cityofsound

Music, Space, Performance, Download

M'learned colleague and friend Paul Schütze has made several of his recent works available for free download at his site, including 'Dressing The Air', originally installed for the Radical Fashion exhibition at the V&A, London; and 'Partial Site', an improvisation around two of the Siteworks series.

Simultaneously, I'm reminded of another recent discovery - Adam Greenfield's piece on the relationship between sound, live performance, and space, entitled "Waiting for the gift of sound and vision: Electronic music, interface, and experience". Adam approaches from an IA/design perspective, but an extremely well-informed one, as with his previous pieces on the Prada store in NYC, and 9/11. Very interesting, and beautifully written. I'm reminded of Brian Eno's comments about interfaces in Swollen Appendices - about the richness of the guitar as a physical interface, say, compared to the paucity of many digital products at the time. Similarly Paul Schütze's work has often interrogated the boundaries between live and sequenced music; between improvisation and composition. It also addresses - directly and obliquely, formally and informally - issues around sound, space, sense, memory, architecture, cities etc. and is certainly worth checking out if you're interested in any of these things, imho.

Paul also posted an excellent riposte/addition to my earlier jumbled piece-ette on the essence of art, design, craft, and everyday life. He and I regularly disagree on this, and hopefully will continue to do so ;) But Paul's comment is certainly worth reading, not least as it's far more considered and informed than my opening salvo, but also as it raises some fundamentally important questions about the process of inspiration and craft. And it draws Joel Schumacher and David Lynch together to critique Frank Gehry. Scroll on.

Math Rocks

After my earlier post about art and design, here's maths. The UK Government is concerned about the teaching of maths in school, and is likely to take steps to make maths "more useful once pupils enter the world of work". That's a seemingly harmless phrase, but what that boils down to is more teaching of numeracy, and less teaching of how rich a subject mathematics is, never mind its wider context(s).

I heard Johnny Ball (childhood hero) on the radio Monday morning, arguing powerfully that this would be a mistake:

"What they need to understand is the mathematics that makes bridges stand up, the mathematics that empowers designers, the mathematics that empowers our technology - because we live in a technological age. And if we don't do that early - and we're not doing that early enough - then we don't get enough people going into the technical trades or engineering in our universities and UK PLC loses out."

Exactly.

From another angle, recall 'Cryptonomicon', in which Neil Stephenson produced numerous examples of the kind of maths I personally first encountered studying Computer Science at college—more philosophy than numeracy. Beautiful, powerful, and effectively another language/system of communication in itself, which is what I believe Stephenson was doing there. He's fluent in both: in prose of course, and able to communicate via mathematics (and its tributaries and waterfalls of code) on its own terms. And able to place it in a wider socio-historical context. I couldn't imagine a better study guide, but one unlikely to be recommended in the Government's report.

BBC News: Drive to improve maths teaching

Art & Design & Messy Daily Life

Interesting article on the role of client in architecture, and particularly, the symbiosis which often occurs between architect and client (and is often ignored in favour of the Randian myth of the über-architect).

However, there's a passage there which ends on an odd statement - well, odd to me. Warning: this argument may quickly head for some tired old ground, almost as bad as the PC vs Mac debate. Enter at your own risk:

"Visitors to Bilbao are dazzled by the stunning originality of Mr. Gehry's exuberant forms, but the building's artistry also resides in its ability to solve a host of difficult planning issues, from channeling an existing rail line through the structure to crowd control. Indeed, much of the artistry is that these problems are handled so deftly we no longer see them as challenges. Architecture, alone of the arts, takes the messy problems of daily life as one of its raw materials."

Here comes the art vs. design argument ... but I find it odd that architecture is perceived as an art here, despite taking on board the "messy problems of daily life" - where exactly are these definitions of art and life-investigation as mutually exclusive? On the other hand, practically speaking (and being oh-so-simplistic), perhaps a simple difference between art and design may be the original impulse to create - architecture has a client, a purpose and real world problems to really solve.

Therefore it is not an art.

If it's not an art, then it's not alone in taking messy problems on board i.e. see all other design-related practices, not least information architecture and informational product design, both of which rely on deep ethnographic research into messy problems of daily life - in fact, actively engaging with and building on them (of course, Computer Science (its sub-set of Systems Analysis) and Product Design in general have both done this for decades.)

It's not enough to be beautiful, and therefore an art - again, a cursory glance at design history will reveal many beautiful objects, which also solve real-world problems. As idiosyncratic and wonderful as, say, the Guggenheim Bilbao is (and I stood, mouth agape, staring at it for, oh, about 4 days when I saw it), that doesn't mean that its beauty is in its form any more than it's in its problem-solving - for that site in Bilbao was a real problem-solving exercise. So beauty alone doesn't define it as an art.

