I Don't Play Girly House Music
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Videogame Music: Chiptunes Byte Back?
Videogame Music: chiptunes byte back? Grethe Mitchell Andrew Clarke University of East London Unaffiliated Researcher and Institute of Education 78 West Kensington Court, University of East London, Docklands Campus Edith Villas, 4-6 University Way, London E16 2RD London W14 9AB [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT Musicians and sonic artists who use videogames as their This paper will explore the sonic subcultures of videogame medium or raw material have, however, received art and videogame-related fan art. It will look at the work of comparatively little interest. This mirrors the situation in art videogame musicians – not those producing the music for as a whole where sonic artists are similarly neglected and commercial games – but artists and hobbyists who produce the emphasis is likewise on the visual art/artists.1 music by hacking and reprogramming videogame hardware, or by sampling in-game sound effects and music for use in It was curious to us that most (if not all) of the writing their own compositions. It will discuss the motivations and about videogame art had ignored videogame music - methodologies behind some of this work. It will explore the especially given the overlap between the two communities tools that are used and the communities that have grown up of artists and the parallels between them. For example, two around these tools. It will also examine differences between of the major videogame artists – Tobias Bernstrup and Cory the videogame music community and those which exist Archangel – have both produced music in addition to their around other videogame-related practices such as modding gallery-oriented work, but this area of their activity has or machinima. -
The Psytrance Party
THE PSYTRANCE PARTY C. DE LEDESMA M.Phil. 2011 THE PSYTRANCE PARTY CHARLES DE LEDESMA A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of East London for the degree of Master of Philosophy August 2011 Abstract In my study, I explore a specific kind of Electronic Dance Music (EDM) event - the psytrance party to highlight the importance of social connectivity and the generation of a modern form of communitas (Turner, 1969, 1982). Since the early 90s psytrance, and a related earlier style, Goa trance, have been understood as hedonist music cultures where participants seek to get into a trance-like state through all night dancing and psychedelic drugs consumption. Authors (Cole and Hannan, 1997; D’Andrea, 2007; Partridge, 2004; St John 2010a and 2010b; Saldanha, 2007) conflate this electronic dance music with spirituality and indigene rituals. In addition, they locate psytrance in a neo-psychedelic countercultural continuum with roots stretching back to the 1960s. Others locate the trance party events, driven by fast, hypnotic, beat-driven, largely instrumental music, as post sub cultural and neo-tribal, representing symbolic resistance to capitalism and neo liberalism. My study is in partial agreement with these readings when applied to genre history, but questions their validity for contemporary practice. The data I collected at and around the 2008 Offworld festival demonstrates that participants found the psytrance experience enjoyable and enriching, despite an apparent lack of overt euphoria, spectacular transgression, or sustained hedonism. I suggest that my work adds to an existing body of literature on psytrance in its exploration of a dance music event as a liminal space, redolent with communitas, but one too which foregrounds mundane features, such as socialising and pleasure. -
Hip-Hop's Diversity and Misperceptions
The University of Maine DigitalCommons@UMaine Honors College Summer 8-2020 Hip-Hop's Diversity and Misperceptions Andrew Cashman Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/honors Part of the Music Commons, and the Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons This Honors Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@UMaine. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors College by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@UMaine. For more information, please contact [email protected]. HIP-HOP’S DIVERSITY AND MISPERCEPTIONS by Andrew Cashman A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for a Degree with Honors (Anthropology) The Honors College University of Maine August 2020 Advisory Committee: Joline Blais, Associate Professor of New Media, Advisor Kreg Ettenger, Associate Professor of Anthropology Christine Beitl, Associate Professor of Anthropology Sharon Tisher, Lecturer, School of Economics and Honors Stuart Marrs, Professor of Music 2020 Andrew Cashman All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT The misperception that hip-hop is a single entity that glorifies wealth and the selling of drugs, and promotes misogynistic attitudes towards women, as well as advocating gang violence is one that supports a mainstream perspective towards the marginalized.1 The prevalence of drug dealing and drug use is not a picture of inherent actions of members in the hip-hop community, but a reflection of economic opportunities that those in poverty see as a means towards living well. Some artists may glorify that, but other artists either decry it or offer it as a tragic reality. In hip-hop trends build off of music and music builds off of trends in a cyclical manner. -
