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ARTS 2965 Game Sound & Musical Play (extended course description for non-catalog topics class)
Hi All, here is the extended course description for the topics course ARTS 2963 Game Sound & Musical Play that is running in Spring 2021. Interest of Arts, GSAS, Media, STS majors/minors and other fields looking for an elective. Also CI. What makes play musical and music playful? How does game sound and music contribute to gameworld creation, gameplay, and virtual performance? Ludomusicology—the relation of music to play—addresses these questions and challenges us to take play seriously. We will study the role of sound and music in video games, interactive media, and beyond to put different examples of musical game studies in dialogue with each other. This course considers the diverse relationships among music, play, media, and performance, including game sound, music-stylistic features of game consoles and systems, children’s games, remixing and sampling across interactive media, and the role musical games play in cultural identity and more. How do the meanings and stakes of performances, choreographies, bodies, and screens play out via sounds and other sensations? How does the music in video games contribute to gameworld development, gameplay, and virtual performance? How is music used and represented in recreational and competitive sport and athletic competition (e.g., SuperBowl halftime shows, walkup music, and the stadium soundscape)? How can we value humor, puzzles, and fun in music and examine how these elements function? The course will consider the diverse relationships among music, play, and performance-from the games African American girls play--handclapping songs, cheers, and double-dutch jump rope--that reflect and inspire the principles of black popular music-making to musical greeting cards, toys and collectables, from the use of recycled pre-existing classical music (Tetris) and environmental sound (Dear Esther and other walking simulators/navigable narratives), genres (the famous opera scene in Final Fantasy VI), in-game composition (Mario Paint) and aleatoric operations (Proteus) in video games to John Cage's WATERWALK on the popular US television game show I'VE GOT A SECRET and his use of chance operations, from virtual performance in Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Just Dance, and Dance Central, or curating the radio soundscape in Grand Theft Auto to children's music games, television programming (Sesame Street, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood). By discussing music as play across diverse case studies from musicology, ethnomusicology, popular music, and science and technology studies, we will trace the lineage of musical play through improvisation, composition, performance, embodied listening, and recreation.
(Part 2) I'm listening to every Autechre album in chronological order. Here is my listener's guide.
Hello, if you liked this last time thank you. hope you find this enjoyable! i love being accompanied on this journey :) Intro Whereas this was initially an impulsive thing, it is now a long process. Post-Confield Autechre is something of a monolith, much like outer space is once you get past the nearest, closest-together planets. Narratives of artistic progression tend to break down; we're only left with the sounds. Autechre's image is one of hermitism, inscrutability, and devotion to the abstraction of their artistic values. No press, weak titles, and no meta-textuality. That these releases increasingly occur in a sort of cultural vacuum is quite interesting, and in my opinion has positive and negative implications. It means that Autechre's music is thrillingly immersive - there truly is nothing on the planet that sounds like this. As a listener, the experience is of tapping into a world that is progressive, adaptive, and unseen, but also manic and isolating. Autechre's music is thrillingly unseen, but it is also scarily unmanned. Or, to put it another way: do I love Autechre's music for what it is? Yes. Does it make me feel like I'm human, like I'm not alone, like I'm deserving of love? Hardly at all. Because of this, I do not blame anyone who hopped off the train earlier. I genuinely don't. I don't blame anyone who listens to Autechre religiously either (I mean, look at me, look at what I'm doing and what it says about me), but I would issue a word of warning to those who are feeling lost, alone, or hopeless: listen to Leonard Cohen instead. Confield 2001 In many ways, this is the first album of a new millennium. Specifically, the interactivity here suggests the presence of some form of life that... isn't... intentional. Factually, of course that's not true - we all know that Sean Booth and Rob Brown used Max/MSP to program many of the sounds on the album. But there's enough of the unknown there to plant