school...

aiyo.... MUmmy!!! Firstly, common test is just over and we just received the MYE schedule... WHY???? somemore is drag over my poor poor birthday, make me cannot enjoy nt like last yr, all thanks to SYF i think. SYF is like one week b4 my MYE?? drag over 3 weeks somemore. SO suay...
Secondly, dazu suck today. got scolded by boon chye again. CAN GE!!! the fast part, cos he ask me listen to the bar 52 first part melody. then when he ask jess n marcus to play with sheng n me, the was no tt part then i gt scolded. so many times.... in the end, waste alot of time talk crap again. then jess and TCH tok tok tok. motivation speech, but in the end, all say before alr. so bored. then they close to 7 then release us. sigh...
LIFE IS UNFAIR... :(


wee!! we finally finished the music project...


What is music? Music is actually the appreciation of life beauty through the melody and sound waves. We come into contact with everyday, every moment. Music provides an appetizer for tracking the controversial issues of life as we try to achieve the glamour and majesty of arts scene on Singapore. Many people might just think that music is the sounds that appeals to us. However, music is much more than that. Whatever we hear in our daily lives is music. No matter how unpleasant it may be, it may still be pleasant to another person’s ears. Therefore, music can be known as organized sounds, or the art of sounds.

Most orchestral music and the ways of using instruments do not appeal to and interest majority of the people nowadays and many modern composers create music which is new, explaining why many people do not like it. Many people prefer classical music from the Baroque period to the Romantic period, which are composed by famous composers like Johann Sebastian Bach, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. They sound more appealing than new music, which composers try to make it as creative as possible, and to make people change their perspective of music appreciation and music. They try creative ways like the different techniques in music making such as changing the ways in which we normally play an instrument and making use of extended techniques. Although they did all these, there are still quite a number of people today who do not find these new ways in music making appealing. That is why extended techniques come in, with a vast variety in making music more interesting, creative and unique.
Basically, extended techniques are performance techniques used in music to describe unconventional, unorthodox or “improper” techniques of singing or of playing musical instruments. One notable example is Luciano Berio’s Sequenza V for trombone, which involves many different extended techniques like including multiphonics which means singing and playing at the same time, rattling a mute against the bell of the instrument, glissandi, and producing sounds while inhaling. In addition, the trombonist mimes and must at one point, turn to the audience and ask, "Why?" This increases the diversity of instrumental colours for contemporary pieces for trombone. Another notable composer is John Cage. He is an American composer and a pioneer of aleatoric music, electronic music, and the non-standard use of musical instruments. One of his famous compositions is the 4’33”, a composition which is tacet. It is rather meant to be perceived as the sounds the audience hears in the surroundings during the silent performance. The silent sounds are called ambient sounds and Cage wants the audience to hear them and let them know that this is music. It may not need to contain notes or melodies but even these sounds can be known as music to a composer or a passionate music lover. John Cage had also created a piano with its sound altered by placing various objects in the strings, which is known as the prepared piano. This is also one of the famous extended techniques created by the various composers.
There is a great diversity of extended techniques present today in the music history. For example, for tuned instruments, there are many extended techniques for the strings, brass and woodwind instruments. For the strings instruments, like the third bridge, which are used mainly on electric guitars. It divides the string into two pieces. When played at one part, the opposed part starts to resonate more or less depending on the distance. Exaggerated tremolo is also one of the extended techniques for string instruments. It is the rapid repetition of one note in music or a rapid alternation between two notes.
For the woodwinds or brass instruments, one of the extended techniques applied is by overblowing. Overblowing is when you over blow a wind instrument and it produces a note different from the one intended. Another technique is a combination of a mouthpiece of an instrument with the main body of another instrument. For example, we can use an alto saxophone mouthpiece on a standard trombone. For the electronics, we can use turntablism. It is the art of manipulating sounds and creating music using phonograph turntable and a DJ mixer. Beat mixing and scratching are some of the techniques applied in turntablism.
To sum everything up, we have learnt the definition of music, appreciated the use of extended technique, and explained the techniques used by various instruments and methods in creating new music. Creating new music is not only by penning down a series of notes from what you hear mindlessly, one need to explore an array of extended techniques, which are used by a composers who one might not have heard of. And to discover how they are able to so can we achieve confidence in creating new music.