Tag Archives: musique concrete

Free Album Celebrates Musique Concrète & The Legacy Of Pierre Schaeffer

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Free Music Friday: Reader Atomic Shadow (Rod Mitchell) let us know about a new album that celebrates musique concrète & the legacy of electronic music pioneer Pierre Schaeffer.

The album, Fifteen Studies of Noises from Pierre Schaeffer, is a compilation album from IFAR, the Institute For Alien Reaserch. This is one in a series of 40 planned musique concrète albums, each with a specific theme. The subject of this album was Pierre Schaeffer – the father of musique concrète.

It’s a free download at bandcamp. Check it out and let us know what you think!

Daphne Oram Gets New Release – On Vinyl

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Daphne OramUK electronic music pioneer Daphne Oram (1925-2003( has a new release out, The Oram Tapes, Volume 1.

Two years in the making, the 46 track deluxe 4-LP edition features two and a half hours of previously unreleased recordings from Daphne Oram?s archives. None of this material has ever been available before and has been compiled and restored from over 400 tapes before being mastered at Dubplates & Mastering and cut at 45RPM for extra depth.

Daphne Oram, founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, died in 2003 leaving a colossal archive of reel-to-reel tapes and documents behind. This important collection of material eventually made its way to Goldsmiths College, London, who have been administering it on behalf of the Daphne Oram Trust for the last few years. The collection holds over 400 tapes made by Oram during her lifetime, and 211 of those have been archived and catalogued by the college so far. Continue reading →

Jean Michel Jarre – Essentials And Rarities

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Synthesist Jean Michel Jarre has a new released coming at the end of May, Essentials and Rarities.

Essentials and Rarities is Jarre?s two-CD tribute to Francis Dreyfus, his producer for 25 years.

Essentials is a selection of tracks from Jarre’s Dreyfus period, covering the albums Oxygene, Equinoxe, Chants Magnétiques and others, digitally remastered by going back to the original analogue master tapes.

Rarities covers mainly material recorded prior to the emergence of Oxygene, some not commercially released, and none ever seen on CD before. At the time, Jarre was a student under Pierre Schaeffer, the creator of Musique Concrète. According to Jarre, ‘experimentation with sounds abounds on these recordings”, which have also been given the same remastering treatment.

Essentials and Rarities is scheduled for release My 30, 2011.  Continue reading →

The History Of Modular Synthesizers (MIT Course)

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This video, via MIT, takes a look at the history of the modular synthesizer.

It captures a lecture by Prof. Christopher Ariza, from MIT’s Music and Technology (Contemporary History and Aesthetics).

Topics covered include:

  • The Modular Synthesizer: Overview
  • The RCA Synthesizer
  • RCA Synthesizer Mark I
  • Buchla 100 Series Modular Electronic Music System
  • Moog modular systems I, II, and II
  • Modular synthesizer concepts
  • Key synthesizers

A PDF is available that goes along with the lecture. Continue reading →

Richard Devine’s Objects Of Granularity

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Free Music: Richard Devine’s Objects Of Granularity.

Here’s what Devine has to say about the track:

This track was composed for the Curtis (iphone/ipod/ipad) app by The Strange Agency. This piece is a Acousmatic composition based on everyday found objects. I recorded various wine glasses, gears, metal, motors, Ratchets, chimes, croaking frog scraper, Indian bells, Tibetan Singing Bowls, Santoor, waterphone, piano, hematite magnets, processed voice, underwater ambiances, computer, and sprinkled bits of Buchla 200e/Doepfer Euro rack Modular.

All of the sounds originally captured at 24-bit 96khz with a Neumann RSM 191 A/S stereo shotgun mic, SMK4060 Stereo Matched 4060-BM Miniature Omnidirectional Microphones and Sound Devices 702 recorder.

You can preview and/or download the free track above.

Musique Concrète Optigan Disc Call For Submissions

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musique-concrete

Submit!

Submit!

Optigan.com’s Pea Hicks has issued a Call for Submissions for an upcoming Optigan disc, Musique Concrète:

In December 2010 we plan to release an experimental Optigan disc called ?Musique Concrète,? which will essentially be a collage of 57 sound loops in the tradition of early electronic studio tape music.

We?re completely disregarding the Optigan paradigm of chords and keys, and simply assigning a different abstract sound loop to each chord button and key. We thought that the most interesting approach for this disc would be to invite Optigoners everywhere to submit sound loops of their own making (please, no samples from commercial or copyrighted sources), from which we?ll choose the best for inclusion on the disc.

All sounds chosen for inclusion on the disc will fall under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Unused sounds will revert back to their respective creators.

The deadline is Nov. 1st, 2010.

You can submit as many loops as you like, the only real rules being that the loops must be exactly 2 seconds long (or we?ll alter them to fit that length) and in mono.

Musique concrète samples for a failed music toy from 30 years ago?

Hell, yeah!

Check the Optigan site for more details and then go get your Musique concrète on.

Musique concrète is the name for the style of electronic music, pioneered by Pierre Schaeffer, based on the tape manipulation of recorded sound.