tom moody

Discussing "chord equivalents" in visual art with TH by email on Christmas.
Kandinsky and the Bauhaus covered some of this but not sure how much attention it's gotten lately.

"Palettes" would be the equivalent of scales: pentatonic, diatonic, etc.--the note universe or family of a given work.
Thus in computer graphics, the MSPaint palette is 16 color hexadecimal, but you could also have kid pix & mario paint palettes (hat tip Travis Hallenbeck) or Photoshop.

Whereas, "chords" would be, e.g., red-white-blue (the USA PATRIOT chord--ugh), yellow ochre and orange (a two note chord--Southwest Airlines), etc.

The "Southwest Airlines chord" is no more absurd than saying "the harmonic seventh chord is also widely used in 'blues flavored' music" or, better, "the tonic is the note of the scale that is considered the most important." (quotes from Wikipedia)

The musical statements are claimed to have mathematical certainty based on pitch and harmonic relations but it's really as entirely subjective as would be saying that ochre is the "key" to the Southwest Airlines color scheme.
I know this isn't an original thought--12-tone music was based on a critique of pitch hierarchies. But I think in visual art people stopped prioritizing colors sometime around the Enlightenment whereas in "western music" pitches, chords, and modes continue to be microanalyzed, ranked, and named to an insane extent.

For example (more Wikipedia), consider scale degrees:

in English, [they are known] by the names tonic, supertonic, mediant, subdominant, dominant, submediant, leading tone.

These names are derived from a scheme where the tonic note is the 'center'. Supertonic and subtonic are, respectively, one step above and one step below the tonic; mediant and submediant are each a third above and below the tonic, and dominant and subdominant are a fifth above and below the tonic.

Translating this into visual terms:

"In the 'US flag color scheme' red is at the center and therefore the tonic; white is the supertonic and blue is the mediant."

That's just silly but the same types of statements are not considered silly by music pedants.

For the record, I know that visual art has theories of complementary colors, the golden section, etc. It's just that they are rules of thumb, learned in first year studio classes and then basically non-issues. It's really chord theory, and its lack of a counterpart in painting, that's perplexing me this holiday season.

From the history of tracker music on Wikipedia:

Most early tracker musicians were from the United Kingdom and Scandinavia. This may be attributable to the close relationship of the tracker to the demoscene, which grew rapidly in Scandinavian countries, and the relative affordability in the UK of computers able to run tracker software. Tracker music became something of an underground phenomenon, especially as so much contemporary chart music was then sample-based dance music (a genre relatively simple to produce with step-based sequencing). In fact, several chart-topping 1989/1990-era dance singles strongly foreshadow compositional trends in tracker music which would remain popular for many years to come; in particular, 808 State's "Pacific" and Octave One's "I Believe." Both tracks rely heavily on muted, detuned saw-wave background pads which play four-tone augmented major seventh chords in chord patterns which fit the pentatonic scale; an unsyncopated 4/4 drum beat runs underneath. Though this particular musical arrangement was scarcely heard earlier, an overwhelming number of tracker compositions in following years used the exact same pattern.

Love this kind of music nerd analysis of pop music and wish I could write it better. The bolded passage led to a night of brushing up on my college music appreciation by researching chord families and scales and listening to sound clips (Wikipedia seems to be undergoing a transition between midi files and an open source Flash type player for clips, by the way.) Have a nascent speculation/beef about the absurdity of naming and nailing chord properties vis a vis painting, where no one gives a shit about quantifying different clusters of pigments vibrating at certain wavelengths, but should probably see what Goethe has to say about this before taking it further.

hat tip JM from NN DVD

holiday plug: Rhizome.org Community Campaign

"Up the Downbeat" [2.2 MB .mp3]

An Absynth patch called Talking Mallets over artificially phattened beats--the two drift around searching for a good matchup, which happens a couple of times. This would fit in a group with "Iceworld," "Rational Song," and a few others, texture, structure and length-wise.

Thanks to anyone who emailed about, or linked to my songs recently, the support is really appreciated.

inside wildchatster's apartment (YouTube apartment tour with voiceover by Guthrie Lonergan)

...more 2008 offerings on Lonergan's recently revised web page, including the collection of depressing self-published book covers (now in 3d!), Google 3d warehouse drawings, a popular locution you might be aware of but at the same time not, and other gems.

Paddy Johnson is having a year-end fundraiser for her blog. Please consider contributing (here), even though times are lean. I concur with her self-assessment that her blog "represents a strong presence in an otherwise thin field of art world professionals working on the web. Considering how traditional media is currently gutting arts coverage, sites such as [hers] are not only important, but essential to the field of art criticism."

Johnson's blog is a necessary counterweight to the institutional writing that constitutes current criticism: magazines chasing ad dollars, 501c(3) organizations that have to say nice things about everyone, and museum curators at the beck and call of powerful board members. Johnson produces a staggering amount of original content each year, including interviews, essay series, and reportage. Her comment boards are moderated in a civilized fashion and are a good place to hash out issues that aren't being discussed elsewhere. Plus she is that rare writer that can cover both the art gallery scene and the online scene with equal knowledge and confidence.

If that's not enough reason, she has upset her commenter "Lisa":

I think highly of your site and wish you all the best with your fundraiser, but there’s still an underlying problem:

Newspapers have cut back on their coverage precisely because bloggers (many of them former newspaper writers or top freelancers) have been giving away the same kind of coverage for free. Now readers expect this content to be free. The idea that writers ought to be paid for their expertise seems to have vanished.

Dear Lisa, the demise of certain print writers' cults of power and personality and concomitant elevation of articulate but previously voiceless commoners is one of the best things that's happened in my lifetime. It's worth $25 to see that bloggers keep giving away content.

hippos by ricky at double happiness

found abstraction with arms, legs and tops of heads; polyrhythmic clicking soundtrack; chaos gradually resolving into order; observable and individual styles of game play; rigorous symmetry challenged by bobbing, rocking movement; play of light and shadow; unusual, severe camera angle; overt pop culture reference; mesh of nostalgia and aesthetic disassociation; medium that works across media (photography, flash video, social networking, "found object art," color field painting, amateur video).

From wikipedia:

In a 1990 short story published in The New Yorker (and sarcastically named after the game), Edward Allen wrote, "The object of the game [is essentially] to press your handle down again and again as fast as you can, with no rhythm, no timing, just slam-slam-slam as your hippo surges out to grab marble after marble from the game surface...."
[...]
In the episode of The Simpsons entitled "Mr. Plow", Homer says, "Now we play the waiting game... Eh, the waiting game sucks, lets play Hungry Hungry Hippos." Another Simpsons episode, Hungry, Hungry Homer is a reference to the game (as well as Homer being one of the four hippos). It also has a mention in Donnie Darko when Donnie informs his psychiatrist that he always wanted Hungry Hungry Hippos for Christmas but he never got any. The Futurama episode "300 Big Boys" features some homeless men who refer to themselves as "hungry hungry hobos."

Re: Milton Bradley dropping one of the "hungrys" in the game's name in 2008, that's corporate thinking in microcosm, "if it ain't broke, bland it down."

"Medium that works across media" is Damon Zucconi's phrase.

"Mosquito Mange" [4 MB .mp3]

A standard Electribe drumbeat is run through the Mutator filter and then the Reaktor Cyan plug-in. A parameter called "distance spread" allows changes in pitch based on altering a delay or chorus function (not sure how it works entirely but it involves putting the treated signal out of phase with the input signal). A controller curve that I wrote acts as a virtual knob turner to create the melody and improvisational sections. "Mosquito Mange" is one of the deadly substances in the Zone in the Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic.