vocalman2004 odds & ends

Original Story

Instruments Use Natural Human Movements To Make Music

What would modern music sound like, were it not for the synthesizer? Electropop wouldn’t exist, Ellie Goulding would be an acoustic act, and the Beatles’ Abbey Road wouldn’t have as much pizzazz. While modular synthesizers existed and were used in music studios, it’s the Minimoog — the first portable analog synthesizer and the first-ever electronic analog instrument, pioneered by Robert Moog — that changed the sound of music. It graced the music scene in the 1970s, introducing electronic sound modulations to the music-making process and dramatically expanding the kinds of sounds that could be produced by an instrument.

History of the Moog

Robert Moog’s (rhymes with rogue) company was known for creating theremins — early electronic instruments — but he moved into new territory when he developed the analog, monophonic synthesizer in the 1960s. This synthesizer makes wave forms by electronic means, and it plays one note at a time. Moog developed standardized modules for the synthesizer sounds and proposed a standardized scale of voltages — the Moog oscillators and keyboard, for example, have a standard progression of one volt per octave. He debuted his prototype at the Audio Engineering Society conference in October 1964 and began taking orders.

The sound of the Moog Modular synthesizer became widely known in 1968, on Walter (now Wendy) Carlos’ “Switched-On Bach,” which was recorded entirely with the instrument.

The modular Moog was large (as were computers of the day), and it was initially developed for use in-studio. But just as room-sized computers were downsized into PCs, so too were synthesizers. Bill Hemsath, a Moog Music Inc. engineer, created the Minimoog Model A prototype out of spare parts during his lunch breaks. In the Moog junkyard, Hemsath found a five-octave keyboard that had been whittled down to three octaves, and then he bolted a synthesizer console on top of it. It was the first time these two parts has ever been combined, and it revolutionized music forever. This new device, the portable Minimoog, debuted in 1970, putting the power of the modular Moog in the hands of keyboard players all over the world.

It’s this smaller invention, the Minimoog and not the original modular Moog, that quickly became a staple for progressive rock bands such as Rush and Yes, who produced the futuristic sounds that were so in vogue in the 1970s. But it was also an instrument of choice for jazz musicians, who could solo on the machine using the innovative “pitch wheel” next to the keyboard. And even Bob Marley “stirred it up” with Moog, using a Minimoog to produce his reggae sounds. Although it doesn’t quite have all of the sonic capabilities of the original modular Moog, the Minimoog’s portability and user-friendly interface enables musicians to produce lots of sounds on stage. A more modern version of this synthesizer, the Minimoog Voyager, debuted in 2002; that’s the instrument you see at rock shows today. To this day, each Moog synthesizer is handmade at the Moog Factory in Asheville, N.C.

Of the Minimoog’s place in music, Moog said:

“Musicians always come up with stuff I couldn’t imagine, using my instruments. I can get a sense of whether something would be a good musical resource, but I don’t do music. I’m a toolmaker. It’s always amazing what someone like Herbie Hancock, Wendy Carlos, or Stevie Wonder can come up with. What they’ll do is, when you put something in front of them that’s new, they’ll turn a couple knobs, and listen, and immediately get a sense of where to go. The muse talks to them.”

The Magic Behind Moog

We know the modular Moog and Minimoog are revolutionary, but how do they actually work to make that cool sound? The Minimoog makes noise electronically instead of acoustically, and the machine’s knobs and can be manipulated to alter the sound the synthesizer emits. So it might sound like this:

or like this:

Before the Minimoog, electronic music studios typically had oscillators, filters and other tools to produce and manipulate electronic sounds; but these tools were limited in functionality and could be laborious and time-intensive. Moog consolidated these tools into one portable device, giving musicians more control in one instrument.

The Minimoog’s most central component is its voltage-controlled oscillators (VCOs), which generates the primary sound signal by producing a waveform, be it sine, square or sawtooth waves. The output from the VCO could then be modified by manipulating other modules, such as voltage-controlled amplifiers, voltage-controlled filters, envelope generators and ring modulators. The circuit looks like this:

So hitting a key on the keyboard and turning the knobs to various settings can create myriad sounds, making the Minimoog one of music’s most versatile and unique instruments.
The Playable Moog Google Doodle

On what would have been Robert Moog’s 78th birthday, Google created an epic Google Doodle to honor the electronic music pioneer. The Google Moog has 19 full-functioning knobs, one wheel, a switch and four tracks that let you record up to 30 seconds of overlaid audio. Check it out above.

