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Podly

This [chat] is dedicated to John Cage, who famously composed 4:33, 4:33 of composed silence, in which the music is the environment itself. Trippy! He thought so.





He also did a lot of other cool stuff that combined meticulous detail and pure chance

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSulycqZH-U

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYsx5Di3bso

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UPlYnBFrI0&feature=related

Podly

But I gotta go to bed, so this shall, appropriately, be a silent chat

Tam

pshaw

all this modern art

Lieberkuhn

I know depressingly little about experimental music, but I do know that this piece by George Crumb is lovely:

Black Angels

Morninglord

They missed the point. There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began patterning the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.
— John Cage speaking about the premiere of 4′33″.

I think it's cool.

But I can totally see why most people don't get it.

Enig

It's cool, but I would call that art, not music.

Morninglord

The thing that gets me is that he actually composed a piece. You can play it.

Only if you play it you aren't playing it.

Because you aren't supposed to play it. It has instructions: don't play.

Fantastically meta.

Music is art, what are you talking about anyway.

Sarksus

Morninglord wrote: »

The thing that gets me is that he actually composed a piece. You can play it.

Only if you play it you aren't playing it.

Because you aren't supposed to play it. It has instructions: don't play.

Fantastically meta.

See

That is fucking awesome.

Morninglord

Well, I should say.

I think that's how it works.

I haven't seen the score myself and I only read up on it on wikipedia just now.

I've read a bit more, and it's possible he's marked scoresheets with all of the notations that go around the actual symbols for the notes without putting any notes in. So, like tempo, name of stanza, and with the number of pages appropriate for the length of each section.

Which isn't quite as awesome but still pretty cool.

Does anyone actually know? I'm really curious myself now.

Duchess Prozac

Morninglord wrote: »

The thing that gets me is that he actually composed a piece. You can play it.

Only if you play it you aren't playing it.

Because you aren't supposed to play it. It has instructions: don't play.

Fantastically meta.

Music is art, what are you talking about anyway.

So it's kinda like the game?

Which I have just lost for the first time in about a year, thanks.

Morninglord

I know about as much as any of you would if you'd spent a curious ten minutes looking it up on the internet btw so take what I'm saying with a healthy handful of salt.

Corbius

so the proper way to honor this with a [chat] would be to not [chat] correct?

L|ama

Enig wrote: »

It's cool, but I would call that art, not music.

This is like the falsest dichotomy in the history of false dichotomies

"No it's not a number, it's one"

Enig

I should have been more specific. Obviously music is art.

What I should have said is that I would call it sound art, not music. I guess I assumed that was implied, since people don't usually refer to music as "art" but as "music".

Premier kakos

        

Tam

Charles Ives is pretty cool

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKJw74JWYwg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNlL27HvLOo&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZ4ABTDmSiU&feature=related

Greeper

a marching band geek friend of mine once mentioned that if only you could keep everyone in time somehow, this song would be the perfect marching band song.

L|ama

The only thing the sheet music says is "tacet", or "break of silence".

says simple english wikipedia.

Anyway, avant-garde:

not really terribly weird

okay what the fuck

All the albums are conceptual albums which are supposed to tell about the life and death of Raagoonshinnaah, a sort of "chaos god", but actually the songs have no lyrics, instead incomprehensible gibberish sung in harsh, death metal-style growling (which corresponds to the assumed nature of the songs' protagonist and also parodies to some extent the so-called "metal epics"), because, as Swanö said later in an interview, they wanted the vocalist to use his voice as an instrument

AHHH MY FUCKING BRAIN

OremLK

I understand Cage's thinking behind 4'33", but as music, I find it to be silly and shallow and gimmicky on a conceptual level. I have no problem admitting that it's music, as I do believe that "found music" qualifies as such.

I just think it's bad music.

I admire many of his other pieces greatly, however.

By the way, this is a brilliant idea for a [chat], but maybe we could keep it and make it the experimental/avantgarde music thread instead?

Tam

Lieberkühn wrote: »

I know depressingly little about experimental music, but I do know that this piece by George Crumb is lovely:

Black Angels

does this refer to bats? that's the impression I got

edit: at the beginning at least

Lieberkuhn

Tam wrote: »

does this refer to bats? that's the impression I got

edit: at the beginning at least

I have no idea. For me it conjures images of a sprawling carpet of insects in the dark.

Tam

well then we're left with "dark and swarming"

I got images of bats and various other creepy crawlies in a cave

Couscous

There’s no such thing as silence.

What about in a vacuum?

Tam

Couscous wrote: »

There’s no such thing as silence.

