unsounded

For our Sound Studies and Aural Cultures unit, we are writing a podcast about a chosen topic to do with contemporary issues in sound art. This will help us develop a critical awareness when investigating our chosen subjects.

Sound Memory?

What perspective cultural capital do we bring consciously or unconsciously to the forefront?

Who am I capable of gatekeeping or leaving out of the conversation?

Having a responsibility to share the hidden truth of a subject at times being aware of a negative role or connection you might have to it.

We spoke of ‘Nichol’s Documentary Modes’

Poetic, Expository, Participatory, Observational, Reflexive and Performative

“the characteristics of a given mode function as a dominant in a given film…but they do not dictate or determine every aspect of its organization.” (Nichols 2001)

Poetic Mode,

Soviet montage theory, a fictional re-interpretation of history, a good example being Koyaaniqatsi. A mass montage of human life to epic minimalist compositions by Phillip Glass.

Here is a piece by Dziga Vertov, an early poetic documentary proclaimed this style as Kinochestvo, translating as ‘the quality of being cinematic’ is ‘the art of organizing the necessary movements of objects in space as a rhythmical artistic whole’.

I personally believe Poetic mode to be the most suitable form of documentary for study of an artist, like this Picasso documentary, which due to the staged nature of the sets, it’s not too concerned with cinema verite, but like the documentary’s title, the film and Picasso invite us into quite a magical place. A very different type of artist documentary to this would be Wild Combination, following the musician/producer/composer Arthur Russell in a linear way through his life with a collection of Narration and Interviews. I think these are quite stark differences in how an artist can be portrayed, one lends itself to capturing the life of an playful older artist in a sort of heavily performed ‘fly on the wall’ as a nod and celebration, the other more like a obituary for a talented artist tragically lost too early. Both these films arguably carry a sensationalist mystique to them romanticising the artist.

Expository Mode,

Rhetorical content – used in which to make a bold statement but perhaps not back with information, a persuasive piece, looking to get some sort of point across. – this at times being potentially quite rigid.

‘Poetic Mode’ was phased out when works became politicised and served as propaganda, this made way for expository types of documentary which were concerned with a narrative. Images were gathered and placed in service of the narrative (parallel with how sound developed to sync to film, in a sense documentary is film to sound). This can be referred to as Evidentiary Editing. An interesting choice of word, the image is the evidence to the narrative. I can see how image as evidence to a narrative would be critiqued, as from experience, it’s easy to see how images can be manipulating or tell a certain story, film can be cut and edited, photos can be cropped, crucial details left out.

Participatory Mode,

The filmmaker interacts with their subjects, has its drawbacks of when it can be used, useful in certain environments to draw upon a personal attachment the filmmaker may have to the content. When the narrative is from the perspective of the narrator, this can be an example of participatory mode.

This mode brings to mind this documentary I have seen by Agnes Varda, admittedly I have only seen this and Le Bonheur. But in Daguerreotypes, we see the road Varda lived on in the 70s, as she and her daughter go around the shops filming and speaking to all the shop workers.

Observatory Mode,

Fly in the wall style. With the invention of portable sound and camera equipment, Observatory documentaries were concerned with capturing the truth of a scene through no narrative, non diegetic sound, no interviews or scene set-up.

The drawback with observatory documentary however, is that no matter how discreet, these people are still being filmed, therefore it can never be said its a true depiction of reality. Much-like the Picasso documentary and this Ryuichi Sakamoto documentary from the 80s, we see this sort of sensationalised reality of people looking perfect.

This drawback is interesting to me, as sound recordists can have a similar plight to documentary filmmakers in the search of truth. I have recently been stopped recording at Birmingham City Station due to suspicious activity. In a recent Q&A with sound recordist and editor Steve Fanagan, he spoke of using DPA microphones over other types not only for their sound but also how discreet they are, also having issues with people coming up and asking him what he was doing. This phenomena is recorded to dangerous effect in Reality TV, where the kind of pressure to perform in front of the camera can cause strange behaviours, traumatically displayed to a mass population. Having in some cases dire consequences for the mental health of those participants. In stark contrast to this morally dubious entertainment….When documentaries focus on an artist the documentary is made in service of an artists vision of themselves (like ‘live albums’ of the 70s, where the parts were overdubbed to make the bands sound better). This kind flattering portrayal of the artist at work is not what Observatory documentaries probably set out to be, but perhaps the ends of the spectrum are both bad and it’s a balancing act both with moral implications for the filmmaker.

