Video of me and JC Cassis performing ODI et AMO live at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn 28 April 2009.

2. In concert with JC Cassis @ Arlene’s Grocery
Sunday, May 3, 2009
8pm SHARP
Arlene’s Grocery, 95 Stanton Street, Lower East Side, NYC
$8 at the door (Make sure to say you’re there to see JC Cassis)
21+
JC will be performing all her new dance-pop tracks off the forthcoming album, Four on the Floor, as well as some old faves.

3.  ITP Spring Show 2009
Sunday, May 10, 2-6pm & Monday, May 11, 5-9 pm
ITP @ 721 Broadway, 4th Floor
A festival of interactive sight, sound and technology from the student artists and innovators at ITP
This event is free and open to the public. No need to RSVP

4. I’ll be in Washington DC from May 13-15, and I’ll be in the San Francisco Bay Area from May 15-20 and then from early June to mid-August.  Ping me if you want to meet up.

Here are a couple screenshots taken from my upcoming piece, ODI et AMO, a music video/karaoke performance piece I am working on as the final project for my Visual Music and Animals class.  JC Cassis will be doing some vocals for the piece, and she’ll be coming over later today to rehearse and record her parts.

I will be presenting the piece for my Animals class next Tuesday, and then to the general public at Issue Project Room on April 28, at 8 pm.

Also check out the ODI and AMO T-shirt I designed, and my original project proposal.

ODI et AMO by Hepnova

ODI et AMO by Hepnova
Buy a tee shirt online from zazzle.com

More info

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

English translation:

I hate and I love. Why I do this, perhaps you ask.
I do not know, but I sense that it is happening and I am tortured.

Used in a different context, this could easily be the lyrics for an Emo track or a Britney Spears track penned by a Swede.

I will be creating an Avant-Pop deconstructed karaoke audio and video track based on the poem.  The video will feature AMO and ODI, two mascot characters I have created based on my exploration with Kaomoji (Japanese emoticons/ASCII art)  and The Cute (Kawaisa).  Together with vocalist JC Cassis, I will perform with the track at the Visual Music class show at ISSUE Project Room on April 28.

AMO

ODI

Then, for the audio portion of Kitchen Song, I recorded sounds from appliances in my kitchen: the sink, the dishwasher, the blender, the stove, the microwave – my response and homage to John Cage’s Water Walk.  Then I layered over growly synth improv I played on the trusty old SidStation.

By the way, the online video format doesn’t really do the piece justice. It’s designed to be projected on a large screen in a very dark room, with the audio turned up really loud.

Without further ado, I present Kitchen Song:

Kitchen Song on Vimeo
Kitchen Song on Blip.tv

A Brief Overview of John Cage’s Musical Philosophy

Asian cultures were a major influence on American composer John Cage.  He began studying Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940′s, which led him to his ideas of indeterminacy and chance-controlled music, which he began composing in the early 1950′s.  Cage adopted principles from the I Ching, the Chinese “Book of Changes” that one consults after tossing a set of coins. The I Ching inspired Cages chance compositions, which were governed by random operations just like readings from the I Ching.

Cage writes about his early contact with Eastern philosophies in his 1989 Autobiographical statement:

It was also at the Cornish School that I became aware of Zen Buddhism, which later, as part of oriental philosophy, took the place for me of psychoanalysis. I was disturbed both in my private life and in my public life as a composer. I could not accept the academic idea that the purpose of music was communication, because I noticed that when I conscientiously wrote something sad, people and critics were often apt to laugh. I determined to give up composition unless I could find a better reason for doing it than communication. I found this answer from Gira Sarabhai, an Indian singer and tabla player: The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences. I also found in the writings of Ananda K. Coomaraswammy that the responsibility of the artist is to imitate nature in her manner of operation. I became less disturbed and went back to work.

Through his study and experimentation, Cage came to the conclusion that there is no distinction between sound and silence, music and non-music, humanity and nature.  Cage said in his address, “Experimental Music,” given to the convention of the Music Teachers Association of Chicago in 1957:

Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.

But this fearlessness only follows if, at the parting of the ways, where it is realized that sounds occur whether intended or not, one turns in the direction of those he does not intend. This turning is psychological and seems at first to be a giving up of everything that belongs to humanity—for a musician, the giving up of music. This psychological turning leads to the world of nature, where, gradually or suddenly, one sees that humanity and nature, not separate, are in this world together; that nothing was lost when everything was given away. In fact, everything is gained. In musical terms, any sounds may occur in any combination and in any continuity.

The most famous/infamous manifestation of Cage’s philosophy was the 1952 piece 4’33″, in which David Tudor sat down in front of a piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds and did not play any notes.  This was Cage’s musical parallel to the White Paintings of Robert Rauchenberg, which whom Cage collaborated.  Cage’s 4’33″ is sometimes referred to as “The Silent Piece,” but it is not at all silent.  The piece is made up of the hum of the air-conditioning in the hall, the ruffle of programs, the coughing of an audience member; it is an invitation, an invocation, to listen to the ambient sounds all around us.  Cage rejects the distinction between musical and non-musical sounds, and embraces all sounds, regardless of the performers intent, to be potentially musical.  In doing so, Cage completes the break from the history of classical composition and offers up a new model for music in which the primary act of for the composer and for the performer is not to make music, but to listen.

Cage’s ideas about what music were also influenced by the Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp, who presented “found art,” or “ready-mades”– everyday, unadulterated objects in museum settings as finished works of art. Just as Duchamp saw art in the everyday objects, Cage found music around him.  Cage rejected the idea of music having to express something within, musical inspiration could be found in the smallest and most mundane things, such as the imperfections in a piece of paper.  Cage also rejects the notion that music is an extension of a composer’s ego, and that it is the role of the composer to create music out of silence.  For Cage, silence doesn’t exist at all. For Cage, composing means listening, and listening is a kind of meditation, a way of communing with nature.

Cage himself sums it up best.  Again quoting from his Autobiographical Statement, “My favorite music is the music I haven’t yet heard.  I don’t hear the music I write.  I write in order to hear the music I haven’t yet heard.”

Original HTML version

PHP/MySQL/Javascript version

Flash XML version

The Animal Subject

You will take your “Animal Object” character, and flip the script by investigating the subjective point of view of the animal you chose.

What is it like being inside this animal? What is its view point? How does it see– or experience –its environment? What – or how – is he/she reacting to the events surrounding him/her? How do those events appear, in terms of scale, form, size, sharpness, color, time?

Drawing on the writings of Üexkull (the idea of umwelt), and the readings on research into animal minds, and / or projected first-person narration (Haskell’s short story, Coe’s “Pitt’s Letter”), you may chose to be anthropomorphic, or you may NOT be, as you see fit.

The purpose of this assignment, coupled with the last one, is to explore how character is made from different points of view, and how your crafting of that character expresses your point of view.

Ruby’s Song from lee-sean on Vimeo.

Music and editing by Lee-Sean Huang.  Paintings by Ruby the Elephant.  Elephant sounds by Kris Hartley.

During our in-class crit, some people thought that the piece was two opaque, that I needed to move the titles to the front of the video, or in someway make it more explicit that the piece is about an elephant.  I’m still not sure how I feel about that.  I would definitely consider moving the “Ruby’s Song” titles to the beginning of the video, but I would also have to restructure the audio portion so everything still synchs up correctly.  My goal was to really get into Ruby’s head and create something based on established elephantine means of expression.  Even if wild elephants don’t paint and make music, they are ways in which elephants in captivity can “express themselves,” whatever that means, I still don’t know, so I’ll leave it up to interpretation.

See also:

Ruby’s Song on Blip.tv

Ruby’s Song on Vimeo

An Audio Portrait of the Life and Death of Ruby

Sketches of Ruby

Ruby Research Links

Das Neunundneunzigmusikspiel (99 Music Game) is a cheeky little board game I invented for my Visual Music class as a way of executing a musical “score” consisting of a list of 99 words or phrases.  The game board, one six-sided die, a placeholder  (coins or Monopoly characters work well) and the list are necessary to play the game/piece.  I have composed my first piece for the system, but presumably, anybody can “compose” their own list of 99 words or phrases to be used for the Game.

All players place their placeholders on “start.”

Each player rolls the die to determine the order of play.  If two or more players roll the same number, then they should roll again, and repeat if necessary until an order is established.

In the established order, each player rolls the die, and advances the placeholder the corresponding number of spaces.  The player then looks up the word or phrase corresponding to the number of the space where she has moved the placeholder.  She then verbally calls out the word or phrase, and then performs a gesture that interprets the word or phrase.  A gesture is broadly defined as a vocal or instrumental performance, interpretive dance, or other expression.  The other players may also choose to perform complementary gestures expressing the word or phrase, but it is optional.

