I haven’t used synthesizing very much, although I have had a very recent adventure involving Pd (puredata) through an audio workshop. Pd is an open source program for sound design where users build map-like structures and create sound-producing objects, filters and controls. This was my first foray into utilising my computer to create sound with no reference to the field so to speak. I found this process quite strange and I struggled with what I felt was a lack of reference and context in what I was making over the two week workshop. I feel that my art practice needs a cultural or historical reference point gained from field recordings as I present sound the way I hear it within an environment or space.

I find that the issue of reference and specificity presents itself to me within live performance and installation environments. As an artist using field work as a significant component of my practice, I find the idea of a live performance quite an anxious one. One event that comes to mind was the exhibition Waveforms 09 at Heaven Gallery, Chicago. There was a range of work from artists including kinetic sculpture, video installations and a program of performances by artists. The sound performances were all of an abstract nature using synthesizing and constructed objects and instruments with one exception. The artist Bethany Childs collaborated with a poet by accompanying her spoken word with a composition of field recordings mirroring the dialogue. I found this work to be the most interesting and challenging, as I was presented with various sounds to work through and to assign a context and meaning related to the spoken word. I find that I am fascinated and drawn to the beauty within field recordings, and with the sound remaining as it is within the real world.

How are field recordings thought of within a gallery environment as stand alone works?

How would field recordings be received when many artist performances that I’ve experienced have been solely synthesized sound works? How can

How would the cultural or historical contexts of a piece be referred to and presented within a live performance?
Here are some links to Kim and her work:
www.heavengallery.com
www.bethanychilds.blogspot.com
www.kimwalker4.blogspot.com
www.puredata.info

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Mix-Blog: A bit like a mix-tape but with blogs instead. Read more from the series here.

Here, Jack Dangers sampled Wyndham Lewis reading from The End of Enemy Interlude, available on this fine collection. Now, if you want a decent Meat Beat Manifesto track, try this tasty blend of Helter Skelter with Radio Babylon. The Future Sound of London used a similar bassline on Papua New Guinea but the notes are different – are people deaf? Yes, the Prodigy put the same beat on Charly, but chopped it further. MBM reworked the sample from Bobby Byrd’s Hot Pants (Bonus Beats) and soaked it in reverb, but The Stone Roses had already used a shorter loop on Fools Gold, no?

So, with further a(u)d(i)o, what to write about? As Emlyn noted in his self-effacing “porcine hearing appendage” of an introduction to this series, it is not easyfinding words to discuss music. More specifically, any attempt to articulate individual sounds is rife with danger – and nigh on impossible without recourse to embarrassing onomatopoeia.

Not Luke Fowler: “Have you got that rare La Monte Young record on Shandar with Jon Hassell on trumpet?”

Not DJ / head chef Michael Kilkie: “What the hell are you talking about?”

Not Luke Fowler: “You know, the one that goes: A~a~aa~aaa~aaaa~aaaaa~aaaa~aaa~aa~a~aa~aaa~aaaa~aaaaa’…”

(a further plea to stop reading and leave this playing for its duration, sadly 4 times shorter than the original recording; bonus prize of temporary enlightenment for anyone with the ‘slack’ in this day and age to do so)

We could resort to metaphor for the purpose of general description. Colliderscope notes that Goethe referred to architecture as “frozen music”. If this is the case, my current flat would be an ill-advised cover version of Foreigner’s I Wanna Know What Love Is. Before anyone goes rushing to check Google Maps’ Street View, please consider that this information is given voluntarily and not designed to encourage prospective stalkers to take up residence in my garden. I don’t need the hassle in my life. There’s been heartache and pain; the thing is, I don’t know if I can face it again. Anyway, I can’t stop now: I’ve travelled so far… to change this lonely life…

Altogether now! *raises arms and eyebrows, inhales…*

(not The Farm, Emlyn, come on: deep focus)

Those of you who aren’t singing along at this point – at least in your mind’s ear – must a) be happily too young; b) have lived in a cave in the mid-to-late 80s; or c) have exquisite taste. To those who are indeed channelling Louis Grammatico and the New Jersey Mass Choir, I offer my sincerest apologies.

