#HUSO2326

[3490148]

“Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation"

http://mkw.melbourne.vic.gov.au/decode/

Decode, an event presented by Media Lab Melbourne as part of Melbourne Knowledge Week was held at 1000 Pound Bend in the CBD. The night featured interactive installations, and performances by both sound and video artists, but my focus here will be MindBuffer – a Melbourne-based multi-media duo consisting of Joshua Batty and Mitchell Nordine. Batty is actually my tutor for a unit called Computational Prototyping, where he gave us a demo of the software he’d been writing that week to be used during the performance.

We entered 1000 Pound Bend through the side alley, where we found two rooms. The first small room featured the interactive displays including a Virtual Reality 3D painting program, and a Tron-esqe hexagonal two-puck pong game. The larger main room held in each corner, the bar, a stage/DJ booth, a huge projection screen for the live video work, and in the last an enormous half-insect half-off-road-vehicle sculpture with flashing coloured wings and speakers for a head. The main room was also very large, with high ceilings, and extremely reflective; most surfaces either concrete or brick, which the crowd did only so much to soften.

MindBuffer’s live show was played from a pair of laptops generating sound and controlling a pair of multi-coloured lasers perched on 3m tall plinths either side of the stage. The main projection screen, insectoid sculpture, and room lights were all turned off for the duration of their performance, and the resulting darkness, fog machine, and brightness of the lasers meant the duo was rendered essentially invisible.

A post shared by lys:// (@lysdexic_) on May 5, 2017 at 8:20pm PDT

https://www.instagram.com/p/BTvE-0UFSTR/

The colours sat predominantly in single tones, and occasionally in pairs with red, green, and blue being most effective – that is really standing out against the black background. During a couple of sections the bands separated into broad rainbows but this always felt like it diluted the potency of the beams. White and yellow in particular lacked any of the force felt from the additive primaries.

A post shared by lys:// (@lysdexic_) on May 5, 2017 at 10:28pm PDT

 https://www.instagram.com/p/BTvTodql67-/

The shapes also seem limited to points or lines; solid fills are impossible, so to create any weight the beams have to be used collaboratively, or collaborate with a third element like the fog pumped into the room. Understanding a little about how Batty had programmed the beams lead me to believe any depth perceived from my vantage point (side on) was coincidental; more on this later.

MindBuffer’s sonic component was a stark angular techno pulse; quite two-dimensional, but in a way suited to the glowing RGB vectors overhead. What greatly impressed me were the patterns that all sprouted from a central 4/4 grid, but didn’t fall back on it as a crutch. The variety of manoeuvres available to the pair, without them sacrificing their hold on the dancers on floor was refreshing in this context, however, after some time the construction of the tracks began to stand out a little too much.

Sometimes this works but in this case, after 30 minutes I felt like I could actually hear the ‘random’ button being pushed to generate the next pattern, and the samples used had a ‘folder of kicks’ library quality that I found difficult to un-hear. I should say, that one great moment of relief came in the form of simple tempo changes, which is something boorishly rare western – and especially dance - music. Be that a global tempo shift, or between beats, the changes were welcome MB!

The relationship between the sound and sight was definitely one linked in data. Sometimes it was hard to pin down exactly what was controlling what, but there were obvious shared fluctuations in both. Joshua’s approach – from my time with him in class – seems to pivot around using combinations of simple motion to create complex motion. Most of the crowd seemed to stand between the lights facing the stage, watching two searchlights, open and close like blooming flowers – which are far brighter and more intense than what I saw side on – but ultimately they’re facing pinpoints.

The control software used in the performance uses a grid or ring of points that are sometimes connected with lines, and moved in relation to one another. These points are essentially the destination of the beams: the wall that stops their potentially infinite path short. What this means is that each laser begins at a single point on top of the plinth, then spreads outward into the room. The two-dimensional shape at any slice along the trajectory from source to destination is self-similar. No matter how complex the shape on screen, you see the same thing 10cm from the plinth as you do on the wall at the back of the room. From the perspective of the software and user who controls them the shape is flat. So any real depth will come from a combination not of the shapes on screen, but from the intersection of the beams, their changes in colour, their duration, and their motion. On this last point is where MindBuffer succeeded.