What about in a vacuum?

the air being sucked from your lungs
like it would rub against your windpipe and you'd kind of hear that in you head or something

Lieberkuhn

Tam wrote: »

Couscous wrote: »

There’s no such thing as silence.

What about in a vacuum?

the air being sucked from your lungs
like it would rub against your windpipe and you'd kind of hear that in you head or something

You might hear the sound of blood in your ears. You have little hairs in your cochlea which vibrate in response to sound waves, and it's their vibrations that your brain interprets as sound. Those hairs are submerged in liquid, so it's possible that a sufficiently strong pulse might be capable of producing sound by knocking against the cochlea... somehow... and making little ripples in the liquid?

This is pretty much pure speculation, I am shit at biology

Apothe0sis

Couscous wrote: »

There’s no such thing as silence.

What about in a vacuum?

Yeah, this is bullshit.

There is a such thing as silence, we're just unlikely to experience it.

Artsy types.

Apothe0sis

But something that IS interesting is that your ears can, and do produce noise. During low noise environments this can be heard by those around you and can be incredibly annoying at that.

nescientist

Premier kakos wrote: »

        

L|ama

In 1951, Cage visited the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. An anechoic chamber is a room designed in such a way that the walls, ceiling and floor absorb all sounds made in the room, rather than reflecting them as echoes. Such a chamber is also externally sound-proofed. Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear silence, but he wrote later, "I heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation."

At least read the wikipedia article first

Enig

How the heck does one's nervous system generate sound?

Drez

Apothe0sis wrote: »

Couscous wrote: »

There’s no such thing as silence.

What about in a vacuum?

Yeah, this is bullshit.

There is a such thing as silence, we're just unlikely to experience it.

Artsy types.

If silence in a forest and no one around blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

Drez

Enig wrote: »

How the heck does one's nervous system generate sound?

Nervously.

Apothe0sis

L|ama wrote: »

In 1951, Cage visited the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. An anechoic chamber is a room designed in such a way that the walls, ceiling and floor absorb all sounds made in the room, rather than reflecting them as echoes. Such a chamber is also externally sound-proofed. Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear silence, but he wrote later, "I heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation."

At least read the wikipedia article first

Is this directed at me?

Because what the hell? That doesn't represent research failure on my behalf.

It might, at best, mean that we're unlikely to experience silence when we're at all healthy but it doesn't demonstrate that there is no such thing as silence.

Of course, the "engineer in charge" is also largely speaking bullshit, even if we accept Cage's story of hearing mysterious sounds, there are more parsimonious explanations. While it might be possible to hear blood flow, nerves making perceptible sound is highly improbable.

L|ama

Enig wrote: »

How the heck does one's nervous system generate sound?

I'm guessing it means phantom sounds, ie our brain making the sensation of noise because nothing would be weird, but that's a complete guess based on pretty much nothing and it's probably just bullshit. The circulation/hearbeat seems legit though.

Evil Multifarious

there is no way for a human being to experience silence, is the point

unless they're deaf

i wonder if deaf people hear any kind of background or biological noise

Morninglord

I have mild tinnitus, so silence makes the ringing louder via comparison.

Apothe0sis

Depends on whether they're born deaf and what the cause of their deafness is.

If they're born deaf they're unlikely to lay down the neural pathways relating to sound perception and are thus unlikely to be able to perceive even phantom sound/tinnutis. Parts of the auditory system could, quite possible, be comandeered to perform or participate in other tasks - like blind people and perceiving braille.

Perhaps the born-deaf would not even able to perceive silence as we understand it. Like how blind people don't see black, they don't see, at all.

Of course, apparently when blind people take hallucinogens their visual centres can be stimulated and sometimes they do see things though they have extreme difficulty describing their experience. So perhaps the deaf could hear some things under specific conditions.

Still doesn't mean that silence doesn't exist. Nor does it imply the somewhat less strong claim that humans cannot perceive silence - for practical or biological reasons. It might mean that we're highly unlikely to be able to do so because of the conditions required for it to be so.

Morninglord

A born from deaf man being the only person who can experience silence does not strike me as profound or at all interesting. Technically correct, but completely meaningless.

It is interesting because it's so rare for a normal person to experience it. (If it can be experienced at all.)

Apothe0sis

I'm not sure whether a person born deaf could experience silence - anymore than blind people "just see black".

Of course the mechanisms and brain structures that support the different senses are radically different so the reified absences of input might be interpretted very differently by the brain.

WMain00

Enig wrote: »

How the heck does one's nervous system generate sound?

Hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....

truck-a-sauras

OremLK wrote: »

I understand Cage's thinking behind 4'33", but as music, I find it to be silly and shallow and gimmicky on a conceptual level.

yeah that happens when you get high :P