a seed of doubt in your mind, right? Walking around with this in my ears, I am so disconnected from what went into making this music that I tend to forget it was made at all, but instead I begin to listen to it as a spontaneously created chain of events, a piece of music with its own primitive sense of awareness. Naturally, the opening suite of songs is where this feeling is especially unruly. "VI Scose Poise" is an introduction to the uncanny valley that this album takes as its home; you could theoretically recreate the complexities of the soft, clattering metal rhythms by hand, but you know that this wasn't by hand, that it was the result of a series of increasingly complicated rules fed into a computer. Interesting side note, though: Confield, while still a formidably barbarous follow-up to LP5, still has an emotional presence, one that I would describe as despairing. "Cfern", for example, starts off super buttoned-up, with triplets of drums accompanying a chromatically descending chord progression... however, this chord progression slowly starts to reveal itself as one witness to a song that is otherwise demented, slowly losing its grasp on any sense of order or consistency. Dementia, the song, basically. It's brutal. I love the end too, where the beat basically bottoms out and finds a groove, something Autechre love to work into their songs. It works as the perfect segue into... "Pen Expers", an epic elegy for a world on its judgement day, and clearly the intended peak of this opening salvo. The loud, slapping snare drums provide the mise en scene for me - they sound so catastrophic, like the howl of ugly, nasty winds. There's a feeling of imminent doom - not imminent like "any time now," imminent like the all-consuming fear that comes over you when you stare your death in the face. If "Cfern" was dementia, then this is war. Or maybe just hell, because during the runtime of "Pen Expers", there is no respite, not til the end. Me listening to this song: picture The mostly pitchless mutant-electro track "Sim Gishel" makes for a welcome respite from the recent drama. "Parhelic Triangle" is a tough nut to crack, with a low-impact drum/bass loop set to churn while some cavernous chimes echo out a mysterious melody. "Bine" is really cool - clearly not much to it conceptually, which allows you to rid yourself of pretense early and sink face-first into the chaos. Indeed, after the early onslaught of "Cfern" and "Pen Expers", any catharsis Confield might be trying to give me seems to have been given, and I'm less interested in decoding meaning. Instead, I just enjoy the woozy bouncing of "Eidetic Casein" (another song with a descending chord progression, very tragedic), and the subterranean "Uviol", which has lots of watery bubbly sounds and a purple, nocturnal, after-hours sort of vibe. This leads into the album's final word, "Lentic Catachresis", which indecisively keeps switching tempos while doctored voice recordings and doomy synths set a dour tone. The indecision settles into stasis, as the song's parts are all slowly crumpled and swallowed by this one incessant processing tone. And that's it. People say Confield is a difficult album, and it is. However, I think I was surprised by why it was difficult - it's not just the increasingly fractious algorithmic soundscapes, but ALSO the subtextual themes of decay and oblivion. (At least, that's my take on it. For the sake of my own love for the album, I decided to run with it and take liberties. Please, tell me what your unique viewpoints are!) Autechre's Book of Revelations. Also, yes, a giant step forward in a technical sense. The songs sometimes seem to be making themselves... a very unusual feeling indeed, one which I'm sure is the reason why a lot of us are fans. In a world where any song in any style is a few controlled hand movements away, this foreign feeling is sorely missed. It's nice to feel it again. Draft 7.30 2003 Totally wild and transportative, as you might expect. Both easier and harder to like than Confield, because it's relatively simple in comparison and doesn't seem to be too convicted about anything in particular. I'll be honest, I'm not too keen on this one - it seems like a lateral move from Confield, although the sonics are innovative as always. Opener "Xylin Room" made a good impression on me with that massive resounding bass drum every eight beats - really cool touch. The spastic lead melody is really good too. That hyper-compressed percussion in "6IE.CR" sounds like fried chicken. Mmm. "V-PROC" is cool. But the only bit on Draft 7.30 that felt adequately different - above and beyond - from other Autechre music was "Surripere", the brilliant, proggy centerpiece. More than anything, I'm intrigued by the patience of this song, the way it slowly drifts from one idea to the next. The long-resonating synthetic chords imbue the whole thing with a certain