7 effects - no digital gear, just an orchestra (Rob Scallon's idea taken one stage further)
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- Опубликовано: 13 июл 2024
- In this video I look at some of the ways composers have been influences by electronic and digital technologies, pieces written for acoustic instruments that have everything from EQ effects, ring modulation and more.
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0:51 E.Q.
3:37 Tape Phasing
4:35 Reinjection Loops
7:15 Feedback/distortion
8:02 Octave shifting
9:02 Ring Modulation
11:02 Sidechaining
Videos:
Alvin Lucier - I Am Sitting In A Room
• Alvin Lucier - I Am Si...
Charles Ives - Largo for Violin and Piano
• Charles Ives - Largo f...
Claude Vivier - Lonely Child
• Claude Vivier - Lonely...
György Ligeti, Concerto de chambre - Ensemble intercontemporain
• György Ligeti, Concert...
ZEITKRATZER - Lou Reed : "Metal Machine Music"
• ZEITKRATZER - Lou Reed...
György Ligeti - Atmospheres
• György Ligeti - Atmosp...
Steve Reich Piano Phase
• Steve Reich piano phase
Rob Scallon Getting Delay, without using any effects.
• Getting Delay, without...
Ravel Bolero
• M. Ravel: Bolero Sheet...
Georg Friedrich Haas - String Quartet nr 4 with live-electronics
• Georg Friedrich Haas -...
Gérard Grisey, Espaces acoustiques 2/2 - Ensemble intercontemporain -
• Gérard Grisey, Espaces...
Tristan Murail - Memoire / Erosion (for horn and nine instruments) (1976)
• Tristan Murail - Memoi...
The Kronos Quartet: Death to Kosmische by Nicole Lizée
• The Kronos Quartet: De... 
Видеоклипы
Correction: Metal machine music was arranged by Ulrich Krieger
www.ulrich-krieger.de/index.htm
the explanation of ring modulation was not strictly mathematically sound other wise awesome video!
Shoutout to the vulfpack
These ideas translate wonderfully into free improvisation as well. One of my favorites is a conducted gesture from Walter Thompson called "Stab Freeze." When signed players must repeat quickly what they were just playing, similar to the effect of a skipping CD.
Love it, David! Such an awesome topic that can be talked about forever then applied in so many ways!
I find Ives' piece to have an excessively humanizing effect rather than technological. It's just like when you sing along to a song that's not in your range and you change from your lower vocal cords to falsetto vocal cords randomly in the middle of a line and vice versa. It's so remarkably similar that I can only believe that Charles Ives intended it that way.
Anyway. Thank you, David, for providing so much entertaining and educational material and your profound thoughts on it! I can't wait to check out all the video links in the description.
That’s a really cool way to put it
or when beethoven tries to orchestrate for instruments whose range is smaller than his imagination :)
The Ravel example was the reason I bought the score to Bolero cause I couldn't figure out what instruments were playing and I was so surprised to see that the celesta was playing with the horn and piccolo which gives it this soft metalic sheen.
David Bruce's music is really good. Check it out.
Fascinating! Reminds me of some of the effects Jerry Goldsmith achieved in his score for the original Alien in 1979. One cue in particular ("It's a Droid") suggests electronic noises entirely with acoustic instruments, just before a character is shockingly revealed to be a robot. There are other examples, too, like "The Shaft" and "The Terrain" that suggest electronic drones and synthetic beds, also with traditional instruments.
Astonishing and inspiring, both in structure and content, as always. I find your analyses to be among the best in youtube. As such, I'd like to ask if you could make a video on impressionistic piano voicings and the use of piano pedals, as in, for example, Debussy's La Cathédrale Engloutie. Though I don't know much about EQ, I feel like there's something similar going on in that piece.
9:52 holy shit i did not expect that sort of sound to come out of real instruments this is amazing
David, thank you for taking the time to create this superb video. It is enjoyable, filled with interesting content, and has a well thought out storyline.
I remember studying the orchestration of Bolero at the same time I was studying organ. It was obvious to me at the time that he was using, in that exact spot you pointed out, the same principal the organ uses when a rank of pipes will play, for example, a 6th(and two or three octaves) above the fundamental, or a 3rd and 5th, or a minor 7th. I forget now, which ranks play those types of harmonics, and there are more than what I mentioned, but that s definitely an organ thing.
This video it's already in the very deep of my -heart- like list. So inspiring.
Your videos just keep getting better!
