JUAN
MAKING MUSIC
RESEARCH PROMPT:
Music is the art of combining sounds and time
INITIAL BRAINSTORMING:
Songs dedicated to cities: Ø
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_about_cities
Cities: Ø
Noise - Automated - Mechanised
Inorganic organic
Lost sound - byproduct Ø
If a tree falls in a lonely forest, does it still make a sound? Ø
Metaphysics: Substance Theory vs. Bundle Theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundle_theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substance_theory
Schrodinger's cat of sound Ø
SECONDARY SOURCES:
EXERCISE ONE - MAKE AN INSTRUMENT
I struggled to concretise my aims for this term, primarily because I was never forced nor constricted to think in terms of audio. This is despite me really enjoying music as a medium in itself or as an accompaniment to something else.
Thus, I decided to create a research question as a guideline for myself based on a podcast about how gothic architecture helped formulate the use of polyphonic harmonies in early Christian choir music. The research question is: How does physical space affect music? I hope this more anthropological approach will help me explore the differences between music, noise, sound, lost sound, space, perceiver and audience.
Following this, I decided to take a loser interpretation of making an instrument. I chose to interpret my home city as the instrument and call its "naturally" produced noise (e.g. cars, metro, people shouting, etc.) as the music in an attempt to record a familiar cacophony. This was heavily inspired by the documentary film Tokyo Noise where the filmmakers follow various artists, such as the photographer Araki, in an attempt to map out what the city sounds like. I ended up recording various points of my walk around the city during my last couple of days there, essentially making a lax version of a derive, and layered the noise.
The noise wasn't good.
Part of this was because I simply recorded on my phone and also because I only layered the individual tracks over one another in Garageband, so I could not filter or amplify anything.
WILL LINK TRACK HERE - NEED TO FIGURE OUT HOW
LESSON
ONE:
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LESSON
TWO&THREE:
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EXERCISE TWO - CONCRETISE AIMS FOR THIS TERM
Ø I have no idea what I want to make for this term. I have no idea how I make things. Or how I used to.
Ø Maybe I map things out rather than make. Like everything is a by-product of broadening a horizon.
Ø In plays, actors would often move around the stage as the action itself and the sound of action could substitute dialogue.
ØAm I the agent or the director?
Ø What do you think about when I saw lost sound?
Ø What did you lose?
Ø Music & Metaphysics & Memories
Ø Why Budapest?
I have a turbulent relationship with that city - kind of the love/ hate relationship that authors have immortalised when talking about places like New York, Paris or London.
I have spent most of my adolescence trying to escape the place where I was and direct my life so that it ends up there. It partially did. I also have entered an age in my early twenties where I am trying to make sense of why I felt that way.
The city still acts budget version of Berlin, cheaper and easier to access for the Eastern European diaspora or British stag party tourists. But I grew up seeing Orban come to power. And this summer I didn't sleep or eat or rest.
I often talked with friends about how one needs to grow a thick skin to live in this city. A thick skin against what exactly, we could never articulate. "This city will eat me," we would say. Not just swallow but also digest. Maybe we were trying to verbalise how even on a Wednesday early morning the last night bus is only filled with drunk 14-year-olds and factory workers. Or how we never saw an end, or more concretely never needed to visualise a possible future with prospects. Maybe it is also Orban's illiberal democracy.
It is definitely how everyone I met this summer is planning an escape route.
I never had to plan this escape. I grew up in permanent exile.
I am not home. I am not in Budapest.
I know people whom I love that are there.
A home that they love. A home that I also love.
Ø IDEA:
Instruction art piece: Recreate the sonic map of Budapest using different prompts given to people and ask them to record it. Make the sonic map using AI.
E.g. "quickest way to your nearest grocery store" // "way to your parent's house" // "where do you go for a walk when you're anxious?"
https://play.acast.com/s/blindboy/howbuildingscreatemusic Ø
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga6ZwfsS1cA Ø
Untitled - Ulrich Werner Ø
Iceland - Darab Zsuzsa Ø
Death Poem - Hokushi Ø
Destroyed Notations - Milan Knizak Ø
Singing in Unison - Yoshi Wada Ø
Sensory Mapping and Ø Spatial
Imaginaries - Illes Szonja Zsofia
INSTRUCTIONS
I. What is the quickest way home? - NORBERT
II. Where do you walk when you are sad? - LUKI
III. Where do you walk when you are happy? - HUBA LILI
IV. What is the quickest way to the nearest grocery store? - NYULI
V. Go to your favourite bar. - OLIVIA
VI. Go somewhere where you have never been. - KRISTOF
VII. Go home from a party on the night bus. - KERSNER
VIII. Go over to your bestfriend. - GAVIL
IX. Go to a church. - PETER
X. Walk over your favourite bridge. - NAGY LILIEN
XI. Go somewhere where you have had the most first dates. - BRUNO
XII. Visit your parents. - BETYA
XIII. Go for a walk with a friend. - ATTILA
XIV. Sit on a bench. - DOKA
XV. Walk through the underground in Astoria. - LILI
LESSON
THREE
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FEEDBACK:
Ø Mariana
How are you getting the recordings together? Are you joining them?
Will you show the viewer where the sound comes from?
Ø Marianna
How would you further develop this?
How would you present this?
Ø Nameless
Are you going to follow the instructions or are they for the spectator?
Ø Ekko
Why did you decide to continue this as an instruction piece?
Do you instruct yourself as well during this?
Ø Rosa
Check out BBC R&D departments - sound, story and location
Ø Louisa
Recordings made by people in Budapest and Rotterdam as well?
Are you going to further use the material or is the project done after the
recordings?
Ø Dori
Do you feel it's enough to create an instruction piece?
Or do you want to create an archive of the sound of Budapest?
Do you imagine yourself doing something like this in Rotterdam?
Ø Renske?
What is the concept behind this?
Why specifically Budapest?
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND SOUND:
Ø Spectrogram:
Since I had not yet received enough audio from the instruction pieces, I started experimenting with my own audio from Budapest from the first exercise. Following the steps taken in the blue highlighted link I first created spectrograms from three individual audio tracks.
Ø design-91935759d628
Ø https://naotokui.medium.com/
Ø https://gist.github.com/naotokui/a2b331dd206b13a70800e862cfe7da3c
Ø https://www.ableton.com/en/live/max-for-live/
Ø https://github.com/ibab/tensorflow-wavenet
Ø https://towardsdatascience.com/neuralfunk-combining-deep-learning-with-sound
Metro line M2:
Tram line 2:
Suburban railway line no.5:
METHOD:
>iPython notebook for sound classification from spectrograms
>WaveNet: track = .wav files / 16kHz / >10sec
>Tensor flow implementation of WaveNet > trained it for the data
>+ conditioning network
>+ spectrogram representation of the first 3 sec of each track
>write variational anticoder (VAE) trained on the spectrogram
>similarity search of the spectrogram comparing distances in latent space
>VAE decoder to reconstruct spectrograms
>+ Griffith Lim algorithm to map back to audio
>VAE + normalizing flow layers