Music of Sound

The name RadiOM might sound like an FM station for meditation but is in fact an archive associated with the Other Minds site. No clearer? Well to quote: “Other Minds is a global New Music community where composers, students, and listeners discover and learn about innovative music by composers from all over the world” and the significance of those capital letters is indicative of the academic form of New Music to be found there. (Don’t get me wrong, thats not a criticism, merely an observation.)

RadiOM represents an amazing collection of archival recordings – heres just a few gems I found:

Computers and Art – John Lifton of London talks about his goal of realizing a cybernetic art work which will alter itself according to the spectators’ response to it. He talks with Don Buchla, who was at the time of this recording (Dec. 20, 1972), adapting his synthesizers to computer control, Richard Friedman, composer and programmer who helped design the Buchla program, and Charles Amirkhanian. Also included in this program, Lifton’s companion, American painter Pamela Zoline, talks about her recent work on the meta-set “Things in the World”.

A Stereophonic Journey Through India – ean-Louis Derche traveled to India in the summer of 1971 and faithfully recorded temple music in several out-of-the-way locations. Even more remarkable are his unusual recordings made in the streets of Benares, Chidambaran, Madurai, Tanjour, and Trivandrum. Listen to the sounds of rickshaws; a walk down a narrow street; craftsmen hammering metal; and the timeless flow of the Ganges River.

Ode To Gravity: Interspecies Music – For many years, Jim Nollman has explored the limits of human-animal communication. Along the way he has made some highly provocative tapes. In this program he talks with Charles Amirkhanian and introduces his recordings, including his now famous “Turkey Song”, in which human slide whistlers perform a call-and-response improvisation with the flock of gobblers at the Willy Bird Farm. Also heard is a recording of a colony of kangaroo rats and wild burros, made during a recent visit to Death Valley.

Nicely cut/composed!

Soundscapes – by Ace Norton from IE HAGY on Vimeo.

I stumbled across this genius piece of public sound art Touched Echo by Mark Uskison which dates back to 2006 but the subject matter itself relates to one of the many air raids on Germany in 1945, in this case Dresden 13th February 1945….

The project is setup at an appropriate tourist location & participants are requested to place their hands over their ears & lean on the metal railing, much as one might have during an air raid… By using sound conductors integrated in the railing, the sound of aeroplanes and explosions are transmitted from the swinging balustrade through the arm directly into the inner ear via bone conduction and cannot be heard by anyone else.

Transmitting sound via bone vibration is often used in hearing aids but this is the first time I have heard of it being used for sound art… After a bit of a wander around via google I found a few interesting applications, including a talking doll that only its owner can hear, and an explanation of how the process of ‘bone conduction’ actually works by a company who produce a system that employs the technique to turn an entire motorbike helmet into a speaker…

So next time you need total isolation when recording gun shots or explosions or that meathead drummer this might be just what you need!

Last time I was in Tokyo I went to an excellent installation by visual artist Shiro Takatani and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto at the icc Gallery and as I just stumbled across a couple of videos on youtube I thought I would reminisce a little. Regardless of whether you understand spoken Japanese or not, check this out:

I visited the installation twice & each time stayed for an hour or more… incase you can’t tell from the video, the moving images are being projected into nine tanks filled with water & dry ice, and as the fog drifts the apparent depth of the image changes… Visually it was very hypnotic, but it was also quite unreal to walk into a darkened gallery with people lieing on the floor, quietly watching & listening this complex evolving environment…

But for me, even more mezmerising was Ryuichi Sakamoto’s soundtrack. Suspended with each of the 9 tanks were pairs of speakers, each of which produced a soundtrack that at times was unique, at other times related to sounds from speakers nearby, but was always evolving. If I spent a total of 3 hours in there listening, I would not have heard a single sound repeat and it intrigued the hell out of me as to how the soundtrack was composed/generated & reproduced…

Luckily a few weeks later I was in a bookstore in Osaka & in the music book section came across a very interesting book documenting the installation as well as including interviews with the two artists.. I’ll quote some of what Ryuichi Sakamoto has to say about his creative process relative to the project;

Secret of Sound

- And how did the structure of the audio aspect develop?

RS: ‘The first thing is that I didn’t want to bring it back to a linear vector. Which of course means that it’s alright to have it completely random, but at some point you want to have certain parts of the music matching certain image sequences. So when you create groupings of sounds and images you want them to end with certain images, and you wind up creating minimal guidelines, things to be avoided. In total, we’re dealing with about 400 sound fragments from the opera (LIFE was originally conceived & performed as an opera) Some of them have some level of musical coherence, and some are resounding crashing sounds. Just setting them off at random would be boring. Especially because I do like taking risks, this kind of became the objective. I don’t like ‘experimental music’ that’s only point is experimentation. So when i started looking at what might make interesting groupings, and this is slightly embarrassing to admit, but I started rereading Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. I don’t remember the chapter, but there was a brief mention of the classification of insects as corresponding to the classification of musical instruments. Eureka I thought. Natural history, natural sciences, taxonomy. This is the way to organise the work!’

- And just what kind of taxonomy was it?

RS: ‘In A Thousand Plateaus it’s the way that insects produce sound; ‘criers’ and ‘scrapers’ are quite different. If you follow this line of reasoning you see musical instruments which are ‘struck’, ‘scraped’, ‘blown’ or what have you. So this is how I began creating my own musical taxonomy. Once I had my major domains, I developed kingdoms, phylum, classes and so on. In the end I arrived at some 30 groups. With nine aquariums it meant that they should be organised into nine variations. Well considering that they are in stereo this would be actually 18. Anyway, there are nine playback systems. One thing that was interesting is that usually you listen to stereo as one thing, but with 9 aquariums created individually, even when you’re hearing the same sound, it doesn’t sound the same. There will be delays and other artefacts of the installation. Of course, there are examples in music, like Toru Takemitsu dividing up the orchestra into two sections for performances, and of course many others in post-war music, but this is the first experiment I’ve heard of using nine. Anyway it was really interesting working in this way.’

- Is this something you were able to simulate in your mind?

RS: ‘These days there are very convenient software tools like Max/MSP that allow you to place nine different sources in stereo headphones, and which allow for random sampling, and these enabled me to test everything first. I tried first playing each of the nine playback systems with seperate sound groups, or dividing them up into arrangements of threes, for example. I had imagined that mixing them up would yield more interesting results, but when I listened to the playback I found that the best results were when a given group was played syncronized or when the times and locations were offset. I remember saying that it was like a garden with 9 shishiodoshi (a Japanese garden water-distribution/temporal awareness system) runnign at the same time. Usually you have only one, right? (Laughs)

- Are there recurrences?

RS: ‘No there aren’t. Each morning when we boot up the Macs, 30 new random examples are generated. With 30 there are a lot of possibilities for recombination, and so each event is unique. The ending is decided though, and once the ending has been reached the program automatically shuffles the data so that a new pattern of 30 new groups is generated. If you’re playing one group of 30 there are times when a random cycle will be uninteresting so for this eventuality, there are secondary rules governing groups. or to say it more accurately, there are situations which it is better to create rules for. Situations wherein random play is interesting are left to run as is. If we say that within a given group there are 30 different sound files at play, they can be played at random, or in an enormous number of different sequence combinations. And of course there are nine different devices playing them. So in the end, there should be no time during the terms of the exhibition when the same sound will be playing.

- It sounds perfectly random, but in fact they’re not.

RS: The point is that they are not chaotic.

Interesting huh?

& just for the record, here is an example of a shishiodoshi (& for the train spotters, one appears prominantely in Kill Bill when Lucy Lieu loses both her final battle & her head)

which of course, someone just had to go & mash up:

I would quite like to hear an ambient dub track with a shishiodoshi though a space echo, but JPop gabba or whatever that is….hmmm… shame…

Micro Garden by Arius Blaze of Folktek

While its very intriguing & makes some great sounds, it reminds me of a Len Lye kinetic sculpture which also made very beautiful sounds, without the aid of any electricity! Actually thats a lie, electricity was involved in making it move…

‘Grass’ made in 1965 by Len Lye

Since theres no video or sound I can link to, I’ll try to describe it from memory: basically the whole wooden base that the thin metal rods are connected to gently/slowly rocks, so the rods emulate the movement of wind through long grass… and of course, as the rods bend & move they ping each other making the most exquisite, delicate sounds..

In my humble opinion, there is nothing better than walking into an art gallery & hearing a sound that is evocative, but you cannot imagine how it is being created. Such is Len Lyes kinetic sculptures, although not all of them are gentle works… A Flip & Two Twisters is a good example of a scary dramatic kinetic sculpture; you stand in awe in its presence – overwhelmed by its physicality & equally fascinated & unnerved by the energy involved…

In the following video you see Universe as well as Blade and at 6’00″ or so A Flip & Two Twisters (although sadly youtubes audio renders the effect to be 0.01% of reality)

Arg! moving – the very word makes my back ache… especially up four floors of stairs… still, progress has been made & my interweb feed is reconnected, phew! So heres a couple of very cool videos people sent me while I was existing in the disconnected netherworld;

First, a very beautiful mechanised instrument/composition by someone called Felix (thanks for the tip Justin!) – the synced light flashes reinforce the mechanics rather than make it feel like a steampunk disco, although the latter conjures up some intriguing ideas… If you happen to be reading this in the UK then you can go experience it for yourself up until January 19th at Gasworks Gallery

Theres an interview with the artist here one bit of which made me smile:

GW: Do you think the absence of a performer makes it easier or harder for an audience to relate?

“I think it makes it easier because the structure of the music is spelt out visually. For example, if I played my mum a powerful piece of Breakcore-Electronica, she would most probably hate it. If the machines performed the exact same piece, she would enjoy it. Rhythmic structures in music are mathematically interesting and it’s good to see them.
Some say that the only people that truly enjoy Breakcore, Glitchcore etc. are the people that make it. You shouldn’t need to understand the inner workings of a computer to take pleasure in the music it plays, but you should be appreciative of work that has gone into it.”

And unrelatedly, some very nifty VR-like head tracking using a wii remote, except backwards (thanks David!)

Stumbled across this on flickr – what a brilliant idea!

Eric Archer makes a number of unique electronic instruments, but his sound cameras do more than just generate sounds – they translate light (captured via the super 8 camera lens) into sound… Check his sound camera sound archive here for some example sonifications including LED signs, dripping water, solar radiation and this evocative description of recording percussion: “The sound camera is tripod-mounted and focused on glare from daylight through a window as it reflects off the cymbal. The camera is 2-3 feet from the instrument. The cymbals are played with mallets, hi hats are played with sticks.”

And its for a good cause!
via notcot

I cite this artist, Peter Vogel, if for no other reason than
I would love to own an analogue synth created by him!

I ask you, is this not beauty?
In form & (one hopes) function?

Maybe?

Its like those people who rebuild synths into transparent cases,
except forget the case… & while you are at it, why not pursue
minimalism to its ultimate endpoint: diddly squat!