Meredith Silverman

Some of my favorite iTunes tracks are cover songs. I love Fountains of Wayne’s version of the Britney Spears single, Hit Me Baby One More Time. I like the way they draw it out and make it richer and darker. At the same time, the pop song underneath hooks you and gets stuck in your head.

Perhaps just as importantly, Fountains of Wayne is implicitly lampooning Britney Spears (and poking fun at themselves) just by covering a song made popular by an artist so different from themselves. The idea of the song could almost be just as satisfying as the recording itself, if the track wasn’t so damned good.

Music keeps changing, all the time. Even with informal distribution systems and recommendation engines cropping up all over the internet, most of us will only hear a certain amount of the stuff that’s happening musically at any given time. But at the same time, information travels so fast that if a song gets huge in Latin America or Europe, it could be a hit in the States just a couple of months later.

I think music and musical performances are going to keep getting richer and more complex in meaning from here. Like the rest of the history of music (or art, or knowledge, or anything), the new stuff will keep referring to earlier styles and quote, or sample, or even cover earlier works.

I don’t know what the music of the future will sound like, or what types of instruments will create it. But I do know that style will keep changing, and new forms will emerge, and they will keep building on older styles.

Mark Katz talks about this process in How Technology Has Changed Music: “while recorded music is often decoupled from its origins in space and time, this ‘loss’ begets a contextual promiscuity that allows music to accrue new, rich, and unexpected meanings.”

In Recycling Music, Answering Back: Toward an Oral Tradition of Electronic Music, Gideon D’Arcangelo talks about young initiates into an oral music tradition. There’s a certain freedom to “re-interpret, putting something of themselves into new performances as they extend the tradition…”

Sampling and referencing involve not just the artist, but also the listener, in a mental process of call and response. It’s exciting when you recognize and identify a beat or a sample from an earlier song. It’s especially exciting when that sample is completely unexpected: whether it’s Cinderella doing Joni Mitchell (Don’t Know What You Got Till It’s Gone), P Diddy doing Sting (I’ll Be Missing/Watching You), or Fountains of Wayne doing Britney Spears.

The Spherical Miracle Machine is center stage, with light above and behind it giving the audience a hint of what’s inside the funnels.

Rosie and Meredith enter at stage right.  Rosie is walking purposefully forward, but Meredith is tied to her with a corrugated plastic tube.  She struggles to keep up, walking backwards.

Rosie stops when she sees the Spherical Miracle Machine.  Unaware that she’s stopped, Meredith backs up into Rosie and knocks her down.  Rosie gestures to Meredith and they both stand up to look at it.  They are in awe of the machine.

Meredith reaches out and touches the machine, causing it to turn slightly.  They both jump back. After a beat, Rosie pulls one of the strings and releases some balls into the clear and pink bucket.  They yelp in glee, then look at each other excitedly.

Throughout the performance, Rosie and Meredith communicate with each other in high-pitched yelps, low grunts, and exaggerated body language.

Rosie pulls the cord three or four times, causing the same reaction as before.  Then Meredith begins turning the machine.  Rosie pulls whichever string is aligned over the bucket.  They play this way for half a minute, getting faster and more fluid.

Then Rosie gets bored and begins wandering.  She comes across the ball sorter.  On top of it rests the spinner.  She tosses the spinner to the side and lifts up the sorter.  Rosie examines it carefully.  Meredith picks up the discarded spinner and explores it.  She spins it tentatively.  Rosie and Meredith hurry back to the machine, toting their prizes.

Rosie gestures to the sorter and Meredith ignores her.  She gestures again to the sorter and the bucket, and finally Meredith puts down the spinner.

While Rosie holds the sorter, Meredith empties the bucket into it.  Rosie shakes it until the balls are sorted.  Then she takes the sorter apart and hands two of its compartments to Meredith.  They both pour the sorted balls back into the funnels of the machine.

They begin to play again but Meredith quickly loses interest.  It is clear she wants to pull the strings, but Rosie won’t let her.  Each time she reaches toward a string, Rosie bats her hand away.

Meredith stomps away, pulling Rosie behind her.  On another part of the stage, she discovers the resonating trash buckets and the costumes.  Meredith and Rosie put on the matching vests and hard hats.  They push the resonating trash buckets over to the machine and move them into place around it.

Meredith picks up the spinner, spins, and authoritatively calls out a command (in squeaks and yelps).  Rosie operates the machine, dropping one category of balls into one of the buckets.  She grabs the spinner from Meredith and spins, calling out a command.  Meredith obliges excitedly, turning the machine and pulling one of the cords.

They continue playing the machine like this, back and forth, until one of them pulls the wrong cord or spills too many balls.  That person gets sprayed with Silly String – which Meredith and Rosie will discover attached to their vests.

They play until any of the funnels runs out of balls, then work together to sort them and dump them back into the machine.

After sorting, Rosie discovers a funnel on her side of the tube that connects her to Meredith.  She looks at it and looks up at the funnels on the machine.  Then she picks up a few balls and drops them into the funnel.

