This blog is written and updated by Tom Hill. To view Jim Boxall's blog, go to www.thejoyofbox.co.uk
• Acoustic Shadow
BBC Radio Program
Some fascinating accounts of how our environment affects sound and informs our perception of it from place to place. My favourite part is about the Mayan pyramid temple in Mexico. It's believed that the steps were not built for climbing, but for producing sounds. The echo from a hand clap whilst stood in front of the steps produces the exact same downward chirping sound as the Mayan bird, the Quetzel. So precise is the sound as to suggest it is no accident.
To listen to the full programme, follow this link
• Musical Accompaniment - A Musician's Dichotomy
Diane Arbus Photo Exhibition, 14th August 2010, Nottingham Contemporary
Producing soundtracks for film (or in this case, photos) can be an odd process. It depends on what its purpose is or what the film-makers intentions are for the music but, essentially, I think some of the best soundtracks serve as a means of intensifying the visual stimulus - which could mean a lot of things, like playing nothing, or just noise, or just a simple repetitive motif to ensure the music is helping rather than distracting.
Gustavo Santaolalla's soundtracks are a testament to the less-is-more approach. It's almost completely ego-less. Sometimes, even to the point that you're unaware there was any music there at all. From a musician's perspective, that's nuts. Why would anyone want their work to be intentionally forgotten? But if it's purpose was to get the audience to engage more with what they're looking at then it should be expected some people won't be aware of the music's influence. And in many ways, those people - the people who benefited from the music but weren't aware of it - are the success stories for the soundtrack composer. Tragically though, how would they know to mention it? - Tom.
Photo: Jim Brouwer for Nottingham Contemporary
• Plato's Secret Musical Code
10th August 2010
The works of Plato, the ancient classical Greek philosopher, appear to contain a hidden musical code, a British academic has claimed, reported in the Telegraph:
Researchers claimed they cracked "The Plato Code", the
long disputed secret messages hidden in some of Ancient World's most
influential and celebrated writings. Dr Jay Kennedy, an historian and philosopher of science at the
University of Manchester, found Plato used a regular pattern of symbols
to give his writing a "musical" structure. In his five year study, Dr Kennedy found Plato, who died around
347BC, used the symbols inherited from the ancient followers of
Pythagoras.
His findings, published in the American classics journal Apeiron, suggested Plato was not only a secret follower of Pythagoras but also shared his belief that in the universe's secrets lay maths and its numbers.
The study, which has created excitement in the academic world, also suggests he anticipated the scientific revolution of Galileo and Sir Issac Newton by about 2,000 years after "discovering its most important idea (that) the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics".
Dr Kennedy said the key to unlocking the code came from the 12 notes
of the Greek musical scale, which he said was popular among followers of
Pythagoras.
Using computer technology, he restored contemporary versions of Plato's manuscripts to their original form, which he said consisted of lines of 35 characters, with no spaces or punctuation.
Dr Kennedy discovered that some key phrases, themes and words occurred during regular intervals throughout, which matched the spacing in the 12 note scale…
• World Wide Telescope
25th July 2010
Google Maps but for space. If you follow the link below you don't have to install the full program to try it out. You do need the Silverlight plug-in but you should be directed to that: http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/webclient/
• Nazi Tuning
2nd July, 2010
When an instrument is tuned using a tuning fork or an electric tuner, the default is set to tune the note of A to 440hz. However, in the time of Mozart and Verdi, this wasn't the case. The Stradivarius violin was 
apparently built to resonate at 432Hz and it was widely accepted around that time that this should be the standard. Plato was supposedly the first to suggest this was important on a deeper level. Some composers believed this tuning was not only better suited to the human voice but also had a calming effect. Others go so far as to suggest it has healing properties.
However, during the second world war - for whatever reason - the Nazis decided to raise that tone and in 1936 the former propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels (pictured) decided 440 Hertz was to be the new standard. With a little help from some other influential figures, it was approved by the International Standards Organisation (ISO). Conspiracy theorists reported this to have been, in part, by turn of the Illuminati, who were supposedly working with the Nazis in an attempt to throw everyone off their natural alignment and spiritual development.
All classical music for instance by Bach, Brahms, Verdi and so on was composed and performed with the use of this standard - an A at 432Hz. This standard is middle C on a keyboard at 256 Hz and if you keep going down an octave you get this sequence: 256-128-64-32-16-8-4-2-1, eventually arriving with C at exactly 1 vibration per second, the so-called "groundtone". Delving deeper there seem to be a whole host of factors contributing to the importance of 432 and its numerical significance, not least the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio.
In 1953, despite the petition of over 23,000 musicians in France for the standard tuning to be returned to the natural, original 432 cycles per second, the ISO didn't budge and 440Hz remains the standard tuning today.