ambient color if you look at it the right way. It's the same type of alien Zen that pervades the longform worlds of NTS. And yeah, the way the song unfolds - the way the drums are left squirming, abandoned, in a void of glossy black ambience - is disquieting and truly beautiful. Untilted 2005 Austere - minimal. Carries glimpses of the outside world, for once. There were moments while listening to this record where my head thought things like "dub techno" and "Berlin." Sometimes I even think about Aphex Twin, whose albums always give off a vibe of being so intricately, caringly constructed. That same human touch is sometimes felt while listening to Untilted. From what I can tell, this pared-down, concept-less style indicates that the album sinks or floats on the attractiveness of its ideas at any given moment. Some are more revolutionary than others, but all ideas dispense with academics and generally aim for the gut. "LCC" has a wonderful B-section, with a melody that comes out of nowhere and knocks you off your feet with its modesty and its grace. "Ipacial Section" is possibly even better, with a bonkers dub-gabber opening that pivots after four exhilarating minutes into a wide-open trot featuring a loose-cannon snare that echoes like artillery. Then... what the fuck happens there, about five and a half minutes in? What an audacious idea, to cut the bottom out of the song and introduce a half-time hip hop sort of rhythm. Not an uncommon thing to happen in an Autechre song, but rarely is it executed so intoxicatingly well. The final minute or so of blubbering drums is the fat at the end of the bacon - a guilty pleasure, indulgent and gross. Little side-note: it's funny, isn't it, the idea of calling an Autechre album "minimal," like there's not much going on or something. It's a paradox - Autechre isn't minimal, but this record is minimal. This record isn't minimal, but for Autechre it is. I think that's my personal take on the title, Untilted. It's technically Untilted... but it sure looks a lot like Untitled. It's technically Untitled... but it sure looks a lot like Untilted: image Pro Radii is cool, but I must be missing a certain something. Please let me know. Augmatic Disport is highly interesting, the way it slowly opens up to allow the introduction of a dub drum/bass line in the seventh minute. Will keep my eye on this one. Iera wears its heart on its sleeve, with one of Autechre's many trademarks, the rapidly accelerating and decelerating micro-rhythm. Makes for a tune that isn't by any means revolutionary, but is still a faithful reproduction of some very innovative production ideas. One of many gnarly mid-level tunes in the group's discography. I have to say, the second side of Untilted is quite unusual - some very interesting cuts which are perhaps some of the less typical "Autechre songs" I've heard from the group. Outliers, that is. "Fermium" is really cool, with a tinny a-section whose melody reminds me of the hollowed-out horror of Wendy Carlos' soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange, which I saw recently. It's a really manic pick for melody from Autechre, something I could hear in a CAN album but not necessarily something I would expect from IDM's chief futurists. Then, the b-section... well, that's more like it. Like they took a CAN record and played pinball with it. "The Trees" is middling - I can't decide whether it's a really interesting experiment, or just an unwelcome side dish. Regardless, it really reminds me of a more chaotic version of Topdown Dialectic, so if you like this track let me know what you think of this. As for "Sublimit"... right now, I'm of the opinion that it buckles under its own weight. Each successive section is interesting, for sure, but I'm not convinced it works as an overall piece, and I'm much more a fan of the relative economy of "Ipacial Section" and "LCC". As always, please challenge me on this. Overall, an unusual album, one that I'd classify as part of their early-Max era along with Confield and Draft 7.30. However, it's much cleaner and lightweight than either of those records, and if I had to guess I would think that it's symptomatic of a growing desire to get away from pretenses and explore the pure fabric of sounds on Booth and Brown's part. Bonus EPs Along with Gantz Graf, I decided to go back to EP7 - I also tried out both Peel Sessions. Peel Session 1999 Illustrative of one of my favorite things about Autechre's discography, which is that whether it's a primitive electro track in 1992 or an aleatoric behemoth in 2015, they're able to summon moments of beauty that are often just totally inexplicable given the limits of what they're working with. The first Peel Session was recorded in 1995, meaning this is around the time where Autechre had released their innovative product Electro 2.0, also known as IDM. Opener "Milk DX" is simple but in