Category Archives: Music

THE BEAST BECOMES THE PRODIGY

Dan showed us a seven-minute film exploring artificial intelligence, and it got deep, quite literally, emotional deep. For someone who feels quite distanced from this development, it still manages to sneak into the think-tank once in a while. For now, we seem to have a stranglehold on the development of artificial intelligence, but that is a pretty uninformed opinion. I have often found myself considering what would happen if someone ever so slightly messed up the specifics and led us into an age of computer-men and women who owned pet robotic dogs and cats and didn’t need to eat anything, just relaxed, but eventually declared a war or something…

It’s kind of funny to think about artificially intelligent robots being the next ‘species’ that inhabits the earth. It’s funny because as ludicrous as it sounds, it probably could happen and would be a huge kick in the face to all of humanity. To quote Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should”.

There’s no denying the usefulness of what AI can achieve, but it is certainly an area that requires some caution. Computer scientist Stuart Russel recently expressed his concerns in an interview with Quanta Magazine, which can be read here. Along with the interview was this video featuring DQN, an artificial neural network developed by researchers at Google DeepMind, which teaches itself to play Atari games such as Breakout. Over time it develops sophisticated strategies.

There is a lot of development required in artificial intelligence, and I think we are a long way off from constructing a robotified human as featured in the short video. But the mystery behind AI is still very intriguing. The technological world has its ways of surprising us, and can only continue to do so.

My friend Jack wrote this song inspired by Artificial Intelligence. Fittingly titled A.I.lien. “The beast becomes the prodigy…”

Kara:

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– Gabriel

REMIX CULTURE

Over the space of three years, my taste in music has changed significantly. This has affected the way I write music and shaped my opinions on how music is consumed and should be consumed. In the bands I used to play in, we wrote songs together in a setup of drums, guitars, keyboards and vocals. We had original copies of the songs to play in a live format before recording commenced. Now, everything is different.

When it comes to music production for me now, there is only a minimal amount of preconceived musicality that goes into a song. The writing occurs within the production suite, leaving questionable evidence of an original song. The song doesn’t exist until the final product has been produced and recorded. It’s strange to think that the recorded version would now more likely be considered the original and the performance is a copy. The complete opposite of my previous works created as a band.

This shift isn’t just something I have experienced. There is an obvious trend of solo electronic artists using tools such as Ableton to make their music. This relies heavily on the cut/copy/paste/sample techniques employed by Girl Talk as presented in class. Whilst I’m not a huge fan of Girl Talk, he is a pioneer of mashup culture and it’s hard for him to go unnoticed. I have since found myself slowly being immersed deeper and deeper in to a combination of mashup/megamix culture. Just like a lot of other artists.

Gregg Gillis’ techniques of production seem to be quite consistent with Dan’s views of originality. The opinion that there is no such thing as an original idea is somewhat confronting, but the message of twisting ideas to create something new allows the concept of ‘originality’ to breathe. I personally think we are too deep in to sampling culture to combat the issues of copyright, and thankfully enough, most of the people I know who sample music don’t intend to make a cent off their products anyway. They make music because they like to make music, and want to see people dance. Don’t stop the party, keep the tunes comin’.

– Gabriel

PROJECT BRIEF 3 – SEDGWICK

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I felt a lot more comfortable with Project Brief 3 compared with PB2. I’m going to put this down to the fact that PB3 allowed me to depict someone else’s character. Instead of me being judged, my friend Sam will be judged, right? Or was this task just setting us up to be more critical of other people’s filmmaking ability? Either way, the shifting of focus allowed me to create something that I liked, rather than something others were supposed to.

I’m happy with the found footage I used within the short. The retro vinyl advertisement slides in nicely with what I have filmed. It not only relates to the sound from the short, the colours make it visually pleasing. And because almost all of the found footage comes from the one source, there isn’t a huge variety of picture quality. I think if there were more than a few sources of footage, it would lose the sense of rhythm and flow I believe it has.

I’m not so happy with some of the sound in the interview; I had to do a lot of cutting with audio files and fades in and out to make it sound decent. As it was filmed on my balcony with a variety of mics, unwanted sounds such as traffic were picked up. When the sound matched the footage of Sam on the balcony it was good, but it was when the audio was placed over the top of other visuals that it sounded out of place.

In terms of producing portraits, I think a key discovery would be that b-roll footage is always good to have. There are a lot of places you can just slip in a bit of footage to show characteristics rather than tell them. Although not all of mine was used in this project, it’s handy to know for next time.

As a media practitioner I found using public access footage to be really useful and is something I want to explore further. There are heaps of cool and weird bits out there that will certainly serve a purpose in my media making over time. I suppose more generally, using Adobe Premiere Pro has got me thinking more about pre production and the actual filming side of filmmaking. i.e what I need to film to ensure it looks alright during editing.


Sam’s music can be found on his soundcloud:

– Gabriel

RECORDING SOUND…

Field recordings are always a bit tricky. Right in the middle of the city there is so much interference which often ruins the quality of the recording. To get a great recording, you have to be in a very quiet space, which is why band recordings are done in sound-proof booths most often. My experience with sound goes back a fair way, but I still have problems with recording fluctuating sound sources. I am fidgety with the gain knob which goes a long way to wrecking an otherwise nice recording.

Many of the sounds captured in todays session were full of noise and unwanted background sounds. I ended up looking at the list of sound files as potential samples for tracks. At some stage I will post a recording of a song which uses these samples in one form or another.

The thing with sampling is, you can use almost anything and make something sound good (subjectively) with it. Take for example these videos that have been doing the rounds recently on the webs. Read article here.

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Now I’m not saying that I like the ‘Melbourne Bounce’ sound (it infuriates me), but I can respect the fact that they are using anything and everything to make music. Good on ’em I suppose.

-Gabriel

TAME IMPALA – LET IT HAPPEN

Tame Impala’s new jam ‘Let It Happen’ is their longest track yet, at 7 minutes and 49 seconds. For an artist so prominent in the music industry, it is interesting to see that their first release in three years is probably closer to a dance track than a radio friendly pop song. This song disregards structure and instead relies heavily on melodic synthesizers to create a catchy atmosphere. This is something that Kevin Parker has gotten extremely good at. Tracks such as ‘Elephant’ explored synthesis as a vehicle for catchiness, but ‘Let It Happen’ solidly maintains your attention throughout its eight minutes. As one of the driving forces in the Australian music scene, Tame Impala have total freedom to experiment with their music. Kevin Parker has a knack of pushing the boundaries with each new release and ‘Let It Happen’ continues this trend. Although their popularity has skyrocketed since the release of ‘Lonerism’, Parker continues to write honest music that isn’t compromised by the need to service it to radio. If ‘Let It Happen’ and his contribution to ‘AAA Aardvark Getdown Services’ is anything to go by, then the new record will be pretty tight.

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– Gabriel