Week 7: Musical Space

• Questions about Audacity

• Sharing of Pieces?

• A Musical Example

  • Ives, Unanswered Question

Throughout the piece the strings sustain slow tonal triads that, according to Ives, represent "The Silence of the Druids—who Know, See and Hear Nothing". Against this background, the trumpet poses a nontonal phrase[7] seven times[8]—"The Perennial Question of Existence"—to which the woodwinds "answer" the first six times in an increasingly erratic way. Ives wrote that the woodwinds' answers represented "Fighting Answerers" who, after a time, "realize a futility and begin to mock 'The Question'" before finally disappearing, leaving "The Question" to be asked once more before "The Silences" are left to their "Undisturbed Solitude".

• EQ and Distance:
  • Attenuation of high frequencies in air
  • EQ example in audacity to make things sound closer, further
• A Couple More Examples:
  • Luc Ferrari, Presque Rien
    
  • Natasha Barrett, Trade Winds
• Reflect in pairs:
  • Is the first example music? Why or why not?
  • Even if you don't think it's music, pretend it is for a moment: what parameters of sound is it playing with?
  • Is the second example music? Why or why not?
  • What new elements does the second example add?
• Reverb and Echo
  • Go outside and experience temporal masking!!
  • Reverb example in Audacity
    • Early vs. late reflections
    • Air filtering
    • Convolution Reverb
  • Echo Example in Audacity (move claps further and further apart)

• Virtual Space:

  • Tape Echo Feedback
  • Pauline Oliveros - I of IV. How do you experience the space created by this music. Virtual space produced by four interconnected tape recorders.

• BREAK (Take a moment to fill this out)

• Locating Sounds
  • Left / right:
    • Amplitude Method
    • Time of Arrival / Phase Method
  • Up / Down
• Check in about assignments:
  • Read these excerpts
  • Practice in Audacity

• Explain Homework