When the options to choose a workshop for this unit came along I thought I would naturally go down the sculpture route, even though I was very tempted by Paint and Print. I didn't think I would choose Hybrid, however, when the brief was put up on the VLE and it was about Sound Art I thought this was too good an opportunity to miss. I have never played with sound but I felt it would be a good fit for my non-verbal communication exploration and an opportunity to do something new and hopefully create some work that I wouldn't have done otherwise. It might even inform some of my other work and perhaps I could combine it with some sculpture in some shape or form, literally.
Week 1 - Introduction and some possibilities of using sound in art.
This first two sessions were a mix of theoretical and practical elements, looking at key concepts and sound recording techniques. We were going to be introduced to some of the software that we can use to layer, manipulate and play with any recorded sounds as well as understanding how we may decide to output it. The final session we are going to work in groups and have mini tutorials to discuss anything about the workshop and work we have created.
It is a short workshop but enough to provoke and inspire us to create some work in a field we are unlikely to have done before.
Sound is interdisciplinary. It spans installation, film, music as well as interactive technology and the spoken word amongst others. It is also used as the primary medium or material and therefore the focus of the piece. It does make you start to think how you can use sound within your own practice.
Sound terminology
Hearing = Active participation versus Listening = Passive
Amplitude = How you amplify the sound, which is measured in decibels.
Frequency = The pitch of the sound. How often it happens and how fast it is. Measured in Hertz. 1 Hertz = once a second.
Reverb(eration) = The echo of a sound reflecting off a surface.
Sound and space.
Sound is a physical phenomenon. It exists in time and space. It travels through space, affects it and is affected by it. It also travels through objects.
Whenever we make, hear or record a sound, space is inscribed in it. The sound of the space the sound was made in defines the actual space.
Anechoic Chamber.
This is a space that soaks up sound by stopping the reverb. The surfaces of the room are designed to deaden the sound and stop any background noise. Even in this space you can still hear your heartbeat and a whine that is your nervous system. A very un-nerving experience and combined with the room being coloured in a way to disorientate you visually would make you potentially feel quite unwell.
Physical examples
Alvin Lucier - I am Sitting In a Room (1969).
A recording of a reading, that is then played back to the room, recorded again, played back again and recorded continuously. The most striking part of this was that it took such a short amount of time for the voice to disappear, it also got quieter the more times it was recorded and played back. It became quite musical, melodic and beautiful. THere are gender issues to consider as the words spoken discuss this and the piece we watched was read by a woman wearing very masculine clothes. The gender in the voice and indeed the humanity is erased within about three playbacks.
When you hear your own voice back it often doesn't sound like you. This is mainly because a lot of the vibrations of the voice come through the chest bone and not just the vocal chords, the chest bone gives a much deeper sound because of the lower frequency.
David Byrne - Playing the Building (2005)
This is a performance piece where each key of a gutted harmonica (church organ) is attached to various parts of the building through wires. When you press the relevant key it activates various mechanics to make a sound. It does have pitch but because the keys are attached various items you can't actually play them in a tuneful way. The audience is encouraged to sit and play the harmonica to hear the variety of sounds which is a collection of motors, solenoids, air blown over holes and more. It does mean that anyone can play it and no player can be see to be a better player than another.
Historical examples
Janet Cardiff - Audio Walks (1991 - )
A 'Soundwalk' where you are guided around a space giving you a mixture of the history and the location but also ambient, emotional and artistic sounds. This piece weaves in an interesting mix of what you are hearing and sounds from where you are. It becomes very ambiguous in what you are actually hearing as it is recorded using binaural microphones.
Susan Philipsz - Lowlands (2010) - (Turner Prize Winner)
Philipsz deals with emotion, lost and longing and this piece is a combination of folk songs and the environment. The piece is played under various bridges in Glasgow, singing in her own voice even though she is untrained the sound that reverberates off the water and the concrete structures has a really ethereal sound, very haunting, almost as if the sound is coming from the sea. It does sound very sad and as the songs are about lost sailors it really feels as if it is the underworld calling to those on the surface. When discussing this piece Dr Phil mentioned that because we don't have 'earlids' we can't shut the sound out. Also that the sense of smell is supposed to be the number one sense for triggering memories and that sound is the second.
Week 2 - Technology and what to use to record and play.
