Soundobject free#

Thus, listening and dancing may be more alike than they at first appear. Connections between sound object analysis and vital materialism – the theory that any phenomenon with the ability to affect other phenomena constitutes a material body – suggest that listening is, as much as dancing, an encounter between material bodies and an embodied form of dialogue. I apply sound object analysis to Yasushi Miura’s track ““Capricious””, attempting to demonstrate that sound object analysis may offer a specific and telling vocabulary for EDM. Sound object analysis is the identification and description of sound objects and how they function in music.

Soundobject free#

Variously defined and utilized by electronic musicians, the term “sound object” may refer to anything from a sound free of referential connotations, to a broadly defined sonic unit, to a sampled sound or a unitary combination of sound and gesture. I investigate the possibility that sound object analysis, a listening technique which I designed to address “avant-garde” music, might also help listeners to describe and discuss EDM in ways that address not just its cultural contexts, but the sounds of the music itself. This article proposes that EDM succeeds as music for close listening, not only for dancing. Perhaps this descriptive evasiveness is, in part, what drives analysts to deem EDM an aesthetic failure outside the dance club. Overall, the experience of listening to EDM is difficult to characterize.

The timbres of EDM are equally elusive: describing this music in terms of its sources (synthesizers, computers.) tells us little about the sounds themselves. The team also hopes that it might find practical application in space one day, where competing against gravity is not an issue.In electronic dance music (EDM), melody, harmony, and rhythm are often indistinguishable, hence are inadequate as descriptive categories. This is an important step forward for a futuristic technology that could one day be deployed to manipulate samples which need to be kept strictly contamination free. Thus, using an adaptive switching between the modes, they can now leverage the best of both modes and achieve a well-controlled, stable lift, as well as more stability inside the trap once it is lifted. Meanwhile, an “out-of-phase” mode is more suited to bringing the lifted particle into the center of the array. Starting with a particle on a surface, an “in-phase” excitation mode is better at lifting and moving the particle close to the surface, with accurate targeting of individual particles only a centimeter apart. The team’s new insight is that different modes are more suited to doing certain things.

There are two “modes” in which the transducers can be driven, where opposing halves of their hemispherical array are driven in and out of phase. Now, the same team have come up with a way of using the same setup to achieve significant enhancements in how they can lift particles from rigid surfaces. However, the stability of their “acoustic tweezers” remained an outstanding issue. The transducers would be driven individually according to a unique algorithm, allowing them to set up fields of sound pressure which ultimately lifted and moved objects. Last year, Dr Shota Kondo and Associate Professor Kan Okubo from Tokyo Metropolitan University had success with the contactless lift and movement of millimeter-sized particles using a hemispherical array of small, ultrasound transducers. Such “acoustic tweezer” technology promises completely contactless, contamination-free manipulation of small objects.