To an extent this has ALWAYS been a part of composition, whether conscious or subconscious.shadowplay wrote:øøøøøøø wrote:
I really wanted to touch on this in the article, but I figured only a few people would read 5,000 words about reverb. So I narrowed my scope.
Another early reverb pioneer was Bob Fine on the "Mercury Living Presence" classical records of the early 1950s. He chose Schoeps microphones in part because their increased sensitivity and "reach" allowed them to be placed a bit further back in the hall, picking up more of the hall's ambience. He tried other things, like sending a signal off the tape machine's repro head to a speaker in the back of the hall to get more ambience/reflection in the mic.
Nowadays, classical records often use multi-mic arrays with mics positioned in the back of the hall for added ambience.
I was supposed to be involved with the recording recently of a suite of pieces that were written specifically to exploit the use of the acoustic characteristics of the respective insides of a series of enormous scupltures upstate. But I think the project lost funding (or had trouble securing permission? dont remember) and stalled. But there were weird reverb characteristics inside these giant walk-in sculptures, and a composer friend wrote pieces to exploit the unique character of each one (or was in the process of writing)
Ah interesting, I've been aware of project like the one you mentioned over the years like ones by David Toop and Max Eastley or recording in specific ambient spaces like Saxjag mentions, like for example Dreams Less Sweet recorded in the hellfire caves and reproduced using Zuccarelli Holophonic systems.
I'm still curious about actual notation to simulate echo (like Emika was shooting for) or even score notes pointing towards the sort of ambient space a piece is to be performed in. I imagine this would go right back to our ancestors taking their hollow log into a specific cave to get the repeats as they banged it. This is touched on in the absolutely brilliant BBC Radio series Noise: A Human History which is a genuinely fascinating series about humankinds relationship with sound. Sadly it's no longer free to stream but there are some clips here and you can get thewhole thing on itunes and possibly elsewhere for less, though even at itunes prices it's good value since it's 8 hours of material.
D
Like-- a Palestrina mass relies upon the acoustics of a cathedral for its effect. It wouldn't AT ALL be the same piece of music if it were sung by the same choir jammed into a 25 square meter room with a 2m ceiling height. Palestrina, whether conscious or not, was composing for the medium-- which was not "a group of human voices," but rather "a group of human voices in a giant, cavernous stone acoustic environment."
Likewise/conversely, bebop in the 1940s developed in small clubs like Minton's in Harlem, and somewhat later, a few places on 52nd St. in midtown Manhattan. Highly rhythmic, syncopated music at tempos upwards of 400 BPM simply does not work very well in a concert hall designed for orchestral performances (anyone who's ever been to a concert by visiting jazz artists held in a University's concert hall surely knows). Things get muddy and indistinct.
Really, any music that's been around long enough to develop a "tradition" will reflect, within the conventions inherent in that tradition, the type of acoustic environment in which that music is typically performed (or originated).