unsounded

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000tlw8

Listened to a great documentary on Muzak. Which I have been a fan of for many years. I am exploring this potentially as one of my essay topics. These Radio show features fascinating contributions by Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo, writer Joseph Lanza, artist Mika Taanila, scholar Caroline Potter, science historian Alexandra Hui, Nigel Rodgers founder of Pipedown and the vice president of programming for music, Rod Baum.

I have enjoyed the Devo Muzak albums for years. I also have a great love of New Age music and library music from the 70s/80s. There is something very humble about the composers who create music within a design specificity. On my radio show, Hit Hit Flop Flop, we cover some Muzak. It oddly through the lens of today seems somewhat tied to a lot of experimental music from the 70s. Holger Czukay chopped up a lot of old music which he then interjected into his music. Brian Eno developed Ambient Music as a reaction to Muzak. In the article I read through Moodle on Ugandan Dub Collective’s take on 4,33. They mentioned that 4,33 indeed could have been a reaction to not only sounds getting louder in general through the industrial revolution, city development etc.. but also as a direct response to ‘designed sound’, this idea that music should feel the uncomfortable silence – I think John Cage wholeheartedly opposed this concept. “Background was not supposed to be listened to, but heard.” – Mika Taanila. There is talk in this radio show as Muzak being this utopian concept of bringing us together, but also a sinister capitalist attempt to boost productivity in workplaces. Music Scholar, Caroline Potter talks about Eric Satie coining the term, “Furniture Music” back in the 1917. Eric Satie wrote five pieces for Furniture Music. Some of which were not even performed in his life-time. Strangely enough if it is true that 4,33 is written as a cut against Muzak, John Cage did perform one of these “hidden” Satie pieces after the composers’ death, Vexations; which has a inscribed on the notation “In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities”. This being interpreted by cage that the piece should be repeated 840 times.

There are a lot of different perspectives on Muzak throughout this documentary about the psychological effects, how Muzak has died out and didn’t last the ages as a concept. I am currently reading David Toop’s “Ocean of Sound”, and there are some quite interesting conversations around Muzak, Brian Eno stating that Muzak or Ambient Music ‘should be designed specifically to enhance the natural acoustics of the space it is played in’. I find it interesting to think of how this movement has effected space within capitalism, I am interested to know if this is purely born out of the Utopian western post-war boom, or whether traces of this thought belong to other cultures. The invasion of music within spaces does feel like an inevitable step on from recorded music and the radio but eventually as the amalgamation of pop music and genres splurged together we eventually found pop music taking the place of muzak from the 80s and onwards. All that springs to mind now is royalty free music, one point of discomfort for me I would like to investigate is music on the news. I have found it quite disturbing during the pandemic when bad news is announced on the news, it is often soundtracked by tense music that seems to have it’s musical routes in the action genre of films. In the same way muzak tried encourage us to keep on keeping on, does the news wield muzak to coerce us into fear ?

Through Jana Winderen’s feature on Between The Ears, I have discovered some very thought provoking radiophonic journeys through environments. Mixed between some classical music, field recording and speech, these shows evoke very satisfying autonomous sensory response.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000tdjm

Powerful glimpses into experience through sound. Some of the recordings of bees in this particular show I found really clear and crisp. It reminded me of Jana Winderen’s presentation as a visiting practitioner due to the fact she talked about sticking her hydrophones in bees nests.

https://markferguson.bandcamp.com/album/humble

Mark Ferguson was credited for some of the field recordings in this radio show. Studying a doctorate at Birmingham University, they are producing very high quality field recordings off the back of studying Music at various Universities.

I am hoping to continue to tune into this show to gain insight into professional sound editing and how it could work for radio format. I am hoping to develop a portfolio for free lance work.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6529/eaba4658

Using Hydrophones on a bees nest. As they are still piezo microphones.

