Category: Introduction to Sound Arts

Part One – Experience

Hildegard Westerkamp defines sound walking as “… any excursion whose main purpose is listening to the environment. It is exposing our ears to every sound around us no matter where we are.“

Below is a list of some sounds that I noted during the experiences.

Stationary – Train Underpass Tunnel

Forward (panning)

• Keys. Metallic short sounds, musical.
• Clothes. Rustling to movement. Like brushed snares
• Talking, laughing. Intensified vulnerability

Left

• Quiet car traffic
• Rattling of larger vehicles
• Wind

Right

• Vertical steps. Rhythmic pattern of footsteps.
• Overground automated announcement. Ordered,Alien.
• Street ‘noise’. Mid freq hum.

Above

The rumble of the overhead train. Metallic banging. Such a low frequency that the reverberance was felt more than heard.

Sound walk. Sydenham Hill Woods

Below.

• Crunching rocks, soft forest floor, snapping twigs. Swaying leaves

Above 

• Rustling leaves in the trees, Birds of all kinds. Rhythmic, melodic, repetitive.
• Aeroplanes overhead

Forward(left and right)

• A panting dog, the owner calling from left and right, the dog’s purposeful steps.
• Child inquiring about us.
• Clanging metal pipes.
• Sound System playing music
• Bicycles chains
• Crying child in the distance

Behind

• The water bottle in my bag, sloshing with my steps

Part Two – Reflection

I found the sound walk to be an interesting, complex experience. I found it quite distracting to be walking during the experience and felt like it took away from the experience of listening to the environment. It was as much a challenge in control as a listening task.

The task of listening with my eyes closed is a familiar experience, though I’m public becomes a lot more vulnerable.

In this respect, I preferred the task of listening while stationary as I could focus more on the sounds themselves than the survival instinct of keeping my footing.

After walking for a while it was disorienting to remove the blindfold and to find me in a place, with little sense of how I got there, and what direction I came from.

It helped for me to think of the sound as moving through me rather than me moving in a physical space

During breaks in the walk, I sketched out the sounds shortly after experiencing them. I have included them in a separate entry.

As someone with a somewhat decent memory, it is contrasted by the fact I have never been good with remembering locations. I often remember individual places, like nodes, but seldom remember how to travel from one to another. I wonder if this is something that can be experienced with sounds, as sound marks. Would I know the sound of my kitchen at home? The hum of the heater, the draft under the door? 

The soundscape is something that interests me, I have plans to create a digital soundscape creator at some point. Where you can plot a journey on a map (like with Google Maps) and travel through the map, experiencing generated sounds based on the location, such as weather, altitude, population, wilderness, biome and language. Like a travelling caravan on the silk road of sound.

Listening to sound in complete darkness is usually my preferred method. It allows me to listen with no distraction, and to mentally imagine and ‘visualise’ the sound. Not necessarily the source of the sound, but some abstract scene or narrative.

This likely stems from my childhood, and general sleep patterns.

I’ve always struggled to fall asleep, often due to the fact I listen intensely. At night, and in the quiet, I’ve always heard a high pitch noise that would keep me up listening to it. And so, since my early childhood, I would always listen to music, or audiobooks as a distraction from this sound. I’m not confident in what the sound is but it could be linked to the hyperacusis that had had when I was younger.

Listening in the dark is also something I do when I have migraines. I’ve suffered from migraines since my early teens, and the only way for them to end is if I throw up or fall asleep.

When I have a migraine, my senses are at their extreme. Sight is simple enough to negate with, closed curtains and eyes, but Sound is more difficult. It feels as though somebody has boosted the low frequencies and I focus extremely hard on any rhythms I can to regulate my breathing. Needless to say, I am thankful when I do not have migraines.

Artists

Yoko Ono, Ryoji Ikeda, Merzbow (Masami Akita), Isao Tomita, Hiroshi Yoshimura, Satoshi Ashikawa, Yasunao Tone

Movements that interest me

Kankyō Ongaku – ‘Environmental music’

As someone interested in minimal and ambient music, the work of musicians such as Hiroshi Yoshimura interests me. Inspired by the Fluxus movement, Satie, Brian Eno and Harry Partch. His music has come popular over recent years due to the mystical algorithm of Youtube. Most of Yoshimura’s music was made with a Fender Rhodes layered on top of field recordings. The use of pentatonic scales avoids any clashes that make the music sound open and, to me, captures the essence of Mono no aware.

