Forum - Week 5 - Collaborations II

Todays forum marked the end of the discussions on Collaborations in music. Today Luke, Daniel, Darren and Alfred presented the topic.

Luke talked about a collaboration between Merce Cunningham, Radiohead and Sigur Ros. This was an interesting Collaboration, as the music was not to be made to accompany the dancers, it was seperate. I would have liked to see some kind of video footage here though so I could actually tell if the collaboration worked.

I found Daniels presentation interesting, as it was on Mike Patton, a man I had heard a bit about before, mainly through his collaborations with Dillinger Escape Plan and Sepultura. Patton has also done collaborations with countless other bands, many of which were highly successful, showing him as being a collaborator of high standard.

Darren led what was without a doubt the best presentation. An accomplished public speaker, Darren kept us on our feet for his whole presentation. Darren talked about collaborations of different music genres, most notably including Steely Dan, Frank Zappa and Weather Report.

Alfred talked about Vinyls and how they are so hard to get these days, which led to how hard it is to get a name for yourself as an artist, which eventually led into a more ethical discussion about music rights.

Overall these last to forums were quite interesting, although I am slightly sceptical about what results the gender in music technology will yield…

Slán go fóill.

Stephen Whittington. “Collaborations II”. Forum workshop presented at EMU, University of Adelaide, South Australia. 29th March 2007.

Alfred Essemyr. “Collaborations II”. Forum workshop presented at EMU, University of Adelaide, South Australia. 29th March 2007.

Darren Slynn. “Collaborations II”. Forum workshop presented at EMU, University of Adelaide, South Australia. 29th March 2007.

Luke Digance. “Collaborations II”. Forum workshop presented at EMU, University of Adelaide, South Australia. 29th March 2007.

CC1 - Week 4 - Creating a Song

This week we were to use our previous paper samples to make an ambient song. I was looking forward to this assignment, because finally I could jump on to 'tools and learn how to make my own music.

One of the harder aspects of this week though, was to make a 'score' of the song, although not in the conventional way. We had to literally score the sound using what made the sound – paper. This could have been interpreted many different ways. One example would be to have a ripped piece of paper where there is the sound of ripped paper, or scrunched where there is scrunched and etc. but as the majority of my sounds were no longer recognisable, I decided to represent the piece following a more spectral base.

As you can see I have labelled the parts to give you a better understanding of what is happening. Just for fun try and follow the score while you listen to the music J. The song can be found here.

Although I managed to complete this exercise, I am still having massive troubles in studio 2, but I will hopefully rectify that soon.

Hit us up and tell us what you think.

AA1 - Week 4 - I/O and Monitoring

In this session we learnt about the process sound goes through whilst recording. This included how it gets from the recording space, to the mixer and then to the computer. The following flow chart shows how the sound gets where.

As you can see from here, after the sound leaves wall bay (junction box) it goes to the patch bay. A patch bay is basically one of those things the old telephone operators used, and simply patches the sound to a different place, or in a different order. This can include patching in effects or EQ/compression. There are three ways a patch bay can be configured. Normalised, half normalised and not normalised. This has got to do with how the patch bay is wired up, for example normalised means the signal goes straight from the in to the out through the hardware, even if you connect one patch lead into either in or out, although if you plug a lead into both in and out (i.e. out to EQ back in to bay) the new signal will flow through. Half normalised is similar to normalised, but you can interrupt the signal, say just taking it out to another place, and the signal will no longer flow through the patch bay but out to where you patched it. If a patch bay is not normalised you physically have to patch it in yourself.

I am still not 100% if this process is correct though, so I shall review the session again soon.

Forum - Week 4 – Collaborations

In this forum, the topic was "Collaborations". Three different people led the discussion, all with different topics. The first topic was led by David and was all about the collaboration between the heavy metal band Metallica, and conductor........ To me this was the most interesting topic, mainly because I am a bit of a Metallica fan myself, and although I do agree that this collaboration worked, I am personally not a huge fan of the production, and I do know that many other Metallica fans did not like the collaboration either, which could lead us to believe that the collaboration was not ‘successful’ as such.

The next talk was from Vinny, and was about a musician named Trilok Gurtu. Trilok was a leading figure in the collaboration of Eastern and Western music. I found this talk interesting because Vinny played a fair amound of music as well.

Following Vinny was Will, who did a talk about collaborations between people making video games, and people making music for video games.

Finally was Sanad, who led what was probably the most 'forumatic(??)' conversation yet. Sanad simply stated ‘What is world music” and then let us have an argument about it, which is to me what forums should me about.

Overall a good week with some interesting topics and interpretations, although I am still quite confused about my topic, Construction and Deconstruction in music, so if anyone has any idea, please do tell...

Sayonara