Electronic Mus. Flashcards
Christina Kubisch Electrical Walks (2004)
- Example of ‘soundwalking’
(1) Takes place in cities throughout the world
(2) Special headphones: microphone amplifies interfering electrical currents (normally suppressed)
- —- Reverses process of transduction, sonifying electrical energy through coil pickup conversion
- —- Highly rhythmic
(3) Participants offered guidance to explore rather than specific path
- —- Interactivity between participants and technology: flat ontology
- Context:
(1) Follows on from Max Neuhaus ‘LISTEN’ (1966)
(1a) Argued you couldn’t change habits of listening in concert hall, so Cage’s gesture wasn’t radical enough
- —- Took audience on listening walk
- —- Seminal for soundscape artists
(1b) Innocuous urban sound installations
- —- Changes space to place and noise to sound
- —- Observing environment changes relationship to place
(2) 1990s: increase in electrical waves stimulated composition
3. Implications:
(1) Andra McCartney (2014): Kubisch ‘draws attention to the ubiquity of electricity by making it audible’
- —- Highlights tacit role of technology in history
- —- Acoustamology (Steven Feld)
(2) Transduction reveals things which are already there: reality as art
- —- Changes relationship to place
(3) Juxtaposition of sounds/spaces encourages re-evaluation of relationship to place and reality itself
- —- Sound/space intertwined
(4) John Ozwald’s term ‘schizophonia’: when sound doesn’t match place
(5) Walks in Eastern Europe very different to London/NYC
Alvin Lucier I Am Sitting in a Room (1969)
- Process
(1) Continuously rerecords the playback of himself speaking
(2) This audifies and gradually reinforces the space’s particular resonating frequencies, until Lucier’s voice is completely eviscerated
- —- Feedback normally avoided by using equalizer to tune out resonating frequencies
(3) ‘natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech’
(4) ‘resonating frequencies of the room reinforce themselves’
- —- Phrasing figures frequencies as actors
- Process is explained in recording: makes explicit tacit process of transduction
- —- Process drowns out composer intentions: chimes with Reich’s focus on the process itself - Utopic
(1) ‘I am sitting in a room; the room you are in now’
- —- Technology facilitates transcendence of space and time: Godlike immortality and omnipresence
- —- Like Wolfman’s metamorphosis, but this time human devoid of living agency: transduction is the actor
(2) ‘to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have’
(3) Highlights microphone’s power to augment human senses by audifying latent acoustic properties
4. Dystopic
(1) Looped human voice is devoid of living agency: becomes usurped as performer as the process of transduction takes over
- —- ‘Any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed’
(2) Elimination of imperfections through technology, but concomitant elimination of very humanity/existence in the process
5. Prompts ontological re-evaluation in listener
(1) What would life be like if the ear picked up these frequencies?
(2) At the work’s end, where the sound suddenly stops: are these frequencies still present, just inaudible?
- Edward Strickland (1993)
(1) Voice gradually distorted until it becomes utterly inhuman, as if modulating through musique concrete [Schaeffer/Henry’s term for combination of synthetic/natural sounds] to Electronische Musik [Eimert/Stockhausen’s term for music of purely synthetic origins]
(2) ‘His stammer transformed into white noise, Lucier commits sonic suicide’
(3) Suggests ‘dehumanization, mechanization, and the alien objectivity of reality’
(4) The featured performer is not the ‘I’ but the ‘room’
- —- [Transduction facilitates flat ontology]
- —- Lucier remains in taped voice, which loses its distinct individuality, fades from recognition as human voice, and is finally swallowed up by the room, surviving in a ghostly existence in its resonating frequencies’
Steve Reich Pendulum Music (1968)
- Process:
(1) 3+ suspended condenser microphones swinging over loudspeakers
(2) Feedback through transduction loop occurs when the microphone is directly facing the loudspeaker
- —- Exploits directionality of condenser microphones
(3) Different cable lengths: gradually get out of sync, producing phasing effect
- —- First explored in It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Piano Phase (1967)
(4) Diverse sonic potential of feedback is explored
- —- Sound-world morphs from sharp whooping staccato stabs to sustained clusters with undulating pitches
- —- Decrease in speed creates smoother attack and decay
- Analysis:
(1) Cathy von Eck (2017): the microphone as instrument comes into being during the performance
- —- Reich requests performers who turn on and initiate swing join the audience
- —- With every swing, more of the sound appears: sonic potential lying dormant within system of microphone/amplifier/loudspeaker
(2) Makes explicit the process of transduction, which Helmreich states must be invisible to be effective
(3) Physically and figuratively illustrates sound as a moving, temporal entity
- ANT links
(1) Foregrounds/protagonises microphones: they ‘perform’ the piece
- —- Highlights microphone’s role in shaping sound
(2) ‘it is quite natural to think about musical processes if one is frequently working with electromechnical sound equipment’
- —- Influence of technology - Context (Reich 1974)
(1) Farcical about Pendulum Music: ‘If it’s done right, it’s kind of funny.’
