The Science of Music - From Rock to Bach

(Original Link - http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/11/15/803788/the-science-of-music-from-rock.html)

What is a musical note? This is one of the deceptively simple questions asked and answered by John Powell in his fascinating book, "How Music Works."

It's an easy question, you might think. A musical note, as created by a musical instrument or a voice, is determined by the frequency of the sound waves produced. Wrong, that would be the note's pitch. Well, one can surely form a note by simultaneously depressing several related piano keys. Nope, that's not a note; that's a chord. A note, the basic building block of all music, is a repeating pattern of sound waves (which distinguishes it from the chaotic sound waves of nonmusical noises). It "consists," Powell says, "of four things: a loudness, a duration, a timbre and a pitch."

Starting with the four properties of a note, the author, who is both physicist and musician, uses easy-to-follow, conversational language to lead the reader into the science of music. He explains every common musical term, from "key" to "bar" to "scale." He differentiates a concerto from a sonata and shows how composers use chords to create harmonies. He brings his explanations to life with a wide range of examples. For instance, a certain type of chord called an arpeggio is found in "Hotel California," by the Eagles, while a complex harmony called counterpoint was used by Bach in his concertos.

After explaining the meaning of musical terms, Powell interprets those strange-looking symbols found in a piece of sheet music. It is amazing that after a few hours of Powell's explanations, a musical novice like me can begin to read music. And for those who would like to use their newly acquired musical education to make their own music, Powell offers advice on how to choose an appropriate first instrument. Violins are too hard; pianos are easier.

For those who approach music more passively, Powell provides a chapter on how and where to listen to music. Instead of spending $75,000 on "a special listening room," he advises us to install our equipment in a normal room, then move the speakers around to get the best sound. He also answers a question that is being passionately debated by audiophiles all over the world: "Are vinyl records better than CDs?" The answer, he says, is no. Those favoring vinyl are victims of "technology nostalgia."

Read more: http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/11/15/803788/the-science-of-music-from-rock.html#ixzz15gC8COAf

The Most From Your Workspace: The 5 Best Trash Audio Music Making Environments

(Original Link - http://createdigitalmusic.com/2010/08/the-most-from-your-workspace-the-5-best-trash-audio-music-making-environments/)

Operating systems aside, the most important “platform” for your music may be the work environment you create for yourself to produce. Seeing that physical environment for someone else can be an inspiration, and certainly a window into their personality. So, as I look through the workspaces submitted by readers, I asked the terrific blog TRASH_AUDIO to select a few of the favorites from their series, “Workspace and Environment.” Rather than ask the usual, bland music journalistic questions of artists, they explore those artists’ creation spaces, and discuss process through that context. (Eat your heart out, MTV Cribs.)

TRASH_AUDIO also has a new site address, so go enjoy:
http://trashaudio.com/

It’s worth checking out the whole site, but here are their top five favorite workspaces and environments, in no particular order. Some are the tangles of wires you might expect, others more unusual, clean digital environments like the images I chose here (if only because I’m more used to seeing the tangles of wires).


1. Finnish-born Sasu Ripatti of Vladislav Delay and Luomo has found an acoustically-wonderful, isolated environment on an island, an environment surrounded by trees and far from people. On the road, it’s just one laptop, one Korg nanoKEY, and an audio interface, to which he adds Faderfox MIDI controllers, small KAOSS pads, and effects pedals for live gigs.

2. Alec Empire stays true to his Berlin roots with an all-white minimal studio. It’s distraction-free – and having a big, dedicated studio space means no neighbors. Think loud. “Actually you wouldn’t really find much colour in there,” he tells TRASH-AUDIO. “And what surprises visitors is that we have no paintings or posters or anything visual up on the walls. I really find this distracting. Somehow my mind would get off path. The great thing is that we can record whenever we want.” On the road, it’s a Mac and Digidesign gear, but most importantly, a big mobile hard drive, so sounds can come along with him for constant revision. Add to that an iPhone as a musical notebook for sketching ideas.

