immersive music -this is the way to hear choral music

I experienced this at the Baltic today: really loved it. ...
Janet Cardiff ‹ Detail ‹ Exhibitions ‹ What's On ‹ BALTIC: A reworking of the renaissance choral work for forty voices Spem in Alium Nunquam Habui 1573 by Thomas Tallis, The Forty Part Motet consists of forty separately recorded voices played back through forty individual speakers grouped in eight choirs of five singers. The work allows the audience to get inside the music and experience it almost tangibly as the voices weave in and out of each other.�

The thing is I love Tallis' music; so that was a first 'good'. Then, I like to sing choral music; second good. But then this way to hear it is brilliant. Normally, I hear choral music either from a fixed point within the choir I'm singing in or from in front of a choir (or a speaker or two). But this is great: to be able to be in the middle of the 'choir' and to be able to wander around and to move towards or to move the head to listen more closely to a particular voice or group of voices -lovely.

I even like the way that the sequence starts with the clearing throats and small talk of the members of the choir before they are called together to sing together.

I think that music is often a more immersive art form anyway -but this ups that by allowing the listener to be 'inside' a ring of sound. I liked, too, the opportunity to tune into more particular parts and the greater sense that could give of closing in on a performer in a way that would be embarrassing or offputting if it were a live performance similarly arranged.

Nice.

Mutiny continues

Increasingly there is a link to the current post -banking-crash, post-'Occupy', mid-austerity world. The way-in to that is noting that the monopolistic tendency historically tends towards blockage and stifling of creativity. One craven example of this is the copyright regime and it becomes particularly pointed in relation to performed music. Kester homes in on Mick Jagger because (perhaps ironically given his rock'n'roll image) he supports the extension of copyright on music. Apparently Jagger wants money to roll in for his family from his record sales for a long time. And yet, we are reminded, how much of Jagger's oeuvre is totally new? -Like much creativity the cleverness is about remix and development. And indeed, Jagger has benefitted from being a performer in a unique window of history when recording was possible but not easily 'ripped'. It's hard to be sympathetic for the guy (who has clearly sold out and has become the man).

"People are naturally going to feel less inclined to listen to Mick Jagger's concerns about being paid for years and years more for songs he wrote and made millions from years and years ago. What much of the recent mood of protest has been about is the lack of a perceived principle of fairness ... how long did it take for Mick Jagger to write 'Street Fighting man'? Perhaps 20 hours. And on a generous wage of  .... time for recording ... equipment ... marketting ... $15000. Many of the Stones singles sold well over 500,000 copies. At what point would it be fair to say that Mick Jagger has received a fair reward for his labour?"

My comment: It is obviously a question that could be asked of many others: they happen to to found themselves occupying an gilded position in the economy  and have enough talent to exploit it. We should stop buying the myth that they are uniquely talented individuals entirely worth it from their own exclusive and unaided resources. I've been around enough to know that there are actually hundreds of people, probably thousands, that in every respect that enabled Jagger and his ilk to exploit the gilded position they found themselves in would be just as capable of producing 'good stuff' in terms of writing, performance and business acumen. This gilded position is borne of things like being in the right  place at the right time and to have received an education developing their abilities and to have been socialised in a way to be able to connect with monetisable trends. 


So it is that copyright, overextended, allows commons to be enclosed. It's fair enough to be able to make back some reward for the effort and work put in; but not in a way that fails to recognise the indebtedness of the author/maker to wider society or the possibility that others might build upon the work. If that doesn't happen, the injustice of it makes for conditions which are likely to produce 'piracy'.