a really cool way, thanks to the papery clatter of the hi hats, which I could either compare to a castanet or to the sound that a teacup makes when you place it down ever so carelessly. Throw in some milky smooth synth pads, and you've got yourself a trademark dreamy electro track. I'm still not the biggest fan of Autechre's more blatant hip hop maneuvers, but I think "Inhake 2" strikes the perfect balance between '95 Warp's pristine melodies and a certain abstracted vocal rowdiness, somewhere between record-scratching and scatting, that is present here throughout. The blippy synth melody laid on top halfway through is the kill shot. A simple track, but it all connects. "Drane", a beautiful track. One with a simple premise that, when repeated enough across ten-plus minutes, accumulates in effect until the weight of it inevitably pulls you from whatever else you're doing. The pressure this song continually creates and releases is a marvelous feeling. The key is truly the simultaneity of the creation and the release of pressure - that synth drone manages to convey pain and pleasure in equal measure. "Drane" cements this EP's status to me as one of their great EPs - just like Cichli Suite or Anti, I'll remember this very rarely but always enjoy it when I do. EP7 1999 Gave this another shot, with the benefit of Confield-given hindsight. I can see now, after subjecting myself to the conceptual slog of that brilliant album, that this EP is a valuable artefact of Autechre's early experiments with stochastic dance music, one that offers a much clearer look than the deeply depressed Confield. These are just simple bangers, and "Rpeg" is endless fun with its rub-a-dub snares and titular arpeggios - the simplest and bangeriest of them all. Lots of novelties here too, particularly "Ccec", the closest Autechre will ever come to having a rap feature, barring what would surely be a major creative misstep in the future. "Outpt" has dusty drones set to a steady beat - naturally, it reminds me of early Gold Panda, but less whimsical. Hard to feel too negatively about this, though: it's obvious that they're just having fun and stretching their imagination after LP5, which I infer was a much more deliberate process. Peel Session 2 2000 Dare I say this is just as brilliant as the first one? The switch halfway through "Gelk" is ballsy, as are the prepared-piano sounds that reverberate throughout. It mostly works. "Blifil", too, is a good-but-not-great track, a screamer throughout - a sort of stochastic, very Autechrean take on "Come To Daddy"-esque deep-fried 'ardcore breaks. "Gaekwad" is my pick of the bunch, a definite outlier in Autechre's discography which sees them playing with the plasticky, quasi-representational sounds I most commonly associate with the synthetic melodrama of Andy Stott or Dean Blunt. (Or this!) Super cool to see, and works really well paired with Autechre's melodic and timbral sensibilities. (Also, the closest to footwork I've heard from Autechre happens about two minutes in.) "19 Headaches" is really cool, too - makes a lot of sense that they'd be making this around the time of Confield. Sounds like a better version of Lee Gamble's recent music - restrained craziness, audible in the jittery runs of the polite soprano synth lead and the ADHD tangents of the feather-light percussion. A fantastic sequel to the first Peel Session - while that one was all about simplicity and poise, this one falls ever so slightly off the deep end. Gantz Graf 2002 Was expecting something legendary in the title track - instead, I got a jumping-off point for what is certainly their best EP. Must be listened to as a whole 19-minute block. I love how the shortness of "Gantz Graf" makes the sound of bit rot that occurs throughout feel like a pop chorus. What a switch-up, then, when the seamless transition into the longer "Dial." reveals the true hit single. One of the only Autechre tracks I'd feel comfortable playing in a DJ set, maybe next to a song from Joe or Nina Kraviz's label трип. Love how at the end the plastic-organ-sounding synth starts to spiral upwards directly on the beat, creating the faintest opportunity for the track to suddenly sound like it's at 80 bpm instead of 160 - the type of rhythmic elasticity that just begs to be fucked around with in a set. And then there's "Cap.IV", which takes "Dial." and molds it into something resembling a conclusion. The beat gets a lot more rubbery, some really nice BoC-esque synths come in, and there's even a hailstorm ending of noisy percussion, a cute little backdoor reference to "Gantz Graf". I love this EP. A perfect little 19-minute adventure... an ear workout, but not too heady, just tons of pure fun. Current ranking
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540 points: deleted's comment in Why do you think Bob Marley initially failed to gain traction with black Americans.
Passion piece for me, on my favorite film. For more context, images and gifs, read on TheTwinGeeks.com Under the Skin is an expression of humanity shown through an alien lens. Jonathan Glazer’s masterpiece is the filmic expression of what people mean when they say, “show, don’t tell.” It is an ethereal and tonally alien piece of work, delving into the psychology of how we gender and sexualize women. Scarlett Johansson has the avant-garde role of a lifetime, as an alien sent to harvest the meat from humans, who finds empathy and love instead, and is punished. The entire production hinges on a vast, cosmic score by Mica Levi that will haunt your dreams forever. The story is loosely inspired by the literature of the same name by Michel Faber. In the book, an alien is sent to our planet to harvest unsuspecting hitchhikers for their meat, a delicacy back on their home world. It’s a big metaphysical experiment with different goals and hooks than the film. Where the book goes deep into the alien’s relation to consumerism and the human experience, the film tragically showcases the alien’s experience as a woman, and is more singular in its goal to convey this experience. Moving the story from the Scottish countryside to Glasgow reflects a different urban feeling. Our narrator has also gone from the named Isserley to an unnamed character – we’ll refer to her as Scarlett Johansson from here. The literary character is more tangentially related to a dog-like alien, with the whimsical wonder of a child about her world, while Scarlett is reserved and clinical about her hunt. What they both excel at is showing us exactly what they mean through imagery, without ever having to tell us that’s what they mean. Under the Skin could have a wordless script and work as a silent film but it is designed to be an audiovisual masterpiece instead. It has one of the most affecting, experimental scores by classically trained musician Mica Levi (of abstract-pop band Micachu and the Shapes). From writing for string quartets to warping strip club music into haunting tomes of sexual dread, she proves to be absolutely masterful. The music here is intensely layered on an audiovisual level. When Scarlet drags men back to the void, she teases and provokes in some of the most sexual sequences put to film. These imply sex beyond penetration, the textures and feeling of sex but also abstracted, made alien and grotesque, while still beautiful and burning with passion. Levi conveys this sense in an interview with The Guardian: “Some parts are intended to be quite difficult. If your lifeforce is being distilled by an alien, it’s not necessarily going to sound very nice. It’s supposed to be physical, alarming, hot.” Where most sound designers will cut loud humanistic sounds, they have been amplified here. Crunches and crackles cut through the porous absence of the void. People speak in their brisk Scottish tongue. Every line and sound is a stylistic enhancement of this romantic style. Levi has concocted a love potion of a soundtrack. The sounds have their own tender moisture, they ooze sexuality, they sound like the fractured orgasms of the Damned. Levi wrote the songs using a viola, influenced by the arrangements of Iannis Xenakis’ “Tetras”, pulling together sweeping strings and aleatoric improvisations. Together, the brutalist sound design and maximalist sound mix achieve a perfect sensuality. Take Levi’s “Lipstick to Void“. This is one of the most haunting tracks recorded for film. Try listening to this without shifting uncomfortably to the darkest recesses of the mind. It’s a song that sits languidly in the sandbox of primal desire and wants to dump the sand over your head. A nightmare of love eating itself. Or try “Love“, the musical expression of what Kubrick achieved in the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey. That is, to catalog the entire human experience. The song unwinds in discordant symphonies, the unbound pleasure of flesh, and the transcendence of giving your love to someone else. The entire soundtrack deserves placement in a damn museum, it’s truly too beautiful to live. Glazer works within rigid restrictions that pay dividends. Under the Skin is shot with the objectivity of a documentary. That is to say, the human and real parts, left on the cutting room floor in other movies, are what gets included here. Short of casting additions, Scarlett Johansson drove around Scotland picking up men who were unaware they were being filmed. Many of the characters in the film are not actors at all. Many of the conversations are genuine and about discovering other people. Exactly like Isserley of the book, the casting process became the same as the alien hunting process, manipulating men into cooperating for the project’s goals. During its sweetest moments, she picks up a disfigured man and they have a heart to heart, where her character has some kind of experiential shift and begins to understand human feelings. Adam Pearson, our brave disfigured subject, said of his scene, in The Guardian piece about how they’ve changed the stigma for disfigured actors, “For me, the film is about what the world looks like without knowledge and without prejudice. It’s about seeing the world through alien eyes, I guess.” His is my favorite performance, affecting, true, something legitimately never captured before. From the beginning, we’re given cues of her otherness. She arrives by spaceship, which parks itself into an adjoining dilapidated home. This is where she’ll bring the men to harvest. She meets a man on a motorcycle, an elite alien (going by the book), who’s packed the body of the woman she’s replacing into his truck. The film expands into endless white space, as Scarlett Johansson takes the expired aliens clothes and dresses herself, trying on someone’s skin for the first time. The dead alien has a tear rolling down her cheek and we understand, she must have felt too much. Then it’s off to the streets of Glasgow. The city life is always filmed in an observational objective style, which allows human interaction to unfold in naturalistic ways. At first she’s an observer, stalking the malls and taking in what human culture looks like, and not completely horrified by the experience of our consumerism, she becomes a participant. When Scarlett lures the men