This brings us to research showing that the unsurprisingly-named auditory cortex in the temporal lobe is at the core of perceiving, storing and regurgitating sonic memories. On a few occasions, I have found myself prey to a particularly stubborn and distasteful earworm, wondering why it should have emerged from the depths… only to realise that the fleeting glimpse of a word, one isolated snippet of a song lyric completely out of context on an unrelated document, has – like a positive streamer which travels upward to connect with the pre-formed trajectory of the negative stepped leader to complete the “return stroke” of lightning – set off an instant reaction; this has then run for some time before apprehension of its existence, let alone any question over its origin.

Interestingly, Kraemer et al. have demonstrated that this type of example – where a discrete linguistic unit stimulates semantic knowledge for reconstruction of a song – may well mirror how figural imagery (“visual imagery elicited when considering names of objects”) operates. Both processes are reported to bypass their respective primary cortices, with neural activity in adjacent “lower resolution” areas being sufficient for materialising representations in the mind. However, in the absence of semantic information (e.g. with instrumental music or “depictive imagery”), both primary auditory and visual cortices are required and become the focal point of neural activity, with perceptual processing operating at “high resolution”. This is still not well understood, though, with other areas of the temporal and frontal lobes also playing a part.

Are we populated by examples of “catchy” music commonly just beyond conscious reach, irrespective of aesthetic preference? What parasitical audio horrors lie dormant, only ever seconds away from reasserting themselves in the mind of their host, following the appearance of a suitable catalyst?

Long-term memory appears to rely mainly upon repetition for reinforcement, with the subsequent blessing that much of the sensory noise bombarding us on a daily basis is filtered out and consigned to history. Exceptions to this rule usually occur when sense impressions are accompanied by strong emotional responses, trauma or incongruities that stand out from the general data set. Similarly, music – even on first hearing – can help cement a combination of other sensory impressions received while listening, leading to strongly evocative recall [shameless reference to own comments regarding The Human League’s Don’t You Want Me? and The Prisoner here].

The fact that there are such exceptions leads me to speculate that we do not necessarily have to notice them at the time to determine their longevity. Is it just me, or is one prone to burp out seemingly random quotes or statements at the oddest of intervals, without the slightest inkling from whence they have come?

“Polar bear livers contain potentially lethal amounts of vitamin A.”

Ok, I admit that I did notice that one at the time and have wheeled it out on many a suitable occasion, finger held aloft. Back to sound: when we read, to what extent does our internal voice – projected onto the written word – selectively embed itself on the author’s behalf? How many phrases of speech from subliminally “overheard” conversations are permanently resident within, despite the absence of any intention to eavesdrop? What else gets racked up on the jukebox?

“Hearing” full answers to these questions might well confirm that we are possessed by and subject to all manner of competing memes, discourses and registers, many of which never reach the light of consciousness; taken together with those that do, how stable is the “narrator” at the centre of this cyclone? Before proceeding to juicier realms of high weirdness, please allow me to offer up a

Patronising and incomplete overview of communication history

[Disclaimer: it is beyond the scope of this blog (and my waking life / sanity) to examine ownership and control of technology, the threat that any new form of empowerment represents to church or state, or subsequent attempts to counter this with censorship. The primary concern here is for music as sound, sound as voice, voice given body. If anyone can be arsed, a parallel history tracing the visual component of communication along similar lines would be most welcome.]

* recommended listening material for the next 77 minutes *

For aeons our species sought to preserve information uttered vocally only through the memory of a select few. Following a phase of scribal culture, the development of theprinting press undermined hitherto sacred roles in the transmission of ideas.

With every technological advance comes an inherent understanding of its limitations and creative desire to extend the boundaries of what is deemed possible. In this respect, we find evidence for a growing sense that “printed text was not enough”, rendered explicit in literary fiction – as we shall see later – by invention of fantastic machines physically embodying the voice. This is simultaneously tantamount to nostalgia for the proximity of utterance, in the face of enforced depersonalisation. It also betrays tacit acceptance of the momentum toward recipients of communication becoming increasingly passive.

