Acoustic sound and looping

[Dave Stagner <dstagner@icarus.net>]

On Fri, 1 Nov 1996, Matthias Grob wrote:

> 
> >Matthias said something about music being a ritual act, thus, there is
> >something lost in the recording.  I feel this way too (although I also 
>love
> >recordings!)  ...but there' s nothing like a LIVE performance!
> 
> YEEES!! And I love recordings, too. Even though something is lacking, 
>there
> is a lot.

Not only is there nothing like live, there's nothing like purely
acoustic.  Amplifiers and speakers (much less processors) do horrible
things to sound.

I had the pleasure of seeing the Tibetan Institute for the Performing
Arts in a reasonably good hall on wednesday (if they come anywhere
near you, do NOT miss them!)  Two things struck me about the
performance.  The first was the wonderful immediacy of live human
voices, simple percussion, and almost primitive horns, with no
amplification.   What a marvelous sound.

The second thing ties to looping.  Tibetan music uses percussion in a
very different way from what we are generally accustomed to.  The
sound sometimes comes, not in precise beats, but rather in waves.
Here's a neat thing they sometimes did... when playing small hand
cymbals, the performer would hold one flat and steady in one hand, and
"bounce" the other on it.  It was an effect not unlike the sound of a
dropped coin spinning as is settles down.  It was rhythmic, but in a
different way.  

This appealed to me because of some things I like to do myself while
looping.  One is to try to make complex percussive sounds that aren't
necessarily "beats", that is, obvious subdivisions of the tempo.  I'm
sure all of us have experienced this just by playing a note at the
wrong time, and after a while it sounds "right".  The other, related
thing is to try to set up sound that rises and falls in intensity in a
regular way, without relying on a beat.  The Tibetans have learned to
do these things and more with very simple instruments.

And speaking of acoustic looping, a small aside... are there any fans
of Balinese music here?  Balinese music generally consists of simple
patterns of varying lengths, played on percussive instruments with a
very simple, four note scale.  Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew were
heavily influenced by Balinese music during the 1980s King Crimson
period.  

(another aside... a few years ago, I found a set of windchimes based
on a Balinese rather than Western scale.  Most windchimes are tuned to
a Major 6add9 chord.  The stacked thirds are so syrupy it almost makes
me ill to hear them for long.  My four-note Balinese chimes are tuned
on a stack of fifths, GDAE.  Harmonic relationships are dominated by
fifths and seconds, with NO thirds.  I *love* them!  I often sit on
the back porch with my acoustic guitar, just playing along and
reacting to the sound of the chimes)

-dave

By "beauty," I mean that which seems complete.
Obversely, that the incomplete, or the mutilated, is the ugly. 
Venus De Milo.
To a child she is ugly.       /* dstagner@icarus.net */
   -Charles Fort