3spds

I’m posting my email of inspiration to my fellow “chakra group” folks on my blog because I know some of them read my blog and not their email. also it provides a link to a beautiful composition by Ms. Radigue that I have placed on my ftp for reference/poetry/entrainment. additionally, i like to compile my personal rants (about natural resources, microtones, idiom, aliens, FOSS, oddmeter, wavelets, socialism, etc etc etc) so that people see just how paranoid i actually am. thus:

i feel like it’s time for a pep talk.
i’m uploading a composition by Eliane Radigue to my sftp to give you guys an idea of what im thinking of for the sound. also you should check out the La Monte Young dreamhouse project that Hans mentioned. These are examples of simple sounds that produce extremely complex reactions to human bodies. I think both of these composers will offer a source of richness that perhaps goes beyond the “close your eyes and relax” nature of other music that might seem at first to be similar. I want to make this clear: I am a composer of experimental music. I am not interested in creating the sound for this thing only in terms of what people are going to be comfortable with. What we got with the demo last week was a palpable physical reaction; I say this is unequivocally a good thing. My discovery was that a 30 hz difference tone (the highest one) is way too high powered to be messing with in this project, so i’m sticking to theta waves. I want to stick to brainwaves because I feel that the literature on chakra relationships to sound are highly context dependent, whereas the relationships from chakra to brainwave and brainwave to sound are not. Thus when the literature tells you some arbitrary hertz value relates to a chakra, that person has already assumed the context of a particular key in music, in addition to 12 tone equal temperament. Why? Because that’s convention. We are not here to be slaves to convention. 12 tone equal temperament is a fairly modern invention, and in my opinion, has very little to do with sound. It is a social phenomenon that happened when a bunch of westerners decided they figured out the secret to making music ‘universal’. problem is, the math is so complex that our ears and bodies don’t resonate with it. this is because when you divide an octave into twelve equal parts you get intervals based on the 12th root of two. this is an irrational number. the relationships are a compromise to allow for transposition into any key. this has nothing to do with Pythagoras, who had his own scale, based on simple relationships between notes. Also the reason why we have 7 notes in a typical scale is because of convention. the “we” in that statement mainly refers to the west. Chinese musicians discovered the heptatonic scale centuries before “we” stopped lopping each other’s heads off and boiling the blood into pudding. They decided, however, that this system was not as pure as the pentatonic (5 note) scale. I could go on forever about tuning. The point is, I am a person who has studied sound almost all of his life. I have a very good understanding of how this project is going to go in terms of sound. I welcome criticisms and commentary and the like. But I don’t think I could put my name on this when we’re finished if I’m not satisfied that the sound is as good as it can be. people are often made uncomfortable by things they’re not used to. perhaps in the field of visual design this happens less often because sound is a ‘wet’ medium. Sound has the ability to make people feel in ways that vision cannot. You cannot ‘look away’ from a displeasing sound like you can a displeasing painting. Sound vibrates your entire body and can change you. This is why our demo got people gasping and totally immersed in our experience. The whole thing would be much less convincing if we left the sound out or compromised it in a way that belittles its role. Also recall that everyone who commented about the demo commented about the sound. Our professor gave us a reference to a composer whose work can make people nauseated as well. This is not to say that nausea is a goal, but palpable physical experience is. And nausea sometimes results. my perspective is that people often respond negatively to things they aren’t used to. Certainly, I would expect that no one attending ITP is having intense religious experiences everyday. These are the kinds of things that shake people into health. Spectral surgery, if you would. Which are we looking for? Do we want Kenny-G’s greatest Christmas Hits or do we want to align people’s kundalini fields? To the extent that it’s the latter, I’m in. To the extent that it’s the former, I’m out.
JM

ps
(for your reading pleasure)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliane_Radigue
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Monte_Young
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Conrad
(quote from this article: “Conrad’s most famous film, The Flicker (1966), is considered a key early work of the structural film movement. The film consists of only completely black and completely white images, which, as the title suggests, produces a flicker when projected. When the film was first screened several viewers in the audience became physically ill.”)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline_Oliveros