This quite alarming at times documentary has a lot more darkness and paints a less perfect image of our character study. Ondi Tominar has directed lots of character study type documentaries in her long career including the equally absurd Dig!, following the Brian Jonestown Massacre on tour capturing Anton Newcombe at his most out of control kicking a fan in the head from the stage and subsequently losing custody of his child.

Reflexive Mode,

Considers the quality of documentary itself, de-mystifying it’s process. A man with a movie camera, is a reflexive piece of documentary due to its choice to feature the camera operator.

Cinema Vérité, or Kino Pravda. – French and Russian movements retrospectively are concerned with ‘truth’ and purists of these schools consider reflexive mode a break from this pursuit of capturing reality.

This piece is an interesting watch, what sticks out to me is the cameraman is present in a few shots, feels like it fits into a few other modes we talked about later. There is something participatory, reflexive, performative, and there is arguably something observational about this poetic type of filmmaking.

What strikes me most, is this silent film feels more like photography than journalism, and the rhythm to this image driven narrative is not too dissimilar from narrative through editing not musical sound. I would not be surprised if there was a bridge between the poetic documentary and musique concrete compositions.

In The Act of Killing, the director gets an ex-military executioner to re-enact his brutal killings under a oppressive regime responsible for the death of a million of its citizens. These horrifying re-enactments attempt to challenge the executioner to revisit the atrocities he’s committed and ask how he can justify what he has done. I have never had the stomach to watch this documentary as I am quite troubled by the concept of it. It was produced by Werner Herzog and is in his top 5 ‘Greatest Documentaries of All Time’.

Performative Mode,

Filmmaker constructs subject truths, e.g Fahrenheit 911, Michael Moore. This type of mode, is very similar and shares a lot with Expository and Participatory modes and I guess I struggle to see its distinction. It seems often concerned with a strong personality, like an informal version of an expository essay performed by the narrator.

I think the drawbacks here are clear, if the ego of the documentarian is too great, and if the arguments are too binary. The documentary becomes the vessel for a performer, and could be light on fact. If the documentarian belongs to a world that exists outside of colonialist status quo however, record and evidence may be more scarce, therefore an emotional and grounded piece on subjects that fall amongst people who society considers minorities. A more subjective approach is far more suitable, where complex experiences can be explained and felt. Adam Curtis’ documentaries are driven by his personality and philosophies on the world, whilst running like a expository documentary.

On the topic of subject truths, one of the most respected artists of the documentary film genre often admits to bending the truth to suit the narrative of his story. Werner Herzog set out a list of rules for his documentary cinema;

1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.

2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. “For me,” he says, “there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail.”
Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.

3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.

4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.

5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.

6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.

7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.

8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: “You can’t legislate stupidity.”

9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.

10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn’t call, doesn’t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don’t you listen to the Song of Life.

11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.

12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species – including man – crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue. (Werner Herzog, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1999)

An article focussing on Werner Herzog from offscreen.com states “It is clear once again from this description that Herzog’s non-fictions can not be considered as ‘pure’ documentaries; his documentaries famously include as much staged and scripted material as ‘real’ footage (as in Fata Morgana, The Wild Blue Yonder, La Soufrière), and indeed overtly deal with the dichotomy fact/truth and with the question of how such truth can be communicated to the spectator through the language of cinema.” -Perhaps this line of thought places Herzog with one foot out of the documentary genre as a hole or places his work somewhere between a reflexive type of documentary and a performative one.

I think it’s clear these modes are flexible and can bleed between each other, and definitely think certain topics are best approached with certain modes in mind, I also think for most documentaries you could argue that they could subjectively belong to a few modes. I see these modes as a helpful historical commentary on the political discourse around documentaries, but personally don’t see how you can truly say one style is better than any other.

