Well, the aforementioned slump has eased and found me looking into new old and old new things. I've returned to researching time, the calendar, duration, and rhythm. My practice is feeling the springtime. Thanks to lovely friends in Santiago de Chile who run a tiny press called Otra Sinceridad, I've come across an inspiring pamphlet on rhythm featuring essays and interviews with Afro-Peruvian artist Victoria Santa Cruz. Her work addresses the critical relationship among practice, obstacles, the body, rhythm, and self-discovery that I find myself contemplating often. Here are a few small excerpts that resonated. The sections on the obstacle reminded me of Rumi's discourses, and how feeling lost or doubtful are important messages in finding the way back to true faith.
Si no conseguimos "entrar" en el proceso rítmico para "renacer" y "crecer" de acuerdo a sus leyes, no entenderemos jamás lo que es crear, ya que no hay creación si no hay ritmo.
El obstáculo está hecho del pasado que, por desconocer al presente, nos hace evocar un falso futuro. El obstáculo es alimentado por el enemigo que en nosotros se aloja... No ha revolución sin evolución y ésta se gesta en casa. El obstáculo, como toda dificultad, es un llamado a la reflexión, por lo tanto, los obstáculos deben ser convertidos por nosotros en el justo estímulo que descubrirá justa actitud.
[...]
Todo lo que es cómodo es una trampa.
It Is What It Is
November 12, 2024
It seems like writing here just hasn't been part of my life in the last couple of years. It is what it is. I'm going through some adjustments to my life's rhythms, directions, pushes and pulls. It has mostly not been to my liking, but I'm working on teasing out the things that I don't like from the things that I like. I've been working with rope a lot, getting to know its material qualities, uses, history to some extent. After reading some pages of Brion Toss's A Rigger's Apprentice, I was sorting through a drawer and found a pamphlet for a rigging rope that I have. It's been striking to me how much our colloquial language borrows from sailiing and rigging terms, and how poetically the mechanical workings of rope relate to life in more abstract ways. Two sections of the "Technical Information" sheet stood out to me:
Hysteresis: Refers to a recoverable portion of stretch or extension over a period of time after a load is released. Most recovery occurs immediately when a load is removed. Thereafter, a remaining small percentage of recovery will occur slowly and gradually over a period of hours or days. This retardation in recovery is measured on a length/time scale and is known as hysteresis, or recovery over time.
[...]
Creep: A material's slow deformation that occurs while under load over a long period of time. Creep is mostly non-reversible. For some synthetic ropes, permanent elongation and creep are mistaken for the same property and the terms are used interchangeably when, in fact, creep is only one of the mechanisms that can cause permanent elongation. (Samson's "Guide to Rope Selection, Handling, Inspection and Retirement")
It Is What It Is
June 8, 2023
Forgive my long absence from here... I've been learning about trees
and climbing them, and otherwise distracted from my studies. But today
I've come across some more fine content on relationships to time in
Miguel León-Portilla's Time and Reality in the Thought of the Maya. It is full of wonderful images depicting Maya icons for dieties, numbers, dates, sun-time itself (kinh) and related concepts.
With their astrological preoccupations coexisted the knowledge which,
through the symbols, had led to the discovery of a universe conceived
from the point of view of an ultimate and all-embracing reality: time.
The relationship with the ancient myths was preserved, and that which
was belief and need for prediction became fused with rigorous
measurements and computations. So was born a most unusual
religio-mathematical vision of the universe, the fruit of highly refined
and precise minds.
It is certain that the universe of the Maya was populated with
countenances of gods, which were the forces acting in the quadrants of
colors and in the celestial and lower regions. But differing totally
from any form of animism, Maya thought had discovered measurements of
the cycles which with intrinsical order rule whatever happens in the
universe. The divine forces were neither indeterminate nor obscure;
their action can be foreseen by means of observations and computations.
As in no other culture, the priests and wise men made out of time
computations formulae for ritual and worship. In the inscriptions they
commemorated with mathematical rigor the moments in which the action of
the god-periods had left their imprint in the world. The elaboration of
eclipse tables in their codices permitted them, for example, to dialogue
with the gods, ordering the ceremonies and manners of acting in terms
of what was going to happen because they already knew what the divine
sequence of the universe was to be.
The entire life of the Maya thus presented itself oriented by a cultural
pattern manifested in their institutions essentially related to the
theme of time. Thus the religious cult prospered and with it symbolism,
art, and their unique kind of science-- in a word, life and the great
and small actions of every day. Obsession with time, therefore, came to
be a unifying factor in this culture. (p.107-8)
Interestingly, León-Portilla continues to compare the Maya
time-worldview with Taoism, noting that the former becomes accessible
through computation while the latter does not. I don't share his special
reverence for the precision-science aspect of Maya belief. The idea
that some technology-oriented minds and cultures are more refined than
others is a dangerous discourse that I think is ultimately based on a
circular logic of European supremacy and has caused a great deal of
suffering over the past several centuries. What I do share is reverence
for this ancient and enduring worldview whose genesis is the flow of
time.
It Is What It Is
December 23, 2022
After taking some broth, the rabbi commented on the Torah, a thing he
had not done in years. His voice was low, though audible. The rabbi took
up the question of why the moon is obscured on Rosh Hashanah. The
answer is that on Rosh Hashanah one prays for life, and life means free
choice, and freedom is Mystery. If one knew the truth how could there be
freedom? If hell and paradise were in the middle of the marketplace,
everyone would be a saint. Of all the blessings bestowed on man, the
greatest lies in the fact that God's face is forever hidden from him.
--Isaac Bashevis Singer, "Joy" (from The Collected Stories)
It Is What It Is
November 17, 2022
Returning to an old thread here (see leap year entries below). This article
recently appeared in NY Times. It seems that the international
community is now further relinquishing any heliocentric concept of time
measurement. They will soon vote, most likely, to abolish the leap
second. Rather than correcting for the imprecision of their measurements
relative to the earth's movement and risking digital synchronization
problems, they're just giving up for now. Over the course of years, the
true current time will be a few seconds off in relation to our position
in the solar system. Since the 1970s, the standard for measuring a
second is based on the resonance of a cesium atom-- a geocentric rather
than heliocentric source. A day could be measured by one sunrise
to the next, though that amount of time is never truly, precisely 24
hours. Having just left daylight savings time a couple of weeks ago, we
experienced the time of sunrise and sunset jolting back about a full
hour. Some say
this is unhealthy. Makes sense. I think it also demonstrates how
arbitrary our society's relationship to time (or the sun) has become.
Considering many cultures have located their divinity in the celestial
bodies-- especially the sun-- it seems to me that we've just lost all
respect.
What to make of this? Does it really matter? I do appreciate the idea
that they're ready to say "fuck it, we'll figure it out eventually,"
coping with the imprecision because it's not so consequential. On the
other hand, the decision is probably motivated by practical interests,
behind which loom capitalism, war, imperialistm, surveillance, etc. For
me it's interesting to contemplate what time actually means, what it's
for, if untethered completely from the natural heliocentric experience
of its origins. If I don't need Coordinated Universal Time for my
website or to arrive on time to my job, why not just use a sundial?
It Is What It Is
February 16, 2021
Two meaningful if unrelated thoughts from a friend whose ideas and work I admire...
Freud has a lesser known theory called “the narcissism of small
differences” that has been important to me. He argues that we tend to
create the most distance between those who are most similar to
ourselves, and there’s a narcissism in that. But, all the things I
reject I still love; I’m still excited to hear them in the hands of
others.
[...]
Music in general, or the kind of music we make, is such an important
tool for self-realization, and understanding the world in some way.
Which is a paradox because the music itself is so opaque and marginal,
yet, somehow it helps one realize their place in the world. You can’t
reconcile this in any rational way but it’s true. So, you don’t really
have much of a choice. You have to pursue your own ideas because it
leads to amazing realizations—situations, friendships, and so on. It’s
paradoxical on every level, but it can really help you understand the
world.
At its core, my discussion of relationships that occur between human and
nonhuman musical and spatial subjects seeks to unseat the
anthropocentrism of listening. To wrest listening away from its standard
conception as a largely human- and animal-centered activity allows us
to understand listening as an ecology in which we are not only listening
but listened to. The particular importance of this reorientation toward
nonhuman vitality, as philosopher Jane Bennett asserts, lies in its
potential to "enhance receptivity to the impersonal life that surrounds
and infuses us, [and] generate a more subtle awareness of the
complicated web of dissonant connections between bodies, and will enable
wiser interventions into that ecology."
--Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies, p.98
It Is What It Is
July 7, 2020
Stopping
In [Audre] Lorde’s own words:
I was driving in the car and heard the news on the radio that the cop
had been acquitted. I was really sickened with fury, and I decided to
pull over and just jot some things down in my note book to enable me to
cross town without an accident because I felt so sick and so enraged.
And I wrote those lines down – I was just writing, and the poem came out
without craft.
She stopped the car to get her feelings out.
She stopped the car and a poem came out.
She stopped the car because she knew that what she felt would come out, one way or another; an accident or a poem.
A poem is not an accident.
I have been thinking about that: how sometimes we have to stop what we
are doing to feel the true impact of something, to let our bodies
experience that impact, the fury of an escalating injustice, a structure
as well as an event; a history, an unfinished history.
Sometimes to sustain your commitments you stop what you are doing.
In stopping, something comes out. We don’t always know what will come
out when we stop to register the impact of something. Registering impact
can be a life-long project. Perhaps collectives are assembled so we can
share the work of registering the impact of what is ongoing; what is
shattering.
I have been thinking about stopping and starting; what we have to do to
express the truth of a situation; I have been thinking about complaint
and survival.
I quote this not to justify inaction in the face of injustice, of
which I have been more guilty than I want to admit. But because it
captures the importance of stopping to process, register, and feel, to
prevent an accident and sustain your commitments. It's taken a while for
me to put my finger on it, but the patriarchal white supremacy and
colonialism underlying both sociopolitical and aethetic aspects of the
so-called experimental music / sound art communities I've been around
has ground my work to a halt in the last year or two. I'm looking
forward to gaining an expanded perspective, exorcising my own work and
thoughts of white supremacist, patriarchal and exceptionalist
tendencies, and finding others, from within these fields or without, to
work towards a more justice-centered creative practice.
It Is What It Is
April 13, 2020
Trompe l'oreille?
At this strange moment in which much of the world is quarantined and
isolated, I'm doing a lot of thinking about how many wildly divergent
worlds exist within one city, one neighborhood, one block, one building,
one household, one family, one relationship, or even one person. I'll
risk sounding cheesy as I express wonder at how many different ways
there are to look at something-- as well as through, into, or around it;
at society's most radically altered moment yet during my lifetime, a
trite realization like this is newer and truer than ever.
