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Whitecube (For a Museum)

uploaded: Sat, Dec 5, 2009 @ 9:32 AM

by	boomaga
length	6:32
BPM	71
Recommends	Recommends (5)

Made for the White Cube museum exhibit project (foreground) using the spoken word “The White Cube” by SackJo22. Ambient with some rhythmic elements.
Made with acoustic guitar, drumsticks, gong, piano, Yamaha Motif XS8, homebrewed ambient sounds manipulated in CoolEdit and Cubase.

Walter Murch has famously stated that the brain can really only perceive “two and a half” sounds as seperate entities - any more than this and the discrete sounds become melded into a single mass of sound. The first section of three in this piece has, I would consider, 3 1/2 sounds - the second, 2 1/2, and the third 1 1/2. The piece ends abruptly and cleanly without reverb tail.

Regarding the “white cube” concept:

Abstractly and pragmatically, white gives us the feeling of a lack, a featureless-ness, a potential energy like an object poised to fall from a height, to be converted into kinetic energy, from possible to definite. It is a space for an idea to be borne out, an infant’s cradle that is, for the moment, empty. So it is a space “in waiting,” but it is also a purity, untainted, unblemished. We probably are programmed with emotional reactions to the sight of a field of winter white, our primitive selves crawling from dark warm smoky huddled masses to stand alone and face that astringent sting of cold and austere field of bright nothing. Some people can’t tolerate this blankness, this purity, and must put their mark on it, by whatever means, to break up that field. Suddenly this white ceases to exist, and what exists is the mark, framed by a blankness - an abstract replaced by a concrete. This could also be a reaction to the Emperor’s New Clothes, the suspicion of a put-on - as silence is the potential for sound, who wouldn’t be tempted to cough loudly during John Cage’s 4’33” ? And yet in that prescribed silence, there IS a breathless expectation, there is the sound of music unheard, as sound fills our space all of our days long and color fills our vision, a sudden blanket of white and silence will take our breath away.