More sonification links

Here are some links to projects we looked at today - in particular I think the Skype article has some interesting insights that we didn't get to. And Luke duBois's work is almost always worth spending time with.

• Boston Globe article on Luke duBois's recent work; and his website
• verge.com article on Skype's sound design
• New York Times, "A Conversation with Whales"; interesting thoughts on interspecies communication
• Philosopher Daniel Dennet's brainwaves sonified, ala Brian Eno
• An in-depth feature on musicologist and acoustician Stephen McAdams on musical timbre - really interesting!
• A bunch of sounds from Nasa

April 22 meetings

We have two classes left: for next week, April 22, I'd like to get through as much of the Sonification Handbook as we can - again, focusing on the audio links. We'll meet as a group until 12:30; then I'd like to have 15-minute meetings with these people:

12:45 Will

1:00 Dakota

1:15 Elisa

1:30 Ralph

1:45 Mike

Then on April 29, we'll have our final group meeting, again ending around 12:30; then we'll have the following individual meetings:

12:45 Qi

1:00 Matt

1:15 Tori

1:30 Guillermo

1:45 John

And as we discussed, we'll have a final presentation/performance on Monday, May 9, to coincide with the transit of Mercury (there are about 13 transits of Mercury every century, so if we miss this one it's not the end of the world, but still). For Central Standard Time, this year's transit starts at 6:12 am, and ends at 1:42 pm; the greatest transit (Mercury right in the middle of the Sun) is at 9:57 am.

So maybe, if we start our event at 11 am, just like our regular seminar, that would work! Is everyone free from 11 am - 1 pm on Monday, May 9? Let me know - thanks!

Christopher Macklin's sonification links

Thanks to Professor Macklin for coming in and sharing his expertise and research! Here are some links to things he was talking about:

- ICAD 2004 dataset and description of channels: http://www.icad.org/websiteV2.0/Conferences/ICAD2004/concert_call.htm

- ICAD 2004 concert with links to sonifications and write-ups describing methods: http://www.icad.org/websiteV2.0/Conferences/ICAD2004/concert.htm

- Example of an audio game, or a "video game without video": https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-nightjar/id431598741?mt=8

Sonification plans

This Friday, I'd like us to discuss specific sonification strategies for our final projects, and how we can use the readings and other projects we've looked at to get ideas. Specifically I'm interested in some aspects of semiotics which I don't think we've discussed yet: icons, indices, and symbols. If you haven't encountered this before, a good starting point is wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotic_elements_and_classes_of_signs

I'd also like to continue diving into the Sonification Handbook - we can check out the first several chapters together, focusing on the sound examples. My dream is to get through the first four or five chapters - we'll see how we do!

Getting into sonification

We've discussed Bach and his use of representation; we've looked at film music; today we are looking at program music. Now it's time to start taking the next step, sonification of data. You can easily find many examples on the internet. Next week, instead of spending another session on program music, I'd like to start focusing on data - but if you like, you can continue to focus on program music. Please choose two or three sonification examples and critique them: what do you think makes them successful or not? Would you do anything differently? And perhaps the biggest question, how does the sonificator (sic) decide on their mapping?

Here are a few places you can get started:

cycling74.com - many Max projects are involved with sonification; here is a feature about some of them.

gizmodo.com - a search for sonification articles on gizmodo, some good stuff here

wired.com - again, the results of a search for sonification

And two other places that are active right now:

Georgia Tech sonification lab - headed by Bruce Walker, this group is doing a lot of interesting work; check out the Sonification Sandbox.

And a project featuring slime mold work by Professor Eduardo Miranda at Plymouth University in the UK.

Revised schedule

We are behind schedule, or at least my original schedule - here is a possible revision, ideas welcome!

Week 7, March 4
Each of us brings in one or two moments of a film score, discuss aspects of representation. What is the music representing, in your scene(s) of choice? How is it representing? Is it playing with or against stereotype? Those are some beginning questions; there is lots of literature on film music, but we have enough reading already, so I will leave it up to you if you'd like to dive into this (of course if you decide on film music for a final topic I'll expect a bibliography).

Other topics:

• Mithen, Fitch on evolution
• Music and neuroscience
• Infant-directed speech, pet-directed speech
• Ligeti, Kubrick & 2001: A Space Odyssey (and film music in general). Movie night either Wednesday or Thursday

Week 8, March 11

• Hofstadter concluded
• Program music
• Hatten & topics
• Wagner & leitmotifs

Week 9, March 18

• Presentations on program music & musical representation

Spring Break

Week 10, April 1

• The Sonification Handbook

Week 11, April 8

• The Sonification Handbook, continued

Week 12, April 15

• Tom Johnson, Looking at Numbers
• Sonification & SuperCollider, other programs

Week 13, April 22

• Sonification & Max

Week 14, April 29

• Preparation for final presentation (or concert?)