I find myself even more deeply puzzled (and troubled) by differences of
perspective that feel so simple to explain yet remain impossible to
reconcile. So I return, mostly by coincidence, to a topic on listening
that I think helps to understand perspective: bad music-- smooth,
easy, corny, tacky-- some material invariably compromised by
inauthenticity, questionable motives, excess, deception and/or poserdom.
And as I often find, the most direct point of departure (that I've
encountered-- again, just by chance) into this topic in the auditory
world is from the visual. While illusion and trompe l'oeil are literal
phenomena in the visual sense, numerous analogs exist on the spectrum of
musical or sonic deception. It's also worth considering what exactly
these aural deceptions are and what they could be, because they are
clearly more complex to determine than visually locating dubious shadows
and false surfaces. I found the following passages (and the whole
essay) interesting...
The illusions that surround us onscreen and in urban spaces today are
designed to capture and divert our attention, to simulate and
dissimulate, to offer us not agency but fantasy, not knowledge but
desire. Nonetheless, looking from a more psychoanalytic position we
might see that trompe l'oeil-- especially trompe l'oeil painting-- can
show us things, can offer a strange kind of knowledge that more
"truthful" images can't. From this angle, desire is not simply an effect
of seeing but an active part of looking.
...
Trompe l'oeil splits us in two-- into the viewer who is fooled and the
one who is not. For a moment we see ourselves seeing, and sense that we
are active, if unconsciously, in that seeing. We glimpse our ability to
project our desires onto the world, to see in it what we want to see.
Trompe l'oeil is like the visual Freudian slip, a mistake that reveals
our unconscious desire, the deepest subjective truth. There is a
difference, though, in the kinds of deception-- unlike the sophisticated
illusions surrounding us today, trompe l'oeil painting offers up its
own failure to scrutiny.
Here's another perspective on rhythm and pulse-- descriptions of the
basic pulse types recognized in traditional Chinese medicine. These are
excerpted from Ted Kaptchuk's The Web That Has No Weaver (2nd ed., 2000).
Types of pulse
The distinctions between pulses that are most commonly made by
physicians are depth (the level at which the pulse is perceptible),
speed, width, strength, overall shape and quality, rhythm, and length.
A floating pulse is "higher than normal; that is, although
distinct at a light or superficial level of pressure, it is less
perceptible when palpated at the middle and deep levels... the floating
pulse signifies Deficient Yin. This is because the pulse is active or
"dancing," a sign of relative Excess Yang and therefore Deficient Yin.
If the pulse is floating but has strength, and again no External
Influences are present, it may be a sign of Interior Wind.
A sinking or deep pulse (chen mai) is distinct only at the third leve, when heavy pressure is applied...
Speed a slow pulse (chi mai) is one that has fewer
than four beats per respiration. It is a sign of cold retarding movement
or insufficient Qi to cause movement...
A rapid pulse (shu mai) is one that has more than five beats per
respiration. It indicates that Heat is accelerating the movement of
Blood...
Width A thin pulse (xi mai) feels like a fine
thread but is very distinct and clear. It is a sign that the Blood is
Deficient and unable to fill the pulse properly...
A big pulse (da mai) is broad in diameter and very distinct, and suggests Excess.
Strength An empty pulse (xu mai) is big but without strength. It feels weak and soft like a balloon partially filled with water...
Shape A slippery pulse (hua mai) is exteremely
fluid. It feels smooth, like a ball bearing covered with viscous fluid.
Classical texts compare it to "feeling pearls in a porcelain basin." A
contemporary Chinese physician says it "slithers like a snake."...
A choppy pulse (se mai) is the opposite of a slippery pulse. It
is uneven and rough, and sometimes irregular in strength and fullness.
Chinese texts liken it to "a knife scraping bamboo or a sick silkworm
eating a mulberry leaf."...
Sometimes a choppy pulse is irregular in rhythm. In this case it is
called "the three and five not adjusted"-- meaning that there are
sometimes three beats per breath and sometimes five beats per breath...
A wiry pulse (xuan mai) has a taut feeling, like a guitar or
violin string. It is strong, rebounds against pressure at all levels,
and hits the fingers evenly. But it has no fluidity or wavelike
qualities...
A tight pulse (jin mai) is strong and seems to bounce from side
to side like a taut rope. It is fuller and more elastic than a wiry
pulse. Vibrating and urgent, it seems faster than it actually is....
Length A short pulse (duan mai) does not fill the spaces under the three fingers and is usually felt in only one position...
A long pulse (chang mai) is the opposite of a short pulse. It is
perceptible beyond the first and third positions; that is, it continues
to be felt closer to the hand or up toward the elbow.
Rhythm A knotted pulse (jie mai) is a slow, irregular pulse that skips beats irregularly...
A hurried pulse (cu mai) is a rapid pulse that skips beats irregularly...
An intermittent pulse (dai mai) usually skips more beats than the
previous two pulses, but does so in a regular pattern. It is often
associated with the Heart, signifying a serious disharmony, or it can
signal an exhausted state of all the Organs...
A moderate pulse (huan mai) is the healthy, perfectly balanced
pulse-- normal in depth, speed, strength, and width. It is quite rare,
and pulse discussions list it as secondary. For a Chinese physician to
issue a clean bill of health, a patient does not have to have this
pulse. In fact, healthy people seldom do have it.
A flooding pulse (hong mai) surges with the strength of a big
pulse to hit all the fingers at all three depths, but it leaves the
fingers with less strength, like a receding wave....
A minute pulse (wei mai) is extremely fine and soft, but lacks
the clarity of the thing pulse. It is barely perceptible and seems about
to disappear...
A frail pulse (ruo mai) is soft, weak, and somewhat thin. It is
usually felt at the deep level. It is like an inverted empty pulse, but
signifies a more extreme Deficient Qi condition because the Qi cannot
even raise the pulse...
A soggy pulse (ru mai) is a combination of the thin, empty, and
floating pulses. It is extremely soft, is less clear than a thin pulse,
and is perceptible only in the superficial position. The slightest
pressure makes it disappear. A soggy pulse feels like a bubble floating
on water...
A leather pulse (ge mai) is a combination of the wiry and
floating pulses, with aspects of the empty pulse. It feels like the
tight skin on the top of a drum...
A hidden pulse (fu mai) is an extreme form of the sinking pulse.
Intense pressure must be applied to feel it. If a hidden pulse is
strong, it is usually a sign of Cold obstructing the Meridians. If it is
weak, it signifies Deficient Yang that cannot raise the pulse...
A confined pulse (lao mai), also known as a prison pulse,
is the opposite of the leather pulse and is a form of the hidden pulse.
It is very deep and wiry, often usually long and strong...
A spinning bean or moving pulse (dong mai) is a
combination of the short, tight, slippery, and rapid pulses. It is felt
in only one position and is said to be "incomplete, without a head and
tail, like a bean."
A hollow pulse (kong mai) feels like the stem of a green onion--
solid on the outside but completely empty within. It is often a floating
pulse as well...
A scattered pulse (san mai) is silar to an empty pulse because it
is floating, big, and weak. It is larger and much less distinct than
the empty pulse, however, and tends to be felt primarily as it recedes.
It is a sign of serious disharmony-- Kidney Yang exhausted and "floating
away."
It should be noted that pulse examination plays a crucial role in all literate traditional medical systems. In the Egyptian Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus
(before 1600 BCE), pulse examination was already an established
practice. Galen of Pargamum (129-200 CE) completed eighteen treatises on
pulse that include finer details of perception than those found in Wang
Shu-he's Classic of the Pulse. Galen elaborated over 100 pulse types by
distinguishing size, strength, speed, duration of diastole and/or
systole, frequency, and hardness and softness. His attention to rhythm
and quality generated such famous pulse categories as the gazelling,
antcrawling, worming, and mouse-tailed pulses that continued to be used
in the West until the eighteenth century.
It Is What It Is
December 19, 2019
More about rhythm (and duration)...
Interestingly enough, the German term takt (from the Latin noun
tactus, which translates into sense of feeling or touch) includes two
different aspects of temporality: the meaning of a measurable musical
pulse which, in the West is seen as the basis of rhythm, and a social
virtue of timing one's speech in a manner in accordance with customs
dictated by the emergent emancipated bourgeoisie (which today remain
widely regarded as appropriate).
[...]This concept of rhythm, which in Western cultures is laid out on the basis of pulse, derives from the Old Greek rheein
which translates to flow. Apparently, rhythm wasn't always tied to a
measured rhythm. Individual rhythmic feel is a question of perception.
As such, for example, in Greek antiquity, syllabic lengths were
precisely fixed. At that time, rhythm was understood as proportion and
there was no such thing as underlying measure or beat. [...] Not until
the seventeenth century did measured rhythm emerge in Europe.
--Anna Bromley & Michael Fesca
"Playing off the Beat: Joke performance, or the Groove of Infectious Laughter"
in Ear|Wave|Event Issue 2, Spring 2015
What do rhythm and duration mean?
December 11, 2019
Yesterday: a seven hour bus ride from the coast to Oaxaca City.
Something feels good about traversing (painstakingly) the land to get
from one place to another rather than flying over. Someone once said
(something like) there are no shortcuts related to energy, meaning that a
source that produces enormous amounts of power comes at equal
environmental expenses. (Think of the extremely long-term, little-known
consequences of generating nuclear energy and dealing with its
byproducts versus the simplicity of hydroelectric power. Maybe there's a
pseudoscientific Law of Conservation of Energy in here?) I wonder if
the same is true of travel: that the experience gained is somehow
proportional to the slowness of the trip-- or on the other hand,
traveling solely by high-speed modes (plane), overpassing rather than
experiencing the topographic changes renders a compressed,
compartmentalized, artificial version of a journey that comes with some
abstracted, diffuse or otherwise untraceable side effects.
I don't know what it is, to be honest. But I like to attribute it to the
physicality of experiencing duration. Just as with cooking and some
other practices, slow usually yields inimitable, more profound results. More slow is more deep,
as my kung fu master would say. In contrast, I avoid microwave cooking
at all costs. It just doesn't feel right (and studies indicate that
microwave heating does, indeed, alter the chemical structure of food in a
different way than conventional radiative heating does). We humans have
a really finely tuned sense of timing. The experience of a grueling
seven-hour trip on the body versus an effortless 50-minute flight must
be something that the body registers with some depth.
