Showing papers in "Organised Sound in 2018"

Selling Nature to Save It: Approaching self-critical environmental sonic art

Abstract: With similarities to the emergence in fifteenth-century landscape paintings, to poems by the Transcendentalists and to the more recent 1960s land art movement, environmental sonic art is always context-based and conjointly performs as environmental activism with aims to break down the nature/culture dualism. Nature, however, is both a material object and a socially constructed metaphor that is infinitely interpretable and ideologically malleable based on one’s values and biases. Does the environmental sonic artist acknowledge this? The theoretical framework of this article extends acoustic ecology, first theorised by R. Murray Schafer, to include environmental history and cultural theory – ultimately problematising definitions of ‘nature’ and ‘natural.’ Through this framework, the author critiques the way composer John Luther Adams represents his environmental sonic art. This analysis will illuminate a dialogue that asks, ‘What is self-critical environmental sonic art?’

Editorial: New Wor(l)ds for Old Sounds

Abstract: The editors’ aim in creating this themed issue of Organised Sound was to explore the resonances between questions raised by electroacoustic specialists and those taken up by scholars who work on the sounds of the pre-electric past. Since 1996, Organised Sound has been the leading journal for the study of electroacoustic music; for this issue we wanted to move beyond the traditional arena covered by ‘EA specialists’ and build a bridge between electroacoustic music studies and sound studies – by now a burgeoning field of inquiry that spans several disciplines, not least musicology and ethnomusicology, music theory and composition, anthropology, and sensory history. With this in mind, for the ‘New Wor(l)ds for Old Sounds’ issue, contributors were invited to apply the insights afforded by electroacoustic technologies, vocabularies, theories and practices to sounds and spaces created and used before the widespread adoption of electric sound. When it came to setting a cut-off date for our call, the density of technological breakthroughs for electrified sound in the decades around 1900 presented us with a rich array of possibilities (Thompson 2002). We could have chosen 1895, the year in which American inventor Thaddeus Cahill first submitted a patent application (US 580035 A) for an electromechanical organ he dubbed the Telharmonium or, more prosaically, ‘The Art of and Apparatus for Generating and Distributing Music Electrically’. Another landmark year was 1905, when Max Kohl A.G., a German firm specialising in scientific instruments, introduced their Helmholtz Sound Synthesiser, one of several such devices built following designs by the German scientist and acoustician Hermann von Helmholtz (Pantalony 2005; Wittje 2013). Or we could have reached back to 1865, when the German physicist and luthier Rudolph Koenig, working in Paris, advertised his own Helmholtz synthesiser, emphasising the ability to replicate the timbre of vowel sounds through the manipulation of overtones (Pantalony 2009: 52–5). Moving from the rarified world of scientific instruments to more publicly oriented technologies took us further into the twentieth century. On 2 November 1920, the first commercial radio station, Pittsburgh’s KDKA, crackled to life, broadcasting US presidential election returns in the contest betweenWarren Harding and James Cox (Hinds 1995: 3; Lewis 1992: 28). If Léon Theremin’s invention of his eponymous instrument in the Soviet Union in 1922 is an especially familiar milestone for specialists in electroacoustic music, the first commercial screening of motion pictures with sound-on-film technology the following year – Lee De Forest’s ‘Phonofilms’, premiered at New York’s Rivoli Theater – suggested new uses for electric sound in the context of mass entertainment (Wierzbicki 2009: 86–7). In 1924 German inventors Walter Schottky and Erwin Gerlach developed the ribbon microphone and ribbon speaker (Gerlach 1924; Schottky 1924; Skudrzyk 1954: 6), while across the Atlantic the first recordings using electric groove-cutting were made in Columbia’s New York lab, reaching the public in the form of the RCA Victor Orthophonic Victrola (Millard 2005: 142–3). Other transformative developments were the release in 1927 of the first ‘talkie’, the American film The Jazz Singer, and the 1932 opening of the first concert hall wired for sound, New York City’s Radio City Music Hall (Thompson 2002: 229–31). But we kept returning to the year 1925, and to a technological innovation that, although rarely foregrounded as a watershed in the history of electric sound, was to have profound and far-reaching repercussions. That year, American electrical engineer Chester Rice filed a set of patents that laid the groundwork for the development of the first commercial loudspeaker. Rice’s main patent describes an electromagnetic loudspeaker (US 1707570 A) with a corresponding amplification system (US 1728879 A), developed in collaboration with his colleague Edward Kellogg. In the patent filing, Rice also credits Kellogg’s Radio Receiving System (US 1584551, incorrectly cited as US 158455), with having a direct impact on his research. Together with an electric condenser (US 1714890 A) these patents made possible the development of the first loudspeaker to be sold commercially. Marketed by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) as the Radiola Loudspeaker Model