Tim Smith on Bach's fugues and religious symbolism

At the website for the Oregon Bach Festival, Tim Smith has created a quite beautiful analysis and performance of the Well-Tempered Clavier. I found this weeks ago by accident and finally re-found it; to my layperson's mind the B minor fugue is one of the best examples I've seen of Bach's religious symbolism. Highly recommended!

There is also an older article at his Northern Arizona University website on the 25th variation of the Goldberg Variations, "That Crown of Thorns" - another good example of Bach and extramusical references.

Singing Neanderthal readings

Let's try the following schedule for Steven Mithen's The Singing Neanderthals. Like the Hofstadter, we won't have quizzes on the readings, and it's OK if you skim some parts; but our discussions will be more fruitful if we all read together. From time to time I will probably ask for some blog comments to get things rolling.

for Friday, March 4, pp. 1-61:

• Chapter 1, The mystery of music
• (Part One: The Present) Chapter 2, More than cheesecake?
• Chapter 3, Music without language
• Chapter 4, Language without music

for Friday, March 11, pp. 62-104:

• Chapter 5, The modularity of music and language
• Chapter 6, Talking and singing to baby
• Chapter 7, Music hath charms and can heal

for Friday, March 18, pp. 105-165:

• (Part Two: The Past)
• Chapter 8: Grunts, barks and gestures
• Chapter 9: Songs on the savannah
• Chapter 10: Getting into rhythm
• Chapter 11: Imitating nature

for Friday, April 1, pp. 166-278 (includes spring break):

• Chapter 12: Singing for sex
• Chapter 13: The demands of parenthood
• Chapter 14: Making music together (maybe the least convincing chapter?)
• Chapter 15: Neanderthals in love
• Chapter 16: The origin of language
• Chapter 17: A mystery explained, but not diminished

Hofstadter readings

Greetings from New York! Sorry I can't make class today, but I have finally figured out which excerpts from Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach we should read, with a quasi-schedule:

for Friday, Feb. 26:

• Introduction & Three-Part Invention (which we already read)
• Chapter I: The MU-puzzle
• Two-Part Invention
• Chapter II: Meaning and Form in Mathematics
• Contracrostipunctus
• Chapter IV: Consistency, Completeness, and Geometry

for Friday, March 4:

• Little Harmonic Labyrinth
• Chapter V: Recursive Structures and Processes
• Canon by Intervallic Augmentation
• Chapter VI: The Location of Meaning
• Crab Canon

for Friday, March 11:

• Chapter XI: Brains and Thoughts
• English French German Suite
• Chapter XVI: Self-Ref and Self-Rep
• The Magnificrab, Indeed

I would also like you to start on Mithen's The Singing Neanderthals; I will post a reading schedule for that soon. In the meantime, for the Hofstadter, the idea is to give us some interesting ideas to talk about, and possibly some food for thought as we prepare analyses and mapping schemes for sonification. So I'm not going to "quiz" you on the readings, but they are really interesting (and if you do run into the occasional boring spot it's OK to skim). We'll have a better discussion if we all read it. Have a good weekend! Next week we will finish the Art of Fugue, and start on the Hofstadter.

LIN Ensemble, Art of Fugue

Here is an interesting arrangement for clarinet, cello and piano of the Bach - this is Contrapunctus XIII, one of fugues that works both right-side up and upside down.

Interestingly enough, this album features some Bach arrangements by the prominent Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen, winner of the prestigious Gravemeyer award this year.

Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin

Here is the YouTube playlist for the Art of the Fugue, performed by Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin. This is my favorite recording, for style, tempo, and variety of instrumentation - but if you have a favorite recording please go ahead and post it!

Art of the Fugue

As we discussed in class, let's plan on a couple of weeks to tackle the Art of the Fugue. I don't want to get too far behind schedule, so it might be more like a week and a half; we'll see how it goes next Friday.

As Will did for the 3-part Ricercar from the Musical Offering, and Dakota and I did for the 6-part Ricercar, please label subject and answer wherever they appear, as well as false entries. Remember, the exposition is finished once all voices have entered. For Art of the Fugue, most pieces have four voices. Also try to do a little bit of harmonic analysis: what are the main key areas?

Any place where there is no subject or answer is known as an episode (or development, or "developmental episode); these passages are often sequential, or feature strettos, etc. One of my favorite fugue scholars, Tim Smith, has a terrific (old but still very useful) website at Northern Arizona University, with a handy glossary.

Finally, if you are interested you can download midi files for each fugue from imslp.org. These need a little bit of cleaning up, but overall they can be useful tools. Have fun!

