I am interested in themes of material and potentiality. The way we perceive the sounds of objects is mostly a result of stimulation of said object. The sound of a rock is only present when it is hit, or dropped or scraped. There are objects that spend most of their existence only with the potential to make sound. In one of the visiting practitioner lectures, Sam Auinger presented a method of listening in which you take a small pebble and knock it against different materials. If you understand and mitigate variables such as the way you hold the pebble, you are able to listen to the resonance of materials and objects in a more objective way. I think that this might be an interesting concept to explore, perhaps using a technique similar to this in order to present the audio of material in a different way to how we normally perceive them, to bring these objects out of a state of audio potentiality and into a constant representation of their identity.
In regards to method Im drawn to granular synthesis as a way of turning a transient sound into a constant one, while retaining its timbre and identity. I would also like to look into exploring the resonance of materials and ways in which to uncover or present them in the most objective way possible.
Ryoji Ikeda is a digital audio-visual artist from Japan. He considers data a material, subject to be composed. This allows him to explore the underlying structures of our existence through implementing the human genome, structure of a protein or astronomical data as the input of his sounds/visuals. He translates these binary data sets into light and sound, giving us a perceivable representation of these hidden structures. He is converting patterns present in our existence that are on an unreachable plane, into a human experience.
This fascination with hidden structures informs his choice of sound. We as humans are perceptually limited by our sensory capabilities, we can only hear or see frequencies within a certain bandwidth. Ikeda tends to use frequencies very close to the edges of these bandwidths, highlighting the metaphysical distance between us and the material.
‘My aim is to show and experience the sound of data, and the data of sound’
Ikeda considers himself a composer, he collects enormous amounts of data which he then feeds to his ‘musicians’, the computers. This orchestral approach to sound art allows for a dispersion of the data through a multichannel installation.
The experience of his installations is that of sensory assault to some people, with the combination of extreme frequencies and flashing lights it can be disorienting. This sensory overload can have a hypnotic effect, inducing trance like states. I think that this is exactly the result you would expect given the source of the sound, Ikeda is presenting the audience a level of data/information that although perceivable through Ikeda’s practice, is not comprehensible.
The installation is constructed as environments for experience, people are encouraged to sit down or lie on the floor to experience the work. In this way Ikeda has placed the audience within the data, illustrating and emphasising the data’s original context. These data sets are all around us (the human genome etc.) they permeate our existence, this engulfing scale with which Ikeda presents this barrage of sensory stimulation reflects that permeation.
If an audio visual installation is an invitation for perceptual investigation (which I think it should be), then the hidden structures and imperceivable world is an excellent subject matter to explore. I would like to invite the audience to experience a sensory element of life in a different way, as Ikeda has done here. I would also like to create an all encompassing environment in which the ‘mobile visitor’ is tempted to stay for a while, relax and experience the work.
‘Extending Musical Form Outwards in Space and Time: Compositional strategies in sound art and audiovisual installations‘
Considering the form of audiovisual installation works-
Established forms of artworks tend to have a solid set of conventions, for example one might see a concert as being contained by the entrance into the space and ended with an applause. Also the viewer can expect a standardised format of location, one sits in a static place with the work emanating from one location in the room, eg. the stage. Audio visual installations do not have these rules or conventions, the presentation of the work is fluid or malleable. Audiovisual installations contain the presence of a ‘mobile visitor’, this audience member has agency over the temporal framing of a piece. They can move where they want, and stay as long as they please. This, in a way, is stripping the artist of a power to define their work. This form of artwork forgoes the traditions of musical artwork.
Installations ‘[eschew] tem- poral narrative progression … [and] instead [unfold] in space through … our perceptual investigations of [spatial] surroundings’ (Minard 1999: 81).
‘Perceptual investigations of [spatial] surroundings‘ – I would like to consider the audience’s experience in this way. I want my piece to be an invitation for investigation.
Olafur Eliasson posits that the dimensions of an installation piece, Euclidian (Width, depth and height), are modulated by not only the fourth dimension of time but also your engagement sequence. This is the first-person sequential unfolding of four-dimensional experience
Through Eliasson’s concept, we can consider the work as within a frame, a frame in which a subject can move in, through and out at will. Our work is an environment for experience, and the ‘form’ is the subject’s first person experience as they navigate within the frame we create.