Have you played a Minimoog? What do you love about the sound?

Image courtesy of Buffalo Museum of Science, Bob Moog Foundation, Moog Music, Inc.

Original Story – Mashable

Mozart pleases his public

The years 1650 to 1750 were a period of feverish invention and technical ingenuity in music that reached an apotheosis in Handel’s sublime oratorios and Bach’s cantatas and Passions. Bach was probably the cleverest composer who ever lived; the mind-boggling complexity of much of his late music, in particular, has yet to be matched by any composer. But, as often happens in musical history, the generation after Bach stripped away much of the older composers’ harmonic complexity, writing instead with a dramatically simpler palette of harmonies. The likes of Gluck, Mozart and Haydn created a whole new style based on, essentially, four major chords. Much of their music is based on the tonic, dominant and subdominant – just like much of rock’n’roll.  Status Quo and the Ramones, say, have shown that the old formulas are the best. Some of Mozart’s most memorable tunes in his opera The Magic Flute are based on very simple harmonic blocks of three or four chords.

Mozart – unlike most composers before him – was able to make a living independent of an institution or a single aristocratic patron, but he lived or died by what the public wanted to hear. If people came to hear one of his operas a second time, he made more money on receipts. He twigged that great tunes were what people were drawn to, and that if he enticed and delighted his audience he was more likely not only to get another commission, but also people were more likely to return to hear his works a second and third time if his tunes were memorable.

Mozart was a melodic genius. The perfection of the shape of his tunes is what strikes me, his wonderful sense of the rise and fall of a tune and what makes it catch the ear. Those great melodies embed themselves in our heads. This gift for melodies is very rare. I think Mendelssohn, too, a century later, was a composer who had an incredibly easy natural gift and wrote some very nice tunes. In my lifetime? Carole King has written beautiful songs, but only a handful. Richard Rodgers was someone who couldn’t not write a decent tune. But if you want the sheer unstoppable flow of Mozart, or Schubert, then you only have Lennon and McCartney.

Schubert invents the three-minute pop song

Most pop songs are based on a dozen or so of the most familiar chord sequences that were “discovered” in the late 18th century. In the present age, someone such as Adele is an original singer because of her voice, her attitude and her style. But the chords and sequences she and most pop writers are using have been around for a very long time. Perhaps the originator of the three-minute pop song was John Dowland, way back in Shakespeare’s time, but I think the modern pop song was created by Schubert.

Schubert was a remarkable talent. Melodies poured out of him. He wrote 600 songs, and, like today’s songwriters, his intention was to write music that would be instantly enjoyable. There’s not a moment where he is trying to catch you out or where you have to listen 10 times before you get your head around a song. He wants you to get it first time; there’s verse-chorus, voice and piano underneath, and he wants you to remember the chorus.

Some of these simple rules of songwriting just continue to be the simple rules of songwriting, and there’s nothing much about Adele or Simon & Garfunkel or Leonard Cohen’s songs that would have seemed alien to the Viennese composer in terms of the chords, or the shape, the way the verse leads into the chorus, or the piano accompaniment. In fact, the thing that would strike Schubert as most odd about an Adele song is the fact that a woman wrote it rather than being its object.

Schubert came to many of the same conclusions as modern songwriters – that writing random song after song is no use, that creating 20 songs and a journey is a much more satisfying form. And so that’s what he did with his song cycles. They are longer pieces where people go on a journey and each song forms the next bit of the story.

