OTO ART

Tanner Maxwell's blog for Art 372: History of Audio Art. Updated weekly.

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Post Ten: Final Thoughts

As my interest in this concept was piqued the entire quarter, it should come as no surprise that I decided to base my final project upon the acousmatic sound. Although I originally intended to create a piece incorporating acousmatic sound--in the "never heard before" sense--critiques and my own self-examination made me realize such a feat was impossible. I simply didn't have the (extremely) high-tech equipment needed to capture sound people have not yet sought to capture. However, in my reexamination of theory, I formed a thought that made for a great paper topic, so I decided to go for that.

My previous blog entry really helped me form some of my ideas for the paper. Dolar's assertion that all sound is acousmatic helped me work backwards. Imagined sound, although unfathomable, can be identified by source merely through the power of our imagination and is therefore unacousmatic. I found this realization to be ironic, considering the acousmatic sound as used by musique concrete artists to fall closely under this definition of "never heard before." It was also interesting to come upon a challenge to Dolar's thought-provoking yet arrogant assertion.

A piece I showed in class, Boundary Music by Mieko Shiomi, also helped me think further about acousmatic sound. Although I'd probably argue Shiomi's piece does not focus on this concept merely from the instructions she crafted, Boundary Music still shows an interesting relationship between sound and source. Not only does one question the sound (or lack thereof) coming from each object, the lack of sound serves to acousmaticize the performance's sound as a whole: Are these objects truly creating these barely identifiable sounds? Does the audience imagining the sounds actually created by these objects influence how the piece is viewed?

All in all, I thought the paper went into detail some discussion-worthy thoughts and hopefully produced some interesting dialogue during the symposium.

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Post Nine: Returning to Acousmatic Sound (A Voice and Nothing More)

In chapter three Dolar discusses in-depth the acousmatic voice. I've already discussed this in earlier, but Dolar's thoughts really made me reexamine acousmatic sound and its implications for listeners. In particular, this quote on page 70 stood out to me:

From all this we must draw a paradoxical conclusion: ultimately, there is no such thing as disacousmatization. The source of the voice can never be seen, it stems from an undicsclosed and structurally concealed interior, it cannot possibly match what we can see.

From here, Dolar suggests a certain level of ventriloquism is necessary when identifying sounds and their sources. The acousmatic sound as a tool for audio artists and musicians interested me greatly, although Dolar's thoughts served to mitigate the its significance. His assertion that modern technology, like the gramophone and telephone, made the acousmatic sound both more common and more trivial, while true, made me look again at why this phenomenon is so interesting to me. If acousmatic sound is everywhere, then why is it worth discussing?

Perhaps the reason why I was interested in musique concrete artists' use of acousmatic sound was the potential for sounds unheard before. This could also be seen as acousmatic, as I've already pointed out: a heavily distorted sound can not be easily identified through its source. New sounds obviously have a place in the interest of audio artists, but I now question acousmaticism and its impact on particular sound. How does an acousmatic sound differ from a disacousmatic sound? If most, if not all sounds, are acousmatic, then why make a distinction?

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Post Eight: Performance and Sound (Sound 3)

I want to examine the work and thoughts of Mieko Shiomi. When reading of her performances, they sounded quite similar to Yoko Ono's work albeit more reserved. I was especially interested in her Boundary Music, whose instructions were so vague I had no choice but to look it up:

Make the faintest possible sounds of a boundary condition whether the sounds are given birth to as sounds or not. At the performance, instruments, human bodies, electronic apparatuses or anything else may be used.

The following sentence makes this piece even more interesting to me: "In retrospect, I think these musical experiments were of an extreme kind." Considering the Fluxus movement's current position in the art world, Shiomi's work almost seems tame by comparison. The works of her's she mentions in her retrospective primarily occupy performance, but Shiomi highlights the importance of sound and music in her thought process. When I watched Boundary Music, this seemed obvious, but then I questioned why she would explore performance in the first place if some of the things she decided to explore remained in a primarily auditory realm.

