Psychoacoustics – Hyperacusis

I have my own personal experience with psychoacoustics as I had hyperacusis while growing up. My hearing is still sensitive, however, I no longer experience the extreme effects that I did when I was younger. My main memories of it began during morning assembly at primary school when during the assembly singing it sounded like an extremely resonant filter kicked in on a certain frequency which caused me to cry and panic from the pain. After this, I tried to avoid car/fire alarms and other loud noises.

I also tried to avoid loud/busy crowds as my ears would be extremely sensitive and I’d find it overwhelming. I remember that many people having conversations at once, in particular, would overwhelm me as I could hear all the conversations at once and would try to follow along with them all. This is still the case today and I find myself very aware of background noises.

Having hyperacusis had a dramatic effect on me growing up, one of the main things being my dislike of loud public places leading to me becoming quite agoraphobic. This also leads to me having a different social experience with music on the whole. I’ve only recently started going to see live music.

Since I was very young I’ve also struggled with tinnitus at night as, much like background noise, I can’t help but focus on it. Because of this, I grew up listening to music or audiobooks a lot at night, with the intent to fall asleep to them.

I also suffer from migraines which increase my sensitivity to sounds.

All of the following experiences have led me to naturally become interested in ’deep listening’ to the point that I would do it before I even knew about it conceptually. It’s also why I’m more focused on the introspective ‘internal’ effect of sound than the externality of dancing (though my enjoyment of singing might not align with this?). I believe it also has an effect on how I listen to music. When listening to albums for the first time I often choose to listen to them at night in the dark. This is also the way I listen to more ambient and ‘experimental’ music, whereas, when I’m in public places, such as on the tube, I listen to more rhythmical and structured music that I’m already familiar with, though, this is as much due to the ability of the music to cut through the loud sounds (I do not own active noise-cancelling headphones.)

The voice

I think voice is an interesting subject to talk about. 

I enjoy singing, and do it every day but am not particularly good or confident in using my voice, even in a social context.

A while ago I was having a conversation with my Dad about music and how the voice of the singer is often a deal-breaker in whether people enjoy the music of a band. The example we were talking about was Morrisey in the Smiths and how his overall vocal style is a definite part of the band’s aesthetic.

The voice is very personal and conveys a lot of meaning, both in the context of words used and also in its sonic qualities.

Listening to music in unknown languages moves the voices from a position of lyrical content to pure sonic qualities.

I find listening to music in languages unknown to me to be an interesting experience. For example, I enjoy the music of Japanese artist Ichiko Aoba. I have listened to one of her albums many times, and find it beautiful, yet I have no idea what she is singing about. It lets me appreciate her voice for its purely sonic properties. If I knew what she was singing about would I like the music more? It might even be quite offensive to ignore the lyrics of the music.

Elizibeth Fraser (of Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil) is know for her creative vocal style and abstraction of lyrics. Using a song technique called Puirt à beul. She often uses preexisting words without attaching the meaning of the word to it. I remember reading about how she would pick words from the dictionary at random. Im a fan of Cocteau Twins and Elizibeth Frazer is an amazing vocalist, though I must admit, that as someone who likes singing along to music it makes it more difficult to sing to.

this is supposed to link to Pearly Dewdrops

A case that works in advantage of this is Jónsi’s singing in Sigur Rós. For the album () all the lyrics are sang in a made up language. This is interesting as their earlier albums were sang in Icelandic yet become popular outside of Iceland.

Less focused on extended technique but once again treating the voice as pure sound, a large influence on me is the work of Liz Harris/ Grouper. Her voice is often buried is reverb and treated as an instrument in the mix. I recently saw Grouper perform and the Barbican and enjoyed it a lot. Her use of low filtered noise (either nature field recordings or portable tape machine hums) fed through guitar pedals created a bed for her guitar and voice to sit on, and was like a glue between songs as long stretches of noise reduced your state of listening, only to be brought back with subtle changes.


I am currently deciding wether I want to use my voice in my piece or not as it can be a versatile tool however I’m not sure i have the current ability to use it as effectively as I might wish.




