VBS.TV Blog

MOON TUNES

August 31, 2009
by VBS Staff

Motherboard

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One thing uneducated people like to say about famous works of art they don’t understand is that they/their kids/arbitrary beast suffering from arbitrary neural affliction could make that. While this statement is generally a gross overestimation of their own creative faculties, exceptions abound, with a major one being the serialist works of Pierre Boulez where the beast/child/dunce in question is the Moon.

This thing uses a topographical atlas of the lunar surface to make tinkly oddball music out of corresponding notes and altitudes from any given orbit. You can screw around with the preferences to make it sound like a slap-bass or whatever (incidentally, the “Space Opera” setting makes it sound exactly like Wendy Carlos’ Digital Moonscapes), but no matter what you pick, the results are guaranteed to be better listening than M. Boulez’s entire ouvre and pretty much any experimental work composed between 1913 and whenever Terry Riley started working on “In C”, especially 12-tone. Sorry Schonberg, but the letters of your name ain’t got shit on the comparative heights of the Mare Fecunditatis. I haven’t bothered with the “Free Scratch” mode because the term “scratch” bugs me.

Anyways, if you haven’t yet you should give this moon-bell thing a whirl. It isn’t quite as day-sucking as this old sine wave synthesizer, but it is a lot easier to accidentally leave playing on your headphones when you go for soda and make your co-workers think their ears are mass-hallucinating.