With hydrophones, patience is really important, Winderen will sometimes wait for 30 minutes before attuning to the water. Winderen uses her hydrophones outside of water as they are basically high powered contract microphones, showing us a demonstration of plugging them into a bee hive. “I sometimes use up to 6 microphones at one time” she claims, each a mono-recording placed mixed in 360, panning certain sounds and captures around the listener in order to sculpt out a depiction of a busier audible picture. The aim with Jana’s hydrophonic recordings is to document the importance of sound through water for aquatic life. In the article above, research into how human made sounds effect aquatic lifeforms shows that freighters and boats make more disruptive noise than earthquakes to nearby settlements of species. This confuses sea life and causes them to move into areas where they can’t thrive and therefor puts species at risk. “We have colonialised the whole planet with our sound” – Jana assesses. Her work is an enlightening look at the macroscopic noise pollution of the sea to the microscopic, the sounds of small fish and insects.

Currents and depths of water influence how sounds will travel in water. Acidity of the water due to CO2 emissions from human activity in the water/pollution of water can effect how sound travels. In this very detailed exploration it shows how many of our activities effect sound and could be having a harmful effect on all of these environments.

https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/oceans/341778/underwater-un-sound/

A deep listening exercise we did in Jose’s class. We uploaded all of our surroundings to our group padlet to see how each other’s experiences differed. An observation I made from this exercise was listing which sounds we found pleasant and unpleasant. Experience of sound can be quite subjective. There are certain sounds that some people really enjoy to hear, there are certain sounds people can’t tolerate, like scratches on a chalkboard. Some of us have heightened Automous Sensory Meridian Response. ASMR has become it’s own genre on youtube, and people seek these sounds that you can stimulate through binaural recording. This I find very interesting.

I have suffered from tinnitus since my early 20s and have had periods of suffering from Tonic Tensor Tympani Syndrome, which causes fluttering in your inner ear lobe. It is an interesting condition because certain sounds are set off by it, most seem to be sudden noises that the ear doesn’t have time to react to, like a microphone clipping… but a constant loud sound doesn’t causes the muscles to rapidly contract or expand therefor it’s not set off by loud music or the loud ambience of a busy street. frequency sounds would distort, and certain high pitch voices would set my ears fluttering, including my own when I would try to sing. This whole experience really effected how I interacted with sound and music for years. Only in the last few years through general improvements in my mental health and stable relationships have I managed to have a good period of not having these sensations. I used to listen to music very loud for most of the day, I could enter trance like states listening to things very loudly and I needed that immersion to drown out distractions, which has effected my relationship with sound greatly as I am now more concerned with subtly strange sounds, as opposed to loud and garish sounds. My tastes have had to change with the things I can experience with a freedom which unfortunately with the trauma attached to an ear injury, has stopped me pursuing these sounds that might put me in that place again, or further the damage. My experience with day to day sounds is informed by a time in my life where there were certain day to day sounds I would try to avoid, I would avoid shouting and I would avoid chopping vegetables on my parents glass chopping board, I would avoid washing up and sometimes avoid conversations with people I knew spoke within frequencies I found harsh. A baby crying or a dog barking could set me off. I know that people with autism often have this heightened sensory response, which in a way I can relate to through my own experience now.

I am really enjoying the work of Daphne Oram, in a lesson with Gareth we covered ‘Oramics’, her synthesizer and sound producing machine.

Gareth was talking about the Science Museum’s retrospective look at Oram’s synthesizers, with some of the spearheads of the curation saying that Oram at this time was the UK equivalent of Robert Moog in the USA.

I love this demonstration of a Moog synthesizer by Robert Moog.

I watched a red bull music interview with Bob Moog.

“Making stuff in the studio is really great, you know there’s no end to stuff you can put on a CD now and walk around and listen to. This is something fairly new in human history. Up until a hundred years ago or even less music was something we did together you know it was a community activity, the only thing before was live performance and it was for the benefit of groups of people who interacted with each other, I’d like to see that aspect of music flourish in the future. I’m not knocking recorded music, I’m just saying if listening to music is going to be an increasingly lonely activity that we do with ourselves and to ourselves then we are going to miss something very important about being human, the ability to get together and do something as a community in real time.”

Bob Moog, speaking at the Red Bull Music Academy in Cape Town, 2003.

Some of Daphne Oram’s music from the ‘Oramics’ album are very motorik sounding, I find it interesting how with a lot of early electronic music, shuffles and 3/4 time seem to feature more heavily than the electronic music of today. These pieces also remind me of experimental musicians in very difficult fields. The acoustic drum machine made by Moondog for example reminds me of this.

Here is Moondog’s Suite No.1, played by Stefan Lakatos, who has recreated the “Trimba” – a percussive instrument invented by Moondog. It reminds me of some of the electronic percussive synth sounds created by Daphne Oram. I have attached a fascinating interview with Stefan Lakatos who was a student of Moondog’s.

Daphne Oram’s work also strangely reminds me slightly of the super influential and innovative but mentally unstable producer Joe Meek.

I like all of these artists approaches to percussion, each sounds natural but robotic. Joe Meek worked extensively with reel to reel tape, before multi-track machines were invented. He would record a track, then record a new sound with the rest of the track playing in the back. Layering these up to create bigger and stranger sounds. He had a tumultuous relationship with the industry which he couldn’t handle and increasingly gained more paranoid culminating in the shooting and murder of his landlord and his suicide. He leaves behind this at times quite unsettling work, which you can’t help but link with his story. I think these are three completely different innovators of their time, but I feel like a certain thread runs through them.

Cage: More than Silence. When Silence Rises from Earth.

https://vimeo.com/509852776

Ugandan Dub collective, produce a powerful reinterpretation of John Cage’s 4,33.

“Silence” is an interesting word. We know that John Cage isn’t talking about the non-existance of sound but the microcosms that go unnoticed as we all go about existing loudly. Silence in this case was considered a political act, harking back fondly to a pre-industrial era, perhaps in the same way people today might make art conscious of a time before smart phones. When we talk about the structures of society we live in, silence has a different meaning depending on your perspective minority and class. Silence can mean rejection, subjugation & consequently oppression. In order for Sound Art to progress in the west, should we not sit with this uncomfortable fact, the society that was shown 4,33 is a vastly less tolerant society than today – in which these racist structures still permeate.

What kind of audience were shown 4,33? What does it mean when 4,33 is played in a large concert hall compared to an automous dub collective in Uganda with no ties to institution led culture or academia? How did colonialism and the history of oppression from the west effect that soundscape? The power of 4,33 being played in this landscape, as opposed to a concert hall representing the skin on the top of the soup… Now Silence is a word heavily tied into the status quo of structural racism and oppression, how does that reflect in the western philosophies of Sound Art? If Silence(deep listening) is informed by Silence(lack of activism) how do we now move forward acknowledging faults and correcting our highly esteemed conceptors of theory? Does this not make the oppressed the true owners of silence?

Here are some of my favourite links shared in classes with Jose. We have been learning about layering sounds and I found this Jurassic Park video especially helpful when visualizing how someone might apply SFX design to a film by playing along on a loaded sampler. It took me a while to get to grips with using ableton and I am still in the process of working things out. It is a field I am interested in and one I’d like to improve at.

The final link – “‘I am here’, an exploration through Field Recordings”, is a collection of incapsulating field recordings and great inspiration for me as I am currently attempting to hone this craft. I am in the process of buying a lot of accessories for my field recorder and working out how I want to capture certain sounds.

NTS have called out for submissions of field recordings for an untitled project and I am using this as motivation to get recording. I have yet to get something I’m happy with to the minimum of 20 minutes without interuptions, but feel I am getting closer each time I go out. Here are a few recent examples.

This field recording was at Brighton Marina on a very windy day… It might be easy to predict the problem I ran into, but the casts whistling an creating the a percussive counterpoint with eachother was quite a capitivating sound. I might need a slightly bigger wind-shield to cut out some of the wind noise. I heard that cotton balls inside the wind shield might also help in more extreme circumstances. I set up the field recorder away from the wind and tried to block it with my body but unfortunately at times it broke through and clipped the microphone so I was only able to get around 6 minutes of stable soundscape…

Tried recording some soup simmering, it was hard to disguise my gas hob but something that would probably work better on an induction hob/eletric hob to get some clear boiling sounds, could work for creating a cauldron sound or lava.

Some builders were working on the flat next door of where I was staying, so I attempted to record them. Unfortunately they kept getting too quiet or too loud and a lot of the file clipped or you can hear me adjusting the input. However I did get a few nice drill sounds and hammer sounds I would like to try and turn into some sort of collage.