The fact is that if you strip that all away and ask what it is he is trying to do, he’s trying to write songs about love (or, let’s face it, unrequited love) or trying to get to grips with the mysteries of life – and do so in a way that is instantly enjoyable. He was a young man (by our standards, very young) so there is some naivety to the songs and there’s a delicacy which, for some people, doesn’t fit in with the modern world. But leaving that aside, he is trying to create something that is instantly liked by lots of people and enjoyed by them either in their own homes or in a salon.
Adele, singer, 2011 Adele’s voice and style make her an original. But the chords and sequences she uses have been around for a very long time. Photograph: Rex Features

That is not really very different from what Adele is doing. Her songs are based on a piano format, with verse-chorus, addressing the issue of love and romance and shaping the voice around that; emotions are expressed; the length; the format – Adele wants her songs to be instantly enjoyed.
Beethoven and the cult of the turbulent genius

Beethoven changed the point of what music was. He and his music became indivisible: it was a reflection of his inner turmoil. His work sits at the time of a broader cultural movement where artists and poets were doing the same, but what became a musical commonplace was begun by him. Seventies groups such as Yes and Pink Floyd tried to do the same thing and express big ideas in instrumental sections on concept albums.

Generally, Beethoven’s impact has been felt much more strongly in classical music than in pop, because he wrote about his emotions without words. When, at the end of his life, he writes his desperately bleak and private string quartets, it’s like having a pscyhoanalytic session with him.

But the cult of the isolated, divine or demonic genius – of which Beethoven was the first outstanding musical example – was developed to a whole new level by Berlioz. We have this French composer to thank for the image of the deranged, hair-challenged, isolated composer, one that persists to this day. He himself was a borderline psychopath at the forefront of the mid-19th century’s obsession with doomed love, death and destiny, and wrote music on an epic scale, music that would embrace all of life. He was obsessed with Beethoven – as we still are today, possibly to too great an extent. We’ve constructed this great building of Beethoven-the-man on top of his music, but if you strip that away and ask what’s going on in this music, it’s not always the same thing.
Franz Liszt Franz Liszt as a young man: the key composer of the 19th century, who turbo-charged music. Photograph: Archivo Iconografico/Corbis

Liszt lets music tell the story

Beethoven developed the idea that you can tell a story in music. In his Pastoral Symphony he goes for a walk in the country; he sees peasants merry-making, there’s a thunderstorm … but that piece is all about the composer, his feelings and his responses. Liszt, however, created the concept that the music itself could tell the story. He moved away from the idea of music as an abstract entity towards orchestral music as a representation of something extra-musical with his symphonic poems. Tasso, Lamento e Trionfo followed the path of an actual period in the life of the 16th-century Italian poet – even weaving in a traditional gondoliers’ folk song and creating an anguished first section about the mental asylum where Tasso was imprisoned for a while. The form of the piece was, crucially, dictated by the story. The climax of his Hunnenschlacht (The Battle of the Huns), devoted to Kaulbach’s 1850 painting of Attila the Hun’s battle against the Christian Roman empire, contains the kind of heavyweight flourish you have heard in the scores of countless Hollywood adventure films. In his tone poems, Liszt provided the template for generations of film composers. If I was scoring a battle scene for a film, I would use many of the techniques that Liszt first employed. His influence is enormous, and he had a huge effect on music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – so much so that I find myself wondering why we don’t love him better today. I think it comes down to the fact that he wasn’t a natural melodist. But to my mind, Liszt is the giant, the key composer of the 19th century, one who turbo-charged music.

Dvorák’s sampling sparks a debate

Composers have always borrowed elements from each other and from ethnic music. Music doesn’t observe racial or national boundaries. Can you “own” it? Nowhere were the moral questions surrounding this more sharply highlighted that in the US in the late 19th century, where the Czech composer Dvorák found himself at the centre of a highly divisive debate. The source melodies for his New World symphony were borrowed – whether deliberately or absorbed unconsciously – from Native American and African American folk songs, which raised the question of whether it is legitimate to plunder the music of another community’s cultural inheritance and place it in an alien and artificial milieu for a very different audience.

Dvorák had only good intentions – the ennobling of African American culture – but it’s important not to see a piece of music isolated from its times. His symphony was written during a period when everything that belonged to Native Americans and African Americans was deliberately being taken away from them by a white culture – and a work by a European composer performed in a New York concert hall was at that time a piece of white culture.

We may never know who wrote the tunes in Dvorák’s symphony – maybe he wrote every note himself. But the conundrums are there nonetheless because it became so commonplace for white musicians to rip off the music of black people. Three decades later, Gershwin, with his Rhapsody in Blue, found himself at the centre of a related debate when his incorporation of jazz – perceived as grubby, street music – outraged middle-class concert-goers.

