And, by golly, it works…
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What if minimalist composer Steve Reich got his hands on the iPhone’s familiar Marimba ringtone? That’s what the website Steve Reich is Calling imagines. Here’s how Jason Kottke describes the basic concept:
[Reich’s] 1967 piece Piano Phase featured a pair of pianists repetitively performing the same piece at two slightly different tempos, forming a continually evolving musical round. Seth Kranzler took this idea and made a Reich-like piece with two iPhones ringing at slightly different tempos.
From what I can tell, there’s not actually an official way to download the ringtone and make it your own–though it does appear that there are, indeed, ways to convert Youtube videos into ringtones. (Note: we haven’t tested these methods, so proceed cautiously.)
For anyone interested in taking a deeper dive–a much deeper dive–into Reich’s musical world, please see this post in our archive: Hear Steve Reich’s Minimalist Compositions in a 28-Hour Playlist: A Journey Through His Influential Recordings.
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From Neil Mendoza comes “Rock Band,” an amalgamation of “electromechanical instruments that make music with rocks by throwing them through the air, slapping them and making them vibrate.” Above, hear the band play one of my favorite Beatles songs, “Here Comes the Sun.” There’s no Paul, John, George and Ringo here. Instead, you’ve got the following band members:
Pinger — fires small rocks at aluminium keys using solenoids.
Spinner — launches magnetic rocks, Hematite, at pieces of marble. Rocks are launched by spinning magnets using Applied Motion applied-motion.com stepper motors.
Slapper — slaps rocks with fake leather.
Buzzer — vibrates the plunger of a solenoid against a piece of marble.
According to Neil, “the whole project is controlled by a computer running a MIDI player written in openFrameworks talking to a Teensy. The machines were designed using Autodesk Fusion 360 and Autodesk Inventor.” You can find instructions on how to build your own Pinger here.
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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!
You don’t need to know anything at all about classical music, nor have any liking for it even, to be deeply moved by that most famous of symphonies, Ludwig van Beethoven’s 9th—“perhaps the most iconic work of the Western musical tradition,” writes The Juilliard Journal in an article about its handwritten score. Commissioned in 1817, the sublime work was only completed in 1824. By that time, its composer was completely and totally deaf. At the first performance, Beethoven did not notice that the massive final choral movement had ended, and one of the musicians had to turn him around to acknowledge the audience.
This may seem, says researcher Natalya St. Clair in the TED-Ed video above, like some “cruel joke,” but it’s the truth. Beethoven was so deaf that some of the most interesting artifacts he left behind are the so-called “conversation books,” kept from 1818 onward to communicate with visitors who had to write down their questions and replies. How then might it have been possible for the composer to create such enduringly thrilling, rapturous works of aural art?
Using the delicate, melancholy “Moonlight Sonata” (which the composer wrote in 1801, when he could still hear), St. Clair attempts to show us how Beethoven used mathematical “patterns hidden beneath the beautiful sounds.” (In the short video below from documentary The Genius of Beethoven, see the onset of Beethoven’s hearing loss in a dramatic reading of his letters.) According to St. Clair’s theory, Beethoven composed by observing “the mathematical relationship between the pitch frequency of different notes,” though he did not write his symphonies in calculus. It’s left rather unclear how the composer’s supposed intuition of mathematics and pitch corresponds with his ability to express such a range of emotions through music.
We can learn more about Beethoven’s deafness and its biological relationship to his compositional style in the short video below with research fellow Edoardo Saccenti and his colleague Age Smilde from the Biosystems Data Analysis Group at Amsterdam’s Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences. By counting the high and low frequencies in Beethoven’s complete string quartets, a task that took Saccenti many weeks, he and his team were able to show how three distinct compositional styles “correspond to stages in the progression of his deafness,” as they write in their paper (which you can download in PDF here).
The progression is unusual. As his condition worsened, Beethoven included fewer and fewer high frequency sounds in his compositions (giving cellists much more to do). By the time we get to 1824–26, “the years of the late string quartets and of complete deafness”—and of the completion of the 9th—the high notes have returned, due in part, Smilde says, to “the balance between an auditory feedback and the inner ear.” Beethoven’s reliance on his “inner ear” made his music “much and much richer.” How? As one violinist in the clip puts it, he was “given more freedom because he was not attached anymore to the physical sound, [he could] just use his imagination.”
For all of the compelling evidence presented here, whether Beethoven’s genius in his painful later years is attributable to his intuition of complex mathematical patterns or to the total free rein of his imaginative inner ear may in fact be undiscoverable. In any case, no amount of rational explanation can explain away our astonishment that the man who wrote the unfailingly powerful, awesomely dynamic “Ode to Joy” finale (conducted above by Leonard Bernstein), couldn’t actually hear any of the music.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
In the arts, technology, or any other realm, Japanese culture encourages taking one’s chosen pursuits to the limits, even when their material comes from other cultures. We have here a particularly notable example in the form of Mandarin Electron, a musical ensemble founded and led since 1999 by pioneer Japanese theremin player Masami Takeuchi. But its members (273 of whom set the theremin-ensemble Guinness World Record with the performance of “Amazing Grace” above) don’t play quite the same touchless, spooky-sounding instrument vintage electronic music fans would recognize; instead, they master the Matryomin, a theremin in the compact form of a traditional Russian Matryoshka doll, conveniently designed “so as to disseminate theremin performance.”
The combination isn’t quite as random as it sounds. Back in 2015 we posted about the history of the theremin, which goes back to the work of a Russian inventor named Léon Theremin. When he first developed the instrument in 1919, he called it the Aetherphone, and in the 1920s demonstrated it in Europe and the United States.
In the decades thereafter, Theremin’s strange new musical invention captured imaginations all over the world, and last year Japan celebrated the inventor’s 120th Birthday with a series of events called Theremin 120 — most of them somehow involving Takeuchi. You can learn more about his history with the theremin and its homeland from the video just above.
In a sense, Takeuchi, who moved to Russia to study under Theremin’s relative and pupil Lydia Kavia, has realized the inventor’s original vision for his “instrument of a singing-voice kind.” Freeing its sounds from their mid-2oth-century Western associations — drive-in horror movies, novelty surf-rock — he has overseen their transformation into the elements of an electronic chorus. You can purchase your very own Mandarin Electron-made Matryomin (now on its third-generation model) and start learning to play it with the video just above, but if its potential still escapes you, have a look at Takeuchi and his ensemble’s extensive collection of tour and media appearances. If the sound and sight of hundreds of people all tuning their Matryoshka-doll theremins at once doesn’t intrigue you, nothing could.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Introvert, bookworm, homebody… labels I have gladly worn throughout my life. I believe in civic engagement on principle, but there have been many times in the past few months, indeed in life, when I’ve wanted to strand myself on one of those proverbial desert islands, surrounded by my favorite books and records.
But surely one needn’t be an introvert to appreciate occasional solitude and time well spent with one’s favorite writing and music? Not in the least. As the BBC’s Desert Island Discs has shown us, many of the most outgoing celebrities, known for their constant presence in the spotlight, have cultivated their own inner castaway.
Or at least many have been happy to share what they would listen to and read on a theoretical voyage into solitude. Since 1942, Desert Island Discs has asked its famous guests to name eight recordings (not strictly limited to music), one book, and one luxury item that they couldn’t live without if left alone. One guest, Louis Armstrong, confessed himself married to the city and had such a long and successful career as a trumpet player, bandleader, composer, singer, actor, and all-around personality that it’s hard to imagine he ever had any time to himself.
Nevertheless, Armstrong possessed a key quality necessary for peaceful time alone: he was a man who enjoyed his own company. In his 1968 appearance on the show, Armstrong told the show’s creator and longtime host Roy Plomley that one favorite track he couldn’t live without was his own recording of “Blueberry Hill.” His luxury item? His trumpet of course. And book? His own autobiography.
Not all the show’s guests have been as intensely self-focused in their answers. Keith Richards, who owes his status, said host Kirsty Young, to a “single-minded dedication to the triumvirate pursuits of sex and drugs and rock and roll,” chose many of his heroes, like Chuck Berry and Etta James. And as a luxury item, he opted not for a musical instrument or an inducement to pleasure, but for a very practical machete.
The long-running Desert Island Discs owes its popularity not simply to famous people making lists, however; that premise has served throughout its 75 years as scaffolding for some of the most fascinating and intimate conversations with artists, actors, politicians, and other notables.
In Kirsty Young’s 2016 interview with Tom Hanks, the affable actor—whose list included Dean Martin, Dusty Springfield, Talking Heads and a Hermes 3000 manual typewriter—broke down in tears while telling the painful story of his lonely childhood. “What have you done to me?” he said to Young, then told her he was trying to express “the vocabulary of loneliness.” In 2014, Young pronounced artist and 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen—a devotee of Prince, Michael Jackson, and Kate Bush—one of her all time favorite interviewees for his candid, engaging discussion of art as his “salvation.”
But of course, no popular entertainment succeeds without its controversies, and Desert Island Discs has had plenty of those moments as well. Sometimes scandalous moments—at least for the show’s host—have popped up in the midst of otherwise excellent interviews. In 2009, Morrissey sat down with Young for an interview that included “plenty of positive statements,” writes NME, including “his relative ease with life.” Yet she was shocked to hear him defend suicide as “honourable… an act of great control.” Whether he meant it or not, true fans of the singer would not have raised an eyebrow.
Another exchange hardly out of character for the interviewee occurred during a much less engaging conversation. In 1989, Lady Mosley, aristocratic wife of British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley, proclaimed her admiration for Hitler and denied the Holocaust. Host Sue Lawley seemed “stunned,” the BBC notes, and accused Mosley of “rewriting history.” It’s hard to know what else the host expected from a woman The Guardian called “unrepentant” and “Hitler’s angel” upon her death in 2003.
Such unpleasant interviews as Mosley’s are few and far between in the massive archive of Desert Island Discs episodes on the BBC’s website, which spans the years 1956–2011, with many more recent episodes on the site as well, like this conversation with Bruce Springsteen. Other notable interviews come from Brian Eno in 1991, Yoko Ono in 2007, Maya Angelou in 1987, and Judi Dench just last year. Want to know their picks? You’ll have to listen to the episodes–all of which you can download–to find out.