We can analyse an installation piece by considering the ‘average’ movement of a visitor and understand how it modulates the piece. In the example provided by Adam Basanta we see a square room in which a speaker is placed in the corner opposite the entrance, it is fair to assume that most visitors will enter through the door, move towards the speaker to investigate the source, and at some point return to the door moving away from the speaker. These movements are modulations of experience, increasing and decreasing audio clarity and loudness. Although the temporal aspect of this modulation will differ between individuals, the general shape of the modulation will be similar. An increase in loudness and clarity, a plateaux, followed by a decrease. Loudness and clarity are not the only aspects ripe for manipulation. There are psychological aspects such as the urge one might feel to investigate when being confronted with the space, the speaker placement influences the audience’s perception of the content. A speaker placed high above the subject might feel looming or imposing, small speakers hidden in cracks in a wall might intriguing and invite exploration, a head height speaker whispering might result in a feeling of intimacy.
I haven’t finished this article but what I have read so far has influenced me to consider the subjects movement as a modulation of the sound and space, also to consider my job as an artist to create an environment for investigation, to create the confines in which the subject can move and shape their own formal experience of the piece.
Director Denis Villeneuve describes Dune as a psychedelic journey, he talks about grounding the film with ‘familiar’ visuals that link with our relationship with nature, and expressing the psychedelic aspect through sound. The approach they took with the sound was that of a documentary, Denis wanted it to sound as though there was a ‘guy with a boom’ on the planet Aracus.
The Worm
Denis integrated postproduction very early into the creative process, he brought the sound team to Budapest where they were shooting the film, this way they were able to feed their ideas together. Villeneuve recalls working on lower budget films and having to rush the sound at the end of production, but now with a bigger budget he is able to make sure the sound has deep enough roots (as he puts it) to stand the test of time. He values having space to experiment, explore and make mistakes. When supervising sound editor and sound designer Theo Green first received the script for the film, he decided to check himself into a hotel in Death Valley where there was a nearby sand dune called Mesquite sand. He did this to get a good idea of the atmosphere of the film, to know what it sounds like to stand in silence and to know what it sounds like to walk up a dune. Green was motivated a lot by some recordings done by their re-recording mixer Doug Hemphill, they were recordings of sand dunes moving, they sing/groan. Green recognised that in order to make that sound the dunes must be resonant like a musical instrument, so Theo planted microphones in the sand to see how human interaction, walking jumping etc, resonated with the sand. This was also useful in the conception of the sound of the worm, Green realised that in order for the worm to swim through the sand as it does visually, the worm would have to vibrate to liquify the sand, this defined the sound of the worm.
Denis described the sound of the worm or ‘worm sign’ as an insect fluttering its wind, something small that doesn’t let on the full scope of the beast. It should be something so contrasted to the worm that only a native would recognise, a visitor would think it was an insect or a bird, its ‘fluttering sand’. Denis emphasised awe as the quality they wanted to portray to the audience, he didn’t want the audience to fear it but see it as a God on the planet. The worm has a strange intelligence and should convey a huge presence, meeting the worm is a spiritual experience.
An aspect of the sound design that informed the visual is something that the designers named ‘The Gunk Gunk’, a series of thumps that can be heard coming from deep within the creature. They defined this as a means of communication, this is why the worm responds to the thumping machines places in the sand by people. After hearing this, Denis Villeneuve decided to take this information to the VFX team, and asked them to animate movement in the epiglottis.
Villeneuve describes the desert environment as introspective experientially, due to the weight of the heat, open plains and silence. This, he says, brings the sound closer to you. Often the loudest sounds in the environment will be your own body, your breath and heartbeat.
The Voice
There is a very important concept in Dune called ‘the voice’. Denis emphasised a theme of channelling ancestry throughout the film, the sound department had to express this concept/theme through ‘the voice’. The idea was that Paul could channel a feminine ancestral power, and so the voice would be a deep female voice, this could be simultaneously or separate from his own voice. The sound department casted lots of gritty female voices, they layered these voices under Timothee Chalemete’s voice. They wanted the projection of the voice to be powerful, for the resonance to be amplified especially in the bass, to the point where the room rattles. They also took an opportunity to use synchronisation as an expression of aptitude, as the protagonist learns to use the voice it is out of synch with him, it comes a few seconds after the words are spoken, whereas the reverend mother’s voice is completely in sync, percussive and immediate. To emphasise the lower frequencies of the voice Theo Green used a technique he learned from Lee Scratch Perry, a pioneer in dub reggae. The technique was to record the audio, and play it back through a very large speaker in a resonant room and record the result, sometimes you can hear a little bit of the room shaking. This, Green says, gives the voice a very tactile sense to the spiritual experience. Giving a tactile sense to the spiritual experience became this sound’s main utilisation, the voice could speak subtext, text and tell a story even when it wasn’t being deployed as ‘the voice’, it became its own entity. Through experimentation the sound department had unlocked a new story telling device for Dennis.
