Watch Gyorgy Ligeti’s Electronic Masterpiece Artikulation Get Brought to Life by Rainer Wehinger’s Brilliant Visual Score

in Art, Music | January 9th, 2018

Even if you don’t know the name Györ­gy Ligeti, you prob­a­bly already asso­ciate his music with a set of mes­mer­iz­ing visions. The work of that Hun­gar­i­an com­pos­er of 20th-cen­tu­ry clas­si­cal music appealed might­i­ly to Stan­ley Kubrick, so much so that he used four of Ligeti’s pieces to score 2001: A Space Odyssey. One of them, 1962’s Aven­tures, plays over the final scenes in an elec­tron­i­cal­ly altered form, which drew a law­suit from the com­pos­er who’d been unaware of the mod­i­fi­ca­tion. But he did­n’t do it out of purism: though he wrote, over his long career, almost entire­ly for tra­di­tion­al instru­ments, he’d made a cou­ple for­ays into elec­tron­ic music him­self a decade ear­li­er.

Ligeti fled Hun­gary for Vien­na in 1956, soon after­ward mak­ing his way to Cologne, where he met the elec­tron­i­cal­ly inno­v­a­tive likes of Karl­heinz Stock­hausen and Got­tfried Michael Koenig and worked in West Ger­man Radio’s Stu­dio for Elec­tron­ic Music.

There he pro­duced 1957’s Glis­san­di and 1958’s Artiku­la­tion, the lat­ter of which lasts just under four min­utes, but, in the words of The Guardian’s Tom Ser­vice, “packs a lot of dra­ma in its diminu­tive elec­tron­ic frame.” Ligeti him­self “imag­ined the sounds of Artiku­la­tion con­jur­ing up images and ideas of labyrinths, texts, dia­logues, insects, cat­a­stro­phes, trans­for­ma­tions, dis­ap­pear­ances,” which you can see visu­al­ized in shape and col­or in the “lis­ten­ing score” in the video above.

Cre­at­ed in 1970 by graph­ic design­er Rain­er Wehinger of the State Uni­ver­si­ty of Music and Per­form­ing Arts Stuttgart, and approved by Ligeti him­self, the score’s “visu­als are beau­ti­ful to watch in tan­dem with Ligeti’s music; there’s an espe­cial­ly arrest­ing son­ic and visu­al pile-up, about 3 mins 15 secs into the piece. This isn’t elec­tron­ic music as post­war utopia, a la Stock­hausen, it’s elec­tron­ics as human, humor­ous dra­ma,” writes Ser­vice. Have a watch and a lis­ten, or a cou­ple of them, and you’ll get a feel for how Wehinger’s visu­al choic­es reflect the nature of Ligeti’s sounds. Just as 2001 still launch­es sci-fi buffs into an expe­ri­ence like noth­ing else in the genre, those sounds will still strike a fair few self-described elec­tron­ic music fans of the 21st cen­tu­ry as strange and new — espe­cial­ly when they can see them at the same time.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch What Hap­pens When 100 Metronomes Per­form Györ­gy Ligeti’s Con­tro­ver­sial Poème Sym­phonique

Watch Clas­si­cal Music Come to Life in Art­ful­ly Ani­mat­ed Scores: Stravin­sky, Debussy, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart & More

The Genius of J.S. Bach’s “Crab Canon” Visu­al­ized on a Möbius Strip

The Clas­si­cal Music in Stan­ley Kubrick’s Films: Lis­ten to a Free, 4 Hour Playlist

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Hear the 50 Best Post-Punk Albums of All Time: A Nostalgia-Inducing Playlist Curated by Paste Magazine

in Music | January 8th, 2018

Post­mod­ernism began as an archi­tec­tur­al term to describe the loss of a seem­ing­ly sta­ble social order and the build­ing of new forms in the 1960s and 70s. The new archi­tec­ture was an elab­o­rate patch­work of high and low cul­ture and past and present design trends. In both the­o­ry and prac­tice, post­mod­ernism delight­ed in odd jux­ta­po­si­tions and self-ref­er­en­tial irony. It did not shy away from pol­i­tics but made sar­don­ic crit­i­cal com­men­tary its méti­er rather than the total­iz­ing agen­das of late mod­ernism.