I am thinking mostly about the relation between sound and image, when dissolving this information into something useful for podcast. I am seeing potential parallels between the capture of truth on film, and capture of the truth through sound alone. As when we talk about film, film is something that has grown to be half image and half sound. The dichotomy of fact/truth is an interesting thing to consider when looking at the documentary and I found a hard to digest quote from a Herzog interview with the guardian; ‘facts do not constitute truth’. ‘Fake news’ and ‘echo chambers’ are new mainstream concepts to our society as an overarching truth to news is harder and harder to discern.

Francis Ford Coppola was apparently influenced by Tomita’s use of Quadraphonic sound when asking him to originally do the soundtrack for Apocalypse Now, wanted a synthesiser rendition of Gustav Holst’s ‘The Planets’. Instantly I am reminded of Wendy Carlos’ work with Kubrick and the heavy use of synthesiser renditions of classical music in their collaborations.

Here is an interesting article that claims that Tomita’s music is supposed to be heard in quadraphonic (which as he’s a name I am familiar with, I was never aware of his relationship with this medium, nor have I heard any of his music mixed for 4 channel, in 4 channels. This is something I would love to change. Ingrid played us some pieces by Suzanne Ciani in quadraphonic stereo. Again, an artist I was familiar with but unaware of their heavy ties to this format.

Tomita In Quadrophonic: Surround Sound Was Made For This Music

This piece was rereleased for quadraphonic, it has an interesting use of stereo but I would like to experience a few quadraphonic recordings before the term is through as it was quite hard to really understand what I was hearing in our introductory spatialisation class due to the sheer number of us who chose the module.

I am thinking about asking the staff whether it would be possible to have a dedicated library of quadraphonic resources, if they do not already exist in the university. As there are currently no records of it in the library, it means it doesn’t exist. If I wanted to listen to these I would have to find some power converters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vZGeHBfxU0

Whilst Isao Tomita’s excavations into quadraphonic sound are quite preoccupied in classical music and almost like transferring these very popular pieces of classical music into electronic music. Ciani’s Buchla Concerts (which I believe were written for quadraphonic sound system due to Buchla pioneering quad-modular [had to..] but cannot find any proof of this.) A similarity with Isao Tomita however, is that they both are responsible in part for very corny covers of the Star Wars theme.

I am still leaning towards seeing modular as perhaps the most intuitive way to utilise quadraphonic sound, due to spatial modulation, the possibility for spatial effect is infinitely greater.

In our second Spatialisation, we explored spatial improvisation. With a demonstration of an Alvin Lucier’s “Lullaby for Amanda Stokes”, in which Ingrid performs around the listener mimicking the sounds of birds and insects, whilst the listener is sat with their eyes closed.

We spoke about the unlimited power of scores. A mmemonic device or a transmission of information. I spoke briefly in a previous post about how I felt the visual score was an interesting concept to me as it puts the onus on the performer to be more creative. This was reinforced for me in a recent talk with Richard Pheonix, who talked about how the London Symphony Orchestra collaborating with Heart N Soul, an arts organisation working with learning disabilities. He spoke about how the LSO musicians found it tricky to interpret the visual scores, and fears and anxieties as neuro-typical people in fact prohibit us and lock us out of parts of our unexpressed creativity. I thought about how this related to scores, and how we fear being wrong. A visual score is more an invitation to invent or create.

Composer > Performer > Listener > Composer > Performer > Listener…………………

In our first lecture for Sound for Screen, Milo played us the first 50 minutes of ‘Making Waves’, a history of sound for screen.

This documentary focussed on work by Walter Murch, Ben Burrt, Robert Altman, Randy Thorn, Richard Beggs, John Lasseter & Gary Rydstrom.

“Ears lead our eyes to where the story lives.” – Spielberg on Saving Private Ryan saying “Sound is the scale, view is limited” on the open D-Day scene, where an incredibly intense and visceral sound scape of war was carefully layered together, between close, tightly filmed visuals with very little visibility of the landscape. The scene an approximation of the chaos of war yet “there is a rhythm to chaos”.

The film sites the war genre as a pioneering area of sound design within movies as means to drive the plot, explosion sounds or battle sounds were needed on order to get across what was happening. Monster movies like King Kong, and sci-fi radio dramas. Jack Foley, the first foley artist, started out making sound effects to enhance radio dramas which bled over to syncing to screen. Citizen Kane, supposedly at the forefront for uses of foley in film.