Technology
Denis wanted the technology of this world to be grounded, as real as possible, so it didn’t become a distraction from the story. He wanted the audience to embrace the technology spontaneously. An example was the ‘Ornithopter’, it was based on insects, he wanted the vehicle to function like an insect and look like a military vehicle. The sound, Denis said, should be close to the spirit of a helicopter, in the same family but not the same. The sound team used recordings of beetles and other insects to create a helicopter sound with a natural quality.
Mark Mangini states that we can be more successful in our sound design when we start with natural recordings. He thinks that the reason for this could possibly be that we have a psychoacoustic response telling us that the sound is real, the time arrival to the ear and the acoustic environment in which a sound lives might be a subconscious identifier for reality. Whether this theory is correct or not, I think he is right. The brain responds to natural sounds differently to synthesised sounds, I’ve created synthesisers out of vocal recordings and they are very un-natural as an acoustic sound, but retain an organic natural quality. These natural sound ‘ingredients’ are all in service to quickly and effectively suspend the audiences disbelief. We can present sounds that are decontextualised from what it really is, present them in a new context and your brain doesn’t have to understand what the original sound was it just recognises that its real.
Sound walk from a hike up Binsey, a very large hill near Ruthwaite. There was a lot of wind and I only had my phone to record, so the quality is not great.
Recording from the summit where there are wind shelters.
My only experience of sound installation work was my final major project for my foundation at CCW, I created a quadrophonic piece that was situated in a hallway. I was allocated the small hallway, with completely blank walls it was very reverberant, not an ideal place for my piece. I had finished my project when they gave me the space so there was no connection between the piece and the space, in fact the space detracted from the piece as it was mixed in a quadrophonic square formation and the hallway was rectangular. Through this I have learned the importance of keeping the space in mind when creating the piece, I think this is why this passage from my Asa Stjerna research resonated with me.
“Asa presents her piece ‘The Well’, a permanent installation in the Swedish Institute in Paris. She installed a mono channel work inside the dried out well, she talk about engaging with the stone wall’s ‘agency’ as she puts it. She describes having a dialogue with the space in question, an experimental practice, an engagement with the space.”
Although from first glance this gallery space seems quite blank, I would still like to (as an exercise) try and follow Asa Stjerna’s approach to site specific works.
Mapping the affective lines– The process of site specific exploration, this is what it means to find the space, researching the site engaging with archives etc. This is, for Asa, a very vivid/active engagement.
Establishing new connections– The artistic design process. Stjerna provides an example of installing a loudspeaker with a cable on a site, this is not just an action of laying a cable. It is engaging in a dialogue with the agencies of the space.
Becoming Non-Autonomous– It is important to understand your own situated perspective.
Ive tried to use the HM land registry and the Tower Hamlets Gov website but I have come up with nothing, the only thing I know about the space is that it’s a Georgian house. I think we might be visiting the gallery this Monday ( 10/01/22) so hopefully I will be able to collect some more information.
First Vocal Recordings, Foley and Environmental Sound
I get a lot of unwanted sounds from the road outside my window, and a lot of unwanted reverb from the reflective surfaces in my room, so as a solution I put a duvet and some blankets on a clothes horse. This actually turned out to be really effective and I got a very clean result. I did get a little bit of low frequency bleed through the floor, but I fixed it with an EQ and a noise gate. If I were to redo this process I would place the microphone stand on the bed or something elevated. I spent a lot of the time editing out bad takes and finding a good pacing for the speech. I mixed the voice fairly loud at -4Db, I wanted it to be very clear and set to the volume so I could know how the other elements fit around it.
Quotes
The first elements I added were the quotes, I had a lot of trouble finding a way to rip the audio straight from the internet. I ended up sending the audio from the internet to my monitors and recording it. This did result in some room sound but I didn’t really have much of a choice, I might continue trying to find a way to download the mp3 files.
Crowd and Playground
The second element I added was the sound of a crowd, this is in the section where I mention the busy street. Ideally i would have liked to used a field recording of my own for this, however with time restrictions and the difficulty finding somewhere that matches what I need, I opted for using audio from a sound library. I had similar reasoning for using sound libraries for the sound of a playground but I also didn’t want to go around playgrounds with a recorder.
In Utero
Lastly for this session, I tried to emulate the sound of being inside a womb. This was the most interesting and entertaining element to record. Firstly I made two base layers of low frequency drones. For the first one I used a sample of a bass drum I had recorded and applied an enormous amount of reverb to it, only using the wet signal, I also removed the initial sound from the bass drum, faded it in, removed a lot of the high frequencies with an EQ and automated a gradual increase in volume to try and keep the volume constant (because the reverb fades out). For the second layer I used a field recording of my own, I had recorded the sound of wind and birds in my garden. I then removed the higher frequencies, added a lot of reverb only using the wet signal and pitched it down a little bit. This layer gave a bit of texture to the sound scape, and a sense of realty as it’s environmental sound. Next I used a bucket and a rubber textured cloth to create sounds of bodily fluids. These recordings were then processed using compression, reverb, EQ and pitch correction. I recorded two takes and panned them left and right making use of the stereo field to aid the sense of immersion. I also recorded some audio of me singing ‘Thats Life’ by Frank Sinatra and some general talking, I treated this audio the same as previous with less reverb. I am waiting on a recording of my female friend talking, I want to show that there are multiple voices for the section where I say the foetus can distinguish between voices.