In the van yesterday I started to think about this and how it's pretty
much coincident with my musical fixations. These days when a musician or
academic tells you their work is concerned with rhythm, they are
usually talking about notation, meter, patterns, and relationships that
can be reduced to mathematics. Not to deny that math is a useful tool
for describing and manipulating rhythmic elements in the abstract, but
it's easy to forget that rhythm, to humans, is much less a mathematical
experience than a biological, phenomenological one. I think of carcadian
rhythms, ingestion and elimination, phases of moon and sun,
menstruation, seasons, reproduction, lifespans, gestation, work and
sleep, illness and recovery, practice, mourning, acclimation of all
types, mood: the rhythms (durations) that for virtually each human being
is distinct and circumstantial. (Have you ever slept for the same exact
amount of time twice? If so, how did your sleep rhythm align with the
sun and moon? Does mathematical precision even matter?) The existential
and phenomenological nature of time... this is what "rhythm" means to
me.
Of course the two interpretations of rhythm are closely related and
each-- the abstract, mathematical and the phenomenological /
biological-- could be compared with illuminating results. For example,
the relationship between pulse and heart rate in global musics; the
durations or rhythmic strucures of various rituals, social, or religious
events; musical meter and body movement. But ultimately math is an
approximation, average, or quantification of essentially qualitative
data. Absolute metronomic precision has been possible in music for an
extremely short period of time (since the advent of electronic
instruments, or at the earliest, the metronome) compared to the history
of human rhythm-making. Forms of precise rhythmic notation are similarly
young-- no more than a handful of centuries in the West. We could
compare the question of rhythmic precision to the debate of whether
nature produces straight lines: the issue for me isn't about whether
they exist, but rather what we are missing by defaulting to reductive
descriptions (math and notation) that assume a false uniformity. Because
the discourse about rhythm, consistent with our quantitative-obsessed
cultural moment, has focused on mathematial and music-theoretical
analyses of rhythm and duration rather than examining their
relationships to basic human experiences.
What exactly to do with this thought is still unclear to me-- and most likely the topic of a future post here.
For Jonas: Musings on Naming
October 13, 2019
A short talk / performance given during the naming ceremony for my
nephew, Jonas. It was attended by the parents' (my brother and his wife)
close family members and friends.
My brother emailed me (last month), asking me to contribute a
composition or performance to this ceremony. I wondered how in the world
my creative practice-- which usually involves some kind of challenging
or harsh listening situation, long durations, multimedia, site
specificity or conceptual pretexts-- could produce something appropriate
for this occasion. But I’m learning that “impossible” conditions are
often the most fruitful grounds for developing my work.
As I began to think and jot notes about naming, I recalled an article I
read recently that detailed how the spaces a person spends large amounts
of time in profoundly affects their mental and physical state:
depending on the shape and material of the room and whatever elements
nearby produce sound, certain frequencies and noises are amplified, and
these become the acoustic field that vibrate around and through our
bodies, which over time-- weeks, months, years of vibrating in this
space-- exerts real physiological effects.
Similarly, when a mattress salesperson tells you you’ll spend half your
life in that thing so you shouldn’t be stingy, they aren’t wrong. The
things we do repeatedly with our bodies, the positions we put and leave
them in, the way we move, just like the spaces we inhabit, literally
shape our bodies. (And in this sense, contrary to the popular narrative,
dominant athletes are dominant not just because of the bodies they
inherit, but because of the extremes of training that those bodies
routinely undergo.)
We are what we repeat.
(And maybe, to share a tangential theory, dancing is culturally
universal because we all want to avoid getting stuck in our habitual
position, as though rather than fearing getting stuck with eyes crossed
for making silly faces, as manipulative parents say, what we’re truly
afraid of is getting stuck cross-legged.)
Anyway, another universal human concept as far as I know: names. What’s a
name? An alien observer might say that it’s simply a practice of moving
the lips, tongue, and oral cavity against the palate, pharynx and teeth
(if you’re lucky have them still or yet), propelled by abdomen and
lungs, flapping the vocal chords, for a period of usually less than a
second or two, in a way that’s repeatable and distinctly identifiable to
the ears.
A young human gets used to hearing this while watching parents and other
dear ones vocalize it. And eventually he learns to move those body
parts like the parents do. Out of necessity, there are often other
speech movements that the baby picks up first-- “mama,” “dada,” “papa,”
“baba,” or maybe in his case “maple cinnamon pumpkin purée”-- but the
name is the pattern that he learns to identify with himself, once he
begins to formulate a distinct concept of self (which I won’t get into,
but you could ask my dad about it). [Note: the parents love food and
cooking. My dad is a psychoanalyst of the Intersubjective
Self-Psychology school.]
So, a name: a repeated string of bodily movements, bestowed by parents
to the child, that gets repeated, remembered, and uttered in all
possible emotional variation, from screamed to whispered, accompanied by
the awesome range of feeling and experience that a lifetime has to
offer.
And through repetition and self-identifying, a name becomes one’s
personal vocal practice, a pharyngeal dance that on each repetition
further defines the channels of the vocal apparatus, training it to spit
out the syllables more efficiently and gracefully each time. Not unlike
how a riverbed slowly erodes, learning to channel the stream with more
depth and velocity as each drop of water flows along it. A name is a
blueprint for the construction of our vocal tract’s life.
And today marks the day, symbolically, that Jonas begins this strange
song and dance, the practice of identifying himself in speech as related
to others. And in doing so, physically enacting his agency, training to
lead his own life. Singing his own song.
People who grew up playing video games will remember that at the
beginning of many games, you get to choose your character, your vehicle,
tools, weapons, home stage, powers, etc. that you then use through the
rest of the game. As with many products we’ve interacted with as youths,
this probably represents yet another subliminal indoctrination into the
necessity of consumerism-- shopping around for the things that will
enable you to win and make you you-- however, there’s also something
about it that feels authentic: an identifying decision at the outset
that in some ineffable way determines the ensuing adventure.
At or near the beginning of this game, this child gets, among other
critical features, his name. Jonas. Or “Yo-nas” (“auf Deutsch”). A
poetry student would notice that it’s a trochee, meaning a long or
stressed syllable, “Jo,” followed by a short or unstressed one, “nas.”
In an alternate universe of trochaic names, Jonas could have been Igor,
or Xerxes, or Linda, or Shiva, or Meizi, or Ahmed, or Pablo, or… Poppy.
[Inside joke: "poppy" was the name for the unborn baby before we knew
its sex.]
And then there are the vowel sounds, the instructions for how his vocal
cavity will resonate each time he sings this trochaic rhythm:
“Oh”
“ə”
In Judaism we have a related ceremony at the beginning of a boy’s life
that sort of more conspicuously influences the anatomy, the motions of
which our dear baby has already gone through… As someone who sometimes
appreciates a little subtlety, I like to focus on the real material
importance this event, the naming, naming and textuality also,
coincidentally being central elements of the Jewish tradition.
Jonas will be vocalizing his name, quite possibly, for longer than any
of us will be sentient on this planet. Over the course of those years
the sound of his name-song will be identifiably the same-- otherwise it
wouldn’t work as a name! But the name song, over a human life, is also
sung with variations: when the diaphragm grows, the vocal chords
stretch, the teeth push in and wobble out, the hormones kick in, and
eventually fade away as the aging singer’s features grow finer and
frailer.
I know, you’re probably thinking that I’m yammering on about abstract
concepts rather than presenting anything musical, right? Well that’s
where you come in...
Indulge me for a moment and think about your own name: what is its
rhythm and its possible variations? What dance does your mouth make?
What are the vowel sounds in your first name? When you say your name,
what musical pitches does it naturally take on? Feel free to try the
sounds out loud if it’s easier than working out in your head…
At the very least, please say your name out loud just to listen to what
it sounds like. At the same time try to listen to others’ names around
you.
I thought we could perform a sort of primal song based on this musing
about names, conducted by Jonas if possible, using our own names. I’m
going to try to take his movements as cues and try to cue you. Each time
I signal, please sing, in whatever tone feels natural to you, the first
vowel sound of your name. The harmony of our natural tones is more
important than musical harmony right now, so just say it naturally. Each
time Jonas and I cue you, sing the next syllable and try to hold it
until the next cue. When you run out of syllables in your name, feel
free to move on to middle and last names or keep repeating the syllables
of your first name.
We’ll cycle through these syllables as a chorus for a while-- until we cut you off.
Then we’ll end with two last syllables to celebrate the guest of honor: “Jo” - “nas”.
It Is What It Is
July 15, 2019
It occurred to me that something in the conditions of our seeing made us
undetectable to one another, perhaps not even occupying the same
concept of time. Perhaps to see was to divide time into even more
slender fragments than those to which we were accustomed. Rather than
make time something that was both accumulated and sliced, this time was
sliced and sent off separately from every other time. So, we were all
neighboring each other's crossings and each other's sightings of
translucent, burgeoning structures, but each making a house out of that
moment of seeing. I'm saying perhaps it was our moments of seeing that
were invisible structures in the first place. And so I wasn't alone in
this strangeness, yet because I was privy to it I had to be on my own;
it seemed there needed to be witnesses to time as much as there needed
to be actors in time. Though, I was not held out of time either. My days
accumulated like everyone else's did....
--Renee Gladman Houses of Ravicka (2017), p. 126-7
It Is What It Is
April 22, 2019
Over recent months I've been occupied with the conundrum of musical (or
temporal / durational) repetition. I'm compelled by the concept because
it feels equally obvious and natural to music while, in an abstract or
literal sense, completely impossible. Maybe Heraclitus would have said
that you can never play or hear the same sound twice. So I am trying--
or looking into-- playing the same sound multiple times in various
forms.
Whether intellectual musings on this topic hold any relevance or
interest in relation to life or aesthetic experience, I'm still not
sure. But I'm exploring some perspectives, and at the recommendation of
friend and composer Simon Labbé, began reading Henri Bergson's Time and Free Will (1889). Below is a passage that explains part of the problem of musical or temporal repetition:
Perhaps some people count the successive strokes of a distant bell in a
similar way, their imagination pictures the bell coming and going; this
spatial sort of image is sufficient for the first two units, and the
others follow naturally. But most people's minds do not proceed in this
way. They range the successive sounds in an ideal space and then fancy
that they are counting them in pure duration. Yet we must be clear on
this point. The sounds of the bell certainly reach me one after the
other; but one of two alternatives must be true. Either I retain each of
these successive sensations in order to combine it with the others and
form a group which reminds me of an air or rhythm which I know: in that
case I do not count the sounds, I limit myself to gathering, so to
speak, the qualitative impression produced by the whole series. Or else I
intend explicitly to count them, and then I shall have to separate
them, and this separation must take place within some homogeneous medium
in which the sounds, stripped of their qualities, and in a manner
emptied, leave traces of their presence which are absolutely alike. The
question now is, whether this medium is time or space. But a moment of
time, we repeat, cannot persist in order to be added to others. If the
sounds are separated, they must leave empty intervals between them. If
we count them, the intervals must remain though the sounds disappear :
how could these intervals remain, if they were pure duration and not
space? It is in space, therefore, that the operation takes place. It
becomes, indeed, more and more difficult as we penetrate further into
the depths of consciousness. Here we find ourselves confronted by a
confused multiplicity of sensations and feelings which analysis alone
can distinguish. Their number is identical with the number of the
moments which we take up when we count them; but these moments, as they
can be added to one another, are again points in space. Our final
conclusion, therefore, is that there are two kinds of multiplicity: that
of material objects, to which the conception of number is immediately
applicable; and the multiplicity of states of consciousness, which
cannot be regarded as numerical without the help of some symbolical
representation, in which a necessary element is space.
