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The National Film and Sound Archive’s Sounds of Australia is a public registry of recordings that celebrates the unique and diverse recorded sound culture and history of Australia. On Tuesday, a lecture on the launch of digital radio in Australia was followed by minister Peter Garrett’s announcement of the NFSA’s 2009 additions to the registry and that fabulous living icon of Australian sound, Robyn Archer, accompanied by Michael Morley, presented Radio and Me – a programme of songs, poems and personal anecdotes, especially created, with the research assistance of Robyn Holmes from the National Library, for the occasion. Sounds of Australia was first launched in 2007 with a foundation list of 10 recordings. Each year, public nominations are called for and 10 new recordings are added to the Registry, selected from the nominations by a panel of experts from the recorded sound industry and cultural institutions. You can find out more about the registry here. ...continue reading "Sounds of Australia – Iconic or just Nostalgic?"

That’s 75th birthday, not symphony (or vodkas)!

The National Library with ANU celebrated Larry Sitsky’s 75 birthday last Friday (20090911) with a public presentation for about 300 people of The Musical Journey of Larry Sitsky. This twilight event, programmed by Robyn Holmes, the Curator of Music at the NLA, consisted of a series of works interspersed with conversation authoritatively lead by her. The music in the programme was: ...continue reading "Sitsky’s 75th"

For those of you who enjoy ABC-TV’s Spicks and Specks, last night’s episode had a couple of segments that used Babelfish (or something roughly equivalent to it) English -> Japanese -> English translations of song lyrics. Excellent!

I have a work using the same technique – but realised with text-to-speech software and extended to other languages (Korean proves to turn up some particularly beautiful obscurities). My piece I am on the net is a homage to the Alvin Lucier piece I am sitting in a room. Read the full text and listen to an MP3 of part of it here:

I am on the net through an interface different from the one you use when you do

A full-bandwidth version is on the 2008 ACMA double-CD Unfenced, which seems not to be commercially available (yet?...)

A rather alarming report by ABC’s Stephen Crittenden entitled Who stopped the music? on Radio National’s Background Briefing programme.

People interviewed include Dick Letts (Chair of the Music Council of Australia, former Director of the Australian Music Centre and Music Board, Australia Council) and music education personality Richard Gill. I worked with Letts on the formation of the MCA and have known Gill since I played violin in Terry Hunt’s Combined Schools Concert Orchestra in my secondary school days in Sydney in the early ’70s. Both are considered human beings and the portrait they paint of the state of music education in public schools in morose. ...continue reading "The decline in music education in Australian public schools"

Composer Gordon Monro, via Warren Burt, has pointed me to Philip Galanter’s manifesto-like piece in which he proposes what he calls “Complexism – a new science-friendly paradigm for the arts and humanities”.

Read Gordon’s blog post/summary and/or Galanter’s original text. ...continue reading "Complexism?"

There I was, taking my evening ambulation; there was yacking about sport on RN and so ABC-FM (bewdiful musick) got my ears for an hour. Classic drive. Broom broom–swept off my feet!–and Julie Lester was reporting on an experiment the NSO tried whereby the audience could get the back story or some bright spark’s interpretation of Beethoven’s 6th “bird music” by logging on to twitter with their blackberry, raspberry or whatever… You can read about it and the press release etc here if you want. “NSO”? You guessed it: National blah blah ...continue reading "The Twitter of Beethoven’s Birds"