MUS 221 Midterm Listenings

Poeme electronique

Edgard Varese

• Composed with tape, electronic sound generators, recorded acoustic sounds

• Premiered at the Brussels World’s Fair in the Philips Pavilion

Pot au Feu

• Delia Derbyshire (1968)

• Composed using various tape loops from the BBC library of sounds

• slow intro then fast section

Partiels

Gérard Grisey.

Written for 18 instruments, the piece is considered a defining work of spectral music

Woodpecker No. 2

By Merbow

An example of noise music

Sounds like static

moDernisT

Ryan Maguire

Created by salvaging the sounds lost to mp3 compression from the song “Tom’s Diner”, famously used as one of the main controls in the listening tests to develop the MP3 encoding algorithm

“Movement 1” from 1-Bit Symphony

Tristan Perich

• Composed on a single microchip

  • The CD case IS the performer!

• Generates all sound with a 1-bit on-off electrical pulse

  • Literally 0s and 1s

• Has a melody but is scratchy

Bucephalus Bouncing Bal

by Aphex Twin, from the Come to Daddy EP (1997)

• Most sounds generated by processing a sample of a bouncing ball, despite not having access to a power DAW with a graphical interface at the time

• percussion sounds like a ball bouncing

Archangel

• Burial, from the album Untrue. (2007)

• Produced in Sound Forge, which lacked true multitrack capabilities and other features present in most DAWs

• Includes:

  • Pitch-shifted, heavily edited vocal samples

  • Samples from the Metal Gear Solid video game series

  • Skipped drum patterns resulting from uneven loop edits

My Home is in the Delta

• Muddy Waters, from the album Folk Singer (1964)

• Use of an echo chamber, a separate space in the studio designed for its reflective characteristics

Sweet Jane

• Cowboy Junkies, from the album The Trinity Session (1988)

• Notable for the use of a single microphone with the band arranged in a circle around it

• The volume balance between performers was carefully calibrated with their distance from the mic and volume of amplifiers