A General Note about Sound Creation
CC8
Fall, 2004
Larry Polansky
10/8/04
(sent originally as an email to
the class, prior to their second sound assignment)
I just wanted to send out a brief note on sound, its creation, and your
role in it with regard to work in CC8. This is essentially a repeat of
what I said in class, but I want to be extremely clear about it, and
not leave any room for misinterpretation.
For the purposes of this class, you are responsible for creating sound
(music/soundtrack/score, whatever you care to call it) at the same
level of direct engagement that you are in animation. Selecting
preexisting music is not an option, even if you mess with it a little.
You are not curating, smapling, remixing, or dj-ing. You are
composing.
This can mean a lot of things (using short samples from other sources,
and doing highly creative and original things with them is fine --
you've got to get raw sounds from somewhere), but it's important to
realize that I'm going to reserve (and vigorously excercise) the right
to be the final arbiter of what is original work and what is simply
glorified downloading. I don't want the latter. You should be aware
that I'm going to be quite sensitive to how much work you do on these
scores, and how much of the final work is your doing and how much is
someone else's. I'll be tough on this issue, so my friendly advice to
you is to err on the side of doing-it-yourself. My yardstick might be
expressed, perhaps, by what I said in the previous email: if a
relationship to your source material would seem unnatural to you if it
were, say, in the visual domain (like taking a South Park clip,
recoloring it, and fitting it to your own music), it's innapropriate in
the sound domain. To me, if it sounds like Avril Lavigne (in this
class), it IS Avril Lavigne, and I don't want Avril Lavigne's work (not
slowed down, not mixed with someone else's, not pitch-shifted, not
flanged), but yours.
I understand that there are complicated philosophical and aesthetic
argumentsn (heck, Brahms did it!), post-modern and not, for the use of
found and prexistent entities in art, including irony, reference,
recontextualization, etc. I'm fascinated by these art forms, and enjoy
them and support them in many ways (frinstance, take a look at a little
informal web-essay I wrote some years ago about these ideas in music,
in an article called "Singing Together, Hacking Together, Plundering
Together: Sonic Intellectual Property in Cybertimes" at
http://www.the-open-space.org/osonline/polansky/singing.html) -- but
not in this class.
Sorry to sound so strict about this -- in general, I'm a ridiculously
inclusive and open-minded artist and composition teacher. But for the
purposes of this class, I'm trying to get you to do as much as you can
for yourself, and I don't want to open up the "plundering", "sampling",
or "curating" door even a little bit.
Thanks
lp