SO YOU THINK YOU’VE HEARD IT ALL?

The brain does marvelous things with the variety of sensory “inputs” entering it –  light, sound, touch. This program pairs a sage of musical and film “minimalism” who specializes in pieces with very extended pitches, Phill Niblock, with the help of David Watson, bagpipes, and with a young master of the way acoustic signals are processed in the brain, Nima Mesgarani from Columbia’s Electrical Engineering Department to lead you to think about sound in unusual ways. Phill’s music is an exploration of sound textures created in very dense, often atonal tunings. Listen, and you’ll hear things that you cannot imagine could have been heard. Nima designs experiments probing how our brain hears speech, and thinks about interfacing brain signals to machines. He likes to invert things, so he will tell us what a ferret hears when you speak to it.  Sounds have textures, they overlay and interlace. And the brain does things with them that you could not imagine!      http://corneliastreetcafe.com/

https://corneliastreetcafe.wordpress.com/entertaining-science/

http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~nima/web/Home.html        www.experimentalintermedia.org

Brazil84, the film, with three pieces for orchestra, as music

A film from the Movement of People Working series, and recently transferred from 16mm film to video

The Music:

“Three Orchids,” for three orchestras – Orchestra of the SEM Ensemble, conducted by Petr Kotik, Merkin Hall, NYC, live recording by Paul Geluso, June 3 2004

“Tow by Tom,” for two orchestras – Trio Scordatura (Amsterdam) and the Nelly Boyd Ensemble (Hamburg), mixed / multitrack recordings of the two ensembles, one on the left channel, the other on the right. Trio Scordatura (Alfrun Schmid, voice; Elisabeth Smalt, viola, Bob Gilmore, synth); Nelly Boyd (Jens Roehm, synth [single analog oscillator, Dave Smith Evolver]; Jan Feddersen, e-bow guitar; Peter Imig, violin; Robert Engelbrecht, cello)

Trio Scordatura recorded by Johan Vandermaelen at Amplus, Aaigem, Belgium, March 1 2008;

Nelly Boyd recorded by Jens Roehm and Julia Berg in the Christianskirche, Hamburg, March 9 2009

“Three Orchids,” – Trio Scordatura plus one, mixed / multitrack recording.

Trio Scordatura (Alfrun Schmid, voice; Elisabeth Smalt, viola; Bob Gilmore, keyboard) with Guy De Bièvre, dobro. played with e-bow; Recorded by Johan Vandermaelen at Amplus, Aaigem, Belgium, August 13-14 2007

Mixing and mastering by Johan Vandermaelen of both the 5.1 surround sound and the stereo tracks. It is available from forcedexposure.com (US) and from metamkine.com (France) and elsewhere