back to her craft, the tone shifts dramatically. As they enter the doorway, perplexed by the odd derelict building and the idea that this woman would live in a place like this, the camera closes in tight to the door, framing their final, claustrophobic contact with Earth. The environment gives way to black, leaving only her and the men. It becomes the most erotic challenge of predator and prey, as the music teases her clothes off. The men follow. They strip too and peruse her into the darkness, slowly seeping into the floor as they walk. Their bodies harden, begin to constrict inside the black liquid. They are consumed completely by sex, consumed in the endless refractory period of their deaths. They stay inside, occasionally screaming out to new men sinking into the floor before constricting into formless meat particles, their remains shipped down a conveyor belt to be sold to the aliens. These scenes have carried a great influence for horror to follow, such as the excellent Sunken Place sequences of Get Out. They are both the most sexual and terrifying thing Scarlett Johansson – or perhaps any actress – has ever filmed. Under the Skin also deals with a more human sexuality. It does feature full-frontal nudity for Scarlett handled in a mature and artistic way. She admires her human skin in the mirror. This moment in the film signifies her understanding of humanity and the beauty of all women. Much more than the book, this is a celebration of feminism. It’s a tragedy of the female experience. It’s about a gender binary alien coming to our planet and trying on the female form. Based on her treatment by men, she grows to understand her own external beauty and sex, and men in turn tear her apart for her internal differences. The film works as a great philosophical work about the nature of gendering and sexualization of women in our culture. This is the experience of all women. The objective gaze of the camera elevates the horror. It treats sex, and death, and terrified abandoned babies left by the ocean all the same. Only Scarlett receives special attention. During her radical feminization, we see the evolution, her trying on the makeup from the mall, going through the process every woman does, to hide what’s underneath and expose a different beauty. What’s remarkable is that she doesn’t have to speak. She has lines but they don’t say nearly as much as what she does with her movement. The actress uses her eyes to convey emotion, thought, power, weakness, whatever the moment calls for. We’re powerfully changed by her performance and all she does is move, and it moves us to our core. This atypical performance is especially interesting when you consider her other signature act in Her, a film that exclusively uses her voice to emote. She is an actor of immense range whom utilizes every part of herself to tell a story. There’s a weird turn in Under the Skin’s third act. It inevitably settles down into a more human rhythm. Scarlett begins to synch with emotions, after allowing the disfigured man to escape. She tries eating some cake and becomes frustrated she can’t experience the decadence of whatever pleasure it withholds. This upsets her greatly and while taking a train, she bonds with a man who wants to take her home and comfort her. She enjoys comedy television for the first time, taps her hands in rhythm to some music, is humanized by the moment. She’s found herself and come to understand her female beauty and is able to share in it with him. When it comes to actually having sex, she has a complete breakdown – having just found her sense of womanhood, the first thing a man can do is violate and penetrate her. This is one of the film’s most interesting tricks. We’ve spent the entire time watching her scout and decimate unsuspecting men and now there is a play for our sympathy. She could’ve saved that orphaned baby on the beach! She’s selling men for meat parts! Because the film slows down and provides human depth and experience behind her interactions – freeing the disfigured man and discovering womanhood – it works as designed. It’s important to note, her usefulness to the aliens has also expired, and now that she’s no longer on the hunt, she’s become the prey. Existing as a hunter was never the most resilient aspect of her character, it was essentially her enslavement, a replaceable alien wearing a feminine husk that grew too close to their prey, and have ensured their own obsolescence. There is a meta commentary about gender politics wrapped inside all of this. Our Elite Alien, cloaked in male skin, checks on Scarlett throughout for signs of emotion and humanity, ensuring she stays objective for her job. This plays out as a parable for the way women are repressed by men the moment they find a means of independent expression. Frightened by the man’s sexual proposition, she runs into the woods. There’s nowhere to hide in public now, with the aliens after her. A man working in the forest takes advantage and tries to rape her. As a general warning, this film exists within these themes and could be devastating if you find that difficult. It will probably be devastating anyway. After a struggle, a smattering of alien material rubs off on the man, and he backs away terrified. The final reveal is shot with a frigid distance, every shot cold and detached. The alien removes Scarlett’s torn skin, revealing its smoothed black features underneath, and holding the skin suit in her hands, it looks back at her and blinks. The man returns and pours gasoline over her, lighting her on fire. The hunter has become the hunted and the aliens have come for her corpse. Under the Skin entrances us. This is dangerous art. Jonathon Glazer operates under a Kubrickian school of thought, that there are completely new ideas left in cinema and that technical perfection can be accomplished with restraint. I recommend experiencing it like Acid, in a safe environment with people you trust. Never before has the grotesque been so beautiful. This is a film that haunts your thoughts, begging for closer and closer examination until it swallows you whole. Experience Under the Skin with an open mind and find its essential newness. It has so much to reveal to you. Originally posted on The Twin Geeks
Another linguistic implication of 'Petscop' - and a way to test it!
