listening to theory

Live blogging the sc symposium

panel: listening to theory

Soumd in film makes film Real and amchors it to the real world. People infer sources of sound with visual cues.

causation - synchresis is synchronization and synthesis. Does sound exist in a vacuum? This a philosophical question. A realed question is where does sound come from?

is an echo one sound or two? Depending on what you think, your perception changes.

what about form and matter? Is it just a medium, or is it the very stuff of sound?

now we are watching a film of car traffic which looks like it might have been filmed in germany. It's got sounds of cars and wind and birds.

but all the sounds were made in supercollider!

so what was before intentions or agency is now about algorithms and effects.

now renate wieser will speak. She did an installation called the phaedrus machine. This is related to a socratic dialog, which she is describing. Good people are reincarnated as philosphers, bad people as george bush. (These are my words, not hers.)

to practice good life and avoid a bad reincarnation, she has a video game you can play to practice looking for truth. There are sound cues if you reach truth or if you fall from it. The game is audio only and uses a verticle speaker arrangement. You do get feedback in the form of a spreadsheet at the end which described your reincarnation level.

she has another installation called 'survival of the cutest.' It's a play with voices coming out of different speakers. Sc sends them to whatever channel, semi-randomly.

the excell thing with the speadsheet works because sc writes to a tab dilineated file and excell look at it from time to time.

tom hall will speak now. He's talking about 20th century stuff. Legacy of musical modernism. What is a muscal object? Instruments vs sounds.

20th century had more math stuff in music than any time since the renaissance. Schoenburg came up with twelve tone almost a hundred yaers ago. Stravinsky took it up after schoennburg died.

stravinsky said when he composed with intervals, he was aware of them as objects. Babbitt took up the 12tone. He was up in the maximum diversity of permutations.

set class theory is an american thing. There's some set class stuff in supercollider, though.

a set can be represented by an array. Tones are integers in equal temperament, much like midi.

he has a pitchcircle class to visualize sets.

powersets are all permutations of elements. A n size powerset will have size 2**n.

tom johnson wrote a piece called 'chord catalog' which sounds cool. Http://www.editions75 . . .

break for 5