A favourite album: Graceland

I had a sense of happy congruence when I saw this article. My favourite album: Graceland by Paul Simon | Music | guardian.co.uk. I find that there are probably only a handful of albums that I keep coming back to. One of them is Pink Floyd's Dark side of the Moon and another is their Wish you were Here. However, one of the other front runners for my all-time best is Graceland and for reasons pretty similar to this writer's, for example: "First those indelible, idiosyncratic lyrics that you just can't help singing along to. Have you heard a finer insult than 'roly-poly little bat-faced girl'? Was there ever a more brilliant union of west coast vibes with east coast urbanity than in the rhyming of 'sunlight' with 'Fulbright'? For some reason the tongue-tripping 'incidents and accidents, hints and allegations' always makes me think, rhythmically at least, of TS Eliot's 'decisions and revisions/ That a minute will reverse', only Simon's words, of course, are a lot more fun to sing."
Like her, the eclectic blend of Western folk and rock with Township Jive produces a sound that really, to my ears, does not age. It's a very clever album lyrically and musically with a real joie de vivre. If you have never listened to it, give it a go.

Musical Language: sometimes they behave so strangely

In my first curacy, the choirmaster used to tell me that he could teach people who were supposedly tone deaf to hold a tune. I asked him to elucidate a bit. Part of his answer was that we use pitch in speech and English speakers do so very well; we can 'sing' our sentences fine. Listen to this programme and in the first few minutes you will hear why this is significant; I mean literally hear it -and you will find it hard to 'unhear' it afterwards! Go here for it. WNYC - Radiolab: Musical Language (April 21, 2006)
Here's what it's about: "For those of us who have trouble staying in tune when we sing, Deutsch has some exciting news. The problem might not be your ears, but your language. She tells us about tone languages, such as Mandarin and Vietnamese, which rely on pitch to convey the meaning of a word. Turns out speakers of tone languages are exponentially more inclined to have absolute (AKA 'perfect') pitch." That's like, in a sample group of Mandarin speaking children, Chinese were nine times more likely to have perfect pitch than American children. Fascinating. However, the bad news -to counter the good just mentioned- is that there are developmental windows.

 

aM laboratory

You have got to try this. It is utterly delightful. You click on the play surface and that creates a 'ripple'. Do it again somewhere else and where the ripples touch they produce a tone. Just add more in different places and you get an ambient and random 'music'. Love it, love it, love it....
aM laboratory

Where the Praan is Matt?

Hat tip to my colleague and friend David Runcorn who introduced me to this -me and the rest of the college- at his spirituality session on friendship last Wednesday.

Music is Praan by Gary Shyman (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfGk6S8-n9E&feature=channel). I was really taken by the tune and the composition. At first I thought it was an Enya number but then it became evident it was far richer than that. And I love the words: translated from Bangla (I gather they are those of Rabinath Tagore) ....
The same stream of life
that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world
and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life
that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth
in numberless blades of grass
and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life
that is rocked in the ocean-cradle
of birth and of death,
in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious
by the touch of this world of life.
And my pride is from the life-throb of ages
dancing in my blood this moment.

In [the Word] is Life, and that life is the light of all ...

Urban Verse for How Great Thou Art ...

A couple of months back David Runcorn, in a spirituality lecture, offered a prize for the writing of an urban verse to 'How Great Thou Art'. At the time I was too busy to give it a go. But it stuck with me as a challenge, particularly as there was only one entry in the end which was a send-up of the idea. But I still felt it deserved a serious attempt. Here's what I came up with in a moment of something close to inspiration.

Down dappled street, the shadows play on tarmac,
the joy of children laughing as they play.
The sounds of life and trade drifts down the train-track,
And neon lights claim fading of the day.
Then sings my soul, O urban God to Thee ....

So that's what they're called: Mondegreens

Misheard -or rather misanalysed- lyrics to songs are called mondegreens. This article gives the etymology. snopes.com: Christmas Carol Mondegreens
My favourite is probably "the hot dogs go on" for "the heart does go on" in 'I will always love you'.
Oh and Desmond Dekker's 'the Israelites' turns out to be the most prolific producer of mondegreens.

How about you?

Amalfi @ Jamendo

Free music downloads: Amalfi - Jamendo

JUST JACK Embers

click through to here: JUST JACK on MySpace Music - Free Streaming MP3s, Pictures & Music Videos and make sure you listen to the Embers track.

Flex-E-books soon ...