Scores
March 17, 2019
Since 2015 I've been composing and performing a series of pieces that
consist of recognizably repetitive structures that alternate between
fixed durations of sound and rest. By engaging so brazenly in obvious
repetition these compositions highlight, among other things, the
disparity between felt and actual (measured) duration-- a quality that
place, time of day, one's physical disposition, and numerous other
factors tend to influence drastically.
I admit that, selfishly as usual, I made these pieces so that I
would be able to experience this phenomenon of perceived duration drift.
(Well okay, I make music that I, from my own perspective, would like to
play and hear, because otherwise I would be foolishly projecting about
what others want to hear.) I feel that the best way to listen to these
pieces and most intensely experience their durations is to perform them
yourself. So with that in mind, I decided to take some of the scores for
these pieces that were previously only intelligible to me and to
publish them so that others could use them as well.
In addition to 80, 40 whose score and electronic element are online already, I've posted scores and uploaded audio for Masking Piece #2 and Masking Piece #3 right here:
I spent a few minutes after dinner one recent night flicking a plastic
bottle on the kitchen table. It had a few drops of water left in it and
the recorder was on.
It Is What It Is
November 28, 2018
For in what does time differ from eternity except we measure it?
--Anne Carson, from the poem "The Glove of Time by Edward Hopper"
published in Men in the Off Hours (2000)
It Is What It Is
November 6, 2018
It's not unusual that visual arts writers work out certain insights
before music/sound writers do. Here's a passage from Paul Chan on
brightness in image work (single or multiple projections) that applies
equally to loudness and multi-channel, 'immersive' sound:
The idea that brighter is better must be cut from the same cloth as
last year's model, bigger is better. Both ideas presume that aesthetic
progress demands the domination of the senses. An artwork that must use
an overwhelming force of light for the senses to register its import.
But our senses are not that dumb. The eye is not a thoughtless hole that
can be easily filled and flooded by the rush of luminous images. It
will instead choke the light from entering the retina and reduce
sensitivity of the stimuli. In the face of art that imagines force as
the image of plenitude, the eye makes due by seeing less. We do not
necessarily see more the more we are given (or forced) to see. (Excerpted from "On Light as Midnight and Noon")
It seems today that artists and audiences are dazzled by the technology
industry-influenced hype of multi-channel audio immersion (as if all
sound were not immersive). Just as Chan describes, our senses are not
that dumb-- our auditory apparatus attenuates excessive stimulation and
then desensitizes to the subtleties that make listening so rewarding--
and essential as a practice. In an immersive sound environment we are
fed such rich signals that we no longer have to interpolate sounds
between their sources; we no longer hear the space we're in but an
entirely synthetic, superimposed space that erases, by brute
technological force, the details of where we are. What do we gain from
this pure escapism? The ability to push ourselves into even further
reaches of isolation? I would go one step further than Chan: We hear
less the more were are given (or forced) to hear.
Thankfully there is a good deal of work that, rather than drowning them
out, draws us closer to the spaces, relationships, machinery, and other
vital contextual information where we listen. This is the work that
challenges and thus enables us to hear details that so desparately need
to be heard.
It Is What It Is
August 2, 2018
Every culture is first and foremost a particular experience of time.
[...]
The original task of a revolution, therefore, is never merely to 'change the world,' but also and above all to 'change time.'
--Giorgio Agamben
"Time and History: Critique of the Instant and of the Continuum" (1993)
It Is What It Is
May 1, 2018
Reading, Writing, Study, Sound (listening)
I like to read, and I like to be involved in reading. And for me, writing is part of what it is to be involved in reading.
I think that writing in general, you know, is a constant disruption of
the means of semantic production, all the time. And I don’t see any
reason to try to avoid that. I’d rather see a reason to try to
accentuate that. But I try to accentuate that not in the interest of
obfuscation but in the interest of precision.
We are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other
people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working,
dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held
under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal—being
in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men
sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory—there are
these various modes of activity. The point of calling it “study” is to
mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these
activities is already present.
I always thought that ‘the voice’ was meant to indicate a kind of
genuine, authentic, absolute individuation, which struck me as (a)
undesirable and (b) impossible. Whereas a ‘sound’ was really within the
midst of this intense engagement with everything: with all the noise
that you’ve ever heard, you struggle somehow to make a difference, so to
speak, within that noise. And that difference isn’t necessarily about
you as an individual, it’s much more simply about trying to augment and
to differentiate what’s around you. And that’s what a sound is for me.
--Fred Moten
quotes selected from "Fred Moten's Radical Critique of the Present," The New Yorker, April 30 2018
It Is What It Is
December 13, 2017
Composing: A Call for Nonsense
If you can describe it well, is it worth doing? Why not just leave it as a description?
What do we do that isn't describable? Plenty-- but I won't describe it here.
There is a lot of indescribable stuff to be done in music. Music
can be a container-- a rational frame for the irrational. But the
container itself should naturally have an edge of irrationality. It's
impossible to prevent bleeding.
Nothing is more important right now than not making sense.
"What we do is called muscular confusion," said my teacher Servando.
Confusion is critical in these times of exaggerated certainty. A
dictatorship of hubristic rationality.
But again, a concerted effort to make less sense is too rational; it needs to come about unpremeditated and unjustified.
Lucky for us the world is full of beauty and nonsense. We have entropy.
Not the entropy of hard science, but maybe more like a meta-entropy.
That says even entropy itself is subject to spontaneous, uncanny order.
My finger is definitely, certainly feeling the pulse of this absolutely non-existent thing (which, by the way, has no pulse).
Religion is important because it doesn't make sense. Faith is literally
senseless-- that's why it's faith. An equally valid form of thinking and
being as any other.
A senseless music. Purposely irrational. Chaotically ordered.
Checklist: Is it stupid? Does it make any sense? Can you justify it?
Where does it come from? How does it fit in? What does it do or not do?
(How) does it work?
It Is What It Is
October 31, 2017
[...]This sort of exaggerated, staged inefficacy asks if we can find a
way to proceed without progressing; if we can use tautology to resist
teleology. This sort of exaggerated, staged inefficacy asks if we can
find a way to proceed without progressing; if we can use tautology to
resist teleology.
Meaningless work is obviously the most important and significant artform today. (Walter De Maria, 1960)
Before he was punished, Sisyphus had fought progression. He attempted to
disrupt the linear transferral of the throne, he halted the human
passage from life to death, and he rapaciously refused his own divinely
dictated fate. As the only possible retribution, his existence would be
condemned to eternal redundancy, where he can never be done with what he
has nevertheless already finished. Refusing to meet his end, he was to
be punished with endlessness-- action without purpose, perpetually
unconsummated process, where achievement would be impossible, since the
completion of each gesture would roll back to its own beginning. But
perhaps this punishment only amounted to the highest reward, and
purposive purposelessness is an ideal towards which we can all aspire?
Kuki Shuzo in 1928: 'It is the enterprise that interests us, not the
goal.'
--Amelia Groom, "Sisyphus" (2012)
It Is What It Is
October 21, 2017
Maggie tends to listen to pieces of music until she can no longer hear
anything of them except her reponses to her experiences of them which
are often more of things or thoughts that occur while she's listening
than of the pieces exactly, she thinks, in pieces.
When causes can't be repeated, you infer them from effects.
[...]
Chapter Two
We are sentimental because we have a sense of time, Quindlan says, we
have a sense of time because we can only take in so much of the world,
we attend and withdraw, attend and withdraw, and that withdrawing is the
click we hear, the shutter clicking-- time consists of our recurrent
shutting and knowing that we shut, regretting what we miss and
remembering in images-- rank sentimentality!
--Lyn Hejinian, "Lola" from Saga / Circus
Anechoic Chair / Silla Anecoica
October 10, 2017
The below text appeared Aeromoto's Mesas Curadas program from August 5 to September 5 in a show titled "El tejido continúa en lo ilegible" curated by Cinthya Garía Leyva.
It originated from a notebook entry from 2014 for which I more recently
wrote a Spanish version (with translation assistance from Cinthya).
* * *
June 22 2014
You would think that the extreme attitude or necessity for building and
an anechoic chamber would lead to consideration of all the room's
practical needs, configurations, functions, etc. Seeing several photos
of shitty office chairs, sometimes minimally modified if at all, placed
into these spec-ed out technologically extreme rooms, made me wonder why
furniture isn't similarly treated. Is it because the room engineers are
concerned with architectural elements only, and not design or temporary
provisions?
Whether or not it's an acoustic necessity (how far do
we really have to go with "anechoic" anyway?) there is a
conceptual interest in bringing this room to its logical extreme. If
chairs will be there, they should be anechoic. Otherwise they present a
sonic blemish, a rupture in the purity of this space.
Removing the chair from the chamber, we get a piece of anechoic in the
echoic world. Does it mean anything to have something that doesn't
participate in the sonic reflections of its environment? It is out of
place by virtue of its vibrational characteristics. And further, what
happens when we sit in an anechoic chair? Does it feel or sound
different? Does it dampen our own vibrations, isolating the listening
self from other? Do we gain anything from this experience? And when our
bodies' vibrations are absorbed, what does that do for the people and
things around us?
2 agosto 2017
Nuestra época se nos presenta con extremos absurdos de la tecnología
que, por un lado, son grandes éxitos de la racionalidad y, por otro,
lúcidas exposiciones de nuestra necedad en la búsqueda de la precisión.
Aunque perdí interés en perseguir la ciencia como carrera hace una
década, ocasionalmente vuelvo a investigar propuestas cientificas, quizá
por un sentido del humor mórbido que disfruta estas paradojas curiosas.
Así fue un día en junio de 2014, cuando estaba buscando fotos de un gran
espécimen de extremas terminales de la tecnología: la cámara anecoica.