The question became for me, not what is the worth of lasers, but if we assume they have a value (good or bad), how far can you move from this, with them? Lasers are captivating, mesmerizing, and beautiful with little effort… so how can you make a laser dull, ugly, or pathetic? I’m writing this well aware of your (Phillip’s) complete distaste for this kind of synesthetic spectacle, but it also raises the question of why you would want, or feel the need for literal connections between sound and sight. I can’t say what I saw didn’t look great, but only half way through I felt myself wondering what else they could really do, and the answer the lasers gave me was: what else would you want?

What I would like is a deeper connection with the forces being manipulated before me. I’m all for absolute music, so I guess I should be all for absolute laser shows, but what I find are missing questions from MindBuffer’s performance, more than missing answers. I don’t care what light is, I want to know what light is to you.

I could have smashed out another 1000 words on this looking at Robin Fox, Chris Cunningham, James Turrell, and Baroque Painting. Sorry Phil I don’t know when to stop.

[3490148]

Novelty In Music

Aviva Endean w/ Justin Marshall - Ping Pong Pop

The night after seeing Will Guthrie perform at INLAND, I went to Make It Up Club. I thought the two might be interesting back-to-back because in many ways the music you’re bound to hear at either has a great deal of commonality, but the events feel completely different.

INLAND with its serif fonts and austere venue, presents itself as somewhat high-brow. MIUC on the other hand, held above a bar, with yelled introductions, feels far more low-brow and punk. They even share many of the same artists, and apart from MUIC’s obvious champion improvisation, there’s no clear distinction between the two in terms of their direction.

No doubt someone with more knowledge of the two could circle my error, but the difference reminds me of Arnold Schoenberg‘s serial methods, and John Cage’s chance music. Coming from two completely different directions, but ending up in surprisingly similar places. By no means a strict rule, but INLAND appears to pay respect to its classical roots, where MIUC seeks to reject them. Especially with regard to virtuosity.

Whether through improvisation, or serious contemplation of what may have come before and a serious effort made to forge ahead, both INLAND and MIUC seem to strive for what is often called New Music; that is Contemporary Classical Music/Contemporary Music/Contemporary Art Music ect. However, these titles don’t seem to be methods of creating new music, but ways of listening to or understanding music and sound art.

And In all cases, whether facing the past, or the future, the motivation seems to be the seeking out, or discovery of the new. New Music, is novelty music, but culturally, humor doesn’t often sit well with the kind of serious posture often associated with the rigor thought to be required to produce great art. The timescale of novelty compresses, as the world speeds up, what is new, doesn’t last as long, and things that don’t last can’t be great.

novelty (n.) late 14c., "quality of being new," also "a new manner or fashion, an innovation; something new or unusual," from Old French noveleté "newness, innovation, change; news, new fashion" (Modern French nouveauté), from novel "new" (see novel (adj.)). Meaning "newness" is attested from late 14c.; sense of "useless but amusing object" is attested from 1901 (as in novelty shop, 1973).

Aviva Endean w/ Justin Marshall - Ping Pong Pop

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcylabDfsD8&feature=youtu.be

At Make It Up Club, I saw Aviva Endean and Justin Marshall perform Ping Pong Pop. Endean, seated behind an extremely large saxophone type brass instrument, on a stool, on a large rotating platform that moved her as she played . Marshall sat off to the side of the stage triggering sounds to accompany Endean’s central performance.

The bell of the giant saxophone faced straight up, and was taller than Endean while seated. The sax had been equipped with some kind of contact mic to be amplified and also been fitted with some kind of plastic or fabric trap/sieve over the opening of the bell.

During the performance someone began tossing hand-fulls of ping-pong balls from a large glass fishbowl into the crowd. Collectively it seemed, people got the idea to try and throw the balls into the open bell of the sax; as this caught on, the energy in the room went from solemn appreciation for ‘difficult’ music, to wry curiosity, the outright playfulness. All the while poor Aviva is being pelted with a storm of flying pong.

Most don’t, but a few balls reach their mark, and at this point the performance shifts gears, with sounds obviously cued for the event being triggered, including warning sirens, boxing bells, and applause, triggering in turn laughter and applause from the audience. The horn blasted deeply in order to expel the lodged balls and the process starts over, repeat some 3-4 times.

While I have seen novel (see: funny) performances at INLAND, it’s hard to imagine this kind of work functioning in that environment. The whole attitude of the show, works here because MIUC not only fosters a real love for chaos within the performance, but also a blurrier line between performance and audience.