Now this looks like what I've been waiting for. I recall seeing this firm's previous discoveries reported a short few years back and it finally looks like they are about to produce the goodies. New Scientist records it here: Flexible electronic books to hit market soon - tech - 23 February 2009 - New Scientist and the nub seems to be this: "Plastic Logic says it has now perfected a way of printing polymer transistors onto a layer of bendy plastic - allowing the screens to flex and bounce. 'Screen breakage is the number one complaint with today's e-reader technology. Our display can take a lot of rough and tumble,'"
A bit later on we're told: "The company says it is now ramping up to commercial production of the screens, which will be just under A4 in size. "It'll be a much better e-reading experience at this magazine size - keeping layouts and graphics intact without converting them to small and unattractive formats," Eschbach claims.The device will have wireless internet connection and a touch screen, allowing use of a virtual keyboard for annotating text. In contrast"
That sounds more like it. I have no idea of cost, and I guess the first generation is going to be beyond my wallet, but it would seem to be what I've been waiting for: glad I haven't bought a Kindle ...

Now combine that technology with this one and you could have something very, very powerful: I can see classroom uses which might make smart board technology as we currently know it obsolete: "a device that lets you do something similar. Called sixth sense, it offers a way of displaying information on any surface - a newspaper or wall, for example - and manipulating it with hand gestures. "We wanted to find out if we could merge information into a sense that is always with us," says Maes's student Pranav Mistry.
The device, which is worn around the neck as a pendant, contains a small projector and webcam. The pendant communicates either with a laptop in a backpack or a smartphone connected to a remote server. The webcam monitors the user's hand gestures and conveys them to control software running on the laptop or server."

And for musos ...

The real human uniqueness is ...

... rhythm. Apparently. Newborn Infants Detect The Beat In Music: "This phenomenon - termed ‘beat induction’ - is likely to have contributed to music’s origin. It enables such actions as clapping, making music together and dancing to a rhythm. Beat induction is also considered to be uniquely human. Even our closest evolutionary relatives, such as the chimpanzee and bonobo, do not synchronise their behaviour to rhythmic sounds." Which I think probably also means that collective ritual is fairly unique too ...

Wellies

Over the last couple of weeks or so I've been taking the dog for walks and finding that this song by Billy Connolly is running through my head. Could have something to do with the wetness of the weather, the mini-flood conditions in the woodland around us and the fact that I bought my first pair of wellies for about 20 years, and am darn pleased I did. The lyrics may tell you why. Except that the version in my head has the chorus starting this way: "If ya didnae have yuh wellies ..." and I hear it in my mind's ear with Billy's voice. The last verse very definitely dates it!

Wellies they are wonderful, oh wellies they are swell,
Cause they keep oot the water, an' they keep in the smell,
An' when yer sittin in a room, you can always tell,
When some bugger takes off his wellies.

If it wasna for your wellies where would you be?
You'd be in the hospital or infirmary,
Cause you would have a dose of the flu or even pluracy,
If you didna have your feet in your wellies!

But when yer oot walking, in the country way about
An yer strolling over fields just like a fairmer's herd.
And somebody shouts "Keep aff the grass," and you think "How absurd;"
And, squelch, you find why fairmers a' wear wellies.

Chorus

There's fishermen and firemen, there's farmers an a',
Men oot digging ditches an' working in the snaw;
This country it would grind tae a halt and no' a thing would graw
If it wasna for the workers in their wellies.

Chorus

Noo Edward Heath and Wilson, they havna made a hit,
They're ruining this country, mair than just a bit,
If they keep on the way they are goin', we'll all be in the sh..,
So you'd be'er ge(t) your feet in your wellies.

Chorus


Tune: "The Work of the Weavers."
Recorded by Billy Connolly on _Cop yer whack for this_; Polydor (1974).
Note: Connolly remarks:

© Mews Music Ltd

Oh and you can get an indication of the tune here.

Worship songs aren't for the blokes

This deserves more thinking about. Definitely. And it's Matt Redman talking, so even more interesting.

YouTube - Worship songs aren't for the blokes. Matt Redman comments.