Como alcanzar al zero Kelvin o contar hasta el infinito, esta cámara
existe solamente para lograr silencio puro, aislándose de vibraciones
exteriores y absorbiendo reflexiones interiores (una propuesta
literalmente imposible, pero intentamos de todos modos). Mirando varias
fotos de cámaras anecoicas, en algún momento me di cuenta de que había
una fisura muy obvia en medio de esta ciudadela de perfeccionismo
quisquilloso: la silla. Sí, en el centro del cuarto perfecto–– que ocupó
quién sabe cuantos recursos materiales y laborales, especialistas y sus
varios modos de pruebas para acabarlo– han puesto una pinche silla
ordinaria de oficina. Como si hubieran olvidado que los técnicos que
usan la cámara iban a sentarse. Ups!
Entonces, ¿por qué no llevar la idea absurda del silencio puro a su
extremo conceptual? Después de la revelación de la silla, me puse a
dibujar sillas anecoicas (que no vale la pena mirar), a considerar su
significación simbólica y a escribir el texto del 22 de junio. Empecé a
soñar: ¿cómo se siente sentarse en una silla anecoica? ¿Cómo suena? ¿Qué
significa traer un mueble anecoico al mundo ecoico?
It Is What It Is
July 30, 2017
In general, I find a predilection towards discreetness problematic,
because I think it conceals how interconnected all these systems are.
Say the relationship between the internet structure and the
telecommunications systems that predate it, or its ecological impacts,
its tie to the power grid to state and private territories. If we think
in terms of bounded objects, we lose the fluidity of life, that all
things have a shifting character, even if their physical shape remains
constant.
For example, this table doesn’t contain meaning, but it creates
relations in real time, it creates a spatial arrangement between people
that come together around it. It encourages certain kinds of social
relationships and discourages others. The thing may have edges, a shape,
but it is not really discrete—it extends into the people around it,
influences their experience of one another, and people are extended, and
live through such objects. And this web of relations changes over time.
So, to go back to the table, it, like all objects or technologies, acts
as a kind of node, a social fulcrum, and its use, its cultural meaning
or significance, as in how it signifies, evolves over time, it isn’t
fixed.
I think of the conventions of use like paths worn in a meadow over time.
There is this way that convention starts to structure the understanding
of things, but when we treat convention as fact, we commit a fallacy of
misplaced concreteness, to use Whitehead’s term. The problem is when
convention or social agreement is seen as intrinsic to things rather
than an incremental process of negotiation and renegotiation that occurs
around things. The table is a connection point, a place where a set of
forces can be pooled, stored, and redirected. The table gives us a place
to convene where one didn’t exist before. But the use of it isn’t
fixed, there are conventional ways to interact around it, which are
learned, but these certainly aren’t the only option, and each time we
use a table, come together around it, we negotiate with and potentially
add to the convention, tweak it in some way. It informs our interaction,
gives it shape, and in turn, we give it shape, give it significance.
--Walead Beshty, interview in The Brooklyn Rail, June 2017
It Is What It Is
May 23, 2017
Acconci on Timekeeping
It used to be, you could walk down the streets of a city and always know
what time it was. There was a clock in every store; all you had to do
was look through the store window as you passed by. The business day
came and went with its own time clock; after hours if the store was
dark, the street lights let you still see inside-- you had the time not
just for business but for pleasure. But then times changed, and the
time went away. Well it didn't go away exactly, but it certainly did go out:
time went out like a virus and spread through all those bodies walking
the streets. Time aimed straight not for the heart but for the arm. It
fit around the wrist in the form of a watch; the quartz watch that was
no trouble to make and no worry to wear, the cheap wristwatch you could
buy for two or three dollars off-the-shelf and on-the-street. The
wristwatch was no longer an expensive graduation present, no longer a
reward for a lifetime of service to the corporation. Time came cheap
now; you picked up a watch like a pack of matches as you walked down
Canal Street. Watches were instant fashion, you chose one to suit your
every mood. Take one with a built-in calculator, one that ran on a few
drops of water, one whose hands were entangled in a spider's web. There
was no need anymore for time to be installed on the street, in a bank,
or in a liquor store-- no need for time to be set in place, to be in the
place where you happened by, when all the while you were on your own
time, you wore time on your sleeve, you had time (almost) in the palm of
your hand. Public time was dead; there wasn't time anymore for public
time; public space was the next to go.
[...]
Music is time and not space; music has no place, so it doesn't have to
keep its place, it fills the air and doesn't take up space. Its mode of
existence is to be in the middle of things; you can do other things
while you're in the middle of it. You're not in front of it, and you
don't go around it, or through it; the music goes through you, and stays
inside you.
[...]
Beware of the Walkman.
--Vito Acconci, "Public Space in a Private Time," Critical Inquiry, Summer 1990. Full text here
It Is What It Is
April 24, 2017
Sound and Time
Following the thread of modern digital timekeeping I came across this excellent article
by Jonathan Sterne and Emily Raine titled "Command Tones: Digitization
and Sounded Time." Below I have crudely dropped some choice quotes that I
found germane to my ongoing monologue here about timekeeping and sound.
(See related postings below starting here and here.)
Thus, the separation between analog and digital sound seems arbitrary
because strictly speaking there is no such thing as virtual sounds --
only sounds.
[...]
Monastic time smells of what Foucault would later call "government in
general." The sonic organization of time through bells and through
ritual tied together the minutia of bodily practice with the passing of
hours, days and years, and the sacred time of eternity. Sounded time
made religion material for these monks, it guided their movement through
social space and endowed their daily activity with meaning. [Lewis]
Mumford argues that the monks’ socialized time is a precondition for all
other forms of modern technics. It was as central to the doxa of
industrial capitalism as it was to the doxa of the medieval Catholic
Church.
[...]
The acoustic publicity of time in fact preceded public visual
representations because, for the most part, the addition of clock faces
to bell towers took place some time after the mechanization of hourly
peals.
[...]
Parishes, for example, are defined solely by the sonic range of their
bells, perhaps the most infamous example being Cockneydom, which is
still delineated as that area within earshot of Bow Bells.
[...]
A mechanical clock is a social metronome, and its audience can be
considered a proper public linked by their shared consumption of its
time (Warner, 2002).
[...]
Paradoxically, considering that the digital face shows only distinct
moments (12:22, 12:23, 12:24) and not the rotational consistency of
sweeping hour hands, the experience of digital time marks a return of
temporal perception that is only called into existence in the case of a
demand, when human agency calls upon its technologies. Time becomes the
moments when people check their watches or set their alarms; thus,
self–regulation is delegated entirely to the subject.
The Tahoe Tapes
April 17, 2017
I had the good fortune of traveling through most of Northern California for Cigarette Life
this past January and February. This curious piece of audio was
recorded while driving and listening to the state emergency announcement
radio station between Tahoe City CA and Carson City, NV on the
afternoon of February 11.
That was the ceremony: nothing, in other words. The adults kept still
and quiet the whole time. The ritual was simply an arrangement, meagre
and ephemeral, something that required a maximum amount of attention
while rendering attention futile. Leaving after midnight, Ema made no
attempt to hide her disappointment.
Gombo smiled and said nothing.
All the indian ceremonies that Ema would attend later on were the same;
they all celebrated a supreme inconclusiveness... Supreme because the
conclusion was not even withheld: at a certain point the ceremony was
simply over, and all the people went back the way they had come.
--César Aira, Ema, The Captive p. 76
Trans. Chris Andrews
Sound for the Leap Second, Part II
March 19, 2017
As promised in Part I, I spoke with a few friends who are professionally
involved in programming and computer science. The conclusion to our
story is that there exists no universal fix for the leap second issue.
Each solution, like Google's (linked below), is a not-so-quick-and-dirty
workaround. And none of these to our knowledge produce a seconds number
that reads "60" during the leap second so my code could never work as
it is. Like the other solutions, a potential future version could cheat:
it would be set to execute during the millisecond before the leap
second-- more or less working but technically starting imperceptibly
prematurely. It's somehow satisfyingly apt that this is the best we can
do.
Sound for the Leap Second, Part I
March 14, 2017
In mid-December my email inbox revealed a curious message from a stranger informing me of the 2016 Leap Second Festival and its One Second Residency
program. An uncanny meeting of my interests in online artwork and the
obscure minutiae of timekeeping, The Festival invited artists to apply
to a one-second "residency" where they would realize a project with the
support of a partner organization. Without even thinking, I knew what I
would do and submitted my brief application. I was promptly matched with
CeRCCa, a small cultural and research center outside of Barcelona directed by Pau Cata.
The idea was stupidly simple: I was going to make a website piece, Sound for the Leap Second, which plays a sound only during the leap second.
There were precedents for this idea, albeit somewhat more involved-- a
set of online pieces that occupied an area between musical installation
and clock. I recently wrote a short essay about this interest here.
The intermittent insertion of leap seconds is the perfect example of
what I love about timekeeping: Despite the immense resources devoted
globally to calculating and synchronizing time with the utmost
precision, the IERS
still has to add or subtract a second every few years to correct for
irregularities in the earth's rotation. (In general, I find this
phenomenon humorously emblematic of modern humans' relationship to
technology: infinitesimally precise yet somewhat besides the point.)
Typically I develop my online pieces by setting certain parameters in
the code to be easily testable, then change the values once I find that
the code works. In this case (as my roommate can attest) I set the sound
to play every time the "seconds" variable on my current date object was
equal to "59." The leap second is the only moment in which "seconds"
officially equals "60" since typically second values step from 57, 58,
59, 00, 01, etc. So setting the sound to play at "seconds = 60" would
presumably trigger the event at 23:59:60 UTC. Or so I assumed.
Counting down a bit before 6 PM on New Year's eve in Mexico City, I
cranked the volume on my laptop and stereo in anticipation of that
special instant-- like the rare and brief momentary blooming of a
solitary desert flower. It felt like a very long minute. I perked up my
ears and watched the clock intently. And then... it was 6:00.
Nothing.
Nothing! I laughed to myself, bemused and befuddled by the outcome.
Alas, such are the risks of undertaking coding projects within one's
abilities but beyond one's understanding. Yet the part of me that sees
the good in everything enjoyed the idea of a handful of people listening
for a second signalled by a sound that never came. Replying to Pau
about the success of the project, I cornily replied that "Yes, things
went well... in a Cagean sense." In a way it was more interesting that
the piece failed than if it had worked (or at least this is a nice thing
to reassure myself).
Seeking to understand what went wrong, I looked to none other than the Chronos of the internet, Network Time Protocol inventor David L. Mills
(partially because he just seems like an intriguing character). In a
brilliantly and perhaps revealingly succint response, Dr. Mills informed
me that "NTP does not calculate the seconds number; it only counts the
seconds and leads to the operating system formatting local time." In
other words, the code I wrote was referring to clock values that my
operating system parses out from a different, universal counter that NTP
maintains and the error was not in NTP but the local clock. So at first
it seems that my mistake was referring my code to local time (as
calculated by the operating system of whatever computer reads the code)
rather than an internet-based UTC clock. But that's only the
beginning...