3. Alessandro Cortini, an Italian-born artist living in the US, focuses on Buchla modular gear as the center of his workspace, with the monome and MLR as the software accompaniment. Corners of the space, he says, are dedicated to different working styles – modular, drum machine, computer – but everything is within reach, which to me is also the epitome of the brilliant Buchla design itself. If you can’t afford a modular (and certainly most of us can’t afford a Buchla 200), perhaps the ergonomics is the single most important lesson to learn here.

4. Mavis Concave, Robert Inhuman and Vankmen of Realicide adapt to a variety of environments – the corner of someone’s room, different homes. As Mavis says, the people in your surroundings often matter more than the architecture: “I need to have enough physical space for my gear and be surrounded by people who encourage the work that I am doing. I can’t be surrounded by people who write off my music production as a nuisance to have in the household. That is probably the biggest creativity/productivity block there is for me.” And for fans of hardware (you’re heard in the poll, don’t worry), that means favorite gear that can go in a car trunk, like the Korg ElecTribe ES-1 (called out by both Mavis and Robert).

5. Atom TM. I just love this, because seeing look-alike studios is boring, because I feel strongly that aesthetics around you can provide visual stimulation for your sonic creativity centers, and because it defies conventional wisdom. So I have to just run the whole quote – decoration instead of gear. (Next – perhaps decorated gear?) Take that, blank white walls of Berlin!

“Decoration instead of gear” became the motto. All my workspaces had to have big windows and if possible a nice view (even though I tend to close the curtains in summer during daytime). I don’t like “studio” atmosphere. I don’t like cables, gear and the entire tech-look. Environments that make me feel well and relaxed are usually of a different type. I like old furniture, warm colours, ornaments and in general everything that does not look contemporary. The contemporary look usually is contaminated with bad taste and pretentious design. Further, the decoration itself helps to absorb reflections and creates a dryer sound. I can say that the decoration itself, that is, obtaining/installing as well as creating amongst it, gives me more satisfaction than obtaining/installing equipment. I can see why “studios” have to look “tech”, that is because the studio owner needs to impress the entirely clueless cast of customers. There is no reason whatever to follow that look, just because it is somewhat implied in the equipment itself. In general I’m very sensible when it comes to “making music”. I find it hard to focus in other studios that don’t fit my aesthetics and sound. I think that my workspace is a perfect combination of the technical-, creative- and aethetic aspects of my work and it has become what it is through a long development of those three components.

Editorial note: In a blinding error of reading on my part, I read the words “Analog Live” as a misprint of “Ableton Live,” as referenced in the original draft of this story. I’ve been looking at software too long. To be clear, this was my inability to read, not a typo on the part of TRASH_AUDIO. I still like the idea of a parody of Ableton’s site redone in analog gear. I will from now on keep that fantasy to myself and stop applying it to the rest of the world.
Whether or not any of these approaches is meaningful to you may vary. But to me, just hearing people make decisions to reorganize their space is refreshing. I find sometimes even an arbitrary change of scenery can help unstop creative juices. Let us know if the same is true for you.

A Game of Checkers Becomes a Step Sequencer, Ableton Live Controller

Checkerboard Step Sequencer V2 from Josh Silverman on Vimeo.

 

(Original Link - http://createdigitalmusic.com/2010/11/a-game-of-checkers-becomes-a-step-sequencer-ableton-live-controller/)

 

This is a demo video to demonstrate the use of a checker board as a step sequencer. This video should make obvious the relationship between the position of the checkers pieces and the noises they represent and trigger. It's still a work in progress, but for now I won't subject you to the cacophony that is the sound of an actual game of checkers.

Aside from the kick drum, which just keeps pace on every beat, all other drum samples are triggered off the board.

In this version, I've implemented a Mute Region that surrounds the board. When the application sees activity in the mute region, it disables the updating of the sequencer. This way, my hand doesn't trigger a cacophony when I move the pieces.

More details at prettyextreme.com/​?p=124

Built with openFrameworks and Ableton Live.

Bat Brains Offer Clues as to How We Focus on Some Sounds and Not Others

(Original Link - http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101114190817.htm)

How do you know what to listen to? In the middle of a noisy party, how does a mother suddenly focus on a child's cry, even if it isn't her own?

Bridget Queenan, a doctoral candidate in neuroscience at Georgetown University Medical Center is turning to mustached bats to help her solve this puzzle.