I'm not gifted enough with photo analysis software to see if this idea has any merit, but it crossed my mind about an hour ago and even if it proves fruitless, I figured it'd be worth a shot. Between them, Petscop 2 and Petscop 12 contain two pairs of nearidenticalloadingscreens - as they need to be brightened, the colour information is somewhat subjective, but enough of a hue variance exists for what I'm about to suggest to feel plausible. The content of both videos also interleaves somewhat, Petscop 2 and Petscop 12 both depicting a shared event between the respective perspectives of the narrating player's movement and a demo recording of estimably archival provenance. One event, two perspectives. This leads me to wonder if the lens perspectives on the aforementioned loading screen photographs are also subtly different, perhaps resulting in a stereoscopic image, the phenomena of which can be read about in greater detail elsewhere, but I will try my best to explain its relevance to this theory here. For the purposes of assigning meaning to this with regard to Petscop, stereoscopy is (by an admittedly rudimentary definition) a technique for simulating an additional visual dimension using two photographs. It is the artificial creation of depth by forcing the brain to calculate the difference between two similar images - a primitive way of generating a 3D image. The difference in shade between the two images implies to me that assembling the two pictures in a stereoscopically-compatible manner would result in the generation of such an image. But where does this lead us? Well, what aspects of Petscop lend themselves to calculation, especially where intervals are concerned? Math and music both factor into Petscop in both expository (Pen is said to be a mathematician, 'Even Care'/using numeration to lie to Care NLM to enable her capture, Marvin is heavily implied to have at least once been employed as a music teacher, Stravinsky is directly invoked in the game's conversation with Belle, etc.) and direct manners, the latter of which most relevant to this theory being how a few atonal, almost aleatoric-seeming jingles have been heard at various points in the video series, including in Quitter's room. Perhaps we are (or Paul/any Petscop player is) intended to transcribe two of these brief compositions and calculate the numerical distance between them so as to arrive at a third, presently-concealed series of notes that will somehow direct us towards information that will help the audience make sense of the story (i.e. a URL for the website referred to on the note Paul shares with us in Petscop 1) or provide the player with something that allows them to progress further (i.e. a figure that needs to be played on the Needles Piano to unlock a door or trigger an event). However, as stereoscopy implies artifice, this may go beyond the idea of Petscop always taking place in an artificial paradigm (as it is both a game in its own universe and a work of fiction in ours) and may also lead to a punch-line of sorts by the creators, revealing Petscop as an exercise in how excessively hunting for meaning in any work of art invariably leads to the creation of false depth. Which would be, itself, fairly recursive and consequently in line with how Petscop values the depiction of cycling behaviour, but I'd hope that the reality of the situation is closer to the first half of what I've suggested, as this would also be somewhat deflating.
Mount St. Mary -- Early(est) Zappa Compositions [WLS #55]
What the hell is this you may ask? Well, from the man himself the Mount S. Mary concert was the first time Frank had any 'serious' compositions of his performed. FZ on an interview from the 1992 Zappa! tribute magazine (Keyboard and Guitar Player):
Actually, the first time I had any of it ["serious" music] performed was at Mount St. Mary's College in 1962. I spent $300 and got together a college orchestra, and I put on this little concert. Maybe less than a hundred people showed up for it, but the thing was actually taped and broadcast by KPFK. (...) By the time I graduated from high school in '58, I still hadn't written any rock and roll songs, although I had a little rock and roll band in my senior year. I didn't write any rock and roll stuff until I was in my 20s. All the music writing that I was doing was either chamber music or orchestral, and none of it ever got played until this concert at Mount St. Mary's. Rip Rense on the liner notes of The Lost Episodes: It took place in 1963 at, of all pastoral places, lovely Mount St. Mary's College, a private Catholic institution perched in the lush Santa Monica Mountains above West Los Angeles. (...) The program included a piece called "Opus 5," aleatoric works that required some improvisation, a piece for orchestra and taped electronic music, with accompanying visuals in the form of FZ's own experimental 8mm films (Motorhead Sherwood described one such film depicting the Los Angeles County Fair carnival, double exposed with passing telephone poles).