As a side note, in relation to the cumulative impact of access to the printed word and its subsequent development into electronic formats, there is a strange irony in the fact that a text regarded as “the earliest complete survival of a dated printed book” should present “the avoidance of abiding in extremes of mental attachment” as its core lesson.

The race to eliminate time and space as barriers to communication features such notable landmarks as Claude Chappe’s semaphore lines as a form of “mechanical internet”, Alexander Bain’s proto-fax machine, Baron Schilling’s use of binary in his electromagnetic telegraph, Cooke and Wheatstone’s electric telegraph and its fascinating role in criminal detection, and the 16km call made by Alexander Graham Bell on 10th August 1876, despite many claimants and contributors to the invention of the telephone. This final event marks the first proper advance in transmission of audio signals for 5,000 years or more, since drums were first used for communication across relatively small distances: a voice from a body, present as a real-time participant, is disembodied in order to achieve physical reconstitution in the vibration of the receiving “speaker”.

11 years earlier, James Clark Maxwell, building on the work of Michael Faraday, had first predicted the existence of radio waves. 11 years later, Michelson and Morley put the idea of the aether – the Aristotelian quintessence, the fifth element acting as a transmission medium for light – to rest, Heinrich Hertz generated the first experimental radio waves in his laboratory, and Nikola Tesla filed patents for his alternative method of electrical power distribution: AC vs DC. At this point, too many protagonists enter the fray to give any fair assessment of who was responsible for the invention of radio. My head tells me to side with Tesla, but my heart retains a bias for Marconi, given that I lived 7km away from Poldhu Wireless Station when less than a year old until the age of 3.

With only a passing nod to the prediction of television, earliest experiments in transmission of a televisual image [it just had to be a ventriloquist’s dummy], first long-distance television pictures [it just had to be Central Station] and pioneering video recordings using audio technology (the gramophone record), let us backtrack to consider this potted history using helpful terminology, kindly donated by Douglas Kahn in his introduction to Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-garde.

Kahn mentions 3 figures – vibration, inscription, transmission – “that begin to account for how sounds are located or dislocated, contained or released, recorded or generated”. These 3 terms correspond roughly to core stages – oral, printed, electric – in the incomplete overview of communication history given above. For now, we will ignore the evolution of electric into electronic with the rise of circuitry, returning the focus back to music, sound and voice, and attempts at meaningful articulation.

The story of the desire to preserve the voice and give it body is a frothing morass of beauty, curiosity, obsession, hoax, ennui, acrimony, madness, mysticism and the desire to cheat death, one that ends in a proliferating cacophony of voices which are mostly disembodied, many of which cascade daily into our permeable brains. In attempting to make transient intangibles manifest and attain a degree of immortality, this quest leads into dark and frankly ridiculous corners of the human psyche.

Please return for the next instalments of this article – blogs are limited to 40,000 characters per post, apparently :( – which describe various attempts to visualise, represent, capture, replicate and disseminate sound, discussed under the headings of vibration, inscription and transmission.

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Mix-Blog: A bit like a mix-tape but with blogs instead. Read more from the series here.

“My objects are to be seen as stimulants for the transformation of the idea of sculpture, or of art in general. They should provoke thoughts about what sculpture can be and how the concept of sculpting can be extended to the invisible materials used by everyone:

Thinking Forms – the way in which we mould our thoughts

Spoken Forms – how we shape our thoughts into words or

Social Sculpture – how we mould and shape the world in which we live.” [i]

I read this book during my summer holidays, before the start of my final year at art school in Glasgow. It had a profound effect on me. At the time, I was listening to more and more ‘experimental’ music, excited by the way in which improvised music could be seen as model for a way of being in the world. I was consumed with idealistic theories of how art could change the world, and Beuys’ ideas of Social Sculpture rang true with my feelings at the time. I was also listening to a lot of folk music both from close to home and from around the world, realising how many different ways of singing there are on our planet, and how these songs are somehow portraits of the individuals as well as of the particular culture from which they come. That same year I had started to perform with my then new band ‘Nalle’, exploring the freedom that improvisation permits within the structure of more traditional song forms. What struck me whilst reading, listening, and playing was the relationship between Beuys’ ideas of sculpture moulded from invisible materials and the possibility of understanding singing as a sculptural process.