This week we discussed some of the technical details of sound and how it can be used in art. Understanding how a microphone and a speaker work helps to open up ideas and possibilities. Basically they are the same thing, in simplified terms, consisting of a magnet, a metal coil and a piece of membrane that vibrates to create or record the sound, depending on the frequency of the sound.
Resonance
Every object has a 'resonant frequency' - a frequency at which it naturally vibrates. This principle can be used in reverse to pick up and record vibrations that travel through an object.
A 'Transducer' is like a speaker connecter without the membrane, it can be attached to a solid object and a sound (music, speech or recording or any sort) is played through the wire to the object, which vibrates as it effectively becomes the membrane of the speaker. Depending on the objects 'resonant frequency' the tone and sound will be different, ie a metal bowl or a door.
A perfect example of this is David Tudor's - Rainforest (1968)
Rainforest IV performed at L’espace Pierre Cardin, Paris, France, 1976
(https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/166) Different objects are used to play sounds and specially created music through. Visitors were encouraged to feel the vibrations, interact with the objects and immerse themselves within the piece. All the sounds are created digitally yet sound as if you are in a rainforest, it is very atmospheric and mediative. Yet visually you are surrounded by random pieces of the everyday. It is a perfect example of sound and sculpture combining. The sound recording can be found here:
Another way to record the sound without a traditional microphone is to use a 'contact microphone' this is used mainly by musicians, ie cellists, violinists, etc. Again, it has no membrane and picks up the vibrations through the contact with the item or instrument, almost like a stethoscope.
Resonance - Cymatics 'The shape of sound. This is when we can make patterns of vibrations by making them visible using liquid or powder. They create very geometric patterns and as the frequency changes so do the patterns. We played with a small brass bowl with water in it and filmed the results. This shows one way how you can 'see sound'.
Media
Matt Rogalsky - Kash (2001)
In radio broadcasting a black box is used in the recording process that detects the gaps in the sound, it snips them out and shoves the recording along. This makes the recording smoother with less pauses but also creates more space for advertising and therefore revenue.
Rogalsky took a broadcast of the day from Radio 4 and reversed the process using the silence as the broadcast piece, he then created these as CDs and sold them for £300! He also used the same technique to George Bush's speech on March 17 2003 telling to Saddam Hussein to leave.. it's called 'Two Minutes Fifty Seconds for the USA' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxzBLQtFYg4)
Vinyl Records
Milan Knížák - Destroyed Music (1979)
This particular piece of Knížák's work shows a collaged version of x4 vinyls quartered and then remade as one. This has not only an interesting visual quality where the aesthetics of the actual vinyls are broken or cut and then made whole, which goes against the way you naturally feel you should treat vinyl. It is something precious and to be treasured, yet here they are fractured and broken. These pieces are also played and the sound only goes to emphasise the breaks, it also jars as the needle jumps.
Christian Marclay - Guitar Drag (1999) -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENzw0XGAX2Q
Marclay connects a Fender Stratocaster guitar to an amp and with the guitar crudely tied to the back of a pick up truck and connected to an amp that is in the back of the pick up and playing drags the guitar behind him. As a sound piece and a spectacle this creates a visual and audio piece that grates and jars with the destruction of the guitar and the resultant wailing noise. If, however, you realise the context of the piece when it is referencing the lynching of a black man (James Byrd Jr.), who was dragged to death behind a truck in Texas in 1998 it becomes even darker. The use of the guitar is a reference to blues, a music emanating from this region and symbolic to many black blues musicians.
William Basinski - Disintergration Loops (2002)
Basinski works with tape to tape recorded sound and exploits the deterioration of the media over time. He is a composer in his own right and although most of his early work was recorded onto tape he was in the process of digitising his work he noticed how time was affecting the original recordings. He happened to be doing this on September 11th, 2001 in New York, the same time as the Twin Towers were hit and destroyed. The film of the Twin Towers slowly burning and collapsing at the same time as his tape is played is unbelievably poignant and full of meaning. It is sadly poetic in the way both elements finally destryed.
Ryan Patrick McGuire - The Ghost in the MP3 (2014) - https://magazine.arts.virginia.edu/stories/the-ghost-in-the-mp3-making-music-of-digital-leftovers
An MP3 is similar to a JPG in so much as it is a compressed file, much is lost to keep the file size down and make it easier to share and download. McGuire worked with what has been lost in the compression process collecting the missing information, similar to Rogalsky had with Kash. He did this by inverting the wave from the MP3 or WAV file and the difference that is left after anything similar is cancelled out becomes the extract, a 'Phase Cancellation'.