Unpacking the Musical and Technical Innovation of Knut Wiggen

Abstract: Knut Wiggen (1927–2016) is not a household name in music technology, despite the fact that he developed cutting-edge technology during the 1960s and early 1970s in Stockholm, as leader of both the concert organisation Fylkingen and the Electronic Music Studio (EMS). In the international literature on computer music, this development has only been mentioned in passing, if at all. However, EMS and the general development has been discussed in Scandinavian texts,1 but the links between Knut Wiggen’s technical achievements and his far-reaching ambitions for the music of the future, and how this vision aligned with philosophy and research at the time, have not been the focus. Hartenstein (2011) provides insights into Wiggen’s personal intentions and philosophy, and does not go much into technical detail, Groth (2010) focuses principally on the politics and aesthetic differences and subsequent conflicts at EMS, and although an overview of the EMS technology is provided, it is not always made clear how innovative it was. In Broman (2007), the broader lines of electroacoustic musical development are in focus.Wiggen combined social and political concerns with technical insight, and his overarching conviction of how a new art was necessary as a counterweight to mute consumerism is unique in computer music. The aim of this article is to describe and explain the coherency of Wiggen’s achievements, his philosophy, his use of current technological advances and research and his development of a new method for composing the music of the future. In order to support this focus, mainly primary sources have been used,2 however, the literature mentioned above has been consulted due to its use of interview data and other personal communication not commonly available. A degree of duplication of information has been required for the narrative not to suffer.The article will show that Wiggen was a visionary pioneer who has a natural place among such computer music luminaries as Max Mathews, Jean-Claude Risset, John Chowning, Iannis Xenakis, Peter Zinovieff and others from the same generation.

The Anthropomorphic Analogy: Humanising musical machines in the early modern and contemporary eras

Abstract: Since the late twentieth century, the development of cybernetics, physical computing and robotics has led artists and researchers to create musical systems that explore the relationship between human bodies and mechanical systems. Anthropomorphic musical robots and bodily integrated ‘cyborg’ sensor interfaces explore complementary manifestations of what we call the ‘anthropomorphic analogy’, which probes the boundary between human artificer and artificial machine, encouraging listeners and viewers to humanise non-musical machines and understand the human body itself as a mechanical instrument.These new approaches to the anthropomorphic analogy benefit from historical contextualisation. At numerous points in the history of Western art music, philosophers, critics, composers, performers and instrument designers have considered the relationship between human musician and musical instrument, often blurring the line between the two. Consideration of historical examples enriches understandings of anthropomorphism in contemporary music technology.This article juxtaposes the anthropomorphic analogy in contemporary musical culture with manifestations of anthropomorphism in early seventeenth-century Europe. The first half of the seventeenth century witnessed a flourishing of instrumentality of all sorts. Musical instruments were linked with the telescope, the clock, the barometer, the paintbrush, and many other instruments and machines, and these came to be understood as vehicles for the creation of knowledge. This flourishing of instrumental culture created new opportunities for contemplation and aesthetic wonder, as theorists considered the line between human being and machine – between nature and artifice. Manifestations of the anthropomorphic analogy in seventeenth-century conceptions of musical instruments help to contextualise and explain similar articulations of the anthropomorphic analogy in the present day.