The players continue performing until the next player decides to roll the die, advances the placeholder, and calls out the corresponding word or phrase, after which the players perform the next gesture.

Game play continues until the placeholder arrives at the end (fin).  If there is an “over-roll,” for example, if the placeholder is one space away from the end, but the player rolls a six, the move is still considered to be valid ending.

Download PDF of game instructions and score.

Download PDF of game board.

I would love to execute this score sometime, anybody interested in performing it with me?

Here are the Opus 1 performance directions:

1.  Gently
2.  Quietly
3.  Comme des embryons desséchés
4.  Comme un chat
5.  Early morning
6.  Slowly
7.  Breakfast time
8.  Just after your morning coffee
9.  Un peu triste
10. Humming bird
11. Alarm clock
12. Singing in the shower
13. Annoyed
14. Building up
15. Slightly bored
16. Half-assed
17. Accelerating
18. Horror movie soundtrack
19.  Muzak
20.  Smooth Jazz
21.  Radio static
22.  Channel surfing
23.  Ausdrucksvoll
24.  Kitsch
25.  Suddenly
26.  With longing
27.  Ascending
28.  With intensity
29.  Sneakily
30.  Bluesy
31.  Satori
32.  Impressionistic
33.  Sforzando, subito piano
34.  Ironic
35.  Sans ralentir
36.  From your diaphragm
37.  With passion
38.  Wagnerian
39.  Karaoke
40.  Stylishly
41.  Mit Weltschmerz
42.  Your favorite Muppet
43.  Birdlike
44.  Pedantically
45.  Dolphins
46.  Mit Sehnsucht
47.  Fierce
48.  Nevermind
49.  Primitive
50.  Blue sky moment
51.  Out of breath
52.  Reptilian
53.  Crustacean
54.  Sentimental
55.  Fashion-forward
56.  Angry wildlife
57.  Ecstatic
58.  Entertain us
59.  With great clarity
60.  Take us to the bridge
61.  Fed up
62.  Flock of seagulls
63.  Dead rockstar
64.  Unpredictable
65.  Nerdy
66.  Scolding
67.  Downward spiral
68.  Like someone in love
69.  Like a thief in the night
70.  Like you don’t give a shit
71.  Like a virgin
72.  With a lust for life
73.  Freebird
74.  Monkey-style
75.  American Idol
76.  Life-affirming
77.  Headbanger
78.  Condescending
79.  Maladroit
80.  Japonesque
81.  I think we’re alone now
82.  I will always love you
83.  With reverence
84.  Cliché
85.  Mit Lebensangst
86.  Descending
87.  Uprooted
88.  Mit Wanderlust
89.  Depressing
90.  Allegro ma non troppo
91.  Nostalgic
92.  Shellshocked
93.  Lent et grave
94.  Catharsis
95.  Orgasmically
96.  Fin du siècle
97.  La mort
98.  L’enfer
99.  Fin du monde

This week’s assignment for Visual Music is to compose a drone music piece.

My voice as the only sound source + La Monte Young + Björk’s Medúlla + Dangerously-close-to-Enya vocal overdubs, reverb, and delay + a lot of copy and paste =   Vocal Drone.

Enjoy.

Our assignment for week 3 of Visual Music with Zach Layton is to “take 12 tone piece & stretch it out with FFT, do spectral analysis, make it a new piece.”

I opened up the AIFF of the 12 tone piece I composed last week in SPEAR.  Then I used SPEAR to drag different frequency partials around.  I eliminated most high frequencies and used the pen tool to draw some frequencies to create a 1-minute drone piece, which I exported as an AIFF.   Then I used SoundHack to mutate the SPEAR-edited file with the original 12 tone piece from last week.  This is the resulting new piece, a spectral/FFT “remix” of the original, if you will.  The spectral analysis above was also done by SoundHack.

[AIFF] [MP3]

Using the Sounding Stone Twelve-Tone Row Calculator, I generated a twelve-tone series based on A, D, and G.

12 x 12 Matrix:

In the Etude I have composed, I wanted to sketch out the vertical (harmonic) and horizontal (melodic) qualities of the 12-tone set. I sat down at the piano, and started recording in GarageBand, while I improvised several vertical and horizontal ways of playing through the 12-tone set. Then I did some editing of the sound samples in GB to isolate the performances I wanted to keep and then added some delay and multitracked the piano parts slightly out of phase to create a “serialism-meets”minimalism” kind of effect.

[MP3] [AIFF]