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Showing posts from January, 2009

Sound Sculpture

I have been working on music and sound for "virtual" sculptures, all in Second Life. It's been quite exciting, mainly due to specific barriers to music production inside the world. 1) Samples are limited to 10 seconds. 2) Manipulation of the sound itself (pitch, length, etc) must be done outside Second Life; samples can only be played in-world. 3) As a rule, a sound can be triggered by a script in the sculpture, but they can't be "stacked", ie you can't play the sound, then play another sound over it to make harmony - the first sound will stop. 4) It's fine to loop sounds, but it starts to sound like a broken record. More later.

Tonality

Question. Do I think atonality will go away? Answer. I doubt it. There is still a lot of things atonality can do. I do believe, that the movement into atonality and 12 tone was simply a path we followed that cannot be followed any more, however. Many people still see it as somehow more "intellectual" and therefore worthy of our attention. I don't follow movements simply because somebody proclaims its intelligence. Composing less dissonant music does not somehow make it less good. There is plenty of music that is less good from all over the world. Not every single atonal piece is a masterpiece, and not every single tonal piece is shallow nonsense.