Use of reverb, crowd cheer, applause, shifted in volume when dialogue from Kane’s son.

Sound =/= Music

Too much music and there is no impact. These two elements must be balanced.

Walter Murch was influenced by Pierre Schaeffer, and the films of Jean Luc Godard, which broke conventions of sound editing, having dialogue un synced to the image.

Walter Murch’s work on THX 1138, George Lucas caught the attention of Lucas’ friend Coppola, who’s partnership went on to create this scene from Godfather, which revolutionised use of SFX in film, and went onto collaborate on Apocalypse Now.

Much claimed this was inspiration

Beatles early stereo experimentation. Stereo was accepted into screens by cinemas, due to Barbara Streisand’s insistence before the launch of A Star Is Born (1976) 9 Years after Stereo became used in recorded music. John Lennon was influenced by Yoko’s sound recordings and reportedly, Stockhausen’s ‘Hymnen’ – which notable for my other specialisation was performed in quadraphony.

The film then talked about Ben Burtt, sound designer on Star Wars. Ben Burtt was religiously recorded sounds off his television onto a reel to reel tape recorder. When recording Star Wars, he would plan expeditions to Garages, Factories and other locations to collect sounds for the film.

The documentary also mentioned Alan Splet, who considering I am a big Lynch fan, I wasn’t aware of. His eerie work on Eraserhead, has contributed to Lynch’s heavy use of atmospheric ‘room tone’.

https://youtu.be/SOHOrd0V8Xo

Lynch talks about Sound like painting. “I used to say picture dictates sounds, but sometimes it’s the other way round”. – “50 percent of the picture and to get it to marry the picture is the trick…”

He’d described Alan Splet’s wind sounds as “maximum power”.

https://youtu.be/7YhpkRWYi_A

“Sound can create a big world”, this concept is the same for Eraserheads eerie atmosphere, and Private Ryan’s grounded action sequence.

“In every instance of every sound, there are 760 million sounds that are wrong and there’s 34 sounds that are correct. And of the 34, 27 are very similar, but 7 of the 34 are completely weird, but they still work.”

When talking about working with sound Lynch says it’s ‘Action and Reaction until you get what’s correct’

An interview with Anne Kroeber, Alan Splet’s wife. She talks about recording sounds with the late Splet, on Dune and other projects and capturing the ‘Lynchian World’ with flat response pick ups on metal walls in a steel mill, to give the wind sounds strange metallic resonance.

https://www.soundandpicture.com/2017/10/ann-kroeber-cinematic-winds/

They met collaborating on the sound for The Black Stallion (1979), in which the horse recordings they captured are apparently still in circulation to this day, the film was directed by Coppola in order to source funds for Apocalypse Now.

At interesting video about the functionality of room tone.

Here are the Logic DAW Definitions of Quadraphonic and 5.1 Surround Sound. For Spatialisation we will be mainly focussed on the latter. Wendy Carlos used a quadraphonic set up with a speaker directly in front and behind, and hard left and right.

Early innovators of Quadraphonic Sound were Stockhausen’s Gruppen. Written for 3 Orchestras placed around the audience. Other noticeable innovators include Suzanne Ciani who usually performs in the format. Modular synthesisers interacting in disorientating counterpoint around the listener.

The Helicopter Quartet could be quite effectively placed in Quadraphonic Surround Sound for performance. It’s interesting the helicopter background noise interfering with each other, mimicking the sounds of the violins.

We watched some Zimoun sound installations. I find these instances of spatialisation a lot more fascinating than speaker configurations. I am interested in the primitive mechanisms and the kind of auto-accompany nature of it. Thinking of sound in these minute suscerations is interesting. There is something quite natural about them in contrast to the visuals (their white-walled setting). The movement is interesting and attention grabbing. Very satisfying asmr quality to the sound.

