source file: mills2.txt Date: Tue, 26 Nov 1996 16:27:49 -0800 Subject: delurkification From: DreamtimeV@aol.com Its a relief to read about tuning & its environment in something other than mathematical language. My initial observation of the cross section of tuning list participants whom have revealed themselves all seem to have a rigorous & serious (read professional) approach to their musics. I come from a very different world. We (my partner Lyx & I) began a eco-village project in part of a very tiny unincorportated town in Southwestern Wisconsin. Our project is being built around a large old brick school that we are slowly (almost exclusively a volunteer project, no funding) starting a school called DREAMLAB where what it takes to live & what there is to learn dont have the typical academic separations. Understanding how to grow a good organic tomato is inseparable from the sounds you make while youre in the field (or the tuning of your instrument, for that matter). I myself have a "rigorous" understanding of 20th century experimental music & its relations to performance, media, & installation. Since 1980, Lyx & I have created 150 performances, each one unique, which include ritual, text, tapes & sampling, invented instruments, mask & costume, environmental installation, audience participation, lowtech hypermedia (hypercard, a mac se, a video camera shooting the screen & projecting on a big tv monitor,(this was after all 1985))... This is to say that we are "rigorously" trying to integrate our experiences of performing & touring to non-profit artspaces, lofts & people's houses into creating a localized village culture where the activities of the arts & performance have value to the people living at Dreamtime. This task would be simple if the people living here where the same people that are out there doing it, but largely the people that live here have never heard of Harry Partch, have never been to an art gallery, & probably listen to radio & mainstream music. So the direction we have always taken is creating an environment where there is a culture of do-it-yourself & perpetrate ways for everyone to participate. In this situation the process & concentration in being involved are key, the aesthethic object is more transient & background. & this is where I might depart from others here, as the concert that still stays with me as the most profound memory of weird tuning was a trio of truly autistic street musicians who were playing on Library Mall at University of WI-Madison in 1980. All 3 were quite dyslexic, none were all that capable of speaking, but the tunings they had mutated into were like non other. It was a very precise auditory ritual. Other interests in tuning are similarly outside the norm. We grow different varieties of gourds & fashion them into simple reed, string, & percussions instruments. Each instrument is unique & all have very limited ranges (which we extend in performance with computer & sampler). For sometime now we have been using a tuning meme which we call Hand Print Intonation. On a very long dipper or trumpet gourd I fashion the openings but not the finger holes. I then mimic playing music on the gourd until my fingers naturally settle on a place that feels inherent. Holes are made & that tuning becomes a signature for that instrument. Then ensembles can be made with different combinations of instruments. One other project of late is a series of pieces I made using SoundEdit for the Macintosh. Using its tone generator, I create samples using only prime number frequencies, then created clusters of these pitches. Then a player for them was created in hypercard. Caveman computer music. One piece we created under the name The Wisconsin Department of Noise called "Qazingulaza" was released in a book/CD called Sounding Off from Autonomedia in 1995. Enough of that, I am actually quite interested in the range of information twirping thru this space, but find even things that interest me not in a form that is usable. Im more excited about the networking, reports, information access & in particular the education aspect. Id like to see more things happening that make this highbrow meditation of tuning be usuable to some anarchist college dropout hanging out at dreamtime. Because I know that the sounds that we are all talking about are one of the evolutionary languages/intelligences of the future & no one should be denied access. Miekal And The Driftless Academy of Botanical Apparitions Dreamtime Village can be visited virtually at: http://net22.com/dreamtime Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Wed, 27 Nov 1996 02:08 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA08536; Wed, 27 Nov 1996 02:10:08 +0100 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA09082 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id RAA12876; Tue, 26 Nov 1996 17:10:05 -0800 Date: Tue, 26 Nov 1996 17:10:05 -0800 Message-Id: <72961127010727/0005695065PK5EM@MCIMAIL.COM> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu