Interested to hear your thoughts on this conversation! By the way if you join either Sarah's or my Patreon there is a bonus video where we show some of our noise techniques and also we share over half an hour of modular synth recordings we did together which you're allowed to download and use freely in your own music :) patreon.com/andrewhuang patreon.com/sarahbellereid
what would really blow people's minds if you put together a small group of musicians playing acoustic instruments but for it to be all noise and played seriously
@@baplotnik I don't think so, whats the Andrew Huang youtube video title? I'm not talking about making sound with found objects. I'm talking about making non-"musical" sounds on acoustic musical instruments
To be fair, my classical experience *never* discouraged composition and exploration. I'm really sorry Sarah had to deal with such a rigid teacher as a youth. That's a sadly poisonous attitude for a teacher to have and convey.
It might be some classism but my teachers always told me that I can explore and compose when I learned to play and dissect what already exists. I got so bored after ten years of daily training that I can't find any joy in playing music even twenty years later.
To be fair, it’s not always the Professor. So decades ago, way before DAWs existed, my wife and I both took a Computer Music course at a local University Music Dept. The class was made up of about 60% music students, about 30% engineering students (taking their elective course), and the rest were “other”, such as we both (newly graduated Dentists). My wife had an ARCT in piano performance and I had a long interest in electronic music. Apart from a small group of outliers, the biggest resistance and push back in the course came from the music students. ‘This is dumb”, “This is just noise” “This isn’t music”, and “This hurts my ears”, were some of the refrains I heard. Conversely, the engineering students went whole hog into the course. I assume they enjoyed exercising a bit of creative freedom, away from their normal studies. Now this is just a sample size of one class and it was a long time ago, so things are probably different now. I downsized my 5U modular system a few years back, and what I discarded made up a small self contained system in of itself. Instead of selling it off, I donated it to another local University’s Music Dept. They were delighted and are expanding their Electronic Music” curriculum. A good sign.
Right, I mean there's a whole branch called 'contemporary classical music' :)) that has been promoting the things discussed in the vid for aaa centuryy But yeah, instrument teachers often are... err... against it :)) and discourage their students from trying extended techniques at least...
@@VampireHeart518 the Professor teaching the computer music course was one of these ‘contemporary classical” composers. He was very open with his definition of music and noise and posed the same questions Sarah and Andrew did in the video. I think he played some computer music coming out of IRCAM that caused the one girl to claim, “This hurts my ears”. 🤔 It was a long time ago and I may have some details wrong,, lol.
@VampireHeart518 I've heard a contemporary classical composter getting frustrated for feeling they're just not allowed to exist alongside the greats. There's definitely interest but ultimately most people are just focused on Beethoven, Mozart, Bach etc.
The "I got in trouble for being creative instead of performative' comment about trumpet class hit me pretty squarely in the revelation moment thing. Its also amazing how that can 'stick' with you your whole life, some off hand comment by an instructor to a younger person and here it is 30 years later and it still defines things you do.
It is, but it is already a tradition going pretty far back. I respect Andrew Huang for studying the roots of it! One of the main pioneers of "noise music" was born in 1883: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgard_Var%C3%A8se
I was a classical violin kid, started at 3 with Suzuki. Got very serious and traditional at 7, started entering concerto competitions. My teacher told me I could never be a composer, I was just a performer. Similarly discouraged me from learning guitar. I ended up playing Paganini’s 1st concerto for 3 straight years, which broke me, so he lost me at 16. I started a rock band, started learning jazz, never looked back. I’m still playing with those musicians I connected with at 16, 30 years later. I’m grateful for my skill and experience, but I have zero regret over leaving the fold. Now one of my favorite music activities is making interesting noise.
I always find it so odd when someone else has such strong prejudice about yourself and tries to convince you, especially to a child which is clearly doing great and showing good learning capacities for a similar field/skill. Happy you got out and made friends for life!
@@VampireHeart518 Eventually my teacher (he was head of the string department at the university I attended) retired, and I got a new teacher. She encouraged me to play jazz and introduced me to the Turtle Island String Quartet, one of whom she happened to be married to. That was the beginning of the end for me and the overbearing teacher, and I’m forever grateful to her
@@emaniacgames8391 not exactly my cup of tea, but it's basically a world of its own, the 00s/10s (in the us) had a lot of bands that mixed noise and pop music, bands like black dice and (early) animal collective, i think it's a good entry point. japan has a pretty intense scene, lots of bands from there, same period. then theres some classic bands like boris and sonic youth, boredoms, deerhoof. punk was an easy gateway to noise too that's worth checking out, bands like throbbing gristle, or protopunk german act NEU. this coming from a more commercial side of things. the amount of jazz and more classical forays into noise go from free jazz (e. g. ascension by john coltrane), to xenakis, stockhausen, spectral music etc. it's absolutely a world of its own and fascinating. then again, not my cup of tea.
Funnily enough, a manifesto has been written: in 1913 :D but yeah, more people need to get on board haha (&here is it: ''The Art of Noises (Italian: L'arte dei Rumori) is a Futurist manifesto written by Luigi Russolo in a 1913 letter to friend and Futurist composer Francesco Balilla Pratella. In it, Russolo argues that the human ear has become accustomed to the speed, energy, and noise of the urban industrial soundscape; furthermore, this new sonic palette requires a new approach to musical instrumentation and composition.'' en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Noises#:~:text=The%20Art%20of%20Noises%20(Italian,Futurist%20composer%20Francesco%20Balilla%20Pratella. )
As an acoustic guitar player, fret noise was my "bete noire" for a while, and then I learned to love it. When I play a real piano, it's the damper pedal sound. Real instruments have noise in them. It's part of them. The vocalist breathing is a part of the music too. These noises are part of us, and (at least notionally) our instruments being "alive". A lot of our inculturated values about "what is music" are nothing more, and nothing less, than social conventions. "I am a musician" is a membership in a social class, and there seems to be a lot of "policing" in human social classes. "You may be a musician, but you're not a CLASSICAL musician!". Translation: CLASSICAL MUSICIANS are REAL MUSICIANS, and you are not that. We also call this "gatekeeping". And it is. And humans do it in a lot of contexts. It's not very helpful, mostly. We tend to do that stuff and harm ourselves and others a lot, for what benefit? What are we protecting? Who or what are we serving by telling other people that their ideas and musical work are worthless, or "worth less"?
"We tend to do that stuff and harm ourselves and others a lot, for what benefit? What are we protecting?" In all these cases there's a deep insecurity of ego, which protects itself by all the means you've described. It's deeply rooted in all levels of society, music is in fact just a relatively benign example.
Years ago I sent my first ep to a programmer at a certain radiostation here in Belgium and the answer I got was that they were a bit scared of my music. At first I was a bit upset but eventually I realised that this was actually a great compliment. They had an emotional response and that’s what is important.
I think it's mostly because people are programmed (no pun intended) by decades of movies to associate certain sounds with certain, VERY narrow, feelings. Much of the vocabulary in more avantgarde music is, in movies, used exclusively for horror basically... any dissonance, tension, weird texture, gestures, BAM, horror :)) urgh.
I think so many people are so set on the things they know. When they don't immediately like it they reject it. I think it's sad to hear most people just have their music taste set from when they're 14, and then hear them complain that nothing gets to them as much anymore. …but the problem is that they're no longer open to let art shape their taste. Any time you come across something weird that you might not like but makes you feel something interesting it's a good time to keep exploring that.
Back in 2002 I was trying college for a second time and I was in a music appreciation class taught by this professor who was deep in medieval madrigals. One day she sat in on our smaller class when we had brought in examples of things we thought our fellow students would think wasn't music. I brought in Merzbow. One other guy in my class thought Merzbow was music and the TA challenged them on it. Afterwards I was talking to the professor and she was interested so I loaned her 3 albums. She claimed to listen to them and really enjoy it. Was an interesting class for sure
This sort of thing can happen in other types of music besides classical. Back when I was at university, I was at a school with a very successful jazz oriented music program. I liked jazz, but I was the outlier because, as a percussionist, I kept asking about sounds and noise. Finally, I asked my percussion teacher, who played in a well known symphony, about using sheet metal and other found items as percussion. They didn't know much about anything outside of strict classical percussion, but gave me a copy of the score for John Cage's 'First Construction in Metals'. This started me on a whole new journey of working with 'sounds' and I haven't stopped since!
As Sun Ra so aptly put it “space is the place” for your mind. Forget the earthly constraints. It’s easy to nod internally about embracing the outer limits of perception but we often fall into habits and dwell in familiar lands. Nothing wrong with the house by the lake and the beautiful vistas but with all of space to explore it does invite the Intrepid to roam free. Really enjoyed this conversation :)
I wish more people could understand this about electronic music, there are those who claim that new technologies are 'ruining music' when in reality they are simply opening doors to infinite untapped creative realms.
Wow, this conversation is so wonderful and *so necessary*. I teach in a university music department and started an audio production program a few years ago in what was otherwise a conventional Midwestern public-school-teacher-training-oriented department, and so much of what your saying rings true with my own background and current situation. What amazes me are some of my colleagues' objections to this kind of work merely existing alongside other kinds of music-making in the department; it's almost like they view it as a sort of contagion. (It's not a universal attitude, but there's enough of it to make my job harder, and *definitely* enough to make some students' lives harder.) You definitely hit on some of the same issues I've dealt with, especially how working in audio/noise/tech smears the boundaries between composing and performing. And if you're working in something like VCV Rack, you're also smearing the lines between those activities and instrument-building, and that just doesn't compute in the classical world. It's much more like the pedagogical structure you find in an art department: classes are taught in particular techniques, working toward a more holisitic goal of individual student art-object-making. Anyway, thanks so much for this.
I remember many years ago, reading an article about ‘creative listening’ It talked about standing in a busy street, and listening to the ambience as an orchestra, the rumble of traffic as bass, engine sounds as mid ranges, and maybe background birdsong, or people talking as top end. I still do this, and it was great to hear you both touch on this in this discussion. 💚😎
Reminded me right away of Frank Zappa teaching Steve Allen to play the bicycle way back in 1963. He was definitely exploring the same questions - what is noise? what is music?
The discussion of "accidents" reminds me of the observation I always come back to, that so much in electric and electronic music comes about from accidents and side-effects. Feedback turned amplifiers into oscillators, the filters that the radio and telephone companies invented for keeping signals out became the ones that sculpt musical timbre, broken and clipping amps became desirable fuzz and distortion on electric guitars - and the volt-per-octave exponential curve in modular synths is mostly something BJT transistors just do. Of course people then worked very hard to tame all these, but it's amazing how so many of the parts and processes we work with were intended for some entirely different application or method of functioning.
Sarah's thoughts and perspective about music and noise is beautiful! And Andrew has always pushed the boundaries when it comes to sound and musical creativity. You both are very unique musicians and a great source of musical inspiration!💙🙏🏻
Andrew, i am so happy that you put out a video about this. I'm a noise musician and you're one of the people who made me interested in seriously taking up making music in the first place (i also have a history with classical music, i was learning piano in a music school from like 6 to 10 years old, but discovered noise more so through punk, hardcore and generally weird internet music later on in my early teens)
Reminds me of the song Echoes from Pink Floyd. 9 minutes into the song, it dives into complete chaos, but it felt appropriate as it was part of the journey of the 22 minute song. It makes you feel uncomfortable during this section as it doesn't sound like anything human, but once it transitions to the ending of the song, it completely elevates it.
What immediately came to my mind: Musique concrète. It never became mainstream, but was very influential. Jean-Michel Jarre was a student of Pierre Schaeffer, and the influence can be heard in many of his pieces. Kraftwerk was influenced by it, and early Tangerine Dream clearly was (in their experimental phase). And many more.