Program I. Variables II for Orchestra II. Variables I for Any Five Instruments Intermission III. Opus 5, for Four Orchestras IV. Rehearsalism V. Three Pieces of Visual Music with Jazz Group Definitely one of the oldest existing recordings of Frank's work it - this is a very unique slice of FZ history. Certain influences of his shine through here and even in 1963 Frank was experimenting heavily (remind anyone of Approximate?)...
“The next piece that we’re going to play . . . Maybe I should tell you what we were doing . . . The, the signals that we were giving, I’ll explain to you very simply: This means ‘free improvisation’ and the finger signals told the performers which of the fragments they were to uh, play at any given moment. Anyway, the next piece that we’re going to play is in standard notation, and it’s actually pretty tame compared to the “Opus 5.” It’s called “The Collage Two,” and it was written last Thursday.”—Frank Zappa
And with electronic tones as well (Varese anyone?),...
The sounds that you will hear are produced by actual musical instruments. The only thing that makes this different than any other kind of music you'll hear, is the fact that the instruments that are being played, are being played by people who don't know how to play those instruments. For instance, you will hear a clarinet on this tape recording which is played by my wife, who does not play a clarinet. And you will also hear banjo music played by another fellow who doesn't know how to play a banjo. These things were then subjected to electronic alterations. For instance, they were pumped through echo chambers. They are reverberated. They are run through a tremolo device, which sends a tone of low cycle which modulates the rest of what's happening on the tape. After all these modifications were completed to the original musical sounds, the tape was then cut up in random order, we just chopped it up, and stuck it back together again any way that the pieces happened to fall together
Further the show ends with some fascinating Q&A on Frank's work! Enjoy! YoutubeMega
Aleatoric Music or Aleatoric Composition is music where some element of the composition is left to chance. The term was devised by the French composer Pierre Boulez to describe works where the performer was given certain liberties with regard to the order and repetition of parts of a musical work. NO. Stop changing my typing when I submit it. The regular dictionary does not mention this being a term used in music. I have never seen this word but once referring to music. I do play the piano, and study music. I have not encountered this word but once. What does it mean in terms of music. Not in my music dictionary. Is it an important term. I am not going into a rant. Read this if you want Aleatoric music, also known as aleatory music, is music with a random element. Chance elements within a piece can be used for composition, as well as for live performance. When a piece is being composed, random elements can be used to influence the outcome of a final musical piece. In a live performance, chance can be used to determine how a piece is played. Aleatoric music differs from improvisational music because improvisational music is composed on the spot by a Aleatoric music (also aleatory music or chance music; from the Latin word alea, meaning "dice") is music in which some element of the composition is left to chance, and/or some primary element of a composed work's realization is left to the determination of its performer (s). 3. also a·le·a·to·ric (ā′lē-ə-tôr′ĭk) Music Using or consisting of sounds to be chosen by the performer or left to chance; indeterminate: An object placed inside the piano added an aleatory element to the piece. [Latin āleātōrius, from āleātor, gambler, from ālea, game of chance, die .] What does aleatoric mean? I have to make a poster for my band class showing pictures a person would visualize if they listened to one of our songs and it also requires a aleatoric section but what does aleatoric mean? Music. What does the musical concept Aleatoric mean? Asked by Wiki User. 1 2 3. See Answer. Top Answer. Wiki User Answered . 2012-09-27 21:00:46. It means by chance. In concert bands, they use it Aleatory music, also called chance music, (aleatory from Latin alea, “dice”), 20th-century music in which chance or indeterminate elements are left for the performer to realize. The term is a loose one, describing compositions with strictly demarcated areas for improvisation according to specific directions and also unstructured pieces consisting of vague directives, such as “Play for five minutes.” What does Aleatoric mean? relating to accidental causes, luck or chance, unpredictable. What does it mean in music? employing the element of chance in the choice of tones, rests, durations, rhythms, dynamics, etc. The latin word Alea means what? dice or chance. When did it become well known? 1950's, but it existed before that. What are the two ways chance elements can be applied? Composition Aleatoric music (also aleatory music or chance music; from the Latin word alea, meaning “dice”) is music in which some element of the composition is left to chance, and/or some primary element of a composed work’s realization is left to the determination of its performer(s). The term is most often associated with procedures in which the chance element involves a relatively limited number of possibilities.
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