Harry Charlton’s Sound notes

Tatsuya Takahashi was born in 1982 in Shizuoka, Japan. At 6 months old his family moved to Frankfurt, and at 2 years old they moved to London where they settled. Tatsuya speaks a lot about wanting control in his life, he found control through technology. At 13 he began building speakers in his garage, he then started to branch out into broader electronics, pulling apart keyboards and making simple oscillators. Tatsuya attended Cambridge university and studied general engineering, structural engineering, thermal dynamics, electrical information sciences and control theory. Shifting his interests from playing back sounds to generating sounds, Tatsuya did a masters in analogue electronics, which set him on his career building analogue synthesisers.

Takahashi believed that synthesisers should be everywhere. In the same way someone can bring an acoustic guitar to a park and play a song, people should be able to be mobile with synthesisers. After university Tatsuya set his eyes on working for a synthesiser company, he had an abundance of knowledge on building synthesisers, but little knowledge on the industry. Being of Japanese heritage, he settled on Korg which was founded and based in Japan. In 2006 he moved to Japan and started working for the company. His first project was the microKORG XL, this synthesiser was already in production when he joined and so he had little control over the project. His input was slightly limited as the product was a digital synth, but it was still a valuable experience as it was his first experience working high speed electronics and his first time making a mass producible product. To summarise this experience, Tatsuya says ‘it was very educational but not very creative for me’. He managed to have more control over his second project, the KORG Monotron. It was the first analogue synth Korg released since the 1980’s, it was a very simple compact machine. The most important aspect of this experience was the transition from one off devices to producing tens of thousands of them. This experience shifted Tatsuya’s focus to think more about how he could make music making more accessible to people. Tatsuya created the Volca in later years, this was the definitive expression of this idea.

A collaboration with Apex Twin on the Korg monologue triggered a desire in Takahashi to pursue more interesting projects outside of Korg. In 2017 he left the company and moved to Cologne, he then joined a brand agency with a goal to work with more artists. The company was Yadastar, it was a brand agency for red bull producing redbull academy works. Through this he was able to work with artists that he admired, one of which was Ryoji Ikeda. They collaborated on an instrument, they made a hundred of them and performed a piece. Tatsuya really enjoyed this process, it was a middle ground between mass produced products and one off products. The piece was only performed once, and tatsuya appreciated this self destructive process, creating a piece of hardware and using it only once. They gathered one hundred car enthusiasts with large sound systems, and gave them each one of these devices tatsuya had designed. Ikeda composed a piece designed for this medium called ‘A for one hundred cars’ which explored different versions of the note A through history, the slight variations in frequencies. The result was a massive drone piece composed of 100 versions of the note A weaving in and out of each other, this was played through the cars sound systems in LA. Another project tatsuya did with Yadastar for RBMA was the ‘Granular Convolver’. This was a device that combined granular synthesis with convolution, convolution being the process of combining two signals together in terms of frequency. This was not mass produced, it was for a project where the device was given to a number of participants to create with. Tatsuya found it very interesting to watch how these artists would use his device, some manipulating field recording, some combining instruments with samples. This project provided Tatsuya with a desire to create mass producible products again, it just so happened to be that red bull sacked the agency shortly after this forcing him to make the change. Takahashi then went back to Korg to open their factory in Berlin, he now works with a small team creating musical equipment.

What I take from this talk is that it is important to love the work that you do, that is the best way to have an influence on the world.

‘Altruism is the most rational form of selfishness’

– Jaques Attali

‘selfishness is the most rational form of altruism’

-Tatsuya Takahashi

Jana Winderen is an artist based in Norway. Her work focuses on hard to access audio environments and creatures, both locationally and in terms of frequency ranges. Her work is displayed as site specific and spacial audio, installations and concerts.

Jana has worked with many different aspects of sound, but she focused mainly on her work with water in this talk. In 2016 Jana was invited to join a project called dark ecology that focused on the area between Norway and Russia. A group of artists and scientist investigated an area on the border, this particular space had a political weight at the time due to complications with the north east passage and the oil industry. Jana recorded local people’s stories, people who are directly effected by the conflict. Jana also recorded the ocean with hydrophones to sonically capture the area. She talks about the use of hydrophones and how one has to be patient and a-tune to that form of listening, it can be that you don’t hear anything at first but in time you start to hear more, ‘without any exceptions, I always hear something that is triggering my interest’ she says. Jana was invited to investigate the marginal ice zone, it was an exhibition to catalogue small aquatic creature populations and the change in ice formations. Jana talks about the difficulties she faced due to the ships noise, and that she had to get away from the ship on land. She then faced difficulty due to a drone some scientists were using to record seal populations. Her work requires isolation, she talks about how she has to get very far away from machinery or people. Jana talked about hearing a dropping tone in the water and working out its source because a seal poked its head out of the water shortly. I find the idea that she hears a great deal more than what is visible fascinating, hearing more but what you hear is less defined. In this talk Jana shows a series of images of her seemingly isolated, it looks about as far away as you can get to human influence, but it is not the case. She says you can still hear machinery even if you walk very far away, you would have to ski for a day to get away from it.