Paul McCartney was really excited by musique concrete. He hung out with a lot of London's avant-garde in the mid 60s. It was his idea to use layers of tape loops in “Tomorrow Never Knows”, and I think he came up with the chopped-up bits of circus music in “Mr Kite”. Then of course John assembled the huge musique concrete opus “Revolution 9”.
I got into Electronics through Morton Subotnik, Wendy Carlos, Tangerine Dream and Fripp and Eno. I got into noise through Pierre Henri and Fred Frith and Henry Cow. I got into acoustic noise through Art Ensemble of Chicago, Sam Rivers Quartet and Anthony Braxton. The 60's and 70's was such an awesome time for musical experimentation. I was so lucky to be there for that.
I absolutely loved sitting in and help edit this discussion. I really resonate with “leaving” classical music. I loved performing and playing with my flute, but wasn’t a fan of how rigorous and close-minded it was at times. I ultimately left to pursue more music composition and music production on my own time during my undergrad. However, it wasn’t until I encountered free improvisation and avante grade styles of music in the composition stream that really freed me from the strict black and white of ‘what is noise’ and ‘what is music’. I don’t own a piece of modular gear at all, but it’s extremely liberating to just make sound regardless of whatever the means, whether playing an instrument with extended techniques with no thought for notated composition, or pushing your sound into a random assortment of effects and experimenting what might happen. At the end of the day, if it sounds good, and you feel good doing it, then that’s great. 😊 No hate on classical music, as it got me started into my musical journey, but it doesn’t mean I have to end with it 🎶
but... the avantgarde styles of music ARE classical music :) sure, many in the interpreting & instrument-playing field are against that too :)) I just want people to know that this is not a separate thing, it is a niche IN the classical world
I think it's not only classical, but a lot of people think about art in absolutes. "The perfect tone", "the best instrumentalist", "perfect pitch". There's a lot to be won if we just relax and enjoy. And I'm not talking about using high end equipment and make it sound like substandard supposed crap. Do your thing with your things where you stand.
When you describe picking something musical out of acoustic chaos, that is really not dissimilar from seeing shapes in clouds, or seeing the suggestion of a form emerge from a speckled floor tile. This is something we do in visual media all the time, so it's not surprising to me that the same thing can be done with sound.
As I was growing up, I was thrown into the world of funky chords due to growing up in a baptist household. As such, my idea of music was already fairly broad. Around the same time, I played a lot of games from Nintendo (and a few from Sega), which introduced me to chiptune, jazz, rock, metal. The idea that noise could be a part of music was entrained into me by the very existence of the noise channel in 8-bit and 16-bit music, and I didn't even know that. I was then introduced to dubstep, drums & bass, liquid dnb, chipstep, et cetera; I also learned about drumline pieces, which are literally nothing by percussion doing their thing. With my progression of music exploration, it was easy for me to call these things music. But what is the difference between a drumline playing 12 different varieties of drums and someone playing on pots and pans with a wooden spoon? What's the difference between brush strokes on a snare drum and the chug of a locomotive's wheel-especially considering the brushes are often used to emulate a train's sound in concert bands? And once I found Andrew Huang's videos (Superfast Beatmaking, Song Challenge, random videos of taking random objects and making music out of them), I saw the connection immediately. I've long since reached the point of believing that genre cannot contain music-even music of similar vibe or history (just look at gospel, jazz, and blues). Noise is just what music is, and that is beautiful-genres are moreso the way we as creators narrow the scope of that noise to create the vibe we're looking for. Everyone makes noise-harsh synthesized static, the roaring distortion of a drop-tuning guitar, the scream of an overblown saxophone, the thunder of a rolled snare, the sea of voices cheering for the performers on stage. That's noise. That's music. All it takes is for the people listening to realize that.
About mistakes (I’m improvising these thoughts): For a listener, mistakes are only detectable if there’s a predetermined map; they’re heard as disruptions of expectations. Or in arhythmic noise music. To a performer, a mistake is an unrealized intention; instead there’s an unintentional sound. Our response to mistakes depends on genre. If it’s perceivable in, say, a performance of a Bach Prelude, a single note error might quickly disappear from consciousness if the performer carries on as if it didn’t happen (the performer may be internally aghast!). When there is no map, say, in a rhythmically erratic electronic piece, or Ornette Coleman playing free jazz, mistakes are banished. In the Bach, there’s no fixing it, there’s only carrying on. In jazz, a mistake might be perceivable but it can also be an opportunity. It’s only one psychological element for musicians, but one of the appeals of noise music is to live in a world where mistakes are banished.
I absolutely adore Sarah's mindset and approach. Thanks for having her on for this chat. While the both of you were discovering these ways of thinking in the library at university, I've been discovering them on youtube. I very much appreciate the both of you, and others like you, who share so much knowledge and perspective with the world on here. Noisy textures and timbres have always tickled my "ooooh, shiny" response, every since I heard my first distorted guitar. Abrasive and aggressive resonates with me far more profoundly than pretty and smooth.
I learned music theory in school... but I didn't _understand_ it until I left that all behind and got into synthesis. Traditional music theory made it _much harder_ to understand anything, and mostly just felt like unnecessarily complex historical baggage. Nothing really "clicked" until I switched from piano to an isomorphic instrument, derived note scales myself from basic math, pulled out a spectrometer, and started making sounds from scratch with synthesizers. It also helped quite a bit to avoid deliberate or analytical methods and play intuitively by feel, like humming ideas into a voice recorder while going about my day, then later using that as a scaffold to build a song around... and adding layers by just jamming along with my incomplete tracks and saving the good bits. To understand music, I had to unlearn everything I was taught in music school.
Could you exemplify what are the contents of what you refer to as 'music theory'? Genuinely curious, as I feel that americans have a different definition from what I'm used to :)
@@VampireHeart518 Schools taught how to read sheet music and mechanically perform it, and based all music education on a system designed for the piano. This makes the key of Ionian C major easier, at the expense of almost every other key and scale, and artificially necessitates learning everything 12 times since it's different in each key. The actual reasons behind things weren't explored, and instead educators relied on a lot of rote memorization and a general sense of woo about how stuff worked. Mere musicians weren't meant to concern themselves with such things; they were meant to just practice repetition and obedience as tools of a conductor, who in turn was merely following instructions handed down from a wizard. Composing music was treated as an advanced topic, black magic, to be approached with caution and reverence, from a very deliberate and analytical perspective. It was like teaching someone how to create cooking recipes by teaching them about enzymes and peptide-protein interactions using pen and paper... when really they just needed to spend some time in a kitchen putting ingredients together to get a feel for what works. So I ended up having to learn all the important stuff on my own... mostly by just messing around and having fun with synths and loopers and spectrum analyzers and stuff.
I've never taken a collegiate-level theory course since I studied STEM in college instead, but from what I've seen the way it's typically taught seems "confused". In addition to 'historical baggage' (like using basso continue to analyze a piece built on fundamental bass, for example) it seems like the whole pedagogical approach struggles to separate music notation from music theory. Also everyone is obsessed with the piano, which probably stunts learning to an extent. I've thought about making a series that teaches theory in a more scientific way where subjects build off of each other, maybe some day I'll get around to it.
I agree with this - concepts about music theory, composition, orchestration and the harmonic series all started to make so much more sense to me once I learned synthesis from scratch, which is really at its core a lesson in how sound works, and how/why instruments sound the way they do and what timbres and combinations can be created to either complement or contrast one another. Now when I approach composition, whether for electronic music or a acoustic instruments, I make more deliberate choices about both harmony and instrumentation informed by ideas of how waveforms work, also thinking about the contour of sound in terms of envelopes. So much that didn't make sense at first from my music theory books suddenly clicked when I thought of it from a synth perspective!
You guys need to connect with the excellent composer/youtube creator/podcaster Samuel Andreyev. A discussion together would be extremely useful for a lot of people who seem stuck between various "walls" of sound creation.
Wow! You two are my tribe! And as a long time DJ (since 1979) and producer, you have articulated and validated where I landed. It’s normal now, but it surely not accepted by my music teachers back in the day. Thank you for this!
I had a great teacher 20 years ago named Fred who told us to stop listening to, and categorizing things as music, but more appreciating sound. He made some remarkable electronic music from what most consider noise.
I resonate with both of you so much! i started like a traditional musician and later on, when i started my production road i played with so much noise and its very exciting!! This is gonna be a video that i'll be visiting from time to time i can assure you that, much respect and love ♥️
When The Beatles were recording I Feel Fine, John Lennon leaned his electrified acoustic guitar against an amplifier, which caused audio feedback. The band members liked the sound and asked producer George Martin to incorporate it into the song. He suggested putting at the beginning of the song. Lennon proudly proclaimed that it was the first intentional use of feedback in a studio recording.
Man I am LOVING Andrew’s personal style these days. Dude’s on fire and looks like a million bucks! For me, I’m in love with the imperfection of medium. For example, I mistakenly found that my field recorder picks up some crazy frequencies from a PVM monitor I have in my studio. I found that experimenting with that using that as the center of my compositions brings them into realms I wouldn’t have explored otherwise. I like mixing classic jazz with electronic interference and feedback for example and it sounds unreal to my ears!
I think you cannot simply frame this into ‘moving’ from classical music to noise. You definitely can do a lot with one style of music, but I find that getting the best of any genre requires expanding horizons and bridging gaps between things as such that two completely different things can be one. And treating them as two separate things becomes increasingly absurd the further you go with doing that.
This. Embracing noise is the natural progression of all that happened in classical music and it's what did get to happen with the avantgarde. There is still a rift, sadly, with many musicians not wanting to look into a paradigm that has been going on for a century at this point :))
Music has two essential things: it happens through time and affects our auditory experience. Both are essential to our consciousness of the world and our auditory perception of beauty and ugly. When you change the timing characteristics of any musical composition, you change the musical message. Timing characteristics being rhythm (speed of changes), pace, direction, pauses, etcetera. Our auditory experience has to do with how our brains perceive any sound and its company (images, tactile/proprioceptive stymuli, even smells or tastes). The wind happens through time, is just white noise changing, moving the leaves and refreshing our skin. It can be music without all the academy.
Great conversation! I always come back to John Cage’s saying, “The music never stops; only the listening”. I think this applies to all art: “art” isn’t something that’s inherent in the work; it’s a mode of attention. Pauline Oliveros addresses that beautifully as well. Once we’ve got past the somewhat pointless stage of asking “is this art?” or “is this music?”, we can get to more fruitful questions such as “is this interesting?”, “does this move me?”, or “what can I learn from this?”. It seems so pointless to gatekeep the definition of art when we can be creating and enjoying instead.
@@lemon2125 I’m not sure if Oliveros said something specifically along the lines of the Cage quote: it’s more the general sense from her Deep Listening work that listening can be a creative act, no matter what you’re listening to. She defined Deep Listening as “listening in every possible way to every thing possible to hear no matter what you are doing”. I think that’s from her book “Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice”.
As someone who is performing / composing Classical Ottoman Music and Noise I can say, the more you know more about the practice of both(it could be any) styles of music the more they improve each other reciprocally. Music in the end is an approach on making noise anyways :) There is a very nice quote of Larry Polansky: " Music shouldn’t be about me guarding my style or me putting down historical claims on things. It should rather be a fluid bidirectional and N-directional process. " Thank you for this video and have a creative journey! :)
Composing scales is the norm, that can expand to composing sounds the way painting composes colors and shapes. They should trade so that painting can start composing color scales and shape scales.
I had no idea you both such an academic background. Good for you for following your heart. I'm 57 and still haven't found where i am going with my sounds. Thanks for the ref to experimental artists I hadn't heard of.
Love this so much. I feel like I'm probably part of the first generation to have grown up with TH-cam as my intro to both "noise" and classical music, so it's super interesting to see how they feel at odds with each other in an institutional space when people like you both are applying theory to these newer and avant garde modes of music. Love it!
i’ve been playing music for over 20 years and love it. but the joy you both share in this conversation is on a completely different level. sarah’s excitement is genuinely exciting me. i want to hear more of you two discuss!