Post­mod­ernism added to mod­ernism’s genre-hop­ping a broad­er cul­tur­al scope and wider inclu­siv­i­ty of forms of expres­sion. We can see a sim­i­lar cul­tur­al shift hap­pen­ing in pop­u­lar music in the mid- to late-20th cen­tu­ry. The pop and rock of the six­ties frag­ment­ed into dozens of radio friend­ly gen­res, all of which met their crit­i­cal match in the aggres­sive­ness of punk, a move­ment with high aes­thet­ic com­mit­ments and a cor­re­spond­ing desire to det­o­nate cul­tur­al norms by any means nec­es­sary.

When we arrive at the “post-punk,” we find all things counter-cul­ture rub­bing up against each oth­er, fill­ing the void left by the old social order with new sounds and visions, some deter­mined­ly grim, some play­ful and iron­ic, near­ly all of them dance­able.

A fine descrip­tion for what the world of “post-punk” looked like comes from a recent per­son­al essay by the poet Patrick Ros­al:

It was the ear­ly 1980s, a brief few years when punk rock kids, b‑boys, new wave freaks, and dis­co fiends might all get down on the same dance floor: this one in moc­casin boots this one in a track suit with three side-stripes down the sleeves and legs, this one in a bag­gy neon sweater and extra eye­lin­er.

This was a time when bands like Pub­lic Image Lim­it­ed (John Lydon’s post Sex Pis­tols project) and Bauhaus incor­po­rat­ed dub reg­gae rhythms, basslines, and stu­dio effects into the core of their sound. The Clash had already embarked on such exper­i­ments, and Clash gui­tarist Mick Jones took things fur­ther with Big Audio Dyna­mite, a punk/funk/reggae/hip hop hybrid that didn’t make the list of Paste Mag­a­zine’s “50 Best Post-Punk Albums,” but was cer­tain­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a strain of post-punk expan­sive­ness.

Bauhaus doesn’t make the list either, but Pub­lic Image Limited’s 1979 Met­al Box appears, at num­ber 14, an album of wob­bly, dub-inflect­ed “death dis­co” that won a spe­cial place in the hearts and record col­lec­tions of an eclec­tic group of fans as the eight­ies dawned. At #36 we find the equal­ly exper­i­men­tal Dub Hous­ing, the 1978 sec­ond album of Ohio’s Pere Ubu, a project that coa­lesced in the midst of Cleveland’s punk scene to make what front­man David Thomas called “avant garage.”

These dis­parate bands define post-punk as much as do the jan­g­ly, south­ern, Byrds-influ­enced sounds of R.E.M. or The dB’s, the surf-rock revival­ism of The B52’s, jazzy, angu­lar art-rock of Tele­vi­sion, jit­tery, So-Cal punk/jazz/country/funk of Min­ute­men, dark drone of Joy Divi­sion, chaot­ic blues-punk of Birth­day Par­ty, anar­chic noise and motorik beats of Swell Maps or Son­ic Youth, sham­bling rants of The Fall, new roman­tic pop of The Smiths or Orange Juice, satir­i­cal syn­th­punk of Devo…. The list can and does go on and on. You can see the full 50 at Paste Mag­a­zine, cho­sen and anno­tat­ed by the magazine’s writ­ers. Above, we’ve com­piled 48 of these albums in a Spo­ti­fy playlist—save Met­al Box and Dub Hous­ing, which are not avail­able on Spo­ti­fy.

This is music made by peo­ple “inter­est­ed in see­ing where music could go.” Many of them for­mer punks, many new to the scene. Many of them left behind these ear­ly exper­i­men­tal phas­es to become more con­ven­tion­al­ly genre-based, while some had only start­ed to push in new direc­tions lat­er in their career. Some of these bands arrived at a sound, made it their own, and rarely devi­at­ed, some shift­ed and changed through­out their career; some burned bright­ly, or dark­ly, for a short time, leav­ing indeli­ble marks of odd great­ness in a time when pop­u­lar music took more risks than before or maybe since.

