has a relationship with the concept of DJ which is the operator who controls the music to be presented at every show. DJ has had a rapid development, which formerly departed from broadcaster radio. Now DJs can be found everywhere since EDM has expanded out of its normal place in discotheques. Ari Wulu is a DJ who has different characters. The purpose of this research is to know the creativity of Ari Wulu which is explained based on the opinion of Rhodes using 4P consisting of Person, Press, Procces, and Product. The result of the research is the creativity of Ari Wulu as a DJ in EDM, much influenced from his experience as an electronic music composer. The music form chosen by Ari Wulu is purely electronic music that has a repetitive rhythm and uses pentatonic melodies. Kata Kunci : EDM, Ari Wulu, kreativitas, dan bentuk musik

scholarly journals Argumentative Theory of probability in the philosophy of Science

2018 ◽  
Vol 225 (2) ◽  
pp. 425-450
Author(s):  
Dr. Karim Mousa Hussein Mezban
Keyword(s):  
Information Theory ◽  
Probability Theory ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Induction Method ◽  
Contemporary Theory ◽  
Logical Probability ◽  
Classical Probability ◽  
Hans Reichenbach ◽  
Basic Model

     This research was devoted to elaborate various models of probability theory which is adopted by a number of philosophers of science in the twentieth century.  The debate between them about the validity of probability theory is shown through philosophical researches, the research is distributed to fifth sections which can be listed as follow: Part (1): The theory of classical probability (classical) has been devoted to knowledge of the basic model of probability theory. Part (2): the theory of repetitive probability adopted by the philosopher of science Hans Reichenbach to fill the lack of the model The basis of probability theory part (3): The theory of logical probability adopted by the philosopher of science Rudolf Carnab to fill the logical deficit in the theory of the repetitive probability of Rischenbach, and also included sparring between them. part(4): The theory of probability of vascular, divided into two parts: Section 4.a: Pragmatisms is adopted by philosopher Charles Pierce to enshrine pragmatism or tendency in the concept of probability. Section 4.b: Karl Popper's Probabilistic Probability Theory, in which he defended the inability of probability to justify the induction method. part(5): The theory of entropy probability, which was devoted to the contemporary theory of probability that took all previous models of probability according to information theory.

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