We planned out a visual score for a quadraphonic performance in class. I had the privilege of hearing students interpret my visual score. It made me think about scores in a new kind of way. Similarly to Gareth’s lessons last term. In my eyes a score has always meant a recording before recording was invented. A way for the art of a composer to be immortalised. Quite a morbid and centred object as accurate of a capture of the artist’s intent as possible. In some ways, the opposite end of the political spectrum to visual scores, which are more interested in the performers interpretation and subject to change as times change and new interpretations emerge. I see visual scores as more of an invitation to restrict a performer and find a new form of experimentation out of themselves, but equally out of the hands of the composer as well. – Much more of a conversation/collaboration. It was really interesting to think of people performing the score in this way, what was a very simple thought to me was turned into something more interesting.

Some very illuminating musings on Quadraphonic Surround by one of its principled innovators and advocators.

Suzanne Ciani shows us her gear and talks about how she uses spatial modulation to great affect.

Ciani worked for Buchla, a synthesiser company.

Ciani claimed that use of spatial sound in performance undeniably lends itself more favourably to electronic performance. Because in electronic music, space is a variable. “Space is a perimeter and can be changed”. Using Buchla synthesizer which she helped build. Suzzane Ciani layers spatial dynamics different on top of each other to create patterns, which she calls ‘Spatial Algorithms’

“Spatial Modulation is a form of rhythm” – Ciani says fast moving spatial modulation, lends itself to faster music. As the panning then matches the pace of the music. In this sense, the pan is part of a rhythmic pattern, and this is used to brilliant effect in moments of her quadraphonic performances where she removes tones, and works entirely with dizzying percussive sounds in a randomised fast moving spatial pattern she calls ‘white noise’. In contrast ‘Ocean Waves’ is used by Ciani on slower songs, with two patterns operating in sync with each other moving slowly together creating swells and changing direction.

When Ciani uses fast movement, she talks about layering slower moving spatial modulation patterns underneath to ‘create a bed’, otherwise the fast spatial modulations can seem ‘naked’.

Here is an interesting project using VCV, a free modular synth emulator to emulate the Buchla 200e.

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

Having some time to think on the hand in for the Global Sonic Cultures Unit, I feel there are a few things personally I would like to fix about my approach to this kind of research in the future. Whilst I am first year and perhaps it’s important to cover the basics of sound art, I felt that my writing wasn’t entirely reflective of ‘Global’ sonic cultures, and more reflective on the West. This being partially effected by what I had in front of me (owning a few John Cage books in the past). My goal when talking about Muzak was to try and credit it’s legacy as one entwined or symbiotic with Sound Art, as it’s an often overlooked ‘genre’ which is parodied or looked down on. I am not sure how well I achieved this goal. I would’ve liked to have referenced more sound theorists and cultures with a relationship to background music. I had to cut a segment on Japanese Background Music in the 80s, as it felt light on sources and I was running out of words. I also would’ve liked to have mentioned a more diverse category of western sound art practitioners, due to finding a lot of material of Eno and Cage talking about Muzak, I felt there were ample sources to link the subjects together and get across my points, but feel I got lost in the sourcing and wasn’t quite true to what I initially wanted to explore. I found it very difficult to be concise, perhaps the topic was too broad, my word count was over but I can’t help but feel like I could’ve said more.

Aeolian Harp, a greek invention. Mentioned in Joseph Lanza’s ‘Elevator Music’. It has it’s origins in Greek mythology, Homers says that Hermes had created a lyre from dried sinews and a tortoise shell that could be ‘played by the wind’. This Aleatoric instrument has existed in myth and ancient culture but was first written about Athanius Kircher in the 17th Century.

