John Cage的Williams Mix与60年后的Williams Mix Extended

很有趣的概念专辑，对John Cage的Williams Mix思路的进一步拓展与重制。

John Cage的Williams Mix的一个重要的特点即是”Cage experimented with radically extreme splices when he produced Williams Mix (1952), using the shape and angle of splices to alter the slope of attack and decay of recorded sounds.“ - Electronic Music and Technology 3rd. (p.126)

维基百科对于Williams Mix的描述：

“Williams Mix (1951–1953) is a 4'16" electroacoustic composition by John Cage for eight simultaneously played independent quarter-inch magnetic tapes. The first piece of octophonic music, the piece was created by Cage with the assistance of Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, David Tudor, and Bebe and Louis Barron (who would later create the first all-electronic feature film soundtrack for Forbidden Planet) using many recorded sound sources on tape and a graphic score by the composer. "Presignifying the development of algorithmic composition, granular synthesis, and sound diffusion," it was the third of five pieces completed in the Project for Music for Magnetic Tape (1951–1954), funded by dedicatee architect Paul F Williams Jr. Richard Kostelanetz of Stereo Review described Williams Mix as a "tape collage composed ... by chance procedures" which, similar to Cage's earlier works (but not many subsequent ones), was "offered to the world in a permanent form.

The material recorded by the Barrons was organized into six categories: city, country, electronic, manually produced, wind, and "small" sounds. These sounds were then "subjected...to I Ching manipulations, producing constant jumps from one sound to another or buzzing, scrambled textures of up to sixteen simultaneous layers." The 193-page score, "a full-size drawing of the tape fragments, which served as a 'score' for the splicing," is described by Cage as similar to "a dressmaker's pattern – it literally shows where the tape shall be cut, and you lay the tape on the score itself." Thus, like a recipe, the piece may be recreated using different tapes and the score. ”

关于磁带，在电子音乐方面的处理技巧与方法方面，我还在翻译，这里先放一个占位符_____。

关于本专辑的背后思路，详见下面作者之一Werner Dafeldecker自己的记录：

http://www.dafeldecker.net/projects/pdf/WME+Video.pdf

Williams Mix Extended

Octophonic electro-‐acoustic diffusion, video.

participants:

valerio tricoli -‐ composition, diffusion

werner dafeldecker -‐ composition, diffusion

lillevan -‐ video

Williams Mix Extended is a new interpretation of John Cage's WilliamsMix by Werner Dafeldecker and Valerio Tricoli, originally scored formagnetic tape in 1952. Approaching the original score from acontemporary perspective, this new interpretation of Williams Mixcontains a close analysis of the relationship between early tapemusic and current digital production, including video, allowing fororiginal parameters of the score to be realized within the context ofrecent audio-‐visual technological practices. The video component ofWilliams Mix Extended, created by Lillevan, will focus on thepermutation and transformation of Cage´s tape notation into visualart. Williams Mix Extended has an duration of 32 minutes whereas theoriginal is 4 minutes and 15 seconds long. The difference between thetwo durations is generated by the transposition of the score´sspecifications from tape to digital audio software. To completeWilliams Mix Extended a library of approximately 600 different soundsis used, all recorded by Dafeldecker and Trico

A brief introduction to the Williams Mix score

Williams Mix (1952) is an 8 channel electro-‐acoustic composition that has a special standing in the oeuvre of early tape music, in that the work was realized in the studio according to an already completed score. In those days, composers usually generated their tape pieces directly out of their studio working process. But in the case of Williams Mix, Cage’s mode of composition called for the realization of preliminary fixed written notations whose musical parameters were derived through chance operations (I Ching divination).The 192 page score is, as Cage referred to it, a kind of'dressmaker's pattern' showing, in 1:1 ratio, how the 8 monophonictapes (running simultaneously) should be spliced, and what kind ofsound should be recorded within each "tape slice".

The sounds are categorized as follows:

A: city sounds; B: country sounds; C: electronic sounds; D: manually produced sounds, including the literature of music; E: wind produced sounds, including songs; F: small sounds requiring amplification to be heard with others.

