Organized Sound Spaces with Machine Learning

1. Materiality of Music

1.1 Expansion of Musical Material

Expansion of Musical Material – Futurism and Beyond

Let's start with expansion of musical material. Let's go back to the beginning of 20th century and try to imagine what music meant back then. For example, this piece by Richard Strauss is composed in 1915, and the video below is a recent performance of that Symphony by Oslo Philharmonic (2020), which was performed in 2019.

In the beginning of 20th century we had a quite concrete understanding of what music is and what kind of sounds were musical. We had an understanding of what kind of musical instruments that we could use to make musical sounds. Of course, some composers were disagreeing with that, such as Luigi Russolo. Around the same time in 1913, Luigi Russolo released his futurist manifesto (1913). The beginning of the 20th century is an interesting time to do that, because at that time, our cities are quite different than today. The cities are loud were loud with industrial noises. We have been in the industrial revolution for quite a while at that time. We could imagine that the soundscape of our daily lives in the beginning of 20th century, were quite noisy. As Luigi Russolo mentions in the Art of Noise (1913):

Let us cross a large modern capital with our ears more sensitive than our eyes. We will delight in distinguishing the eddying of water, of air or gas in metal pipes, the muttering of motors that breathe and pulse with an indisputable animality, the throbbing of valves, the bustle of pistons, the shrieks of mechanical saws, the starting of trams on the tracks, the cracking whips, the flapping of awnings and flags, we will amuse ourselves by orchestrating together in our imagination the din of rolling shop shutters, the varied hubhub of train stations, iron works, tread mills, printing presses, electrical plants, and subways.

Luigi Russolo suggests further that:

Futurist musicians should substitute for the limited variety of timbres that the orchestra possesses today the infinite variety of timbres in noises, reproduces with appropriate mechanisms.

The video below (BBC Radio 3, 2009) is an example from Luigi Russolo's futurist intonarumori. These are devices that are made to make a variety of noises, performed in a musical way. We could call them noise instruments, and those instruments have been proposed in the beginning of 20th century as a way of expanding our sound palette for musical practices.

Dieser Inhalt wird von YouTube bereitgestellt.
Beim Abspielen wird eine Verbindung zu den Servern von YouTube hergestellt und der Anbieter kann Cookies einsetzen, die Hinweise über dein Nutzungsverhalten sammeln.

Weitere Informationen zum Datenschutz bei YouTube findest du in der Datenschutzerklärung des Anbieters.

This was the expansion of our musical material.