To sing is very physical process. Sound, though transient and immaterial, is a physical medium. It has a measurable volume, width, length and tempo. It exists as a physical energy, as sound waves moving through space and responding to space in particular ways. When I sing loudly I can feel the vibrations of the sound I am creating from my body. I can mould them by changing the amount of air I use and the shape of my mouth.

“… there is absolutely no possibility for a human being…. to express himself to someone else except through a material process. Even when I speak I use my larynx, bones, sound waves, for instance, and I need the substance of air…. There’s no possibility of conveying one’s meaning except through imprinting it in a particular material. And for some things less solid materials are needed than for others. But basically it’s the same thing whether I speak or combine pieces of iron and thus create an object.”[ii]

If indeed, sculptural forms can be shaped from our thoughts into words using the spoken voice, can we therefore, also understand song to be a sculptural form moulded from the singing voice? This process begins with listening and finds expression using the tongue, the larynx, air, sound waves and the ear of the listener as materials. In this way, the composition of song can be understood as a sculptural process that finds expression using the materials of the body. It therefore follows, that sound making and song naturally function as portraits of the self. Song Sculpture can thus be defined as the way in which we shape our feelings and thoughts into song.

Using my voice as well as the voices of others, I have worked with these ideas in a number of projects. Pollokshaws Song Portrait(Glasgow 2006), Kensington Cradle Songs (Liverpool 2007) and Abbeyview Note Catcher (Dunfermline 2008), bring together voices from diverse groups of people where recordings of songs and/or vocal sounds function as sculptural materials to create portraits. Airs of the Sea (Cromarty 2006), is a composition replicating the sounds of the sea, sculpted from the recordings of 100 different people’s breath. Salutation to the Sun (2006) also imitates a soundscape from the natural world; in this instance an entire dawn chorus is sculpted from a single voice. The projects experiment with dissolving language and structure, inviting the participant and/or listener to become absorbed in the merging of different layers of sound.

I use my voice as a material to compose and improvise, both alone and with other musicians. With the band Nalle I seek to explore the constituent elements of the voice within more traditional musical forms. I regard my own songs and performances as self-portraits of my personal experiences.

Find out more about Hanna here.
Visit Hanna on MySpace.

I’d  just given a presentation in the  Pop-Up tour, showing a couple of Colliderscope‘s music videos, and a little introduction  to our work.. a great afternoon – lots of really vibrant, exciting work and interesting presentations.. then to the networking  and nibbles afterwards – great setting, lots of fascinating stuff on show, and people eager to mix and mingle and network… but what did strike me as something a little odd about the networking event in the  Hannah Maclure Centre was the lack of music, soundtrack, background ambience -  zilch… just a slightly awkward silence and polite mumbings until the room filled up a bit and people were more relaxed, and their individual conversations  not so starkly highlighted against the silence and white walls…

Which leads neatly onto the important relationship between space and sound, visual and aural, concrete and abstract – we need each other, music and vision!  Goethe said that architecture is frozen music…and sound, consisting of intangible vibrations,  needs the architecture of a  physical  resonating chamber before it can be heard.  The abstract  nature of music needs the concrete form of visual imagery to bring it down to earth, otherwise its just free floating in the ether…  Which is why, given the demise of the medium of album cover art , with the canvas of visual identity for a piece of music now reduced to the size of an iTunes thumbnail,  why audio-visual collaboration is such an exciting area to be working in…I remember the days when sitting on the floor listening to your favourite album and pouring over the artwork on the gatefold sleeve, was like a magic gateway into another mysterious world….flicking through postage stamp sized images on iTunes or Spotify doesnt really err, hit the spot…

After my presentation, I had quite a few people ask if I had any CD’s – “I would just love to listen to your music on my iPod while working away in my studio”  a comment which emphasised to me how art and music are so intertwined…. and so it still surprises me  when music is seemingly added as an after-thought, rather than being an integral part of the conceptualisation of an event.   When I suggested to the Censta organisers at the networking session  that maybe some sounds might be nice, we found out that there were no facilities rigged up… come on you art folk – we musos want to come to the party too!

In fact, our wee patent leather shoes and frilly frocks are being dusted off as we speak… we soooo cant wait, that we decided to throw one of our own… Colliderscope are putting in a proposal to the Central Station Members’ fund to produce a collaborative  audio-visual event with  films and music, audio-visual installations, music videos, VJ’s and live performances… so all you Central Stationers who would like to contribute to an event “celebrating the collaborative synergy of music and moving image” *get in touch with us! You heard it first here….Lots of love from Colliderscope. xx

https://vimeo.com/12707515

* this luscious phrase courtesy of Willie Richardson of iMan4D – thanks Willie!

Find out more about Colliderscope here.
See some of Colliderscope’s work on Vimeo.

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Mix-Blog: A bit like a mix-tape but with blogs instead. Read more from the series here.

Amazing piece of 70′s analogue Rutt-Etra processing digitized for a new audience, with a Merzbow like soundtrack.

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Neighbours – Norman McLaren, 1952

Truly stunning early stop motion film from the 50′s, produced by the National Film Boards it generated criticism due to the infamous “Baby kicking” scene!

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Une Mission Ephemere – Piotr Kamler & Bernard Parmegiani

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aulXlb8Dt24

This has to be one of my favourite animations ever, it has a profound other worldliness attached to it. The soundtrack is by music concrete ledgend bernard parmegiani

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Another selection of early computer/hand made animation and sound

Lillian Schwartz – UFO’s (1971)

Lillian Schwartz-The Artist and the Computer pt.1

Ron Hays Music Image-Starship

Snow Canon (1981)

Speed (1980)

Lillian Schwartz – Pixillation (1970)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_54sqEMql5A

Synchromy

Morton Subotnick – “Sidewinder”

Norman McLaren: Pen Point Percussion

Rainbow Road

Find out more about Konx-Om-Pax (aka Tom Scholefield) here.

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Mix-Blog: A bit like a mix-tape but with blogs instead. Read more from the series here.

The issue of categorising sound raised itself again, along with categorising visuals, while I was compiling notes on all the audiovisual works I received for a concert this weekend as part of the Soundings electroacoustic music weekend. Out of the 50+ works received, only about 7-8 can be performed within the hour available, so it was important to have a good criticism of each one, but keep the notes as brief as possible.

So how do you go about selecting the pieces? Well, to start with, the brief for the call was deliberately vague (…syncraesthesia: n. the fusion of acousmatic sound and abstract vision to create an immersive audiovisual experience; see also synchresis and synaesthesia…), but there were a few entries that didn’t quite fit, so they were out, no matter how good.

Next, Soundings itself is mainly about electroacoustic music – but that really covers any manipulation of sound, from the very musical through to the sound of a CD drawer glitching for 25 minutes (yes, that is a real recorded piece of music). In practice, though, very recognizably classic or ‘pop/rock’ is out. But wouldn’t you know – that eliminated almost no-one.

So, it came down to a set discipline for each one – listen to it without the video. Then watch it without the audio. Then watch and listen to the full thing. And make notes at each stage. Did the sound hold up as an interesting composition in itself? Was the video interesting enough to watch as a silent movie? And, crucially, did the two aspects synthesize to form something that was definitely more than the sum of its parts? This led to a shortlist of particularly outstanding pieces, and then it became apparent that there were audio and visual themes that could be explored between certain of them to give shape to about an hour’s worth of work. And a final list was created – I think it’s well worth a look and listen, and hope you will too. And maybe a listen in on one of the other concerts over the weekend – there’s a lot of interesting work being performed, and a chance to talk with many of the composers.

So that’s how the list was selected – though. I still have two other potential lists, with completely different works, that I’m itching to show another time…

But the good thing is that there will be another time, and plenty more of them. There’s more and more happening in this sound/visual art, the combination of soundscapes, electronic and digitally manipulated sounds with experimental and abstract video. Soundings is just one opportunity for this work to be shown – I hope to see and be involved with many more.

Find out more about Soundings here.

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Mix-Blog: A bit like a mix-tape but with blogs instead. Read more from the series here.