OT: As SLow aS Possible: Sound Changing on the 5th of February 2009

Since we're heading into the new year, and I'm midway waiting for a render, I came across this amazing slow piece of music that I've never heard before.... Does anyone have an mp3 of this?

[en.wikipedia.org]



www.strypesinpost.com

Tsk, tsk, tsk, strypes...you're asking for a pirated copy? Naughty!


www.derekmok.com

I'm actually waiting for the Blu-Rayed boxset to be released in about 600 years. Meanwhile, i don't mind listening to a few notes first...



www.strypesinpost.com

In the meantime, here's a recording of John Cage's 4:33. Another outstanding piece of music that you've never heard before...

[interglacial.com]



www.strypesinpost.com

We can joke about "4′33″," but a close friend who happens to be a music teacher explained to me once that the piece can't be recorded, because the actual music is created by the audience that's "listening" to it as it's being "performed." It's supposed to be about ambience, the tone of the room, the sound of the people around you, she said. And then she launched off into this lengthy and profanity-laden diatribe about something called "twelve-tone," and I got well and truly lost.

Here's a cinematic equivalent!



It's called "00:04:33:00 NDF"... Maybe I should have embedded a TC generator...



www.strypesinpost.com

But remember, you can only appreciate it in a full theater, because the real work is created by the audience as they watch the black oh never mind I can't even get myself to buy into it.

I'm now selling tickets to a performance of nothing on an empty stage, with a cast of none, directed by nobody. Special discounts apply to LAFCPUG members. Email me quick, before all the good seats sell out!

As a lark I once turned one of my pop/rock songs into a Black Sabbath sludgefest:

[www.derekmok.com]

Not "As Slow as Possible", but still pretty perverse.

Now, what was that Warhol film about sleep? Ah, yes, the aptly titled...Sleep. Five hours of sleepy goodness. And Empire -- eight hours long.


www.derekmok.com

>directed by nobody.

Uhmm... John Cage WROTE 4:33. You could credit yourself as the scriptwriter (make sure you have a text copy of the script) or the director (a storyboard). You could probably export a blank xml and credit yourself as the editor, but it's going to be a tough case to win a copyright suit.



www.strypesinpost.com

Yeah, he wrote it, but his original score includes lots of notes about just exactly what kind of nothing the performer is supposed to be doing at each point in the performance. That's way too much work for me. My debut on IMDB will have to continue to wait.

I know I'm being a nerd about the whole "4'33"" thing, but I can't think of it without being reminded of an experience I had ten or twelve years ago.

I was visiting a post house that had a particularly well-built audio booth. It was on the ground floor, right in front of the curb, in a building that stood beside a trolley line. In order to insulate the room from the noise of the train, they dug out the foundation and laid down an oil-filled bladder, and built the room on top of it. (Or so they said, anyway.) It was the deadest room I've ever been in. Not just quiet, like a normal recording studio. Not even really, really quiet. It was dead. I stood there at a floor-to-ceiling window and watched the trolley roll by, hearing not even the faintest sound, feeling not even the faintest vibration. It was remarkable.

I don't know if you've ever been in a room like that, and if you have, I don't know if your experience was like mine, but I was astonished to find the room was full of sound. Or rather, my ears were full of sound when I was in the room. There was this sort of whistling, rumbling sound that was either my own blood, or the inherent noise of my ears, or just something my brain manufactured to fill the void, I dunno. But rather than perfect silence, I heard whatever it is I hear all the time, underneath all the other sounds that fill the world. It's there all the time, that background hum of being alive, but I'd never noticed it, because there were always other sounds in the way: traffic outside my apartment, a neighbor walking on a hardwood floor, the hiss of air moving past my chimney, whatever. Take all those away, and there's something underneath, something under all that, and I'd never known it was there.

I don't mean to make it sound like a deep, spiritual experience or anything. It wasn't. I was just standing in a quiet room, I wasn't blinded by a revelation. It's just that the minute or two I spent standing there were really neat, and ever since I've been aware of what silence sounds like.

The other thing that surprised me was how dizzy the room made me. Not like falling-down dizzy, but it was a little disorienting! I guess a person just naturally gauges the space around them by the sounds they hear, and if you take that away, the body notices. Or something.

Anyway. Yeah. I guess I'm a nerd.

Yea, I had a similar experience back in school in sound class. It was enlightening, definitely, to know what silence is, and your head feels like exploding when you're exposed to it.

4:33. Important, perhaps, innovative, no. However, you can't do sound design without understanding that silence is never silence, and perfect silence is really uncomfortable. And it's when you start knowing what silence is, and how a seemingly quiet room is filled with at least 10-12 different kinds of sounds that your mind usually shuts away. And that's also when you start paying attention to all those sounds, and that even every individual footstep has its own unique sound.



www.strypesinpost.com

Quote

your body feels like exploding when you're exposed to it

There is no way, if you gave me forty years to think on it, that I could put it better.

Snif. I love you, man.

> And that's also when you start paying attention to all those sounds, and that even every
> individual footstep has its own unique sound.

It's just as important to know that people don't do "active listening". If they're doing that in a film you cut or sound-designed, then they're not watching the film. Sound has a directly line to the brain; it's much easier to absorb sound non-analytically than to absorb images. That's why music has a more direct emotional impact than visuals. Visuals require more interpretation, while sound invites immediate response.


www.derekmok.com

Interesting. I was just on Michael Rubin's blog and read this...

Quote
http://ldvb.blogspot.com/2008/12/still-photography.html
The thing that makes video so significantly different from still photography is not the element of moving images so much as the element of sound. Adding sound makes video complex and more invasive. Photos are almost surreal, clinging as they do to fractions of seconds, but add sound and now your documentary borders on surveillance.

www.strypesinpost.com

But also, you need to remember to include silence, which many blockbusters NEVER do. The entire 120 minutes is full of frenetic music, sfx and dialogue. It's tiring, and it gives no light and shade to the soundtrack. Sudden loudness is always much more startling when it comes right after calm silence. Hitchcock was one of the first masters of this, I think.

That oil-bladder room sounds amazing - I'd love to experience that.

> But also, you need to remember to include silence, which many blockbusters NEVER do.

Comic-book films are some of the most guilty ones for this trend. I keep remembering the central action scene in Heat. Tremendous, and not a single music cue once the action starts. John Woo's A Better Tomorrow is another example -- the first time Chow Yun-fat uses the two pistols, it's real sounds only until the crescendo is over.

For a great instructive example of how Hollywood loves to ruin great action scenes with music, pick up the Disney-released U.S. DVD for Hayao Miyazaki's Laputa: Castle in the Sky. It has both the original, far superior Japanese sound mix and the newer Disney-fied sound mix. While Disney did ruin the sound by remixing the score, using it much more, and casting all the wrong actors (who filled every nanosecond with ad libs -- too much dialogue is another American bad habit), the company did make a classy move by including the original soundtrack. The opening of the film is real sounds only, the buzzing of airships and shuffling personnel, and it's an intense, effective, poetic pure-cinema opening to an action sequence.


www.derekmok.com

I have been in the anechoic chamber at the Harmon International Labs in Northridge, Ca. where they soundprint and measure all of the JBL, Infinity and other OEM speakers that Harmon makes.

Anechoic chambers are kind of creepy if they close the door. It's the same experience as you describe except you are standing on a chicken wire floor, suspended over all of the long, pointed, spike-like foam treatments coming up from the floor.

It's a cool experience if you ever get to try it.

Dan

i wouldn't call that music. I would call it sound-scapes. I did an itunes store search since i could not here the particular you heard but the rest i would call sound-scapes.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"