Hannah Kemp-Welch

Hannah Kemp-Welch is a sound artist with a socially-engaged practice. She produces audio works with community groups for installation and broadcast, using voices, field recordings and found sounds. She also delivers workshops, makes zines and builds basic radios, aiming to open out sonic practices and technologies for all. Hannah is a member of the feminist radio art group Shortwave Collective and arts cooperative Soundcamp. 

Hannah is currently a PhD student with CRiSAP, developing and testing methodologies for collective listening within socially-engaged art.

I found Hannah’s talk to be very moving, specifically her project The Right to Record. https://www.sound-art-hannah.com/right-to-record

It reminded me once again of a topic that came up when I attended the Ultra-Red sessions at LCC (and met Hannah previously), where do we place ourselves in this work. Its important not to come across as some kind of protagonist, and to give others the tools to express themselves instead of dictating the piece.

This project was successful in telling an empathetic story unknown to me, that has also been impactful in lobbying the government to act and change these corrupt laws.

I also found the topic of the Shortwave Collective to be interesting and I’m happy about it existing in order to explore shortwave radio outside of the current older, male-dominated scene and structure. I’m interested in shortwave radio myself, mostly thanks to recordings of scanner and number stations in works by Godspeed You! Black Emporer, Tim Hecker, William Basinski and the Conet Project.

Manifestos

Good design is innovative.

Good design must be useful.

Good design is aesthetic design.

Good design makes a product understandable.

Good design is honest.

Good design is unobtrusive.

Good design is long-lasting.

Good design is consistent in every detail.

Good design is environmentally friendly.

And last but not least, good design is as little design as possible.

Dieter Rams

Luigi Russolo

Brian Eno – Music for Airports liner notes

The famous quote that come up a lot from the liner notes of music for airports is the following:

“Ambient Music must be able to accomodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”

Ultra-Red

http://www.ultrared.org/mission.html

Our Manifesto

Solidarity

Inclusion

Freedom of the Individual

Collaboration not Competition (Mutual Aid)

Vulnerability

Felisha Ledesma

Felisha Ledesma is a Berlin based sound artist and musician. Ledesma co-founded and directed S1, a project space that hosted experimental music, performance and visual art as well as being the headquarters for the Synth Library –  a lending library for electronic music equipment. 

 Most recently Felisha conceptualized a synthesizer, AMQR, together with instrument designer Ess Mattisson which was used on Ledesma’s releases for labels Ecstatic Recordings and Enmossed x Psychic Liberation. This collaboration led to the formation of Fors, a music technology project creating software instruments.

I have previously come across the Fors software instruments available for Ableton Live, and plan to get into creating my own in Max.

I like the idea of the Synth Library and think it serves well as an educational tool

Pamela Z

Pamela Z is a composer/performer and media artist who works primarily with voice, live electronic processing, sampled sound, and video. A pioneer of live digital looping techniques, she processes her voice in real-time to create dense, complex sonic layers. Her solo works combine experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, digital processing, and wireless MIDI controllers that allow her to manipulate sound with physical gestures. In addition to her solo work, she has been commissioned to compose scores for dance, theatre, film, and chamber ensembles including Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Ethel, and San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. Her interdisciplinary performance works have been presented at venues including The Kitchen (NY), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), REDCAT (LA), and MCA (Chicago), and her installations have been presented at such exhibition spaces as the Whitney (NY), the Diözesanmuseum (Cologne), and the Krannert (IL). Pamela Z has toured extensively throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. She’s a recipient of numerous awards including the Rome Prize, United States Artists, a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation residency, the Guggenheim, the Doris Duke Artist Impact Award, Herb Alpert Award, an Ars Electronica honourable mention, and the NEA Japan/US Friendship Commission Fellowship. She holds a music degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder. 

I recently got my hands on a Quest 2 VR headset and and find that the hand tracking techniques that Pamela Z uses could be used, as well a more flexible experience of interactable objects in a virtual, or augmented reality. I believe that the technology is more versatile than the controllers that Pamela uses due to the cameras ability to use gestures with individual finger tracking. 

Perhaps it is possible to assign a ‘track’/ instrument to each finger, what could then be selected by touching the said finger and thumb together.

I have the experience in Unity to experiment with this in terms of spacialisation, creating simple objects that emit sound and having the ability to move them around in a space.