“Rapper's Delight”
1 “Rapper’s Delight” From Genre-less to New Genre I was approached in ’77. A gentleman walked up to me and said, “We can put what you’re doing on a record.” I would have to admit that I was blind. I didn’t think that somebody else would want to hear a record re-recorded onto another record with talking on it. I didn’t think it would reach the masses like that. I didn’t see it. I knew of all the crews that had any sort of juice and power, or that was drawing crowds. So here it is two years later and I hear, “To the hip-hop, to the bang to the boogie,” and it’s not Bam, Herc, Breakout, AJ. Who is this?1 DJ Grandmaster Flash I did not think it was conceivable that there would be such thing as a hip-hop record. I could not see it. I’m like, record? Fuck, how you gon’ put hip-hop onto a record? ’Cause it was a whole gig, you know? How you gon’ put three hours on a record? Bam! They made “Rapper’s Delight.” And the ironic twist is not how long that record was, but how short it was. I’m thinking, “Man, they cut that shit down to fifteen minutes?” It was a miracle.2 MC Chuck D [“Rapper’s Delight”] is a disco record with rapping on it. So we could do that. We were trying to make a buck.3 Richard Taninbaum (percussion) As early as May of 1979, Billboard magazine noted the growing popularity of “rapping DJs” performing live for clubgoers at New York City’s black discos.4 But it was not until September of the same year that the trend gar- nered widespread attention, with the release of the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight,” a fifteen-minute track powered by humorous party rhymes and a relentlessly funky bass line that took the country by storm and introduced a national audience to rap. -
Discourse on Disco
Chapter 1: Introduction to the cultural context of electronic dance music The rhythmic structures of dance music arise primarily from the genre’s focus on moving dancers, but they reveal other influences as well. The poumtchak pattern has strong associations with both disco music and various genres of electronic dance music, and these associations affect the pattern’s presence in popular music in general. Its status and musical role there has varied according to the reputation of these genres. In the following introduction I will not present a complete history of related contributors, places, or events but rather examine those developments that shaped prevailing opinions and fields of tension within electronic dance music culture in particular. This culture in turn affects the choices that must be made in dance music production, for example involving the poumtchak pattern. My historical overview extends from the 1970s to the 1990s and covers predominantly the disco era, the Chicago house scene, the acid house/rave era, and the post-rave club-oriented house scene in England.5 The disco era of the 1970s DISCOURSE ON DISCO The image of John Travolta in his disco suit from the 1977 motion picture Saturday Night Fever has become an icon of the disco era and its popularity. Like Blackboard Jungle and Rock Around the Clock two decades earlier, this movie was an important vehicle for the distribution of a new dance music culture to America and the entire Western world, and the impact of its construction of disco was gigantic.6 It became a model for local disco cultures around the world and comprised the core of a common understanding of disco in mainstream popular music culture. -
1 "Disco Madness: Walter Gibbons and the Legacy of Turntablism and Remixology" Tim Lawrence Journal of Popular Music S
"Disco Madness: Walter Gibbons and the Legacy of Turntablism and Remixology" Tim Lawrence Journal of Popular Music Studies, 20, 3, 2008, 276-329 This story begins with a skinny white DJ mixing between the breaks of obscure Motown records with the ambidextrous intensity of an octopus on speed. It closes with the same man, debilitated and virtually blind, fumbling for gospel records as he spins up eternal hope in a fading dusk. In between Walter Gibbons worked as a cutting-edge discotheque DJ and remixer who, thanks to his pioneering reel-to-reel edits and contribution to the development of the twelve-inch single, revealed the immanent synergy that ran between the dance floor, the DJ booth and the recording studio. Gibbons started to mix between the breaks of disco and funk records around the same time DJ Kool Herc began to test the technique in the Bronx, and the disco spinner was as technically precise as Grandmaster Flash, even if the spinners directed their deft handiwork to differing ends. It would make sense, then, for Gibbons to be considered alongside these and other towering figures in the pantheon of turntablism, but he died in virtual anonymity in 1994, and his groundbreaking contribution to the intersecting arts of DJing and remixology has yet to register beyond disco aficionados.1 There is nothing mysterious about Gibbons's low profile. First, he operated in a culture that has been ridiculed and reviled since the "disco sucks" backlash peaked with the symbolic detonation of 40,000 disco records in the summer of 1979. -
Neotrance and the Psychedelic Festival DC
