Added: 4 years ago
From: d21d34c55
Views: 176,677
Sort by time | Sort by thread (beta)

Link to this comment:

Share to:

All Comments (227)

Sign In or Sign Up now to post a comment!
  • those are some angry bees 2:00 - 2:55

  • GREAT

    

  • amazing

  • he's pretty intense.

  • mjkc

  • I don't recommend putting this on at a party.

  • so i opened this video with my earphones deep in my ear canals. goddammit.

  • Genious!

  • @TomTheGuitarist Yes, I know. But what I wanted to stress is that sound itself (I mean the pure oscillation of molecules in the air at a certain frequency) may be better to convey an idea or a concept rather than a complex mix of sounds of an orchestra. Plus the fact that another civilized population in the space may not like Beethoven or Mozart, but it would have probably studied sound as a physical phenomenon.

  • Someone said classical music would be the best way to exchange ideas and emotions with the aliens, but I think this piece by Xenakis would be better for that purpose :)

  • Epic!

  • it actually caused ear pain listening it on my laptop

  • This music reminds me of The Shining soundtrack

  • superman at 8:05 lol

  • This program is amazing. I wrote the first five Radiohead songs from memory! Wow, I'm already a composer!

  • why should music reflect emotions? does music always have to be like "some guy talking"? (john cage said something like that, the vid is up here on youtube...)

  • 2:20 Reminds me of the THX sound

  • omg. why though? why is this music? why? who can dance to this and what would they do?

  • @TheDymondusic You do realize that the vast majority of music that has ever been composed was not made for dancing, right?

  • Like aliens having an epic starship battle in outer space...

  • this is by far one of the coolest things i've ever heard of.

  • music students are so used to listening to "older" music and the ending sounds like an imperfect cadence LOL!! there's a "I - V" rofl xD

  • this scares me. so much

  • My god..... never again.

  • my brain is full of fuck and I love it.

  • Lack of emotion? All that violent noise is lack of emotion? All the whining glissandos and frantic buzzing? This is mathematical / emotional music of great enthusiastic beauty.

  • he is not reflecting anything of his soul into this sounds. Its like if you write a poem, make a scrabble or wordle out of it and then turn it into morse code, then systematically apply dynamics and pitch with another soul removing system, and voila, you have another master piece xenakis, that reflects nothing but musically-emotionally irrelevant notes that are related by a subjacent inhuman and raw system. Xenakis isnt a musician in the psychological sense, his language is art but not music.

  • @rwrobp Probably, as you said, pretentious idiots. I'm one of the people who just likes listening to this stuff and no one (not even me) knows why. It might also be because the few people who do like listening to this don't know anyone in real life who wouldn't criticise them for listening to "interesting noise" or whatever, much less enjoy it with them.

  • awesome! like taking a crap and throwing up at the same time :)

    btw xenakis ftw!

  • Instant headache

  • Music for Fungus to grew by, perhaps?

  • WTF

  • the "landscape" moves slightly when the line passes due to artifacts or whatever but i am staring at this high as shit

  • How does the program interpret left-balance out of the drawing, do you suppose? Also, if one is trying to 'actively listen' to this, do you think it would be better to watch the score, or keep your eyes closed?

  • How does the program interpret left-balance out of the drawing, do you suppose?

  • Now I know my ears are ticklish...

  • i like it. it sounds how it looks, and it looks awesome. sonic representation of a weird and awesome alien landscape, tracing these beautiful patterns in tonal space and time. good stuff

  • 0:25 Out of tune violin

  • why couldnt he have drawn something cool like a sword or something....

  • Industrial meets Stockhausen...

  • well, this is the first piece by Xenakis that I really don't like. It's physically painful to listen to. Bits of it are bearable. Like parson's egg.

  • 4:20 sounds like dive bombers

  • this music? confounds the understanding.

  • Fantastic!

    Excellent for dinner parties!

    Seriously though, That burned me out, Guess I haven't listened to enough of him yet :D

  • Mosquitoes from hell.

  • I find it mundane, but surely it broke down barriers in its time.

  • The pan effect from left to right makes for quite a strange feeling with headphones on :S

  • 2:20ish -2:50 sounds like tron

  • This is excellent, I find it actually quite soothing...

  • I love this! But why!?

  • So each line corresponds to a different frequency?

  • On the contrary what you talking about is abstract, and adding ones' imagination you get close to the metaphor conveyed. On the other hand, I am talking about a concrete, exact, mathematical analogical relationship. Feelings are not something 'magical', as the word 'magic' in its initial meaning is illusion, they are not illusionary, feelings are real and now we can have the aid to grasp them.

  • I will agree that this is music but I do wonder if this style of composition can portray emotions other than fear and horror.

  • 私はこの曲を聴いて大変衝撃を受けました。この斬新さに驚きまし­た。私は色々な曲を聴いてきましたが、この音響空間の素晴らしさ­は他の音楽には無いと思います。気に入ったので何回も聴いていま­す。

  • I think this is quite amazing for being noise music.

  • wonderful. it's art. music of the future. finally something differtent.

  • are there credits for this video? i am linking to it from an article.

  • Is this music/art? Sure, to a small amount of people maybe (though I don't understand it).. but it also no doubts breeds pretentious idiots more interested in the image it gives off than the actual music. You can usually tell by reading the defensive comments. Comments masking a simple message such as "you're an idiot if you dont like this" with unnecessarily large words. I don't see countless comments of people praising each other for understanding stravinsky so why do I see so many here?

  • @rwrobp I find this to be art. Xenakis did some really cool audio/visual installations that I find to be inspiring. I agree with you though. A lot of listeners tend to think they are more intelligent than listeners of other styles.

  • @rwrobp i doubt you'll find a less pretentious music buff than me. i like this though. i'm not saying it's catchy, and it's definitely not what i would bring to a deserted island. it's just interesting noise to me.

  • @bretchet23 Can we bring our friend's sisters to deserted islands?

  • Imagine you are a composer and really want to try out that new idea you have. You don't have to give a f*** about statements like "music must have a melody" or something. You just do what you think is right.

  • @DerJayger You shouldn't give one about what established music is like go your own way and be free to do it as you see fit that's how you should do it.

  • I think I just pooped myself.

    Nope, that was the music too.

  • This sounds soo weird when you listen to it with headphones

  • It is not music but the very thing in which music hides

  • anyone tried listening to this on acid or mushrooms?

  • I will!

  • Sadly not, but I listened to this earlier when I was really high and drunk.

    The tones are just scary

  • hermoso sin ninguna duda. xenakis es de los pocos que han sabido trasceder el significado del termino musica. impresionante

  • When I look at the drawings Xenakis inputted into the UPIC to create Mycenae Alpha, I wonder if he had derived inspiration from biological assortment of cells. I can't help but be reminded, for example, of fungi when I see the picture at the right at 4:19.

    I'm wondering what his inspiration for the timbres used were as well.

  • ooo @ 4:43 looks like a beard man

  • This is a very intense and unsettling piece. VERY intense.

    Part of the reason I like Xenakis music so much.

  • beautiful

    #@!

  • His music scares me!And that is why eventually I appreciate it and like it!Music can very rarely provoke fear to people!This kind of music is perfect for thriller movies,it's a shame they don't use his music.

  • i wonder how timbre and amplitude are controlled.

  • timbre incontrollable, unless certain textures are set for different time slots. amplitude probably varies with thickness

  • Superb!  One of my favorite electronic works. Thanks for posting this.

  • I CAN FEEL THE WARP OVERTAKING MEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeee

  • There is a huge lack of imagination/creativity for those that come here and call this work by Xenakis horrendous...I'm going to use Xenakis studies for an architectural project, I think his work was far away for his time. Thanks for this great video.

  • I can almost imagine what it might be like to experience synethesia; I wonder if Xenakis might have been partly inspired in this by Kandinsky.

  • Hi D21d34c55,

    I've contacted you a little while earlier regarding your Mycenae Alpha video. Could you please let me know how you got the time line to travel across the images? What programme did you use?

    Please Help!

    PS: if anyone else happens to know how this is done and is willing to help, I would really appreciate it.

  • I sang this for my girlfriend on our first date and well, folks, now we're married.:)

    Just shows what music does for the human heart.

  • classic!

  • GAAAAH!!! It sounds Like the THRENODY!!

  • Yay!!!!!! It sounds like the THRENODY!!

  • The Second Picture is terrifying as it unfolds harmonically. I love it. I feel as if I am seeing the synapses in my brain firing in slow motion.