I have recently been trying to learn Max MSP, and have come across a package that works with VR (created by Graham Wakefield). I will try to experiment with this.

Vivienne Griffin

Born in Dublin and living in London, Vivienne Griffin studied fine art at City University New York supported by a Fulbright Scholarship. Griffin is a recent recipient of an Oram Award, named after legendary producer and electronic musician Daphne Oram, the award celebrates innovation in sound and music. Most recent exhibitions are Manchester International Festival 2021, the AGM in Somerset House at St Mary le Strand 2021, for Montez Press Radio in NYC, Griffin is a PhD candidate at Queen’s University Belfast at the Sonic Arts Research Center. They are represented by Bureau, NYC. They are currently working on a video game that functions as a music interface and writing poetry. Their upcoming album Music For Dead People (or requiems) will be out in 2022. 

I found Vivienne’s recent work in Unreal Engine somewhat frustrating and more like a gimmicky demo. It’s not that I don’t think of games as art, quite the opposite, I just don’t believe it’s very beneficial to apply the modern art mentality of ‘ready made’-ing everything. I think my background in games, and previous experience in games engines made me feel like the piece was an uninspiring collection of prefab assets and devalued the potential of the medium.

The game Proteus was the first game that explicitly me think about the game environment as a composition tool. You would walk around an environment and in-game assets would add to the music as instruments (such as walking past flowers.)

Proteus

I previously dabbled with changing the sounds of a platform game I was making. Jumping triggered a kick and landing a snare etc.

For a while, I was very interested in the idea of creating simulated environments in games, and continue to be in relation to sound. This stemmed from watching films by Chantel Ackerman, as well as reading about the One City Block game design concept, and playing the indie game It’s Winter.

I find something appealing about the mundane escapism.

Yan Jun

“I wish I was a piece of field recording.”

Yan Jun

Yan Jun is a musician and poet, born in Lanzhou in 1973 and currently based in Beijing. His work transcends the boundaries between improvised music, experimental music, field recording, performance, organising and writing. Alongside performing in venues, he also runs a project called Living Room Tour, where he goes to the audience’s homes to play with the environment and whatever else is available in the room.

He is a member of FEN, Tea Rockers Quintet and Impro Committee, and founder of the guerrilla label Sub Jam.

Yan Jun’s work was accompanied by a sense of humour and focus on performance and subverting the social and performative expectations of certain environments. He talked briefly about Tan Ping, a current social movement/behaviour in china where the youth are choosing to reject the pressure of long hours of stressful work. (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-60353916)

He alluded to the humourous nature of his work taking this absurdist perspective, as opposed to the seriousness of making outright political statements. I found these two political angles interesting, they tackle the same issue with opposite approaches.

Lindsay Wright

Lindsay Wright is an award-winning British composer combining traditional practices with experimental techniques. She utilises her skills as a performer and her experience with music technology to create visceral, emotional and enigmatic scores for all genres of visual media. She recently scored the feature documentary Adventures of Joan Collins; the independent drama Things Unsaid; and the HBO/BBC documentary The Mystery of D.B. Cooper with Tim Atack. Her music for Mudlarks starring Mirren Mack (Sex Education) was recently nominated for Best Score at the British Short Film Awards. Her advertising work includes the British Airways ‘Take Off to the People and Places You Love’ campaign, Rightmove’s ‘The Renter’ and Hewlett Packard’s ‘Orchestra’, winning Bronze at the 2021 LIA Awards. She is currently working on a television drama series set to be broadcast next year; an upcoming documentary for the BBC; and her next EP of original material.

My opinion on the Digital

As I’ve previously mentioned, a lot of my perspective on the digital space is rooted in escapism. As a child, I would look out the window at the landscape and wonder what it would look like without human interference.

I think the internet is a great demonstration of mutual aid in terms of learning. I’ve taught myself many things this way.

NFTs

I do not like NTFs, to me they are their use is the antithesis of what makes the internet good. Ownership and digital scarcity. I personally don’t can’t think of what ‘value’ they have in society. Most of what I see about NTFs is driven by scarcity consumerism and economics. Kinda Crypto-Anarchism/ Ancap.