At least that’s what it feels like look­ing back. If this is a nos­tal­gia trip for you, you’ll find it’s pret­ty com­pre­hen­sive, with the inevitable omis­sion of a favorite album, band, or two (where, I must ask, is My Bloody Valen­tine?) If you’re new to the range of this music, con­sid­er that, for all the vagary a term like “post-punk” might evoke, like the “post­mod­ern,” it has a spe­cif­ic his­tor­i­cal con­text, one in which a hand­ful of artists saw tremen­dous cre­ative oppor­tu­ni­ty amidst a gen­er­al sense of cul­tur­al malaise.

via Paste Mag­a­zine

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Punk Rock in 200 Tracks: An 11-Hour Playlist Takes You From 1965 to 2016

33 Songs That Doc­u­ment the His­to­ry of Fem­i­nist Punk (1975–2015): A Playlist Curat­ed by Pitch­fork

Hear the 20 Favorite Punk Albums of Black Flag Front­man Hen­ry Rollins

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Reworked in Major Key, Becomes a Cheerful Pop Song

in Music | January 8th, 2018


Last year, Josh Jones took a good look at what hap­pens when Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” gets shift­ed from minor to major key, and Radiohead’s “Creep” moves in the oppo­site direc­tion. Sud­den­ly, two songs you know so well sound so dif­fer­ent.

Over the week­end, “Sleep Good,” a psy­che­del­ic pop band from Austin, TX,  took their own whack at shift­ing Nir­vana’s 1991 song into major key. And the result will catch you a bit off-guard. A grunge anthem abrupt­ly turns into a cheery pop song, and the bop­ping cheer­lead­ers in the orig­i­nal music video strange­ly fit into the mood of the adapt­ed song.

You can find a ver­sion of “Teen Sprite,” as the song has been dubbed, over on Sound­cloud.

via Uncrate

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book and BlueSky.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent

Watch Nir­vana Per­form “Smells Like Teen Spir­it,” Just Two Days After the Release of Nev­er­mind (Sep­tem­ber 26, 1991)

Hear Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” Shift­ed from Minor to Major Key, and Radiohead’s “Creep” Moved from Major to Minor

1,000 Musi­cians Play Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” Live, at the Same Time

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The Movements of a Symphony Conductor Get Artistically Visualized in an Avant-Garde Motion Capture Animation

in Animation, Computer Science, Film, Music, Technology | January 5th, 2018

Some clas­si­cal music enthu­si­asts are purists with regard to visu­al effects, lis­ten­ing with eyes firm­ly fixed on lin­er notes or the ceil­ings of grand con­cert halls.

Those open to a more avant-garde ocu­lar expe­ri­ence may enjoy the short motion cap­ture ani­ma­tion above.

Moti­vat­ed by the Lon­don Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra’s desire for a hip­per iden­ti­ty, the project hinged on recent­ly appoint­ed Musi­cal Direc­tor Sir Simon Rat­tle’s will­ing­ness to con­duct Edward Elgar’s Enig­ma Vari­a­tions with a spe­cial­ly mod­i­fied baton, while 12 top-of-the-range Vicon Van­tage cam­eras not­ed his every move at 120 frames per sec­ond.

Dig­i­tal design­er Tobias Gremm­ler, who’s pre­vi­ous­ly used motion-cap­ture ani­ma­tion as a lens through which to con­sid­er kung fu and Chi­nese Opera, stuck with musi­cal metaphors in ani­mat­ing Sir Simon’s data with Cin­e­ma 4D soft­ware. The move­ments of con­duc­tor and baton morph into a “vor­tex of wood, brass, smoke and strings” and “wires rem­i­nis­cent of the strings of the instru­ments them­selves.” Else­where, he draws on the atmos­phere and archi­tec­ture of clas­sic con­cert halls.