Meredith and Rosie work together to move the balls into a clear container on Meredith’s end of the tube.  They do this while continuing to play the machine, grunt and yelp, and spray each other with Silly String.

At some unseen cue, Meredith and Rosie suddenly become alert to their surrounding and stop playing.  They drop what they’re holding guiltily.  Then they slowly and methodically restore all the parts to the same way they found them.  Last of all, they take off their hard hats and vests.  Rosie pulls Meredith, balls still bouncing in her end of the tube, off stage left.

Also posted on our new blog.

Rosie’s blog update says it all.  Silly string, whipped cream… this project is getting better and better.

This week we spent a lot of time thinking about the gameplay aspect of our machine.

What she doesn’t mention is that we spent last Wednesday in the PComp lab, starting to build the four receptacles out of scrap wood.  After taking a break and walking back into the shop, we realized that wood containers would block the audience’s view of the bottom half of the instrument.  So we kept the bottom wood pieces and decided to build up their walls out of plexi.

Today, I lugged an 8×4 foot sheet of plexi into the lab, where it’s still sitting, waiting for Thanksgiving to be over so we can make it sing.

Rosie and I have been up to no good this week, putting in extra hours in the lab and finishing our prototype. Our ideas came together well and we were able to present a working prototype. Although, in Rosie’s post, she puts working between quotes.

I’m very happy with the way the device turned out. It’s big, sturdy, and industrial-looking. It’s all metal and hot pink. But the sound it produces and the way one interacts with it could use some hot pink as well.

After our demonstration, Jamie suggested finding a way to make the sound continuous. Gideon observed that we had an interface but not an instrument. I think they may both be right. What we have now is — although it’s precisely what we planned to build — a whole lot of visual and not much auditory.

We might end up going in the Rube Goldberg/Pythagorus Switch direction they first imagined for us. I can see three possible scenarios:

• Add four musical landing pads in a circle around the base of the instrument. Construct these out of anything percussive — wood, metal, toys… Adapt a Twister spinner to control gameplay. For instance, one person spins and calls out: “Wooden balls xylophone!” and the other person has to obey.
• Get a whole bunch of hard, translucent tubes (of the hamster variety) and construct a 3D ball labyrinth, winding its way around the pole and toward the floor. Maybe incorporate the sorting mechanism into the instrument itself.
• Some wacky hybrid of the previous two ideas.

Rosie and I are both excited to keep working on Soundball. It’s a nice looking machine, and it’s already fun to play with. It can only get weirder, more complicated, and better.

After we presented our idea in class, Rosie and I felt encouraged to start gathering materials for our instrument (which we’re currently calling Soundball).  Shopping is my favorite part of any ITP project.  I know, I know – the thrill of making it work, the excitement of presenting to my peers…  I still like shopping the best.

So, we ordered all kinds of balls online.  We got glass marbles, rubber bouncy balls, wooden balls, and ping pong balls.  And then we hit up Home Depot.  I had a gift certificate that I’d been waiting to use on my next big project.

We went through Home Depot by feel and ended up in the plumbing section.  We built a prototype for the basic structure right there in the store, much to the amusement of the guys working there.  I think plumbing pieces were a good choice because they’re modular, standardized, sturdy… and plus, they look cool.

In addition to the plumbing supplies, we got four funnels to hold the balls, and two hard-hats, just for fun.

Back in the shop, we rescued some unclaimed plexi and put our names on it.  Then we assembled the whole pipe structure on top of its pole.  Right now, Soundball is feeling very tall, and very top-heavy.

Now that all the balls have arrived, we can start constructing the sorter.  We wanted to wait until we had their exact diameters and total volumes.  We plan to work on the sorter on Tuesday night.  It wouldn’t be a bad time to work on the bowl/catcher, either.

Meanwhile, we’ve got serious things to think about:

• buying an industrial strength lazy susan to make the whole thing spin,
• weighting the base of the structure so it’s not so top-heavy,
• and how in the world the release mechanism will work.

See Rosie’s writeup and a picture of our NIME prototype here.

Here’s the musical instrument that Rosie and I proposed in class last week.  This weekend, we’re going to Home Depot to start getting parts.

A musician friend was staying with me and I showed him the website for this device, the monome. I didn’t realize it wasn’t the only device of its kind until he pulled a sampler out of his duffel bag and started playing with it.

In fact, after doing the reading I realize these devices are in the same family as the Roland TB-303.

I like the monome for its sleek looks. I like the way samplers in general operate, kind of like a portable, customizable version of Garage Band. For someone who doesn’t know anything about electronic music, they seem both magical and — maybe — magically easy to play.

I saw Ben Harper in concert when I was in high school. He played two sets with his band, and then came back onstage to play a full acoustic encore set. He gave so deeply and so much to his audience.

When I was in high school (and listending again now) I loved his music for its catchiness and simplicity. After that show, I loved it because Ben Harper made it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtoYKmmnyC4

Al Green was great at writing songs that could’ve been about either Jesus or romantic love. The same sense of euphoria and worship come through toward both subjects.

Al Green’s Up Above My Head, excerpt, recorded 1972