Unless you really want to declare it an art, in which case so is design, in all its myriad forms. Check the Design Museum, or the Cooper Hewitt, not least numerous brilliant creations online. Or on the streets. As Frank Zappa said, stick a frame around it, and it's art.

I guess the tone of that phrase seems funny - oh, it's an art despite having to deal with that troublesome life thing. Seems to me that the problem here is casting architecture as an art, which actually really does it a disservice. Unless our definition of art can be richer and include these-design related practices? But what would that serve? In my trade, I think Jeff Veen had it right when he called his book 'The Art & Science of Web Design'. It is both. I'm no architect, and totally unqualified to speculate that it's the same, but I reckon it is ;-)

But it feels kinda pointless to separate these things out. I feel we should revel in the opportunity to address "the messy problems of daily life" and celebrate that desire, whether art or design.

NY Times: For Great Buildings, Get a Great Client [requires registration, free]

Alan Lomax RIP

Legendary musicologist Alan Lomax has died, aged 87. He was responsible for recording many of early folk/blues artists from the 1930s onwards, including songs which would later turn up on last year's Grammy winning O'Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack, but more importantly contributing much to the early years of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. And thence to the rest of the music of the 20thC.

"Long before tape recording became feasible, the work entailed lugging around recording equipment that weighed hundreds of pounds. Lomax said making it possible to record and play back music in remote areas "gave a voice to the voiceless" and "put neglected cultures and silenced people into the communications chain."

Sounds more resonant now than ever.

eJazz news: Musicologist Alan Lomax Dies
[via Peter Marsh - thanks]

DJ iPod

A New York club has set up a DJ booth equipped with twin-iPod action, according to Wired.

One is a 5-GB model containing about 1,000 songs, the other a 10-GB model with 2,000 songs. Connected by headphone jacks, the iPods sit on Plexiglass blocks, one on each side of the mixer. Would-be DJs take a numbered ticket from a deli-style dispenser next to the DJ desk. A stack of print-outs of all 3,000 songs are available to help DJs prepare their set list. The print-out also provides a quick guide to DJ etiquette, including the rule, "Playing of any heavy metal ballads will result in immediate expulsion from the premises. Everyone gets seven minutes to play a set; the time is counted down on a giant digital clock placed in front of the mixer."

I like the communal, collaborative aspect of this (despite the mullet ballad-fascism). Though I can't imagine it really works for everyone - 7 minutes to play a set doesn't allow for much leeway, and whilst I'm immensely fond of the random shuffle experience (it's now my preferred way of listening) it seems a very personal experience. Being exposed to a stranger's shuffle for 7 minutes sounds less than satisfying.

But hey, some New Yorkers are just too cool ;)

Society's Child speaks out on mp3s

Janis Ian (yes, that Janis Ian) on the ol' mp3 downloads from the artist perspective issue ... at OpenDemocracy

"There is zero evidence that material available for free online downloading is financially harming anyone. In fact, most of the hard evidence is to the contrary. It�s sheer stupidity to rejoice at the Napster decision."

A freedom that works: the upside of download

NYC Ghosts and Flowers

It's all kicking off in NYC, over the recently announced plans for the redevelopment of Ground Zero. Not least in the the New York Times Editorial, headed 'The Downtown We Don't Want':

"(T)hese are dreary, leaden proposals that fall far short of what New York City - and the world - expect to see rise at ground zero."

... and more forcefully, the New York Times letters page, headed "Downtown Visions: Remembrance and Resolve" e.g.:

"Development proposals for downtown Manhattan are bereft of imagination and look backward instead of to the future. We are thus confronted with the paradox that the devastation caused by backward-looking madmen will lead to a homage to the past. None of these proposals remotely represent New York City as a town of dreamers and strivers. The world's great architects have been shut out of what is possibly the recent past's greatest urban building site. A minimum level of fairness would require the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to reject these proposals and throw the site open to a global competition."

[New York Times site requires registration, free]

It's a complex problem: a private development with perhaps the largest amount of public interest ever seen (apparently, 40m+ people tried to view the plans on the LMDC's website, overloading its server and slowing Internet traffic throughout the north-eastern US).

Music To Watch URLs By

"The webPlayer is a generative music creator, taking pages from the web and turning them into music, providing a soundtrack to enhance your browsing experience."

webPlayer [requires Shockwave] At this point, all websites sound pretty darn similar. The 'author' (perhaps programmer is the better term here - or not - confusing, no?) notes that his composition algorithms are based on serialist composers, yet there's a lot more variety in the sound of serialist compositions imho. His approach seems a little flawed by trying to make the music "more tuneful" as they're based on "sets of notes (which) are classically recognised as sounding good together". That's pretty arguable, natch, and an unecessary limitation? I'm sure I detected a touch more dissonance and melancholy in cnn.com as opposed to the sound of this site, but that may have been wishful, er, listening. Still, interesting idea. [via Paul Hammond - thanks!]