This is such a valuable discussion! Thanks for taking the time to collate these thoughts for all the curious minds that may be looking for validation outside of their more traditional mentors. It hurt to hear Sarah describe her experience when branching into composition and being reprimanded; an artist seeking more perspectives for their craft should be praised, not shut down for the sake of retaining a tenure. Deeply appreciate what you both do for music!
What a wonderful conversation! I have an experience to share, when noise became music for me. I was in New York City many decades ago, riding the IRT subway from uptown to Grand Central Station on a hot summer day, when the train suddenly stopped between stations. Everyone in the crowed car was just waiting to get moving again, as the temperature slowly increased. I decided to move to another car, hoping it would be less crowded, so I slid the door open to do that. Instead I stayed outside between cars because there was a hint of breeze there. A few minutes later the train started up, and I remained out there. (Maybe not the safest thing to do!) As the train started up with creaks and groans, I found myself listening to the accumulation of sounds as if it were a piece of abstract music. The orchestra of wheel squeaks and bumps along the tracks quickly accelerated to a roar as the train picked up speed, swelling in volume and intensity to an almost unbearable level. But I kept with it, as the cacophony reached full speed, hurtling toward our destination. Then came an elaborate deceleration, as we slowed to come into the station, complete with loud brake squeals and hisses. It seemed to me like a structured piece of music, with intro, crescendo and resolution. When I stepped out onto the platform, I was in a higher state of consciousness, with every face and sound seeming to be part of a colossal multi-media movie. I was high as a kite! This lasted for several minutes as I walked down 42nd Street, until I passed a record store, and my attention narrowed to normal consciousness again. It was an experience I will never forget. It forever changed the way I experience sound and music.
This reminds me so much of the art history and philosophy of art I learned about in my fine art degree. The conversation about "what is music vs. sound" parallels so many of the attempts to ask "what is art". It's a shame - besides John Cage, I found there was a lot of condescension and dismissive was towards music in the fine art world. I think part of that comes back to how music vs. noise is constructed, and how music is pigeonholed by popular expectations into offering a limited range of aesthetic experiences. When sound is appealing, we call it music and valuable, and when it's unappealing, we call it noise and worthless - but art is far more free to be valued for being unappealing. I wonder if part of this double standard comes down to the simple fact that you can look away from something quite easily, but tuning out a sound is a much more difficult and slow process.
And there are so many fantastic composers, both in the 20th century and living now! Great point - yes, there is more to the art and experience of music than just 'pleasant air wiggles' Interesting last point, it crossed my mind as well that it may be one of the reasons of many people's... hostility. I guess in the concert hall / space one feels a bit like being kept hostage. And usually you don't know how long each piece will take
‘loved the discussion the discussion at 12m of random brilliance is similar to visual art, where old sketches and doodles can ignite and help lead the next complete illustration piece.
This is highly relatable...I also did the conservatory route and mostly gave it up to become what I call a "sound scientist." Thanks for sharing, this makes me feel less isolated!
A violin/theory/comp major in the early 80s, I drove a car with a faulty odometer cable, which made a rhythmic swishing sound, and I often on long trips turned off my cassette player to instead listen to the steady pulse of that cable. I still play & teach instruments, but composition is my true creative outlet. I enjoy odd tonalities & dissonant counterpoint, to be sure, but I also use dissonance in ways that cause my harmonic structures to mimic noise. Lately, I’m experimenting with a chromatic style in which functional harmony becomes irrelevant, but the relationships between the 12 tones, along with sophisticated rhythmic structures, can give the impression of percussion, free jazz, and noise. I’m glad to see Busoni’s aesthetic is still alive - and Varese’s “modern composer will never die”.
Totally agree about the texture and grit is what MAKES the sound. If anyone have listened to my music. You realize that it's usually geared more towards rythmic textures and grit, than "musicallity" and melodies. (some songs obviously differ)
Maaaaaaaan! You guys are two people after my musical heart! Not necessarily because of genre or style or anything, but because of UNDERSTANDING. I think one of the biggest things people miss is that timbre IS the combination of a fundamental and/or overtones and/or noise. When I was young in the 80s, I got a CASIO SK-1 sampling keyboard. It was GREAT. And it had "drawbars" that weren't that, but you could press overtone buttons to create custom sounds where each press brought that overtone out a bit more. So 4 presses was more of that overtone than 2. So they did the same thing as drawbars. And that gave me a basic understanding of how sounds are "put together." Then from sampling and finding a bug where it might sample a sound and the sound only be a few milliseconds long. So if you looped it (sustain during key press), you would hear a note, not from the sound itself, but from the sound REPEATING. That gave me an understanding that octaves are just twice the frequency. From that I figured out how to compute the equal temperament tuning frequencies. Also, after having done a lot of home recording, I started "hearing noise in music" instead of the opposite. Like a lot of frequencies squished together can make speakers and ears unhappy. It's not that "noise" in and of itself is bad or unpleasant. It's that what people normally label as "noise" is irritating to them. Really, noise is just a lack of a prominent fundamental. Some noise you want. Some you don't. I did a recording once where the hiss of the mic was nuts. And I HATED it. But then, after a while when I started LISTENING, the hiss actually gave it a "mood" all its own. The song was meant as a 40s style piano, bass, drum, singer type of slow crooner tune. The more I listened, the more I liked it. Now, as soon as the song comes on, it's like a sigh. It just puts you "there" where you need to be with THAT particular song. It's kind of like how the mono and room noise of Procol Harum's original A Whiter Shade of Pale paints a sonic picture BEHIND all the music (which is phenomenal in itself). Finally, I'm no expert, but I have gleaned over the years that classical used to be a much more "open" genre. It was experimental and many composers - including much of the greats - would routinely improvise. I had a composition class that tore apart some Chopin sonatas and showed how he played loose and fast with the rules of that form. I don't remember that form necessarily. But the teacher was a real appreciator of music and really pointed out how his soft "rebellion" made his music stand out. Not saying it is always appropriate. But I AM saying that you never know unless you TRY! And maybe classical music has become a bit "lost in translation" over the centuries from a ferocious need to preserve itself in its most formulaic sense as to not lose its unique identity as a genre. I'd LOVE to see a very proper classical piece whose main theme is improvised on the spot. That would be.... beyond amazing. Sure. Jazz is great. Classical is great. But I really feel classical improv is a lost art and should definitely be brought back and treated with the respect it should be given.
Interesting stuff. I think I had a somewhat "progressive" education while getting my masters in classical percussion. Partly because I had a lot of focus on chamber music (my bachelors) and modern percussion ensemble. John Cage and Iannis Xenakis (like you mentioned) are two Avant-garde composers using electronics elements that also wrote for percussion and made some of our most iconic pieces. In Denmark where I did my masters, I ended up working a lot with the electronic composition students since I never say no to a challenge and are a bit "crazy". The pieces I premier and performed where sometimes multi media and often more based on a general concept or "experimentation". I think you guys would have fit right in.
not even five minutes into this video and it's already resonating a lot. From growing up in a classical music environment to getting interested in synthesis to learning about Pauline Oliveros to hearing the music in every sound (including all the sounds Sarah mentioned). Now I'm enjoying experimenting with anything from the usual melodic, blues/jazz style of improvisation to noise, synthesizers, guitar feedback and anything else I can get my hands on and it's been so freeing and encouraging me to expand my musical horizons, and it's great to see other musicians I respect sharing those same experiences.
i've felt so alone in this pipeline for so long, i'd spent almost two decades trying to shoehorn myself into acceptance in the classical scenes with my wierd synth/trumpet practice, and it felt so futile so often. i love to see both of yall finding joy and success at the other side of this !!
7:49 (to Sarah) - As a classically-trained singer, I have to say I'm sorry you went through that in college. The approach taught in music will change depending on the teacher you have. I was taught at a small college, and because the school was smaller, there was more cross-over for students. A guy who plays drums for the jazz band would also get the change to play percussion for the wind ensemble, mostly because the school needed more players. I'm sorry you didn't get as much wiggle room in the schools you attended. I would encourage you to branch out as you explore. I'm sure you're branching out much more than while you were in college. I hope that you find some kind of fulfillment in your exploration of music, and of what can be musical.
that is incredible on so many levels - first, I agree with you both on this, let me call it, "modular music theory" - where you play with textures, modulation, noise filtered and enveloped etc. and so on. But the other thing is that I observe you both separately for some time and you brought a lot of musical ideas to me, and suddenly you both talk to each other and the two stories combine. And it makes perfect sense to me, as I new them as separate, but coherent. Like I would see my friends meet :)
This was amazing! Super interesting and I can relate to literally everything you two talked about. I also left the world of classical music (conservatory classically trained pianist) and deep dived into electronic music in the broad sense of the word because I felt extremely restricted by all the shoulds and shouldn’t of the classical music world. And what a journey it’s been! My moto is: experiment, try new things, there are no rules.
It's quite appealing how you wanted to start talking about noise but then the conversation shifted towards what music is. It is very hard to discuss about noise because it is still a field to explore! Just to add to that evergrowing conversation, I share one of the definitions a teacher of mine did about noise: she defined it as 'unfocused sound', and since then I haven't been able to find a definition that changes my mind in that sense.
I think of of mistakes as being exactly that: an incorrect application of intention. However, the reaction to a mistake is usually what we think about: "oops, better never do that again," or "oh wow, I got to figure how to do that more!" But I think there should be a spectrum of reactions to that discovery of improperly executed intent. "Never do that again" may be appropriate for some genres or compositions. "I've gotta try that in this other song!" is likely the most common response we should have to a mistake. "This should happen again in the next phrase/passage/verse" is definitely a valid response that musicians should consider more often.
I don't know if you've ever heard of it, but there's this contemporary dance form called contact improvisation. It's an interesting exploration of movement based on some simple principles and it usually not danced to any music, or if it is, the music is improvised live. I practiced this dance for years, but over the last years I became more interested to the music that can happen in the space of a contact improv dance jam. I had beautiful experiences when some improvisational musicians brought in different objects and let people play with them, also a small synth and playing with that sound live. The sound and the space of moving people have a very interesting and sensitive connection: noises can spark laughter or deep silence, rythm can bring up the energy, and noises sampled in live and replayed can cause a ton of people to move together, to repeat it, interpret it and take it apart, morph it into something else. It's something that is not traditional in EVERY aspect, but it's deep, meditative and also liberating and neverending, addictive. One of my dreams as a musician is to play for contact improv jams, or just make an album inspired by it. Maybe noone will listen, but I don't care, it will be my playground :D
As a multi instrumentalist who has a similar path in the 90s into the early 2000s i can relate to this. this is why i mess with synthsis, tape machines, samplers. filters , delays, so much fun to be made with all these tools. its not unlike a traditional artist getting into pinstriping and going with the flow of pulling lines . its almost a meditation compared to the traditional painter say doing a photo realistic painting. that free form simplicity can really tap into very musical experiences that are far more enjoyable then being able to noodle on my guitar with precision. with that said i enjoy both processes , mixing and matching tools can bring alot to the table. Chemical brothers got me away from alot of traditional sounds. and sampling can teach us new ways of timing, new ways of notation that might not have come naturally alone. and modular is alot like that aswell. its like looking at the clouds and seeing something in the clouds , a Rorschach test , you can find new ideas and it allows the brain to find things in what might be considered just noise. above all, its just fun. I love what is talked about here so much. thanks for sharing your stories and ideas on the matter.
I was never good at being the kind of focused perfectionist required of classical training. It's why i ceased that path after reaching adulthood. Since then I've vowed to be the best 'me' I can be, musically speaking, and that means recognizing that my ear is my strongest tool, my imagination is my muse, and a meditative state is the best portal to access these strengths.
