Thursday, June 16, 2011

frequency and tempo

Soundings

I gave a talk at the apartment of Nisha Nadan (and flatmates) as part of Fredtalks… the talk was entitled Advanced Metronome Techniques, and it branched off into a general discussion about the nature of perception.
I showed how you can use a metronome to cultivate the ability to view a rhythm from different perspectives. Like a piece of sculpture, a rhythm will take on a completely different shape and feeling depending from which perspective it is heard. I stumbled across this quite by accident. Perhaps you have had this experience too? Turning on a radio, I happened across a song midway through, and my mind placed the gravity (or the 'one', as muso's like to call it) of the music in a different spot from where it was intended, the result being a wonderfully weird sounding piece of music. Alas this state didn't last, as the many pointers and cues in the music muscled this fresh perspective to where it was intended, and the piece morphed before my ears back to a run of the mill pop song.
I have had similar experiences with harmony, hearing a song from a different tonal centre to the one that was intended with similarly delightful results.
But back to the talk on rhythm… it stemmed as well from some renewed investigations of the correspondences between an exercise called the Rhythm Pyramid and the ratios of the intervals found in the harmonic series.

If quarter notes = C1, then 8th notes = C2, 8th notes triplets = G2, 16th notes = C3, quintuplets (a 5 note subdivision) = E3, 16th note triplets = G3, and 32nd notes = C4.

frequency = tempo and melody = rhythm (from a certain perspective anyway).

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

a new tack

So the ol listing of stuff I do is proving too overwhelming to sustain. You get the idea I'm a busy fellow in music. So for this blog I'm going to change tack and muse as the whim takes me…
I'm coming to the end of this years first semesters teaching and thats a relief!
Today is the first of the ZEAL performances by my Unitec students. I'm looking forward to it. Some wonderful naive and wonderful songs have been put together.
Got some interesting work next year at AUT taking some sound walks and an improv tutorial.
Other upcoming projects include a piece of children's theatre called The Butcher and the Bear (more about that in a later post), The Wizard of Oz, gigs w Andrew Keoghan, Surfin USSR, Francis Plagne, the Songs of Kurt Weill and the Sad Lament of Pecos Bill on the Eve of Killing his Wife..