  • Yeah, real good. This is DRIVEL. Go listen to Bach's Preludes and Fugues for a real experience, not an avant-garde posturing session where you "get into" this "music."

  • There's no need to get on the defensive and start insulting people just because you don't understand something if it doesn't fit into your narrow (and restrictive) mindset of what 'music' is...It's good to have an mind open to possibility and development...

  • Does anybody out there have information about if CeMAMu still exists and if so what they are doing? I saw a posting somewhere for some summer programs for composers in 1998, but that is no long ago. I would be interested to know if they are still there, and how to contact them.J

  • drthess thn poutsa mou thn 8es?

  • I loved this piece, but would have preferred it to be performed in K-flat Major.

  • Sounds like angry bees.

  • WTF?

  • The lack of emotion in the piece makes it sound 'alien', 'inhuman', 'monstrous'. The fact it evokes this in the viewer makes it music and not simply just noise. My cat came downstairs as if wanting to know what the hell I was listening to. So obviously it stands out. I wouldn't say I enjoyed this in the slightest since it sounded frightening, but it is fascinating.

  • @ehrenyu This piece just as everything from Xenakis is very thoroughly composed.

  • We just haven't learned how to listen to atonal or avant-guard, futuristic classical music because our ears are too trained to hear and enjoy the familiarity of tonal, common music. Atonal music is the only way to elicit and extract all the inexplicable feelings from within the depths of the slumbering human condition. Tonal music fails horribly at doing this. So be patient.

  • and it is now the time with the aid of technology, to pass through ratio relationships to the best possible analogies of the human condition. one prime example, convert human;s heart rhtyms under stress or love state for example into pitch intervals, translation of the heart pulse ratio into pitch interval ratio , so on so forth

  • @ArgonDeeBosh Listen to some recordings of say, pines of rome or symphony fantastique and you will hear that kind of stuff used extensively

  • Now if you mean Berlioz and Respinghi, you have a lot of imagination! ;p

  • @ArgonDeeBosh I'm not talking about some abstract frequency derivation that no one will actually feel the emotions it is derived from. But music that can and does portray such emotion...

  • I have a feeling this is the future of music. At this point in time it lacks the amount of theory needed to be defined as a form of art that demands the conviction from it's listeners that it truely is music. People on here are thinking too linearly; too traditionally; too.. 19th/20th Century-ly. In the later years of the 21st century we will be bored of the predictability found within tonal, classical/popular music and we will find enjoyment within the beautiful music of atonal "shitty sounds"

  • Well such a mean being I am ^^ I am thinking too traditional... because I still have this pityful idea that music should touch feelings.

    This kind of art is interesting but it does not touch anything at all. Sorry.

  • where have you been the last 100 years?

    atonal music has become traditional itself. and slices of it have been incorporated into all kinds of music. for me that piece is music history. the future is somewhere else

  • I haven't been anywhere in the last 100 years, I've only lived for 20. Atonal music may not be the future, I agree. But it surely is one of the most recent musical disciplines to work from, and future music will probably be dominated by that "atonal sound".

  • Well.. OK lets say that, on its general definition, this is some form of art.. Some may even regard it as being creative because Xenakis spend some of his precious time to put down an arrangement of graphs and drawings to create this..

    BUT the end product is just NONSENSE.. Humans created the term music to define noises that excite feelings. THIS DOES NOT (unless you have some serious issues). Noise existed before humans defined music and will exist forever. SO THIS IS JUST F******* NOISE!!

  • It excited your anger, so it's music.

  • @charmand79

    You sound pretty angry. Anger is a feeling too.

  • it's sound and form, that's all

  • This is CREEPY!

  • τουρκόσπορε lampogialoglou παρε τον μπουλο....δεν ειναι για αμορφωτους τσιφτετέλληνες ο ξενακης

  • how do so many angry people find this anyway?

  • sound like somthing off of 2001 a space odessy

  • surely this video shows that this music is intricatly and deliberatly composed, not just improvised feedback and in no way theatrical. sonic design maybe, especially Xenakis' electronic pieces. i dont think its radical pop or jazz, its radical classical, it comes from classical roots ie rigorously formal composition, however noisy the resulting music is.

  • EL HOMBRE HABLA DONDE HAY VIDA.