I love the discussion at 16:40 around whether music should be enjoyable or whether it is allowed to be discomforting. As someone who was getting into music production around the dubstep era, I feel like some of the sound design there played pretty explicitly with this discomfort. The amazing video essay "All my homies hate Skrillex" gives a beautiful insight into how myself and many others got fully absorbed into this genre because of a fascination with discomfort and later came to hate the resulting arms race to the most loud drop. Of course many other electronic genres play with discomfort in super interesting way, so I would love to see this topic discussed further. Either way, thanks for the great video!
Noise is kind of what a drum set is. People love it. Why? Because it makes noise. The cymbals especially. We love them for their round and full sound. It's not about notes or rhythms, just about the thick sound they create.
I guess ultimately, music is anything that the person who created it calls music. I watched a Q&A with John Zorn where he said that he occasionally gave performances that (IIRC) involved placing and moving objects on the tray of an overhead projector. Though the performance had no sonic element, he was adamant that it was, in fact, music.
Hmm, I remember practicing French Horn solos and find great variation and creativity between the various virtuosos - Dennis Brain, Barry Tuckwell, etc. Rigidity was not what I found in my little corner of classical music.
As someone who has largely burnt out on through-composed/conventionally gifted music but has generally enjoyed Andrew's content whenever it shows up in my recommendations, I was both glad and surprised to learn how important non-representational art was to him and am also very interested in hearing more noise-informed work from him as well as work by Sarah, who is entirely new to me, in general. Thanks for sharing this part of yourselves!
Thanks guys! This was a GREAT conversation. Excuse me while I riff a moment but ... I just got back from week in Alaska during which I attended a July 4th parade, rode several trains, visited museums, took walks, got a ship to go out and see wildlife, etc. etc. AND I took along a 4 track digital tascam and a PO33. The PO33 is full with sixteen fresh samples from ???? and I have a full 30 minutes of field recordings from every imaginable sound scape taken mostly 1 minute but never more than two minutes at a time. So far I've made through about 10 minutes of the tascam stuff and already filled a whole new bank of 16 sounds on the Zeptocore - and that's by skipping a lot of stuff I plan to use eventually. In other words this conversation was so on point for me it's really serendipitous and I'm so inspired by it. Thanks!!!
Something I’m kind of curious about is, is visual music possible? I mean I know it is, but that’s not what I mean. When you hear music, it makes you feel things. Happy. Motivated. Sad. Angry. So many other feelings. Existential thoughts. Blank mind. It can do so many things. But can that same effect by translated into visuals that deaf people could watch and feel the same things?
I think the reason why Andrew sees the lights as music is because he has heard the same modules produce sound so much. Some musicians who read scores a lot hear them in their heads, and think the scores even without any sound are music. Dance and other visual arts can be enjoyed in similar ways to music, but personally, I think music needs to be sound, or the very least: an expectation or imagination of sound.
ive been a dubstep producer for several years now and this is exactly how i feel. many people hate on the genre because "its all one note" but if you really open your mind to it theres so many different things to listen to. the drums serve a much different purpose than in traditional music. as a producer myself, listening to other peoples music i always try to think about the other artists processes and approach to a similar idea where the main goal is headbanging. it opens your eyes to the idea of tone vs melody, and phrasing with atonal sounds. really fun concets!
funny enough the other genre i love most is ambient music, specifically horror soundtracks which i believe has pretty much all of these exact same concepts!
When I was a kid, my dad had a CD that was Christmas music played on tools (drills, saws, hammers, etc). That really subtly influenced the way I think about sound. If we can make conventionally good music with tools, what else can we do? Remember, folks: there are no bad sounds, only sounds that do and don't fit whatever you're conveying.
I have no formal training outside a week of piano i rebelled against in primary school. Had a piano in the house I mucked around on from a super early age, doing simple scales frustrated me as I could already do so much more. Anyway progressed thought keyboards and synths but always gravitated back to a upright piano, not perfectly in tune, the overtones and the sound of the strings interacting when the pedal is down. More recently with a 2600 clone, I really enjoyed reading the original ARP 2600 manual. Meant for education, the original ARP 2600 manual available freely online is a real gem starting with how you hear and perceive sound and then later how that applies to recreating it. Great stuff :) But yes, I enjoyed this talk, thank you :)
its amazing to me that the teacher reprimanding a performance major trying composition could be so myopic as to not see the myriad ways that gaining a broader context to music and sound could then feedback into performance in a way that mere practice never could. To perceive performance through new lenses can open up entirely different realms of relating to the instrument that are not on the table if you only ever do the same kind of route engagement with sound
Noise: an auditory signal you don't want. Signal: an auditory signal you do want. Music: a collection of auditory signals, or lack of auditory signals over time. I've been operating using these definitions for decades, they have served me very well.
Actually noise has an acoustic definition. It is a signal composed of a multitude of vibrations whose different frequencies are not integer multiples of the lowest frequency vibration (no harmonic structure). This distinguishes it from musical sounds, where the frequencies are integer multiples of the lowest one, creating a sound perceived as harmonious.
I think THIS is where it comes to the issue of colloquial definitions vs. official definitions vs. contextual definitions. Noise being "something you don't want" is a subjective idea (we all "want different things at different times). To paraphrase a famous saying: "One man's noise is another man's signal". Contextually, music CAN be defined as "signals" from a production standpoint, because it's all about what the artist's intent is, but from a listener's standpoint, that changes based on experience, mood, and a variety of other factors that cannot always be isolated. In this context, subjective definition changes from how it's used in production, to how people speak. Think of the cliche' of the parent telling their child to "cease that noise". It is "noise" because the parent doesn't want it, but to the child, it is wanted. Your "definition" technically works in this case, but it's still talking about the same sound. It isn't an objective definition, it's SUBJECTIVE and that's where the confusion begins. In a conversation about what we CAN call noise vs. music, these definitions that might be useful in a studio setting are essentially useless as it doesn't help with the objective ideas that encompass this broader definition of music.
@@Kadaj456 To me, the sound of a washing machine or dryer or the sound of a BART train passing through the Transbay Tube can be music. It depends on how I'm listening to it.
Such an interesting conversation! I'm a painter who dabbles in music now and then and I found many parallels between my outlook on visual art and both of your thoughts on music. There really is no right or wrong way to create art (as long as no one is being harmed). Exploration, expression, and/or communication is art at its core. Thanks for posting this! P.S. I have your book but I still need to read it 😅
I am not a musician and I found this conversation to be very inspiring. Embracing play and exploration in life as opposed to following a straight line that feels oppressive. Allowing ourselves to feel safe in these alternative ways to relate to our practice.
I sang a lot in choirs growing up and it made my singing voice become very polished to not stand out from the rest. I often wish I had more of an imperfect voice because that would give it more character when singing lead. It’s of course a lot down to not practicing my lead vocal voice. Now I mostly play drums, so I make all the noise! 😁
FANTASTIC VIDEO! Growing up listening to mostly classical and traditional music genres gave me a sense of what music is "supposed" to sound like and how it's supposed to be written. It wasn't until I heard Aphex Twin for the first time where my perception changed and my world just grew even bigger.
Classical music continued into the 20th century, so a lot of 'weirdness' happened in the classical world itself (maybe you know them, but I'll name some names: Stravinsky, Cage, Pierre Schaeffer, Xenakis, Ligeti...) It tends to fly under the radar so most people think it ended in like 1900 and then it evolved in film music :)) but there's a loooooooooot of fantastic stuf to be explored ^^
@@VampireHeart518 Yes! Stravinsky and Xenakis! It's incredible how classical music have inspired modern artists of today and the music they create. so much to explore here. Thank you for the recommendations!
I am doing GPU programming. And coming up with functions for noise, different higher dimensions, gradual noise, fractal noise etc makes a big difference. Audio noise is like just a single value... But 2D noise of a cloud texture or 3D height maps for mountains looks soo much different. A lot of procedural textures and shapes is coming up with a combination of peusdorandom math (often at the edge of where computation falls apart in microelectronics). In music you have a ton of analog input and not the exact control about what the next bit might be... For 2D noise - it's the absence of patterns. So your eyes and brain don't see nothing repeating. And your eyes are really great at doing so. Sure your cellular noise still follows some rules - but it's not a tiled pattern. Knowing two values can't help you predict the next one.
I was classically trained on Viola from 4th grade and all the way through high school. I never felt any passion for performance so much so that I just stopped playing and really struggled to practice. It took me getting my first Akai drum machine and Korg synth that I really expanded to composition. I pretty much taught myself everything at first but composition and creating conceptual experiences was what really mattered and still matters most to me. I really could care less about performing my music because that isn't what makes the music for me. The emotions expressed are what resonate with me. Not that performances can't do that but I've never had a live music experience that emotionally changed me as much as synthesizers and incredible recordings. Synthesis can create so much emotion and I always want to explore that.
your speaking my musical language - I've just learnt how to make music through just tinkering with sound, noise, something that provokes emotion, or highlight epiphany
Yes!! I wrote my B.M thesis on Pauline's practice, and wrote series of pieces based on her approaches. So happy to see people like her, and Morton Subotnick mentioned here!
I think there is a distinction between noise and music, although I cant quite describe it. Like how a siren could technically be music.. and it certain contexts it is. Noise on its own is just a noise, like a door banging or pans clanging. But once you piece these things together into "music", then it is now music Kinda like how we just have materials laying around, but they arent a Shirt or a hockey stick until we form them
This has 100% been my experience with the starts of my real passion for sound, learning about deep listening techniques and playing music that's just a set of instructions. I'm really grateful to my university's composer's orchestra for giving me a chance to dive into interesting sound. I can't remember the name of the piece, but there was one we played where everyone played a random note and then gradually crept toward unison, or as the piece says, until it becomes "shimmering gold"
Sarah, I wrote you an email a while back where I told you about a very enjoyable jam session I had playing my guitar along with the rhythmic wash cycle of my washing machine. I really feel like music is ANYTHING that's rhythmically repetitive and really even things that don't really meet those criteria such as John Cage's 4'33". It's one of the main things that appeals to me about Eurorack...there are infinite possibilities contained within all those modules and I know you know that you often get the best and most interesting results when you hook things up "out of order". Great video!
![[FULL EP.73] เปิดบ้าน 70 ล้าน "แป้ง Zbing" ยกมาทั้งญี่ปุ่น l เคหสถานบานปลาย l One Playground](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YBnJhTt07Pg/mqdefault.jpg)
Interested to hear your thoughts on this conversation! By the way if you join either Sarah's or my Patreon there is a bonus video where we show some of our noise techniques and also we share over half an hour of modular synth recordings we did together which you're allowed to download and use freely in your own music :)
patreon.com/andrewhuang
patreon.com/sarahbellereid
I pretty much only listen to classical music but I respect experimental music
Thanks for that. I’m so glad to see that you two decided to gather and have this video
what would really blow people's minds if you put together a small group
of musicians playing acoustic instruments
but for it to be all noise
and played seriously
@@sat1241 they've done that before on live TV
@@baplotnik I don't think so, whats the Andrew Huang youtube video title? I'm not talking about making sound with found objects. I'm talking about making non-"musical" sounds on acoustic musical instruments
To be fair, my classical experience *never* discouraged composition and exploration. I'm really sorry Sarah had to deal with such a rigid teacher as a youth. That's a sadly poisonous attitude for a teacher to have and convey.
It might be some classism but my teachers always told me that I can explore and compose when I learned to play and dissect what already exists.
I got so bored after ten years of daily training that I can't find any joy in playing music even twenty years later.