Tori, Contrapunctus 1
Elisa, Contrapunctus 12
Mike, Contrapunctus 3
Guillermo, Contrapunctus 4
Will, Contrapunctus 5
Dakota, Contrapunctus 6
Qi, Contrapunctus 7
Ralph, Contrapunctus 8
Matt. Contrapunctus 9
John, Contrapunctus 10

Guillermo, Contrapunctus 11
Elisa, Contrapunctus 2
Mike, Contrapunctus 13
Tori, Contrapunctus 14
Ralph, Contrapunctus 15
Dakota, Contrapunctus 16 (inversion fugue)
Matt, Contrapunctus 18
Will, Contrapunctus 19
Qi, Contrapunctus 19

Contrapunctus IX

From the Art of the Fugue, with the amazing Akadamie für Alte Musik Berlin.

Webern's Ricercar; Frankfurt Radio Symphony

Another lovely performance of Webern's Ricercar arrangement, by Antonello Manacorda with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony. By the way, you should all have the ability to post things on this blog - if you think there is something worth sharing with the rest of us, please go ahead!

Ricercar a 6, arranged by Webern

And here is Webern's famous arrangement of the Ricercar, with a wonderful score and analysis by Emusicarte España. The performance is by the late, great Pierre Boulez with orchestra. I think this is the kind of youtube project that, done right (like this one is), would be a really worthwhile final project (but watch out for copyright).

Ricercar a 6, arranged by Ensemble Sonnerie

Most of the ensembles performing the Musical Offering just play the 6-part Ricercar on harpsichord or organ. It took me a long time to figure out why - I think it's because most of these groups don't have 6 people! Ensemble Sonnerie is a happy exception, and it might be fun to listen to how they make their choices - not unlike the Igor Markevitch string arrangement of the opening Ricercar that we listened to in seminar today.

Assignment for February 5

We're going to keep diving into the Musical Offering (or "musical sacrifice"?).

3-part ricercar - Will
Canon perpetuus - Guilhermo
1. Canon cancrizans - Elisa
3. Per motum contrarium - John
4. Per augmentationem, contrario motu - Ralph
5. Fortuna Regis - Qi
Fuga Canonica in Epidiapente - Matt
Ricercar a 6 - Dakota
Quaerendo invenietis - Mike
Canon a 4 - Tori
Canon perpetuus - Steve

Maybe we can have our flutists, keyboardists and Guilhermo play through some of the Sonata sopr'il Soggetto Reale? Or that could wait til next time.

Please analyze the piece you've agreed to above; and if you are so inspired, go ahead and make an arrangement of it for the following instrumentation. Or, if you can find friends to come in and play, you can write for them too. I'll be posting some videos of arrangements, as well; the most famous is Webern's orchestral arrangement of the 6-part Ricercar.

Flute/Piccolo: Elisa, Tori, Kerrith
Tuba/Euphonium(?); Matt
Horn: Steve
Viola: Ralph (needs an instrument)
Cello: Guilhermo
Bass: Dakota
Piano: Qi, Will, Tori
Accordion: John

Finally - as we discussed, let's continue with Evening in the Palace of Reason; try to get through at least chapter 2. And if you're so inclined, please keep reading in Gödel, Escher, Bach. It's the kind of book that rewards random browsing, but it's also worth it to read straight through. Chapter 2 is easy enough to get the gist of the logic and philosophical systems he introduces later on; chapter 3 is a little harder, but my ears always perk up when he mentions music (like p. 70, "Figure and Ground in Music"). And the dialogues are almost always great - let's make sure to spend time with one or two of them next Friday. Have a great weekend!

Musical Offering - Jordi Savall

Bach, A Musical Offering

Course schedule

Week 1, January 22
(This schedule is tentative, and open to suggestions from everyone in the seminar)

• Intro to sonification
• Bach, The Musical Offering, and canons

Week 2, January 29

• Gaines on Bach, gematria and musical encryption
• Analyzing canons and fugues

Week 3, February 5

• Musical Offering concluded
• Art of the Fugue

Week 4, February 12

• Art of the Fugue concluded
• Hofstadter & representation

Week 5, February 19

• (ST out of town)

Week 6, February 26

• Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals
• Music and neuroscience
• Infant-directed speech, pet-directed speech

Week 7, March 4

• Mithen, Fitch on evolution
• Ligeti, Kubrick & 2001: A Space Odyssey (and film music in general)

Week 8, March 11

• Program music
• Hatten & topics
• Wagner & leitmotifs

Week 9, March 18

• Presentations on program music & musical representation

Spring Break

Week 10, April 1

• The Sonification Handbook

Week 11, April 8

• Tom Johnson, Looking at Numbers

Week 12, April 15

• Sonification & SuperCollider, other programs

Week 13, April 22

• Sonification & Max

Week 14, April 29

• Preparation for final presentation (or concert?)