At the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego, Queenan reports that she has found neurons in the brains of bats that seem to "shush" other neurons when relevant communications sounds come in -- a process she suggests may be working in humans as well.

In her investigations, she has also found that "some neurons seemed to know to yell louder to report communication sounds over the presence of background noise."

"So we can now start to piece together how the cells in your brain are able to deal with the complex sensory environment we live in," Queenan added.

To understand auditory brain function, bats are especially interesting animals to study because they process sound through echolocation, which is a kind of biological sonar. Bats call out and then listen to their own echoes produced when those calls bounce off nearby objects. Bats use these echoes to navigate and to hunt.

Not only do the brains of bats have to process a constant stream of pulses and echoes, they have to simultaneously process the bats' social communication, Queenan says.

"What we are trying to figure out is how a bat can fly around echolocating -- screeching and listening to its own individual sounds bouncing back -- amidst a whole colony of hundreds of other echolocating bats -- and possibly hear another bat saying 'watch out! Bats actually do make these cautious calls quite a bit," she says. "In fact, bats have a whole host of communication sounds: angry sounds, warning sounds, and sounds that says 'please don't hurt me."

The auditory processing area in bats' brains is larger than other centers, just like the visual processing center in humans is large. "Humans operate predominantly by sight so a huge portion of our brain is devoted to vision processing. Bats, however, operate by sound," Queenan says.

In this study, Queenan and her colleagues presented different combinations of echolocation sounds with various communication sounds to awake bats to see how neurons in the bat brains were dealing with this incredible cacophony. The researchers found that some bats' neurons control the activity of other neurons when important sounds are perceived. These GUMC scientists also found other neurons that amp up perception of bat communication in the face of background noise. Working together, these clumps of neurons allow the bats to hear what is needed.

"All organisms are constantly assaulted by incoming stimuli such as sounds, light, vibrations, and so on, and our sensory systems have to triage the most relevant stimuli to help us survive," Queenan says. "As humans we are not only sensitive to a child's cry, but we notice flashing ambulance lights even though we are engrossed in something else. We want to know how that happens."

Queenan says her next task is to record brain neurons in bats that are not only awake, but flying.

The sound (and sight and feel) of music for the deaf

(Original Link - http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/science/the-sound-and-sight-and-feel-of-music-for-the-deaf/article1792763/)

Frank Russo helps make music for the deaf.

Working with a team of researchers, the Ryerson psychology professor invented a chair that allows deaf people to feel music through vibrations. He also works with both deaf and hearing musicians to compose music that focuses on vibrations and vision rather than sound.

Prof. Russo, a music cognition expert who also sings and plays guitar, will discuss music without sound at the TEDx Talks in Toronto Thursday. The conference’s tagline is “ideas worth spreading.”

Your talk will be on experiencing music without sound. Tell me more.
 
I plan to talk about the other modalities – or the other senses – and whether or not we can experience music through these other senses. This is interesting from a scientific perspective. It also has some interesting practical and artistic implications when we’re considering music experienced by the deaf.
Performers do things when they’re performing that convey emotion and these things can be seen. So, for example, when a performer is performing something that is melancholy, their movements are melancholy. By movements, I mean their facial expressions, the way that their body moves, the way that their hands move. There’s really a lot that can be seen that conveys important structural and emotional information about music. There’s [also] a long history of the deaf experiencing music through vibration.

Legend has it that in his later years, a deafened Beethoven cut the legs off his piano to feel the vibrations through the floorboards. How do deaf people experience music and how does this inform your work?
 
Deaf culture is extremely visual and it also involves the body, more prominently I would say than oral cultures. So their experience of music, maybe not surprisingly, is informed by what they see and what they feel. There’s this long history of feeling music. For example, there’s a famous percussionist, Evelyn Glennie. She’s deaf and she talks about experiencing music through her body. So she’ll perform without shoes so that she can feel the vibration through her body.

You and a team of researchers at Ryerson developed the emoti-chair. What is it and how does it work?
 