I want to reference my thoughts from last week's readings, in which Alvin Lucier's essay argues the importance of images in processing audio. When we look at Boundary Music, the importance of "boundary conditions" rests solely on the actions of the performers -- a purely visual observation. This provides the necessary connection between auditory and visual parts in performance art.

However, something I wanted to explore when first thinking about the readings for this class was the purity of sound as an art. Our visual culture has provided a wealth of knowledge, jargon and philosophy behind the meaning and feeling of images, but Western culture fails to do the same for sound and music. We see that when exploring artists who brought everyday visual culture into high art: today, even the most art-illiterate people will find artistic value in mundane objects, but the revolutionary work of John Cage and his redefinition of music remains laughable to some.

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Post Seven: Visual Cues in Audio Art (Sound 2)

Often it is necessary to provide visual cues as to the overall sound situation ... you only hear what is available to your location in space. Your focus is oblique.

Alvin Lucier, Careful Listening is More Important than Making Sounds Happen

This quote struck me quite a bit, especially considering it was very early in the week's readings midst Schaefer's romantic ideas of the importance of listening and the formation of soundscapes. I've researched briefly about cinematic music and the use of acousmatic sound in musique concrete, so my understanding up until reading Lucier's ideas have been focused on the purity of sound. Lucier's sound installations are quite interactive and seem to create a sort-of physical soundscape, so I think it would be productive to look into Lucier's work.

In Bird and Person Dyning, we see a disconnect between the natural bird sounds and the industrial, artificially lit stage. In this work, the importance of the visual space is imperative to the work as a whole. Listening only to the audio does not make much sense: although once can get the sense of an unnatural disturbance via the feedback of the microphone, the stage provides the bulk of the symbolism.

However, Lucier's work does not completely rely on this notion of visual backing. Crossroads utilizes an eerie, slow soundscape that needs no imagery to make sense of it. Obviously, not every audio piece has a corresponding visual element, but I question the possibilities of the space we occupy and how it influences the way we listen.

I think Steven Connor described the phenomenon of listening well in his essay Ear Have Walls: On Hearing Art:

We use sound to locate things, and to orient ourselves in space: to take the measure of things, we take 'soundings' or 'sound things out' ... Sound is exploratory rather than merely metric or analytic, because sound does not give us just the outline or contour of things -- their size, shape and position -- but also gives us the sense of their quality, or their relation to us: their texture, density, resistance, porosity, wetness, absorptiveness.

Not only does he recognize the physicality of sound -- they are waves we can feel, after all -- but the way he likens sound as an exploration draws many comparisons to visual senses. Perhaps this understanding is key to linking senses together and a better understanding of auditory perception.

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Post Six: Concepts of the Sonic (Sound 1)

We usually think of the camera as an eye and a microphone as an ear, but all the senses exist simultaneously in our bodies.

Bill Viola, 1985

The opening short essays from Sound were very useful for me in determining what exactly audio art is. I was fascinated with John Cage's definition of music as the organization of sound.

I was mildly surprised to see Douglas Kahn's The Latest: Fluxus and Music reference Erik Satie's influence on the avant-garde movement. After studying his work earlier, I realized just how important Satie's sound was. I'm fortunate for this coincidence. I find irony in Kahn's assertion that Fluxus was the "most musical" of the avant-garde movements considering how anti-musical, in the traditional sense, it was. I guess utilizing Cage's definition, it would make perfect sense.

I want to look at a quote from this essay, found on page 30 of Sound:

Thus Russolo's embrace of 'all sounds' became conditional upon the tenacious requisites of musical signification. If he had chosen to create a compositional and performance practice based upon the tension between sound and musical sound, he might have created a (relatively) autonomous art of noises. Instead, his 'great renovation of music' became on that would not confound the representational bounds of what stood as musical sound. For the next half-century it represented the strategy propelling or repelling composers with avant-garde motives. They, too, were allured by extramusical sounds but refused to become too associative, too referential.

