What does music look like? With new sounds and new technologies, the question is more apt than ever. Tom of Music thing points, via his Twitter feed, to this interesting post regarding Ligeti’s Artikulation:

Visualizing Artikulation [Bad Assembly]

Music notation takes on a different meaning in the age of computers. After all, the essential divide in notation – between sound representation and realization – is blurred in the digital domain, in which we move between visual and sonic information seamlessly and a sound can be reproduced exactly. But, perhaps in that fluid context and without the musical conventions that grew up with notation, the importance of notation becomes that much clearer.

In this case, the classic experimental electronic composition Artikulation by composer György Ligeti has already had a visual score associated with it. Rainer Wehinger created the visuals above after the fact as an “aural score,” intending visuals to present a visible “reading” of the sounds of the piece. That makes the score itself closer to the digital visualizations we see as motion graphics works all over the Web (and on our sister site Create Digital Motion). The point isn’t to create a set of instructions by which you can perform a piece, but a visual counterpart that allows you to (presumably) hear it differently.

To be honest, I’m not always certain what to make of these results. Does this score really help you hear the piece? I’m curious to hear different reactions. But I wonder if the real holy grail comes back to software and interface. Seeing a pre-composed score is already interesting. But make that score interactive, and, in short, you have music creation software. Perhaps we’ll get beyond simple sequencers and step sequencers and start to see a growing number of interactive software designs that play around with that concept. (See Tom’s other thoughts on that today as he looks to Audio Damage’s new Automaton plug-in.)

Side Note: Twittering

If you want to follow us music bloggers on Twitter, I’m (uncreatively) peterkirn; Tom Whitwell is tombola. FriendFeed for me is the same. I haven’t made a CDM Twitter account; if for some reason that interested you, let me know, but otherwise I’m inclined to think RSS is just fine.

And if you have Twitters/FriendFeeds you think I should follow, please do holler.

Musician, composer, and musique concrete artist Henri Chopin has died, writes Seth:

he has been and remains a figure whose sound work is very important to me, so i thought i’d share it with you all.

he was a sound poet who used reel-to-reel tape as his paper, performance instrument, and collaborator.

Chopin is lesser-known than some artists even in the concrete world, so if you don’t know his work, there’s no time like the present to discover it — quite a lot is available online.

Videos and comments at WFMU Beware of the Blog

Lots and Lots of Sound Files at UbuWeb

His work spanned more than just experiments with audio tape, as a graphic and visual artist and even a typographer. His poems took striking shape as visual art, like the dagger formed with a typewriter, at right (via the dbqp blog, below). As a magazine publisher, he brought together works by characters from William S. Burroughs to the Fluxus gang. I have to admit, much as I love some of the power of the blog world, I don’t think we have anything approaching the insane avant-garde magazines of the 20th Century. (But, then, maybe we’re just waiting for the 21st Century’s Erik Satie. Or maybe we need to spend more time learning from the likes of Chopin — Henri Chopin, that is.)

So far, I see these obituaries; please feel free as always to add other comments, memories, reflections, or links. Via Harriet, we learn that Chopin died peacefully at home with his family in England at age 85:

Henri Chopin (1922-2008) [obituary by Kenneth Goldsmith, Harriet blog (Poetry Foundation)]

Tribute to Henri Chopin [Soul Sphincter]

When Sound Ends, Vision Endures [words, images, and more following his death, from dbqp: visualizing poetics]

And you think you can do strange things on a mic? Watch this:

If you like your plug-ins extreme and dangerous — like causing bodily injury to pregnant women and children dangerous — here’s some good news from you. Legendary (or perhaps infamous) Windows VST plug-in developer Jack Dark has decided to leave the scene, and he’s leaving his source projects for plug-ins released on DarkWare and (later) Novuzeit:

All DarkWare & NOVUZEIT SynthEdit source files, here, free. [KVR Audio forums]

That’s dangerous as in sonically and, uh, technologically. And digging into the source means finding still more of the technological avant-garde. Jack explains:

One word of warning though, I never intended for anyone else to see the guts of these projects. As such don’t expect the .SE1 layouts to be clean and elegantly organized. That’s not how I worked. I always created at the speed of thought.

Jack is one of the punks of plug-ins, with creations like Hypnotastic, Hands of Darkness, Nuclear Cranium, and The Nightmare Machine. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. But if you can decode the Dark arts here, you could make some electric mayhem of your own. Thanks, Runagate!

Thanks, Wilfred Fumbly. (video’s gone now … more in a moment)

So, the original theory holds: most likely a sample rate issue. Well, unless Van Halen is really old school, run their backing tracks on reel-to-reels, and had that set to the wrong speed. Sample rates it is.

More importantly, we’ve definitively proven Eddie is a “great guitar player,” which I know is what was really bothering everybody about this clip. He demonstrates this greatness with true vigor, by playing as loudly as possible for five minutes completely out of tune with the backing track and the vocals (which were matching the backing track) as if he’s completely deaf. If you had any doubts about what a true Guitar Hero is, now you know. (And yeah, unfortunately, I do think that really was his only choice. Guess the techs couldn’t get the clock rate set back to normality.)

Speaking of Guitar Hero / Rock Band: Activision / Harmonix, if you’re listening, I think you know what my request for an Easter Egg in your game would be.

Updated: The video is gone. So now we can not only speculate about what happened to Van Halen, but what happened to the video. Perhaps WilfredFumbly noticed that, while the keyboard part in Greensboro was pitched higher than the original album recording, so were other gigs on the tour. That means the guitar is far from absolved. And it lends new credence to my “Wormhole Theory.” Maybe Eddie’s guitar was temporarily replaced with one from the past, in which the song was in a different key, or even an alternate universe where this is in tune.

Okay. I got nothing.

You can hear the piece in its entirety, thanks to an installation that plays free daily at Washington DC’s National Gallery of Art. That installation was supposed to end last month as part of the Dada show, but it’s been extended through May 7, including a concert with new music written for the “ensemble.” I know it’s still running, because the other day I got a mysterious cell phone call from my Dad with what sounded like a 15-car automobile accident in progress. Of . . . player pianos.

The installation runs entirely via MIDI, in a fairly conventional setup. A Power Mac G5 running MOTU Digital Performer simply plays a MIDI sequence that plays the instruments. It’s the instruments themselves that are unusual: every single one is played in an entirely automated fashion, though all of them are acoustic. (And, I might add, loud.)

Popular demand has extended the piece, challenging the notion that audiences don’t like avant-garde. After all, one listen to this piece and some of our more contemporary “avant-garde” works sound positively pedestrian.

Especially when the robotic xylophone rebels against its human masters and leads a cyborg metallophone revolution.

Full details of the concert, the installation, the work, the composer, and everything else here:

The Ballet Mechanique Page

Related:
Gulbransen, who made the pianos, have also created self-playing violins and beer bottle organs, as seen previously here on CDM. Eric Singer has been responsible for flaming propane-powered organs, and (with LEMUR) the GuitarBot robotic guitar instrument.

For still more, see tag robotics.

Let me know if you’re able to get to DC.