Don Buchla - Parabolic Trajectorie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W7Hr-WHvzc

The closest thing I could think of having seen/heard before was this performance of Parabolic Trajectorie by Don Buchla and friends. Consisting mainly of waiting, or prep time, until the conductor (a small heated pot of popcorn) begins to erupt  - one-kernel-at-a-time - then traced by the musical gestures of the small ensemble around it.

[3490148]

Space as Instrument

INLAND 17.4: A HOUSE OF BROKEN DISHES, IN DENSE WOODS - Will Guthrie, Drum Kit

After class on Monday evening I went and saw the latest INLAND concert at the Church of All Nations. This week’s class had been all about space, in sound and music; and this weighed greatly on my mind as I walked into an acoustic space I can only assume Phil Samartzis would have rolled his ears at.

The Church of All Nations in Carlton is a roughly 50(L) x 25(W) x 10(H) meter space, with a peaked wooden ceiling and smooth hard plaster-over-brick walls. The floor is two-thirds carpet at the entrance, and one-third wooden floorboards at the pulpit. The sound is certainly reflective, reverberant, but not distractingly bright like an old stone church, or modern glass-and-marble office foyer.

In class Phil explained his generally negative stance toward the use of reverb: to even out, or smooth over potentially dissonant sounds as inherently homogenous. For Phil, reverb seeks uniformity, and suppresses difference. Reverb is entropic.

While we didn’t discuss the piece in class, for me the obvious example would be Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room, which literally uses the natural reverb in the room where it is performed to reduce the once dynamic and complex sounds of human speech to a single fundamental tone.

On this point I would have to agree with Samartzis. Politically speaking, reverb is fascistic. Conservative. Sonically it seems to support an essentialist position: that there is a fundamental, some sort of pure, singular force from which all others can be derived. However, everything is relative.

While this view may be true, it suggests a direction faced – the origin – which would by definition propose an opposite – the destination. So the question becomes, what is the opposite of reverb?

The other problem raised by this view of reverb is that it is in itself a conservative view. Lucier’s piece, and by extension, Samartzis’ theory only function when the reverb in question is static. An object, or space with fixed properties that support a fundamental, and suppress its harmonics. So the question becomes, can a reverb be dynamic?

[I feel a huge footnote about the potential flexibility of dynamic reverb here, but think I might leave it for a later entry, or possibly a project?]

 Perhaps this can change the way we think about the word?

reverberation (n.)

late 14c., "reflection of light or heat," from Old French reverberacion "great flash of light; intense quality," from Medieval Latin reverberationem (nominative reverberatio), noun of action from past participle stem of Latin reverberare "beat back, strike back, repel, cause to rebound," from re- "back" (see re-) + verberare "to strike, to beat," from verber "whip, lash, rod," related to verbena "leaves and branches of laurel," from PIE *werb- "to turn, bend" (see warp (v.)). Sense of "an echo" is attested from 1620s.

 As the etymology outlined above would suggest reverberation is an internal act, we are the reverberant, we deflect that which comes toward us, away.

Perhaps when we say reverb, we don’t mean ‘the reflections of a given space’ exactly. Maybe we move further toward, ‘the average reflections of a given space or object’, or ‘the mean of an object’. And even then, we’re talking about the mean of the frequency domain. So perhaps reverb is simply the rule by which we map the mean of one dimension across another.

The problem I found with all these abstract ideals of reverb, whether mathematical models – calculating the fundamental tone of a struck metal rod – or a recording – a mic picking up single most dominant pitch in a room – is that they don’t come close to exploring the complexity of reflections I found myself experiencing while listening to Will Guthrie playing a fairly traditional drum kit in this church.

Firstly, I should say Guthrie’s performance was fantastic, lasting approximately 10-15 minutes and maintaining a relatively narrow tempo (while much of it was fairly free) and dynamic range. Guthrie’s playing seemed less about pattern, and more about patterns, where the layers of divided and multiplied clocks assigned to individual parts of the kit (steady 16th hats, alternating ¼ note kick and snare ect.) heard in rock drumming were loosened up to the point they spilled out into one another.

But what really struck me was the way the kit interacted with the space. I would normally sit as close to the front as possible, but having arrived late found myself in the back with some 10 rows of bodies between the performer and myself. The direct sound of the kit was blocked, and what I caught far more of were the reflections of each piece coming from different parts of the room.

