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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."
Wow this is like Andy Warhol's film "Empire", only that it is probabbly not as artistically creative for its time.
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for those that don't know - Empire is a film where he (Andy Warhol) put a camera aiming at the empire state building in the morning, started the film, and let it ran EIGHT HOURS.
right up there with watching corn grow and whatever.
silly people that do silly things in the name of art.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Someone here did a project last year to "derive" a new symphony by a composer. The idea was to analyse various pieces written by the chosen composer, find the common themes, and then use them to produce new pieces which would have the same "feel" as the originals.
That way you end up with more music you like without making you think you've overdosed...
Phil, just me
"Cattle Prods solve most of life's little problems."
Most digital stretching filters i've heard-- even the ones in professional music programs like ProTools and Logic Audio-- cause the output to be exceedingly gravelly and robotized, like they're being played through a digital cell phone that's slowly giving out. The resulting sound is possible to be used in a musically interesting manner, but it definitely doesn't sound like something a classical music fan would find pleasant to listen to, in my experience.
:)
How did the stretch turn out in this thing? Is it relatively smooth, or is it just like listening to a rotor slowly changing pitch to form something similar to beethoven's 9th? No, of course i'm not going to listen to it myself, especially not when there are X number of slashdotters pounding on their poor realaudio server. Though i may check out this "Herb Levys Mappings" page they link to, if i ever find the correct link. (Theirs is busted. Actually, pretty much everything linked from that first page seems to be slashdotted at this point. Ah well.)
And if it did turn out smoothly, will someone please tell me what software they used for the time expansion, because i want a copy
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
The following story is no joke.
After building a decicated organ (US$ 700000) the first notes will begin to be played on January 5th, 2003 in St. Burchardi Church in Halberstadt, Germany. The first accord (gis', h' and gis'') will continue for three years, the first additional note will be heard on Juli 5th, 2004. The whole piece will take 639 years to be finished.
The first large church organ in history was built 639 years ago in Halberstadt - this is why the piece is stretched to 639 years. The original John Cage composition (the music was not composed for this occasion) contains an instruction to play as slowly as possible, and now a dedicated team of artists and sponsors is taking this seriously.
The organ was built with redundant air compressors, UPS and diesel generator buffering, hot-swappable organ parts, and everything else required to allow uninterrupted playing for 639 years.
More info at http://www.welt.de/daten/2000/09/13/0913ku190585.
Well, I'll try to give you the general idea in a nutshell.
For those of you who do not follow space-rock, post rock, atmospheric, ambient, organic et al, this is basically a great idea.
There are thousands of artists who release albums which have a similar sound to this one. Take Vir Unis for example. It's ambient as it gets. Sure, he has more substance in his albums than just prolonged note progressions, but one you hear Vir Unis or other musician in the genre you'll get the general idea.
There are other artists too, like Steve Roach, Michael Brook, etc.
For one, I think this is highly innovative. In the past, to reinvent music, one would have to do a remix, play it with different instruments, etc. And the end result would be very similar. What separates these guys from the rest is how they were able to stretch the music and transform it from one genre to a totally new genre. Beethoven would have approved of this, if he was alive. After centuries, his music is going into a new territory which was not even heard of couple of decades ago. And as an added bonus, this is quite listenable. I've heard arrangements of SETI signals, space noise ambience, etc. And this ranks very high on top of that list.
I could understand how many people feel this is pointless, as did I, until I had a chance to hear it. If you're familiar with ambience, you'll understand the significance of this pioneer effort.
Case in point: Robert Rich's Somnium, a DVD (a video disc no less, but with no video, how zen) filled with 7 hours (count 'em!) of ambient music.
Totally listenable, and not at all boring.
The name comes from the idea of a record 'tuned' for sleeping, but it's nice background (and sometimes foreground music) as well.
Comes highly recommended, and i'd imagine, judging from this story, that there's more releases like this coming up...
Interesting comparison to Eno and Discrete Music. If you read the liner notes to the original Discrete Music album, Eno talks about how he was laid up in the hospital, immobilized in a cast, when a friend came in and brought a record player with some classical music, he put it on to play and then left. The player was set to 16rpm instead of 33, so he was stuck listening to a slowed down album of Pachelbel's Canons. He said the album seemed to take hours, through his fog of pain and painkillers. He says it gave him the idea for ambient music.
The article says only that the "9th symphony is streched" which means the tempo of the track is slown down, which basically means that the each note(sample) is played for a much longer time.
There is no mention of the use of "timestretching" in the article itself, so the scoop is kind of misleading.
A guy named Peter Schickele (Have no idea of the real spelling. Ok, lemme go google... Wow - I got it right.) a music professor and composer has been 'deriving' compositions, 11 albums' worth, of the mythical son of JS Bach, PDQ Bach.
Funny stuff, yet very scholarly, in a weird way.
Anyway, he has a website at pdqbach.com.
His peices always have great names too, like Music for an Awful Lot of Winds and Percussion and The Short-Tempered Clavier and Other Dysfunctional Works for Keyboard. Worth a listen.
Cheers,
Jim
-- My Weblog.