Neotrance and the Psychedelic Festival GRAHAM ST JOHN UNIVERSITY OF REGINA, UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND Abstract !is article explores the religio-spiritual characteristics of psytrance (psychedelic trance), attending speci"cally to the characteristics of what I call neotrance apparent within the contemporary trance event, the countercultural inheritance of the “tribal” psytrance festival, and the dramatizing of participants’ “ultimate concerns” within the festival framework. An exploration of the psychedelic festival offers insights on ecstatic (self- transcendent), performative (self-expressive) and re!exive (conscious alternative) trajectories within psytrance music culture. I address this dynamic with reference to Portugal’s Boom Festival. Keywords psytrance, neotrance, psychedelic festival, trance states, religion, new spirituality, liminality, neotribe Figure 1: Main Floor, Boom Festival 2008, Portugal – Photo by jakob kolar www.jacomedia.net As electronic dance music cultures (EDMCs) flourish in the global present, their relig- ious and/or spiritual character have become common subjects of exploration for scholars of religion, music and culture.1 This article addresses the religio-spiritual Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 1(1) 2009, 35-64 + Dancecult ISSN 1947-5403 ©2009 Dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ DC Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture – DOI 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.03 + D DC –C 36 Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture • vol 1 no 1 characteristics of psytrance (psychedelic trance), attending specifically to the charac- teristics of the contemporary trance event which I call neotrance, the countercultural inheritance of the “tribal” psytrance festival, and the dramatizing of participants’ “ul- timate concerns” within the framework of the “visionary” music festival. -
FURTHERING the DRUM'n'bass RACE: a Treatise on Loop
FURTHERING THE DRUM'N'BASS RACE: A Treatise on Loop Development By Cape Canaveral e-mail: [email protected] Version 1.2 September 1999 Updated versions will be found at www.spinwarp.com or www.lanset.com/shansen. All statements are IMHO. Forward: So, you'd like to make some beats? Want them to sound like 'real' beats, not the lame beats you've been making? Maybe you've read some tips in 'Keyboard' or 'Future Music' and are wondering why they haven't helped. At all. Well, we've all been there. But now, I'm going to tell you how beats are really made. This is the stuff those posers at the magazines don't even know, and the pros don't want you to. But I say forget secrets: let the music stand on its own merit, not on some simple tricks! In this article I will cover two ways of making drum loops, with extra information for jungle programming. But that is information all drum programmers need as well, as it is vital to how your new beats will sound and feel. Before You Begin: If you are no good at music-making at all, or are completely new to this, this article won't make you the Chemical Brothers (well, a Chemical Brother... er, whatever). But if you're OK at making beats, here are some basic and not-so-basic tips for you try, or at least be familiar with: 1. When you sample off a record, or even any other source, you may want to add to the sound without changing it a lot. -
The DIY Careers of Techno and Drum 'N' Bass Djs in Vienna
Cross-Dressing to Backbeats: The Status of the Electroclash Producer and the Politics of Electronic Music Feature Article David Madden Concordia University (Canada) Abstract Addressing the international emergence of electroclash at the turn of the millenium, this article investigates the distinct character of the genre and its related production practices, both in and out of the studio. Electroclash combines the extended pulsing sections of techno, house and other dance musics with the trashier energy of rock and new wave. The genre signals an attempt to reinvigorate dance music with a sense of sexuality, personality and irony. Electroclash also emphasizes, rather than hides, the European, trashy elements of electronic dance music. The coming together of rock and electro is examined vis-à-vis the ongoing changing sociality of music production/ distribution and the changing role of the producer. Numerous women, whether as solo producers, or in the context of collaborative groups, significantly contributed to shaping the aesthetics and production practices of electroclash, an anomaly in the history of popular music and electronic music, where the role of the producer has typically been associated with men. These changes are discussed in relation to the way electroclash producers Peaches, Le Tigre, Chicks on Speed, and Miss Kittin and the Hacker often used a hybrid approach to production that involves the integration of new(er) technologies, such as laptops containing various audio production softwares with older, inexpensive keyboards, microphones, samplers and drum machines to achieve the ironic backbeat laden hybrid electro-rock sound. Keywords: electroclash; music producers; studio production; gender; electro; electronic dance music Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 4(2): 27–47 ISSN 1947-5403 ©2011 Dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net DOI: 10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.02.02 28 Dancecult 4(2) David Madden is a PhD Candidate (A.B.D.) in Communications at Concordia University (Montreal, QC). -