The concept of Muzak stimulus progression in the workplace was born through World War II, where it was used to boost morale on production lines. ‘Work Song’ are usually rhythmically orientated folk songs sang between labourers to sync there movements. These have probably existed for thousands of years. Work Song has dramatically declined in use as our world has gotten louder, with most labouring jobs now aided with large mechanisms and the introduction of recorded music into society. So music has always had a role within manual jobs, and bizarrely with muzak it has entered a new field of work. With Work Song manual labourers are actively participating in the work and the act of work becomes almost a performance. In a sense, this is what happens with background music in the workplace, as our pop culture experience of radio dramas and movies subconsciously turns us into the star of some sort of play. It’s interesting to me how fresh this idea of ‘background music’ was. As reading Toop’s Ocean of Sound and relating to my own experience as a listener; I listen to wide varieties of music, and sometimes I will stick on a playlist or radio show of a certain genre or ‘play all uploads’ on a youtube channel owned by a virtual crate digger. – The desire here is to hear something new within a set of parameters, I personally do not intend to listen to forgettable music, but in my desire to digest ‘everything’ I do. You often stumble across playlists without a tracklist and I often wonder the intent, whether it’s a collectors’ fragile need to hold onto their own discoveries to claim more ownership over them. Or whether it’s just that the listeners aren’t after new artists to find and explore. What they actually want is a mood to have on in the background. This commodification of genre shows how Muzak is almost ahead of the curve. With the increasing availability of apps and services that aim to compartmentalize our lives for sake of comfort & luxury. It’s less about seeking out and finding specific things and more about picking an approximation. In the way that Muzak with it’s 1001 Strings and lack of vocals invited people of old to be lost in a story of themselves, where they are the protagonist, it’s closest relative might be the movie and tv soundtracks contemporary to the time. The themes are songs they had picked up through their own life experiences and times in their lives that they are subconsciously harked back to framed like a flashback in a story.

Albion Voice

Troubling relationship with England. “Indian skin and Albion voice.”

When discussing her experience as a working musician Bishi states ‘There is colonial bias in the music industry’ as she and others she has encountered have felt South Asian British acts are regularly shipped into the category of ‘world music’, this kind of profiling meant that Bishi felt ‘locked’ out of pop music, stating in our lecture ‘”Your cultural roots and the doors that slam in your face are sometimes the greatest indicator of where you have to go”. This led Bishi Bhattacharya into an explorative field diagnosing her relationship with her Britishness and Bengali heritage. In a way this links in with Zakia Sewell’s exploration with her BBC radio 4 series ‘My Albion’ as she details her love and connection to pagan and folk culture as a British (London-born, raised in Wales) person with African Caribbean ancestry and the problematic balance between embracing ones cultural roots whilst acknowledging the history of white supremacy, colonialism and the slave trade.

Bishi breifly mentioned the F-list, an organization which sole purpose to address the racial and misogynistic biases in the music industry, as well as her work with the organisation WITCiH (Women In Technology Creative Industries Hub) of which she is a co-founder. In response to the quote earlier, about ‘doors being slammed in your face’, again with her work within these communities, Bishi has responded to racial and sexist bias by building a platform to combat these sometimes outright and sometimes internal prejudices.

Bishi spoke about the power of the collective and community through queer performance art and mentioned Leigh Bowery as a person she was influenced by greatly in the 80s, and queer fashion circles helped her gain the confidence young to follow her art with conviction. Leigh Bowery in the latter years of his life formed a band called Minty in the 90s, they recently reformed after 30 years where Bishi can be seen using Imogen Heap’s FX glove prototype ‘Mi.Mu’. Here are some vintage Minty recordings and videos with Leigh Bowery.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtZ_cnMsWo4

Leigh Bowery passed away in 1994 of AIDS related Meningitis, he was a revolutionary figure in drag and art performance. Here is a quote from the Legacy Project Chicago, an oraganisation that seeks to preserve the histories of queer people.

“[Bowery] … became his own greatest creation. Combining dance, dandyism, music, and outrageous fashions (of his own design) Bowery lived as a piece of performance art. His extreme appearance was based on the continual distortion of his physical form. This tendency, combined with a blatant queer narcissism, made him a star of the gay and polysexual club scene. Smart, well read, and interested in all forms of artistic expression, Bowery was an ideal candidate to transform the underground world. In 1985 he hosted London’s outrageous and notorious club night, ‘Taboo’ – the wild, edgy epicenter of young and fashionable London. Taboo closed in 1987 when hard drugs and HIV decimated the underground scene. Bowery continued to perform with several concept bands, was featured in a show at d’Offay Gallery as living sculpture, and became his own greatest masterpiece. His groundbreaking style influenced an entire generation of artists and designers such as Vivienne Westwood, Alexander McQueen, David LaChapelle, John Galliano, The Scissor Sisters, and Boy George. He is also credited as a major factor behind the new Romantic music movement that became popular in London during the 1980s. Leigh Bowery died of AIDS related meningitis on New Year’s Eve of 1994 at the age of 33. Despite his brief life, his greatest legacy was the lesson to be found in taking the pain of being an outsider – then owning, exaggerating, and ultimately reclaiming it as the ultimate badge of power.” – https://legacyprojectchicago.org/person/leigh-bowery

I am currently reading David Toop’s Ocean of Sound. Toop speaks a little bit about Muzak, in relation to Brian Eno and various sci-fi books that predicted AI generated music and store bought Sound Sculptures. The commodification of Sound outside of music. It’s quite an interesting read. Alongside the Radio feature on Muzak I posted previously, I feel I may have enough content to research an essay based on Muzak. I am interested in how threads of background music exist in today’s society, where they exist and what their purpose serves. How has Muzak influenced our relationship with Music with advances in technology, streaming services and the commodification of genre in the 21st century. Whilst new forms of music continue to exist and develop, there is a certain self-awareness and conceptual element to pop music now. How does this effect our relationship with music? Playlists to a degree have always been around with Radio. In the early days of Muzak(the company), they would play music down peoples phone line’s on a monthly subscription fee. In Ocean Of Sound, Toop talks about the increasing fluidity of music. Playlist culture whilst to some degree has existed since Radio, extrapolates diverse ranges of genre & production technique into one linear experience and more than ever human’s listen to (or are exposed to) an increasingly varied array of music. I am interested in how that effects Muzak’s role in society, Shops have for some time played their own curated radio stations, so in essence the new Muzak is pop music. In some chains, the company purposefully uses playlists of pop music that is royalty free in order to save money. Not only has Muzak changed due to a shift in culture, but also it seems naive not to mention the acceleration of business and capitalism and how much these choices are effected by money. On Youtube, channels of ‘Lo-fi beats to study to’ receive millions of views and are in essence exactly what Muzak set out to do.

https://youtu.be/vhLSdGIKqrw

“Incidental Music”

Stimulus Progression, epitomises to some the troubling nature of Muzak’s practice. A program of recognizable covers will play for 15 minutes, with each piece, tempo will increase and the music will have a louder arrangement. The music would stop for 15 minutes to limit ear fatigue amongst workers and then another ‘stimulus progression’ selection of covers will play. There is something about the silence that strikes a covertness to this program, for the music to zone in and out and almost to try and not impose itself is an attempt for it to be absorbed subconsciously. In reference to Deep Listening, attempt to assert itself as a passive listening experience. The flip side to the criticisms of this style of programming is that these types of BPM oriented conversations for tracklisting are common place in club music an DJ sets. ‘Beat matching’ and tempo progression in a DJ sets are seen as part of the ride of being in that space, the only difference is you are there for the music and whilst you are subconsciously driven, it is a consensual experience.

I have ordered a copy of Joseph Lanza’s Elevator Music and will source that material alongside Toop’s, with reference to ‘The Day Muzak Died’. I am going to search for other sources that could give me insight into narrowing down my Abstract.

But here is an attempt at my Abstract today…

The Future of Muzak…

The concept of Background music hit mainstream society at the beginning of the 20th Century with the continued technological advances in recorded sound and radio. Muzak™ was a branded source of background music, played in supermarkets, elevators and the workspace. The goal? to encourage leisurely spending, fill awkward silences and boost worker efficiency. The music was designed to be a covert influencer, this arguably pervasive and manipulative concept is considered ‘anti-inspiration’ to many artists who have sought to change our relationship to sound (such as John Cage & Brian Eno) and is potentially inspired by Eric Satie’s Furniture Music, a series of pieces written to ‘not be listened to’. On one side Muzak is a cynical, crude, capitalist form of hypnotism, on the other a sound experiment in passive & active listening. In my essay I hope to outlay the historical impact of this industry on sound culture and what legacy it leaves in the soundscapes of our modern consumerist society.

-Whilst I like the jist of the vocabulary in this, upon considering what was spoken out in Milo’s class covering student’s abstract, this fits more of a Introduction than an abstract and should be a little more descriptive and to the point.

Here is an amended draft of my abstract which I will upload late, I am going to send this to my peer mentor for some feedback also.