I’m sure the effect had two main – and overlapping – causes: a) The placement of objects in the room; the kit in the space, including the angle and position of different drum heads and cymbal faces, as well as the arrangement of seating including my own position in the space. b) The absorbent/reflective qualities of these objects and surfaces. To put that less abstractly, I felt I heard each piece of the kit in a different part of the ceiling.

So to return to the conversation about reverb, what I found in this performance was an entirely different function for the ‘effect’; namely, to change the scale of the instrument applied. This also wasn’t universal, with the sound of the instrument becoming smeared into a single amorphous blob, but just the opposite. The room didn’t just cause dominant tones in the original material to linger, it worked like a microscope, taking a regular sized kit, and making it sound as large as the room.

I heard the cymbals in the upper corners of the ceiling, the toms bouncing from the back wall, and the kick flatly pulsing under chairs across the whole floor. The reverberant room didn’t sing the song of the drums, as a hollow tone back to me from a distance; it brought me inside the kit, planting me among its elements. In this way I felt it far easier to hear, and appreciate the skill of Guthrie’s playing: a quick roll across the snare capped by a crash wasn’t a matter of 10cm, it now felt a gigantic yet speedy leap from one side of the room to the other.

Reverb was no longer an effect, but an instrument.

[3490148]

Meta

Listening to Listening

Last week we looked at a number of ways a recording of place could be approached; and while a few of these examples contained elements of meta-commentary through an acknowledgement of the recording process, none seemed to succumb to a full-blown recursion.

While I’m always concerned about hegemony’s disposition to create weakness (think inbred), rather than strength (uniformity/solidarity), I think recursion is an important dimension for understanding or traversing the difference between metaphoric and literal modes of thinking. Recursion allows you to repeat a motion in it’s most abstract form, once a motion has been abstracted, it becomes universalised, and it’s particulars can be swapped out for others – allowing you to use the universal mode as a solution for other problems.

People often talk about the core tenant of post-modernity being irony, but I think irony is weak, and would instead promote a meta-mode as the true ID of the post-modern.

Shellac - 1000 Hurts

While I’ve been a fan of this record since it was released, it’s only recently I began to appreciate the humorous, self-referential qualities in the band, and particularly this work; no doubt I’m only scraping the surface.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fXwbFxenC0

The band’s name ‘Shellac’ I assume is a reference to the shellac resin early records were pressed in – a standard in the late 1800s - the speed at which records play was also directly related to the frequency of current powering the turntables. On this note, the name of the record is a reference to the test tones often used in calibrating recording, pressing, and playback.

Even the opening statements heard before the first song refer quite literally and correctly to the details of the master which would have been sent to pressing.

The album artwork continues this theme with the rather thick box (considering its flat contents) resembling the packaging of the ¼” Ampex tape preferred by the band. The protective sleeve the vinyl comes in has a picture of a self-branded oscilloscope (complete with green-yellow glow in the dark display), and even the sticker in the centre of the record designed to look like a reel-to-reel tape cartridge.

Lyrical themes on the record are often emotional, and bizarrely narrative; completing the second half of the 1000 Hurts title. Of particular note the opening track Prayer to God, or the follow-up Squirrel Song, which we’re informed upfront “is a sad fucking song.” Balancing this emotionally reflective side to the record are songs like New Number Order, where a pitched voice over shifting tempo, suggests a new order for the natural numbers that play with cliche’s surrounding the math inherent in music, while poking fun at the band’s roots in math-rock and emo simultaneously.

While it’s hard to claim that this record achieves the kind of grand task I described in my first paragraphs, I still think it manages to balance what we normally think of as the human-elements of life: emotions, and human relations, with the equally human dimensions of math, science, technology; all with a sardonic, harmonic, percolation.

[3490148]

Nocturnal cont.

Tackle - Benzedrine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlM1ITmeTwM

Continuing with the theme of night... I’d call this track ‘dark’ off the bat - but what do we mean when we say dark? But before I get stuck into that I want to look at the piece for the week. Tackle’s Benzedrine is around 07:30, and begins with almost a minute of sound design and atmospheric prep. Short teasing bursts of drum samples and synthetic bass swells build a kind of tension, before a brief pause, and then the real drum breaks kick in.

The tempo sits around 150BPM, slightly faster than Dub-Step, but much slower than most Drum and Bass or Jungle, which are it’s obvious peers. This makes the whole thing sound slightly too fast and too slow simultaneously. The rhythms are also quite different from the standard DnB break. Many of the patterns work with a kind of rule-set-rule-break motif, building expectation and anti-climax, sometimes within the space of a single bar.

