John Cage

Many of Cage's works in the sixties reflected works from both Marshall McLuhan and R. Buckminster Fuller, which promoted social change. HPSCHD, created in 1969, was multimedia piece created from seven harpsichords, 52 computer-generated sounds, 6,400 slides, 64 slide projectors, and 40 motion-picture films. It was first played at the University of Illinois in 1969.

Also in 1969, Cage produced the Cheap Imitation for piano, derived from Erik Satie's Socrate. This production marked a major change in Cage's music. He now turned to writing full works for traditional instruments and attempted improvisation, which he previously disregarded. Unfortunately, Cheap Imitation was the last work Cage performed in public due to his increasing symptoms of arthritis. Once Cage could no longer perform, manuscripts for publication had to be created by assistants as oppose to Cage himself. Cage began to rely on the commissions of Grete Sultan, Paul Zukofsky, and Margaret Leng Tang in the 1970s. The largest portion of Cage's visual art consisted of a series of prints, which he completed up until his death.        

Three Modes of Listening

With regard to my previous post, each one of the uses of the contact microphone can be listened to with consideration to each of the three modes of listening: Causal, Semantic, and Reduced.

Causal Listening
With the violin video, one can obviously infer that the source of the sound is coming from the vibration of the strings on the violin. The sound produced from the magazine is from the crumbling of the magazine. Similarly, the sound that the container made is due to liquid hitting each side of the container.

Semantic Listening
Semantic Listening does not apply to the examples given in the previous post.

Reduced Listening
On the other hand, reduced listening is more difficult to understand or explain. In the violin clip, the sound being produced is a combination of quick, sporadic, high-pitched noises that play over and over in some sort of melody. The magazine sound has a lower-pitch and one may describe it as "annoying." There seems to be no purpose or melody. The sound produced from the container describes a "wishy-washy" sound that has a smoother flow than that of the violin or magazine.

Contact Microphone

A contact microphone, also known as a pickup, is a type of microphone that transmits audio vibrations through solid objects. Used widely as a substitution for normal air microphones, contact microphones pick up vibrations usually from musical instruments and convert them into a voltage that can be made audible. Here are three uses of a contact microphone:

A violin can usually compete with another acoustic instrument in a concert hall or orchestra; however, in an electric environment, such as a rock band, a normal microphone doesn't work. A normal microphone picks up too much sound for the surrounding instrument. The contact microphone serves as a perfect solution, since it is mounted on the violin and picks up vibrations from the violin and violin only. 

The following video includes examples of many uses of a contact microphone. Some examples include the following: At 2:36, a contact microphone is used to pick up the vibration of a wine glass as water is poured into it. At 3:58, the vibration of a crumbling magazine is picked up by the contact microphone. At 4:05, a contact microphone is attached to a container full of liquid.

Microphone

Today, we made our microphones, a very interesting process. For the most part, the directions were simple, however, the soldering was tough. To my surprise, the microphones worked! What a great project...

Hornbostel-Sachs

The Hornbostel-Sachs is a system of musical instrument classification created in the 19th century by Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs. It is made up of 4 top levels of classification with over 300 sub-categories that attempts to put every instrument from all cultures into a specific category.

The first of the 4 levels is known as the Idiophones, which includes all the instruments that produce sound through the actual body of the instrument as oppose to the vibration of a string or column of air. Sub-categories include struck idiophones, plucked idiophones, friction idiophones, and blown idiophones.

Next, the Membranophones consists of any instrument that produces sound by the vibration of a tightly stretched membrane, such as a drum.

Third, instruments that produce sound through the vibration of a string or strings are categorized as Chordophones. Sometimes, these are referred to as "string instruments"

The last of the 4 main categories is Aerophones, in which sounds is produced by vibrating air. There are no strings and the body itself doesn't vibrate.  

Man Eating Tree Facts

Have you heard of plants eating man?  These silent species have been featured in books, news, television and film.  History tells that native tribes wandering through unfamiliar sites in the jungle were weary and fearful of man-eating plants

• It's 1878. Somewhere in the backlands of Madagascar, German explorer Carl Liche, his companion Hendrick and a party of cave-dwelling Mkodo tribespeople are hacking their way through the jungle. At a bend in a sluggish creek, they come upon a remarkable plant, something like an 8-foot-tall pineapple. Eight agave-like leaves, each 11 or 12 feet long and studded with hooklike thorns, surround a depression filled with honey-sweet liquid. From the top of the tree sprout long hairy green tendrils and a set of tentacles, "constantly and vigorously in motion, with ... a subtle, sinuous, silent throbbing against the air."
• In 1881, Carl Liche wrote a story about his expedition in Madagascar where he saw a human being sacrificed to feed a man-eating tree.  Upon investigation, he was told that while the natives, called Mkodo tribe, were wandering through the jungle, they chanced upon a weird-looking tree. The natives revered the tree and warned the German to move away. They brought a woman close to the tree and in front of Liche’s eyes; the tree moved to grab the woman and ate her.  This story continued for sometime gaining popularity and fear in the 1924 book named Madagascar, Land of the Man-Eating Tree.
• According to Darwin's theories, there are a number of man eating plants in the world. Many live in wet areas where water can easily wash away the nutrients that the plants need in order to thrive and grow. Therefore, over the years they have had to adapt and make use of whatever they could find in their natural environment. Most have developed mechanisms to ensnare small animals, which they in turn use to draw the nutrients they require - - from their blood. It really isn't such a big leap from there to larger animals and perhaps even to man himself. In fact, the people of Madagascar will tell you that switch over has already taken place. Many in the area have claim to have witnessed trees, with long snake-like tendrils that envelop humans, strangle them, and then engulf their bodies inside to draw out the nutrient requirements from their blood.
• Although the legend of the "Man-Eating Tree" is still widely questioned, many fictional short stories and movies have included variations of man-eating trees: 
• In The Sagebrush Kid, a short story in Annie Proulx's 2008 Fine Just the Way It Is, a childless Wyoming couple transfer their affections first to a piglet, then a chicken, and finally to a sagebrush they fancy to have the appearance of a child. It is tended and protected, and even fed bones and stray scraps of meat from their dinner-table. Even after the couples' passing, the shrub - now grown to the height of a fair-sized tree - is used to human attention, and meat. It consumes livestock, then soldiers, then a local medico, railroad men, surveyors, and most lately a botanist come to investigate its unusual height and luxuriance
• In J.W. Buel's Land and Sea (1887), the Ya-te-veo ("Now-I-see-you") plant is said to catch and consume large insects, but also attempts to consume humans. It is said to be a carnivorous plant that grows in parts of Central and South America with cousins in Africa and on the shores of the Indian Ocean. There are many different descriptions of the plant, but most reports say it has a short, thick trunk and long tendrils of some sort which are used to catch prey
• In his popular Bengali horror short story, Septopas-er Khide (the hunger of the Septopas), Satyajit Ray chronicles the tale of a cryptozoologist who finds a rare carnivorous plant in remote mountainous region, brings it back to Kolkata city and nurtures it to full growth. The tree then starts to show signs of intelligence, telepathy and ultimately turns on its captor.