Due Week 6

Reading: "Some Sound Observations" by Pauline Oliveros. Please turn in a 150-200 word response to this reading (and to the material below) by 5pm on Sunday the 5th. This reading touches on a bunch of aspects of the nature of sound, many of which will not be familiar to you. That's why I would also like you to...

Investigate some of the following quotes using the links given:

1. "During the quiet evening of a summer vacation near the Feather River Canyon, Lynn, Bob, and I wanted to play music. We decided to read John Cage's Atlas Eclipticalis from the original score, which was still shining brightly above"
   • What is John Cage's Atlas Eclipticalis? (Read up on it here.)
   • What does she mean by playing it from the original score?
   • Take a look at this webpage. It's fun.
2. "As I lean on my wooden table, my arm receives sympathetic vibrations from the low frequencies of the bulldozer" ... "7Hz at high intensity can make you sick or kill you"
   • What are "sympathetic vibrations"? See this wikipedia page, and take a look at this video.
   • This video shows more or less the same thing at, just with pendulums connected by a spring, instead of tuning forks. Here, it's clear what is connecting the two pendulums, but in the case of the tuning forks, what is the medium connecting them?
   • With this video of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse in mind, how might 7Hz at high intensity make you sick?
3. "Sitting in a parking lot on my third day of article writing, I could listen to the sterophony of car starter gagglings, motor wigglings, door squeals, and "bllaps" forever. It's almost like Debussy, compared to Saturday's Wagnerian bulldozer"
   • What does she mean by "stereophony" here? Read some of this
   • Why are the sounds like Debussy, why was the bulldozer Wagnerian? Take a listen here and here, and to other works of Debussy and Wagner.
4. "A faraway jet simulates a fifty foot tabla, accompanied by an infinite freeway tamboura"
   • See the wikipedia pages on Tabla and Tanpura, as well as this sample of them playing together.
   • Here's an actual performance. The Tanpura and Tabla players are the two furthest on the right.
   • What does she mean by this comparison? What does it say about the nature of the interaction of the sounds?
5. "When I was sixteen, my accordian teacher taught me to hear combination tones..."
   • What are combination tones? Watch this video and find out!
   • So how was she going about only hearing the combination tones?
   • Can you hear the melody that I hid in this horrible, horrible sound?
6. An extra challenge, what's going on with this quote: "Walking toward the theater, my footsteps greeted me from the approaching wall; midway, they followed me from the opposite wall".
   • This will require a bit more digging to understand, but it's and example of temporal masking, specifically applied to echos. Take a look at the Wikipedia article.
   • Why would they approach from in front, and then come from behind?
7. Another extra topic (look at the others first): "Human hearing is non-linear. Our ears are less sensitive to low and high frequencies."
   • Take a look at the wikipedia article on Equal Loudness Curves
   • Also take a look at the Bark Scale

Make some recordings: Using your phone or other portable recording device, collect 8 recordings of sounds that you find interesting. Aim for as great a variety of sounds as possible, and try to have each recording contain just one single "sound object", editing the files where necessary using a tool such as Audacity. Name each recording something simple that describes its contents, such as "alarmclock.wav". Place these sounds in a single folder with your name on it, compress the folder, and e-mail it to me as a downloadable link (e.g. from google drive, box, dropbox, wetransfer) by Sunday at 5pm.