Skip to main content

Deconstructing Brian Eno’s Music for Airports: Explore the Tape Loops That Make Up His Groundbreaking Ambient Music

Brian Eno debuted Music for Airports in 1978 and in terms of ambient music he’s been remaking it ever since. This groundbreaking album was both composed and left to chance. “Composed” in that for each piece Eno selected a number of notes and simple melodic fragments that would work together without dissonance. And "left to chance" because each fragment was given a tape loop of different length. Once Eno set the loops in motion, the piece created itself in all sorts of permutations and intersections.

Eno no longer uses tape loops, but he still believes in “generative music,” creating albums that are hour-long captures of randomly generated tones that could conceivably go on forever.

Dan Carr over at his site Reverb Machine has written a deconstruction of two of the four pieces on Music for Airports, reverse engineering them to figure out their original loops. And the best thing is, you can set the loops rolling and have your own version play out all day long if you wish.

The first, “2/1” is recognizable from the choral voices used in the score. Each loop contains one note sung for a whole bar, but the note and the length of the tape containing the bar changes. This is the most basic of all the four tracks, but there is something quite magical when all seven loops sync up.

The second “1/2” contains eight loops containing either a single piano note, a melodic phrase, or a glissando chord. (Although the article doesn’t mention it, it also contains the choral loops of “2/1”)

You can play the loops at Reverb Machine simply by clicking on the arrow beneath each bar, or at the bottom “play all” or “pause all.”

For musicians thinking they’d like to make their own loops and follow Eno’s methodology, Dan includes some instructions.

In the comments section, musician Glenn Sogge notes that he took the loops and created his own deconstructed take on Eno’s classic, Blooms Engulfing Deconstructed Airports, which you can play at the top of this post. As he explains, the piece started with downloading the WAV files from Reverb Machine’s post. Then:

Beside the 15 clips of voices and piano, 10 long loops were build from the 10 worlds of the Brian Eno & Peter Chilvers generative music app Bloom: 10 Worlds (Android Version). A mixture of improvised clip-launching and more stucture form resulted in 25 audio files that then mixed & mastered. In keeping with the Oblique Strategies dictum, “Honour thy error as hidden intention,” even a random phone notification sound has been left in.

What do you think of Sogge's tribute to the master? Let us know in the comments.

Related Content:

A Six-Hour Time-Stretched Version of Brian Eno’s Music For Airports: Meditate, Relax, Study

The “True” Story Of How Brian Eno Invented Ambient Music

Brian Eno Explains the Loss of Humanity in Modern Music

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW's Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Deconstructing Brian Eno’s Music for Airports: Explore the Tape Loops That Make Up His Groundbreaking Ambient Music is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/32NLtNB
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

A 10 Billion Pixel Scan of Vermeer’s Masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring: Explore It Online

We admire Johannes Vermeer’s  Girl with a Pearl Earring   for many reasons , not least that it looks exactly like a girl with a pearl earring. Or at least it does from a distance, as the master of light himself no doubt stepped back to confirm countless times during the painting process, at any moment of which he would have been more concerned with the brushstrokes constituting only a small part of the image. But even Vermeer himself could have perceived only so much detail of the painting that would become his masterpiece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKaZYTwmjwU Now, more than 350 years after its completion, we can get a closer view of Girl with a Pearl Earring  than anyone has before through a newly released  10 billion-pixel panorama . At this resolution, writes Petapixel’s Jason Schneider , we can “see the painting down to the level of 4.4-microns per pixel.” Undertaken by Emilien Leonhardt and Vincent Sabatier of 3D microscope maker Hirox Europe ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The History of the Fisheye Photo Album Cover

Like gothic script in heavy metal, the fisheye album cover photo seems like a naturally occurring feature of certain psychedelic strains of music. But it has a history, as does the fisheye photograph itself. The Vox video above begins in 1906 with Johns Hopkins scientist and inventor Robert Wood, a somewhat eccentric professor of optical physics who wanted to duplicate the way fish see the world: “the circular picture,” he wrote, “would contain everything within an angle of 180 degrees in every direction, i.e. a complete hemisphere.” Rather than putting them to underwater use, later scientists employed Wood’s ideas in astronomical observation. Their next stop was the professional photography market: the first mass-produced fisheye lens, made by Nikon, cost $27,000 in 1957. From academic journals to the pages of Life magazine: mass media brought fisheye photography into popular culture. An affordable, consumer-grade lens in 1962 brought it within the reach of the masses. For t...
Post a Comment
Read more