All of the show’s subjects are accomplished people, but not all of them have been celebrities. The BBC has chosen as one of its most moving interviews a 2016 conversation with David Nott, who has volunteered as a surgeon on battlefields around the world since 1993. Nott’s harrowing stories of over twenty years of warzone trauma will likely have you convinced that among the show’s hundreds of guests, he may be most in need of that island getaway.
Given Desert Island Discs’ constraints of eight recordings, one book, and one luxury item, what would you, castaway readers, take with you, and why? Please tell us in the comments below.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Last year, Tony Conrad–an avant-garde video artist, experimental filmmaker, musician, composer, and sound artist–died at the age of 76. In its obituary, The New York Times wrote:
Mr. Conrad was relentless and rigorous in expanding the parameters of the fields in which he worked. His early musical compositions, like “Four Violins” (1964), were high-volume sustained drones. His first film, “The Flicker” (1966), created a pulsating stroboscopic effect with alternating black and white frames. It was preceded by a stern warning that the film could induce epileptic seizures in certain spectators and that audience members remained in the theater at their own risk.
Another work that elsewhere gets special mention is “Music and the Mind of the World,” a piano composition comprising over 200 hours of recorded music. Influential but little heard, “Music and the Mind of the World” features “the sounds of practicing, banging on the keys, formal exercises, experiments with the harmonic sonority of the piano itself, and even ‘On Top of Old Smokey’.” Begun in 1976 and completed in 1982,“Music and the Mind of the World” is a “total encounter between an improvising performer and the central instrument of Western musical culture.”
For the first time, that influential piece has now been published and made available online for free on Youtube (above), or at this dedicated website. Set aside a big chunk of time and start streaming.
To learn more about the conceptual underpinnings of this avant-garde creation, read this interview with Conrad. (I’d suggest clicking here and doing a keyword search for “Could you tell me something about your late 70s music, such as Music and the Mind of the World?”).
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Image via Wikimedia Commons
Earlier this week we told you about this 326-track, 20-hour playlist of music from the films of Martin Scorsese. One of the masters of juxtaposing song with image, Scorsese paved the way for another director with a fine record collection, Quentin Tarantino. And what do you know? There’s a similar Spotify playlist that you can enjoy featuring 100 tracks and running five hours. (If you need Spotify’s software, download it here.)
Tarantino might be more of a music geek, but he just hasn’t made as many films as Scorsese. However, if you came of cineaste age during the 1990s, dollars to donuts you had a CD of the Pulp Fiction soundtrack in your collection. Just like Tarantino resuscitated John Travolta’s career, he took an obscure single–a cover of a Turkish-Arabic-Egyptian melody called “Misirlou” by a once-popular surf guitarist–and made it not just the opening track, but the sound of 1980s filmmaking being shot and stuffed in a trunk. (And guitarist Dick Dale got to have a second career from it.) The soundtrack made surf instrumentals popular again, Urge Overkill relevant, Neil Diamond cool, and inserted a Statler Brothers’ song into the collections of thousands of people who wouldn’t touch country with a ten foot pole.
Prior to this, Reservoir Dogs used both “Little Green Bag” by George Baker and “Stuck in the Middle with You” by Stealers Wheel to great effect, and the soundtrack included the narcoleptic DJ patter by comedian Steven Wright, but it was just an appetizer for the full Pulp Fiction meal.
After that, there’s still flashes of brilliance–Jackie Brown is a safe but excellent collection of mostly ‘70s soul–but the soundtracks by themselves don’t stand up as cultural objects in the post-CD era. Instead, there’s moments like the 5.6.7.8’s “Woo Hoo” and Tomoyasu Hotei’s “Battle without Honor or Humanity” from Kill Bill, and the goosebump-inducing use of David Bowie’s “Cat People” in an otherwise period centric, WWII-set Inglourious Basterds.
In later films, he’s become more of a curator of Ennio Morricone works and other composers of the films he loves, and less of a pop magpie. But then, his films have darkened and deepened, and his soundtrack vinyl collection–which he has collected since a kid–just continues to grow.
In an interview with Billboard magazine, he mentioned how integral his record collection is to his filmmaking process.
I am always looking for some cool song that I could use as a big set piece. I’ll finish work and I’ll go into my record room and I’ll put on some song, and literally, I can see it on the screen. I can project myself into a movie theater and I’m watching the scene onscreen and I’m hearing the music and I’m imagining an audience: either an audience of people I know who are digging it or an audience of people I don’t know who are digging it — they’re always digging it. (laughs) And it keeps reminding me that I’m making a movie.
And Tarantino usually gets the rights to use whatever he pleases because of his fame and the Quentin-bump he gives the artists: “It’s actually quite easy to get the rights now, because I’ll use music that some people haven’t heard that much before,” he says in the same interview. “Then after my movie comes out, it seems like every commercial in the world buys it. They can double or triple and quadruple their income just by the exposure the movie gets it.”
Dive into this playlist and let us know any specific gems you find.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
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