The Tone of Prime Unity

Abstract: In The Soundscape, R. Murray Schafer describes a tone of ‘prime unity’, a tonal centre conditioning an international sonic unconscious. Diverging from the bucolic image of nature readily associated with Schafer’s ethics and aesthetics, this tone is found in the ubiquitous hum of electrical infrastructure and appliances. A utopian potential is ascribed to this tone in Schafer’s writing whereby it constitutes the conditions for a unified international acoustic community of listening subjects.This article outlines Schafer’s anomalous concept of the tone of prime unity and interrogates the contradictions it introduces into Schafer’s project of utopian soundscape design. Discussion of the correspondence between Schafer and Marshall McLuhan contextualises and identifies the source of Schafer’s concept of the tone of prime unity. Of particular interest is the processes of unconscious auditory influence this concept entails and its problematic relation to the politics of sonic warfare. Through discussion of contemporary artistic practices that engage with these problems, it is argued that the tone of prime unity nonetheless presents an opportunity to shift the focus of Schafer’s project from a telos of divine harmony towards collective self-determination through participatory intervention in the world around us.

Materiality in Sound Art

Abstract: This article investigates the recent resurgence of kinetic sound art in light of the relationship between art and material. It does this by studying the history of mechanical musical instruments and kinetic art, the role of immateriality in the history of Western art, and the renewed focus on materiality in the arts. Materiality is key to understanding the resurgence of kinetics in sound art. The first part of this article studies the historical narratives of materiality in sound art, while the second part investigates materiality in my own works as more contemporary examples. Here the text turns to exploration of the material and acoustic properties of metal rods and plates, and suggests that direct contact with sound-producing objects provides opportunities for new art forms where the morphology of sound can be developed in dialogue with the physical objects and the surrounding space. By examining the underlying acoustic principles of rods and plates, we get a deeper understanding of the relationship between mathematical models and the actual sounding objects. Using the acoustic model with basic input parameters enables us to explore the timbral possibilities of the sound objects. This allows us to shape the spectrum of acoustic sound objects with great attention to detail, and makes models from spectromorphology relevant during the construction of the objects. The physical production of sound objects becomes both spectral composition and shaping of spatial objects. This highlights the importance of knowledge of both materials and acoustic principles, and questions the traditional perception of sound art and music as immaterial art forms.

Staging the Kinetic : How music automata sensitise audiences to sound art

Abstract: Western audiences have long been fascinated with music automata. Against this backdrop, it may not be surprising that art and music curators display historical examples of such mechanical instruments together with contemporary sounding art. Yet what exactly do these curators aim to accomplish when combining historical music automata with kinetic sound art? And do visitors understand the connections between the objects on display in the ways intended by the curators? To examine the curators’ ambitions, this article analyses three exhibitions: Fur Augen und Ohren (West Berlin 1980), Ballet Mecanique (Maastricht 2002) and Art or Sound (Venice 2014). To unravel visitors’ responses, we focus on the Berlin exhibition, the best documented case. We argue that the curators staged the automated kinetic as a key historical link between mechanical musical instruments and contemporary sound art, and that they tried to tap into specific dimensions of public fascination with musical automata – the magical invisible, mechanical wonder and blurring of boundaries – to open their audiences’ senses to sound art. As we will show with the help of the notion of ‘listening habitus’, visitors’ responses indeed drew on these dimensions, but more often than not displayed a preference for the historical automata rather than contemporary kinetic art.

Filling Sound with Space: An elemental approach to sound spatialisation

Abstract: This research introduces different compositional techniques involving the use of sound spatialisation. These permit the incorporation of sound distortions produced by the real space, the body and the auditory system into low-, middle- and large-scale musical structures, allowing sound spatialisation to become a fundamental parameter of the three compositions presented here. An important characteristic of these pieces is the exclusive use of sine waves and other time-invariant sound signals. Even though these types of signals present no alterations in time, it is possible to perceive pitch, loudness and tone-colour variations when they move in space, due to the psychoacoustic processes involved in spatial hearing. To emphasise the perception of such differences, this research proposes dividing a tone into multiple sound units and spreading these in space using several loudspeakers arranged around the listener. In addition to the perception of sound attribute variations, it is also possible to create dynamic rhythms and textures that depend almost exclusively on how sound units are arranged in space. Such compositional procedures help to overcome to some degree the unnaturalness implicit when using synthetic-generated sounds; through them, it is possible to establish cause–effect relationships between sound movement, on the one hand, and the perception of sound attribute, rhythm and texture variations on the other. Another important consequence is the possibility of producing diffuse sound fields independently of the levels of reverberation in the room, and to create sound spaces of a particular spatial depth without using artificial delay or reverb.

Music as Organised Time: A strategy for transmedial composition and a questioning of the relation between music and sound

Abstract: As a consequence of the universal alphabet of binary code, music is expanding to include transmedia practices. This text suggests that the seemingly exclusive bond between the art form of music and its primary medium, sound, might be opened up to include other media. If the practices of composers who also appear as sound- and kinetic artists are not recognised as music, possible contemporary perspectives on past music is lost and the future development of music is inhibited.The author presents an artistic perspective on transmediality, where two questions are addressed. The first is whether or not a transmedial structure can be made with light, movement and sound – and if so, how is this done? A strategy for transmedial composition with light, sound and movement is proposed, and exemplified with hand drawings. The second question raised in this article concerns whether or not transmedial compositions result in music. An idea of music as organised time is developed, and includes a discussion on the exclusive relation between art form and medium, especially between sound and music.

Between Szőke’s Sound Microscope and Messiaen’s Organ: The cultural realities of blackcap song

Abstract: The song of the blackcap (Sylvia atricapilla) has been a subject of fascination among Europeans for centuries. In the first half of the article, I present factors that influenced the evaluation of the bird’s song between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, and dedicate the second half to developments in the past sixty years. In the 1950s, two mutually exclusive interpretations of the bird’s song appeared: one connected to Peter Szőke and his sound microscope and the other to Olivier Messiaen and his organ. I draw a parallel between this duality and the ‘sound-based’–‘note-based’ dichotomy that has been naturalised in the discourse about sonic culture during the last decade. I examine what this dichotomy and the natural experience of the blackcap’s song can reveal about one other, shedding light on what may be viewed as the most influential source for this centuries-long fascination.

Editorial: Sound and kinetics – performance, artistic aims and techniques in electroacoustic music and sound art

