Forum week 10

Freddy May



This talk took inspiration from Michael Paul Stavrou's book "mixing with your mind." Freddy attempted to deconstruct the most famous songs of all time to annalyse what exactly it is about them that makes them popular.

To begin with he utilized a formula for writing a successful happy song. The formulae being P+Pos+T+BPM+I=happy pop song. Now I could extenuate what this formulae means as Freddy did, but I think I'd rather focus on the inherent problems I find with this approach to music.

The modern Pop world today is the epitome of formularised music, yet its hold on the industry, although immense is not absolute and in many regards waning. In the advent of the downloadable music generation pop artists are finding it harder than ever to make CD sales, while artists who make an effort to expand music beyond a basic formulae and endeavor to express themselves creatively earn the respect from an fan base who bore of formulaic music and want something more to what they listen too. This fan base would make more of an effort to buy the CD and support the artist too from musical respect.

On another aspect though I did really appreciate the Psycho-acoustic ideas presented within Freddy’s talk. The ideas of certain frequencies/pitch and tempo/BPM resulting in various physiological or psychological responses is highly fascinating. It’s something I look forward to looking into more in the future.

Dragos Nastasie

Dragos analysed various pieces of music which had elements/ layers which constructed and/or deconstructed as they progressed. He also looked at the way in which this process changed the feel of the piece. I think the examples he chose really illustrated this.

Matt Mazzone

Matt deconstructed some work he did for an advertising company, which basically resulted in him explaining the processes he went through to create the sound for a few adverts. I can understand why one of the adverts one an award and think the way matt approached the sounds for each add was very clever.

References

Steven Whittington. “Forum – Week 10 – Construction and Deconstruction." Workshop presented at EMU space, Level 5 Schultz building, University of Adelaide, 17th May, 2007.

Frederick May. “Forum – Week 10 – Construction and Deconstruction." Student talk presented at EMU space, Level 5 Schultz building, University of Adelaide, 17th May, 2007.

Dragos Nastasie. “Forum – Week 10 – Construction and Deconstruction." Student talk presented at EMU space, Level 5 Schultz building, University of Adelaide, 17th May, 2007.

Matt Mazzone. “Forum – Week 10 – Construction and Deconstruction." Student talk presented at EMU space, Level 5 Schultz building, University of Adelaide, 17th May, 2007.

Pic References

Michael Paul Stavrou 2007. Mixing with your mind. http://www.mixingwithyourmind.com/ 17 May 2007.