Josh McNeill

Month: January 25, 2013

Prosody and Janacek.

January 25, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I posted a long time ago about a study that tried to apply both linguistic analysis and musical analysis to the composer Leos Janacek’s notations of speech melodies. Janacek transcribed the speech of those around him for some 30 years at a time when prosody in speech was barely even considered by linguists. The field itself was still relatively young at the time and it seems that prosody is one aspect of phonetics that is still poorly understood today.

Initially, this interested me greatly as the intersections of music and linguistics are what I plan on focusing my studies on, but half way through reading the study I was sort of wishing it would just end. The thing is, this wasn’t so much as a scientific study as it was a whimsical look at Janacek’s pet habit. Occasionally, Jonathan Secora Pearl, the author, compares what Janacek notated to how the phrase in question might actually be said based on our modern understanding of Czech prosody, but more often then not he simply describes what was notated. These descriptions are complete with tonal analyses as if they were literally musical scores in A minor, or whatever.

What was more troubling was that, even though Pearl acknowledged multiple times that we have no recordings of what Janacek heard to determine the accuracy of the transcriptions, he still attempts to draw conclusions. At one point, he describes an oddly placed rest in the middle of a phrase, stating that this could actually happen but would be very difficult to notice. This was meant to be some sort of remark on Janacek’s keen ear but, really, we don’t know what Janacek was actually notating. Even if he wrote down something that was in every way possible and even common, we don’t know if notated the phrase accurately or just coincidentally notated something that’s possible.

The paper reads as if the author is desperately searching for ways to connect music and linguistics via Janacek’s speech melodies but, ultimately, none of his attempts make any sense specifically because there’s no way to be certain of the accuracy of the transcriptions. Maybe my expectations were too high because I also would’ve liked to connect the two fields but it seems this is the wrong way to go about it.

I’m still hopeful, though. My own attempt at analyzing speech through software was fairly eye opening. One thing I’ve done is taken my own speech and converted the first three formants of all the vowels into musical pitches to create chords. The results were pretty dissonant for the most part, or simply full of octaves. I was hoping they would align with chords found on tonal harmony in a fairly regular way but this doesn’t seem to be the case. Of course, I also used an equal tempered tuning system for reference, which is probably not the best way to do this. I’ll be reworking the comparison using just intonation soon enough to see if the results are still the same and, either way, I think I might just make some music out of the chords I do get. Because, ya know, why not?

No one is ever the bad guy.

January 18, 2013 / / 0 Comments

… From their perspective that is. I was having a back and forth with a friend about various political/historical junk and it got into the merits or lack of for using the atomic bombs during World War II. I’ve always been under the assumption that they ended the war but he pointed me to a source that doubted that theory. The discussion kinda moved me away from being secure in my assumption but the alternative theory still wasn’t as convincing. In any case, the conversation ended with him talking about how he loves history because it changes and how it would be interesting to look into textbooks from other countries to see how slanted their descriptions of the same events are.

So I recently went to the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, just because it seems like I should at least visit all the tourist sites in the city while living here. I didn’t actually have any particular interest in it but it turned out to be a propos to the conversation I had with my friend.

There was a large section devoted to racist propaganda between the Japanese and Americans. For instance, there was this comic which was from the New York Times:

New York Times comic during WWII

I’m glad this sort of material was available because reflection on this sort of thing in hindsight seems like one of the most beneficial aspects of such a museum. I’m not personally as interested in what kind of guns were used as I am in what the social climate was at the time. What was a bit frustrating was their attempt to place equal claims of racism on both sides. Certainly, there was racism in Japan at the time but their example of such was the following:

Anti-American manga during WWII

It’s really hard to draw comparisons between the two. The first seems to be promoting extermination of a lower race while the other seems to be saying the people we’re at war with are mean. Should we really be claiming that the Japanese were just as racist as Americans at the time? They did terrible things to prisoners, sure, but we probably did, too. But such actions are not necessarily based on racism so it seems more appropriate to go by what we find in their media to determine the level of racism, which is notably weaker than American racism judging by these images. Let’s not kid ourselves about this; it does no one any good.