  • incredible

  • trash

  • COOL

  • I picture a wonderful starlit night in paradise while beautiful enchanting melodies are faintly heard from the distance.

  • :)as usual wonderful comments

    heart? sense? meaning?

    there's no place for you in Valhalla

    RIP mr Xenakis

  • Isn't music simply organised sound?

  • What organization does this piece have? It's noise to me. This may be art, but it's not music.

  • it's actually quite musical. you just have a very limited and conservative definition of music. OPEN YOUR MIND!

  • There's nothing wrong with the music of those composers, but is this music not of the same quality? It may not have a discernible melody or any sort of characteristic that would make it exactly "pleasant", but Mycenae Alpha is brilliant in its own right.

  • Is the purpose of music to be understandable? To make sense? A lot of music makes no sense at all.

    Does music exist as a thing to entertain YOU, or as an open forum of expression for a person? What is the purpose of music?

    I, personally, find a huge amount of expression in this.

    Of course, there's going to be huge divides in opinion on this. We're both totally entitled to whatever we think. Just wanted to throw another idea out there. :)

  • step off faggot

  • my friend this music its a result of some things like second world war and stuff like that.the fact that you cant understand this piece of art doent mean that it is not music.you r just unable to understand in your ignorance

  • Yes maybe you're right, because I must say that I will never understand this "music". For me it will always be as beautiful as a plane flying... but I'm only ignorant of that kind of music, because i learn classical piano since I'm 6 and I learnt classical music history. what I think about this "song" is that it was only created for provocation

  • flying planes make beautiful sounds!

  • They actually do. That, in my opinion, is a portion of what makes me enjoy takeoff during a plane flight — the surging of masses of sound that eventually and beautifully coalesce into a sonic lullaby. I find it to be music.

  • you see, a piano sounds always the same. of course, there are many different pitches and two pedals, but generally, the sound is quite similiar all the time.

    were you at any time surprised by the sound of you piano? certainly not. of course, what is the importang thing are the notes rather than the sound of each key.

    I'm sure hearing this xenakis piece was a new experience to you, even though you did not like it.

  • No you dont get it yes I know how will sound my piano but I'm often surprised when I play a tune or when I compose. But I think this piece is less surprising than a piano even if you can't predict what will happen because this song sounds like an effect just like in echoes (pink floyd)

  • the entire drawing at 4:20 sounds and looks so cool

  • XENAKIS RULES!

  • I wouldn't call xenakis amazing, interesting yes, but not amazing. Thanks for sharing this, very entertaining! :)

  • cool

  • aREN'T YOU THE CATTY ONE.

    meow meowmeow.

    anyway, this is quite lovely. xenakis made some amazing stuff.

  • Comment removed

  • It's hard to explain in words why I like this. I'ld have to know more about music in order to fully understand this, but I liked it. It might sounds like noise, but it's a good noise (if that makes any sense). Xenakis is quite good! yeah!

  • you don't have to know more about music to understand it. the reason you like it is its a direct correlation of audio/visual data and that's always interesting. it's also the basis for a good deal of hypnosis

  • ohhh that is truly fascinating Xenakis - Genius !!!!!!!!!!!!

  • esto es una gran cagada a quien le gusta estos chirriantes sonidos

  • Xenakis didn't draw the traditional distinctions between math/science and art, or between the visual and the auditory...he used all of it and more to create his endlessly fascinating music. I am in awe.

  • awesome

  • no sea tan turro

  • Inversing the fourier transform

  • omg 5:16 incredible

  • very interesting...

  • xenakis...such a renegade.

  • This is incredible...a potent fusion of music and image!

  • it looks like a writing system for an alien language, with the alien interpreting it. spooky

  • Combine a fax machine and synthesizer, and you have UPIC! Add lights and lasers to an art installation, and this would represent the ambient sound.

  • He requires you to take music as he sees, not bunched into the same old structures of Western music and question where noise ends and music begins. This wouldn't go over big at a Rave!

  • wow that incredible!

  • Esta música fue realizada en la UPIC, software creado y desarrollado por Xenakis y por Julio Estada (mexicano), que trabajó con él varios años, de hecho, con el Dr. Estrada se puede conseguir este programa para PC (no hay versión para Mac), pero se pueden conseguir sonoridades muy similares e interesantes con Metasynth (para Mac).