November 2021 – Ben Thorn [ Sound Art ] https://benthorn.myblog.arts.ac.uk/

Andrew Pierre Hart

The main focus of Andrew Pierre Hart’s work is the symbiotic relationship between sound and painting. His practice is an ongoing rhythmic research and play of improvised and spontaneous generative processes, through various mediums: sound, video, performance, found object and image, language, photography and installation, and themes of: improvisation, collective memory, cross-modality, spatialisation, musicality and rhythmology.

A focus of Andrews presentation was built around improvisation and performance. One of these performances, in collaboration with Shabaka Hutchings (of Sons of Kramer, and The Comet Is Coming) was improvised over a interviewed man.

I often find that when paired with music over the top, we start to see the rhythms of everyday speech in a more pronounced way. Some favourite examples of music that include field recorded speech include the piece “Sleep” by the band Godspeed you! Black Emperor, as well as the music of Boards of Canada, who repurpose sound from old VHS tapes. When creating music, I often like to use a VST plugin that streams digital radio right into Ableton Live. This means I can access streamed sounds from across the world. I sometimes use talking based radio stations, and I find it interesting that what the station is talking about seems to change meaning when sounds and music are played underneath (or on top of).

This got me thinking about an album by Jan Jelinek called Zwichen (between). Here is a description of the album from its Bandcamp page.

‘Zwischen brings together twelve sound poetry collages using interview answers by public figures. Each collage consists of the brief moments between the spoken words: silences, pauses for breath and hesitations in which the interviewees utter non-semantic sound particles. These voice collages also control a synthesizer, creating electronic sounds that overlay and merge with the voices to make twelve acousticstructures.’

At the beginning or at the end — At the Beginning or at the End.

Lucia Chung

Lucia H Chung is a Taiwanese artist based in London, UK.

She performs and releases music under the alias ‘en creux’ where the sound creation springs from her fascinations in noise generated via feedback on digital and analogue equipment, and her role as a ‘mediator-performer’ in the multifaceted relationship between the sonic events incurring within the self-regulated system. She also works as a broadcaster and an independent curator at Happened. She has curated and organised residency programmes and music events around the UK and Europe.

Lucia’s presentation talked about her early work and inspirations. She mentions being inspired by the work of Jacob Kirkegaard’s 4 Rooms, a project in which 4 abandoned rooms inside the zone of exclusion in Chernobyl were recorded and played back in the same manner as Alvin Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room”(1970) demonstrating the resonances of the room from their own feedback.

Feedback is something that I will most certainly explore further and already experiment with. Most of my experiments have been done with microphone feedback and filtered oscillators.

There is something about the sound of feedback, its piercing resonance, that has always intrigued me. In a musical sense, guitar feedback has been used intentionally by many influential rock musicians such as Jimi Hendrix, Lou Reed, Robert Fripp. Artists such as Alvin Lucier, Hugh Davies, Steve Reich used feedback in their work.

I also find the location of Chernobyl to be alluring in its unique desolation. I find abandoned places and buildings very aesthetically beautiful when nature reclaims them. This romanticism likely comes from the visual appearance of pillboxes and tank blocks that are dotted around the countryside at home.

There is also the physical alienation of such structures. Monolithic, brutal and utilitarian, they now stand faded, covered in ivy surrounded by seas of stinging nettles. Perhaps less romanticly, a great deal of them seem to become public urinals graffitied with obscenities.

In the future, I wish to explore such structures in their dilapidation and create a work from them.

Radio

Over the week I returned home for a couple days and picked up an old Roberts R606-MB radio (c.1974) that was collecting dust in our old chicken storage barn.

Listening to the radio made me think about the following things.

The detachment of physicality (regarding modern digital media) and nostalgia
The lack of ‘purity’ in the medium and how it effects the listing experience

When listening to the radio, if you intend to listen to a certain broadcast, you are fighting a battle to maintain and find that perfect frequency. Much of what you hear is not what you actually intend to listen to, but is the signal noise of surrounding frequencies.