The problem with my idea is that this is a much deeper issue than I had imagined-- one that remains enigmatic (or at best troublesome)
to even professional engineer-developer teams. The simplest explanation
I can find is that JavaScript (as well as many if not all other
languages) simply ignores leap seconds and remains out of sync with
official UTC clocks. This information I first gleaned here but read in further depth at the University of California Observatories website here.
From manual clock changes to Google's "leap smears" to completely
disregarding the leap second, there is clearly no consensus on leap
second counting strategies or technical clock fixes. There are even IEEE
standards that are inconsistent with each other on this topic.
But there are benefits to asking the wrong question, or the right
question in an unusual way, which for me are near to the essence of what
creative work does. In addition to a friendly reminder that I don't
really know what I'm doing with computers, this project has cast into
even higher relief the absurd and peculiar complexities of chronometry
as well as the ingenuity of the multitudes behind the scenes who make
these issues invisible to everyday technology users. There is a tedious
yet fascinating body of seemingly endless information around the
questions of digital timekeeping and synchronization (all mostly beyond
my comprehension to begin summarizing here, but I encourage you to take a
look, especially at this guy's website).
Zooming out from the details these findings reveal the basic
incompatibility between contemporary science and the natural world that
it seeks to model. Because ultimately this is a problem of our inability
to connect universal, computer-based clocks to the rotation and
revolution of our planet. Or as a friend put it, "clock time is
imaginary."
In the coming weeks and months I'll continue to enlist the help of
computer-wise friends in the pursuit of more complete explanations. But
I'll post this for now so "Part I" of this story can see the light.
It Is What It Is
December 10, 2016
Classical Greek, along with many non-Indo-Europoean languages, has a
middle voice of the verb that, unlike the active voice, does not
separate agency from action or the doer from the deed. It is not, then,
that things have agency; rather they are actively present in their
doing-- in their carrying on or perdurance. And as things carry on
together, and answer to one another, they do not so much interact as correspond. Interaction is the dynamic of the assemblage, where things are joined up. But correspondence is a joining with; it is not additive but contrapuntal, not "and... and... and" but "with... with... with."
Now it is all very well to refute the classical separation of knowing
from being, or of epistemology from ontology. Surely, since we owe our
very existence to the world we seek to know, our knowledge must grow
from within the crucible of our involvement in this world, in its
relations and processes. Yet we have things to know only because they
have arisen. They have somehow come into existence with the forms they
momentarily have, and these forms are held in place thanks to the
continual flux of materials across their emergent surfaces. Things become, as does our knowledge of them. It follows that our primary focus should not be on the ontologies of things but on their ontogenies,
not on philosophies but on generations of being. This shift of focus
has important political ramifications. For it suggests that things are
far from closed to one another, each wrapped up in its own, ultimately
impenatrable world of being. On the contrary, they are fundamentally
open, and all are participants in one indivisible world of becoming.
Multiple ontologies signify multiple worlds, but multiple ontogenies
signify one world. And since, in their growth or movement, the things of
this world answer to one another, or correspond, they are also
responsible.
--Tim Ingold, response to "A Questionnaire on Materialisms" October 155, Winter 2016, pp.59-60
Not Yet Titled Piece for Calle Bustamante (2016)
December 6, 2016
On December 3 2016 between 5 and 6 PM I presented a piece on three
blocks of Calle Bustamante (between Colón and Zaragoza) in the Historic
Center of Oaxaca. With the support and invitation of the Museo de Arte
Contemporáneo and Festival Umbral to present a work in public, I
realized a sound installation using the speakers that were already
installed and used by 21 stores along the corridor. Many thanks to the
businesses who generously lent me their sound systems and dwelled in
this unusual sound for the hour. Complete documentation is here.
What Villiers teaches us is that not every sound is reproducible; and
that if we reproduce a sound that is not meant to be reproduced, it
loses, along with its address, its destination, and its origin, an
element that is constitutive of it and which binds it to its auditor...
If a sound is only authentic when it is directly linked to its context
of appearing, that is to say its recipient, then inversely, a reproduced
sound can acceded to authenticity only on condition that one considers
it for itself, and not as a phantom of the original sound.
--François Bonnet, The Order of Sounds / A Sonorous Archipelago, p.42-3
Soundwalk with Claves
September 27, 2016
A recording of a soundwalk with claves
on Queens blvd under the 7 train viaduct from 40th to 48th street, Queens NY
Thanks to Liliana Rodriguez for recording.
A lifetime is not so long. You cannot wait for a tool without blood on it.
--Joseph Beuys
It Is What It Is
September 20, 2016
Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem
of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the
circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.
--Henry James, preface to Roderick Hudson
The Tlalpujahua Tapes
July 15, 2016
Sometime in April 2016, I unintentionally recorded about four hours of
my life as I wandered Tlalpujahua, Michoacán, Mexico. Here is an excerpt
of that recording. It sounds so unfamiliar to me that I'm not entirely
sure I recorded it myself, even though the recorder never left my
possession.
"Craziness is more an exacerbation of logic than its negation."
--Cesar Aira
In the last year I've grown fascinated by the modern measurement,
articulation and coordination of official time and all the technological
and institutional apparatus that makes it possible. Constantly keeping
up with the times, the official tools
used for this are as in flux as time itself. In my mind, juxtaposed
against some of the world's most ancient philosophies (eg. Heraclitus
and Laozi) modern timekeeping science feels quixotic. Where once the
position of the sun was enough to schedule an event, we now have dozens
of international organizations measuring the radioactive decay of rare
elements, coordinating their data through increasingly sophisticated
algorithms that are monitored maintained and replaced constantly for
maximum precision. Despite all this exacting, expensive work the
official international standard setters arbitrarily throw in a leap
second every few years to correct for irregularities in the earth's
movement. Because through all this painstaking measurement of our
standard time unit-- the second-- it still doesn't adequately relate to
its astro/geophysical basis, the earth's rotation and revolution. To
adapt the Yiddish proverb, man measures time, God laughs.
I marvel at the acheivements and intricacies of modern science while
also finding it dazzlingly inane in its quest to explain the unknowable
(cosmos, brain, time, you name it). Time is a compelling topic for this
since it's evident literally everywhere: Everything, whether or not we
can "read" it-- registers passage of time. Living creatures age, trees
amass rings, rocks show weathering and erosion and transformations
through heat and pressure over time. Ecologists can observe a landscape
and estimate how far that ecosystem has developed since lichens emerged
from bare rock. A light bulb flickers, dims, eventually burns out. Books
yellow. Clothes tear and stain, beds and private parts sag, doors
creak, dust accumulates, clouds gather and pass, eaters get hungry for
the next meal, your body tells you that you slept too little or too
late. Time bears on everything; a thing is a clock.
Some known precedents for clock pieces: Robert Smithson wrote often of
entropy, usually referring to the effects of geologic time on objects
and landscapes. In a sense he used this idea often as a foil for a
comparatively petty, superficial white cube gallery culture fixated on
flimsy two- and three-dimensional objects. (But rather than
simplistically critiquing this culture, he brought his notions of
entropy inside it as well.) Recently a friend brought to my attention
Christian Marclay's film The Clock (2010), which I hadn't seen or
thought about during these projects. Though it's more narrative and
content-driven than my interests, we do share this basic concept of an
artwork operating as a timekeeping tool.
Thoughts about musical structure similarly brought the idea of clocks
into my consciousness. My last ten years of being a composer have taken
me through many changes in how I envision good musical structure-- what
its function is, how to construct it, which concepts and processes are
valid or irrelevant in thinking about it, which precedents I see as
touchstones of good music, etc. In a process of continuous zooming out,
through years of negotiating the internal elements of musical structure,
I began to view these elements as less aesthetically and ethically
consequential than a serious consideration of listening and its context.
In other words, structural features at their best could catalyze a
change in perspective-- to forms of deeper listening-- but could also
distract and valorize the surface materials of music, the sounds. (In
fact I read a recent 'scientific' study that I can't retrieve now that
shows that listeners are unable to distinguish changes in larger
temporal structures-- essentially arguing that musical memory is
exclusively short-term.) Though I love a good sound, I've become wary of
the fetishization of sounds and of "new sounds," which often amounts to
simple materialism. Hearing nice things is not what music is about for
me. With the guidance of some others (I can and will list many someday),
I began to believe in music as frameworks for listening rather than for
organizing sound material. Accordingly, my recent pieces have been
things to listen-with rather than things to listen-to, building a thing
more than telling a story. Using the inherently relational aspects of
sound, these pieces are tuned to their context to constitute
interventions in listening. In this process I've usually eschewed fixed
temporal or sequential musical structures in favor of random or
arbitrary presentation of sound elements in time.
Practicing accordingly has opened me to a different type of
decision-making in composition: though I still reserve some decisions as
intuitive personal choices (where intellectual rationalizations seem
inadequate or irrelevant), many are made more or less arbitrarily-- or
not made at all. The structural necessities of composing are broken down
to just a few non-negotiable essentials. For example, Audience
(2015) was an experiment with the bare-bones of a remote performance:
performance space, audience, listening, network connection, beginning,
middle and end. It was a "no-input" performance with respect to sound
material.
Which brings us to the clock pieces (or "A thing is a clock"). (12 3 4)
They posit time, space and sound as the only essentials, making use of a
compositional structure that can be seen alternatively as arbitrary or
absolutely fixed. The sole determinants of temporal structure in these
pieces are the hours, minutes and seconds of the clock according to the
browser.
A third but equally important source of inspiration here has to do with
the most influential change in my creative life over the past five
years, something that has certainly broadened my consciousness around
time and duration: My typical morning routine includes about an hour of Dachengquan zhan zhuang,
a type of standing, still, listening meditation that originates in
Chinese qigong practice. Most of my learning from this isn't quite
articulable. However, listening to nothing but a duration (or rather an
ambience in, of, and from a body) taught me that duration itself merits a
close musical treatment as inherently rich content. My meditation
practice taught me to endure and enjoy the duration, which then became
an important question for my musical practice.
There is something else to these pieces that appeals to me, which is
that they project the time into three-dimensional space. Through
resonance, a space is filled with the markings of time's continous
passage. I don't think this is simply a linguistic trick, but actually a
direct test of this concept-- that a clock can occupy a space without
being visual, signifying through resonance rather than by mechanical
movement. In these pieces the resonances change more or less detectably,
though in a related way that light in a specific space can change over
the course of a day.
I feel that there's more to say and that I've said enough. Hopefully the pieces and listening can fill in the blanks.
