Re: Golden Ratio, anyone?

["Per Boysen" <perboysen@gmail.com>]

On Jan 8, 2008 8:54 AM, miles ward <miles932@gmail.com> wrote:
> Funny, I met several of the members of the Seattle Symphony who 
>participated
> in the recording sessions for the source material in the work.  BT 
>composed
> for and directed the 110 piece orchestra, and definitely had the 
>treatments
> in mind during the composition, his near neurotic methodical approach
> boggles the mind.  Interested: are you listening to the 5.1 mix? it's 
>much
> more bettah!  The thing that freaks me out about the stuttered rhythms is
> that they're not fabricated, not milisecond delay based.  They're all 
>note
> values..  There's rain in the third piece, each drop of rain was 
>isolated,
> and time corrected to 256th notes, I watched him do a few on a projector.
> It's mind numbing detail, but for whatever reason it gets his rocks off, 
>and
> that means it loops perfectly...  so the twittery noises, they're all 
>"real"
> notes, which is just nuts to me ;)


That's interesting background information. Thanks for sharing it! I
hope you understand that I wasn't talking about the real story of how
BT created that album, but rather what it sounds like to me when
listening. I wrote it because you initiated a discussion on what we
loopers think about BT's music, and I just came to think about some
more interesting aspects of him: BT is so skilled in everything he
does that any comment on his different productions tends to say more
about your own taste than about BT. What I think I have learned the
most from BT is not music but rather his ideas and techniques on micro
editing audio when producing recorded music. Especially his early work
with ReCycle where he used a sample editor on audio files to set
different filtering characters over very short slices of audio. That
gave a completely new and punchy sound in pop music and I found that
very inspiring although I wasn't a fan to that particular musical
style. It's rather his way of zooming in on details and carrying out
tweaking on the micro level to achieve a certain change in expression
on the more general level of the complete piece that inspires me. It's
indeed a challenge to apply those techniques to both real-time music
making and production work! Applying it on the compositional level is
way over my horizon. Maybe even over BT's but he deserves all the
respect for trying. I'd love to check out the surround version BTW,
can imagine it all makes more sense that way. I have a second pair of
monitors here but I don't have time or space for keeping all four
satellites constantly mounted for surround. I don't own a 5.1 DVD
player either so the only time I listen to surround music is when I
produce it. Last time that happened my living room looked like a
construction area with ladders holding gaffa taped Genelec's in
surround listening position. Then I burn the mixes do DVD-r and run
over to a friend that has home theatre system to check it out in an
end user listening situation.

What you're stating about BT's stuttering is also interesting. I tend
to like those tricks much better when they are built on musical values
as opposed to absolute time values (milliseconds). This opinion have
grown from experimenting with those techniques. However, I sometimes
like "off sync stuttering" as well, but then typically in a dub style
context. This "off sync" love of mine also comes in when listening to
musicians playing freely. It's amazing how you can listen to almost
complete noise (if looking into it from a music theory angle) and
experience new meanings building up all the time inside that noise.
This happens very rarely with computer created noise but almost always
when humans make noise together. I think that comes from the extremely
fast way the human brain adapts to hearing and our superb instincts
for babbling ;-)  Not only for "babbling", also for telling stories. I
read that scientists had taught monkees  to communicate with some thee
or four hundred symbol signs. The monkeys answered when questioned,
they told their keepers when the wanted food but then never told
anyone anything spontaneously. Compare that behavior with humans;
approach any child of four years age and it will start telling you all
kind of stories of what he/she has seen lately. It's like humans are
constantly boiling over with the urge to tell each other stories, to
share themselves and mirror each other. Maybe that's why we keep
making music? Hmm.... does this have anything to do with the Golden
Ratio? Don't think so... guess I just lost track of this thread so I'm
signing off here now.

-- 
Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
www.boysen.se (Swedish)
www.looproom.com (international)