Score For A Film

"How about we meet and I tell you about music notations?"

[wildcat2030]

This is not to say that the brain dances to its own beat, dragging perception along for the ride. In fact, it seems to work the other way around: Rhythms in the environment, such as those in music or speech, can draw neural oscillations into their tempo, effectively synchronizing the brain’s rhythms with those of the world around us.

It’s Not a ‘Stream’ of Consciousness - NYTimes.com (via wildcat2030)

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Quantum Calls Dimensions variable 2014

"To Sail Beyond the Sunset" Featuring: Sam Burford; Mehreen Murtaza; ​Deimantas Narkevicius Opening: Saturday 22nd Nov, 7-9pm Continues: 23rd Nov- 21st Dec THURS-SUN, 12-5pm

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Score For A Film at Experimenter, Kolkata 2013

Score For A Film attempts to be a meld of sounds dedicated to recordings of low frequency transmissions, a sweeping soundtrack, noise patterns, historical recordings, and a fictitious narrative performed by a team of voice actors, interspersed with semantic language shifts and conversations covering ufology, space travel, crop circles, mysticism, spirituality, and the mapping of imaginary cartographies. With the help of voice over actors and musicians, a ‘score’ is developed for the ghost world, probing buried or unknown areas of the brain as potential components of such unreal archives.

  Score For A Film focuses on a ‘Su-fi’ rendering to the realm of science fiction that focuses on the character of A.S., a magician scientist, invoking incantations, a self-serving hagiography; as well as embodying itself as a sort of a secular prayer.

  Crystalline fragments of prose are interspersed with found news clippings, photographs, and physical artifacts that perform as punctuations in a fictional narrative that charts the process of invocation and erasure, pilfering and re-making, and the precarious and subjective nature of shared histories.

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TRANSMISSION FROM A MISSING SATELLITE’s premise lays in dream logics, alternative knowledge, uncertain histories and the creative production of new and perhaps imaginary information. Transmissions… is a 12 minute and 40 seconds long audio which attempts to stage a “dramatization” of a scripted science fiction novella interpreted through musical performance and part conversation covering scientific discovery and space travel within a parallel time span.

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Strawberry tarts with prophetic verses

Shehzad Butt

9:17 AM (30 minutes ago)

to me

mehreen did i ever tell you about a dream i once had?

in the dream hira and i were getting ready to go to this seminar about religion. i was getting dressed and i came across these little red packets with Chinese on it- you know woh boat wali cakes? anyway i open the little packets and it had scriptures in them

and a strawberry tart. so ..yeah scriptures and tarts. the arabic looked very pretty. i thought you'd like that.

Also, imagine if you broke a biscuit and you heard a hu in a whisper. like, a hu escapes from it. jaisay kisi nay dua parhy thi biscuit kay ooper.

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ANNOUNCEMENT: . . .for the next twenty-four hours not much change in temperature. A slight atmospheric disturbance of undetermined origin is reported, causing a low pressure area to move down rather rapidly over the northeastern states, bringing a forecast of rain, accompanied by winds of light gale force. Maximum temperature 66; minimum 48. This weather report comes to you from the Government Weather Bureau. . . . We now take you to the Meridian Room in the…

[f0restpunk]

“I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness-in a landscape selected at random-is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern-to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal”

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak/Memory

[plagiarismisnecessary]

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Mark Bain

Geosite: Portable Earthquake (2001)

The work of American artist Mark Bain centres on the interaction of acoustics, architecture and physical/mental reactions to infrasonics – sounds below the human hearing threshold. Bain is involved in ongoing research investigating the effects of inherent and induced sonic events on structures and the people that inhabit them. He uses both the inaudible sounds normally present in buildings and other large constructions, amplifying them with seismographic and other specially designed equipment, and the sound potential of structures, using machinery to vibrate the materials and/or surroundings – essentially shaking buildings or the ground – for sonic effect.Amplifying the seismographic oscillations of the architecture and ground, either acoustically or using vibrators, allows Bain to plumb structures with waveform data and sound, mapping out the signatures of each and defining a presence within that which is normally thought of as static. 