‘We have colonised all of the planet with our sound’

During a project in Newcastle following a river source to mouth, Jana became interested in listening to the health of a body of water. She saw fresh water biologists counting underwater insects to say something about the health of the body of water. Jana became interested in trying to identify the sounds of these underwater insects, with the goal of understanding which insects survive certain changes to the river over the years, she found that this method would be quite difficult to prove quantity. While working with these fresh water biologists, Winderen became enamoured by the worlds she found within small sections of rivers, speaking about the variety of creatures and the sounds they produce.

Jana Winderen emphasises the value of drawing a subject, believing it forces you to pay attention to what it looks like, ‘you get to know them better so when you then see them again, in my experience you recognise and see them and remember them.’ I think this could be a valuable practice to just to familiarise yourself with your auditory materials.

Jana reminisces about working in northumberland listening to an ants nest using hydrophones. She describes the movement/vibration of the ants nest as an incredible sound. She emphasises the importance of just trying things out, exploring the auditory world, whilst being mindful to not disrupt it.

Pedro Oliveira is a Brazilian researcher and artist, his work focuses on political use of sound and political violence. He considers himself a researcher, who’s research expresses itself through art. 

He began his talk by outlying three themes he feels are essential to his research and practice:

1). Material Conditions of listening- how sound becomes ‘sound’. How the body perceives frequencies as sonic and vibrational information. 

2). Listening as Relation- Not just grasping knowledge, to relate, to ‘give in and give on’ to the event. Who we are and where we are, and what informs the conditions of this encounter with the sound.

3). Legibility and detectability- What listening ‘produces’ about the body, meaning that sound is inherent to a ‘body’. Listening as an act produces the body. 

Germany adopting language/accent recognition software in immigration. 

The practice of using language/accent recognition in immigration originated in the 90’s, a recording would be made of someones accent, a team of people would then analyse the recordings to determine whether the individual was from the place that they claimed to be from. This is mostly used in cases of asylum seekers as there is often a lack of documentation. In 2017, Germany replaced the teams of linguists with software. An individual would enter a room, speak into a microphone for two minutes and the software would return the probabilities of the persons geographical origins. Pedro Oliveira found interest in the idea of machine listening revealing a truth about a person, external from their claims about themselves. He began researching this process, and collected all of the information he could. He investigated into how many times this software had been used in asylum cases, he found that in a single year the software was used almost 10,000 times. Pedro took a specific interest into the success rates of the software, as he found the idea of 10,000 people’s quality of life being decided by software very worrying. He points out the lack of accountability in this process, and the difficulty of contesting the results. Utilising a freedom of information act he found that the margin of error for this software was 20%, which means that out of these 10,000 cases almost 2,000 were probably wrong. 

Pedro was commissioned by the gutter institute in Brussels to do an art piece based on this piece of research. He analysed the paperwork that asylum seekers get when they arrive in Belgium, its a description of what they need to do, how they should behave and what will be done with the recordings of their voices if a dispute was made. Pedro then hired a semi professional choir, and had the leader of the choir select singers from Belgium with a migratory history. He then had them sing the documents written by the Belgium government in a slightly mocking way, like a machine was reading it stretching out syllables. An element of this piece was to highlight these people’s relationship with Belgium, as they identify as Belgians but Belgium doesn’t look at them the same way.

Robert Henke is a German composer who specialises in multichannel audiovisual works. His works utilise computer algorithms, generating sound and image, integrating field recordings, photography and light. His works can be described as ambient, contemporary or club music.

His latest work explores the grey area between engineering and artistic creation, and the relationship between the two. The work began with just one machine, a CBM 8032 computer, a now obsolete machine that holds sentimental value to Henke due him learning programming on it as a child. He wanted to see exactly what he could do with the equipment, gradually Henke added more computers and hardware until the project became a live performance utilising five computers and hardware he developed that allowed him to extend the machine’s utility. One of the things that interests Robert about this piece is that due to his restriction to obsolete technology, everything he does on stage could have been done in 1980. Furthermore, Henke appreciates the fact that the results he produces on stage probably would’ve been discarded as not interesting at that time. He believes the work, at least to him, highlights the change in the collective mind set of the art world, we can now appreciate works created from a piece of technology in the same way we appreciate works created from instruments. 

Henke speaks on the cultural significance of the commodore CBM 8032. The computer had the first affordable CPU, suddenly students in the 1970’s could build their own computers, this created a doorway for people to become computer developers. Another culturally significant part of these computers is the visual layout, green characters on a black background. Henke describes its aesthetic as ‘a future of the past’, and he speaks on how he likes that he carries this subtext with him on stage. One of the most important aspects the Henke is the minimalist nature of the machines, the screen is limited to 24×80 characters, giving what he describes as a limited scale with which to create something pleasing. Henke describes this as liberating. 

HIs piece utilises the computers monochromatic green aesthetic to provide a visual accompaniment, creating complex imagery with something that is simple in nature. Henke draws influence from Manfred Mohr and his work in computer art, he had a reduction in his creative process due to the limitations of the medium. This reduction, Henke believes, resulted in works that still remain fresh by todays standards. This kind of art has a unique challenge, creating something simple enough to work with a machine of low processing power, but complex enough to be aesthetically pleasing. I think finding freedom within limitation is very interesting and id like to experiment with this method of creation.