Today, there are people who are antagonistic to popular culture of all kinds, who rant about how there’s nothing good on TV, that young people’s tastes, habits and fashions are all repellent to them. But it was ever thus. For a “serious” composer such as Gershwin to put jazz into a piece of classical music was deeply threatening and played to a fear that, somehow, it would pollute “serious” music. But you can’t make styles stay apart. They will come together no matter what.

As told to Imogen Tilden.

Original Story – Guardian

The post-war reconciliation between France and Germany was enshrined in a treaty signed 50 years ago. But many believe a song recorded the following year did as much to thaw relations.

Can there be many songs that really did change the world?

There have certainly been records which have been immensely popular – and some of those have had a message. But did they really change the hearts and minds of ordinary people? Did they alter politics?

There is one which did, and it’s barely known now.

Fifty years ago, Germany and France were neighbours where the scars of war were still raw.

Germany had invaded France and been repulsed, inch by bloody inch and town by town. Germans were trying to come to terms not just with total defeat, but with how what they thought was their civilised country had perpetrated one of the great crimes of history.

nto this minefield of potential resentment and painful rancour, stepped a slight, soft-voiced chanteuse.

Barbara was her stage name – she had been born Monique Serf in Paris in 1930. She was Jewish and so a target for the Nazis. But, two decades after the end of the war, she travelled to the German city Goettingen, as near to the heart of Germany as you can get.

She fell in love with the city and its people and recorded a paean of praise, first in French and then in German, the language of the former oppressor. She sang of “Herman, Peter, Helga et Hans”. Who had they been, the listener wonders. Her friends? Her lovers?

It captured the hearts of her German audience at the Goettingen theatre. It became a hit.

A street was named after her. The city bestowed its Medal of Honour on her. The citation talks of the song and its “quiet, emphatic plea for understanding”. The song’s popularity, the citation says, “made an important contribution to Franco-German reconciliation”.

As the song says:

In Goettingen, in Goettingen.”

And then:

“But children are the same,

In Goettingen, in Goettingen”.

One of the people in the audience was a student by the name of Gerhard Schroeder.

He would later become Chancellor of Germany and use the words of the ballad in a speech marking the 40th anniversary of the Elysee Treaty of reconciliation between France and Germany, a speech made exactly 10 years ago.

He said: “I was a doctoral student in Goettingen when she came to sing. It went to our hearts, the start of a wonderful friendship between our countries.”

Listening to the song today, it’s easy to understand its appeal then. It remains hauntingly beautiful, a wistful paean of love with a tinge of sadness.

She had much to be sad about. She had suffered sexual abuse from her father, and she had spent the war in flight from the Nazis, leaving Paris for the south and then dodging to hide from collaborators who would have handed her over to her murderers.

With the war over, she returned to Paris and took up singing and piano lessons at the Paris Conservatoire. But it was cabaret to which she was drawn, and the world of Edith Piaf and then Jacques Brel. Her big breakthrough came in the early 60s with “Barbara chante Barbara”.

And Goettingen. In Germany, she was loved for the love she had extended to them. In France, she was a star. Streets were named after her there too. A stamp had her face on it. When she died in 1997, a quarter of a million mourners went to the funeral.

But all that is just the ephemera of show business – the hits and the publicity and the pictures in the paper of her smouldering in dark glasses.

The part that still matters is that song. After all, which other singer could claim to have changed the world and for the better?

“Goettingen” was recorded just after one of the big political speeches of the century. President Charles de Gaulle of France went to the German city of Ludwigsburg and addressed the “youth of Germany”, again in their own language.

“To you all I extend my congratulations,” he said. “I congratulate you for being young.”

He had spent much of the war in London as the exiled leader of the Free French and returned to France as the German enemy was forced out – so his speech in German was important. The historians mark it as significant.

But which is more important – the speech of the General or the song of the girl?

BBC News – Goettingen: The song that made history.

A piece of music that was composed by waiting for bird droppings to fall onto giant sheets of manuscript paper has received its premiere.

Artist Kerry Morrison laid manuscript sheets on the ground in Liverpool parks and let birds deposit their droppings.

Composer Jon Hering has transformed the bum notes into a full musical score.

Morrison said the 20-minute Bird Sheet Music, which was performed at the Tate Liverpool art gallery, represented the role birds play in the environment.