Mono no aware
Meaning "the pathos or sentiment of things"
It is often translated as the 'ahness' of things, falling cherry blossoms, the changing of seasons, an awareness in the transient beauty of life.

Something I’ve found interesting is that Yoshimura’s music has been categorised as New Age in some resources that I have been researching him. The term New Age is something I very much dislike. My dislike of the term is the appropriation of the environmentalist attitude along with spiritual exoticism, skewed for the sake of commercialisation and marketing.

Japanoise and Glitch Music

To me, noise and glitch music is the manifestation of the Japanese concept of Wabi-Sabi.

Wabi Sabi
An appreciation in the beauty of imperfection, incompletness and impermanance. Influenced by Shinto and Buddhism.

Works such as Yasunao Tone’s Solo for Wounded CD show what can be created through the physical distortion of a physical medium. It was created by purposely distressing a CD. I personally do not get much emotional satisfaction from the sounds achieved, however, they are unlike anything I had heard before, and as sounds, themselves could be used in compositions.

The history of noise music and glitch is routed in the politics, and economy of post World War 2 Japan. After the nationalism of WW2 imperialism, Japan was occupied by American forces and the nation was rebuilt economically, shifting away from a war economy to a consumer-based one. The Japanese economical miracle, as it is known, caused an economic boom in which Japan become the 2nd largest economy in the world. One of the largest industries was/is the field of electronics (Casio, Yamaha, Sony, Akai, Nikon, Fujifilm, Nintendo, etc). I imagine this had a direct impact on the accessibility of electronics and the culture surrounding these scenes.

Ainu folk music

The Ainu are the indigenous people of the lands surrounding the Sea of Okhotsk, including Hokkaido Island, Northeast Honshu Island, Sakhalin Island, the Kuril Islands, the Kamchatka Peninsula and Khabarovsk Krai, before the arrival of the Yamato Japanese and Russians.

Gagaku is a type of Japanese classical music that was historically used for imperial court music and dances. It was established in the Heian period (794-1185) and derived from Chinese Yayue music

During this interview (1971), Ravi Shankar talks about how the 60s counter-culture adopted Indian classical music and created the western view of it being ‘exotic’ and connected to the use of psychedelic drugs.

An instrument imitating the sound of the human voice.

Language of Tabla – The instruments have their own language

Introduction

“What I’m trying out at this stage of my life is new formats, or new settings maybe, or formats and settings that have been tried before but then been forgotten or pushed aside because established formats have a powerful hold on our thinking.”

(Toop p 582)

This article is a conversation between David Toop and Adam Parkinson made in 2014.

David Toop (b. 1949) is an English musician, author, curator, and Emeritus Professor whose practice crosses boundaries of sound, listening, music and materials. His work encompasses improvised music performance, writing, electronic sound, field recording, exhibition curating, sound art installations and opera.

Summary

In the text, Adam Parkinson asks about the usefulness of the term sound art, and what was used before its first application in 1983.

Toop prefers to use the term sound work, instead of sound art.

Toop finds the term sound art problematic for the following reasons.

• 1. The economy of the art world (issues of value – e.g Exclusivity, elitism, classism, capitalism, privilege, austerity, laundering).
• 2. The creation of an object (text, concept ,installation) – “sound work was always about a process”
• 3. Alienation from the working class.

Toop talks about the British culture of sound arts and what makes it different. He believes that comedy has played a big part in the evolution of sound work in the uk, siting Gilbert and Georges Singing Sculpture, Laurel and Hardy, Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers.

He goes on to talk about the influence of the BBC Radiophic Workshop, suppression of electronic music by the BBC but also the poulist effect of using it on state media.

Reflection and Discussion

Adam Parkinson refers to 1983 as being the first use of the term sound arts. Upon research, Alan Licht says:

“The term sound art dates back to William Hellerman’s Sound Art Foundation, founded in 1982, which primarlity seemed to work with “experimental music” or “new music,” although it did organise an early show of sound sculpture and other exhibitable work at the Sculpture Center in 1983″

Licht, A (2007) Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories, Rizzoli, New York

However, according to Judy Dunaway, there seem to be earlier uses such as an Exhibition at the MoMA in 1979 titled “Sound Art”.