(The unini­ti­at­ed may find them­selves flash­ing on less rar­i­fied sources of inspi­ra­tion, from lava lamps and fire danc­ing to the 80’s‑era dig­i­tal uni­verse of Tron.)

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Grace­ful Move­ments of Kung Fu & Mod­ern Dance Revealed in Stun­ning Motion Visu­al­iza­tions

Visu­al­iz­ing WiFi Sig­nals with Light

The Entire Dis­ci­pline of Phi­los­o­phy Visu­al­ized with Map­ping Soft­ware: See All of the Com­plex Net­works

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Watch Prince Play Jazz Piano & Coach His Band Through George Gershwin’s “Summertime” in a Candid, Behind-the-Scenes Moment (1990)

in Music | January 5th, 2018


A rock enig­ma wrapped around an R&B quandary, wear­ing plat­form shoes and pur­ple velour. The cheek­bones of an angel, dance moves and lyrics from an infer­nal­ly sexy place, and more musi­cal tal­ent than it seems pos­si­ble for a sin­gle per­son to pos­sess in one life­time…. These are some of the ways we remem­ber Prince Rogers Nel­son.

We do not typ­i­cal­ly remem­ber him as a jazz pianist. But his facil­i­ty with jazz earned him the admi­ra­tion of Miles Davis, who made sev­er­al efforts to col­lab­o­rate with the extreme­ly busy pop star. (They per­formed togeth­er only once, it seems, on New Year’s Eve, 1987 at Pais­ley Park.) Prince’s style, stage show, song­writ­ing, and arrang­ing drew from jazz of all kinds—from zoot suit-era big band to the fre­net­ic move­ment of hard bop to the clas­si­cal­ly-inflect­ed show tunes of George Gersh­win. Just above see him “casu­al­ly own” Gersh­win’s “Sum­mer­time” dur­ing a 1990 sound­check in Osa­ka, Japan.

For the first minute, it’s a Prince show­case, but once he coach­es the band through the changes, he lets them take it, set­tling back while the gui­tarist rides out a solo. The can­did moment does much more than demon­strate his chops on the piano and appre­ci­a­tion for Gersh­win. It offers yet anoth­er con­trast to the pop­u­lar image of Prince as a charis­mat­ic, self-suf­fi­cient solo artist who just hap­pened to work with a reg­u­lar crew of stel­lar musi­cians and not-so-stel­lar actress­es.

It’s true Prince played most or all of the instru­ments on many of his albums, wrote near­ly all his own songs, direct­ed or pro­duced near­ly every aspect of his music, career, and per­sona.… As solo artists go, no one comes close to defin­ing full cre­ative con­trol. The Pur­ple One ruled over a musi­cal empire; most of the time, it seems, he got what he want­ed, even if he some­times had to fight like hell for it. We might expect such an artist to be a pet­ty tyrant, hog­ging the spot­light and throw­ing his weight around at every oppor­tu­ni­ty. What we hear and see behind the scenes paints a much rich­er pic­ture.

The footage here was shot by Steve Pur­cell, who direct­ed sev­er­al videos for Prince and, as he remarked, “spent six years of my life work­ing for, cre­at­ing with and lay­ing the foun­da­tion for the rest of my career with Prince.” In his intro­duc­tion to the video, he writes, “This may not be the Prince you think of but it is the Prince I knew.” A band­leader who was also an ensem­ble play­er, and who con­stant­ly paid trib­ute to the music that inspired him in live per­for­mance.

We might have known Prince as a gen­er­ous hit­mak­er, who gave song after song to artists like Sheena Eas­t­on, Cha­ka Khan, Sinead O’Connor, and the Ban­gles, and launched the careers of a good many of his col­lab­o­ra­tors, musi­cal and oth­er­wise. Since his death, we’ve also learned much more about both his tremen­dous finan­cial and emo­tion­al good­will, and the time he took with oth­er musi­cians to help them devel­op and learn.