Week 3 - Learning Adobe Audition
This week was swapped around to allow us time to have a play with audition and any recorded sounds we had collected from previous sessions and in between. Having a basic understanding of Adobe Premier Pro there was a familiarity with the interface and this helped along with the session to understand how to create a piece of sound and then how to play with it and output a file.
Although all the information is on the VLE (https://vle.nua.ac.uk/mod/book/view.php?id=30586&chapterid=347) I find it really useful to take notes in the session that I can use as my reference points when I might want to create a new piece. We discussed the setting up of a file and the basic tools, what they could be used for and then how to manipulate the clips and layers, what the various symbols and graphics indicate and how to adjust them. Once we had got through the basic elements and how to cut a clip around and add additional layers it was then onto the fun stuff.. playing with 'Transformation Effects'. With this we could slow clips down, add effects and generally take a piece of recorded sound to a new level.
Examples of where this had been done were shown and included:
Marcus Coates - Dawn Chorus (2007) https://vimeo.com/76729109
'Nineteen individual singers uncannily recreated birdsong and bird movement. Together they formed a chorus that accurately simulated the sounds and timings of a natural dawn chorus. With each singer depicted in an everyday location: an underground car park, an osteopathic clinic, a bedroom, a bathtub, Dawn Chorus was as much a portrait of British people and their daily habits as it was of the natural world.' (https://www.fabrica.org.uk/archive-dawn-chorus)
We also discussed the software called 'Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch' this is a free piece of software that allows you to stretch audio is a smooth way. An example of this is A-Ha's song and video 'Take On Me', slowed down 800%. It creates a new piece of work, very ambient and stretched out. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmD7z7uH-Hg)
I have put together another one of my iThought Digital Mind Maps to help me going forward. I do find these invaluable to keep referring back to for links and information found earlier.
Practice
Once we had completed exploring a series of effects including reversing clips, affecting the reverb and pushing the sound from left to right, etc we then learnt how to output a file to correct format. Below should be the test file from the session, I intend to create a more developed piece using these techniques to see what I can create now I have this additional knowledge.
A finished piece
From the very basic understanding of Adobe Audition I have been playing with a piece that has x3 tracks, one of morse code slowed down and reverb added to distort it, a looped snip of fellow student, Freya, laughing, which I have looped through the whole track, as well as pushing the pitch up really high and then a layer of me walking on gravel that I have again affected, stretched and added an effect, this time a synthesizer to give it a musical feeling. I kept all the files similar in so much as there was a sort of rhythm, I looked at underlaying a vocal track but it didn't flow, it had too many gaps and not enough info. Maybe with a more interesting clip I could make it work.
A screenshot of the how it actually looks in Adobe Audition, the layers and the way I have adjusted the clips to create the sounds.
Tutorial notes
For the last week's session we were allocated a 15 minute tutorial to discuss any intentions we may have. I put to Phil Archer my Final Project Proposal and we discussed the possibilities of my proposal. The good news is it is all possible, the tough bit is that it's going to get a little 'techy'.
We also discussed the idea of the sound that was happening during the making of my Braille pieces. This lead on to the sound of bells and how they can be used as signals. One of the items we discussed was 'Box with the Sound of Its Own Making', 1961 by Robert Morris. 'From inside an otherwise ordinary wooden box emerge the occasional sounds of hammering, sawing, and sanding. These sounds form part of a three-and-a-half-hour recording that Morris created while making the very box shown.' (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/689665)
Another idea was to actually use Morse Code to 'say' the message shown in Braille, thereby combining the two non-verbal languages.
One of the other interesting things to discuss was the work by Jacob Kirkegaard, called PHONURGUA METALLIS A series of three unique works of copper, iron & brass, sensors and contact speakers that create feedback from the metal themselves. Three metal plates (copper, brass, and iron) are caused to vibrate through their own subtle resonant activity, which is being amplified and played back simultaneously. Even though the three plates are of exactly the same size they turn out to be "affected" in different ways, for each matter has its own resonant humor.
The low tech way to take my idea is to use guitar affects pedals, which can control the delay and loop recordings. The high tech way will require a certain amount of software learning and understanding of the technical side. Could be interesting.