With digital media, we (generally) take it for granted that when we press play the audio will be flawless, of high quality and will not degrade over time.

Richard Phoenix

Richard is an artist with interests in accessibility, inclusion and imperfection and how art and music can intersect these points, remove barriers and make new forms of normal that include rather than exclude.

Using painting, drawing, music and interaction he works with communities and on his own to try and draw these disparate ideas together.

Currently an artist on the Conditions Studio Programme in Croydon. Richard also works for the learning disability arts organisation Heart n Soul as their creative associate and is the founder and director of not-for-profit organisation Constant Flux, and he plays in several punk bands.

During his virtual visit, Richard focused on the work he did with neurodivergent or, the term he prefers, disabled people. He says this is because he sees that these people are disabled by the limits and accessibility (or lack of) of their environments, whereas he sees the term people with disabilities as putting the responsibility on the affected individual.

As well as his visual art has released the book ‘D.I.Y As Privilege: A Manifesto’ published under Rough Trade Books. In this, he writes about his experience with supporting musicians with learning disabilities and being part of the DIY punk scene, re-evaluating his perception of the culture.

Richard works with musicians such as Daniel Wakeford, The Fish Police, Beat Express, Pertti Kurikan Nimipäivät, Electric Fire and more. He helps to organise the events from the and is involved in helping venues make themselves more accessible.

His presentation made me reflect on how little music I have heard from musicians with learning disabilities and makes me think of how I can make my work more responsible when factoring in other audiences, such as warnings before video and audio playback.

Richard left us with 5 key things to think about in creative projects:

People
Environment
Communication
Belonging
Sharing

He says to create structures that allow freedom, involve people in decision making from the start and to not focus on the outcome. This supports people to have more agency and control and delevop creativity independently.

I will keep in mind all these things in future group projects.

Graphical Notation

After the sound walk, I created a basic visual representation of the experience. Notations are something I find quite interesting after seeing John Cages ‘Notations’

I thought of the purpose of notation, whenever we create work MIDI in modern DAWs it almost creates its own notation in the form of the piano roll. Can I make a DAW with a more expressive or indeterminate interface, one that is new and does not limit itself to equal temperament? The notation creates the music itself.

I found that 2D, on paper, stationary notations are limited. While I was drawing my notation of the sound walk I felt limited in its dimension and lack of fluidity. I felt I could express time and duration on the paper but it felt cumbersome. Maybe animated notation is more useful and practical when we spend more time looking at screens, which allow for such fluidity, than paper.

My initial drawings were done between breaks of the sound walk. I was thinking of the sounds in regards of spaciality rather than on a linear time frame. I thought as my self as a microphone and what directions the sounds where coming from. As you can see in the images, I used a birds-eye/top-down view. This limited the concept of sound from above and below. The other rings surrounding the LR circle show the distance of sound from the microphone. In the middle ground sounds are much more tangible in their spacial placement. Basic colour theory as well as shape could be used to differentiate sounds or even convey mood. Angular shapes have more aggressive attacks, rounder shapes fade in and out. Size determines volume. Lines and gaps rhythm.

Åsa Stjerna

Åsa Helena Stjerna is a Swedish artist who creates site-specific sound installations, exploring sound’s potential and connection to time, place, as well as human/non-human. As a researcher, she is interested in the transformative ability of sound and what it means to make a difference in the era of Anthropocene and Advanced Capitalism.

MARE BALTICUM

Mare Balticum is the artistic outcome of the participation in the EU/Life funded scientific investigation BIAS: Baltic Sea Information on the Acoustic Soundscape. Gathering scientists from six Baltic nations, the project investigated human-induced noise in the Baltic. Deploying thirty-eight hydrophones, recording different locations in the Baltic, these recordings were made at exactly the same moment every hour, each day, for a year; creating a sonic map of the Baltic enabling the scientists to measure the effects of human-induced sound in the ocean.

