paulhazel.com

Check out this superb little film. As Peter Kirn says in his original post:

Sound design and recording quality are important, but in this film, directed by Henrik Hansen, each gesture of the sound mix is likewise deliberate and meticulously paced. There’s a reason some of the best editors are both film and sound editors.

Note there’s also an HD version on YouTube for full effect.

[Via Create Digital Music]

[Via Pixelsumo]

Absolutely exquisite:

[Via Grant Senior. Nice.]

Jim who? Jim Reekes is the gentleman who designed many of the Mac system sounds including that start-up sound. This a recent interview with him (posted February 11th of this year) from a Dutch TV program called One More Thing:

A fascinating and amusing insight into the machinations of corporate culture. Interesting also to associate a personality to the sounds our machines make and which we inevitably take for granted.

[Via Create Digital Music]

This is super-funky:

[Via BoingBoing]

I love this: very clever, very funny, great use of the technology, and the guy’s got talent! Excellent video, too:

[Thanks to Matt Ottewill for sharing this with me.]

This next track was actually written and performed by DJ Sanctuary & DJ Asterix, not by me. I did do some extra programming on it though, and it was produced and mixed at my place. A really cool track, one of those that can be said to take the listener ‘on a journey’:

To finish, a late-period Blue Train track with Natalia Farrán-Graves on vocals, Dave Westmore on bass and backing vocals, Steve Waterman on trumpet:

Just a quick post by way of paying my respects to the sadly deceased Lester William Polsfuss:

I’m not going to insult your intelligence by trotting out all the usual known facts. (Get those here or here. See also my Brief History of Electronic Music.) Suffice to say that of the three things he’s best known for—his music, the invention of multitrack recording, and that guitar—it’s the first two of these that have always impressed me the most.

Clearly, the two were inextricably intertwined. From the early 1950s the originality of Les’s music largely depended upon his technical prowess: firstly overdubbing layer upon layer of sounds using acetate discs, then later the development of the 8-track ‘Sel-Sync’ tape machine in conjunction with Ampex.

I still find his records from this time completely thrilling: despite the often cheesy material, the overdubbed and speeded up guitars and thickly layered vocals have a futuristic “space-age” sound to them that is absolutely redolent of the Sputnik era.

Here’s a video I’ve had up on YouTube for a couple of years now that uses his (and his wife, Mary Ford’s) arguably best-known track How High The Moon as the soundtrack. What a fabulous and extravagant piece of music!

[Thanks to Julian for the BBC link.]

According to its creators, Mabuse is a piece of “real-time audio-visual composition and performance  software.” It’s an application written using Max/MSP that allows users to create audio tracks and manipulate video in real-time using graphical sequencing tools they call modulators: as usual you can create your own patterns or draw on an existing bank of presets. Check out this short tutorial video for an overview:

Presumably to allow for a greater degree of flexibility with the audio composition and processing aspects they’ve also released Mabuse as a VST plug-in for Ableton Live. It’s only available on the Mac as yet, but say that a PC version will be forthcoming given the interest:

There’s also a video tutorial here.

Although I suspect the VST plug-in won’t really take off until the promised full-screen version is available, overall these are very clever pieces of software that deserve to succeed. The seamless integration of the audio and video elements—and their real-time capabilities as performance and composition tools—make Mabuse very powerful. It’s a fabulous example of convergence!

I think if I was still performing techno music live this is what I would be using. Hooked up to a Lemur, natch…

Raymond Scott

1992 found me studying Music Information Technology at City University under Jim Grant and Simon Emmerson. As part of my dissertation I wrote a long piece on the history of electronic music. It sat around on the old paulhazel.com for a while, but I recently revised it and updated it for my own students, and, for those who are interested in such things, I’m including it here.

I think it remains useful. It is only a brief history but it covers a lot of ground, technological, artistic and political. It finishes around the time synthesizers entered the mass-market and just before MIDI, but it goes right back to the medium’s real beginning. Contrary to what most people think, “music technology” didn’t begin in the late 1960s with Bob Moog: as far back as 1906 Thaddeus Cahill had a working polyphonic additive synthesizer that transmitted pure electronic music over a telephone network. Talk about being ahead of your time…

The Telharmonium

A Brief History of Electronic Music (372kB .pdf)