The impos­si­bly cool aloof­ness with which he glid­ed through pop star­dom did not extend to his rela­tion­ships with the peo­ple clos­est to him. Prince was so beloved that his two ex-wives worked togeth­er to orga­nize a star-stud­ded memo­r­i­al ser­vice for him. Sto­ries of his kind­ness, good humor, com­pas­sion, and loy­al­ty pour out at the same rate as the music he had locked up in his Pais­ley Park vault. We’ll like­ly see more can­did videos like this one emerge as well, from those who, like Pur­cell, found their time doc­u­ment­ing the artist a total­ly life-chang­ing expe­ri­ence.

via Clas­si­cal FM

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read Prince’s First Inter­view, Print­ed in His High School News­pa­per (1976)

Prince Plays Unplugged and Wraps the Crowd Around His Lit­tle Fin­ger (2004)

Hear Prince’s Per­son­al Playlist of Par­ty Music: 22 Tracks That Will Bring Any Par­ty to Life

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Hear Glenn Gould Channel Marshall McLuhan and Create an Experimental Radio Documentary Analyzing the Pop Music of Petula Clark (1967)

in Music, Radio | January 5th, 2018

Glenn Gould, that intel­lec­tu­al­ly intense, aes­thet­i­cal­ly aus­tere inter­preter of Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach, had lit­tle time for pop music. He had espe­cial­ly lit­tle time for the Bea­t­les: “Theirs is a hap­py, cocky, bel­liger­ent­ly resource­less brand of har­mon­ic prim­i­tivism,” he wrote in High Fideli­ty in 1967, when the Fab Four had reached the top of the zeit­geist. “The indul­gent ama­teur­ish­ness of the musi­cal mate­r­i­al, though close­ly rivaled by the indif­fer­ence of the per­form­ing style, is actu­al­ly sur­passed only by the inep­ti­tude of the stu­dio pro­duc­tion method,” he declares, liken­ing “Straw­ber­ry Fields For­ev­er” to “a moun­tain wed­ding between Clau­dio Mon­tever­di and a jug band.”

But the Bea­t­le-bash­ing was inci­den­tal to the pur­pose of the arti­cle, a paean to Eng­lish singer Petu­la Clark. At first lis­ten, her four sin­gles on which Gould focus­es his analy­sis — 1964’s “Down­town,” 1956’s “My Love,” and 1966’s “A Sign of the Times” and “Who Am I?” — sound like noth­ing more than ado­les­cent-ori­ent­ed pop hard­ly touched by any of that decade’s musi­cal (or indeed social) rev­o­lu­tions. But “this quar­tet of hits,” in Gould’s view, “was designed to con­vey the idea that, bound as she might be by lim­i­ta­tions of tim­bre and range, she would not accept any cor­re­spond­ing restric­tions of theme and sen­ti­ment,” with the result that she came to com­mand an audi­ence “large, con­stant, and pos­sessed of an enthu­si­asm which tran­scends the gen­er­a­tions.”

Gould says all this in The Search for Petu­la Clark, a 23-minute radio doc­u­men­tary that aired on the CBC on Decem­ber 11, 1967, less than three weeks before his much bet­ter-known exper­i­men­tal doc­u­men­tary The Idea of North. He sit­u­ates his analy­sis of the singer he calls “Pet Clark,” which gets into not just her songs’ themes and lyrics but their tech­ni­cal qual­i­ties as music, in the con­text of a solo road trip around Lake Supe­ri­or when “Who Am I?” first hit the air­waves. So com­pelled did he find him­self that he timed his dri­ve to get with­in range of one of the radio sta­tions scat­tered across the vast­ness of his home­land at the top of each hour in order to hear the song over and over again, after 700 miles he got to “know it if not bet­ter than the soloist, at least as well, per­haps, as most of the side­men.”