The emoti-chair is a sensory substitution technology that’s designed to take sound and present it to the body as vibration. You can put your hand on a speaker and you can feel the vibration because all sound emanates from some form of vibration. The challenge, though, with touching a speaker or even touching a musical instrument is what we call perceptual masking. Perceptual masking occurs in vibration when the lower frequency vibrations dominate the higher frequency vibrations. So all we feel is the thump, thump, thump. So what we’ve done in the emoti-chair is separate out the frequencies and present them to different parts of the body. We’ll take the high frequencies and we’ll present them to the upper part of the back. We’ll take the lower frequencies in the music signal and we’ll present them to the lower part of your back.

You’ve held a couple dozen concerts for deaf and hard-of-hearing people with the emoti-chair. What are the concerts like?
 
It’s really evolved. We’ve gone from taking prefabricated music that’s been constructed for hearing ears and have translated it into deaf music. We are now doing something entirely different, where from the conceptualization of the music we’re thinking about this as a vibe track or a piece of music that’s primarily for vibration and vision, not sound. So that opens up all sorts of interesting artistic possibilities for the deaf and hearing community.

It sounds like you’re almost creating a new art form of music without sound.
 
That’s what we like to think, yeah. And we actually are putting on a series of workshops across the country where we’re exploring this. We did one in Vancouver last June. We’re going to do the next one at the Banff Centre for the Arts next spring. At these workshops, we’re trying to bring together music performers or composers that want to work on this new art form, on developing something that’s music-like but has this reallocation of the sensory priorities so that vibration and vision are in the foreground.

Do people who experience music without sound also experience the emotion that is so much a part of music?
 
Absolutely. We have been doing some research in the lab along those lines. And yes, there’s a great deal of agreement between the emotion experienced by a deaf individual and a hearing individual.

Ringing in your ears

(Original Link - http://www.thespec.com/news/local/article/275472--ringing-in-your-ears)

Tinnitus, that phantom ringing in the ears that affects thousands in Canada, is generated not by the ear, but by neurons firing in the brain, according to a North American research team that includes a McMaster University scientist.

“The tinnitus is not generated by processes in the ear, but changes in the brain when hearing loss occurs,” said McMaster professor emeritus Larry Roberts, with the department of psychology, neuroscience, and behaviour. 

Neurons, he said, are meant to talk to each other. When the ear stops talking to them, usually because of hearing loss, they start talking to themselves and this in turn, generates the ringing. “The sound is generated by neuron activity.”

Roberts said the conclusion is the result of collaborative work in the past decade, but said many people are not aware it’s the neurons, or changes in the brain producing tinnitus. Now the question is: how is the noise generated in the brain? “What are the neurons doing, and where are they doing it?” he said. “Our work will assist.” 

Understanding how it happens might lead to finding a treatment. The findings also help scientists understand why tinnitus is such a difficult problem to treat, he added.

They also point to the importance of prevention.

About 300,000 to 350,000 people in Canada, or about one to two per cent of the population, suffer from severe tinnitus. About 10 to 12 per cent of all Canadians have some form of tinnitus, he said.

Peter Austen, acting president of the Tinnitus Association of Canada, has suffered from a severe form for five years and says he’s researched everything and tried everything. He says it’s long been known that tinnitus is a phantom noise generated in the auditory cortex in the brain.

The main problem with tinnitus, he believes, is that people are trying to find cures but none of what is out there will help. 

“There’s no cure. Only management,” he said.

“You never want to get it. Don’t ever go to a concert without wearing earplugs,” he warns. “Teenagers don’t realize what they’re doing to themselves.”

Roberts said although tinnitus is most common after age 60, chronic tinnitus can happen at any age and it is a major cause of disability in soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq.

Studies show hearing loss among young people is increasing and this may also lead to an increase in tinnitus, he said.

“If there’s a price to be paid for listening to loud music, it’ll be later in life,” Roberts said Thursday before leaving for the annual Society for Neuroscience meetings in San Diego where he and the other researchers will present a symposium on their findings.

Roberts said U.S. data shows 12 to 13 per cent of adolescents have hearing impairments. With iPods so common and the use of ear buds almost universal, this is quite alarming because more children will be more susceptible to tinnitus as they grow older, he said.

Holograph Sells Out Concert In Japan!