Hovey's Lounge in the basement of Thayer Dining Hall played host last Thursday to performances of original digital music compositions by faculty and graduate students. The dim common room-turned-venue looked like a trendy cafe, with ambient lights showing silhouettes of an intimate group lounging on couches and armchairs, eating cookies from Umpleby's and chatting about their upcoming projects.
This was the second of three concerts in the student-organized Digital Harvest Concert Series sponsored by the College's digital musics program.
Paul Osetinsky GR '10 and Chris Peck GR '10, professors Spencer Topel and David Casal and a guest band, Living Things, played original pieces that blended acoustic sounds with synthesized music from computer programs.
Peck kicked off the show by leading the approximately 20-person audience through a series of tongue twisters. Holding up cards that read "crush groats groats crush," "the body bought some butter but the bitter butter," among other phrases, Peck gave the spectators clear instructions about repeating and speeding up.
After a few minutes Peck played back a recording of the exercise. The audience members were left to listen to their voices in what Peck called "a strange amateur choir."
Peck, who was recently mentioned in The New York Times for a performance at the Chocolate Factory in Queens, N.Y., studies text and language in music.
Osetinsky played electronic music from his laptop that he manipulated on the spot with a soundboard. The product of his digital creation was vibey and soothing, with upbeats dispersed through the piece. When he tweaked the soundboard, the beat would slow down or speed up. Occasionally, beeps sounding like a submarine underwater were thrown into the mix.
Next, Topel on the piano and Casal on the violin echoed each other's short, sharp sounds, clearly engaging in a musical conversation. The computer offered a constant jagged piece behind the acoustic music, giving the work as a whole complex layers for the audience to explore.
To end the show, the band Living Things played a half-hour piece that included wind-up toys and fur-covered instruments. The three band members seemed to be in the midst of a musical seance, a red light illuminating their faces and none of them leaving their seated positions on the floor. They were surrounded by puppets and toys, which they incorporated into their performance.
The piece started with bird-like and jungle noises coming from a variety of wind instruments, including whistles and recorders. As they built up in the middle, the band members switched to a guitar, drums and two horn instruments. All three sang, the words not mattering as much as the strained inflection of their voices.
After this epic ending, the band invited the audience to join them in a night on the town in Hanover.
Osetinsky, a second-year student in the two-year program, planned and organized the event. He originally planned for the series to debut this summer in what is now One Wheelock in the basement of Collis Center.
"One of the reasons we were going to have it in a central place like Collis is to reach out to the undergrads," Osetinsky said. "We think the undergrads may be really interested in what we're doing and we'd like to interact with them as much as possible."
Undergraduate students have in the past participated in performances with the graduate digital music students. In the eight-week Ear Warmer concert series in Winter 2009, faculty and students from the masters program shared a performance space with undergraduate students from Music 9, "Music and Technology."
According to professor Michael Casey, who co-directs the digital musics program along with professor Larry Polansky, the opportunity for students to design their own concert series is important so that they have a place to freely try new things.
"The whole idea is about giving students a forum to express creativity," Casey said. "And also for it to be a safe forum for experimentation."
The 20-year-old digital musics graduate program has a focus on interdisciplinary studies. It specifically explores the relationships among music, technology and cognitive and computer science. Dartmouth professors invented the first commercial digital synthesizer in the 1970s, Casey said.
"There's a campus-wide awareness and shift toward embracing digital culture in general. It's affecting everything," Casey said. "Why is that important? Because that's the world that your generation is going to enter."
Although the digital musics program is labeled as such, Osetinsky said he tries to avoid classifying what he does as fitting a certain music genre.
"Categorization can be dangerous sometimes, even though it's helpful," Osetinsky said. "Sometimes it's just hard to describe things, especially when it's experimental."
For the next and final concert of the series on Nov. 19, Casey will present music using software that he developed. Undergraduate students will also play at the performance.