Dan Shaw's article - Hey! I Invented a New Musical
Art Form - and upcoming events
15Jan2007 09:44 PM Events & News
Yesterday, I met
with colleague Dan Shaw and several other
"fellow geometers" in Ashland, Oregon, and it was
a joy to share mutual inspirations and support;
much more to follow as a result of our
collaborative brainstorming ... There are details
of our most recent public
collaboration at the Mobius on 21 Sep 2006
here. For now, here
is a timely post (for multiple reasons, since it
is Dan's birthday as well as the day before he
presents one of two upcoming events in Ashland if
you can attend... Here's Dan's update, along with
a few comments from me...
Sound is such a wonderful "universal language" which in many respects is even more intuitive than geometry. Sound also embodies geometry so beautifully, as noted by visionaries from Pythagoras to Hans Jenny (the Cymatics sound/form research pioneer whose modern work is currently carried forward through the efforts of Jeff Volk who was one of our New Frontiers speakers.) Dan's work explores the realm of spatial orientation, which seemed to have a renaissance in the 1970s with quadraphonics (now seemingly absorbed into the "surround sound scene"), and John Chowning's computer generated sound (where a tetrahedron of speakers, one directly over the listener's head could make sounds so realistic that a simulated fly buzzing around one's head might evoke a swatting response
The magic of architectural
acoustics is yet another aspect of sound and
spatial interaction; an early inspiration for me
(and probably lots of others was Paul Horn's
classic recording in the Taj Mahal,
Inside, and
Inside the Great
Pyramid. Another early
influence was Paul Beaver & Bernie
Krause's
"Gandharva" album, half of
which was recorded in San Francisco's Grace
Cathedral, which I had the pleasure of visiting a
few weeks ago with my family. I was inspired by
the Inside recording to do similar acoustic
research in the Great Pyramid, and eventually
recorded sound within it such as
this clip of the resonance of the
granite box erroneously
referred to as a sarcophagus within the depths of
the Great Pyramid of Egypt. Add to the mystical
experience of interacting acoustically with an
inspiring space with the mystical experience of
feeling kinship with other souls attuning with
sound, and the potential for transformation can
multiply astronomically!
Here's details on Dan's upcoming events in Ashland, Oregon on 16 Jan 2007 and 7 Feb 2007:
======================================
Hey! I Invented a New Musical Art Form
by Dan Shaw
What is a Vortex? I wanted to give people the experience of being in a Vortex, not just talk about it, as I have at VortexMaps.com. It's easy to demonstrate the geometric reinforcement of patterns of energy vortexes, using musical instruments. With these simple instructions you can try it yourself, and be among the very first to develop this new art form.
So I took eight chimes, and did the simplest thing I could think of. I gave seven volunteers a chime and hammer(?!) and we stood at the center of the room, back-to back. The "audience" stood in a circle around us.
I began by slowly walking and chiming from the center to the edge of the room, outside the ring of the audience. Then I walked back to the center, still chiming. I then tapped the person across from me, and we each walked to the edge of the room and back chiming. This gave the audience the sense of their relationship to a "line" of sound-energy. Next, three chimers walked out and back, forming a triangle of sound. We progressed in this way, adding a chime at each repetition, until there were eight chimes, forming an expanding and contracting octagon of sound.
The entire process took just a few minutes. The audience had an experience they had never had before, their relationship to geometric patterns of sound. The audience and volunteers all enjoyed it. Had we taken more time, we could easily have come up with an infinite number of variations, such as counter-rotating circles of chimes.
The volunteers were unrehearsed, so we used a random assemblage of an octave of chimes. A quite different effect could be achieved with continuous instruments, such as violins, instead of chimes, which are more percussive and intermittent. The audience, on the dance floor, may move among the instruments, become participants in creating a unique soundscape, instead of sitting in an audience, removed from the instruments, hearing more or less exactly what the rest of the audience hears. The musical piece may be composed in complete synergy with a choreography of the physical movement of the instruments and musicians. One sound-healer called the new art form, "equivalent to the discovery of perspective in painting."
