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24 Hours Of Beethoven's 9th Symphony
Ermintrude the Flying Cow writes "Ever wonder what "Ode to Joy" would sound like if stretched to 24 hours? Now you can find out. 9 Beet Stretch is the result of running Beethoven's 9th Symphony in a digital stretching program, turning the one hour piece into a 24 hour attention span acid test. Thankfully, for those of us who know our limits, it's been cut into 19 parts."
So, what the piece was was more of a painting or a photograph with some dynamic content.
--- http://foo.ca
It's really amazing! I'm listening to section 4.1 right now. It sounds like a complete orchestra making very long, slowly changing notes, such as background music for a movie.
As someone actually listening to it right now, I think I can safely say "No, you don't want to hear it."
Its the 9th symphony stretched out to 24 hours. Think about it.
And yet, it still plays in the background.
sin(6cos(r)+5A)
I belive you're referring to Steve Reich, but close enough. And incidentally, only a very limited ammount of his music can be considered ambient, and he wasn't really a minimalist after about 1970 anyway (he hated the term really). Try listening to the 'opera "Einstein on the Beach" by Philip Glass. To me that's actually worse than the topic at hand. For some reason the title of this work reminds me of the title of said Philip Glass opera. interesting. Ambient music I like: Discrete Music by Brian Eno
I know "Empire" because I took a philosophy of art class.
:-)
Now, I am probabbly getting a lot of this wrong and my professor will smack me for getting them wrong, but as far as I remembered, one of the mojor reasons why it was so "genius" is because it explored the medium of film and contrasted it to the ideas of stillness.
The idea is that on a static medium (painting / photography), you obviously cannot show movement, as even the best painting is only the capture of a moment (lets not get into Van Gough and the funny square stuff for a second);
Similarly, a moving medium like film can capture motion, but in turn, it REALLY captures something static in a much more "complete" sense than, say, a painting can - case in point, you can see the empire state building, unmoving amongst the birds (there is this famous scene when a seagull flew by), clouds, etc. This contrast of moving (the environment) and the still (the building) is only captureable, and experssed, on film. In turn, the stillness of the building is understood in a way that is unexpressable on a photograph, a painting, or whatever.
Of course, maybe there are some obscure purpose to this stretching of the symphony too? I really don't know - one thing the class taught me was that art is wayyyy over my head.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
"Ode to Joy" is a poem written by Schiller. Beethoven used the poem as the lyrics for the fourth movement of the symphony, which is the choral section and most famous part of the symphony. The symphony also has three other movements, so it's not really accurate to refer to the whole symphony no. 9 as "Ode to Joy."
</pedantry>
Phew. Now that's off my chest, you can continue about your business.Sorry, don't mean to be a smartass, but your original comment inspired me to pull out my copy of Discreet Music and throw it on the turntable. I'm listening to it now.
As I look on the back cover it says nothing regarding the 16/33 issue or even anything to do with the speed the record was played at. It was however played at a very low level, with only one of the stereo channels functioning. The end of the paragraph that describes the experience is more than worth the cost of the record in my opinion.
This is the original release (that I was very excited to find in my local record shop, Last Chance Records). A copy of the text can be found on probably the best Eno site on the web here.
One interesting thing about this album is that it is well documented. He explains the purpose and the method involved in creating the album and provides a operational diagram for the setup he used to create (or more accurately direct) it. I guess this appeals to the Computer Scientist in me as well as the music appreciator.
Unless you're intensely familiar with all parts of Beethoven's Ninth, you'll probably get the most recognition out of listening to section 5.2. That's the choral "Ode To Joy" section that most people know.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Fun that someone slashdotted this. Heres some info from the person that did the hard work of the stretch. (setting up scripts, dealing with disk-space, doing high-level lisp-programming, etc.)
The artist is Leif Inge, and the person writing the stretch-algoritm is Anders Vinjar, a classical composer and programmer.
The stretch itself was done using a programming package called "CLM". It stands for Common Lisp Music: http://www-ccrma.stanford.edu/CCRMA/Software/clm/
Only granular synthesis is used, no phase-vocoder or fft-stuff. (as someone here seems to be very sure of.)
The program was run on a linux box for about 12 hours to produce the mp3-files (lame encoder).
The mp3-files was later converted to real-audio by Leif Inge and put on the net by me.
If you want the mp3-files, I think Leif Inge can send you some cdrs.
I have also put the first file here, since there were so many wanting it:
http://www.notam02.no/b9s1_aa_ut.mp3