We’re not singing anymore… or are we? Exploring worship and the emerging church… at Jason Clark

Taking the title from a well-known chant from football terraces , : Jason Clark asks some helpful questions about sung worship and manages to be reasonably balanced about the way he answers. definitely worth looking at .We’re not singing anymore… or are we? Exploring worship and the emerging church… at Jason Clark. I liked the emphasis on corporate worship as spiritual formation and the sadly uncommon recognition of sung worship as liturgy.

"One of the primary ways that Christians learn about God is not through the preaching but through the singing - the repetition of songs becoming a sung liturgy where the words can bypass our brain at times and yet form deep impressions in us as to who God is/what God is like - they teach us and we learn even when we don’t realise that we are being formed."

This is part of the impetus behind my stalled writing project on culture-jamming worship.

12 Days ... messed about a bit

I'm a sucker for singing comedy: and this is a nice exemplar for the run up to Christmas.
Enjoy.

YouTube - Straight No Chaser - 12 Days

Music And Language Are Processed By The Same Brain Systems

I find this intriguing: that bran imaging research "...tells us that these two aspects of music, that is rules and memorized melodies, depend on two different brain systems – brain systems that also underlie rules and memorized information in language,”
Which would support the, to me, anecdotal evidence that prosody can be leveraged to teach some supposedly tone-deaf people to sing. I'm also intrigued by the partial explanation that this could give to the desire to use song in worship: it's actually a reflex of wanting to say things to God ... ? The instinct for sung worship is deeply rooted. Perhaps that's why it's not commanded in scripture: it is hardly necessary; if people worship they will sing.

Of course this also has intriguing correlations potentially for understanding the image of God. I have been thinking about 'homo loquens' in relation to the image of God, now I find I should factor in singing too.

As the researcher, Ullman, says. “The findings open up exciting new ways of thinking about and investigating the relationship between language and music, two fundamental human capacities.”
And another piece of research recently published tells us, "new research suggests, music training may have considerable benefits for engendering literacy skills."
Maybe we should be taking musical metaphors for relating to God and God relating to the world more seriously...
ScienceDaily: Music And Language Are Processed By The Same Brain Systems:

Musical Listening Test

Help research into human ability in hearing music. This study is being conducted by my former university at Newcastle and involves "listening to pairs of tunes and deciding whether they are the same or different. Once you have completed both tests you will receive your scores. "
While I got a high score, it wasn't perfect. There are some sequences which are harder to differentiate or 'similate' than others. I'm certainly interested to know the results. There seemed to me to be something about rhythm, something about tone, something about order and something about complexity involved. Short term memory for these things is part of it but memory is based on perception ...
Delosis - Musical Listening Test:

‘Atheist’ Worship

You know, at times, I know just how this feels: "Sometimes, I feel like an atheist amid worship. The songs being sung earnestly around me are about a god I don’t really believe in anymore. As Shane Claiborne asked, does God really have lightning in his fists, or is this Zeus we’re talking about? “God, rid me of ‘god,’” Meister Eckhart prayed. Many times this is my silent prayer amid circles of saints singing their hearts out to a deity I scarcely recognize."
And sometimes doubly so when someone is trying to lead me from the front into expressions of worship that just jar with where I'm at fairly fundamentally or are culturally miles from me.
THe rest of this post is worth looking at, and although the quality of the video is not all I would want, it is a kind of proof of concept. I would want to underline the idea of writing stuff that's outside of the contemporary praise band repertoire of half-digested biblical imagery with Disney soundtracks. I've occasionally tried to do something about it myself. Here's one attempt that I'm not too unhappy with and have used a few times.
‘Atheist’ Worship � zoecarnate:

Essential Tones Of Music Rooted In Human Speech

A former choir-master of mine used to say that he could teach anyone to sing because to speak used tonality, pitch and rhythm. Well he may have scientific investigation on his side too. ScienceDaily: Essential Tones Of Music Rooted In Human Speech: "'In about 70 percent of the speech sounds, these ratios were bang-on musical intervals,' Purves said. 'This predominance of musical intervals hidden in speech suggests that the chromatic scale notes in music sound right to our ears because they match the formant ratios we are exposed to all the time in speech, even though we are quite unaware of this exposure.'"