I hope I haven’t become too obsessed with guitar hero knock-offs and derivatives lately, but this project seemed too fascinating to ignore.
http://www.thereminhero.com/
Theremin hero seems to adapt the theremin to function as a controller for guitar hero. The volume antenna controls the note trigger and the pitch antenna controls the note value. If you look at the note screen on the right side of the video, you’ll notice a little orientation arrow indication the selected note.
Impressive hack. If the little guitar shaped controller convinced people to take up guitar lessons, perhaps this game could inspire more people to take theremin lessons. I look forward to the day when throngs of disaffected youth punk-out in packed rooms watching a band stand perfectly still for an hour or more.
The game features new instruments, including an octave and half keyboard and a 17-fret guitar w/ six strings.
I’m not going to wax and wane philosophical about whether this is good or bad for music. If it’s a fun game, I think the creators have done good work, but with rumors of midi input adapters– will I be able to play with my DG-20?
Writer for the New Yorker, Alex Ross, muses on possible explanations why John Cage is still held in such disdain while so many of his contemporaries like Rauschenberg and Pollock are hailed as visionaries.
Perhaps the answer to his question rests in the nature of aleatoric music itself. Although Cage did experiment with other techniques, he is best known for his forays into chance. Despite its conceptual edginess, the musical performances, like much of our extraneous sensory stimuli, failed to make any profound or evocative statement.
But unlike the painters Ross compared Cage’s work to, the performances of Cage’s alleatoric music produced no enduring artifact. They are ephemeral, existing in the concert hall but making no lasting mark on those who share in the work. Which was perhaps Cage’s original intention.
“I have nothing to say, and I’m saying it.” –John Cage
A visualization of the imperfections tempered tuning vs. perfect ration based intonation.
From Justonic(by way of Synthtopia):
With just tuning, composers were more or less locked into the key that a piece of music began in. This was not thought to be a problem until the rise of keyboard based instruments, which would sound out of tune if not played in their native key.
Equal-temperament– which remains the common tuning to this day– was developed in the 16th century as a compromise that allowed keyboard instruments to freely play in any key without being re-tuned. While this provided great freedom to composers to use any key and move between them with a piece of music, it has the side effect of making all music mathematically imperfect.
Wikipedia has a great chart demonstrating these imperfect ratios.
Most people– myself included– are used to it, but the musipheliacs at Justonic insist that this is the proper tuning(and their graphics make a hypnotizing argument.
In stark contrast to the exploration of latent musical patterns that appear to be present in all cultures that Bobby McFerrin explored(as mentioned in yesterday’s post), Harry Partch was one of the systematic innovators of music in the twentieth century. He sought to imitate natural sounds of machinery and speech more closely than the traditional twelve-tone western model could achieve by putting 43 tones between the octave pitches.
Many composers in the twentieth approached music with a eye on progress. The assumption was that once people became acclimated to new styles and new tonalities, the music would be considered just as beautiful as the music of Beethoven or Wagner, but that never happened. Composers who took radical departure like Schoenberg, Cage, and Partch never achieved the grand celebrations and general name recognition that came to the great innovators of previous centuries like Beethoven and Biber.
Thirty-five years after the death of Partch when we look back at those twentieth century visionaries who sought to revolutionize art and sound are remembered, it is not for great works or contributions to form and theory that they are remembered, but instead for their gimmicks and diversions. And thirty-five years from now, the composers of our time and who are most celebrated will not likely be the most daring or new, but instead those who remembered how to serve the listener rather than drag them along on flights of fancy. Or perhaps we have lost something from that time when 4 minutes of silence could garner excited reviews. A sense of optimism and exploration at the prospect that no people previously have attempted to do what we are seeking to do now or that the future could be ours to reinvent.
If, in this spirit of optimism, the works of those twentieth century composers do not represent the next great achievement in art. Perhaps a broader philosophical hope that we do not need to be bound to the patterns and mistakes of our past but can instead create new ideas and motivations in progress towards utopian society. Efforts have historically failed, but it is this hope that makes the life Harry Partch so fascinating. Besides the music’s not so bad once you get used to it; is it?
