Low Brow Eye Ltd - Music Technology Consultancy

rubbercitynoise:

What The Future Sounded Like (2006)

“Post-war Britain rebuilt itself on a wave of scientific and industrial breakthroughs that culminated in the cultural revolution of the 1960’s. It was a period of sweeping change and experimentation where art and culture participated in and reflected the wider social changes. In this atmosphere was born the Electronic Music Studios (EMS), a radical group of avant-garde electronic musicians who utilized technology and experimentation to compose a futuristic electronic sound-scape for the New Britain.

Comprising of pioneering electronic musicians Peter Zinovieff and Tristram Cary (famed for his work on the Dr Who series) and genius engineer David Cockerell, EMS’s studio was one of the most advanced computer-music facilities in the world. EMS’s great legacy is the VCS3, Britain’s first synthesizer and rival of the American Moog. The VCS3 changed the sounds of some of the most popular artists of this period including Brian Eno, Hawkwind and Pink Floyd. Almost thirty years on the VCS3 is still used by modern electronic artists like The Emperor Machine.”

youmightfindyourself:

The Paperwork Explosion (1967). Commissioned by IBM, the film was directed by a little-known experimental filmmaker named Jim Henson and scored by the Raymond Scott, the composer and inventor who wrote most of the tunes behind Looney Tunes, introduced the first racially integrated network studio orchestra, and pioneered electronic music with such technologies as the Orchestra Machine, the Clavivox, and the Electronium. Henson and Scott’s collaboration explains, no doubt, the film’s considerable formal intelligence and diegetic wit.3

The film promotes the IBM MT/ST, a machine released in 1964 combining the company’s Selectric typewriter with a magnetic tape disk. Operators entered text and formatting codes onto magnetic tape; they could then make simple changes before printing a clean copy of the document. More advanced versions of the machine included two tape drives, allowing for mail merge and similar features. Among historians of computing, the MT/ST is best known as the first machine to be marketed as a “word processor” (a term that, as Thomas Haigh has pointed out, emerged at the same moment as Cuisinart’s “food processor”).4

The IBM film opens with an extraordinary montage of the history of media and communication: scribes and printing presses, watermills and assembly lines, container ships and spacecraft. This montage is interrupted by the sound of brakes squealing and the image of a car swerving towards the viewer. Cut to a rural scene, the sound of chickens, an old man with a corncob pipe. “Well,” he says. “You can’t stop progress.” A quick glimpse of a subway train before a man who looks like he must be an engineer of some kind tells us “It’s not a question of stopping it so much as just keeping up with it.” An image of a jetliner before another talking head — thick frames, thin tie — tells us that “At IBM our work is related to the paperwork explosion.” Suddenly stacks of paper on a desk explode into the air and sail through a blue sky. Another voice tells us “specifically, paperwork in an office,” while paperwork explodes in the figurative sense, spilling out of desks and drawers. Then a repeat of the literal explosion. “Paperwork explosion” a voice says.

We are not quite one minute into the five-minute film. Faces of office workers appear one after the other to tell us that “There’s always been a lot of paperwork in an office — but today’s there more than ever before — there’s more than ever before — certainly more than there used to be!” This last statement is spoken by the old farmer, whose folksy observation also concludes the next montage: “In the past, there always seemed to be enough time and people to do the paperwork — there always seemed to be enough time to do the paperwork — there always seemed to be enough people to do the paperwork— there always seemed to be enough time and people to do the paperwork — but today there isn’t.” The pulse of Raymond Scott’s electronic music accelerates as more faces speak to us of their struggles with paperwork: “Today everyone has to spend more time on paperwork: management has to spend more time on paperwork — secretaries have to spend more time on paperwork — companies have to spend more time on paperwork — salesmen — brokers — engineers — accountants — lawyers — supervisors — doctors — executives — teachers — office managers — bankers — foremen — bookkeepers — everybody has to spend more time on paperwork.” Once again we see a shot of paperwork exploding. The farmer: “Seems to me we could use some help.”

The Paperwork Explosion takes its place in a long history of images of paperwork combusting.  This history might begin with J.M.W. Turner’s two brilliant canvases Burning of the Houses of Parliament (1835). These fires weren’t sparked by paperwork, exactly, but by the notched wood sticks used for some eight centuries by the Exchequeur’s office to record receipts and expenditures. As Charles Dickens recounted twenty years later: “The sticks were housed in Westminster, and it would naturally occur to any intelligent person that nothing could be easier than to alllow them to be carried away for firewood by the miserable people who lived in that neighborhood. However, they never had been useful, and official routine required that they should never be, and so the order went out that they were to be privately and confidentially burned.”5 The sticks were thus unceremoniously fed to a furnace in the basement of the House of Lords on October 16, 1834. They took their revenge, however, by taking the Houses of Lords and Commons with them into the flames. Turner’s paintings depict the accident in delirious detail.6

Think also of the paperwork explosion that opens the narrative of Fassbinder’sThe Marriage of Maria Braun (1979). As the film opens, we hear bombs falling and watch a wall collapse to reveal a wedding in progress. The bride and groom and guests scramble to get out of the Civil Registry Office as women scream and babies cry and hundreds and hundreds of documents tumble through the air. “Sign here! Put a stamp on it!” Maria Braun yells to the Nazi official as they lie on the ground. The image reappears several years later in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), as Robert De Niro’s character vanishes beneath with paperwork falling from the sky following the destruction of the Ministry of Information.

“IBM can help you with the time it takes to do the paperwork,” the film continues. We see sexy shots of machines as voices offscreen tell us that “With IBM dictation equipment I can get four times as much thinking recorded as I can by writing it down…” The voices continue to explain the various features and benefits of IBM office equipment: cordless dictation,  error-free copy, improved typography, increased productivity. “IBM machines can do the work — so that people have time to think — machines should do the work — that’s what they’re best at — people should do the thinking — that’s what they’re best at.” Once again the music accelerates as a series of faces and voices speed across the screen: “Machines should work — people should think — machines — should work — people — should think — machines — should — work — people — should — think.”

“So I don’t do much work anymore. I’m too busy thinking.”

David Vorhaus Analogue Electronic Music 1979

What you heard in this film has been just a tiny sample of the sounds technology now offers the musician. Are we witnessing technological self-indulgence, or is music going through an exciting period of development?

You might find it reassuring to remember that this development never stops. Be it spinnet, serpent, sousaphone or synthesiser there has always been a new sound of music. However bizarre some of it may sound today, we are perhaps privileged to be witnessing this development at a time when technology is presenting a range of possibilities wider than ever before.

It took some respected composers 30 years to accept the piano forte as a serious instrument. Judged on that time-scale, this revolution has hardly begun.

— Michael Rodd, narrating.

(via @_lemon and @CoLDSToRAGE)