Mood Music and iTunes3

"Chances are your answer to the question "what's your favorite music?" would depend on your mood, where you are, who you�re with and what you�re doing."

In that one simple marketing-puffed phrase, Apple have captured the essence of how people might want to organise music i.e. in utterly variable, complex, and ultimately highly personal ways. Seeing music organisation in a wider context of the user experience is something I've touched on before, but not really dealt with thoroughly, as I'm keen to do some user-research on this matter. But Apple's new iTunes 3, presumably on the back of their own user experience models, is already beginning to make their 'digital hub' products near-essential. Here's Apple's suggestions for potential applications of their ratings mechanism:

• Classic Rock Genre is Rock and Year is in the range of 1960 to 1979
• Never Been Listened Play Count is 0
• Absolute Favorites My Rating is five stars
• Forgotten Tunes Last Played is not in the last six months
• New York Times Song Name contains NYT and Genre is Spoken Word
• Flavors of Mozart Composer contains Mozart and Genre contains Classical
• New Releases Year is 2002
• Love Songs Song Name contains Love or Album contains Love
• 100 Newest Limit to 100 songs selected by Date Added
• Fill my iPod Limit to 4 gigabytes selected by random

By adding date (note: both recording date and date added), rating within genre, device-oriented measures such as gigabytes, track title, and composer_name vs. artist_name,  they've already enabled a rich set of possibilities. My earlier post picks out a few more angles such as location, instrument/technique etc., but Apple are really forging ahead here, imho, by integrating quite powerful operations in highly accessible, consumer technology. Fascinating developments. As the NYTimes says, "Over all, the new iTunes-iPod combination makes you wish there were a Pulitzer Prize simply for good ideas." [registration required, free]

Broadband in the context of PC Baangs

Reading like a postcard from the future ... and yet, not. J.C. Herz writing about Seoul's high-bandwidth culture, for Wired, almost comes on like a cyberpunk throwback, if she weren't actually describing reality. In South Korea, over 50% of the population has broadband. She describes Seoul as the most wired city on earth. As Simon Hopkins would say, it's a testbed of futurity.

The article is chock-full of fascinating observations - here's an initial selection of just some of them:

• Describing the city itself - the old ballet between the city deploying technology around close physical networks; the technology in-turn reinforcing the city's density and form (Seoul's population density makes broadband easier to implement).
• The emphasis on using PCs with broadband in public spaces; not logging on as a solitary activity, but as part of a varied series of physical group interactions. The old 'third place' really beginning to emerge in digital interaction.
• Online games culture emerging as a national sport, with prime-time TV coverage! 'StarCraft' has 5 million players; 'Lineage' has 3 million, 150k simultaneously on any given night. Pro gamers practice 10 hours a day, like musicians.
• How Korean culture affects the game design itself, enabling complex hierarchical models to emerge (as, generalising, Korean society itself is distinctly structured and hierarchical - cf. the recent World Cup). These models enable a massively collaborative system, neatly avoiding the problem of every player trying to be the lone hero.
• The games are often played in PC Baangs (cybercaffs - there's 26000 of them in Seoul, and it's where most people access from), enabling close physical cooperation and meme-spreading.
• A key point about broadband itself, with salient lessons for 'the West' perhaps. What has worked here isn't streaming linear content at people (aka TV), but providing environments, platforms, spaces which enable true interaction (in this case, games). And as Matt Jones and Danny O'Brien have recently pointed out, that's what 'the media cartel' just doesn't get.

As Herz neatly puts it:

"South Korea's broadband commons challenges North American assumptions about what bandwidth is for and why it's relevant. In the US, cable, telephone, and media companies spin visions of set-top boxes and online jukeboxes, trying to "leverage content" and turn old archives into new media streams. There is a profound fear of empowering consumers to share media in a self-organizing way on a mass scale. Yet this is precisely what makes South Korea the broadband capital of the world. It's not a futuristic fantasy that caters to alienated couch potatoes; it's a present-day reality that meets the needs of a culture of joiners  a place where physical and virtual are not mutually exclusive categories ..."

"So what about those of us in channel-surfing American cocoon-land? The vision of streaming media piped into the home, video-on-demand 24/7, and needle-narrow target markets is heralded as the way forward. Yet it is possible that this vision is holding us back. Perhaps the real market opportunities have nothing to do with connecting people to the Universal back catalog and everything to do with connecting people to each other. If Seoul is any kind of signpost, the way forward does not lie in the single servings of media we consume but in the playgrounds we share  no matter who's manning the turrets and storming the castles."

The Bandwidth Capital of the World, by J.C. Herz, for Wired.