(2) Attitude to process music (1974)
- —- Gradual process invites sustained close attention to sound
- —- [Encourages examination of microphone’s capabilities]
- —- Interested in sound as objective, autonomous
- —- Listening to processes is an ‘liberating and impersonal kind of ritual’, focusing on ‘it’ rather than human subjectivity
Robert Ashley The Wolfman (1964)
- First work to use microphone/feedback as major compositional tool
- Performer places lips near the microphone and move them into specific shapes as sounds are played on a tape
- —- Microphone enables vocal cavity to act as acoustic chamber: subtle movements distort sound from tape
- —- Human performer is embedded into process of transduction, facilitating their metamorphosis into a ‘Wolfman’ - Conventional roles reversed: technology responsible for producing sound, while human merely interprets it
- —- This inversion of roles emblematises the role of microphone/loudspeaker/tape in history of electronic music
Stockhausen Mikrophonie I (1964)
- Concept:
(1) 2 percussionists play a large tam-tam with a variety of implements
(2) 2 performers use hand-held microphones to amplify subtle details and noises, inflecting the sound through quick (and precisely scored) motions
(3) 2 performers, seated in the audience, apply resonant bandpass filters to the microphone outputs and distribute the resulting sounds to a quadraphonic speaker system - Implications:
(1) Opening up new world of timbre
- —- Stockhausen codified timbres in 36 qualities ranging from dark to bright
(2) Audification
Feedback
- Feedback is a transduction loop between microphone and loudspeaker
- Ashley: feedback is ‘the only sound that is intrinsic to electronic music’
- Feedback creates sustained sounds: key attribute of electronic music
- Holmes (2015): ‘feedback is a rich and wonderfully expressive voice when incorporated into music’
- Feedback draws attention to the process of transduction: sound as moving entity which influences and is influenced by whatever it passes through, including the listener themselves
The Soundscape Schafer (1977)
- Microphone’s status raised from measuring tool to aesthetic tool
- Field recording
- The Soundscape Schafer (1977)
- —- Coined notion of soundscape
- —- Documented sounds, originally to track noise pollution then aesthetically - Soundscapes can be changed by zooming in or out (camera-esque)
John Cage 0’00” (1962
Microphone encouraged a refiguring of aural perspective: shift
- Premise: disciplined action performed with maximum amplification without causing feedback
- —- Vast detail/acoustic interest from sounds of everyday actions - Microphone as an agent/instrument – piece only possible with it
- Known as 4”33 part 2
(1) Sounds that happen to occur constitute music
(2) Ostensibly heard as music
(3) Drawing attention to everyday sounds as musical
- —- from Russolo to Varese to Cage
Internalized electronic feedback (Holmes 2002)
David Lee Myers
- Composes with internalized electronic feedback alone, using specialist “feedback workstations” to create music with no human origins
- Feeds effects devices with their own output, creating a loop where electrons flow freely, and sonifies this
- Myers forms this loop with several devices to provide direction and shape
- —- Declares it essential to ‘have a routing scheme which allows them to speak to each other and to themselves’
- —- [Autonomous: deliberately eschews human agency]
- —- [Idea of interactivity?] - Creates variety of sounds, from soothing drones to pulsing electrical signals
Toshimaru Nakamura
- In contrast, creates hypnotic, minimal, wire-thin sounds by manipulating a closed-circuit, no-input mixing board
- Connects input to output then manipulates audio feedback
- Pioneered this approach in the 1990s
- Unpredictable instrument creates surprise and indeterminacy
Conclusions
- As a sonic transducer, the microphone has had an active role in electronic music history, shaping its relationship to the wider world in unique ways and creating a greater awareness – and manipulation – of space
- Plays vital role in recorded music and contemporary electronic music
- Transduction reminds us that the microphone physically influences everything that passes through it, making its role as an actor in history, whether great or small, ultimately undeniable
