"MUSIC AS DIFFERENT AS POSSIBLE" - Don Byrd, April 2006

* Do the opposite of what all existing (to my knowledge) music recommenders do

* Tim Crawford to Don: I don't want to find more music like what I already know,
	I want music as different as possible from it!

* Jeremy Pickens' example: Eigenradio

	> Listen to some of the "eigenradio" stuff that Brian Whitman has done. Here is an
	> interview:
	> 
	> http://www.bagatellen.com/archives/interviews/000974.html
	> 
	> Basically, he takes multiple songs/pieces of music, boils away everything that makes
	> all the songs similar to each other, and leaves you with only those things that make
	> the songs different, and then resynthesizes it.  He did this a few years ago with
	> Christmas songs:
	> 
	> http://eigenradio.media.mit.edu/christmas_2004.html

* This is NOT a good example! (Note: Jeremy just mentioned this to me in an e-mail
conversation, so his comment on it should not be taken too seriously.)

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Where can you find really different music without buying and listening to a
ton of new stuff?

One great place to look is Variations2. True, it's overwhelmingly Western
art-tradition music, but with 15,000 hours or so of music total, even 5% (at a
guess) of other music is still the equivalent of, say, 750 CDs. Besides, Western
art-tradition music gets pretty wierd before, say, 1300 and often after, say, 1910.
And how can you find the different music? One starting point you might try is the
reserve lists for various music courses
(http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/variations/reserves/). You might also find helpful my
list of pieces that made me think "I've never heard anything like that before",
below. Another hint: to find audio in Variations2, do a keyword search in IUCAT for
"http and sound and [whatever you're looking for]".

Another idea: use iTunes' or Ishkur's Guide's free samples or All Music Guide to
find likely candidates, then get the music elsewhere. Free from Variations2, though
maybe you find something you like so much you'd be willing to pay for it :-) .

What is Ishkur's Guide? Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music
<http://www.di.fm/edmguide/edmguide.html>. My bibliography says of it:

	An amazing guide to "electronic music" in a broad sense, obviously by someone
	with a non-art-tradition perspective, though it displays reasonable
	familiarity with musique concrete and the electroacoustic works of Varese,
	Stockhausen, etc. Has an amusing and informative tutorial on the history of
	electronic music. An outstanding feature is the presence of hundreds --
	perhaps thousands -- of audio examples.


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Here are some pieces of music each of which made Don think, when he first heard it
(and according to his 2005-06 memory), "I've never heard anything like that before."

Year	Music
heard
----	-----
		
1959	Alexander Brott: Three Astral Visions [dissonance, atonality, etc.--as
		well as I can remember; I was only 13!]
1960	Stravinsky: Le Sacre du Printemps [rhythm, dissonance, orchestration, etc.]
1961	Sibelius: Violin Concerto
1961	Ives: The Unanswered Question
1964?	Bob Dylan
1965	Early music in M201 (Music History from Antiquity to J.S. Bach),
		including Leonin & Perotin (12th cent.), Machaut (14th), Gesualdo (16th)
1966?	Webern: various works, e.g., Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op.10
1966	Music of the new Polish school, e.g., Lutoslawski: Trois Poemes of Henri
		Michaux, Penderecki, etc.
1967	Beatles: Sgt. Pepper (the whole album)
1967	Indian classical music, e.g., Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan
1967	Stockhausen: Kontakte (electroacoustic music)
1970's	Charles Dodge: Speech Songs, In Celebration [computer-synthesized
		"speech"/singing]
1970's	Jimi Hendrix: Star-Spangled Banner (from Woodstock), etc.
1970's	Mozart: Adagio & Rondo for Glass Harmonica [tone quality]
1980's	Minimal/gradual-process music, esp. works by Steve Reich and Phillip Glass
1980's	Vietnamese monkey chants
1980's	Nancarrow: Studies for player piano [texture, density of events]
1990's	Glenn Branca: Symphony (for orch. of electric guitars)
2004	Varese: Equatorial
2005?	[turntabilism]