It Is What It Is
May 24, 2016
What we know prevents us from recognizing what we don't know.
--Reza Negarestani, "Where is the Concept?"
It Is What It Is
May 6, 2016
Before we met, I had spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgentstein's idea
that the inexpressible is contained-- inexpressibly!-- in the expressed.
This idea gets less air time than his more reverential Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent, but it is, I think, the deeper idea. Its paradox is, quite literally, why I write, or how I feel able to keep writing.
For it doesn't feed or exalt any angst one may feel about the incapacity
to express, in words, that which eludes them. It doesn't punish what
can be said for, by definition, it cannot be. Nor does it ham it up by
miming a constricted throat: Lo, what I would say, were words good enough. Words are good enough.
It is idle to fault a net for having holes, my encyclopedia notes.
In this way you can have your empty church with a dirt floor swept clean
of dirt and your spectacular stained glass gleaming by the cathedral
rafters, both. Because nothing you can say can fuck up the space for
God.
--Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts
It Is What It Is
April 25, 2016
Observation acts on its object; listening affects its content:
"Is it possible to observe the breath cycle without disturbing it?
Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty (as applied to quantum theory)
teaches that
'there is no such thing as mere observing, in the sense that the only
action is a one-way action of the object on the observer; every
observation we make is bound to act on the object we observe, even if
only by the impact of a single quantum of light. In other words, there
is always a mutual inter-action between the observer and the object.'
(Otto R. Frisch: Atomic Physics Today)
Perhaps participation in Teacher Yourself to Fly is to experience Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty."
--Pauline Oliveros, "On Sonic Meditation" (1973), collected in Software for People
It Is What It Is
January 30, 2016
[It] does not offer itself with proofs and results; it does not vaunt
itself, nor is it easy to approach. Like a part of nature, it waits
until it is discovered. It offers neither facts nor power, but for
lovers of self-knowledge, of wisdom-- if there be such-- it seems to be
the right [thing]. To one person its spirit appears as clear as day; to
another, shadowy as twilight; to a third, dark as night. He who is not
pleased by it does not have to use it, and he who is against it is not
obliged to find it true. Let it go forth into the world for the benefit
of those who can discern its meaning.
--C.G. Jung, Foreward to the I Ching, 1949
It Is What It Is
January 23, 2016
A wind orchestra positioned itself somewhere in a glade. The musicians
sat on the freshly cut pine stumps and placed the sheet music in front
of them, although not on music stands but on the grass. The grass is
tall, thick, and strong, like the lake reeds, and effortlessly holds up
notebooks with sheet music, so the musicians easily see all the notes.
Who can tell, perhaps there is no orchestra at all in the glade, but the
music is heard from beyond the forest and you feel good. You want to
take off your shoes and socks, stand on tiptoe, and looking at the sky,
dance to the accompaniment of this distant music; you don't ever want
the music to stop. Veta, my darling, do you dance? Of course, my dear, I
really love to dance. Then allow me to take you for a spin. With
pleasure, with pleasure, with pleasure! But then mowers appear in the
glade. Their instruments, their twelve-handed scythes, also shine in the
sun, but not like gold, as the musicians' instruments do, but like
silver. And the mowers begin to mow. The first mower approaches the
trumpet player and, having prepared his scythe-- the music is playing--
with a swift swing cuts those grass stalks that support the notebook
with the trumpeter's sheet music. The notebook falls and closes. The
trumpet player chokes on a half note and quietly heads off to a grove
filled with water springs and the singing of all kinds of birds. The
second mower sets out in the direction of the French horn player and
does the same thing-- the music is playing-- as the first mower cuts.
The French horn player's notebook falls. He gets up and leaves,
following the trumpet player. The third mower walks briskly towards the
bassoonist, and his notebook-- the music is playing but is becoming
quieter-- also falls. And so, by now, three musicians silently, one
after the other, go to listen to the birds and to drink spring water.
Soon in their footsteps-- the music is playing piano-- walk
percussionists, a cornet player, the second and third trumpeters, as
well as the flutists, and all of them carry their instruments-- they all
carry their own-- and the entire orchestra disappears in the grove; no
players touch the mouthpieces with their lips, but the music is playing
nevertheless. Now sounding pianissimo, it remains on the glade, and the
mowers, disgraced by the miracle, cry and wipe their wet faces with the
sleeves of their red peasant shirts. The mowers can't work-- their hands
are shaking and their hearts resemble gloomy swamp toads-- but the
music keeps playing. It is alive by itself; it is a waltz, which only
yesterday was one of us: The man disappeared, changed into sounds, and
we will never know about it.
--Sasha Sokolov, A School for Fools, trans. Alexander Boguslawski
It Is What It Is
January 21, 2016
A passage, equally about aesthetics and ethics, that resonates:
"My music is not intended to be listened to as the protagonist, like in a
concert situation; rather it becomes part of a complex event in which
the music is only part of the whole like all things: trees, people,
scents, colors etc. – the idea is that the music connects things.
I propose entering into a relationship with the music, that one considers it, as not simply in front of us, but that we are the music, that we ourselves create the work by being active participants, by listening."
--Walter Branchi
"Listening by Listening"
It Is What It Is
December 10, 2015
"Craziness is more an exacerbation of logic than its negation."
-- César Aira, The Dinner
This statement, emblematic of much of Aira's storytelling, reminded me of contemporary timekeeping technology. My recent clock pieces
have coincided with a fascination with, and research into this
technology-- which strikes me as both dazzlingly intricate and
ludicrously excessive in its quest for greater and greater precision.
I've made some unsuccessful attempts at expressing my clock fascination
in writing so far... maybe something will surface here soon. In the
meanwhile this fragment will do.
Clock piece and claves improvisation
November 18, 2015
Below is a video excerpt of a recent performance in La Capilla de
Hacienda Sta Barbara, Tlaxcala MX on November 14, 2015. It also features
Odds & Ends (Xavier Lopez, Supercollider / Florence Lucas, visuals)
and Gudinni Cortina playing white noise from portable speakers.
It Is What It Is
October 21, 2015
Robert Morris writes the following in his "Notes on Sculpture Part 2,"
published in 1966. It just as easily comments on sound/music work; just
replace the words "object" and "shapes" with "sound," and "light" with
"resonance." As it articulates a balance between so-called ocular and
non-ocular features of the work, we can also extend it to express a
reasonable attitude between the so-called cochlear and non-cochlear
features of sound work.
"The sensuous object, resplendent with compressed internal relations,
has had to be rejected. That many considerations must be taken into
account in order that the work keep its place as a term in the expanded
situation hardly indicates a lack of interest in the object itself. But
the concerns now are for more control of and/or cooperation of the
entire situation. Control is necessary if the variables of object,
light, space, and body are to function. The object itself has not become
less important. It has merely become less self-important. By taking its
place as a term among others, the object does not fade off into some
bland, neutral, generalized, or otherwise retiring shape.
...
So much of what is positive in giving to shapes the necessary but
non-dominating, noncompressed presence has not yet been articulated. Yet
much of the judging of these works seems based on the sensing of the
rightness of the specific, non-neutral weight of the presence of a
particular shape as it bears on the other necessary terms."
Motel Room
Jordan Topiel Paul & J. Gordon Faylor
October 9-12, 2015 HDTS: Epicenter
Robber's Roost Motel, Room #15, Green River UT
It's been three years now since I took a traveling field research job
that sends me for weeks, sometimes months at a time on the road
throughout the United States. By day, I drive a rental car from one data
collection site to the next. By night, I arrive at a nondescript motel,
open my door with the swipe of a keycard, and within a few hours fall
asleep.
After drifting from one motel to another, from Massachusetts to Florida
to Tennessee to North Dakota to Kansas, etc., I began to experience
something surreal-- that I could travel hundreds of miles each day and
still arrive in what felt like the same place each night. On one hand,
these motels are designed with such a smooth aesthetic (more accurately:
anaesthetic) that one could ignore their details and experience only
the repetitive architecture of sameness regardless of the location. On
the other hand, a durational repetition of this structure amplifies the
small details that stand out as slightly distinct: the view from the
window, an awkwardly placed door stop, an unusual carpet pattern, an
especially loud mini-fridge.
Since falling under the hypnotic spell of the US motel travel
experience, I began taking photos and audio recordings in these strange
structures. Are they not a dispersed, disjointed masterpiece of serial
minimalist architecture? Observing the unattended details of these
spaces, what do we learn about attenuation by design?
*
A definition of attenuation is the perceptual reduction of a repetitive
or constant signal-- for instance, when you cease to hear the hum of an
air conditioner in your room after some time. This phenomenon has become
a common thread in my work, in projects ranging from a Smooth Jazz
research/DJ outfit, to web-based sound installations, to
electro-acoustic music performances. In each of these areas, materials
are situated on the edge between background noise and signal, attenuated
and attended. The causes of attenuation are culturally mediated as well
as physiological: As I write this, I barely notice the noise coming
from out my window, the texture of the ceiling, or my laptop screen
color settings. Someone who hasn't been here would hear the trucks,
construction hammering, sirens, street vendors, dogs barking, airplanes
passing, etc., and see the strange stucco ceiling and reddish tint of my
screen-- which I only hear and see now because I'm thinking about them.
This is a feature of being at home in an environment. Attenuation of
detail is central to motel design: on entering, guests experience a
sterile familiarity that allows them, in the absence of feeling like any
other place, to feel at home.
*
Motel Room, running from October 9 to 12 in Green River Utah, is a
multimedia meditation on motel aesthetics presented in its native
environment: a motel room. Faylor's text for the installation
simultaneously operates within and riffs on these phenomenological
qualities. With facets of theory and fiction, it edges toward text's
limits as repeatable objects in a linear space. From other angles it
points beyond that space-- to the room where it sits, to the audio
recordings and photos of rooms similar to it. Together the installation
functions as a mise en abyme of the smooth, the serial, the attenuated.
*
From the days of its settling, the majority of people who experience
Green River do so as a waypoint to other destinations, whether spending
the night in a motel room or refueling at the truck stop. This is clear
from the number of motels that populate both sides of Main Street. From a
resident's perspective, however, Green River is slow, permanent, and
known in minute detail. There could be no better place to contemplate
the features of motel aesthetics than a town rooted on one hand in
transient experience, and on the other, in isolated stillness.
The first performance of Audience took place on June 22, 2015
between a motel room in Salisbury, North Carolina and the Galería Manuel
Felguérez at CENART in Mexico City. To date it's my work that most
directly advances the proposition that the essential activity of
composition is listening.