- By transducing all sound, regardless of provenance, into a manipulatable form, the microphone arguably effected the blurring of boundaries between “music” and “noise” that has been a defining trait of much electronic music of the last 70 years
Transduction: definitions and uses
- Literally: to travel (ducere) across/beyond (trans)
- Helmreich (2015): ‘transduction names the way energy changes as it transverses media’
(1) (The conversion from one form of energy to another)
(2) The transformation of something from one form, place or concept to another
- Adrian MacKenzie Transductions (2002)
(1) Uses transduction in ANT-based study
(2) Transduction describes ontogenesis: the process through which something comes to be
(3) ‘A transductive process calls for transductive thought’ to comprehend it
(4) ‘To think transductively is to mediate between different orders, to place heterogeneous realities in contact, and to become something different’
(5) Transduction can be ‘physical, biological, mental or social’ (Simondon)
- Helmreich: ‘Narrows the distance between cultural analysis and technical description, offering a conceptual language partially shared between scholars in the humanities and engineering and science circles.’
- —- Way for sound scholars to gain a ‘productive complicity with the worlds they seek to describe’ - Michael Chion (composer): sound ‘unscrolls itself, manifests itself within time, and is a living process, energy in action’
- —- Transduction conveys temporality of sound - Eisenberg 2015: transduction reminds us that sound and space are ‘phenomenologically and ontologically intertwined’: sounds are always in motion through space
- Effective transduction produces immersion through a sense of seamless presence
- Connections with ANT
(1) Notion that energy moves between networks rather than emanating from a single point
- —- ANT focused on process of mediation
(2) Microphone as transducer renders both microphone and space it is in active participants (actors)
- —- Microphone is able to shape conception of a space
Microphone: definitions and history
- Transducer: converts sonic energy to electric energy
- Sensor: device that translates a nonelectrical value into an electrical value
- D’Escrivan: the microphone is an instrument ‘played by sound’
- Ear
- —- Extension of the human sensorium - Mouth: ‘the microphone became, in effect, an extension of the vocal tract
- —- Microphones have diaphragms - Alexander Graham Bell (1876): liquid microphone
- —- Used for phone calls - Ribbon microphone (early 1920s)
- —- Electric replica of sound - Types of microphone shape conception of sound
(1) Stereo: broad overall picture, captures all sounds equally
(2) Shotgun: narrow focus, able to bring out faint sounds
(3) Contact microphones:
- —- Sense audio vibrations through contact with solid objects
- —- Sound filtered through materiality of window
- —- Coil pickup: audifying electromagnetic waves - Capturing sub-cellular sound (Helmreich)
Jimmy Hendrix: feedback
Feedback: when output of system is fed into input
Jimmy Hendrix initiated stylistic use of feedback in pop music
- Uses many forms of distortion including feedback
- Extreme distortion of quasi-sacred piece
- Musical representation of counter-cultural movement
- Blues musicians began using feedback
- Punk: purposefully feedback-driven, lo-fi aesthetic
- —- e.g. Sonic Youth/Velvet Underground/Lou Reed
Dubbing
Caruso Sings Again! 1931 re-recording of 1907 original
- Biggest hit of pre-electronic recording era
- Removes voice and grafts it onto new orchestral accompaniment
- —- Posthumous duet: new forms of synchronisation between living/dead
History of the microphone
- 1878: carbon microphone
(1) Limited frequency response, noisy
(2) Double-button carbon microphone became widely used for radio broadcasting in 1920s - 1916: condenser microphone
(1) Weak output: needed amplifier to be useful
(2) Require external power source
(3) First commercial condenser not until 1928
(4) Far better frequency response than carbon - Late 1920s: dynamic microphone (omnidirectional, moving coil), ribbon microphones (bidirectional)
- Microphone’s subsequent progress characterised by directionality and miniaturization
