eric siday and sound logos
I've been commissioned by the American Music Center to write a piece of music for the Siday Music On Hold Program. Siday "was the first American composer to systematically utilize electroacoustic sound potential within the television medium, particularly with his 'invention' of the sound logo and the Musical Rorschach test."
In Japan composers are commissioned to create short electronic pieces to announce train arrivals. Experimental design collectives, like Tomato, create 3 second Flash animations for instant download to millions of NTTDoCoMo cell phone subscribers. Means of distribution have become equally if not more interesting than most content. A politician's soundbite or a faux-authentic record scratch: they're both part of a always-on network of highly condensed sound codes. I thrive in it.
Siday's sound logos are like sonic DNA molecules that get in your head and take on a specific and condensed meaning, usually in the form of subliminal marketing. I think the Japanese are brilliant at this, I vividly remember the very very short and frighteningly catchy theme to 7-11 convenient stores, or the train songs from various stations in Tokyo telling me that I better run before the doors close and the train leaves me waiting at the station.
For the Music-On-Hold piece, I'm thinking of making a kind of game, a collection of sound logos, maybe I can develop a system that would make it interactive, so the listener, while waiting, could actually play along with it using the touch-tone phone, a kind of audio Simon Says. Or maybe I'll just write a piece of music that is made from sound logos, a collage of international marketing logos that play nicely with one another. Or...