Forum - Week 2 - Originality

"I am the originator." — Little Richard


In this forum we had a discussion on the originality of music. Stephen Whittington led the discussion, which was an interesting two hours, full of music of vast varieties. Two of Stephen’s quotes which seem to have popped up a few times now, are “I want to be like everyone else”, and “If you steal from one its plagiarism, if you steal from many its research.”

We were then played several pieces of music, some of which were pieces made out of pre-existing music, but chopped up, and others which were ‘original’. We were posed the question of which of the pieces were original. I personally believe that they were all original, even the pieces which were created using other peoples music, because even though they did not write the music, they put a different creative aspect on it, henceforth making it original. But then there is the philosophical question of originality, are any of us actual original? By typing originality into the almighty Wikipedia, I got the following: “Originality is the aspect of created or invented works as being new or novel, and thus can be distinguished from reproductions, clones, forgeries, or derivative works. An original work is one not received from others nor one copied based on the work of others. The term "originality" is often applied as a compliment to the creativity of artists, writers, and thinkers.”1 Although this meaning does support my belief about whether work is original or not, there is still that great philosophical question looming all around us. I could go into a debate about whether anything in life is original, but that would be more of a discussion for a philosophy 101 blog than a music tech blog.

Back to originality in music, although I believe most of the music played to us is original, I do not believe that the majority of music is original, because how can one be truly original when you must follow the rules of counterpoint or jazz. The reality is that so many songs simply use the 14736251 progression, or derivatives of it. To be truly ‘original’ in music, one must throw off the shackles of theory and embrace doing what feels right to them, not what they feel is ‘meant’ to be the right way.

I can think of several prime examples of people who have created good original music without the fetters of theory, two of which are Brian Eno, in his ambience works, and Malefic of Xasthur.
Anyway as you can see from this I really don’t understand the point of knowing theory when some of the best and most original music is created by people who break the ‘rules’.

If anyone wants to have a discussion on originality in music with me, feel free, as I would be interested to hear your views.

Until next time.

En Taro Adun

1. Originality, Accessed 14/03/07, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Originality

CC1 -Week 2 - Paper Sounds

For our first actual creative computing assignment, we were to record the sounds that a piece of paper could make, and then use tape effects, such as reverse, fade in or out, or cutting and splicing to make several samples up to 20 seconds in length. I promptly booked studio 5 and headed up there with Rode (cheers Darren) NT5’s. Once I worked out that I had no idea about how to get a signal from the desk to the computer, I decided to plug straight into the M-Box. After this I simply opened up Peak, set everything up, hit record and went at it like a bull at the gates, recording a variety of paper sounds. I had planned to go in on Monday, but when I got there, I barely had time to finish one sample before I got the call to go in to work – bloody Adelaide cup. So instead I was forced to complete the rest of my loops on Tuesday, within a two hour break between my lectures. After I had worked out that you had hit bounce after applying a plug-in, I came up with the following results.



Sound 1:
For this sound I recorded a paper being snapped (folding together and pulling apart violently). For this sound I simply cut and spliced and then pitch shifted it upwards – way upwards.

Sound 1











Sound 2:
For this I once again used the sound of paper being ‘snapped’ (although a different one this time), and then cut and spliced, and also reversed parts of the sound. I then massively downshifted it using the following settings:
• Render quality: max
• Pitch -2400 cents
• Effect blend 70%
• Smoothness 61%
• Tightness 85%

Sound 2








Sound 3:
For this sound I rubbed the paper between my hands, and then once again used the pitch shifter (I’m loving this pitch shifter aren’t I), and also used the gain change to remove several louder parts of the recording






Sound 3







Sound 4:
In this sample I flapped the paper, reversed a section, used a gain change to remove a louder section, pitch shifted it, and used an EQ to remove excessive low end noise created by the wind of the flapping paper.
Pic

Sound 4











Sound 5:
This sound was of me punching the paper, and this time I did nothing to it except a slight gain change in a few places, and a plug in called the mad-shifta, as you can see below.

Sound 5












Sound 6:
The last sound is of me ripping the paper, which I chopped and pasted several times to make it longer and dodgier. I also pitched it downwards, changed the gain in a few spots, then faded it in. After this I wanted to do an automated EQ sweep, but as peak is not able to do this, I jumped into logic and automated a parametric EQ to do a waveform sweep over the loop.

Sound 6