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The School of Music hosted a unique concert played by the Experimental Music Studio on Tuesday night. Computer music certainly isn't what you would normally think of when it comes to live music. Even so, there was a fair-sized audience for the USC Computer Music Concert.
The event consisted of a series of songs created by individuals using music programs on laptops, digitized voice recordings and, of course, Guitar Hero for the finale. While this sounds quirky and fun, the actual experience was very strange and at times disconcerting.
What made this concert so special was the method that students used to write it. Director Reginald Bain explained that the makeup of the songs was very mathematical and involved the use of microtones, which are sounds that do not appear in conventional western music.
Modernist composer Charles Ives once described them as "notes between the cracks." There were several methods used in creating this mathematical and experimental music. Bain began the concert with a song that he wrote with prime numbers.
Another performer, fourth-year music student Alex Wroten, developed a song called "Gold Nanorods" by taking the actual atomic concept of gold and expressing it as a sound. These two songs obviously were the most technically experimental pieces in the concert.
The vocal musical pieces, or "Speech Songs" as Bain called them, consisted of only a few phrases played over and over at different speeds and pitches, and many times the voices would overlap one another.
For example, "The Days are Ahead" was a song based on a poem by American poet Mark Strand, and it only had three lines. And yet, the way they were arranged was quite expressive and not as annoying as you might think.
"Four Years" by fourth-year music student Laura Nevitt was the song that had the most direct theme, and it vividly illustrated the anxiety of life after college.
Then, of course, was Guitar Hero. Alex Wroten also composed this last song, and if anything, he was simply intent on establishing the Guitar Hero controller as a legitimate musical instrument.
"One thing that struck me about the game was that some people thought it had the potential to ruin the musical literacy of children because it gave them instant success when compared with learning to play traditional instruments. This led me to want to turn the controller into a viable musical instrument," Wroten said.
The experimental nature of this music was at times eerie to the average concertgoer. Much of the music sounded very grim, like it was designed for some kind of survival horror game.
The fact that no one was onstage while most of the songs were playing made things even more awkward. It is difficult to think of such an experience as being a live concert when there isn't an apparent musician actively playing.
However, once you understand how this kind of music was conceived, it becomes much more interesting.
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