Abstract: On their web pages, Tate Museum in London has posted a short definition of kinetic art: ‘Art that depends on motion for its effects.’ In a sense then, music is a kinetic art, since sound consists of pressure waves propagated through air or another medium on its way to the listener’s ear and attention. Music has always been concerned with the movement and agitation necessary for generating sound-producing oscillations, and everyone who has played an acoustic instrument knows the intimate connection between their movement and the more or less musical result. However, with electroacoustics, this has all changed, and there is no longer a necessary connection between movement and resulting sound, although we can imagine it to be so. And many do, by mimicking musicians’ gestures or what they perceive to be the musical expression of the recorded sound, and by inventing new controllers and instruments to better fit their needs. But in music, it is still the movement of wavefronts that matters most. The study of kinetics is the study of motion and its causes, thus logically also including inertia – the absence of movement. Stillness has consequences, but when there is movement there are masses and forces to consider, motions and causes, materials and objects, as well as human biomechanical movement. The link to dance is obvious, and in addition, imaginary movement and the soon-to-be 30-year-old electronic simulation technology of virtual reality. It is possible to say that movement and/or the illusion of it is integrated in music to the degree that it is impossible to imagine music without it. Grasping movement in the visual arts was arguably first attempted by the impressionists from the late 1800s – Manet, Degas, Monet and so on – however, a closer scrutiny of cave paintings from the palaeolithic period, such as those found in the caves at ChauvetPont-d’Arc, reveals an animation-like technique for capturing the physical dynamics of the depicted animals, so this crediting of the impressionists might have to be reconsidered. Regardless, it was with the more radical thoughts found among the Futurists half a lifetime later that the intention of capturing movement became an important identifier in giving form to the dynamics of the modern, industrial age. Umberto Boccioni’s painting The City Rises (1910) and his sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) are excellent examples. So is also Marcel Duchamp’sNude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), which precedes Boccioni’s sculpture by one year and is more than a little similar. The desire to capture dynamics was on the rise. More explicit and materialfocused forms were created by Alexander Calder a few years later, in his series of mobiles from 1931 onwards, and a continuation of this mobile tradition is also found in the Stravinsky fountain (1983), where sculptors Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle created whimsical play with water and moving objects outside Centre Pompidou and the music technology centre Ircam in Paris. Incidentally, the commission to Tinguely was particularly appropriate; to his credit he also has a string of kinetic sound installations. As a term, sound art covers many practices and a plethora of artistic aims and intentions, ranging from simple explorations of materials and acoustics to use of culturally laden objects that carry their significance into cultural and political contexts, using sound as their vehicle. As a generalisation, one can say that sound art as a whole makes it easier for the artist to work with a broader artistic palette than in absolute music, intervalor non-interval based, where orchestration, balance, sound and structure are goals in themselves. Philosophically, this notion has arguably been underpinned bymedia theoristMarshallMcLuhanwhen he stated that the qualities of one medium could only be expressed through another. With this statement from the 1960s, he introduced transmediality – art across different media – and opened the door for the slippery exercise of labelling art. With the absorption of digital code into nearly all sectors of modern society, demarcation lines between art genres have become less important, and the public increasingly accepts different mixes of expressions. Questions from the mid-1900s of whether ‘art created by computer code and machines is really art’ have generally disappeared, and the notion of what can be considered art is no longer defined by an educated art elite to the degree that it once was. This is noticeable also in the field of sound-based music, where the term itself is an admission of the fact that ‘electroacoustic’ describes only a smaller section of today’s practices. Code and data can This is what Murray Schafer refers to as ‘schizophony’ in his remarkable book The Tuning of the World (Schafer 1977).

Proprioception in Visual Mental Imagery of Spaces while Deep Listening

Abstract: This article explores the sense of proprioception within visual mental imagery. The research is based on an experiment named In/Pe (Intention/Perception) developed by the author. The analysis of the data investigates the perception by an audience of architectural spaces, as well as natural environments, in visual mental imageries, emerging from a focused listening process of three fixed-medium pieces, one sound installation and one performance. This highlights the idea of the experience of the artwork as a virtual constructed perception within one’s mind, an embodied experience that triggers the phenomenal world of sensation. The study examines what kind of spaces are visualised by the ‘beholder’. The overall agreement in how participants imagine spaces suggests that the perception is linked to their own bodies.

Orphan Sounds: Locating historical recordings in contemporary media

Abstract: This article seeks to articulate the interaction between archival sound recordings and the contemporary media, arguing that digitisation and post-digital mediation have led to the interpretation of historical sound recordings as object-disoriented sonic artefacts drifting through the contemporary media environment. Investigating past, current and ongoing sound-based artistic projects and artworks as case studies, the article substantiates the argument by addressing questions of identity, mediation and interpretation in the post-digital condition of contemporary media. These projects are examined in order to gain understanding of how the source materials are often derived from older sounds, such as the pre-electric era early sound recordings made in India on shellacs and cylinders, and how they are reused in artistic production following their re-interpretation as object-disoriented sonic artefacts.