• John Cage: In Love With Sound
February 9th, 2010
| "I love sounds just as they are and I have no need for them to be anything more than what they are. I don't want them to be psychological, I don't want a sound to pretend that it's a bucket, or that it's presedent or that it's in love with another sound... I just want it to be a sound" - John Cage |
• Language is Power?
Random rant (mostly note to self) January 30th, 2010
"As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good---I use it because I have to, but I don't put any trust in it. We never understand each other." - Marcel Duchamp.
Can the expression of emotions through music be directly related to knowledge or experience? Or, put another way, Does academic intelligence or learned information make it any easier to convey complex emotions musically?
It's generally accepted the more you understand a language the better you can express yourself through it. Having all the knowledge at your fingertips normally means you're able to take any direction you choose.
But, focusing on a momentary emotion and holding onto it's rawness is a hard thing to do. Certainly, trying to illustrate a complex feeling is not easy. Can there really be a map or predefined language to convey emotions?
John Cage said, "I want something I don't yet know." He almost expressed a desire - not in building upon previous experiences to produce better versions of old attempts - but instead, attempting to wipe his memory and see every new thing as something entirely different, which he believed should be be dealt with as such.
Stumbling across a simple lift in emotion just through accidentally shifting up a semitone during a chord change is half the excitement of creating music. Of course, someone has undoubtedly given those combined elements a name and formula; 'X' combined with 'Y', times by 'Z' and divided by 'Q' equals emotion 'B'. There's nothing wrong with that, but when you compare that to making a completely new and outstanding personal discovery, there's no comparison.
The difference is enormous. I believe those two methods of composition leave an inherent imprint on the finished product. The 'outstanding discovery' (or the feeling of being immersed in personal discovery) is going to be truly celebrated, whereas the formulaic method most likely will not. It's not something anyone would be able to put their finger on. It would just be that raw, unrefined emotion of someone who is focusing on the emotions rather than the formula, which fundamentally means the listener is likely to have a closer relationship with that.
Obviously, it would be absurd to actively fight against traditional or established methods but it's equally absurd to depend on them entirely when dealing with something so malleable and ever changing as emotions.
Everything can be broken down into a formula. I guess there's no getting away from that. You can dissect a frog, take out all it's innards, stretch out its nervous system, veins, eyeballs, skin, skeleton, bone, cartilage and so on... That might tell you how it's constructed or what it's comprised of. Putting it back together and bringing it back to life, however, is not the same thing.
• The Loudness Wars
November 19th 2009
If you're unfamiliar with the 'Loudness Wars' then you may be surprised to hear that there is a decline in the quality of music being produced despite the evolution of technology.
it's an issue all studio engineers and music producers battle with to some degree or another. You'll notice this when you make a playlist or compilation of various artists. Certain tracks seem louder than others making the quieter tracks seem weaker. This is down to the final mastering stages in music production. You can push the 'perceived' loudness of a track using compressors and limiters, but there is a compromise - you lose the dynamics of the music and sometimes even the clarity of individual sounds.
But, because everyone wants to be the loudest on a playlist, producers are jumping over themselves to push the volume higher, no matter what the cost of the music's clarity. Have a look at the differences of these two waveforms below, one is the original (produced back in 1990) and the one underneath is a remastered version:
The black represents the volume of the music. In the top picture, there are peaks and troughs indicating loud parts and quiet parts. The one below contains no dynamics at all! This undoubtedly has been pushed to the point of crushing any fine details out of the original piece.
• Hauschka / Jeff Desom
September 25th 2009
This film has been animated and pieced together entirely using found postcards and photos from the U.S. Library of Congress.
• Resonance Experiments
February 4th 2009
• Tangible Product
January 23rd 2009
The first of these links that follow is a lecture by Bill Drummond about the redundancy of recorded music. The second is a link to an article by David Byrne about a similar subject with some great clips, including Thom Yorke and Brian Eno, about the music industry and how things are evolving.
• Why
December 19th 2008
A ball flying through the air is responding to the force and direction to which it was thrown, the action of gravity, the friction of the air which it must expend its energy on overcoming, the turbulence of the air around its surface, and the rate and direction of the ball's spin.
And yet, someone who might have difficulty consciously trying to work out what 3x4x5 comes to would have no trouble in doing differential calculus and a whole host of other calculations so astoundingly fast that they can actually catch a flying ball.
People who call this "instinct" are merely giving the phenomenon a name, not explaining anything.
I think that the closest that human beings come to expressing our understanding of these natural complexities is in music. It is the most abstract of the arts - it has no meaning or purpose than to be itself."
(Excerpt taken from "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" by Douglas Adams)
• Kinetic Sculptor
November 2nd 2008