In the sound installation, each loudspeaker represents a specific place in the Baltic where sound recordings were made. Distinct places bleed into one another in the sound installation, sometimes acting as solitary voices and sometimes as ensembles. Together, they constitute a geographic choreography that invites the visitor to move from place to place.

The area of her work that interested me most was based on sonification.

Sonification is the use of non-speech audio to represent information.

I’m conflicted on my opinions of sonification as an art form.

This is mostly because data, something that is seen as having an ‘objective truth’, is then potentially skewed by an artist’s subjective application of the sonification process, which then has the ability to completely undermine, or even negate the entire concept that is trying to be presented.

For instance, the arbitrary use of setting all the sounds to a scale might make the information more pleasing and recognisable to the listener, but at what point is the meaning of said information lost?

I can certainly see its value as a means of education and creating interest in a field that might otherwise be dismissed as numbers that have no meaning.

An area of sonification that is interesting to me is its potential use in computer games and simulations. It would allow for dynamic, and potentially, interactive sounds based on complex information.

Ancient Chinese Philosophy and Music

China as a nation. The concept of an ancient established kingdom and its claim to the land. The cultural revolution. Removing the past (Four Olds: Old Ideas, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Customs). Encouraged vigilantism.

I read about Yayue, meaning (elegant music), a form of classical music and dance that was performed at the royal court in ancient China. The philosopher Confucius considered yayue to be beneficial music and good, whereas he saw the popular music of the day, termed suyue (uncultivated music) to be decadent and corrupting. Yayue was seen as refined, improving and essential for self-cultivation and symbolised good and stable governance. In Confucius tradition the Guqin, a seven stringed zither, is seen as the instruments of the scholar-official class.

This made me of Jacques Attali’s Noise: The Political Economy of Music and the concept of sound/music in regards to authority and power. Has much really changed in the way we see music?

In some circles, classical music is seen as having a sort of superiority over popular music, is this a result of the perpetuation of the educatated ruling class enforcing what is ‘elegant’ and what is ‘uncultivated’? Perhaps a better word for uncultivated would be uncensored. If the same emotions are felt from 2 different pieces of music, popular and classical, is one seen as more valid than the other, is the value equal?

Western ‘classical’ music is an interesting field for me, from a social standpoint. I do not come from a background of classical musicianship and neither do members of my family. My Dad listens mostly to rock, and my Mum more Alternate/Indie rock. Classical music is seen as something of an sophisticated and intellectual category, as well as elitist. I suppose the same thing can be thought about regarding jazz. Maybe it’s because while the working class labour, the elites dictate what is music and what is not. However, I do enjoy classical music. In my childhood I had compilation of Tchaikovsky that I would listen to in order to fall asleep. Maybe my Mum got me the cd after reading something about the controversial ‘Mozart effect’ of listening to classical music making children smarter, that is no doubt regaled by elitist institutionalists. I didn’t really get into classical music until I started listening to Debussy and Satie, what then introduced me to ‘modern’ composers such as Arvo Part, John Cage, Morton Feldman and the minimal music movement.

The ancient philosopher Mozi denounced anything that was seen as divisive based on the concept of consequentialism. This meant the entire condemnation of music as an extravagance and indulgence, something that serves no useful purpose and may be harmful. This is a stance that I have not come across before due to its intense utilitarianism in regards to the material, but little regard for the pleasures of the individual.

The Taoist branch of philosophy has an emphasis on Tao (“the way”) balance and harmony with nature. Taosim is an interesting mix of philosophy and spiritual tradition, though I would argue that philosophy and religeon/spirituality are much in the same thing. Rooted in folk tradition, Taoist music is seen as a way to bring Yin and Yang into balance during ceremonial rites, and as a way to speak to the gods, to pray for the dead. Yin tones are seen as soft, female, dark, cold and negative while Yang tones are seen as hard, male, light, warm.