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White Noise & Death Chords

Abdus Salam <[email protected]>

Feb 27 (8 days ago)

to Shehzad

If you are guided by the principle of less is more, then this initiative must be generated out of an interest in silence, ephemerality and emptiness - at the crux of whichever 'thing' or concept you approach. Intentionally spare, attempts to find a balance between emptiness and form. What we're doing is anything but. I think it's important to address this approach and be more critical of it (for both our personal sakes). I've been thinking a lot about what you deliberate on as compactness.

I don't know if I shared this with you earlier but glitch, white noise and drone are three sonic patterns that have emerged so far, elliptically. 

I think White Noise makes for a great rhetorical precipice for what we've begun working on.

White Noise refers to a purely theoretical sound concept that imagines an infinite-bandwidth, a flat and dense noise signal that has equal power at any frequency. Because the total power of such a signal would be infinite, it is therefore impossible to generate. 

It infers a drone, an unparalleled existence in the acoustic realm and it functions as a formless contradiction. It's a kind of formulated chaos being experienced when heard. This is very close to my philosophy of approaching work or my artistic sensibilities. The eclipsing of an idealized healthy human existence (whatever that may be) torn by shattered fragments resulting in the contradiction of social existence. It is a state of cognitive dissonance. It indicates the failure of function, equilibrium and organization. 

I've always been concerned with materials, excess, not-knowing and the absurd. And strangely, the radio play is taking a vital and similarly dynamic shape; recuperating material, transforming, agglomerating and de-forming in order to bring about that which is unforeseen.

It sounds like a large mutating beast alongside small clustering sculptures, as if they are caught in a stage of arrested development. 

The other word that comes to mind when I hear our first rough cut is Qualia;

Qualia (pron.: /ˈkwɑːliə/ or /ˈkweɪliə/; singular form: quale (Latin pronunciation: [ˈkwaːle]) is a term used in philosophy to refer to individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. The term derives from aLatin word meaning for "what sort" or "what kind." Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, or the perceived redness of an evening sky.

Daniel Dennett (b.1942), American philosopher and cognitive scientist, writes that qualia is "an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us."[1] Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961), the famous physicist, had this counter-materialist take:

"The sensation of color cannot be accounted for by the physicist's objective picture of light-waves. Could the physiologist account for it, if he had fuller knowledge than he has of the processes in the retina and the nervous processes set up by them in the optical nerve bundles and in the brain? I do not think so."[2]

The importance of qualia in philosophy of mind comes largely from the fact that it is seen as posing a fundamental problem for materialist explanations of the mind-body problem. Much of the debate over their importance hinges on the definition of the term that is used, as various philosophers emphasize or deny the existence of certain features of qualia. As such, the nature and existence of qualia are controversial.

Daniel Dennett identifies four properties that are commonly ascribed to qualia. According to these, qualia are:

ineffable; that is, they cannot be communicated, or apprehended by any other means than direct experience.

intrinsic; that is, they are non-relational properties, which do not change depending on the experience's relation to other things.

private; that is, all interpersonal comparisons of qualia are systematically impossible.

directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness; that is, to experience a quale is to know one experiences a quale, and to know all there is to know about that quale.

If qualia of this sort exist, then a normally sighted person who sees red would be unable to describe the experience of this perception in such a way that a listener who has never experienced color will be able to know everything there is to know about that experience. Though it is possible to make an analogy, such as "red looks hot," or to provide a description of the conditions under which the experience occurs, such as "it's the color you see when light of 700-nm wavelength is directed at you," supporters of this kind of qualia contend that such a description is incapable of providing a complete description of the experience.