With my visual score I wanted to use colours and their intersections as a way to demonstrate how the sounds might engage with each other in the piece, in my eyes each colour was a different sound or player, and each sound should be informed by their relation with the other.

I had always seen this as one solid drone or field recording being the orange, and the spaces between the points the other colours meet the orange being an indicator of how frequently other more delicate sounds should interject throughout the piece. The larger the body the deeper the tone, the more uniform the body the plainer the tone. I think strangely this score is fairly relatable to what I ended up going for in the final piece.

Paul Klee (1879-1940) was a painter & a colour theorist who also taught Music. He was fascinated with capturing the colour of music, he was friends with Kandinsky although never formerly writing visual scores, here are some examples of his paintings inspired by music.

Wasily Kandinsky’s “Succession” though never explicitly used as a visual score, is often interpreted that way by it’s viewers.

Visual Scores, and scores in general have potentially had a shift in their design since the discovery of recorded music, as their need has changed. With the arrival of modern and more abstract forms of art too there has been a shift in philosophy slowly bleeding into music & sound. When scores were once the only way to preserve music for future generations they are now an artifact of arguably less clarity. What can they mean when their place as gatekeepers of history has been taken from them by recordings? I think visual scores speak to a more liberating force within the art world, I see them as invitations to play placing the tools in the hand of the performer and I see it as trusting a performer and allowing them more influence on the final piece. It brings a chaos element to work, it accepts a level of separation that makes it feel like it’s a less egocentric type of composition and more collaborative. I believe the development of recorded music must have informed this movement, as it feels like a direct response to the finality of a composed and recorded piece – redefining the purpose to a performance of a piece of music as something that can/is allowed to change.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X7E2i0KMqM&list=LL&index=32

This was my first time hearing Kurt Schwitters and Jaap Blonk, both providing quite stimulating vocal works that instantaneously come off as free and playful, this so far is my favourite aspect to vocal improvisation. Whilst I appreciated Cathy Berberian, I didn’t particularly like the structure to the performance, it felt quite conceptual and academic in it’s execution and not as free as the other works, dealing mainly with onomatopoeia but I felt it was a little cold and disparate.

A member of the class contributed this fascinating video of Francis Bebey playing the bamboo flute which I hadn’t seen having been a fan of his music for some years, I hadn’t realised the subtle complexities of his use of the instrument and was quite amazed by this performance.

Schwitters’ Ursonate was an early demonstration of Sound Poetry. In the assessment feedback from my last project, the french literary movement ‘OuLiPo’ was brought to my attention by Ed as a demonstration of creativity through self imposed limitations . This seems to come from a completely different angle of dissecting poetry, the latter being one of dissecting prose and Song Poetry being more concerned with dissecting speech. I discovered I mix online whilst researching Song Poetry which has been really enlightening on the field and I am really drawn to this piece by Brenda Hutchinson.

I have never attempted Improvisation in such a free way, and spoke briefly with Gareth about Fred Frith of whom I am a big fan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFhy1ISTp5w

“Your reflective writing focuses on the lack of a shared physical space which curiously is one of the defining characteristics of sound culture since the invention of recording in 1877.” – Ed

This was an interesting opening observation to open with. I think I was mostly talking about shared physical space of performance and how ‘performance’ has changed so much in this time. With most radio shows being prerecorded and even ‘live shows’ streamed online being a series of people filming and recording themselves, then cumulatively collecting these abstract performances and piecing them together. It is true though that in a way the forms of recorded music and distribution of music goes widely unchanged. Maybe one exception I can think of being Bandcamp showing charity on artists by occasionally waving their fees… But I guess that is more business orientated than listener’s experience. Recorded music since it’s wider distribution into the lower classes as with it brought masses of experiences to people who would never have been given the opportunities to hear certain sounds. I have been interested in the availability of music to the working classes before recorded music since watching Elephant Man and the scene where Joseph Merrick gets taken to the theatre.

I think this is perhaps a more extreme example of someone not being accepted by society experience a night of acceptance, but perhaps before the availability of recorded music, were these high brow experience not for the working class? Did folk music exist in an entirely difference sub-system of existence, was their shared influence? I am not really sure but interested in investigating further.