Sonogram Visible Speech is a very cool visualisation program for producing 3D sonograms.  It is developed by Christoph Lauer and runs in Java and is cross platform.

I was sorry to hear of the passing of Bebe Barron, Pioneering Electronic Composer.Create Digital Music have published an excellent Obituary with a number of other links including a detailed article on  Matrixsynth

I was recently asked to write a page titled: Thoughts for young composers - I thought I’d place it here for comment and discussion.

Thoughts for young composers:

Music is about sound. Much of the teaching you will have received is about the abstract formal strictures of music – harmony and counterpoint, the range of instruments and their function in orchestration, but I would protest that all this is somewhat irrelevant if you can not feel, see and engage with the qualities of sound itself.

IS the sound heavy, dense, thin, light, sparkly, sharp, intense, dynamic etc – I think of composing as sculpting – I think of the sound as a viscous, fluid medium, sometimes I think of it as a lump of clay on a pottery wheel and we can draw it up and make it into forms of our choosing to represent something of our experience in the world. You can use one note/sound to call into being the entire universe, to create a vast emptiness as though in front of you is contained all the planets of the solar system in a peaceful solace. Or, you can use a single sound to send a chill up the spine, to make the space intimate, clammy, scary and threatening. What this means is that your music has the power to condition the space you and your audiences occupy – to change the scale and the emotional energy of that space. Good film music is a masterful example of this approach to composition, and you will see that it often engages electroacoustic techniques. The sound effects and the music work together to create the emotional world of the film. The same is true in theatre and music for contemporary dance.

All of the above illustrates some of the ways in which we engage in music as sound – as pure abstract communication. Electronic processes allow the expansion of an acoustic instrument or found sound to express a multitude of emotional states. Edgar Varese often called for new electronic instruments in order to realize his dream of a music “set free from the crippling forces of tonality” – the only purely electronic work he made was Poeme electronique (1957-8) for the Phillips Pavilion at the 1958 World Fair. His other work Deserts (electronic tape music and orchestra), 1953 was the first of these two electronic works he wrote after not composing for nearly 20 years due to his frustration with the strictures of tonal music and acoustic instruments. Around this same time John Cage composed Imaginary Landscape no.1 (1939) for magnetic tape, and Stockhausen completed Studie I. All these composers were actively engaged in seeking sounds beyond the acoustic instrument and the formal notions of harmony and counterpoint. An explosion of electronic and electroacoustic works came there after in the 1960’s and onwards – there are many works worthy of your consideration.

These works may not be to your liking – you may never have heard music like it, you may therefore need to learn to listen in a different way, but I strongly encourage you to listen to them, to think about the use of sound as raw material for sonic composition, and to think about how important Timbre is to musical composition. Strange then that we are not able within the Western Music Notation system to notate timbre, except by the limitations of orchestration techniques, mutes, bow positions etc.

Great music understands the integration of more traditional composition techniques and a deep feeling for the quality, the texture, weight etc of the sound, and thereby creates a rich and rewarding musical experience.

Mouthdrumming : Wes Carroll’s Instructional Site For Vocal Percussion

Solkattu (S Indian), Bols (N Indian), peurt a beul (Celtic), and ‘beatboxing’ are all kinds of mouth music. Check out the sequencer via this link to Wes Carroll, and groove away!

Probably the most eagerly awaited release of any musical interface in a decade or more, the Tenori-On is presented in a Sonic State video, presented by Yamaha’s Yu Nishibori.

Seems like an extraordinary year for innovation in musical interfaces with the Nintendo Wii controller being adapted by a number of people for music performance and now the Tenori-on

Another Aspen page - this time about La Monte Young’s Notes on Continuous Periodic Composite Sound Waveform Environment Realizations of map of 49’s dream the two systems of eleven sets of galactic intervals ornamental lightyears tracery by La Monte Young

The audio can be heard here

The ARC project, From Talking Heads to Thinking Heads is a large 5 year research project underway at the University of Western Sydney, where psychologists, computer scientists and artists, lead by Stelarc, are developing Stelarc’s original prosthetic head into an artificially intelligent companion!

SSL have published a series of TUTORIALS on compression - these are for use with their Duende series of processors, but make an excellent foundation intro to using audio compressors

An interesting interview/performance/rehearsal video

This is the page from the Antheil website leads to information about a recent performance of Ballet Mecanique in Washington (also see youTube excerpt below) The Ballet Mecanique Page.

Scroll down the page to see a heading
BALLET MECANIQUE causes a “HAPPY RIOT” in WASHINGTON, DC!

and watch a video of the performance.

Also, a link just below that one leads to an excerpt of the original film - check it out - crazzzyyyy