Though born with­in two months of each oth­er in 1932 and there­after liv­ing lives ded­i­cat­ed to music, Gould and Clark would seem to have lit­tle else in com­mon. While Gould died at 50, Clark, at the age of 85, con­tin­ues to both record and per­form. Gould, as J.D. Con­nor writes in an essay on The Search for Petu­la Clark, “stopped per­form­ing for live audi­ences in 1964. Freed from the rig­ors of the con­cert cir­cuit, he dove into radio and tele­vi­sion at just the moment when he and Cana­di­an state media could par­lay his immense musi­cal pop­u­lar­i­ty into some­thing more.”  This and the more intri­cate radio pro­duc­tions that would fol­low both sprang from and allowed Gould to con­struct “a media the­o­ry of his own. In print, on tele­vi­sion, and, most impor­tant, on radio, Gould became the great com­ple­ment to Mar­shall McLuhan.” And like McLuhan, when Gould obsess­es over some­thing that nev­er seemed to mer­it seri­ous atten­tion, we’d do well to heed the insights he draws from it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to Glenn Gould’s Shock­ing­ly Exper­i­men­tal Radio Doc­u­men­tary, The Idea of North (1967)

Glenn Gould: Off and On the Record: Two Short Films About the Life & Music of the Eccen­tric Musi­cian

Glenn Gould Explains the Genius of Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach (1962)

Glenn Gould Gives Us a Tour of Toron­to, His Beloved Home­town (1979)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Hear the Hagia Sophia’s Awe-Inspiring Acoustics Get Recreated with Computer Simulations, and Let Yourself Get Transported Back to the Middle Ages

in Architecture, Art, Music, Science, Stanford | January 4th, 2018

The tech­nol­o­gy used to pro­duce, record, and process music has become ever more sophis­ti­cat­ed and awe-inspir­ing, espe­cial­ly in the capa­bil­i­ty of soft­ware to emu­late real instru­ments and acoustic envi­ron­ments. Dig­i­tal emu­la­tion, or “mod­el­ing,” as it’s called, doesn’t sim­ply mim­ic the sounds of gui­tar ampli­fiers, pianos, or syn­the­siz­ers. At its best, it repro­duces the feel of an aur­al expe­ri­ence, its tex­tures and son­ic dimen­sions, while also adding a seem­ing­ly infi­nite degree of flex­i­bil­i­ty.

When it comes to a tech­nol­o­gy called “con­vo­lu­tion reverb,” we can vir­tu­al­ly feel the air pres­sure of sound in a phys­i­cal space, such that “lis­ten­ing in may be viewed as much as a spa­tial expe­ri­ence as it is a tem­po­ral one.” So notes Stanford’s Icons of Sound, a col­lab­o­ra­tion between the University’s Cen­ter for Com­put­er Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) and the Depart­ment of Art & Art His­to­ry. The researchers in this joint project have com­bined resources to cre­ate a per­for­mance of Byzan­tine chant from the 6th cen­tu­ry CE, sim­u­lat­ed to sound like it takes place inside a prime acoustic envi­ron­ment designed for this very music, the Hagia Sophia in Istan­bul.

Built by the emper­or Jus­tin­ian between 532 and 537, when the city was Con­stan­tino­ple, the mas­sive church (lat­er mosque and now state-run muse­um) “has an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly large nave spread­ing over 70 meters in length; it is sur­round­ed by colon­nad­ed aisles and gal­leries. Mar­ble cov­ers the floor and walls.” Its cen­ter is “crowned by a dome glit­ter­ing in gold mosaics and ris­ing 56 meters above the ground.” The effect of the build­ing’s heavy, reflec­tive sur­faces and its archi­tec­tur­al enor­mi­ty “chal­lenges our con­tem­po­rary expec­ta­tion of the intel­li­gi­bil­i­ty of lan­guage.”

We are accus­tomed to hear the spo­ken or sung word clear­ly in dry, non-rever­ber­ant spaces in order to decode the encod­ed mes­sage. By con­trast, the wet acoustics of Hagia Sophia blur the intel­li­gi­bil­i­ty of the mes­sage, mak­ing words sound like ema­na­tion, emerg­ing from the depth of the sea. 