I love this video, my favorite! So happy to see Vivier and Lizée here, very insightful in a very short time, great
Amazing video! I just love hiw you take "modern" subjects or subjects that one should not expect to find in a channel that deals with "classical" music and present them bridging the gap between "popular" or "current technology" music wmand orchestral music. This helps me to feel more close to any kind of tradition, without prejudice or without feeling defensive. This is SO important in my opinion! We need this to let music evolve freely. Thank you very much for addressing all of this and carrying this mission! This way you help to bring piece and understanding for the musical communities of any musical language!
This video inspired me a ton, thank you so much for doing what you love, greetings from Chile!
Love your videos Bruce! They feed curiosity and intelect alike, thank you!
This is an extremely interesting subject. Amazing video with fluid and precise production, David.
I love the way you analyze different facets of music. It is very inspiring to see how composers like yourself have always searched for and used sound and its myriad forms to create new music and add flavor to their compositions.
I've been searching for this video for ages
That piece at 9:55 was so refreshing to hear! I haven't heard anything like that before, and I don't get to say that often. I'll certainly be following up on that.
amazing as always
Great video AND I love your Vulfpeck shirt!
Excellent insight as always
_9:47__ that spot on pronunciation. Very impressive._
Hum ... no, sorry.
Well, at least better than that of 'Zeitkratzer' at 7:29 :D
What, no it wasn't! It sounded a bit slavonic perhaps, but not flawless French. Good try though.
Was this sarcasm?
Magnificent video, as usual. I learnt a lot.
The echo effect (nowadays achieved digitally) has a long long history in orchestral and choral music. Monteverdi's Vespers has several great examples (with one singer singing an echo to another). One of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos (was it the 5th?) has an instrumental equivalent.
Another recording-based effect is the fade out, and you've mentioned its orchestral precursors (Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, Holst's Planets) in another video.
Your videos and music are an important contribution to the world
Thanks for this great content David. Who needs a university education these days with creators putting this level of quality out there!
Hi David, as being both a student of composition at the conservatory and a electric guitarist/synth nerd, I just wanted say I love this. Keep up the good work.
Wow your Sidechain composition is amazing!
love this video. steve reich is such an inspiration. this video gives many more ideas to explore.
dig the vulf shirt!
Great idea to give a visual comparison to the audio effects! WAY TO GO! Also, great choosing of visual effects to display the audio effects! Hats off! Really great educational feat! (I'm going to stea... uhm "take an inspiration" from that for my lectures ;-)
Great video! Thanks
I once did a looping improvisation, and then wrote it out for 10 identical instruments. It actually seems to be halfway popular with ensembles.
Bolero: yeah, that's been my test for a good performance if they can get that doubling passage to sound seamless. Btw, I wouldn't call it EQ'ing: more additive synthesis.
the orchestra is one big additive synth
Bolero case can be identified as additive synthesis for sure
And please never forget the ”cascading strings” of Mantovani!
I had no idea Bolero is technically bitonal! Talk about taking things for granted... Gr7 vid m9, keep it up!
p.s. I'd love to hear your take on artists like Zappa, Björk, Jeff Buckley, and any newer artists pushing harmonic boundaries of songwriting acceptability in the pop/rock world of late.
As a hopeful songwriter, I like to draw a parallel of pure mathematics to the avante garde in music, in the sense that one day someone will find a way to use the abstract concepts explored in, for instance, 20th century classical music, by more amiable (or euphonic) means. Much in the same way a fancy formula may not prove particularly useful to 99% of people until the world has developed enough to find a way in which to use the BASTARD.
Also, if anyone could help a poor autodidact out in making sense of Bartok's take on tonality, that'd be WELLIN.
I'm off to go superimpose a chord sequence onto the same one in a different key in the hope it (or I) won't end up a cacaphonic mess (again).
Wish me luck!?!
I didn't know that either about Ravel
also: good luck!
That was super helpful, thank you!
Metal machine music was arranged by Ulrich Krieger and has been performed y multiple ensembles. He is a innovative and inspiring performer, composer and teacher, and I really hope more people might hear his music.
Thanks!
thanks for this!
What a brilliant video! I had this thought the first time I heard Ligeti's Atmospheres, that if I'd heard it without knowing it's an orchestra I would assume it's synthesized! But, I think there's an amendment to be made, that is, these effects are not digital per se, but electrical (not electronic). All the effects you mention (EQ/filtering, transposable VCOs, Ring Modulation, side-chaining, distortion) were introduced in the Analog Era and then replicated (and further developed) digitally/electronically.
Amazing video!
something I have noticed over the past 4-5 years is that young pop inspired singers, especially young women, do all of their singing with phrasing that sounds like vocal parts where recorded in a DAW a phrase at a time and quantized.
But this is them doing their natural acoustic singing!
It seems when a generation grows up enjoying music that sounds a certain way, the music they are unconsciously drawn to recreate that in their own music.
We have heard this for a long time with acoustic instrument players like pianists, drummers or guitarists who have grown up on the electronic music of the 80's and 90's. But it's very interesting to now hear vocalists whose natural singing sounds like it came out of fruity loops.
What a wonderful and insightful video to stumble upon. Starting with using ultrasonic frequencies to silently voice control smartphones (Dolphin Attack) to Intermodulation Distortion, Subharmonics, organ mixture and mutation stops to here. I also saw Rob Scallon's video and thought of human use of delay. The one that jump to mind was Benjamin Britten "This little babe" from Ceremony of Carols. The imitation done at an 1/8th note creates a similar effect. A video of a similar theme is Adam Neely's video of the player piano music of Conlon Nancarrow "Steampunk Black Midi". Thank you for this!
Excellent video, super interesting! Also, sweet shirt¡
Gerard Grisey did what is basically additive synthesis. 'partiels' is from analysed trombone notes, rearranged for a whole ensemble of non-trombones creating drone from each overtone. I guess organs are additive synthesisers to start off with, but the additive synths of today can arrange complex inharmonic sounds and create a whole complex sample from sine waves in high fidelity, which is more like partiels.
You can't believe how much I wanted you to touch upon these topics! Spectralism FTW!
Reface CS! I love my Reface CS! Did not expect to see it here!
this video actually made my jaw drop
Some decades ago I worked in the same lab as Amelia Kaplan in Chicago (maybe she was finishing her doctorate at the time)? As far as I could figure out, while composing she was taking musical waveforms, Fourier transforming them, then deriving orchestral scores from the decompositions-consciously implementing additive synthesis with conventional instruments. But whatever the details of the method, the effect in performance was that you often felt you were hearing quite different instruments than the ones that you could see playing.
Now I watched a second time I understood the piccolo thing in the Bolero, but i'd rather say it is just parallel major thirds 2 octaves away. This piece is a class on arrangement, I always wanted to know what was playing in this passage with the horn, thank you.
You should do an episode on Astor Piazzolla, specially his work with his quintet.
Thanks for reminding me to listen to Chamber Concerto again
Wow this video was basically a semester long course on 20th century EQ oriented orchestration/composition summarized in like 12 minutes. Glad atmosphere and bolero were featured
Great video David! As an electronic music composer/performer I am excited to try and recreating these techniques in a DAW. That could yield some interesting results.
One small thing i noticed however is that the programming language you are referring to is called Max/MSP, not IMAX/MSP.
Thanks for sharing your wisdom!
Cool video, cool tshirt!
Really interesting video. I was very pleasantly shocked to see Rob Scallon's name appear in the title. Do you think you'll ever do a video where you go through your composing process?
Excellent. Would love to hear a similar examination of composers of earlier times who toyed with our ears. A good example is Bruckner, who in a few instances, scored to provide an echo effect. Richard Strauss also did some amazing things with sounds. Thanks for posting.
Robert Fripp used the phrase loop technique with guitarists in the King Crimson song Frame by Frame. One guitar plays in 7/4 always starting the loop over at the beginning of each measure. The other guitarist is playing the same thing but missing one eighth note at the end of the loop. So they start in synch and then slowly drift apart before realigning and drifting apart again.
That Gerard Grisey piece is amazing. It's like FM synthesis done live.
Always interesting...
EQ effects are so cool :))
I always feel like Bartók does this octave shifting in his Viola concerto.
Check out the first movement between bar 180-190 (serly edition). Some serious octave shifting in the solo viola.
And then there are pieces written for mechanical/digital instruments which have inspired performers to learn and play them like Conlon Nancarrows Studies for Player Piano and Zappa's Synclavier Pieces.
This would be an awesome video!
Or the acoustic drum covers of Aphex Twin and Venetian Snares tunes.
Yes and there have also been Acoustic Piano and Orchestra version of Aphex tunes.