To be fair, it’s not always the Professor. So decades ago, way before DAWs existed, my wife and I both took a Computer Music course at a local University Music Dept. The class was made up of about 60% music students, about 30% engineering students (taking their elective course), and the rest were “other”, such as we both (newly graduated Dentists). My wife had an ARCT in piano performance and I had a long interest in electronic music. Apart from a small group of outliers, the biggest resistance and push back in the course came from the music students. ‘This is dumb”, “This is just noise” “This isn’t music”, and “This hurts my ears”, were some of the refrains I heard. Conversely, the engineering students went whole hog into the course. I assume they enjoyed exercising a bit of creative freedom, away from their normal studies. Now this is just a sample size of one class and it was a long time ago, so things are probably different now. I downsized my 5U modular system a few years back, and what I discarded made up a small self contained system in of itself. Instead of selling it off, I donated it to another local University’s Music Dept. They were delighted and are expanding their Electronic Music” curriculum. A good sign.
Right, I mean there's a whole branch called 'contemporary classical music' :)) that has been promoting the things discussed in the vid for aaa centuryy
But yeah, instrument teachers often are... err... against it :)) and discourage their students from trying extended techniques at least...
@@VampireHeart518 the Professor teaching the computer music course was one of these ‘contemporary classical” composers. He was very open with his definition of music and noise and posed the same questions Sarah and Andrew did in the video. I think he played some computer music coming out of IRCAM that caused the one girl to claim, “This hurts my ears”. 🤔 It was a long time ago and I may have some details wrong,, lol.
@VampireHeart518
I've heard a contemporary classical composter getting frustrated for feeling they're just not allowed to exist alongside the greats.
There's definitely interest but ultimately most people are just focused on Beethoven, Mozart, Bach etc.
The "I got in trouble for being creative instead of performative' comment about trumpet class hit me pretty squarely in the revelation moment thing. Its also amazing how that can 'stick' with you your whole life, some off hand comment by an instructor to a younger person and here it is 30 years later and it still defines things you do.
John Cage: “Silence is music” Andrew Huang: “especially if there are blinking lights”
The classical to noise pipeline is real and it cannot be stopped
😂
It is, but it is already a tradition going pretty far back. I respect Andrew Huang for studying the roots of it! One of the main pioneers of "noise music" was born in 1883: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgard_Var%C3%A8se
Will I have to pay royalties to my toilet?
real
I was a classical violin kid, started at 3 with Suzuki. Got very serious and traditional at 7, started entering concerto competitions. My teacher told me I could never be a composer, I was just a performer. Similarly discouraged me from learning guitar. I ended up playing Paganini’s 1st concerto for 3 straight years, which broke me, so he lost me at 16. I started a rock band, started learning jazz, never looked back. I’m still playing with those musicians I connected with at 16, 30 years later. I’m grateful for my skill and experience, but I have zero regret over leaving the fold. Now one of my favorite music activities is making interesting noise.
I was just about to say... What about jazz? But you alread had ;-)
I always find it so odd when someone else has such strong prejudice about yourself and tries to convince you, especially to a child which is clearly doing great and showing good learning capacities for a similar field/skill. Happy you got out and made friends for life!
@@SkribbleNL I couldn’t agree more. And thank you!
Did you look for a different professor?
@@VampireHeart518 Eventually my teacher (he was head of the string department at the university I attended) retired, and I got a new teacher. She encouraged me to play jazz and introduced me to the Turtle Island String Quartet, one of whom she happened to be married to. That was the beginning of the end for me and the overbearing teacher, and I’m forever grateful to her
You two need to write the thesis. Write the manifesto. Indoctrinate the masses. Noise music is music. I love you both.
@@emaniacgames8391 try silver apples of the moon it was released july 1967, almost 60 years ago, youtube wasn't around yet. will blow your mind
Yep
@futurememories1660 right, I haven’t dug very deep into noise music. But I do enjoy listening and making it. Any suggestions?!
@@emaniacgames8391 not exactly my cup of tea, but it's basically a world of its own, the 00s/10s (in the us) had a lot of bands that mixed noise and pop music, bands like black dice and (early) animal collective, i think it's a good entry point. japan has a pretty intense scene, lots of bands from there, same period. then theres some classic bands like boris and sonic youth, boredoms, deerhoof. punk was an easy gateway to noise too that's worth checking out, bands like throbbing gristle, or protopunk german act NEU. this coming from a more commercial side of things. the amount of jazz and more classical forays into noise go from free jazz (e. g. ascension by john coltrane), to xenakis, stockhausen, spectral music etc. it's absolutely a world of its own and fascinating. then again, not my cup of tea.
Funnily enough, a manifesto has been written: in 1913 :D but yeah, more people need to get on board haha
(&here is it: ''The Art of Noises (Italian: L'arte dei Rumori) is a Futurist manifesto written by Luigi Russolo in a 1913 letter to friend and Futurist composer Francesco Balilla Pratella. In it, Russolo argues that the human ear has become accustomed to the speed, energy, and noise of the urban industrial soundscape; furthermore, this new sonic palette requires a new approach to musical instrumentation and composition.''
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Noises#:~:text=The%20Art%20of%20Noises%20(Italian,Futurist%20composer%20Francesco%20Balilla%20Pratella. )
As an acoustic guitar player, fret noise was my "bete noire" for a while, and then I learned to love it. When I play a real piano, it's the damper pedal sound. Real instruments have noise in them. It's part of them. The vocalist breathing is a part of the music too. These noises are part of us, and (at least notionally) our instruments being "alive".
A lot of our inculturated values about "what is music" are nothing more, and nothing less, than social conventions. "I am a musician" is a membership in a social class, and there seems to be a lot of "policing" in human social classes. "You may be a musician, but you're not a CLASSICAL musician!". Translation: CLASSICAL MUSICIANS are REAL MUSICIANS, and you are not that. We also call this "gatekeeping". And it is. And humans do it in a lot of contexts. It's not very helpful, mostly. We tend to do that stuff and harm ourselves and others a lot, for what benefit? What are we protecting? Who or what are we serving by telling other people that their ideas and musical work are worthless, or "worth less"?
"We tend to do that stuff and harm ourselves and others a lot, for what benefit? What are we protecting?"
In all these cases there's a deep insecurity of ego, which protects itself by all the means you've described.
It's deeply rooted in all levels of society, music is in fact just a relatively benign example.
Years ago I sent my first ep to a programmer at a certain radiostation here in Belgium and the answer I got was that they were a bit scared of my music. At first I was a bit upset but eventually I realised that this was actually a great compliment. They had an emotional response and that’s what is important.
I think it's mostly because people are programmed (no pun intended) by decades of movies to associate certain sounds with certain, VERY narrow, feelings. Much of the vocabulary in more avantgarde music is, in movies, used exclusively for horror basically... any dissonance, tension, weird texture, gestures, BAM, horror :)) urgh.
I think so many people are so set on the things they know.
When they don't immediately like it they reject it.
I think it's sad to hear most people just have their music taste set from when they're 14, and then hear them complain that nothing gets to them as much anymore.
…but the problem is that they're no longer open to let art shape their taste. Any time you come across something weird that you might not like but makes you feel something interesting it's a good time to keep exploring that.
Back in 2002 I was trying college for a second time and I was in a music appreciation class taught by this professor who was deep in medieval madrigals. One day she sat in on our smaller class when we had brought in examples of things we thought our fellow students would think wasn't music.
I brought in Merzbow.
One other guy in my class thought Merzbow was music and the TA challenged them on it. Afterwards I was talking to the professor and she was interested so I loaned her 3 albums. She claimed to listen to them and really enjoy it. Was an interesting class for sure
Madrigals and Merzbow! Two of the best things ever created :)
This sort of thing can happen in other types of music besides classical. Back when I was at university, I was at a school with a very successful jazz oriented music program. I liked jazz, but I was the outlier because, as a percussionist, I kept asking about sounds and noise. Finally, I asked my percussion teacher, who played in a well known symphony, about using sheet metal and other found items as percussion. They didn't know much about anything outside of strict classical percussion, but gave me a copy of the score for John Cage's 'First Construction in Metals'. This started me on a whole new journey of working with 'sounds' and I haven't stopped since!
As Sun Ra so aptly put it “space is the place” for your mind. Forget the earthly constraints. It’s easy to nod internally about embracing the outer limits of perception but we often fall into habits and dwell in familiar lands. Nothing wrong with the house by the lake and the beautiful vistas but with all of space to explore it does invite the Intrepid to roam free. Really enjoyed this conversation :)
Yes we must “travel the spaceways” from sonic “planet to” sonic “planet”
I wish more people could understand this about electronic music, there are those who claim that new technologies are 'ruining music' when in reality they are simply opening doors to infinite untapped creative realms.
Wow, this conversation is so wonderful and *so necessary*. I teach in a university music department and started an audio production program a few years ago in what was otherwise a conventional Midwestern public-school-teacher-training-oriented department, and so much of what your saying rings true with my own background and current situation. What amazes me are some of my colleagues' objections to this kind of work merely existing alongside other kinds of music-making in the department; it's almost like they view it as a sort of contagion. (It's not a universal attitude, but there's enough of it to make my job harder, and *definitely* enough to make some students' lives harder.)
You definitely hit on some of the same issues I've dealt with, especially how working in audio/noise/tech smears the boundaries between composing and performing. And if you're working in something like VCV Rack, you're also smearing the lines between those activities and instrument-building, and that just doesn't compute in the classical world. It's much more like the pedagogical structure you find in an art department: classes are taught in particular techniques, working toward a more holisitic goal of individual student art-object-making.
Anyway, thanks so much for this.
It’s so unfortunate to be met with those attitudes that aren’t even open to alternate approaches co-existing. You’re doing good work!
I remember many years ago, reading an article about ‘creative listening’ It talked about standing in a busy street, and listening to the ambience as an orchestra, the rumble of traffic as bass, engine sounds as mid ranges, and maybe background birdsong, or people talking as top end. I still do this, and it was great to hear you both touch on this in this discussion. 💚😎
Reminded me right away of Frank Zappa teaching Steve Allen to play the bicycle way back in 1963. He was definitely exploring the same questions - what is noise? what is music?
A theme explored as well in the Classical world (which the avantgarde was a part of), starting about a century ago
The discussion of "accidents" reminds me of the observation I always come back to, that so much in electric and electronic music comes about from accidents and side-effects. Feedback turned amplifiers into oscillators, the filters that the radio and telephone companies invented for keeping signals out became the ones that sculpt musical timbre, broken and clipping amps became desirable fuzz and distortion on electric guitars - and the volt-per-octave exponential curve in modular synths is mostly something BJT transistors just do. Of course people then worked very hard to tame all these, but it's amazing how so many of the parts and processes we work with were intended for some entirely different application or method of functioning.
Sarah's thoughts and perspective about music and noise is beautiful! And Andrew has always pushed the boundaries when it comes to sound and musical creativity. You both are very unique musicians and a great source of musical inspiration!💙🙏🏻
Andrew, i am so happy that you put out a video about this. I'm a noise musician and you're one of the people who made me interested in seriously taking up making music in the first place (i also have a history with classical music, i was learning piano in a music school from like 6 to 10 years old, but discovered noise more so through punk, hardcore and generally weird internet music later on in my early teens)
Reminds me of the song Echoes from Pink Floyd. 9 minutes into the song, it dives into complete chaos, but it felt appropriate as it was part of the journey of the 22 minute song. It makes you feel uncomfortable during this section as it doesn't sound like anything human, but once it transitions to the ending of the song, it completely elevates it.
What immediately came to my mind: Musique concrète. It never became mainstream, but was very influential. Jean-Michel Jarre was a student of Pierre Schaeffer, and the influence can be heard in many of his pieces. Kraftwerk was influenced by it, and early Tangerine Dream clearly was (in their experimental phase). And many more.
Yeah, and avantgarde *is* classical music. But WOW, didn't know J-MJ was a student of Schaeffer!! How cool
Paul McCartney was really excited by musique concrete. He hung out with a lot of London's avant-garde in the mid 60s. It was his idea to use layers of tape loops in “Tomorrow Never Knows”, and I think he came up with the chopped-up bits of circus music in “Mr Kite”. Then of course John assembled the huge musique concrete opus “Revolution 9”.