“They play a massive part in the ecosystem of the city through their droppings – they disperse seeds, also their droppings help the enrichment of the soil, so we get fertiliser,” she said.

“It’s something people don’t often think about. The whole thing about looking at detritus and waste tends to be quite negative. People think it’s mucky or horrible, but of course it’s critical to life on earth.”

Hering was told to remain faithful to the positions of the droppings on the score and the order in which they fell, Morrison said. Sound artist Helmut Lemke has also incorporated birdsong and the other sounds of park life.

The composition was performed by the experimental Liverpool-based aPAtT Orchestra.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-21082873

It’s 30 years since the development of technology that allowed synthesisers and drum machines to be connected to computers – and since then MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) has revolutionised the world of music recording.

If you really want to appreciate Pink Floyd’s track Shine on You Crazy Diamond, aficionados claim, it’s best to have it on vinyl.

The sounds of the synthesisers burst through the crackle on the record as the guitar and drums set a heavy, rolling rhythm.

It made for a huge, era-defining sound – and you can feel the full 1970s sensation on that vinyl version.

But despite the awesome creativity of the music, the sound betrays a major limitation to the way electronic musical instruments were controlled at the time.

“You could play one keyboard with your right hand and another keyboard with your left hand,” says Dave Smith, a synthesiser manufacturer from California who was working on the issue back then.

“But [musicians] couldn’t play more than one at the same time because there was no way of electrically interconnecting them,” he remembers.

What Smith did next would transform the way recording studios worked, and create a revolution in music and recording production.

He persuaded manufacturers to adopt a common format which allowed their synthesisers to be controlled externally – by another keyboard potentially made by a rival manufacturer, or even by a computer.

It was called Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) and would soon become the industry standard for connecting different makes of synthesisers, drum machines, samplers and computers.

The development opened up a “whole new era of music processing”, as Dave Smith puts it.

“What MIDI did is it allowed the first home studios to be born,” he says.

“The computers were fast enough to be able to sequence notes, control the number of keyboards and drum machines at the same time… it kind of opened up a whole new industry.”

It was a breakthrough that would have the same kind of impact on popular music as the electrification of guitars decades earlier.

Sitting beside a row of keyboards and a big mixing desk at a home studio in Buckinghamshire is Alex Paterson, founder of the ambient dance band The Orb.

“God bless MIDI”, he exclaims, as a bass sound from one the synthesisers pulsates from the studio speakers.

“It was like walking into a dream,” says Paterson, describing the studio set-up used to record the band’s anthemic 1990 track Little Fluffy Clouds.

“Suddenly, you could be playing something on one synth and then you could walk over to the next synth and you could be playing the exact same thing.

“It was all there stored up ready to go for you – unbelievable stuff really,” he recalls.

This intricate and orchestrated control of synthesiser sounds, drum machines and samples saw a transformation in what was possible in the studio and ushered in a whole new means of production – it was the birth of dance music.

The first instrument with MIDI capability was a synthesiser called the Prophet-600 – designed by Dave Smith – which rolled off the production line in December 1982.

Atari and Commodore 64 computers – hugely popular among game-playing teenagers at the time – could also be used to control MIDI instruments via a cable with 5-pin connectors at either end.

The wide availability of the format and its ease of use helped redefine pop music in the 1980s – giving it a strong electronic feel and spawning many of the contemporary music genres that followed.

Alex Paterson’s co-producer Dom Beken remembers how MIDI allowed anyone to create “massive soundscapes”.

“Those electronic pioneers and those people who might have been punks before could now just make stuff that people would go mad to on the dance floor,” he says.

For Dave Smith, MIDI could only become a success if every manufacturer adopted it – “we had to give it away”, he says.

The universality of the format was perhaps an early example of what now gets called “open source” technology – MIDI’s backers intended it to be a free gift to the world which allowed anyone access.

Three decades on, and MIDI is still going strong – remaining one of the core components of professional recording and music production.

It’s a give-away which has changed the world of music – although you wouldn’t guess it chatting to MIDI’s understated Californian creator, Dave Smith.

“Of course it would have been even more fun to have made some money off of it, if that were possible,” he says.

“But that wasn’t part of the plan.”

BBC News – How MIDI changed the world of music.