Another way of defining qualia is as "raw feels." A raw feel is a perception in and of itself, considered entirely in isolation from any effect it might have on behavior and behavioral disposition. In contrast, a "cooked feel" is that perception seen as existing in terms of its effects. For example, the perception of the taste of wine is an ineffable raw feel, while the experience of warmth or bitterness caused by that taste of wine would be a cooked feel.

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I'm constantly deliberating over what I'm wanting to express in those exact words.  That's the way I think, function and feel. This is probably the best analogy I have to date.

So coming back to what you said about compactness, I'm interested in this perception of what is exactly being compact. I know the play has overwhelming details and embellishments but the underlying theme (or even themes) synchronize themselves as a disharmonious monster that hinges on very base questions and feelings. I'm still curious to know how you feel about the plot/narrative/story. What  exactly about it bothers you? What do you think is the essence of the story? What has changed for you since we first spoke about this story up till now?

These were a few questions nagging me and I didn't know how or when to ask you specifically  But it's become really important for me to know what you think in all honesty. Maybe we should talk about it face to face or you can email back.  This is segueing into a conversation separate form what's happening with the play so I hope it doesn't throw you off but I'm curious to know

Abdus Salam <[email protected]>

Feb 28 (7 days ago)

to Shehzad

Do you know about this:

Todesakkord (death chord) from the opera Lulu by Alban Berg.

The chord, which contains all twelve notes is frozen to an infinite duration.

The sound is "deadly“ not just in regard to the content of the opera, it also means the end of the

perception of time in music as well as the death of music as a whole – a sort of unformed formation

without harmony or disharmony, the end of musical dynamics and progression.

I want to steal this somehow - I think we already are working around such territory. Are we? 

[scoreforafilm]

The footage in this video is derived from image sequences from NASA's Cassini and Voyager missions. (The European Space Agency with the Cassini Imaging Science System)

Raw photos from the Cassini mission downloaded from:

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/photos/raw/

The soundtrack is a rough cut recording of ‘The First Phase of Sleep’ from recording sessions involving the Tanpura, electric guitar’s tremolo on feedback, Glokenspiel and Shehzad Noor’s vocals (from the local music band The Poor Rich Boys) and produced by Zain Ahsan from Poor Rich Boys. 

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Rough cut for The First Phase of Sleep with Shehzad Noor and Zain Ahsan of The Poor Rich Boys Illustration by E. Benyaminson for Hello I'm Robot! by Stanislav Zigunenko (Russian Kid's Book,1989)

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Most likely to be mistaken for aliens arriving: Birds-of-paradise make some amazing sounds – here’s the UFO-sound of a Curl-crested Manucode in New Guinea

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Looker (1981)

Exorcist: the Heretic (1977)

La Jetée (1962)

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(Interlude with a song) How shall we distribute the accumulated wealth of a millennia amongst the sons of prescient Fathers? Which amongst them will survive the great weight? Be wary, sons of prescient fathers, tread carefully. The oceans are poor analogies  for what we know.

(Interlude end)

[scoreforafilm]

The following text (prelude to Score For A Film) was converted to audio using an online text-to-midi generator:

"I recently stumbled upon a brand new invention, the Mentalex. A machine that uses the power of light to bring supra natural powers to the user's mind.
 It is in fact a strange artifact from an unknown origin, discovered during a balneotherapy session (the treatment of disease by bathing in mineral springs).

Essentially a scientific study about the interaction between the angle of rain, the shapes of the drops and the probability of being happy led to this innovative breakthrough.

While I was in the midst of taking out a patent on this discovery (in the hope that this would solve the planet's geopolitical problems), I discovered that my head was stuck to a magnet enabling the free flowing production of musical compositions with transformers, generators, modulators, and magneto-phones. In an apparent attempt to raise the volume above the prevailing din in my mind, my brain had learnt to unleash 95-decibel thought experiments, matching the loudness of a chainsaw.

Hence, I have come to the conclusion that the reason there is so little sensibility on the subject of religion is, perhaps, because people have trifled so long with their own con sciences."