lowercase music

tregoweth writes "Wired News has an article about "lowercase music" -- electronic music made with itty-bitty quiet sounds."

Comments

nothing particularly groundbreaking about it

[discogravy]

cage did this, as the article points out. one of the main points behind his "silent" compositions -- aside from the obvious tongue in cheek 'let's mess with the critics' attitude it had -- was the use of ambient sound as part of the composition. brian eno was inpsired to make "music for airports" (for intents and purposes the first non-classical "ambient" record) when he was recovering from a car accident and asked a friend to put a harpsichord record on the turntable..but she didn't raise the volume high enough before she left so he had to put up with it at a very low volume, barely loud enough to hear over the rain on the windows in his room. the ultra-quietness of these recordings reminds me of heavy metal guitarists trying to out-"heavy" each other. these guys are just trying to out-"quiet" each other.

Re:This is bullshit

[jafuser]

It's nice to see Wired drawing some attention to these guys

Re-read the article and determine whether it was written to draw some attention to a music genre, or as advertising for DigiDesign and Apple.

• Picture with a Mac
• "magnification of minute sounds through a computer, typically a Macintosh."
• "...and amplify them with software such as DigiDesign's Pro Tools."
• "...attracted about 100 people to see three performers, all using Apple PowerBooks. "
• "Macs are central to the creation of lowercase sound ... and they amplify and edit the soft sounds on Macs. "
• "this work has blossomed tremendously with the relative availability of Pro Tools (especially the free download from DigiDesign)"
• "the lower prices of Mac hardware over the last few years"
• "The Mac is the favored platform ... Most people who work with computer music use a Macintosh. "
• "This grew out of putting powerful computers into the hands of ordinary people..."