@@mooseyard Forgot about that!
Hip hop production especially the heavy sample collage approach is the legacy of musique concrete stuff like Bomb Squad, Madlib, etc.
I got into Electronics through Morton Subotnik, Wendy Carlos, Tangerine Dream and Fripp and Eno. I got into noise through Pierre Henri and Fred Frith and Henry Cow. I got into acoustic noise through Art Ensemble of Chicago, Sam Rivers Quartet and Anthony Braxton. The 60's and 70's was such an awesome time for musical experimentation. I was so lucky to be there for that.
I absolutely loved sitting in and help edit this discussion.
I really resonate with “leaving” classical music. I loved performing and playing with my flute, but wasn’t a fan of how rigorous and close-minded it was at times. I ultimately left to pursue more music composition and music production on my own time during my undergrad. However, it wasn’t until I encountered free improvisation and avante grade styles of music in the composition stream that really freed me from the strict black and white of ‘what is noise’ and ‘what is music’. I don’t own a piece of modular gear at all, but it’s extremely liberating to just make sound regardless of whatever the means, whether playing an instrument with extended techniques with no thought for notated composition, or pushing your sound into a random assortment of effects and experimenting what might happen. At the end of the day, if it sounds good, and you feel good doing it, then that’s great. 😊
No hate on classical music, as it got me started into my musical journey, but it doesn’t mean I have to end with it 🎶
but... the avantgarde styles of music ARE classical music :)
sure, many in the interpreting & instrument-playing field are against that too :))
I just want people to know that this is not a separate thing, it is a niche IN the classical world
@@VampireHeart518 you're right! Definitely a more experimental niche :) and it did come from the western classical tradition
Great conversation. So much acceptance here. It made me cry.
Fascinating chat. You two should do a podcast or series along these lines. I'd love to hear these ideas examined and explored in a longer form.
I think it's not only classical, but a lot of people think about art in absolutes. "The perfect tone", "the best instrumentalist", "perfect pitch". There's a lot to be won if we just relax and enjoy. And I'm not talking about using high end equipment and make it sound like substandard supposed crap. Do your thing with your things where you stand.
When you describe picking something musical out of acoustic chaos, that is really not dissimilar from seeing shapes in clouds, or seeing the suggestion of a form emerge from a speckled floor tile. This is something we do in visual media all the time, so it's not surprising to me that the same thing can be done with sound.
As I was growing up, I was thrown into the world of funky chords due to growing up in a baptist household. As such, my idea of music was already fairly broad. Around the same time, I played a lot of games from Nintendo (and a few from Sega), which introduced me to chiptune, jazz, rock, metal. The idea that noise could be a part of music was entrained into me by the very existence of the noise channel in 8-bit and 16-bit music, and I didn't even know that. I was then introduced to dubstep, drums & bass, liquid dnb, chipstep, et cetera; I also learned about drumline pieces, which are literally nothing by percussion doing their thing. With my progression of music exploration, it was easy for me to call these things music.
But what is the difference between a drumline playing 12 different varieties of drums and someone playing on pots and pans with a wooden spoon? What's the difference between brush strokes on a snare drum and the chug of a locomotive's wheel-especially considering the brushes are often used to emulate a train's sound in concert bands? And once I found Andrew Huang's videos (Superfast Beatmaking, Song Challenge, random videos of taking random objects and making music out of them), I saw the connection immediately.
I've long since reached the point of believing that genre cannot contain music-even music of similar vibe or history (just look at gospel, jazz, and blues). Noise is just what music is, and that is beautiful-genres are moreso the way we as creators narrow the scope of that noise to create the vibe we're looking for. Everyone makes noise-harsh synthesized static, the roaring distortion of a drop-tuning guitar, the scream of an overblown saxophone, the thunder of a rolled snare, the sea of voices cheering for the performers on stage. That's noise. That's music.
All it takes is for the people listening to realize that.
I like that take on genres. Well put.
About mistakes (I’m improvising these thoughts): For a listener, mistakes are only detectable if there’s a predetermined map; they’re heard as disruptions of expectations. Or in arhythmic noise music. To a performer, a mistake is an unrealized intention; instead there’s an unintentional sound. Our response to mistakes depends on genre. If it’s perceivable in, say, a performance of a Bach Prelude, a single note error might quickly disappear from consciousness if the performer carries on as if it didn’t happen (the performer may be internally aghast!). When there is no map, say, in a rhythmically erratic electronic piece, or Ornette Coleman playing free jazz, mistakes are banished. In the Bach, there’s no fixing it, there’s only carrying on. In jazz, a mistake might be perceivable but it can also be an opportunity. It’s only one psychological element for musicians, but one of the appeals of noise music is to live in a world where mistakes are banished.
I absolutely adore Sarah's mindset and approach. Thanks for having her on for this chat. While the both of you were discovering these ways of thinking in the library at university, I've been discovering them on youtube. I very much appreciate the both of you, and others like you, who share so much knowledge and perspective with the world on here.
Noisy textures and timbres have always tickled my "ooooh, shiny" response, every since I heard my first distorted guitar. Abrasive and aggressive resonates with me far more profoundly than pretty and smooth.
I learned music theory in school... but I didn't _understand_ it until I left that all behind and got into synthesis. Traditional music theory made it _much harder_ to understand anything, and mostly just felt like unnecessarily complex historical baggage. Nothing really "clicked" until I switched from piano to an isomorphic instrument, derived note scales myself from basic math, pulled out a spectrometer, and started making sounds from scratch with synthesizers. It also helped quite a bit to avoid deliberate or analytical methods and play intuitively by feel, like humming ideas into a voice recorder while going about my day, then later using that as a scaffold to build a song around... and adding layers by just jamming along with my incomplete tracks and saving the good bits. To understand music, I had to unlearn everything I was taught in music school.
Could you exemplify what are the contents of what you refer to as 'music theory'? Genuinely curious, as I feel that americans have a different definition from what I'm used to :)
@@VampireHeart518 Schools taught how to read sheet music and mechanically perform it, and based all music education on a system designed for the piano. This makes the key of Ionian C major easier, at the expense of almost every other key and scale, and artificially necessitates learning everything 12 times since it's different in each key. The actual reasons behind things weren't explored, and instead educators relied on a lot of rote memorization and a general sense of woo about how stuff worked. Mere musicians weren't meant to concern themselves with such things; they were meant to just practice repetition and obedience as tools of a conductor, who in turn was merely following instructions handed down from a wizard.
Composing music was treated as an advanced topic, black magic, to be approached with caution and reverence, from a very deliberate and analytical perspective. It was like teaching someone how to create cooking recipes by teaching them about enzymes and peptide-protein interactions using pen and paper... when really they just needed to spend some time in a kitchen putting ingredients together to get a feel for what works.
So I ended up having to learn all the important stuff on my own... mostly by just messing around and having fun with synths and loopers and spectrum analyzers and stuff.
I've never taken a collegiate-level theory course since I studied STEM in college instead, but from what I've seen the way it's typically taught seems "confused". In addition to 'historical baggage' (like using basso continue to analyze a piece built on fundamental bass, for example) it seems like the whole pedagogical approach struggles to separate music notation from music theory. Also everyone is obsessed with the piano, which probably stunts learning to an extent. I've thought about making a series that teaches theory in a more scientific way where subjects build off of each other, maybe some day I'll get around to it.
I agree with this - concepts about music theory, composition, orchestration and the harmonic series all started to make so much more sense to me once I learned synthesis from scratch, which is really at its core a lesson in how sound works, and how/why instruments sound the way they do and what timbres and combinations can be created to either complement or contrast one another. Now when I approach composition, whether for electronic music or a acoustic instruments, I make more deliberate choices about both harmony and instrumentation informed by ideas of how waveforms work, also thinking about the contour of sound in terms of envelopes. So much that didn't make sense at first from my music theory books suddenly clicked when I thought of it from a synth perspective!
You guys need to connect with the excellent composer/youtube creator/podcaster Samuel Andreyev. A discussion together would be extremely useful for a lot of people who seem stuck between various "walls" of sound creation.
Wow! You two are my tribe! And as a long time DJ (since 1979) and producer, you have articulated and validated where I landed. It’s normal now, but it surely not accepted by my music teachers back in the day. Thank you for this!
I had a great teacher 20 years ago named Fred who told us to stop listening to, and categorizing things as music, but more appreciating sound. He made some remarkable electronic music from what most consider noise.
Really. I think that approach nudges us to appreciate the life around us more too :)
I resonate with both of you so much! i started like a traditional musician and later on, when i started my production road i played with so much noise and its very exciting!! This is gonna be a video that i'll be visiting from time to time i can assure you that, much respect and love ♥️
When The Beatles were recording I Feel Fine, John Lennon leaned his electrified acoustic guitar against an amplifier, which caused audio feedback. The band members liked the sound and asked producer George Martin to incorporate it into the song. He suggested putting at the beginning of the song.
Lennon proudly proclaimed that it was the first intentional use of feedback in a studio recording.
Man I am LOVING Andrew’s personal style these days. Dude’s on fire and looks like a million bucks!
For me, I’m in love with the imperfection of medium. For example, I mistakenly found that my field recorder picks up some crazy frequencies from a PVM monitor I have in my studio. I found that experimenting with that using that as the center of my compositions brings them into realms I wouldn’t have explored otherwise. I like mixing classic jazz with electronic interference and feedback for example and it sounds unreal to my ears!
I think you cannot simply frame this into ‘moving’ from classical music to noise.
You definitely can do a lot with one style of music, but I find that getting the best of any genre requires expanding horizons and bridging gaps between things as such that two completely different things can be one. And treating them as two separate things becomes increasingly absurd the further you go with doing that.
This. Embracing noise is the natural progression of all that happened in classical music and it's what did get to happen with the avantgarde. There is still a rift, sadly, with many musicians not wanting to look into a paradigm that has been going on for a century at this point :))
Music has two essential things: it happens through time and affects our auditory experience. Both are essential to our consciousness of the world and our auditory perception of beauty and ugly.
When you change the timing characteristics of any musical composition, you change the musical message. Timing characteristics being rhythm (speed of changes), pace, direction, pauses, etcetera.
Our auditory experience has to do with how our brains perceive any sound and its company (images, tactile/proprioceptive stymuli, even smells or tastes).
The wind happens through time, is just white noise changing, moving the leaves and refreshing our skin. It can be music without all the academy.
Great conversation! I always come back to John Cage’s saying, “The music never stops; only the listening”. I think this applies to all art: “art” isn’t something that’s inherent in the work; it’s a mode of attention. Pauline Oliveros addresses that beautifully as well. Once we’ve got past the somewhat pointless stage of asking “is this art?” or “is this music?”, we can get to more fruitful questions such as “is this interesting?”, “does this move me?”, or “what can I learn from this?”. It seems so pointless to gatekeep the definition of art when we can be creating and enjoying instead.
where did Pauline say that? I would love to read/listen to the context
@@lemon2125 I’m not sure if Oliveros said something specifically along the lines of the Cage quote: it’s more the general sense from her Deep Listening work that listening can be a creative act, no matter what you’re listening to. She defined Deep Listening as “listening in every possible way to every thing possible to hear no matter what you are doing”. I think that’s from her book “Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice”.
As someone who is performing / composing Classical Ottoman Music and Noise I can say, the more you know more about the practice of both(it could be any) styles of music the more they improve each other reciprocally. Music in the end is an approach on making noise anyways :) There is a very nice quote of Larry Polansky: " Music shouldn’t be about me guarding my style or me putting down historical claims on things. It should rather be a fluid bidirectional and N-directional process. "
Thank you for this video and have a creative journey! :)
Composing scales is the norm, that can expand to composing sounds the way painting composes colors and shapes. They should trade so that painting can start composing color scales and shape scales.
I had no idea you both such an academic background. Good for you for following your heart. I'm 57 and still haven't found where i am going with my sounds. Thanks for the ref to experimental artists I hadn't heard of.