“The concept of background music hit mainstream society at the beginning of the 20^th century with the continued technological advances in recorded sound and radio. Muzak (and it’s competitors) was a branded source of background music played in supermarkets, elevators and the workspace. The intent? To encourage leisurely spending, fill awkward silences and boost worker efficiency. In this essay I will outlay a brief history of Muzak the company, its evolution and eventual downfall. I will then contemplate the historical impact Muzak had on sound culture in reference to Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening and finally, I will attempt to draw links to the way the philosophies of Muzak might subsist in today’s society; with AI automated playlists, the commodification of musical genre and modern day uses of ‘background music’ in the commercial setting.”

A really illuminating read on the history of commercial ‘environmental music’ in Japan and the seeds of influence Satie and Eno had on experimental electronic composers. There are some great sources I can site here for my article. https://www.vulture.com/2019/02/how-japanese-ambient-music-became-a-thing-in-america.html

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000pffx

Zakia, of both Caribbean and British decent talks about her experiences as mixed raced in England & Wales. In ‘The Cuckoo’, the first episode from ‘My Albion’, Zakia talks about being drawn to Pentangle and other folk revivalists of traditional English music. Asking questions about whether this music can belong to her. When interviewing Ben Edge, he talks about how folk monuments in the UK have so much mystery to them and all that is left of these are interpretations and speculations.

The beginning of this show talks about Sheela Na Gig, these crude sculptures can be found on old Romanesque churches around the United Kingdom, they have also been found in Jersey & Norway. The cultural origin is perhaps most likely Irish as most Sheelas being situated there. However it is most famously connected with Pagan mythology. “[Sheelas are usually] overtly sexual the representation is always grotesque, sometimes even comical. They are usually associated with “hags” or “old women”. – sheelanagig.org

The Sprig of Thyme, or ‘Let No Man Steal Your Thyme’, a traditional folk song performed by Pentangle. Is often interpreted to mean Virginity.

It’s interesting to consider the spaces these pieces were performed and the communal ownership of these pieces. Community being a key word. With the arrival of recorded music, our understanding and relationships with songs has completely changed. A folk musician before that time, not from a noble birth, not within the hierarchy of classical music, would not have any way to make record or preserve their music, other than to teach and share it and let others interpret it and pass it on. These pieces live on through the culture and tradition of folk. In the 20th century, with the birth of pop music, arguably recorded music can belong to the working classes, but this music has it’s origins, they are captured and that is where the piece ends. Framed and stuck to the wall, it’s production often a vital part to the story of that song. Can a folk song shifted through hundreds of years of performance and interpretation retain it’s essence (by which I mean, it’s immediacy & relevance to society) than a piece of recorded music captured in stasis? One feels like the work of many and the other like more of a singular vision (Recorded music however, is a deceptively collaborative medium).

I found an interview with Zakia Sewll with Elephant.Art in which I will quote the following passage of text…

“Sewell’s desire to reassemble disparate identities is rooted in her own past. She grew up apart from her mother, who began experiencing schizophrenia shortly after Sewell’s birth. “I was quite disconnected from my mum for a lot of my life, and that also meant being disconnected from my heritage, from my Blackness, from my Caribbean family,” she says. Conjuring “an idea of Carriacou as this kind of alternate landscape” in My Albion represents part of her ongoing attempt to reconcile her identity.”

Experiencing this kind of conflict of identity is difficult. Britain’s history of colonialism, slavery and genocide is unaccounted for and seeps itself into modern institutional racism and white supremacy. It is by most accounts a troubling history that is difficult to navigate, and should be for any British national. It has it’s own inter-sectional conflicts amongst British with historical favoritism of the South and neglect of the North, and ugly state brutality in Ireland. It is in short, an ugly history. Before Colonialism, there tyrannical kings. However, there has always been a thread of socialist activity within folk music. It is said in some Morris circles that the Morris dancers were often veterans, who would dance on the property of the rich to get money, bells attached to them bashing sticks in order to create a nuisance and be paid off to leave. I would like to research this more. There were some brilliant curated nights on Deeper Movies Channel, which have since the easing of lockdown disapeared from the internet – which I will attempt to track down in the next few days to write about this further.