Episodes
Published 09/02/22
Published 09/02/22
Published 09/02/22
Published 09/02/22
Published 09/02/22
Published 09/02/22
Published 10/12/21
Published 10/12/21
Published 10/01/19
Published 10/01/19
The introductory audio essay illuminates four aspects of sound in physical space—location, size, reverberation and environmental noise—with examples of how composers from across the spectrum of Western art music exploited these phenomena in their music. Acoustician Jürgen Meyer and musicologist Elaine Sisman show how the classical composer Joseph Haydn used space to create musical effects beyond the boundaries of melody, harmony, rhythm and dynamics. Credits, tracklists, and more:...
Published 01/06/18
What is music like without the sound of a space? Historian Emily Thompson discusses the aesthetics, technology and politics of spatial absence at the dawn of the recording era while John and Susan Edwards Harvith explain how musicians coped with, adapted to and sometimes thrived in the acoustically dead confines of the recording studio. Credits, tracklists, and more: http://bit.ly/2AAWRNh
Published 01/06/18
In the 1950s, classical record producers were fixated on realism, aspiring to put listeners in the ‘best seat of an acoustically perfect hall.’ Not so for John Culshaw, however, a maverick producer who used new stereophonic technology to produce operas that were more dramatic, more spatially immersive and (so he claimed) more faithful to a composer’s intentions. Sonic highlights from Culshaw’s producing career accompany a reading from his two memoirs, ‘Ring Resounding’ and ‘Putting the Record...
Published 01/06/18
The pianist Glenn Gould was dogmatic about his recording setup, placing the microphone as close as possible to his piano to exclude the sound of the surrounding room. That is, until he encountered the music of Alexander Scriabin—Gould felt that no one acoustic could do justice to Scriabin’s mystical musical language, and devised a system of ‘sound cameras’ that could zoom into or zoom out of his piano. Gould’s ambitious ‘Acoustic Orchestrations’ experiment remained unfinished, however, until...
Published 01/06/18
One day, while practicing the prelude to Bach’s Cello Suite #1, Yasuaki Shimizu accidentally ran his tenor saxophone through a reverb machine. The sound so moved him that he embarked on an odyssey to record each of the six Cello Suites in a different acoustical environment. In this piece, Shimizu takes us into a warehouse, a stone quarry, a mine, a concert hall, a Baroque villa and a Gothic palazzo, showing us how the unique acoustics of each site drew out the emotional nuances of each suite...
Published 01/06/18
Bad acoustics inspired Daniel Neumann to become a composer and sound artist. After struggling to tame echoes, flutter and too much reverberation as a sound engineer at a nightclub in Leipzig, Daniel embraced these and other acoustical peculiarities and made them the focus of his work. In this piece, Neumann talks about how he uses sound to raise awareness of the idiosyncratic sounds of architectural spaces and plays us an iteration of his piece, ‘Free Field / Pressure Field / Diffuse Field’....
Published 01/06/18