The Icons of Sound team has recon­struct­ed the under­wa­ter acoustics of the Hagia Sophia using con­vo­lu­tion reverb tech­niques and what are called “impulse responses”—recordings of the rever­ber­a­tions in par­tic­u­lar spaces, which are then loaded into soft­ware to dig­i­tal­ly sim­u­late the same psy­choa­coustics, a process known as “aural­iza­tion.” CCRMA describes an impulse response as an “imprint of the space,” which is then applied to sounds record­ed in oth­er envi­ron­ments. Typ­i­cal­ly, the process is used in stu­dio music pro­duc­tion, but Icons of Sound brought it to live per­for­mance at Stanford’s Bing Con­cert Hall last year, and made the group Cap­pel­la Romana sound like their voic­es had trans­port­ed from the Holy Roman Empire.

“To recre­ate the unique sound,” writes Kat Eschn­er at Smith­son­ian, “per­form­ers sang while lis­ten­ing to the sim­u­lat­ed acoustics of Hagia Sophia through ear­phones. Their singing was then put through the same acoustic sim­u­la­tor and played dur­ing the live per­for­mance through speak­ers in the con­cert hall.” As you can hear in these clips, the result is immer­sive and pro­found. One can only imag­ine what it must have been like live. To com­plete the effect, the pro­duc­tion used “atmos­pher­ic rein­force­ment,” notes Stan­ford Live, “via pro­ject­ed images and light­ing.” The audi­ence was “immersed in an envi­ron­ment where the unique inter­play of music, light, art, and sacred text has the poten­tial to induce a qua­si-mys­ti­cal state of rev­e­la­tion and won­der.”

The only sounds the researchers were able to record in the actu­al space of the ancient church were four pop­ping bal­loons. By lay­er­ing the rever­ber­a­tions cap­tured in these record­ings, and com­pen­sat­ing for the dif­fer­ent decay times inside the Bing, they were able to approx­i­mate the acoustic prop­er­ties of the build­ing. You can hear sev­er­al more audio sam­ples record­ed in dif­fer­ent places at this site. In the video above, asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of medieval art Bis­sera Pentche­va explains how and why the Hagia Sophia shapes sound and light the way it does. While purists might pre­fer to see a per­for­mance in the actu­al space, one must admit, the abil­i­ty to vir­tu­al­ly deliv­er a ver­sion of it to poten­tial­ly any con­cert hall in the world is pret­ty cool.

via The Smith­son­ian

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Byrne: How Archi­tec­ture Helped Music Evolve

The Same Song Sung in 15 Places: A Won­der­ful Case Study of How Land­scape & Archi­tec­ture Shape the Sounds of Music

What Did Ancient Greek Music Sound Like?: Lis­ten to a Recon­struc­tion That’s ‘100% Accu­rate’

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

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The Story of How Beethoven Helped Make It So That CDs Could Play 74 Minutes of Music

in Music, Technology | January 4th, 2018

We music fans of the increas­ing­ly all-dig­i­tal 2010s take com­pact discs for grant­ed, so much so that many of us haven’t slid one into a play­er in years. But if we cast our minds back, and not even all that far, we can remem­ber a time when CDs were pre­cious, and the medi­um itself both impres­sive and con­tro­ver­sial. Back when it first came on the mar­ket in 1982 (pack­aged in long­box­es, you’ll recall) it seemed impos­si­bly high-tech, inspir­ing dream­i­ly futur­is­tic pro­mo­tion­al videos like the one below and emerg­ing from a process of devel­op­ment that required the com­bined R&D and indus­tri­al might of both Japan and Europe’s biggest con­sumer-elec­tron­ics giants, Sony and Philips.

That years-long coor­di­nat­ed effort, as Greg Mil­ner writes in Per­fect­ing Sound For­ev­er, saw a team of engi­neers from both com­pa­nies “shut­tling between Eind­hoven and Tokyo,” the pro­to­type CD play­er “giv­en its own first-class seat on KLM.”