Great video
Great shirt
I love you Dave ❤️❤️❤️ You remind me of Morrissey but kinder and with more degrees
I'd love to see a video about video game music! there's so many interesting topics that are worth examining
excellent presentation
:◎)
I so needed to find this ! This week and weekend evicting roommates takes many weeks sometimes and this guy is evil and crazy and at 63 if i knock anymore of his teeth out I will be injail and then I wouldnt be able totocar i piano or jumpon my 2 laptops ! I luv da Spectralists (Vivier,Murail, Grisey those guys . Hope I can discover more on your channel . always hearing about Pierre Schafer yet to really explore all the possibilities opened up since the 1960 's ! So good to see the various histories again . Alvin Lucier ,G.F. Haas etc. I spend a lotta time reseraching but how is it Ive yet to hear or purchase Lou Reed 's MetalMachine Musik . Wow ! Another Ives violin sonata No. A slow single composition I've never heard or !SEEN ! iNTERESTING SCORE ! i HAVE so much work to do Thanks for waking me up !
Something I have noticed just today when playing Chopin's Mazurka F major. In the middle section (Poco piu vivo) the player is instructed to hold the sustain pedal for almost 12 bars, which is unusual, or even in bad taste, but here it combines very well with the droning bass and the high, fiddle-like melodic line to create a very dreamy soundscape. Which made me realize - in this section Chopin was using the sustain pedal as a long reverb. Which made me realize that in piano pieces in general the sustain pedal is often used as or in a similar way to a reverb, even if it is not being held for 12 bars straight.
Love your channel, I'm discovering a lot of really interesting stuff here! :D out of curiosity... what's the keyboard you're using in section 5 (octave displacement)?
I wrote a piece for uni a few months ago in which I attempted to mimic sampling and basic pitch-shifting (stretching the waveform i.e. changing speed as well as pitch). Wish you'd released this vid before I submitted it, would've been v useful!
I love hearing you talk about your own music! I wonder if you think it's a problem of classical music that you often get a lot more from it after taking to time to understand it/ know the composers motivation, or do listeners ears grow to be able to do this sort of thing more quickly?
Ralph Towner while in the uncategorizezble unit Oregon talked about how they sometimes consciously mimicked electronic effects etc.
An early influence of recording technology on music is to be found in Bartok's composition, although I haven't found any source confirming it. Bela Bartok, who with Zoltan Kodaly, famously used early recording technology to field record Hungarian folk music, has passages in his music that seem obviously influenced by a familiarity with backwards masking. Retrograde has been part of Western musical compositional forever, but in Bartok, for instance in Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, passages intentionally seem to recreate the sound of acoustical passage played backwards.
I was kinda surprised you didn't mention the 2nd movement of Shostakovich's last quartet. It always gave me the feeling of something being played in reverse.
By the way, nice shirt my dude
thanks.
I hand wrote a 7 part orchestral piece without an instrument to sound like it was created on a drum sequencer . After I put in score edit it did sound sort of like a drum machine .
Here's one I can think of: Vaughan Williams' "Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Talis". There second string orchestra part which is supposed to be placed in an adjacent room with a door open, or something along those lines. Its almost like a FX send. This is like some combination of a lowpass filter / reverb / delay effect in the context of the piece.
Make a more fleshed out video on spectralism, it intrigues me immensely
Great video! I was just wondering what you love about Ligeti's Chamber Concerto. I also think it's good but I'm curious about thoughts on it!
Nice Vulf digs
Thanks for another great video! Another recording/composition that is worth mentioning is the Robert Fripp/Andrew Keeling/David Singleton CD "The Wine of Silence". It contains orchestal arrangements of Robert Fripps soundscapes (live improvised guitar/synth performances using "frippertronics") performed by the Metropole Orkest. Well worth checking out. By the way, if you feel you have anything to say about either Robert Fripp or Frank Zappa from a composers point of view I would be thrilled to hear that.
nicole lizée is a very fun composer!!
The example from Claude Vivier is not using harmonics, it is using sum tones attained from the soprano and bass, more akin to ring modulation. Good video regardless.
When Georg Haas visited Florida State College of Music, he mentioned that a lot of his electronic works are meant to either be performed on tape or tape emulating software! He made one of our composition professors create a Max patch to replicate his original tape version for a piece for solo Piano and live electronics!
Hi David, did you mean Pierre Schaeffer at 3:38 ? I love your channel, that was a fascinating topic
Great stuff, sir! Probably a video on Jean-Michel Jarre?
Thank you
10:00 that dude on the right of the contra bassoon really hates us all x'D
10:23 that score is massive
VULF T SHIRT FTW!!!