I invite you to contact me to let me know what you're doing and how we can work together.
--
Dan Shaw
http://VortexMaps.com/
http://DanShaw.com
P.O. Box 3028, Ashland, OR 97520
Sound is such a wonderful "universal language" which in many respects is even more intuitive than geometry. Sound also embodies geometry so beautifully, as noted by visionaries from Pythagoras to Hans Jenny (the Cymatics sound/form research pioneer whose modern work is currently carried forward through the efforts of Jeff Volk who was one of our New Frontiers speakers.) Dan's work explores the realm of spatial orientation, which seemed to have a renaissance in the 1970s with quadraphonics (now seemingly absorbed into the "surround sound scene"), and John Chowning's computer generated sound (where a tetrahedron of speakers, one directly over the listener's head could make sounds so realistic that a simulated fly buzzing around one's head might evoke a swatting response
The magic of architectural
acoustics is yet another aspect of sound and
spatial interaction; an early inspiration for me
(and probably lots of others was Paul Horn's
classic recording in the Taj Mahal,
Inside, and
Inside the Great
Pyramid. Another early
influence was Paul Beaver & Bernie
Krause's
"Gandharva" album, half of
which was recorded in San Francisco's Grace
Cathedral, which I had the pleasure of visiting a
few weeks ago with my family. I was inspired by
the Inside recording to do similar acoustic
research in the Great Pyramid, and eventually
recorded sound within it such as
this clip of the resonance of the
granite box erroneously
referred to as a sarcophagus within the depths of
the Great Pyramid of Egypt. Add to the mystical
experience of interacting acoustically with an
inspiring space with the mystical experience of
feeling kinship with other souls attuning with
sound, and the potential for transformation can
multiply astronomically!
Here's details on Dan's upcoming events in Ashland, Oregon on 16 Jan 2007 and 7 Feb 2007:
======================================
Hey! I Invented a New Musical Art Form
by Dan Shaw
What is a Vortex? I wanted to give people the experience of being in a Vortex, not just talk about it, as I have at VortexMaps.com. It's easy to demonstrate the geometric reinforcement of patterns of energy vortexes, using musical instruments. With these simple instructions you can try it yourself, and be among the very first to develop this new art form.
So I took eight chimes, and did the simplest thing I could think of. I gave seven volunteers a chime and hammer(?!) and we stood at the center of the room, back-to back. The "audience" stood in a circle around us.
I began by slowly walking and chiming from the center to the edge of the room, outside the ring of the audience. Then I walked back to the center, still chiming. I then tapped the person across from me, and we each walked to the edge of the room and back chiming. This gave the audience the sense of their relationship to a "line" of sound-energy. Next, three chimers walked out and back, forming a triangle of sound. We progressed in this way, adding a chime at each repetition, until there were eight chimes, forming an expanding and contracting octagon of sound.
The entire process took just a few minutes. The audience had an experience they had never had before, their relationship to geometric patterns of sound. The audience and volunteers all enjoyed it. Had we taken more time, we could easily have come up with an infinite number of variations, such as counter-rotating circles of chimes.
The volunteers were unrehearsed, so we used a random assemblage of an octave of chimes. A quite different effect could be achieved with continuous instruments, such as violins, instead of chimes, which are more percussive and intermittent. The audience, on the dance floor, may move among the instruments, become participants in creating a unique soundscape, instead of sitting in an audience, removed from the instruments, hearing more or less exactly what the rest of the audience hears. The musical piece may be composed in complete synergy with a choreography of the physical movement of the instruments and musicians. One sound-healer called the new art form, "equivalent to the discovery of perspective in painting."
I invite you to contact me to let me know what you're doing and how we can work together.
--
Dan Shaw
http://VortexMaps.com/
http://DanShaw.com
P.O. Box 3028, Ashland, OR 97520
|