Theremin in the Press: Instrument remediation and code-instrument transduction

Abstract: This article shows how the theremin as a new musical medium enacted a double logic throughout its century-old techno-cultural life. On the one hand, in an attempt to be a ‘better’ instrument, the theremin imitated or remediated traditional musical instruments and in this way affirmed the musical values these instruments materialised; simultaneously, by being a new and different medium, with unprecedented flexibility for designing sound and human–machine interaction, it eroded and challenged these same values and gradually enacted change. On the other hand, the theremin inadvertently inaugurated a practice of musical instrument circulation using electronics schematics that allowed for the instrument’s reproduction, starting with the publication of schematics and tutorials in amateur electronics magazines and which can be seen as a predecessor to today’s circulation of open source code. This circulation practice, which I call instrument-code transduction, emerged from and was amplified by the fame the theremin obtained using its touchless interface to imitate or remediate traditional musical instruments, and in turn, this circulation practice has kept the instrument alive throughout the decades. Thus remediation and code-instrument transduction are not just mutually dependent, but are in fact, two interdependent processes of the same media phenomenon. Drawing from early reactions to the theremin documented in the press, from new media theory, and from publications in amateur electronics, this article attempts to use episodes from the history of the theremin to understand the early and profound changes that electric technologies brought to the concept of musical instruments at large.

Applying Kinaesthetic Empathy and Extended Mind Theory to Invasive and Discreet Instruments in Sound-Based Live Performance

Abstract: I have taken the ambiguous psychology of Kinaesthetic Empathy and the relatively recent ideas that form Extended Mind Theory and re-contextualised them so they are relevant to sound-based live performance. I then used these psychologies as a guidance to investigate how we interact with discreet and invasive instruments by analysing specific examples of performance, sound installation and composition. I have defined ‘invasive and discreet’ by using examples of how these instruments are presented as objects in the context of performance. For example, the way in which an object or system can physically invade, and make use of, the performance space when employing technology and physical sculpture; or how an object or system can interact with the performer through tactility and psychological presence. During the process of defining discreet and invasive instruments I noted that there is no binary differentiation because the instruments denotation is dependent on context, sound palette and how they are interpreted as objects for creative expression by the performer. I concluded that the physicality of invasive instruments gives strength to the presentation of ideas in live performance. This is in opposition to discrete instruments which I argue are better suited to studio production or acousmatic performance.

Orchestra Machines, Old and New

Abstract: What is ‘orchestral’ about a networked laptop orchestra? And what is network-like about a classical orchestra? This article juxtaposes orchestras, nineteenth-century music machines and twenty-first-century network music projects. Drawing on organology and cybernetics, it asks how these systems connect people and instruments. It considers interaction and coordination in particular networks, from the panharmonicon to PLork, but also their abstract informational topologies. Ultimately, orchestra machines, old and new, involve both technical and social organisation – and, as such, they can be used to problematise the ontological separation of technology and society.

Code-switching and Loanwords for the Audio Engineer: The flow of terminology from science, to music, to metaphor

Abstract: The social and sociological implications of what David Beer calls the ‘precarious double life’ of the recording engineer – a technical professional on one hand, an artistic one on the other – are only recently coming to the fore in scholarship. Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network theory and the Social Construction of Technology theory pioneered by Trevor Pinch, as well as the contributions of Susan Schmidt-Horning and Beer himself, have begun to give us an intellectual framework to examine how social forces shape sound technology and the variegated implications of that shaping. This article examines the case of the ‘bilingualism’ required of the recording engineer. Drawing on primary sources from across the twentieth century, it traces the case of scientific terminology becoming musical terminology, that musical terminology becoming ingrained in consumer culture, and that ingrained, well-understood musical terminology becoming, finally, metaphorical. We trace the case of spectral terminology from Joseph P. Maxfield’s articles explaining electromechanical recording to a general audience in the publication Scientific American in the 1930 s, through the application of spectral terminology in advertising during the hi-fi boom of the midcentury, and finally to the metaphorical use of the same terminology in popular music in the last two decades of the century. We show, then, that it is not only the audio engineer, but also their terminology itself that participates in a ‘double life’.