I think Ravel may have gotten his harmonic ideas in "Bolero" from organ stops which double at 8-foot, 4-foot, 2-foot, etc.
PLEASE do a video on the PanArt Hang and it's brainchild, the handpan
Your French accent is the best!
This is awesome, are there any resources you can suggest for people who want to know which overtones are prominent with which instruments? I've looked at a few through spectrograms on Max/MSP, but if somebody's already done that and written out in sheet music like you have in the bolero example, I'd love to see just a big ol' chart about it.
Oooh someone got played at the proms!
Could you or have you done a video on sonata-allegro form development? I've had a lot of fun working up small ternary form pieces for solo piano (my instrument of choice for composing) but I struggle to expand my ideas past standard retrograde and inversion while still holding cohesiveness in the piece.
What about natural chorus effect? Having instruments play together that are slightly out of tune with each other. I've done it only in recording, taking two acoustic guitars and tuning one slightly above pitch, and one slightly under. I was surprised how much like an effect it sounded. I got the idea from chorus effect obviously, but also tremolo harmonicas which have two reeds per each note, tuned slightly out of each other, which gives this nice warble and richness to it.
Has this been done with an orchestra? Obviously there's already a slight bit of that just due to the small differences in each players performance, but I'm talking more deliberate and to sound like the chorus effect from guitar pedals or computer effects.
It's actually the opposite: a chorus imitates the natural "detune" of a choir (hence the name), to give the impression of multiple voices in unison. In my opinion, not only it would be really hard to replicate an electric chorus with acoustic instrument, but even pointless: the beauty of natural chorus is that it's unpredictable, and therefore, much more lush. More "analog" than analog BBD chorus, dare I say.
Well yes true, but I guess I'm just asking if anyone has taken advantage of detuning on purpose, either above or under pitch to give it that warble on purpose. Usually in a choir or section of instruments they try to be in tune. I'm talking about being out of tune. Like sections of instruments with fixed tuning having some of them higher or lower than pitch and then playing in unison, things like that. I guess we get a bit of that sound when a string section plays with vibrato. I dunno, I just thought it might be cool to see how far people could push the idea of playing together slightly out of tune and how much they could make it warble.
@@TomMilleyMusic Oh, I misunderstood your comment, I always think of chorus as a subtle effect. The way chorus actually works is slightly different than subtle detuning. It's a really short delay effect, with vibrato on the delayed signal. You'd have to ask two musicians to play the same part, one acts as the dry signal and the other as the wet signal. The wet musician (lol, better not say that) would have to play with somewhat like 20 ms of delay and use a wide vibrato.
Well I figured there'd be enough delay naturally from the small differences in each persons performance. And I figured you could have three people at least play a line, and then have two people double it, but one is lower than pitch and one is higher. You'd could even just have one on pitch and one off. That's how tremolo harmonicas work. They have two reeds per note and one is off pitch and it gives this nice natural warble that sounds almost like a chorus. That's the kind of sound I'm thinking of, but with other instruments playing together. I've done it with recording acoustic guitars, but it could be cool if maybe you purposely detuned some of the brass section or woodwinds so when they play together, they have this natural warble to them. Or if the strings players were good enough to play slightly out with the others. If they had good enough ears they could possibly be able to play with a small delay, but I don't know if it'd even be needed as the warble in this case would still happen due to the tuning difference. It's the warble of the notes clashing. Even with effects you can get a chorus types sound with just one channel with the dry signal, and one with vibrato on it. I guess that could be another way of doing it too: have half the players in a section use vibrato and the other don't.
i think the very digital warbling chorus you can get, would best be imitated by notating a wide vibrato, simply enough. I also think a string section probably has far too many players...you'd need about 8 lets say because you get something like 8-stage chorus (essentially 8 modulated delays set very fast little feedback). Whether it sounds the same, for some reason i don't think it will but not sure why. Mechanically maybe use something like vibraphones in unison? or microtonally detune some keyboard instruments (that's the other 'chorus' sound is simply detune the pitch using a pitchshifter, no delay or vibrato...you can hear some of that in this composer called Michael Harrison who tuned his piano with 27cent (?) intervals, and part of La Monte Young or microtonal composers using 'commas' of just intonation.@@TomMilleyMusic
These are really cool! Do you know of any books or sources that delve deeper into experimental/twentieth century ideas like this?
He may have mentioned it in another video but does anyone know a good book of extended techniques for orchestral instruments?