We were blessed at the start of this term with a fascinating talk from Sam Auinger, who spoke quite candidly and casually about sound, but whose dedication and depth of work spoke for itself.
Sam encouraged students to bring a small rock or pebble to the session and to consider and perform his sound piece ‘My Pebble’
In this sound piece, we are encouraged to ‘create a story in three parts’ with a pebble as our instrument.
My Pebble
a) Pebble meets object
b) Pebble meets object in changing situations
c) Pebble falls to the ground
Imagine a friend (our Pebble) visits us for the first time,
and we show him our room/apartment in detail. He is
interested in everything and wants to get to know every
detail, try everything, and contact everything.
Auinger spoke of the Pebble being a reference point between you and objects and encouraged us to keep them with us as a kind of sound guide. Tapping each new material with the same object you gain some sort of familiarity with that object and builds up an encyclopedia of sounds in your mind interlinked with your object.
He spoke about the change in perception of sounds. How certain sounds when you are younger are exciting, like the sounds of a crowd or a party. ‘These same frequencies for an old person cause stress’. – I thought about the significance of this point in regards to lockdown, and the sound of a party in lockdown was a source of dread for me, a sound that still makes uncomfortable especially of a crowd indoors. We spoke about these psychoacoustics and how modern life has changed sound, we often think of these behemoth structures (by histories standards) as architecture leaving a striking presence on the world but do not think about the sound architecture of a road that completely blocks off your ability to hear the people on the other side. City design decisions that effect how we hear. There was a crisap lecture before this lecture that was perfectly timed which had lots of great speakers talking about the urban soundscape.
Auinger’s work is heavily infuenced by this area of discussion. Saying cities have a vivid narrative and that it ‘felt like society was too prioritised with the visual’.
Even in the recent ‘My Pebble’ a sound piece completely different from his large city installations there is this idea of the city having a narrative, like the My Pebble sound piece having a story, these themes seem prevalent through his diverse body of work.
Here is a diagram Auinger showed during his presentation of Blue Moon. A installation in New York City. Resonating tubes (which act effectively as resonance filters) at three frequencies took in the sounds of the city. Cutting out when they are submerged by the tides, low tide all three tubes are allowed to resonate and at highest tide none. The frequency being replayed on seats in the city. Constantly changing and producing unique frequencies based of the tide height. – The piece being named ‘Blue Moon’ as the sound being connected to the tides which is intrinsically connected to the moon.
“The Rotunda is one of a few buildings that remained intact after Thessaloniki was destroyed by fire in 1917. Having been used as a mausoleum, a church, and a mosque, it is ideally suited for the resonance of the human voice—chanting or in song. The scale of four perfectly matched unamplified human voices within this space will be in a dramatic struggle with the recorded resonances of the city.”
Really impressive drones from this video. The symphony of Resonances, is called by it’s creators a ‘Requiem for Fossil Fuels’, I really like the orchestration on this piece by Bruce Odland. In their biography Sam Auinger is concerned with global warming and most of these pieces are driven by a need for us to listen to our world and it’s narrative. This is interesting to consider in relation to the Spatialisation module. I hope to follow up this talk by finding a pebble I can use as my sound artefact.
In response to questions about resonant frequency tubes in Auinger’s work, he spoke about the giving these sounds a musical tone makes you ‘continue to hear the resonances after being in the spaces’, like a way to keep the sounds of the city in your mind. In the same way when we hear music, if we hear a chord, we can’t stop hearing it until we hear something else. It’s almost like he’s trying to enhance your ability to notice the sounds by adding drone to it.
“Harmony is a kind of order, but sound isn’t chaos.” it “Offers a chance to consciously engage with [it] the sounds.”
I was impressed by Auinger’s talk and I think without realising I did something similar with a piece I did last year called Traffic Lights, where I imposed approximate frequencies of colours red, orange and green over the field recording of a busy viaduct. The scope and installation present in Sam Auinger’s pieces however, being far more impressive and polished in their application.
“We wont understand ourselves until we understand our noise”
“We are always simplifying”
Hates Grid-like cities for their predictable acoustic qualities, favourite city soundscapes are Italian
Reference points to follow up: Vilem Flusser, Paul Virillo & Jean Baudrillard