Assignment for January 29

For next Friday, please go to the library and read Professor Nettl's definition of music in the 2001 edition of the New Grove. Also, please read the Introduction and "Three-Part Invention" from Hofstadter's Gödel Escher Bach; I have uploaded a scan of it here, but I think the book is excellent and well worth the cost. Also please pick up a copy of The Musical Offering and Art of the Fugue, and listen to the former; then finally, please start in on Evening at the Palace of Reason, which re-tells the same story as Hofstadter, but in a much darker light. Very interesting! Come to next Friday's session prepared to discuss the two readings.

Finally, I would like you to try composing a canon of your own; the subject can be either an existing or original melody, and you can write it in any style. We'll talk about how to go about doing this.

Course Syllabus

Fridays, 11:00 am - 1:50 pm
Music Building room 4033 (CAMIL computer lab)
- at 1 pm, we move downstairs to room 0360
Stephen Taylor, office MB 4030
office hours Thursdays 2:30 - 3:30 pm, and by appointment

Course Description

Music and representation, from Bach to sonification. 2 or 4 hours. The final project can be either a research paper or an original data sonification; if you take the course for 4 hours, I will ask you to do both.

Topics

1. The big picture: What is music? Why do we do it? Bruno Nettl has written perhaps the best definition of music, in the New Grove Dictionary (2001). In this seminar, I'm interested in how musicians use music to represent ideas: this ranges from program music (like Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony), to musical cryptograms (like Berg encoding the name of his lover into his opera Lulu), to data sonification. This brings up the relation of music to language (see below).
2. Bach's music and representation. Bach wrote what could be called "program music" or "tone painting," with vivid descriptions of the Crucifixion and other topics. He also used gematria, a kind of numerology, to encode messages and numbers into his music (some scholars have gone overboard with this). And he famously used his own name in his final, unfinished fugue from the Art of the Fugue. Analyzing Bach's music to see how he did this will give us some hands-on experience with one of the masters of these techniques. From a strictly musical point of view, I'm going to argue that Bach's canons are a special kind of musical encryption: an individual line encodes itself, at other points in musical space and time (not unlike DNA, actually). Bach's late masterworks, the Musical Offering and Art of the Fugue, are full of these ingenious canons.
3. The evolutionary origins of music and language. The first question, what is music, raises other questions: who do we make music? What is the difference between music and language? Is music the "language of emotion"? How can music represent extra-musical ideas, if it's just a series of abstract sounds? Current research into the evolution of both music and language provides some fascinating insight into these questions, and we will sample some of this rapidly developing research. A related topic is the philosophy of music and representation - this can get quite technical, but also worthwhile.
4. Sonification. In some ways, data sonification can be thought of as an updated version of program music, or maybe even better, musical encryption. We'll read The Sonification Handbook, to see what the current best practices are for sonification. One really interesting aspect, at least for me, is that sonification straddles the line between "music" and "sound design," as practiced in video games and film. This gets into electro-acoustic music, musique concrète, etc. etc.
5. Original contributions. My fondest hope for this semester is that we make a beginning towards a contribution to "program music" and sonification. I suspect that current research on music and evolution can give us ideas about Beethoven, Debussy, Xenakis, etc. etc. And for sonification, I'm getting some data sets from colleagues on campus for us to mess around with. We may do some work in SuperCollider and/or Max. It's still a developing field, and I think there are things we can do both in thinking about sonification, and it actually doing it. Also - and this is my own idiosyncratic idea - I've always been inspired by Bach's inscription at the end of his pieces, "Soli Deo Gloria." In other words, his music had a purpose beyond itself - as the American composer Tom Johnson says, it's about more than "autobiography". I'm trying to write pieces these days that have a purpose beyond the sound itself, a kind of double meaning (although really, at the end of the day, you could argue that there is no higher purpose than the sound itself, and listening, and playing). Anyway, this is the kind of stuff I'm wrestling with, and it's one of the reasons I wanted to try this seminar. It's definitely the kind of class where we are all exploring together.

Required texts

• J. S. Bach, The Art of the Fugue & A Musical Offering (Dover, 1992) ($14)
• James Gaines, Evening in the Palace of Reason (Harper, 2006) ($12)
• Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals (Harvard, 2007) ($21)
• (optional) Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Basic Books, 1999) ($17)
• The Sonification Handbook (free pdf)

(I think the library has an interesting Chinese translation of the Hofstadter.)

Grading

The grading will be based on discussions, presentations and the final project; there aren't any tests, since it's more of a discovery and exploration, rather than a mastery course. Although I may have us write some canons for practice.

Final project

The final project will be either a research paper (at least 2000 words), an original sonification project (for either electronics or live instruments), or both. If you are taking the seminar for four hours, I will require both.