COMM620/Noise and social music/Presentation
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http://kevindriscoll.info/docs/presentations/social_music
Contents |
0: title slide
Social music: Noise among the Pop and Popular
Kevin Driscoll, COMM620, 3 December 2009
1: industrial noise
"Roars, thunderings, explosions, hissing roars, bangs, booms, whistling, hissing, puffing, whispers, murmurs, mumbling, muttering, gurgling, screeching, creaking, rustling, humming, crackling, rubbing, shouts, screams, shrieks, wails, hoots, howls, death rattles, sobs" -- Luigi Russolo
Video:
- Russolo, Macchina Tipografica, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcHJySm7ZO0&fmt=18
- Russolo's instrument, the Intonarumori, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYYkMux6Dgw&fmt=18
- Cage, Water Walk, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSulycqZH-U
- Einstürzende Neubauten, Halber Mensch, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2G3KfKbJwE&fmt=18
On Russolo and Cage
- Noise-thinking brings broader palette of sonic material
- Noise ruptures the "calculated" nature of "academic" music with chance
- Concerned with changing music but not destroying music
- New composition strategies
- New instruments
On Attali
- Music as organized noise
- Noise is violence
- Music the simulacrum of violence
- Information theory: Noise as an interruption
- Which is the signal? Which is the noise?
- Political economy
- Industry turns music from ritual to commodity
2: social music
"I don't like that word, jazz. [...] It's social music. All the social melodies out in the air. There's no jazz anymore." -- Miles Davis, Today Show interview (1:40), 1981.
Video:
- Miles Davis interview, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHeYG9SNaS0
3: industrial noise pop
Video:
- Michael Jackson, Human Nature, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T1E1aI95Ro&fmt=18
- Miles Davis, Human Nature, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jkKTcG0xuw&fmt=18
- SWV, Right Here, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOKd_et0A4o&fmt=18
- John Mayer, Human Nature, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvrtuAmHHnI
Notes:
- Original track is industrial noise, the byproduct of an industrial process
- Miles is playing noise music, in a manner similar to Russolo, Cage
- SWV's reuse of HN reflects it's popular relevance
- How does Mayer's performance fit with Davis'?
4: open questions
- Incompatible understandings of "noise"
- Which is the signal? Which is the noise?
- Pop v. the popular
- Does industrial noise affect relevance?
- Is an industrial artifact potentially more open to appropriation than an art or expressive artifact?
- Industrialization of pop production
- Sonic clarity
- Semiotic noise
- Recording product more explicitly, aesthetically reflects its process and the structures of power within which it operates
References
- Cox on signal?