While there is very little melodic content, sections are easily distinguished from one another; though I think this is more than simply changing patterns. The key is the underlying texture, or atmosphere of the track that shifts between sections. This includes the hum and hiss of recording equipment, as well as environmental sound, and acoustic elements such as scraping metal.

Brief moments of ‘silence’, where the loudest samples give way to the underlying atmosphere are the easiest points of entry, but on repeated listens its much clearer just how many layers of sustained tones and textures are playing at any given moment. These are then added and subtracted under conscious threshold of the attention grabbing breaks.

I feel the overall production of the track captures the mood of the night perfectly. One of the key ways it achieves this is by keeping a particular balance of quiet and loud sounds, and reverbs. The reverb is mixed quite high, but some of the quietest sounds like the amp hum doesn't seem effected by it. During the day most ambient electrical sounds in our home are drowned out by day-time activity, and it isn’t until we sit still in the quiet of night that we hear what was always there.

The relative volumes of elements in the track are also established by playing them together: for example drums sound different when you hit them hard, or soft; so by pairing a synthetic bass tone with the sound of some cans being kicked across concrete, we can establish parallel relations between synthetic and natural sound objects.

Reverb also helps establish these kinds of boundaries. ‘Quiet’ sounds such as amp hum, are mixed loud, with no reverb, as they would normally not be loud enough to be heard reflecting off distant surfaces, whereas the loud drums have loads of reverb. The mix builds a night-like environment.

Week 4 - Sound and Place

Speaking to the first assignment - 20% - 500 words.

Pieces we were played in class looked at:

Activation of people

Technological mediation of place

The world beyond ours (extra-human)

Preservation

Soundscapes

Improvising or collaborating with spaces

Natural vs built environments

Realtime vs edited recordings

In class we were talking about the way a soundscape might change drastically, (from a symphony of sirens to a waking fishing village) what we hear now may not be the same in 10 years, 100 years...

The night might be a way for us to travel the greatest distance, within the shortest distance. The night and its noise floors, its density - how quiet it is brings things closer to us.

A challenge to represent a place without simply sticking a mic out a window.

Stay away from the middle literal description of the place. Possibly move toward a hyper-literal approach.

While recording try to really meditate on what it is you’re doing, become better aligned with the task at hand, which will then hopefully open a new space, where the real work takes place.

Don’t step out as day-light into the night-space - you will blind it.

Try answering questions with sound: what is the night? The night is a place where [sound]. This might simply be a documentation of the process of asking this question.

Draw inspiration from the Japanese focus on negative space from week 2. Akira and light video essay ect.

Look for assumptions, look for the justs as a way out/through. It’s just a recording out a hotel window - all they did was hit record ect.

Brian Jones’ ethnomusicology and the mistake of trying to capture what is there. Perhaps a more productive approach is to try and produce something.

Of course there are gear fetishes, but this could be undone by or substituted for magic, where the tools are a nexus. Again, the hyper-literal as a way out.

Think about the activity or the passivity of the action - where is the power placed in the recording? How thoughtless or obvious are your choices?

How can you include or remove yourself from the recording process or the environment? - The example given of the old pianos being left out to rot - the environment is present in the piece before you’ve even set about recording or playing them.

Pitching things up or down can effect the density of the space, you’re not just moving faster, you’re sort of populating the spectrum with more harmonics, but self referential and recursively.

Felix Hess and Francisco López play with this idea of compression and expansion of time. Lopez’s ‘arbitrary’ cuts of approximately 2 minutes for every hour of recording time are no less arbitrary than the way pitch shifting cycles through live incoming audio.

Ways of accessing a space:

what are the sounds I can hear?

spatial dynamics/architecture

socail funtion of the space - ritual/transport/entertainment ect.

narative - what story does it tell?

signification - what does it mean to me?

100 words on each theme

Chasing Epiphany

Trying to explain to people, or sell them on the art project. The communication of ideas. Have the work perform that function (a numbers meaning is what it does - need to look up this quote). Art practice is not something you ever ‘get’ or hope to have done - Rick Roderick: Philosophy is like housework, there is always more to do, the point may be closer to ‘keeping up’ rather than ‘completing’.

How to shed opinion in favour of questions?

Opinions don’t generate anything, or open things up.

[3490148]

timespace

Muray Schafer – Thinking About Sound – Open Ears

“Where you want to have slaves, there you should have as much music as possible’, Tolstoy once said to Gorki. A society too drunk with music is incapable of other operational achievements, and the ruler who wishes to stay in power knows how to stimulate music and when to withhold it, as the church did in the Middle Ages or as Stalin did when he slapped the wrists of Shostakovich and Prokofiev and strangled American Jazz.” (p30)

 I don’t think music is a type of sound, but a way of listening. Sound may be the neutral signal, music the message, and the remainder, is noise.

The master without a slave is no master at all, and if you need music to produce slaves, then the master is also a slave to music. 

Etymology

“The Latin word audire (to hear) has many derivations. One may have an ‘audience’ with the king – that is, a chance to have him hear your petitions. One’s financial affairs are ‘audited’ by an accountant, because originally accounts were read aloud for clarity (cf. Ong 1982). An accused person is given a ‘hearing’, that is, a chance for the accused and witnesses to offer aural testimony in the courtroom. Of course, rooms are often constructed or appointed to favour the transmission of some voices over others, and the courtroom, like the royal court, is no exception, with the judge as the king occupying the most elevated position, reminding us that the latin word obaudire meant ‘hearing from below’ – obeying. Similar relationships have been noticed in other languages, for instance in German, where horen (to hear) is also the root of gehoren (to belong to) and gehorchen (to obey). We hear sound. We belong to sound. We obey sound.” (p30)

I’m all about etymology for revealing metaphor, and playing with the literal meanings of words to explore and generate language. However this whole paragraph - while interesting, and does some of that - sounds a bit like the ‘law of the instrument’: When you’re holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

 Sound is everywhere and everything, if and when sound is everywhere and everything. I feel this is like the acoustic ecology primary sound from LaBelle’s chapter last week. It seems a backward and entrenching view.

“The power of technology really comes down to a fascination with buttons and switches in an attempt to modulate information intake. “ (p38)

Really? I think that’s a bit literal. Though I might grant a more abstract version where technology is about our fascination with control.

“Most of the sounds busy people listen to are signals of activity. This explains their immunity to the sounds of nature. One of the essential differences between the natural environment and the engineered environments in which most people now live is that natue can’t be shut off with a button. Things that can’t be generated or shut off with buttons or switches attract little attention in the modern world. “(p38)

I guess in an abstract way this is true, but even a bird singing in a tree outside my window could be “turned off” with the push of a “button”. Do I really have the power to simply turn off an entire city’s traffic with the push of a button? We are not separate from our technology, it is environmental, no matter the scale.

“The composer Toru Takemitsu explains the difference between the oriental and the occidental listener in this way:

The bells of Westminster Abbey speak in terms of first person singular: they have an individual motive with a distinctive statement. The Japanese temple going [gong?] however, speaks without personal identification: its sound seems to melt into the world beyond persons, static and sensual. (Takemitsu 1995)

Sound objects in the oriental landscape encourage peripheral listening, while sounds in the West compete for focused attention – can this be true?” (p38)

 This all feels like it links nicely to the guest speaker had in class this week:

Christophe Charles

Borrowed scenery (借景; Japanese: shakkei; Chinese: jièjǐng[1]) is the principle of "incorporating background landscape into the composition of a garden" found in traditional East Asian garden design. The term borrowing of scenery ("shakkei") is Chinese in origin, and appears in the 17th century garden treatise Yuanye.[2]

Ma – Spacetime

Ma (間) is a Japanese word which can be roughly translated as "gap", "space", "pause" or "the space between two structural parts."[1][2][3][4] The spatial concept is experienced progressively through intervals of spatial designation. In Japanese, ma, the word for space, suggests interval. It is best described as a consciousness of place, not in the sense of an enclosed three-dimensional entity, but rather the simultaneous awareness of form and non-form deriving from an intensification of vision.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXTnl1FVFBw

I feel there’s a real link in this analysis of the space used in Ghost In The Shell to what we might be doing this semester.

Listening to Charles talk about the remix project he worked on - and the way he removed parts of the original, and ended up with something a lot shorter - made me think about how the two dimensions of sound frequency and amplitude (or duration, and intensity) could be thought of as a way of folding time-space. When we make cuts, we stitch two moments that were not next to one another together, we create a kind of worm-hole, a portal that leaps from one place(time) to another.

Filtering frequencies also removes time domains. Sound happens simultaneously, yet we hear multiple frequencies at once. Does a crossover filter create two halves – two time domains? Does a filter achieve the same thing as a linear cut in audio, but in another dimension?

Takeisha Kosugi – micropaper – generative music.

Charles also mentioned Duchamp as a big influence on his work with transparency. Duchamp experimented with glass and work that allows the gaze to pass through it. Though he didn’t spend much time talking about it, I feel there’s a lot here to look at.

Phil didn’t like the Raster Noton stuff – too much of it’s time. But his question -  what of the trend among what you’re playing to be so many acts that are simply one person on a laptop – are there any ensembles?

Made me consider the label as the ensemble. Where a band/orchestra has been broken down into discrete parts. Each of these acts can be heard on their own like soloists, or considered part of a larger collection. Raster Noton is the name of a single group - the name evokes a specific sound

[3490148]

Nocturnal

Nocturne Podcast - ep1 - Night Owls

http://www.nocturnepodcast.org/episode-1-night-owls/

"Nocturne is essay radio – a hybrid form of audio storytelling that blends elements of documentary, fiction and sound-art.“

“The Nocturne podcast was created by Vanessa Lowe and Kent Sparling, and is produced by Vanessa Lowe. Theme music composed by Kent Sparling.”

The Podcast

I didn’t really understand what a podcast was until I found this show.As described in the quote above it, it doesn’t fit neatly into music, field recording, interview, lecture ect. Of course there are many kinds of podcast, but this show taught me what some of the potential differences between it and other media– including its closest relative: radio – are, and the way in which the format is special.

I’m sure this ‘essay’ format is far more familiar to long-term radio listeners (which I am not) but there are two main differences I hear: the first is repetition, and the second, duration. Radio, like television after it, was traditionally designed to be broadcast live, and has a tone or pace that suggests a single listen. Repetition in programming such as the news headlines being announced multiple times a day assumed a fragmented listener base

People downloading, and consuming media at their own pace – be that faster or slower than the medium previously allowed – was eventually reflected in the writing of said media. Shows are produced to be ‘binge watched,’ and written to be viewed repeatedly.

This episode is 19 minutes, but others in the series are longer and shorter. Duration also becomes flexible when the Internet is your distribution platform, as opposed to the fixed time-slots of television and radio. Each episode can take the time it needs to explore its topic, without the pressure to rush or pad content. 

The Show

Nocturne’s production consists of four main elements: narration, music, sound design (including field recording) and Interviews, though these elements sometimes blur. The structure of episodes is linear, with a real emphasis on narrative, but they flow more like music than single-layered stories. Elements are swapped in and out as they are needed.

Some of the people interviewed may not be the best storytellers, or eloquent, but the sound design and music helps fill in the gaps with details they may have omitted. Lowe’s narration helps bridge ideas together, and keep the subject of each episode on track, while Sparling’s music helps cue emotional changes between segments.

There’s a little Micky-Mousing quality to some of the non-dialogue audio, which I would normally find a bit twee, but in this context it works. Granted I might not be the shows primary target audience, and is supposed to be quite a friendly invitation to what some (Lowe herself) might consider an uncomfortable subject. This first episode (pilot aside) tries to do exactly this.

Related Works

In many ways the show reminds me of Hildegard Westerkamp’s Kit’s Beach Walk, or Janet Cardiff’s The Missing Voice. Both take seriously the psycho-geography of the places they explore, and understand sound’s power to cross boundaries, and blur the line between objective and subjective content.

Like Kit’s Beach, Nocturne also plays with meta-narratives; Lowe includes such literal details as her holding the device she uses to record some sections, and even includes a joke one of her interviewees makes about being recorded. Rather than distance the listener by pulling you away from the emotional content, Lowe helps draw you into her personal experience of making the recording, and how she felt when doing it.

Regarding the sound design and music, there’s also a real similarity to Adam Curtis’ work like Bitter Lake – where narration is abandoned at times for long sections of footage (often paired with music) that simply speak for themselves.

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Sound Shaft/Stem

Brandon LaBelle – Background Noise - Chapter 13 – Seeking Ursound: Hildegard Westerkamp, Steve Peters, and the Soundscape

LaBelle gives a good overview of what the project is, even if not espoused by any of its key figures. Though this is only a single chapter in a book with a broader project itself I don’t get the feeling anything exciting enough is happening to make me want to look into other chapters right now.

He has however given me reason to return to R. Murray Shafer’s The Tuning of the World. Namely citing links Schafer makes to Dionysian/Apollonian perspectives, the alchemical and gnostic traditions among others, which I think I could learn a great deal from.

One of LaBelle’s main goals in this chapter seems to be distilling a primary goal or project from Acoustic Ecology as a collective practice. His conclusion ironically, is that acoustic ecology seeks a mythological “primary sound”: the “Ursound from which the sound world itself is born.” (p204) As Westerkamp explains: “I transform sound in order to highlight its original contours and meanings” (LaBelle’s emphasis). But I’m not convinced; as Westerkamp’s Kit’s Beach meta-commentary demonstrates – the origin of what we hear in her piece is the intersection between the field recordings and the filters in her studio. She doesn’t seek the Ursound LaBelle argues earlier, she reveals it’s fallacy.

“In setting out to archive, notate, and document environmental sound, acoustic ecology relies upon recording technology’s referential character to fully mimic and embody “real” sound. Recording was, and is, understood to carry sound to our ears intact, combating it’s evanescence and retaining through a temporal slippage it’s signifying body. “ (p205)

Reading this I picture the monolithic star gates in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the folding space-time of gravity in Interstellar. When we record, we create a link with a time, we play the sound back, and we revive and pull at the threads that link one moment to the next. The more we record, the more we spin a web of mirror-like web, cocooning the time in which we live.

  “Soundscape composition can be heard in contrast to musique concrete […] in so far as soundscape work while reducing listening does so by reminding the listener of context as the source of sound. Whereas Chion and Schaeffer’s acousmatic ethos strips sound of any visual referent, linguistic description, or direct narrative, relying instead of the qualities of sound itself.“ (p209)

This feels like a pretty solid setup for the distinction between the two ideologies. Definitely a place to return when looking for rationale and discussion of my own process during the semester.

  “Noise, while physically harmful, damaging, and deadening, as a physical aural presence, in turn, is at the heart of acoustic ecology’s vocabulary […] noise’s productive dynamic already at the heart of someone like Westerkamp, could only benefit the project of soundscape work, in remaining sensitive to the acoustic environment and what drives acoustic communications: the confrontation with difference.” (p215)

 In this way I think the two halves work together, as the primary source of sound, is noise. Not as an object or nexus, but as the difference which reveals the signal.

“What acoustic ecology reveals, and must contend with is the full body of sound in all its beautiful and terrible dimensions, […] Noise comes into play because it is unavoidable.” (p215)

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Inspirations

Phil isn’t interested in genealogies - no “these guys did it first” arguments.

We’re looking more directly at the work - what does it do?

Pierre Henry - Berlin: Symphony of a Great City

Neu - Isi

Douglas Quin - Fathom

Robert Ashley - Automatic Writing

Ennio Morricone (with Gruppo Di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza) - Seguita

Glenn Gould - Sibelius: Sonatina #1 In F Sharp Minor, Op. 67/3 - 3. Allegro Moderato

Syd Barret - Baby Lemonade

In each of these cases there was a clear response to something. The music didn’t float out there disconnected from a context, but of course that relationship isn’t cemented - as Phil gave personal examples of not making sound while performing ‘collaboratively’ or making ‘sound’ but perhaps not what the other performer wanted.

Bio Acoustics as mentioned in class usually refers to animals and insects, but I wonder if it would be possible to apply these ideas to humans.

Humans make sound, but because of our obsession with signs, the noise we make is often filtered out. We speak our own languages - or feel we’re only ever a few steps away from understanding the signal, informed greatly by intent. But if our sounds are not singular voices, if we listen to them as environmental, what objects emerge from within?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjJbV2hWCUU

What is the remainder of beauty, in sound?

My narrow focus with this idea right now is a listen to our qualities of speech. Whether this in public or private spaces - while trying to remove or suppress the text in speech. To record groups of people as a substance, rather than isolate-able parts.

It seems important in what we listened to this week - from Pierre Henry’s black screen, to NEU!’s sparse production, to Gould’s allowance for editing, and Phil’s own present absence within collaboration to create space for... whatever comes. Simply the room for things to happen.

Producing sound is always research - Samartzis

This also felt like a really important point. And what might follow closely - that listening is equal to reading. Literature isn’t a kind of text, it’s a kind of reading, which requires both a hard and soft approach - you don’t want to give it too much license, or take the word as gospel, but you also don’t want to let your own education and previous experiences interfere too much with the potential of the interaction.