For a number of years we had been attracted to the idea of working on an interpretation of Cage's Williams Mix score, asking ourselves if it would be both relevant and suitably interesting to develop a new tape version of it, in all means (except for new sounds) representative of the original one completed in 1952. After some weeks of research into the logistics of developing the piece for actual concert presentation, which included a close analysis of Cage's detailed one hundred and ninety two page score and multiple experiments with tape, we came to the conclusion that a realisation of the original piece true to the score would be somewhat impractical. To complete the piece we would have needed no less than six months of painstakingly intricate tape splicing and cutting(Cage's original took approximately a year to finish). This, for obvious economical reasons wasn´t possible for us. Nonetheless, we realized that the problems associated with the tape editing required by the score wouldn't necessarily prohibit us from successfully working on Williams Mix, if we approached it from a different perspective. Cage's original piece was in fact made for the current audio technology of its day, and we realized that a digital interpretation could be a way to capture the spirit of technological sound exploration that is as much a part of Cage's score as was the use of tape. Thus, applying twenty first century production techniques to a score written for a historical set of audio technologies emerged as a worthwhile path of exploration. However, in saying this we were aware that some of the physical tape effects that the score requested were not directly transferrable into the digital domain. This presented itself as an intriguing problem and a challenge for us to find appropriate digital solutions to meet the requirements of Cage's original score. With further experimentation in the studio we became convinced that it was indeed possible to translate this "Cagean tape grammar" from the score to digital sound.Moreover we had obtained the possibility to further investigate and magnify certain implicit elements of the composition, unfolding Williams Mix into a rich and sonically detailed piece. As soon as the specifications of the score were transposed to fit digital requirements, we recognized that the duration of the piece, but not its dynamics, became a factor to be interpreted within the score. Infact, no time indications are given by the score itself; it only gives spatial information (the length in inches of the tape fragments that compose the piece). Tape is physically set at inches per second,so by knowing how fast the tape runs we can easily discover theduration of each page of the score. However, this formula does not apply to the digital domain. In digital audio software, spatial information and its relationship to time is not fixed, but always related to a number of variables (e.g. zoom function, monitor sizeand resolution), thus the duration of the score becomes a matter of subjective decision. Williams Mix Extended became a total duration of 32 minutes.

As mentioned above, the conversion of the piece to the digital domain implied a reinterpretation of a number of tape effects that the score required; if conventional tape editing can be simulated by digital means, this is not true for the unusual editing techniques required by Williams Mix.

In particular:

1 -‐each fragment of tape must be cut, according to the score, in a unique way (different angles; single or double cuts...) to "effect the attack and decay of the sounds recorded on the tape" (John Cage, Williams Mix Instructions, unplublished manuscript).

2 -‐ "when arrows appear in the score on diagonal lines, this refers to a way of splicing on the diagonal [sic] at the angle and in the direction notated which produces an alteration in all the characteristics of the recorded sound" (John Cage, Williams Mix Instructions, unplublished manuscript).

We experimented on magnetic tape in an attempt to clearly understandthe effects such techniques would have on the particular sound thatwas cut. Using a Revox B77 HS, we recorded the output of a tapetreated with these techniques on the computer to eventually slow itdown (or stretch it) to have a clearer insight into these sonicphenomena (which in reality last at most, 1/3 of a second, butusually a lot less). According to these experiments we decided how to'translate' these analogue effects into the digital domain:

1 -‐ by stretching the sound (recorded at 24bit, 96kh) several times, some sort of fade in (or fade out) together with frequency rumble is perceivable. To obtain a similar effect, we will apply lowpass and highpass envelopes following the same angles of the tape cuts.

2 -‐ "An alteration in all the characteristics of the recorded sound"is perceivable, with every kind of sound suddenly transformed intofrequency rumble, and some mid-‐range distortion is present.It remains unclear if the increase of the angle of the diagonalaccording to which the tape is spliced produces an increased amountof distortion or not. A digital simulation of this would be possible,but instead we opted to stay coherent with our medium; we decided toapply percentages of bit degradation in relation to the angles of thediagonals given by the score. The ratio is 1° to 1.1%, hence a tapefragment spooling horizontally will not be degraded; one spooling in a diagonal of 45° will be degraded by 50%; one spooling in a diagonal of 35° will be degraded by 38,5; and so on.

VIDEO

The video component of Williams Mix Extended is interwoven within the musical framework, approaching the score from a visual arts perspective. After investing much thought in the matter, it seemed natural to concentrate on Cage's original "tape grammar", and on its possible relationship with moving images mirroring the octophonic sound diffusion. Lillevan will assemble a library of moving images in similar categories to the sound library;

a: city images; B: country images; C: electronic images; D: manually produced images; E: wind produced images F: small images requiring amplification to be seen with others.

These will be treated and edited with film transitional techniques reproducing formal and functional aspects of the tape cutting and splicing methods present in John Cage's Williams Mix scoce.