Toop’s work is very much based on improvisation and musicking so I can understand that he doesn’t like the concept of a final material object to be the aim of creating. However, for me personally, I find the idea of creating a final piece alluring.

I think this is in the aim of achieving perfection in an object incarnate, but as I think about it there is only so much that can be gained from such a thing.

I recently finished the book The Chrysalids, what ended with the familiar taoist concept that life is water, fluid and ever changing, and as solid as rocks are, they will eventually erode. Experiencing sound in this manner is perhaps what improvisation is about, the fleeting sound of life.

However, if I listen to an album 100 time do I hear the same thing everytime? Sometimes I might hear new sounds that I hadn’t before as I wasn’t listening to that certain thing. This is something that isn’t experienced with the phenonomon of unrecorded anomalous sounds

Conclusion / Future Work

As someone who has never performed before, let alone improvisational performance, I find the prospect interesting. I do however prefer the idea of working in a style closer to that of CAN, where the improvisations are edited afterwards, mostly due to my aprehention to perform, though that might be because of lack of experience.

References (Harvard System)

Surname, Initial, (Year), Title, Publisher City

Small, C (1998) Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT

Dunaway, J (2020) The Forgotten 1979 MoMA Sound Art Exhibition, Available at: https://online.ucpress.edu/res/article/1/1/25/109397/The-Forgotten-1979-MoMA-Sound-Art-Exhibition (Accessed 7 December 2021)

Glossary

Problematic – Analyse the problems that arise from something

I recently watched the film Solaris (1972) directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. The soundtrack was created by Eduard Artemyev (b. 1937).

Artemyev was a Russian composer who created the scores for Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Mirror, and Stalker, as well as many other films over his career. His scores are famous for the use of the ANS synthesizer.

Solaris is a science fiction film set on a decaying, derelict space station that observes the ocean planet of Solaris, where, as a result of radiation experimentation, a replica (though not a continuation) of the protagonist’s deceased wife is materialized. Like most of Tarkovsky’s work, the goes into philosophical questions such as questioning the necessity of knowledge and science, its morality, as well as of treating beings (in the case of the film, the protagonists manifested ‘wife’) with respect, what draws a parallel with the questions of respect for AI, a common theme in 21st-century sci-fi.

The score for Solaris is a mix of more traditional instruments for the returning theme throughout the film (voice, organ, strings, marimba), field recordings (birds, people talking, clattering metal), and electronic synthesis. Throughout the film, the synthesizer is used to create dark drones as well as sound effects such as futuristic cars from combining it with what sounds like clattering trains and machinery such as air conditioning fans. Another sound that is created sounds like a howling wind.

The ANS Synthesizer was invented by Evgeny Murzin (b. 1914) over a period of 20 years (1937-57) and is based on the method of graphical or drawn sound. This made it possible to visualise a sound wave, as well as create a sound from a drawn spectrogram.
The sine waves are generated from printed glass disks. Each disk has 144 tracks, for a total of 730 microtones spanning 10 octaves. The interface displays these vertically through projected modulating lights with the lowest frequencies being at the bottom and higher frequencies at the top. The horizontal axis plots time. The user ‘draws’ on a non-drying mastic glass plate that allows light to pass through.

Notably, the influential experimental music group Coil also made use of the ANS in a box set released CoilANS. The instrument was used to create drones similar to other work created by Coil like Time Machines. Below are some of the images used to create the boxset.

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Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening is an album that I have been familiar with for a while. I first listened to Deep Listening in 2019, while looking for drone-based music to listen to, as at night I like to listen to ambient and drone music to sleep to.

The audio document outlined a history of sound art.

I am interested in sound arts roots of Dada .

I am aware of the following artists that appear in the video and will likely research further, and write on the works of John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Hugo Ball, Morton Feldman, Pierre Schaeffer, Pauline Oliveros, Karlheinz Stockhausen, La Monte Young, Alvin Lucier, Throbbing Gristle, John Oswald, Negativland, Carsten Nicolai.

Joe Banks (Disinformation), Hildegard Westerkamp, Steve Roden, John Oswald.

The inclusion of music was entertaining and is something that I am interested in.