performance

admin — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 14:57:40 +0000

For the .pdf of the presentation on performance and performativity, please click here.

included is the sound of Ghanian postal workers canceling stamps at the University of Ghana

as well as a bbc documentary on Ghana

Click here to view the embedded video.

and video of Steve Reich’s Clapping music

Click here to view the embedded video.

notation

admin — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 16:26:22 +0000

Here is a .pdf on the history of western music notation with a focus on stochastic music.

Sound walks and acousmatic/acousmêtre

admin — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 18:51:23 +0000

1. Sound walk Critiques I

Topics discussed:

It was Pierre Schaeffer who introduced this word ‘acousmatic’ to the vocabulary of modern media art. Generally speaking, an acousmatic voice is a voice where the speaker cannot be seen, as in the case of the telephone conversation or of the radio speaker. The acousmatic voice being the voice without a body or, a body consisting of sound alone is at the same time ‘a body without organs’ to use the phrase of Gilles Deleuze, who insists that ‘the body without organs’ is not just to be understood as “radiophonic”, but “as a plateau in communication … a component of passage.”

http://www.lislegaard.com/texts.php?id=17

Acousmêtre – a kind of voice-character specific to cinema that derives mysterious powers from being heard and not seen. The disembodied voice seems to come from everywhere and therefore to have no clearly definded limits to its power.

Acousmêtre depends for its effects on delaying the fusion of sound and image to the extreme, by suppling the sound – almost av voice – and witholding the image of the sound´s true source until nearly the very end of the film. Only then, when the audience has used its imagination to the fullest is the real identity of the sound revealed, almost always with a accompanying loss off imagined power. As long as we can´t see whom we attribute all-seeing power to the voice, but once inscribed in the visual field he loses his aura (as the wizard in the Wizard of Oz and HAL in 2001).

The acousmêtre has…