Fortier Fruity Loops

After a week or so, I have finally completed my song created entirely from sounds made by our microphones. Here's the final project:


Fortier Fruity Loops by lucfortier

Exit Through the Gift Shop LOOPS Project

Throughout the past week, I have learned to create loops, efficiently and creatively. My 25 unique loops are found on soundcloud, a very useful site in which one can upload and share music files easily.

The following clip was created with the turtle instrument:



Turtle time fortier D by lucfortier




Edited in Audacity, the following was reversed and changed in the "phaser" effect:




Turtle time fortier C by lucfortier

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.