In the 1968 science fiction epic ‘2001: a Space Odyssey’ HAL-9000 is a supercomputer aboard the spaceship Discovery, this computer controls all of the ships systems and is designed to support and aid the ships crew. Kubrick presents HAL predominantly as a voice, the computer is visually represented as small red lights present in all compartments of the ship. However, Kubrick doesn’t consistently reference the visual representation of HAL when he speaks, associating it’s identity primarily with the audio. The computer is a perfect representation of the acousmetre as this voice permeates all places on the ship, it is omnipresent. As a result it is also all knowing, and with control of the ship’s systems it is omnipotent. These acousmatic powers give HAL-9000’s soft friendly human voice a very sinister underlying quality.
As the film goes on HAL begins to malfunction in subtle ways, and the crew decide that it must be shut down to prevent any further serious mistakes. However, HAL realises this and decides to try and kill the astronauts in order to save himself. Herein lies the engagement with the acousmetre, the deacousmatization of HAL. Through struggle the crew manage to reach HAL’s ‘brain’, a room of computer modules which a crew member is able to remove in order to shut down the supercomputer. As the crew member removes the modules HAL begins to lose his consciousness, and with that his control. The interesting part of this for me is the engagement of dialogue with the acousmetre using the deacoumatization. HAL begins to apologise and plead for his life, expressing fear which humanises this previously God like entity. The voice, engagement with language and visual contextualisation of HAL are used to express the dynamic of power and in turn dramatically change the effect/perception of the entity for the audience.
Excerpt from Michel Chion’s ‘The Voice in Cinema’
Alfred Hitchcocks 1960 film ‘Psycho’ contains a very interesting example of an acousmetre. The film follows a young girl who’s car breaks down, she ends up staying in a motel run by Norman Bates, a man who has a dysfunctional relationship with his mother whom he looks after. The young girl overhears a dispute between Norman and his mother, this is the first exposure to the acousmetre as the audience is privy to the mothers voice but not her appearance. Hitchcock has established an acousmatic character engaged with action. Later in the film the young girl is savagely murdered in the famous shower scene by a visually obscured character. Norman cleans the scene in order to protect her from justice, he goes upstairs to try and find a place for her to hide. As Norman carries his mother while she talks, Hitchcock films the scene from above and far away, offering the audience a form of deacousmatization. This turns out to be a mislead as it is revealed that the mother is dead and Norman ‘plays her’ from time to time.
Bibliography:
Chion, M. and Gorbman, C., 2008. The voice in cinema. New York: Columbia University Press.
CHION, M., GORBMAN, C., & MURCH, W. (1994). Audio-vision: sound on screen.
Liquid Architecture. 2018. Michel Chion: The Voice in Cinema, or the Acousmêtre and Me (Liquid Architecture). [online] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRik_1-eSdE&t=456s> [Accessed 25 November 2021].
Önen, Ufuk. 2008. Acousmetre : the disembodied voice in cinema. Journal for Bilkent University Dept. of Communication and Design – Master’s degree. [Accessed 05/12/21]
Pythagorean learning, Freud and Acousmatics in Religion
The Ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagorus adopted an unusual method for teaching. He was concerned that his appearance would distract his students from the content of his speech, in order to circumvent this he would teach from behind a curtain, and he would not reveal his appearance to the students until they had been learning for substantial amount of years.
A similar practice was adopted by Freud during his psychoanalysis. He would ask his patients to lie down on a victorian day bed and look up at the ceiling, the patient mustn’t make eye contact with the psychology and vice versa. This was an effort to induce something called ‘free association’. It would create an environment that as clinical and intimate, it encouraged the patients to freely express their thoughts. Perhaps people listen more intently when there is no visual source, and express more freely when their is no visual receptor.
There are a lot of instances of people hearing voices without a source in religious texts. In the bible, Adam hears the voice of God telling him how to behave in the garden of Eden, Moses hears the voice of God telling him to lead the Hebrews out of Egypt. There are always descriptions of someone ‘hearing’ a voice telling them important information. My interpretation of this is that people are more likely to heed the word of something unseen. I see this as an example of acousmatics in early civilisation.