Luigi Russolo's interest in unnatural, mechanical sounds as musical elements helped broaden the spectrum of music. Kahn's analysis explaining "extramusical sounds" that avoid reference recalls the style of many musique concrete pieces, the development of which intensified during the Fluxus movement.

However, I do question some of the artists' intents with some of the work to emerge from the Fluxus movement, especially when looking at Cage's complex pieces. Looking at the motives of the movement, Cage's work seems to fit right in: utilizing the sounds of everyday and an appreciation for "non-musical" sounds that occur through everyday actions very much fall in line with the movement's anti-bourgeois, countercultural ideal. However, part of the Fluxus manifesto supports a simple, uncomplicated approach to creating art--does Cage's work prove to be complex or simple? Although Cage certainly simplified the definition of music, I think there are interesting ideas to explore in how complicated the everyday can be, especially in looking at how Cage uses it in his work.

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Post Five: Furious Pig and the Human Voice (Ubu 3)

I stumbled upon Furious Pig's self-titled EP through sheer curiosity of the band name. I did not anticipate hearing such a grating yet engrossing audio experience. The UK experimental band, active in the early 80s, created a cappella tracks that directly replaced instruments with guttural human sounds. Both absurd and abject, the music is at times hilarious and excruciating, but the complexities of the sounds and layers of sound cannot be dismissed. From one band member: "We'd spend 8 hours a day for months working on extending our vocal ranges, often in grotesque and hilarious ways - we had fun!"

Fun indeed. However, this particular sound makes me question the power of the human voice. I'd like to draw attention to the caption provided on Ubu for the Furious Pig EP:

Recording: 'I DON'T LIKE YOUR FACE' [1980 Rough Trade EP] Stephen Kent - Vocal, Guitar, Percussion, French Horn Cass Davies - Vocals, Percussion, Pause Button FX Martin Kent - Vocal, Drums and Percussion Dominic Weeks - Vocal, Electric Piano, Bass, Bass-Clarinet

The caption explicitly mentions instruments even though the group is clearly a cappella. It's easy to infer that the vocalists are trying to directly mimic the sounds of instruments unlike traditional a cappella performances. This fact is ironic considering that instruments were modeled after various ranges of the human voice. In this context, I think Furious Pig's voice work is incredibly smart. The variety and intensity of each sound, as absurd or abject as it may be, provides great contrast with one another. If the tracks cannot be considered pleasing, then I would at least like to shine appreciation on their technique.

Furious Pig's work pushes the human voice as a medium to its limits. I wonder how easily distinguishable human sound can be made from other sounds. Perhaps it is the familiarity of the human voice that makes work like Furious Pig's or actors who do impressions or sound effects so strange to listen to.

The timbre of the human voice is unique and incredibly hard to mimic. Even the most advance of synthetic vocals fall short. Whereas Furious Pig quite literally uses the human voice as an instrument, Vocaloid software responsible for Japanese virtual pop star Hatsune Miku attempts to do the opposite: using software -- an instrument -- literally as the human voice. One might think voice software that sounds incredibly robotic would be a poor substitute for the real thing, but these very qualities attracts many listeners. Vocaloid music has gained a large following in Japan and the outside world.

Generally speaking, I think people love a good singing voice, but perhaps other qualities of the human voice can be considered for appreciation as well.

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Post Four: Psychoanalysis and Audio Art (Kittler 2)

In the second half of Gramophone, Kittler examines one of the more practical uses of the gramophone as a tool to aid psychoanalysis. Because this class focuses on audio art, I could not help but to make a connection between audio art and the interviews recorded during psychoanalysis.

