Group items tagged

"Music sketch diary. Prototyping. Generate music and synthesizers by sketching wavetables and scores."

"Neuroscientists have found that there are audiovisual mirror neurons in the monkey premotor cortex that discharge when the animal performs, sees, or hears a specific action. Scientists of human motion have shown that auditory stimuli are important in the performance of difficult tasks and can, for example, elicit anticipatory postural adjustments in athletes."

"Years ago I unearthed a case full of cassettes in my parents closet. I'd been saving a certain one for the right time. A recorded letter, "To Ron" written on the label. It would have been sent to my father in Costa Rica from his family in Ohio. Upon pressing play I hear who I think is my grandmother as the initial hiss of the tape settles and soon the voice of my young uncle. My Mother and Father met while they were both serving as Mennonite missionaries in Costa Rica during the 1970s. He sang love songs outside her window. He rode an old Yamaha motorcycle up through Central America. He loved to tell those stories. While on my third stay in the psychiatric hospital I started sketching out a short piece. The new season of Twin Peaks was airing at the time and the adult unit I was housed in is known as "Lodge". It was during my fourth and most recent stay that my father fell ill and passed away. I experienced his last days through second-hand phone calls in my own hospital room miles apart. Such a physical disconnect and heightened reality complicates my ability to grieve. I returned home and had to finish the piece. The sample finally had a purpose."

In the decades following World War II, the musical score emerged as a unique and powerful medium for experimental art. A new movement of visual artists, composers, poets, and performers reimagined the score-traditionally defined as the written representation of a musical composition-as a tool for structuring experimentation in the nascent fields of performance art, conceptualism, and intermedia. They drew inspiration from unconventional musical notations devised in the early to mid-1950s by the composers Earle Brown, John Cage, and Morton Feldman. The new movement's use of experimental scores spread during the 1960s through publications, festivals, concerts, classrooms, networked correspondence, exhibitions, happenings, and a renewed awareness of score-like antecedents in the charts, diagrams, sketches, and written instructions of earlier avant-gardes, from Dada and Surrealism to the Bauhaus. By the later years of the 1960s, diverse communities of artists, musicians, poets, and dancers had transformed the possibilities of the score into an ever-expanding universe of textual, symbolic, and graphic marks. They used experimental scores to stage a multitude of practices that dismantled and recast the traditional boundaries of artistic media.