Love this so much. I feel like I'm probably part of the first generation to have grown up with TH-cam as my intro to both "noise" and classical music, so it's super interesting to see how they feel at odds with each other in an institutional space when people like you both are applying theory to these newer and avant garde modes of music. Love it!
They're only at odds in the instrument departments (and even there not fully). Composition is all about that noise ;)
i’ve been playing music for over 20 years and love it. but the joy you both share in this conversation is on a completely different level. sarah’s excitement is genuinely exciting me. i want to hear more of you two discuss!
This is such a valuable discussion! Thanks for taking the time to collate these thoughts for all the curious minds that may be looking for validation outside of their more traditional mentors. It hurt to hear Sarah describe her experience when branching into composition and being reprimanded; an artist seeking more perspectives for their craft should be praised, not shut down for the sake of retaining a tenure. Deeply appreciate what you both do for music!
What a wonderful conversation! I have an experience to share, when noise became music for me. I was in New York City many decades ago, riding the IRT subway from uptown to Grand Central Station on a hot summer day, when the train suddenly stopped between stations. Everyone in the crowed car was just waiting to get moving again, as the temperature slowly increased. I decided to move to another car, hoping it would be less crowded, so I slid the door open to do that. Instead I stayed outside between cars because there was a hint of breeze there. A few minutes later the train started up, and I remained out there. (Maybe not the safest thing to do!) As the train started up with creaks and groans, I found myself listening to the accumulation of sounds as if it were a piece of abstract music. The orchestra of wheel squeaks and bumps along the tracks quickly accelerated to a roar as the train picked up speed, swelling in volume and intensity to an almost unbearable level. But I kept with it, as the cacophony reached full speed, hurtling toward our destination. Then came an elaborate deceleration, as we slowed to come into the station, complete with loud brake squeals and hisses. It seemed to me like a structured piece of music, with intro, crescendo and resolution. When I stepped out onto the platform, I was in a higher state of consciousness, with every face and sound seeming to be part of a colossal multi-media movie. I was high as a kite! This lasted for several minutes as I walked down 42nd Street, until I passed a record store, and my attention narrowed to normal consciousness again. It was an experience I will never forget. It forever changed the way I experience sound and music.
This reminds me so much of the art history and philosophy of art I learned about in my fine art degree. The conversation about "what is music vs. sound" parallels so many of the attempts to ask "what is art".
It's a shame - besides John Cage, I found there was a lot of condescension and dismissive was towards music in the fine art world. I think part of that comes back to how music vs. noise is constructed, and how music is pigeonholed by popular expectations into offering a limited range of aesthetic experiences. When sound is appealing, we call it music and valuable, and when it's unappealing, we call it noise and worthless - but art is far more free to be valued for being unappealing.
I wonder if part of this double standard comes down to the simple fact that you can look away from something quite easily, but tuning out a sound is a much more difficult and slow process.
And there are so many fantastic composers, both in the 20th century and living now! Great point - yes, there is more to the art and experience of music than just 'pleasant air wiggles'
Interesting last point, it crossed my mind as well that it may be one of the reasons of many people's... hostility. I guess in the concert hall / space one feels a bit like being kept hostage. And usually you don't know how long each piece will take
this is something I think All of my students need to see from now on - it is just that good! Thank you both.
‘loved the discussion
the discussion at 12m of random brilliance is similar to visual art, where old sketches and doodles can ignite and help lead the next complete illustration piece.
This is highly relatable...I also did the conservatory route and mostly gave it up to become what I call a "sound scientist." Thanks for sharing, this makes me feel less isolated!
Sarah was my teacher for a couple of classes at CalArts and she was an amazing teacher :') so cool to see her hanging with Andrew Huang
A violin/theory/comp major in the early 80s, I drove a car with a faulty odometer cable, which made a rhythmic swishing sound, and I often on long trips turned off my cassette player to instead listen to the steady pulse of that cable. I still play & teach instruments, but composition is my true creative outlet. I enjoy odd tonalities & dissonant counterpoint, to be sure, but I also use dissonance in ways that cause my harmonic structures to mimic noise. Lately, I’m experimenting with a chromatic style in which functional harmony becomes irrelevant, but the relationships between the 12 tones, along with sophisticated rhythmic structures, can give the impression of percussion, free jazz, and noise. I’m glad to see Busoni’s aesthetic is still alive - and Varese’s “modern composer will never die”.
holy cow sara ! my one modular synthesis professor loves her !! glad to see it
Totally agree about the texture and grit is what MAKES the sound.
If anyone have listened to my music.
You realize that it's usually geared more towards rythmic textures and grit, than "musicallity" and melodies. (some songs obviously differ)
Maaaaaaaan! You guys are two people after my musical heart! Not necessarily because of genre or style or anything, but because of UNDERSTANDING. I think one of the biggest things people miss is that timbre IS the combination of a fundamental and/or overtones and/or noise. When I was young in the 80s, I got a CASIO SK-1 sampling keyboard. It was GREAT. And it had "drawbars" that weren't that, but you could press overtone buttons to create custom sounds where each press brought that overtone out a bit more. So 4 presses was more of that overtone than 2. So they did the same thing as drawbars. And that gave me a basic understanding of how sounds are "put together." Then from sampling and finding a bug where it might sample a sound and the sound only be a few milliseconds long. So if you looped it (sustain during key press), you would hear a note, not from the sound itself, but from the sound REPEATING. That gave me an understanding that octaves are just twice the frequency. From that I figured out how to compute the equal temperament tuning frequencies.
Also, after having done a lot of home recording, I started "hearing noise in music" instead of the opposite. Like a lot of frequencies squished together can make speakers and ears unhappy. It's not that "noise" in and of itself is bad or unpleasant. It's that what people normally label as "noise" is irritating to them. Really, noise is just a lack of a prominent fundamental. Some noise you want. Some you don't. I did a recording once where the hiss of the mic was nuts. And I HATED it. But then, after a while when I started LISTENING, the hiss actually gave it a "mood" all its own. The song was meant as a 40s style piano, bass, drum, singer type of slow crooner tune. The more I listened, the more I liked it. Now, as soon as the song comes on, it's like a sigh. It just puts you "there" where you need to be with THAT particular song. It's kind of like how the mono and room noise of Procol Harum's original A Whiter Shade of Pale paints a sonic picture BEHIND all the music (which is phenomenal in itself).
Finally, I'm no expert, but I have gleaned over the years that classical used to be a much more "open" genre. It was experimental and many composers - including much of the greats - would routinely improvise. I had a composition class that tore apart some Chopin sonatas and showed how he played loose and fast with the rules of that form. I don't remember that form necessarily. But the teacher was a real appreciator of music and really pointed out how his soft "rebellion" made his music stand out. Not saying it is always appropriate. But I AM saying that you never know unless you TRY! And maybe classical music has become a bit "lost in translation" over the centuries from a ferocious need to preserve itself in its most formulaic sense as to not lose its unique identity as a genre. I'd LOVE to see a very proper classical piece whose main theme is improvised on the spot. That would be.... beyond amazing. Sure. Jazz is great. Classical is great. But I really feel classical improv is a lost art and should definitely be brought back and treated with the respect it should be given.
Interesting stuff. I think I had a somewhat "progressive" education while getting my masters in classical percussion. Partly because I had a lot of focus on chamber music (my bachelors) and modern percussion ensemble. John Cage and Iannis Xenakis (like you mentioned) are two Avant-garde composers using electronics elements that also wrote for percussion and made some of our most iconic pieces. In Denmark where I did my masters, I ended up working a lot with the electronic composition students since I never say no to a challenge and are a bit "crazy". The pieces I premier and performed where sometimes multi media and often more based on a general concept or "experimentation". I think you guys would have fit right in.
not even five minutes into this video and it's already resonating a lot. From growing up in a classical music environment to getting interested in synthesis to learning about Pauline Oliveros to hearing the music in every sound (including all the sounds Sarah mentioned). Now I'm enjoying experimenting with anything from the usual melodic, blues/jazz style of improvisation to noise, synthesizers, guitar feedback and anything else I can get my hands on and it's been so freeing and encouraging me to expand my musical horizons, and it's great to see other musicians I respect sharing those same experiences.
i've felt so alone in this pipeline for so long, i'd spent almost two decades trying to shoehorn myself into acceptance in the classical scenes with my wierd synth/trumpet practice, and it felt so futile so often. i love to see both of yall finding joy and success at the other side of this !!
7:49 (to Sarah) - As a classically-trained singer, I have to say I'm sorry you went through that in college. The approach taught in music will change depending on the teacher you have. I was taught at a small college, and because the school was smaller, there was more cross-over for students. A guy who plays drums for the jazz band would also get the change to play percussion for the wind ensemble, mostly because the school needed more players. I'm sorry you didn't get as much wiggle room in the schools you attended.
I would encourage you to branch out as you explore. I'm sure you're branching out much more than while you were in college. I hope that you find some kind of fulfillment in your exploration of music, and of what can be musical.
that is incredible on so many levels - first, I agree with you both on this, let me call it, "modular music theory" - where you play with textures, modulation, noise filtered and enveloped etc. and so on. But the other thing is that I observe you both separately for some time and you brought a lot of musical ideas to me, and suddenly you both talk to each other and the two stories combine. And it makes perfect sense to me, as I new them as separate, but coherent. Like I would see my friends meet :)
Also, I think that ‘play’ is so important to the creative and expressive process. I have the most fun just finding new ways to explore my world too.
As someone who's really digging into ambient/"noise" music lately, this conversation was incredibly appreciated
This was amazing! Super interesting and I can relate to literally everything you two talked about. I also left the world of classical music (conservatory classically trained pianist) and deep dived into electronic music in the broad sense of the word because I felt extremely restricted by all the shoulds and shouldn’t of the classical music world. And what a journey it’s been! My moto is: experiment, try new things, there are no rules.
This is the collaboration I never knew I needed, coming from a musician who also went through the classical to synth nerd pipeline
It's quite appealing how you wanted to start talking about noise but then the conversation shifted towards what music is. It is very hard to discuss about noise because it is still a field to explore! Just to add to that evergrowing conversation, I share one of the definitions a teacher of mine did about noise: she defined it as 'unfocused sound', and since then I haven't been able to find a definition that changes my mind in that sense.
I think of of mistakes as being exactly that: an incorrect application of intention. However, the reaction to a mistake is usually what we think about: "oops, better never do that again," or "oh wow, I got to figure how to do that more!" But I think there should be a spectrum of reactions to that discovery of improperly executed intent. "Never do that again" may be appropriate for some genres or compositions. "I've gotta try that in this other song!" is likely the most common response we should have to a mistake. "This should happen again in the next phrase/passage/verse" is definitely a valid response that musicians should consider more often.
I don't know if you've ever heard of it, but there's this contemporary dance form called contact improvisation. It's an interesting exploration of movement based on some simple principles and it usually not danced to any music, or if it is, the music is improvised live. I practiced this dance for years, but over the last years I became more interested to the music that can happen in the space of a contact improv dance jam. I had beautiful experiences when some improvisational musicians brought in different objects and let people play with them, also a small synth and playing with that sound live. The sound and the space of moving people have a very interesting and sensitive connection: noises can spark laughter or deep silence, rythm can bring up the energy, and noises sampled in live and replayed can cause a ton of people to move together, to repeat it, interpret it and take it apart, morph it into something else. It's something that is not traditional in EVERY aspect, but it's deep, meditative and also liberating and neverending, addictive. One of my dreams as a musician is to play for contact improv jams, or just make an album inspired by it. Maybe noone will listen, but I don't care, it will be my playground :D
Sarah needs to write a book. It's like music to my ears hearing her explain her brilliant perspectives ❤
'classical' music is like using calculus to paint a portrait; i am so happy you were able to open up to the entire world of sound.
