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CHAOTIC_SOUND
Jan 1, 1996
Rev: Jan 31, 2004
Rev: Aug 3, 2007
Rev: Jan 21, 2009
John Cage did a lot of work
with chance. I gather for
two reasons:
To break habits, to Random events taken as
reach something not some sort of cosmic
determined by your message, which can be
usual prejudices. interpreted ala the E-Ching.
A method of overcoming "There are no coincidences,
your ego. only sometimes the pattern
is more obvious."
A method of reaching
something really new. -- Bonzo Dog Band
I have some sympathy I don't think this makes
with this approach. any sense at all.
Unless you take the cosmic
message to be the absence
I gather Duchamp had of any cosmic message.
a different take:
chance as a way of "... I'm fascinated by Cage's
unleashing the id, Buddhism ... But what is that
getting in touch do with art? That is the
with the unconscious. difficult and interesting
question. Do you just accept
what is? In that case why
does Cage bother? On the
other hand, obviously he
bothers because he wants to
make us accept what is. "
Jonathan Harvey, p.20 of
_The Wire_ 282, August 2007
There's another angle on all this
though, that's come out in these
post-chaos theory times: a lot of
natural beauty is bound up in the
chaotic. Tightly ordered, tightly UNINTENDED
structured things tend to be less
interesting to us.
This can be a problem with
music based on artificial
loops: there's a difference
between a muscian trying to
carefully reproduce the LOOPY
same notes over and over
again, and a machine Why *do* we sometimes have
precisely playing the same humans try to imitate
notes over and over again. mechanical precision?
What's the point?
Instead of using
a tape loop of a Advances in technology
sound, you can do frequently undercut
pieces based on fetishes for human
the sound of a skill... PUNK
typical piece of
rotating Or at least force them
machinery to take a different
(washing machine, form.
dryer... ?). Welcome to
"Industrial" COMPOSITION_UNITY_AND_CLUELESSNESS
This is likely to music.
have a little more
variation in it INDUSTRIAL
than a tape loop,
but it can still
sound kind of
dull, because a
typical machine is
designed to be
deterministic, and
hence produces
fairly precisely
the same sound
over and over
again.
But there's no reason that
machinery *has* to be designed
this way, in fact a piece of
machinery that's slightly out The ancient ventilator
of whack often puts out some raps out a funky tattoo.
more interesting sounds, as
the bearings bounce around in
complicated ways the designer
originally tried to minimize.
NECESSITY
It is possible to design things with
this in mind, to produce mechanical
sounds with the same level of detail (May 2022)
as natural sounds. David Toop, in "Oceans of Sound"
mentions that one of the modern
classical composers (Stockhausen,
I think), fantasized about
domestic appliances designed to
One of the early on-the-air sound musical.
noise performances I engaged
in was the Natural Chaos
special, put together (under
great stress) one holiday season...
This included:
Sweep fans blowing against
wind chimes.
The chaotic xylophone: marbles
rattling around in a sieve,
randomly striking a toy
xylophone.
Popcorn popping.
Alka-seltzer fizzing.
Water sloshing.
((A Random thought:
fractal shapes are And all too
easy to find... what obvious, really.
would a fractal
sound be like? Self "Fractally inspired
similar at different composition" makes
scales, i.e. at people break out in Adam and Eve in
different speeds?)) groans in new music the radioactive
circles. gardens of Cleveland.
Maybe the video game
is really real.
SLUSH
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