Furthermore, please remember that the sound samples are just samples--not highlights, not the pieces, just out of context highly compressed excerpts that hang together in ways that give a sense of what one might expect to hear from various tracks. It's important to get beyond confusing the samples for the pieces. If you are at all interested in the quality of music, listening to a CD via a good audio system gets your ears reasonably close to the original music. In any case, avoid settling for dumbed down audio. The difference between even a decent satellite audio system hanging on the end of a computer and what you would hear from good standalone audio system is like the difference between night and day. Often I hear from young people who've grown up with buds in the ears that they doubt they could hear the difference between mediocre and good audio. My response to them is that now is a good time to educate your ear so you can have a lifelong deeper appreciation of the power and beauty of sound to affect your soul. Much is lost when music is considered no more than a commodity to be squeezed into smaller and smaller storage spaces. Go for the systems that can handle bigger files; they tell better stories.
The Electronic Arts Of Sound And Light
Volume 1 of Music for the Book
"Viewed from this point in time, the fact these recordings exist at all is nearly miraculous. Whether I was working in my studios or working an event in real time, recording was normally the last thing on my mind, if there at all. Fortunately I collaborated with some people who had the foresight and willingness to take the extra steps to record our real time public play; principally among them are James Gillerman and Gordon Mumma. I did make recordings at the ends of my own studio sessions, primarily as a form of documentation so I would have a sense of the extent of my session’s experiments and where to begin in my next session or perhaps whether it was even worth the investment to continue pursuing that particular design or line of thought.
Furthermore my library of audio and video tapes goes back to 1967 and has lived through seven major house moves including an Ohio to California move and a California to Texas move. I did make the effort to protect master tapes by moving them in an air conditioned car if possible rather than loading them into a truck, but that was not always possible. All the tapes were subject to major temperature and humidity fluctuations, both of which are to be avoided according to the book. So recently when I finally got around to working with the tapes I was truly amazed that they had retained so much of the original signals, a testament to my practice of using the best quality tape available at the time. Of course once I started working with those tapes, I was required to clean the tape machines often and at critical moments to rid the heads and guides of the oxide that had dropped out of the tape because the binder had dried out. But that just became one more step in the process of converting the sounds on the analog tape to digital signals so I could work with the recordings on my computer to prepare them for transfer to CDs.
All the music on this CD is made public for the first time outside of my solo and collaborative live performances. The music provides examples of the musical and philosophical positions articulated in my 1983 book, The Electronic Arts of Sound and Light, as well as those in the book I finished recently, Emergent Music And Visual Music: Inside Studies (2009)…"
The Electronic Arts Of Sound And Light
Volume 1 of Music for the Book
Track titles plus program note and sound sample for Track 2
Track 2 - Score to Video Slices (1975). For years this music was used in my performances as a score to a 16 mm film I did in collaboration with a number of projected light artists at Project Artaud in San Francisco. We did the original video (soon after converted to film for performance reasons) with the Templeton Video Synthesizer, an instrument that had been one of the mainstays of video setup at The National Center for Experiments in Television located at KQED in San Francisco. After the The National Center for Experiments in Television disbanded in the mid 1970s Larry Templeton, the creator of the instrument, put it in the hands of light artists at Project Artaud.
Like so much of what I have done over the years the music grew out of a compositional study, in this case one focused on discovering the nature of a particular electronic system's voice. The study or inquiry or composition can be summed up as answers to a set of fundamental questions such as: What do you want to say? What’s your nature? Are you dramatic, lyrical, or both? Do you want to play? What's your approach to talking, singing, and dancing? Can you become a window to another world? Sound sample.
To view selected sections of Emergent Music And Visual Music: Inside Studies, Part 1: The Book, click on one of the following:
Information on Part 2: The DVDs.
Click here to buy this CD or other parts of Pellegrino's projects.
Contents
Preface
Chapter 1, Emergent Music
Chapter 15, Visual Music Flavors
Acknowledgments
Index
©1996-2010 Ron Pellegrino and Electronic Arts Productions. All rights reserved.