As a multi instrumentalist who has a similar path in the 90s into the early 2000s i can relate to this. this is why i mess with synthsis, tape machines, samplers. filters , delays, so much fun to be made with all these tools. its not unlike a traditional artist getting into pinstriping and going with the flow of pulling lines . its almost a meditation compared to the traditional painter say doing a photo realistic painting. that free form simplicity can really tap into very musical experiences that are far more enjoyable then being able to noodle on my guitar with precision. with that said i enjoy both processes , mixing and matching tools can bring alot to the table. Chemical brothers got me away from alot of traditional sounds. and sampling can teach us new ways of timing, new ways of notation that might not have come naturally alone. and modular is alot like that aswell. its like looking at the clouds and seeing something in the clouds , a Rorschach test , you can find new ideas and it allows the brain to find things in what might be considered just noise. above all, its just fun. I love what is talked about here so much. thanks for sharing your stories and ideas on the matter.
well said.
Some great ideas from both of you - so liberating. Thank you.
I was never good at being the kind of focused perfectionist required of classical training. It's why i ceased that path after reaching adulthood. Since then I've vowed to be the best 'me' I can be, musically speaking, and that means recognizing that my ear is my strongest tool, my imagination is my muse, and a meditative state is the best portal to access these strengths.
I love the discussion at 16:40 around whether music should be enjoyable or whether it is allowed to be discomforting. As someone who was getting into music production around the dubstep era, I feel like some of the sound design there played pretty explicitly with this discomfort. The amazing video essay "All my homies hate Skrillex" gives a beautiful insight into how myself and many others got fully absorbed into this genre because of a fascination with discomfort and later came to hate the resulting arms race to the most loud drop. Of course many other electronic genres play with discomfort in super interesting way, so I would love to see this topic discussed further.
Either way, thanks for the great video!
Noise is kind of what a drum set is. People love it. Why? Because it makes noise. The cymbals especially. We love them for their round and full sound. It's not about notes or rhythms, just about the thick sound they create.
I guess ultimately, music is anything that the person who created it calls music. I watched a Q&A with John Zorn where he said that he occasionally gave performances that (IIRC) involved placing and moving objects on the tray of an overhead projector. Though the performance had no sonic element, he was adamant that it was, in fact, music.
Hmm, I remember practicing French Horn solos and find great variation and creativity between the various virtuosos - Dennis Brain, Barry Tuckwell, etc. Rigidity was not what I found in my little corner of classical music.
As someone who has largely burnt out on through-composed/conventionally gifted music but has generally enjoyed Andrew's content whenever it shows up in my recommendations, I was both glad and surprised to learn how important non-representational art was to him and am also very interested in hearing more noise-informed work from him as well as work by Sarah, who is entirely new to me, in general. Thanks for sharing this part of yourselves!
Sarah has some really cool no-input mixer videos that I recommend checking out sometime, she's great
Thanks guys! This was a GREAT conversation. Excuse me while I riff a moment but ... I just got back from week in Alaska during which I attended a July 4th parade, rode several trains, visited museums, took walks, got a ship to go out and see wildlife, etc. etc. AND I took along a 4 track digital tascam and a PO33. The PO33 is full with sixteen fresh samples from ???? and I have a full 30 minutes of field recordings from every imaginable sound scape taken mostly 1 minute but never more than two minutes at a time. So far I've made through about 10 minutes of the tascam stuff and already filled a whole new bank of 16 sounds on the Zeptocore - and that's by skipping a lot of stuff I plan to use eventually. In other words this conversation was so on point for me it's really serendipitous and I'm so inspired by it. Thanks!!!
nice casual talk about sound and music in general.
Something I’m kind of curious about is, is visual music possible? I mean I know it is, but that’s not what I mean.
When you hear music, it makes you feel things. Happy. Motivated. Sad. Angry. So many other feelings. Existential thoughts. Blank mind. It can do so many things. But can that same effect by translated into visuals that deaf people could watch and feel the same things?
I think the reason why Andrew sees the lights as music is because he has heard the same modules produce sound so much. Some musicians who read scores a lot hear them in their heads, and think the scores even without any sound are music. Dance and other visual arts can be enjoyed in similar ways to music, but personally, I think music needs to be sound, or the very least: an expectation or imagination of sound.
ive been a dubstep producer for several years now and this is exactly how i feel. many people hate on the genre because "its all one note" but if you really open your mind to it theres so many different things to listen to. the drums serve a much different purpose than in traditional music. as a producer myself, listening to other peoples music i always try to think about the other artists processes and approach to a similar idea where the main goal is headbanging. it opens your eyes to the idea of tone vs melody, and phrasing with atonal sounds. really fun concets!
funny enough the other genre i love most is ambient music, specifically horror soundtracks which i believe has pretty much all of these exact same concepts!
What a duo! :D
When I was a kid, my dad had a CD that was Christmas music played on tools (drills, saws, hammers, etc). That really subtly influenced the way I think about sound. If we can make conventionally good music with tools, what else can we do?
Remember, folks: there are no bad sounds, only sounds that do and don't fit whatever you're conveying.
Not to mention the Singing Dogs
I have no formal training outside a week of piano i rebelled against in primary school. Had a piano in the house I mucked around on from a super early age, doing simple scales frustrated me as I could already do so much more. Anyway progressed thought keyboards and synths but always gravitated back to a upright piano, not perfectly in tune, the overtones and the sound of the strings interacting when the pedal is down. More recently with a 2600 clone, I really enjoyed reading the original ARP 2600 manual. Meant for education, the original ARP 2600 manual available freely online is a real gem starting with how you hear and perceive sound and then later how that applies to recreating it. Great stuff :) But yes, I enjoyed this talk, thank you :)
Sound or music is like water, it flows in so many directions, and crosses many perceived boundaries
its amazing to me that the teacher reprimanding a performance major trying composition could be so myopic as to not see the myriad ways that gaining a broader context to music and sound could then feedback into performance in a way that mere practice never could. To perceive performance through new lenses can open up entirely different realms of relating to the instrument that are not on the table if you only ever do the same kind of route engagement with sound
Noise: an auditory signal you don't want.
Signal: an auditory signal you do want.
Music: a collection of auditory signals, or lack of auditory signals over time.
I've been operating using these definitions for decades, they have served me very well.
Actually noise has an acoustic definition.
It is a signal composed of a multitude of vibrations whose different frequencies are not integer multiples of the lowest frequency vibration (no harmonic structure).
This distinguishes it from musical sounds, where the frequencies are integer multiples of the lowest one, creating a sound perceived as harmonious.
I think THIS is where it comes to the issue of colloquial definitions vs. official definitions vs. contextual definitions.
Noise being "something you don't want" is a subjective idea (we all "want different things at different times). To paraphrase a famous saying: "One man's noise is another man's signal".
Contextually, music CAN be defined as "signals" from a production standpoint, because it's all about what the artist's intent is, but from a listener's standpoint, that changes based on experience, mood, and a variety of other factors that cannot always be isolated. In this context, subjective definition changes from how it's used in production, to how people speak.
Think of the cliche' of the parent telling their child to "cease that noise". It is "noise" because the parent doesn't want it, but to the child, it is wanted. Your "definition" technically works in this case, but it's still talking about the same sound. It isn't an objective definition, it's SUBJECTIVE and that's where the confusion begins.
In a conversation about what we CAN call noise vs. music, these definitions that might be useful in a studio setting are essentially useless as it doesn't help with the objective ideas that encompass this broader definition of music.
@@Kadaj456 To me, the sound of a washing machine or dryer or the sound of a BART train passing through the Transbay Tube can be music. It depends on how I'm listening to it.
Such an interesting conversation! I'm a painter who dabbles in music now and then and I found many parallels between my outlook on visual art and both of your thoughts on music. There really is no right or wrong way to create art (as long as no one is being harmed). Exploration, expression, and/or communication is art at its core. Thanks for posting this!
P.S. I have your book but I still need to read it 😅
I make noise and some people are nice with me and call it music.
Very good conversation. Liked it a lot.
I am not a musician and I found this conversation to be very inspiring. Embracing play and exploration in life as opposed to following a straight line that feels oppressive. Allowing ourselves to feel safe in these alternative ways to relate to our practice.
I sang a lot in choirs growing up and it made my singing voice become very polished to not stand out from the rest. I often wish I had more of an imperfect voice because that would give it more character when singing lead. It’s of course a lot down to not practicing my lead vocal voice. Now I mostly play drums, so I make all the noise! 😁
FANTASTIC VIDEO! Growing up listening to mostly classical and traditional music genres gave me a sense of what music is "supposed" to sound like and how it's supposed to be written. It wasn't until I heard Aphex Twin for the first time where my perception changed and my world just grew even bigger.
Classical music continued into the 20th century, so a lot of 'weirdness' happened in the classical world itself (maybe you know them, but I'll name some names: Stravinsky, Cage, Pierre Schaeffer, Xenakis, Ligeti...)
It tends to fly under the radar so most people think it ended in like 1900 and then it evolved in film music :)) but there's a loooooooooot of fantastic stuf to be explored ^^
@@VampireHeart518 Yes! Stravinsky and Xenakis! It's incredible how classical music have inspired modern artists of today and the music they create. so much to explore here. Thank you for the recommendations!
I am doing GPU programming. And coming up with functions for noise, different higher dimensions, gradual noise, fractal noise etc makes a big difference. Audio noise is like just a single value... But 2D noise of a cloud texture or 3D height maps for mountains looks soo much different.
A lot of procedural textures and shapes is coming up with a combination of peusdorandom math (often at the edge of where computation falls apart in microelectronics). In music you have a ton of analog input and not the exact control about what the next bit might be... For 2D noise - it's the absence of patterns. So your eyes and brain don't see nothing repeating. And your eyes are really great at doing so. Sure your cellular noise still follows some rules - but it's not a tiled pattern. Knowing two values can't help you predict the next one.
I was classically trained on Viola from 4th grade and all the way through high school. I never felt any passion for performance so much so that I just stopped playing and really struggled to practice. It took me getting my first Akai drum machine and Korg synth that I really expanded to composition. I pretty much taught myself everything at first but composition and creating conceptual experiences was what really mattered and still matters most to me. I really could care less about performing my music because that isn't what makes the music for me. The emotions expressed are what resonate with me. Not that performances can't do that but I've never had a live music experience that emotionally changed me as much as synthesizers and incredible recordings. Synthesis can create so much emotion and I always want to explore that.
your speaking my musical language - I've just learnt how to make music through just tinkering with sound, noise, something that provokes emotion, or highlight epiphany
Yes!! I wrote my B.M thesis on Pauline's practice, and wrote series of pieces based on her approaches.
So happy to see people like her, and Morton Subotnick mentioned here!
I think there is a distinction between noise and music, although I cant quite describe it.
Like how a siren could technically be music.. and it certain contexts it is.
Noise on its own is just a noise, like a door banging or pans clanging. But once you piece these things together into "music", then it is now music
Kinda like how we just have materials laying around, but they arent a Shirt or a hockey stick until we form them
This has 100% been my experience with the starts of my real passion for sound, learning about deep listening techniques and playing music that's just a set of instructions. I'm really grateful to my university's composer's orchestra for giving me a chance to dive into interesting sound. I can't remember the name of the piece, but there was one we played where everyone played a random note and then gradually crept toward unison, or as the piece says, until it becomes "shimmering gold"
Sarah, I wrote you an email a while back where I told you about a very enjoyable jam session I had playing my guitar along with the rhythmic wash cycle of my washing machine. I really feel like music is ANYTHING that's rhythmically repetitive and really even things that don't really meet those criteria such as John Cage's 4'33". It's one of the main things that appeals to me about Eurorack...there are infinite possibilities contained within all those modules and I know you know that you often get the best and most interesting results when you hook things up "out of order". Great video!
Fantastic conversation! Love Sarah’s modular courses!