Speaking of doing terrible things to prisoners, also absent was any mention of Japanese-American internment camps whatsoever. I don’t know why we have such trouble talking about this subject in the US. We did it, it was terrible, we admitted that when reparations were authorized in the 80s, yet I still don’t remember being taught about this part of our history at all during my high school years in the 90s. And you would think the one place where this could be openly discussed would be a museum dedicated to the war. What better forum could there be for bringing this out in the open? Instead, there was one newspaper clip that gave directions to Japanese-Americans to go to a specific location on a specific date and that was it. The clip didn’t say what they were going there for and never used the word “internment.” There was also no caption explaining what the clip was a reference to. It’s like we’re willing to hint at the idea that we did something bad but no more than that.

This isn’t completely off-topic, however. Part of what I love about learning other languages is that it almost forces you to learn about other cultures and in a more direct way than just reading about them in your native language. For instance, one of my Spanish classes at City College of San Francisco spent one day a week where someone in the class would present a topic involving the country we were learning about at the time. This almost always turned into sort of guilt-ridden sessions about the evils of US activity in other countries but there was good reason for this: there was truth to it. And this was almost always buoyed by my Chilean professor who seemed to have a pretty robust knowledge of the history of all of Latin America. In fact, I really wanted to ask her personally why she came to the US because I later learned about how the US supported the takeover of her government by a pretty brutal dictator.

I never did work up the nerve to ask, but this is something I could only really get an inside perspective on by speaking the language. Likewise, my Spanish professor last semester was Cuban and even spent some time being locked up for his religious beliefs. I really wanted to ask him questions about Cuba but couldn’t work up the nerve either, unfortunately. But even the possibility of having that conversation is very unlikely to occur in monolingual situations. I even enjoy reading Wikipedia articles in both Spanish and English to see what changes from the other perspective. It’s interesting, to say the least.

Now that I’m learning Japanese, it will again be very tempting to ask my professor about her perspective on things like WWII. Maybe this time I’ll actually work up the nerve to take advantage of such an opportunity.

But anyway, for clarification for anyone who didn’t realize it: the US rounded up Japanese-Americans during WWII, especially on the west coast, and sent them to camps that they weren’t allowed to leave. Their property and possessions were often sold, etc. It was a pretty terrible thing and it happened.

(Sorta) new chamber piece.

January 12, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Today I tracked down another piece I did last Spring for school. This was supposed to be under the theme of “world music,” which for me just meant using a few Japanese instruments and employing a pentatonic scale. I’m never really satisfied just trying to mimic a style that already exists. Most people in my class composed straight Latin music or bossa nova or something along those lines. I like making statements so I tried to warp something that starts out sounding very traditional into something else entirely. There was a point in doing this that involved my perspective on Japan’s history as well as just how I was feeling at the time, but I won’t say more than that because I’d rather the music stand on its own.

I wasn’t even gonna post this for the longest time because I was dissatisfied with the synth sounds but I’ve come to the conclusion that I will probably never get around to fixing it up so keep in mind that the whole thing is rather rough and rushed. It’s No 4 in the Doodles for Chambers section of the music section (or just click on No 4 [to the left]).

You are where you speak.

January 11, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Continuing with posting papers I’ve done for school, here’s what I did for my phonetics class:

The Distance Between Acadiana and Cape May

This might be of more interest to my relatives than anyone else, really. I’ve taken out any reference to personal names since I didn’t get direct permission to publish this info but it’ll be obvious to those in the know.

I wish I had more time to devote to this paper but it took up probably more than 100 hours of work during the semester. There are definitely a lot of weaknesses in the analysis given that it’s the first thorough phonetic analysis I’ve ever done but I’m pretty satisfied with it given the constraints I did it under.

Also, I doubt I have anyone familiar with linguistic jargon (or even audio jargon) reading this blog so, if you’re actually taking the time to read the paper, you should totally ask about anything that’s not clear.

Meeting yourself.

January 4, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I was just trying to figure out where a particular song I was working on last year for school went so I could finish it up and I came across something with the filename “New.” “That can’t be true,” I thought. So I opened it up and found something I wrote, uh, I don’t know when. The whole thing was very mysterious. I listened to it and thought, “This person has good taste,” and decided it would be worth sharing.

But seriously, it’s kinda strange coming across work you’ve forgotten that you’ve done. I looked at the notes that I had put down–and there are many–and I can’t figure out how I decided to put just those notes down. I don’t even know what I was trying to accomplish because there wasn’t so much as a single dynamic marking let alone a title or tempo indication. It was just a bunch of notes on a page that played something sorta familiar and comforting but also strangely alien. There was probably one day when putting that music together consumed all my time and energy and focus and now it’s just this thing I discovered.

It’s No 16 in the music section (or just click on No 16 [to the left]).

The cost of art.

January 4, 2013 / / 1 Comment

The Chris Bennett posted recently about an argument he had with Jim McCann on Twitter. They spent an hour or two bitching about each other over the merits of purchasing comics versus downloading them for free without permission. Chris, who at least arguably could be called an aspiring comic book artist himself, was surprisingly arguing against the former. His argument seemed to be mostly based on the cost while Jim’s argument was that it takes a good amount of cash even to just put out digital comics.

To me, Jim’s claim seems pretty unlikely to be true. I can’t speak personally about the cost of creating digital comics but I can speak of the cost of creating digital music. The cost there is $0. Ok, that’s an exaggeration but it’s also almost the literal truth. In my case, for instance, I’ve purchased equipment over the years that allows me to record whatever I want. Let’s go over what’s necessary on that list.

  • A half-decent computer: This is something most people own now anyway as it’s used for, I dunno, everything one might need to do in life. But, in the unlikely case that this isn’t already owned, you can get a fully capable laptop for $379. The only requirement, really, is 2GB of RAM and a USB 2.0 or Firewire port. You can certainly get even cheaper if you find something refurbished or just look a little longer.
  • An audio interface: This is what gets sound into your computer. The interface I use is discontinued but there are plenty of others out there, like this Tascam US-1800 that I found pretty easily. It’s $300 and has more inputs/preamps than you could ever need outside of recording an orchestra. It also includes pro-quality DAW software (Cubase).
  • DAW software: This is where you do all your work on the computer. Like I said, this was included with the interface I picked out. If not, you can get the acclaimed DAW Reaper. And it’s $60 unless you’re making quite a bit of money off your work, in which case it’s still only $225.
  • Microphones: This can cover a pretty huge range of costs but you can really get away with only using SM57s if you’re careful with mic placement. Eight of these, more than you could ever need outside of recording an orchestra, are $810.
  • Speakers: You can get away with using your regular computer speakers that you bought for $25 but, to be fair, let’s add decent studio monitors to the cost. You can get M-Audio AV30s for $100 and they have a frequency response plenty flat enough to use for mixing.
  • Cables, mic stands, etc.: All these accessories can add up, sure, but if you can get by pretty cheap. For instance, I make my own XLR cables and you can get 100 ft for $50. I’m positive you can do this part for less than $400.

Outside of these costs, you may want to add in instruments, if you’re doing that kind of music to begin with (the above gets a lot cheaper if you’re only doing electronic music) but this is the cost of being a musician period, not of recording and distributing music, so I’m leaving that out. As for distribution, torrents mean you don’t need to pay for bandwidth. You can also use sites like Bandcamp which not only give you a free way to distribute and sell your work (for free), it also provides methods for promotion. Then there’s promotion. Really, this can be done for free in the age of viral videos and internet memes. When was the last time you learned about a song by listening to 101.5 The Lame? You don’t need to be on the radio or TV anymore; those are antiquated forms of publicity.

So that’s it. $2214 max to create professional quality music, distribute it, and publicize it. And that’s a one time cost to boot. After that, you’re home free.

Certainly, there are materials that one needs to repeatedly restock if they’re an oil painter, for instance, but if we’re limiting ourselves to digital art, this factor is completely erased and the only cost is the initial cost of purchasing equipment, which has been getting cheaper by the day as technology has gotten more powerful and widespread.

I get the impression that what people really mean when they say that it costs a lot to create digital art is that their time costs a lot. That’s it. I mean I get it, artists want to live off their art because it allows them to focus exclusively on creating and, potentially, create better things. This is a different argument than what’s usually made, though. I’m totally open to a debate on whether art should be a hobby that one does outside of their day job or whether art should be the domain of professional creators. That sounds like a fair conversation. What is ridiculous to me is the idea that artists need to make money off everything they create because the costs of doing the work that they do are just so great that they couldn’t continue without financial support. That sounds like bullshit to me.

And for anyone who’s interested in the hobby versus job debate, let’s not be unrealistic about where financial support should come from. Check my previous post on that matter.

© 2024 Josh McNeill

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