The Wiki Music Dataset: a Tool for Computational Analysis of Popular Music
The Wiki Music dataset: A tool for computational analysis of popular music Fabio Celli Profilio Company s.r.l. via sommarive 18, 38123 Trento, Italy Email: fabio@profilio.co Abstract—Is it possible use algorithms to find trends in monic and timbral properties that brought changes in music the history of popular music? And is it possible to predict sound around 1964, 1983 and 1991 [14]. Beside these research the characteristics of future music genres? In order to answer fields, there is a trend in the psychology of music that studies these questions, we produced a hand-crafted dataset with the how the musical preferences are reflected in the dimensions intent to put together features about style, psychology, sociology of personality [11]. From this kind of research emerged the and typology, annotated by music genre and indexed by time MUSIC model [20], which found that genre preferences can and decade. We collected a list of popular genres by decade from Wikipedia and scored music genres based on Wikipedia be decomposed into five factors: Mellow (relaxed, slow, and ro- descriptions. Using statistical and machine learning techniques, mantic), Unpretentious, (easy, soft, well-known), Sophisticated we find trends in the musical preferences and use time series (complex, intelligent or avant-garde), Intense (loud, aggressive, forecasting to evaluate the prediction of future music genres. and tense) and Contemporary (catchy, rhythmic or danceable). Is it possible to find trends in the characteristics of the genres? Keywords—Popular Music, Computational Music analysis, And is it possible to predict the characteristics of future genres? Wikipedia, Natural Language Processing, dataset To answer these questions, we produced a hand-crafted dataset with the intent to put together MUSIC, style and sonic features, I. -
University of Birmingham from Microsound to Vaporwave
University of Birmingham From Microsound to Vaporwave Born, Georgina; Haworth, Christopher DOI: 10.1093/ml/gcx095 Document Version Peer reviewed version Citation for published version (Harvard): Born, G & Haworth, C 2018, 'From Microsound to Vaporwave: internet-mediated musics, online methods, and genre', Music and Letters, vol. 98, no. 4, pp. 601–647. https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcx095 Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal Publisher Rights Statement: Checked for eligibility: 30/03/2017 This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in Music and Letters following peer review. The version of record Georgina Born, Christopher Haworth; From Microsound to Vaporwave: Internet-Mediated Musics, Online Methods, and Genre, Music and Letters, Volume 98, Issue 4, 1 November 2017, Pages 601–647 is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcx095 General rights Unless a licence is specified above, all rights (including copyright and moral rights) in this document are retained by the authors and/or the copyright holders. The express permission of the copyright holder must be obtained for any use of this material other than for purposes permitted by law. •Users may freely distribute the URL that is used to identify this publication. •Users may download and/or print one copy of the publication from the University of Birmingham research portal for the purpose of private study or non-commercial research. •User may use extracts from the document in line with the concept of ‘fair dealing’ under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (?) •Users may not further distribute the material nor use it for the purposes of commercial gain. -
House, Techno & the Origins of Electronic Dance Music
HOUSE, TECHNO & THE ORIGINS OF ELECTRONIC DANCE MUSIC 1 EARLY HOUSE AND TECHNO ARTISTS THE STUDIO AS AN INSTRUMENT TECHNOLOGY AND ‘MISTAKES’ OR ‘MISUSE’ 2 How did we get here? disco electro-pop soul / funk Garage - NYC House - Chicago Techno - Detroit Paradise Garage - NYC Larry Levan (and Frankie Knuckles) Chicago House Music House music borrowed disco’s percussion, with the bass drum on every beat, with hi-hat 8th note offbeats on every bar and a snare marking beats 2 and 4. House musicians added synthesizer bass lines, electronic drums, electronic effects, samples from funk and pop, and vocals using reverb and delay. They balanced live instruments and singing with electronics. Like Disco, House music was “inclusive” (both socially and musically), infuenced by synthpop, rock, reggae, new wave, punk and industrial. Music made for dancing. It was not initially aimed at commercial success. The Warehouse Discotheque that opened in 1977 The Warehouse was the place to be in Chicago’s late-’70s nightlife scene. An old three-story warehouse in Chicago’s west-loop industrial area meant for only 500 patrons, the Warehouse often had over 2000 people crammed into its dark dance foor trying to hear DJ Frankie Knuckles’ magic. In 1982, management at the Warehouse doubled the admission, driving away the original crowd, as well as Knuckles. Frankie Knuckles and The Warehouse "The Godfather of House Music" Grew up in the South Bronx and worked together with his friend Larry Levan in NYC before moving to Chicago. Main DJ at “The Warehouse” until 1982 In the early 80’s, as disco was fading, he started mixing disco records with a drum machines and spacey, drawn out lines.