In particular, I was fascinated with the figure on page 91 showing a transcription of a person with schizophrenia with musical notation. As a sort of drawing or art object, this figure is extremely captivating albeit objectifying. However, it took further research to make me realize just how objectifying this sort of idea is. Although I could not find early recordings used particularly in psychoanalysis, interviews with people with schizophrenia helped me determine the "humanness" of these unstructured rants. Perhaps this idea, that things that do not initially sound "human" can become more relatable, could create more interesting discussions on audio art.

Additionally, the relationship between doctor and patient presents other comparisons through the lens of art. I want to examine this quote found on page 90:

The storage mediums of writing fails once it is utilized by the patient and not by the analyst. Turning speech flows into syllable puzzles or "letters," which "do not occur in nature," remains the monopoly of the scientists seated in his chair.

This observation recalls class struggles during the shift of Western society as oral to written. In the context of audio art, it almost seems to give the medium a sort of "purity" with artists as gatekeepers. Based on earlier posts, if we consider audio artists as "organizers of sound," then we focus less on the technical skills of these artists and more on the selection of sounds. Can the same be said of visual media?

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Post Three: Erik Satie Sans Piano (Ubu 2)

The works of Erik Satie have always fascinated me. His avant-garde music, with its repetitive elements and minimal sounds, captured my attention as a violinist from a young age. To this day, his Gymnopedie No. 1 remains one of my favorite compositions: hauntingly beautiful, slow and careful. The lucid tones simultaneously make me tense and put me at ease.

A re-imagining of his Vexations caught my attention. Composed in 1893, the short motif repeated 840 times proved to be too bizarre to be performed publicly until 70 years after the fact. This take of Vexations invited musicians and artists to perform part of the piece without the use of a piano, leading to all manner of sounds and instruments used in the performance. Laptops and flutes, drums and film projections -- the eclectic mix of sounds rivals that of Satie's own whimsical compositions.

Satie once called himself a "phonometrician," or someone who measures and writes down sounds. I feel the distinction he made between himself and other musicians shows Satie's work as a precursor to modern audio art. Already credited as being the father of ambient music, Satie's compositions compare quite easily to the organization of sounds we've studied so far in class.

Pianoless Vexations also gave artists full creative freedom. Violinist Amy Granat, for example, only played one note her nearly 20-minute performance. Others relied upon technology unfathomable to Satie and his contemporaries. Take for example the methodology of music duo D. Edward Davis and Erik Carlson:

Using Max/MSP, I created software that tracks the pitch of the violin and uses that information to pitch-shift the violin sound, creating the appropriate upper harmonies in real time. Nothing is sampled or prerecorded. -DED 

Satie's composition itself already presents very interesting questions. What happens to sound when it repeats? What happens when it is repeated nearly 1000 times? However, Pianoless Vexations opens up even more possibilities for the composition. In the case of Garant's performance, what do (extremely) abridged or edited versions of audio mean? Meaning obviously changes in content, but what do these artistic interpretations themselves mean of this avant-garde composition?

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Post Two: The Phonograph vs. The Brain (Kittler 1)

I want to examine Kittler's analogy of the phonograph with the brain. Kittler outright states an exact comparison between the phonograph and the brain is futile, but I want to talk more in-depth about how the brain works. Often indexical media draws comparison to the human brain, which itself is an index. However, the accuracy of our memories is a lot muddier than we give our brain credit.

Eyewitness accounts are often easily discredited: the things people on the scene during times of intense stress or shock alter the memory to fit a narrative closer to the traumatic nature of the event. For example, many people claimed weeks after 9/11 that the second tower fell moments after the first. However, records show the second tower fell 30 minutes after.

Another example: survivors of the Columbine High School massacre painted a grossly inaccurate picture of the killers and the events of the school shooting itself. Students claimed the killers to be goths who played nothing but video games and also provided a horribly inaccurate account of the shootings to authorities. It took years before the case was completely settled and is documented quite well in David Cullen's Columbine.

Where am I going with this? I suppose I want to point out that our brain is not as indexical as we'd like to imagine.

