Do Make Say Think is a Canadian instrumental post-rock band from Toronto, Ontario. Their music combines jazz style drums, distorted guitars and wind instruments as well as a prominent use of the bass guitar. Their music is featured in several movie soundtracks due to their diverse sound.
Archive for the 'Research' Category
Have a listen to the Introductory track from ‘ágætis byrjun’ – 01 Intro
Sigur Rós is an Icelandic post-rock band with melodic, classical, and minimalist elements. The band is known for its ethereal sound and lead singer Jónsi Birgisson’s falsetto voice. Most of their influences come straight from their homeland ‘Iceland’ and it becomes very apparent if you listen to a few of their tracks. Sigur Ros are also common on television adverts and Film. Their music gets used to generate emotion in the viewers/listeners.
Terms, Techniques & Key Theories
Published March 10, 2010 Terms, Techniques & Key Theories Leave a CommentDistortion: A distortion is the alteration of the original shape (or other characteristic) of an object, image, sound, waveform or other form of information or representation. Distortion is usually unwanted, and often many methods are employed to minimize it in practice. In some fields, however, distortion is actually desirable; such is the case with electric guitar (where distortion is often induced purposely with the amplifier or an electronic effect to achieve an aggressive sound where desired), or censoring words. The slight distortion of analog tapes and vacuum tubes is considered pleasing in certain situations. The addition of noise or other extraneous signals (hum, interference) is not considered to be distortion,[citation needed] though the effects of distortion are sometimes considered noise.
Effects: Sound effects or audio effects are artificially created or enhanced sounds, or sound processes used to emphasize artistic or other content of films, television shows, live performance, animation, video games, music, or other media. In motion picture and television production, a sound effect is a sound recorded and presented to make a specific storytelling or creative point without the use of dialogue or music. The term often refers to a process applied to a recording, without necessarily referring to the recording itself. In professional motion picture and television production, dialogue, music, and sound effects recordings are treated as separate elements. Dialogue and music recordings are never referred to as sound effects, even though the processes applied to them, such as reverberation or flanging effects, often are called “sound effects”.
looping: In electronic music, a loop is a sample which is repeated. Loops may be repeated through the use of tape loops, delay effects, cutting between two record players, sampling, a sampler or with the aid of Computer Based Looping Software.
Balance: Balance can mean the amount of signal from each channel reproduced in a stereo audio recording. Typically, a balance control in its center position will have 0 dB of gain for both channels and will attenuate one channel as the control is turned, leaving the other channel at 0 dB.
Melody: A melody (from Greek μελῳδία – melōidía, “singing, chanting”), also tune, voice, or line, is a linear succession of musical tones which is perceived as a single entity. In its most literal sense, a melody is a sequence of pitches and durations, while, more figuratively, the term has occasionally been extended to include successions of other musical elements such as tone color.
Pitch: Pitch represents the perceived fundamental frequency of a sound.[1] It is one of the four major auditory attributes of sounds along with loudness, timbre and sound source location. When the actual fundamental frequency can be precisely determined through physical measurement, it may differ from the perceived pitch because of overtones, also known as partials, harmonic or otherwise. The human auditory perception system may also have trouble distinguishing frequency differences between notes under certain circumstances. According to ANSI acoustical terminology, it is the auditory attribute of sound according to which sounds can be ordered on a scale from low to high.
Rhythm: Rhythm is the continual beat of the music, a constant flow that guides the melody (often created with drums but not solely). The study of rhythm, stress, and pitch in speech is called prosody; it is a topic in linguistics.
Tempo: In musical terminology, tempo (Italian for time, plural: tempi) is the speed or pace of a given piece. It is a crucial element of composition, as it can affect the mood and difficulty of a piece.
Foley Artist: A foley artist on a film crew is the person who creates many of the natural, everyday sound effects in a film, which are recorded during a session with a recording engineer. Before the session, a project will be cued, with notes kept about what sounds need to be created during the foley session. Often, the project will have a sound supervisor who will dictate what sounds need to be covered in a foley session and what needs to be created by special (audio) effects, which is generally left to the sound designer. Sound effects and foley are added during post-production to dialog and real effects that were picked up by microphones on-set. Sometimes (especially in the case of cartoons, many Italian films, and almost all Bollywood films) there is no sound recorded on-location, and all the sounds need to be added by the foley artist and sound designer, and dubber. The Foley artist may also accent existing sounds to make them more effective—enhancing the sounds of a fistfight may require thumping watermelons or cracking bamboo. Many Foley artists take pride in devising their own sound effects apparatuses, often using simple, commonly found materials. Some making-of featurettes show Foley artists at work. The term Foley artist is named after Jack Foley, one of the earliest and best-known Hollywood practitioners of the art. Foley began his career in the film industry as a stand-in and screenwriter during the silent era, and later helped Universal make the transition from silent movies to talkies. The Universal Studios Hollywood theme park presented a demonstration of a Foley artist in its World of Cinemagic feature.