Mil­ner also men­tions that “Philips want­ed a 14-bit sys­tem and a disc that could hold an hour of music, while Sony argued for 16 bits and 74 min­utes, sup­pos­ed­ly because that was the length of Beethoven’s Ninth Sym­pho­ny,” though he calls the Beethoven bit “like­ly a dig­i­tal audio urban leg­end.” But, like any urban leg­end, it con­tains grains of truth, though how many grains nobody quite knows for sure.

Philips’ pre­ferred sys­tem would play 115-mil­lime­ter discs, while Sony’s would play 120-mil­lime­ter discs. As Wired’s Randy Alfred tells it:

When Sony and Philips were nego­ti­at­ing a sin­gle indus­try stan­dard for the audio com­pact disc in 1979 and 1980, the sto­ry is that one of four peo­ple (or some com­bi­na­tion of them) insist­ed that a sin­gle CD be able to hold all of the Ninth Sym­pho­ny. The four were the wife of Sony chair­man Akio Mori­ta, speak­ing up for her favorite piece of music; Sony VP Norio Ohga (the company’s point man on the CD), recall­ing his stud­ies at the Berlin Con­ser­va­to­ry; Mrs. Ohga (her favorite piece, too); and con­duc­tor Her­bert von Kara­jan, who record­ed for Philips sub­sidiary Poly­gram and whose Berlin Phil­har­mon­ic record­ing of the Ninth clocked in at 66 min­utes.

Fur­ther research to find the longest record­ed per­for­mance came up with a mono record­ing con­duct­ed by Wil­helm Furtwän­gler at the Bayreuth Fes­ti­val in 1951. That play­ing went a lan­guorous 74 min­utes.

A good sto­ry, sure, but as Philips Engi­neer Kees A. Schouhamer Immink writes in a tech­ni­cal arti­cle mark­ing the CD’s 25th anniver­sary, “every­day prac­tice is less roman­tic than the pen of a pub­lic rela­tions guru.” What­ev­er the influ­ence of Beethoven, in 1979 “Philips’ sub­sidiary Poly­gram — one of the world’s largest dis­trib­u­tors of music — had set up a CD disc plant in Hanover, Ger­many that could pro­duce large quan­ti­ties of CDs with, of course, a diam­e­ter of 115mm. Sony did not have such a facil­i­ty yet. So if Sony had agreed on the 115mm disc, Philips would have had a sig­nif­i­cant com­pet­i­tive edge in the music mar­ket. Ohga was aware of that, did not like it, and some­thing had to be done.”

How much does the run­ning time of a CD, which would enjoy a long reign as the dom­i­nant media for record­ed music, owe to what Immink calls “Mrs. Ohga’s great pas­sion for [Beethoven],” and how much to “the mon­ey and com­pe­ti­tion in the mar­ket of the two part­ners”? Not even Snopes, which rules the claim of a con­nec­tion between Beethoven’s Ninth and the devel­op­ment of the CD as “unde­ter­mined,” can set­tle the mat­ter. But what­ev­er deter­mined the length of the albums in the CD era, that 74-minute run­time remains a strong influ­ence on our expec­ta­tions of album length even now that musi­cians can record and sell them at any length they like — and now that we the con­sumers can lis­ten any way we like, frag­ment­ing, re-arrang­ing, and cus­tomiz­ing all of our music expe­ri­ences, even Beethoven’s Ninth.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Did Beethoven Com­pose His 9th Sym­pho­ny After He Went Com­plete­ly Deaf?

How Steely Dan Wrote “Dea­con Blues,” the Song Audio­philes Use to Test High-End Stere­os

A Cel­e­bra­tion of Retro Media: Vinyl, Cas­settes, VHS, and Polaroid Too

The Dis­tor­tion of Sound: A Short Film on How We’ve Cre­at­ed “a McDonald’s Gen­er­a­tion of Music Con­sumers”

Neil Young on the Trav­es­ty of MP3s

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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