 I want to examine a quote from Gramophone, found on page 32:

A further analogy between the phonograph and our brain exists in that the speed of the vibrations impressed on the apparatus can noticeably change the character of the reproduced sounds or recalled images. Depending on whether you increase or decrease the rotation of the phonographic disk, a melody will be transposed from one octave to another.

This quote recognizes the not-so indexical nature of our brains. We distort information we gain to fit our narratives, similar to the "realness" of recorded audio. However, audio technology easily allows the distortion of these indexes to also fit particular narratives.What is the realness of these so-called indexes? 

In short, I feel Kittler's comparison is a lot more true than he gives it credit, at least metaphorically speaking.

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Post One: Musique Concrète (Ubu 1)

Audio art is an area in which I know extremely little about, but I've always had an interest in electronic dance music, whose origins lie heavily in the avant garde experimentation by music theorists and audio artists conducted prior to the 1960s. I have previously explored musique concrète in relation to EDM. Notably, it is mentioned in the hilariously outdated Flash animation Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music (mentioned under "Downtempo"). However, I wasn't aware it was a form of electroacoustic music, which seems to be a notable part of the history of audio art.

Musique concrète is typically made with acousmatic sound, or a sound whose origin is indecipherable. French audio artists Jérôme Peignot and Pierre Schaeffer coined the term "acousmatic sound" to define the experience of listening to their musique concrète, which intended for listeners to not relate these sounds with physical objects, but to only refer to the sound itself.

When I found this playlist of musique concrète soundtracks, I decided to take a listen:

I noticed quite immediately the hypnotic nature of musique concrète, which shares this trait with EDM. However, while EDM creates this feeling through the repetition of beats, musique concrète achieves a similar effect without resorting to a particular BPM. In some cases, I feel the isolation of sounds allows for acute concentration of the music, which inverts EDM's formula of layered and progressive sounds. The difference can be made quite clearly in the soundtrack by Włodzimierz Kotoński for Dom (track 7), which separates strange "clop" sounds with actual music tracks. The progression is strange, unlike that of any kind of music I enjoy listening to, yet it respects the individual sounds used in the composition.

The playlist contains soundtracks from experimental short films. While listening, the sounds felt very cinematic to me. Obviously, as these were sounds used in film, this conclusion seems awfully simplistic. However, this thought led me to find this interesting bit of info in regards to acousmatic sound in film:

According to the French film sound theorist Michel Chion (1994), in cinema, the acousmatic situation can arise in two different ways: the source of a sound is seen first and is then "acousmatized", or the sound is initially acousmatic with the source being revealed subsequently. The first scenario allows association of a sound with a specific image from the outset, Chion calls this visualised sound (what Schaeffer referred to as direct sound). In this case it becomes an "embodied" sound, "identified with an image, demythologized, classified". In the second instance the sound source remains veiled for some time, to heighten tension, and is only later revealed, a dramatic feature that is commonly used in mystery and suspense based cinema; this has the effect of "de-acousmatizing" the initially hidden source of the sound (Chion 1994, 72). Chion states that "the opposition between visualised and acousmatic provides a basis for the fundamental audiovisual notion of offscreen space" (Chion 1994, 73).

This idea makes me want to explore how this technique is used in particular films, especially horror films where acousmatic sound can create an eerie effect. Additionally, Chion's idea makes me question whether acousmatic sound has any inherent qualities. In film, acousmatic sound can be a powerful yet dangerous tool considering film is an audiovisual art. Audio art, however, is pure sound and does not benefit from any visualization whatsoever. Does acousmatic sound in the context of audio art carry meaning as a whole, or does it depend entirely on the sound? At first glance it would seem to be unsettling: not knowing the source or origin of something sensory like audio, to me, feels not only mysterious but also nerve-wracking. One could argue aesthetics of sounds. While some sounds might be calming or trance-inducing, others might incite fear or panic. Ultimately, are all acousmatic sounds equal? I think not, but certainly these sounds would be interesting to explore.