Dubbing: In sound recording, dubbing is the transfer or copying of previously recorded audio material from one medium to another of the same or a different type. It may be done with a machine designed for this purpose, or by connecting two different machines: one to play back and one to record the signal. The purpose of dubbing may be simply to make multiple copies of audio programs, or it may be done to preserve programs on old media which are deteriorating and may otherwise be lost.
Noise: In common use, the word noise means any unwanted sound. In both analog and digital electronics, noise is an unwanted perturbation to a wanted signal; it is called noise as a generalisation of the audible noise heard when listening to a weak radio transmission. Signal noise is heard as acoustic noise if played through a loudspeaker; it manifests as ‘snow’ on a television or video image. In signal processing or computing it can be considered unwanted data without meaning; that is, data that is not being used to transmit a signal, but is simply produced as an unwanted by-product of other activities. In Information Theory, however, noise is still considered to be information. In a broader sense, film grain or even advertisements encountered while looking for something else can be considered noise. In biology, noise can describe the variability of a measurement around the mean, for example transcriptional noise describes the variability in gene activity between cells in a population.
Furniture Music: Furniture music, or in French musique d’ameublement (sometimes more literally translated as furnishing music), is background music originally played by live performers. The term was coined by Erik Satie in 1917.
Silence: Silence is the relative or total lack of audible sound. By analogy, the word silence may also refer to any absence of communication, even in media other than speech.
Mono: Monaural or monophonic sound reproduction (often shortened to mono) is single-channel. Typically there is only one microphone, one loudspeaker, or (in the case of headphones and multiple loudspeakers) channels are fed from a common signal path. In the case of multiple microphones the paths are mixed into a single signal path at some stage.
Johann Sebastian Bach (31 March 1685 [O.S. 21 March] – 28 July 1750) (often referred to simply as Bach) was a German composer, organist, violist, and violinist whose ecclesiastical and secular works for choir, orchestra, and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ultimate maturity. Although he did not introduce new forms, he enriched the prevailing German style with a robust contrapuntal technique, an unrivalled control of harmonic and motivic organisation, and the adaptation of rhythms, forms and textures from abroad, particularly from Italy and France.
Revered for their intellectual depth, technical command and artistic beauty, Bach’s works include the Brandenburg concertos, the Goldberg Variations, the Partitas, the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Mass in B Minor, the St. Matthew Passion, the St. John Passion, the Magnificat, The Musical Offering, The Art of Fugue, the English and French Suites, the Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin, the Cello Suites, more than 200 surviving cantatas, and a similar number of organ works, including the celebrated Toccata and Fugue in D minor and Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor.
Bach’s abilities as an organist were highly respected throughout Europe during his lifetime, although he was not widely recognised as a great composer until a revival of interest and performances of his music in the first half of the 19th century. He is now regarded as the supreme composer of the Baroque, and as one of the greatest of all time.
Yoko Ono is a Japanese-American artist, musician, author and peace activist, also known for her marriage to John Lennon and her groundbreaking work in avant-garde art, music and film making. Ono brought feminism to the forefront through her music, and is also considered a pioneer and major influence of the 1970s new wave genre.
Harold Budd (born May 24, 1936) is an American ambient/avant-garde composer and poet. Born in Los Angeles, California, he was raised in the Mojave Desert, and was inspired at an early age by the humming tone caused by wind blown across telephone wires. Budd’s career as a composer began in 1962. In the following years, he gained a notable reputation in the local avant-garde community. In 1966 he graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in musical composition.
John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer, philosopher, poet, music theorist, artist, printmaker, and amateur mycologist and mushroom collector. A pioneer of chance music, electronic music and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage’s romantic partner for most of their lives.
Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4′33″, the three movements of which are performed without a single note being played. The content of the composition is meant to be perceived as the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed, rather than merely as four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence, and the piece became one of the most controversial compositions of the twentieth century. Another famous creation of Cage’s is the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by placing various objects in the strings), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces, the best known of which is Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48).
His teachers included Henry Cowell (1933) and Arnold Schoenberg (1933–35), both known for their radical innovations in music, but Cage’s major influences lay in various Eastern cultures. Through his studies of Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, Cage came to the idea of chance-controlled music, which he started composing in 1951. The I Ching, an ancient Chinese classic text on changing events, became Cage’s standard composition tool for the rest of his life. In a 1957 lecture, Experimental Music, he described music as “a purposeless play” which is “an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living”.