Typically my way of operating is to research, visit, and listen to a
space before I conceptualize any program or process to undergo for a
performance. Listening always reveals what I need to do as a composer
(and if it doesn't, then maybe there's nothing to be done). For this
occasion, working with a space that I knew I wouldn't be able to visit
before the performance, I modified the step of performing by merging it
with preliminary listening: a microphone was set up in the space, its
signal streaming live online for me to listen in remotely. The
performance began when listening started and it ended when listening
stopped.
The audience, who were invited to participate in this activity as they
normally are, were given folding chairs to place and sit in wherever
they pleased in the gallery. The microphone was positioned in the front
of the room like a live performer would be, though it was pointed
towards the audience rather than away. The performance was essentially a
structured listening session: for a designated amount of time we would
all listen together (to the audience, to the space) without any audio
inputs. One microphone served as my surrogate ears to the space while
the audience had no way of listening to me. A few questions, intended to
be distributed at the event, were posed:
What is composition? Structured listening?
What is the sound of an audience listening?
How do remote/proxy bodies and real bodies listen together?
Has listening changed?
What to me was a strong idea conceptually presented problems socially:
namely, how to stage a concert without putting any sound into it and
frame that privation as a positive experience-- not a fuck-you, not a
pitting of composer vs. audience, not an ego trip. This depended
entirely on the care and attitude in the event's presentation.
At the time I was on a work
assignment in North Carolina but was able to listen quite clearly from
the wifi connection in my Super8 motel room. Because some aspects of the
event's production and presentation were not ideal (which maybe I
should have foreseen and addressed in advance), the essentials of the
piece did not come across: those in attendance didn't reach a critical
mass of listeners to constitute a public audience; and whether related
to that or not, no formal announcement was made that the piece had begun
or ended. In a work with so few recognizable elements (space, audience,
remote listening setup, beginning, listening, end), each has to be
clearly communicated in order for the idea to work properly. Although I
was actively listening throughout the piece's specified time frame, the
audience was unable to do the same because there was no clear signal of
beginning or end.
It's taken me some time to write about this performance after the fact
because I've felt disappointed and disillusioned with the process. I was
maybe at my peak of trust in certain people and institutions and the
mishaps of this event were a bit derailing. (I don't want to give the
impression that there are any hard feelings; while there was some
miscommunication, I believe it's always within the artist's ability and
responsibility to make things right rather than blaming others for
things going wrong.) With some time passed now, I see this is a
necessary hiccup for my development, a learning experience that will
inform the way I communicate with people and work on subsequent stagings
of this same idea.
Sincere thanks to the folks who made the event possible and who came out and listened.
It Is What It Is
August 11, 2015
"So much needs to be reiterated and redrawn in order for emptiness to appear."
"This is life seen by life. I may not have meaning but it is the same lack of meaning that a pulsing vein has."
--Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva
It Is What It Is
March 31, 2015
"...One can never locate a medium in isolation... A phonograph disc and a
PVC construction pipe, to take another example, are differentiated not
by their material, which is molecularly identical, but rather by the
various mechanisms with which they can meaningfully connect (the former
with a stylus, the latter with a valve). Indeed, the requirement of
multiple materials obtains even in the low-tech case of the most
conventional poem; to know whether or not a piece of paper has been
printed requires sufficient light and enough space to position the sheet
in the field of vision. However absurdly obvious these requirements
sound when enumerated in this way, they are not trivial for a rigorous
definition of media."
--Craig Dworkin, No Medium
It Is What It Is
March 5, 2015
"It isn’t what it looks like but what it is that is of basic importance."
Performed January 23, 2015 at a small housewarming party concert
Colonia Nápoles, Mexico City
This is a thread of work that excites me even though it's in most ways
much more traditional than other areas of my practice: there is no
online, indeterminate component; there is a clear beginning and end;
sound objects are fixed in the sequence of the form rather than
variable; I perform live on traditional percussion instruments; and much
more emphasis is placed on the sound produced than its immediate
interactions with listening in the architectural space. This is all for a
purpose, though, and that is to realize a particular idea as directly
as possible without ornamentation-- the phenomenon of attenuation in
music and listening.
Attenuation is the listener's gradual reduction of attention to a signal
as it repeats or sustains over time. On one end of the spectrum
attenuation is purely physiological, as in when a new sound repeats or
sustains regularly enough over a short period of time that it isn't
heard (as in, after entering a room with a loud air conditioner or being
close to repetitive construction hammering, you no longer pay attention
to it). On the other end of the spectrum is a more culturally-mediated
attenuation: sirens are a good example of something relatively
unattended at home, but on hearing a foreign siren my attention is
piqued. And then eventually I get used to this sound. Most attenuation
is somewhere on the spectrum between purely physiological and purely
cultural, which yields an interesting variety of listening experience in
musical context. Another definition is simply the reduction of a
signal, but that one is less important than the one concerning
listening.
So this piece proceeds from a simple premise but its elements become
somewhat complicated as they are layered. The known entity is that
attenuation comes naturally over time with repetition and sustain;
what's less known is how this process proceeds when a listener is
thinking about it, when multiple elements are repeating, sustaining,
fading in and out over a relatively short period of time, and how
physical presence (acoustic vs. digital sound) and relative volume
interact with attention. This is an art project and not a scientific
study, so luckily these are questions to be asked in various ways
without ever expecting or seeking objective answers. One way of
understanding composition is as a set of questions to guide listening.
Happily there are many more questions to be asked around the theme of
attenuation.
Sound materials included two field recordings, one nearly
indistinguishable from white noise but that was made at a large fountain
in a nearby neighborhood; another a direct recording outside the window
at the performance space, also nearly indistinguishable from the
ambient sound at the time of performance. The latter recording plays
through the entirety of the piece, but is only really discernible as a
recording (and not noise from out the window) at the end when all other
sounds go quiet. White noise is my primary material when thinking about
attenuation since it's so immersive and attractive at first but so easy
to attenuate within seconds. The piece begins with a fade-in of the
off-white fountain recording which both cuts out and recedes slowly at
different points in the piece. For the majority of the first half, I
juxtapose the digital off-white with a sustained action of brushes on
snare drum, also with an off-white character. In both of these materials
one can attend to irregularities, hear voices (in the recording) and
movement-- or on the other hand, attenuate them, as we are typically
conditioned, as white noise.
From out of these off-white sounds emerge other tones, fading in and
high-frequency, which are probably difficult to hear at first but then
become more obvious. But with these the listening process identifies
them over time as faintly present -> definite -> sustained ->
attenuated, a process which is different for each listener and probably
depends on position and individual attention sensibilities. A handheld
oscillator/instrument tuner is introduced during this time as well,
masked at first by white noise and then obvious (abrasive, even) as the
noise fades. Then the second section shifts from focus on sustains to
focus on repetition. Digital clicks, fading in and out, and metronomic
clave playing (or at least as metronomic as I was able) repeat at
various pulses. Off-white noise returns later in this section, layering a
sustained sound mass over the repetitive clicks. At this point the
interactions of acoustic masking (one sound perceived as 'covering'
another due to volume and proximity), pulse, sustain, and
acoustic-vs-digital (live claves vs clicks/noise) are at a peak. My
guess is that this is too much information to NOT attenuate. On the
other hand, my attention is different from everyone else's. Eventually
these elements fade out and what's left is a reduction in energy and
demand on attention. At this point the ambient field recording rides out
the remaining seconds of the performance, revealing that a perceived
baseline of silence was in fact an easily attenuated recording the
entire time. When this recording cuts out abruptly, the natural ambience
of the room takes on a different perspective or dimension.
In this sense, the music acts differently from most of my other work,
which usually seeks to focus the listening on the space and time during
the performance. In this piece the density and relentlessness of sound
perhaps make that too difficult. The sound is more disorienting than
orienting. Instead what happens here is that the full shift of
perception on the space occurs after the music ends. The listening
apparatus is jostled (or equally plausible, lulled to sleep), and then
the resting state afterwards assumes an altered dimension. But I think
that attenuation is such a fertile area for music that there are plenty
of possible narratives or outcomes depending on how these future studies
are structured.
Network Time
January 9, 2015
In the West timekeeping technology began with environmental signals and
sundials that demarcated fractions of earth's daily rotation. Later,
signalling its authority, the Church tolled the official hours with
bells. With industrialization, the mechanical clock then became critical
to measure work shifts; analog clocks and wristwatches displayed time
at home, in the workplace, and on the body. Presently an international
standard timekeeping organization, which defines seconds in terms of the
atomic decay of caesium-133 under specific conditions, dictates the
exact time in each zone and synchronizes timekeeping devices through
electronic signals and electromagnetic waves. On the internet time is
measured according to the milliseconds elapsed since 00:00:00 AM on
January 1, 1970 and distributed by the Network Time Protocol (NTP).
Chances are the devices you use to tell time are coordinated through
telecommunications networks using NTP.
Music is made of time. Changes in timekeeping technology alter our
perceptions and conceptions of time and music. Musical production and
experience will change in parallel. Below are studies in internet-based
musical time. Rather than the typical musical piece which constitutes
its own independent epoch, these pieces are anchored in absolute time,
progressing according to the standards and artificial idiosynracies of
internet-synchronized universal time (UTC).
"The great natural poem about anything is its name"
--Carl Andre
It Is What It Is
December 9, 2014
"We are most concerned because having experienced joy we know that it
prevails and we think that with violence, destructiveness,
possessiveness and frustration we are off the track. The transcendent
response that is free from and unrelated to the concrete environment is
so blissful and seems so much more innocent that we wish to maintain it
at the expense of a concrete response. But it is not possible and it is not desirable.
We are as though on an adventurous journey and frustration merely
points out those things to be avoided and the rest maintain us on our
way. We cannot understand details but we can know the truth about it and
accept it all and be contented.
...
It is sometimes baffling to the rest of us that we have to do so much
work that is unrelated to art work. But looking back we see the positive
aspect of all our actions...You can see that discontent is a positive
state of mind urging us on to discover our function.
...
Now we must consider the idea of power because without freedom we
cannot make our full response. With the idea of power in our minds we
are subject to that power. If you believe in it, then it exists for you
and you are naturally subject to it. But in reality there is no power
anywhere."
--Agnes Martin, Writings
It Is What It Is
December 2, 2014
"Or is [listening] a construction that assumes form, assembling a great
number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated
twice according to the same pattern? Every time I seek to relive the
emotion of a previous [listening], I experience different and unexpected
impressions, and do not find again those of before. At certain moments
it seems to me that between one [listening] and the next there is a
progression: in the sense, for example, of penetrating further into the
spirit of the [sound], or of increasing my critical detachment. At other
moments, on the contrary, I seem to retain the memory of the
[listenings] of a single [sound] one next to another, enthusiastic or
cold or hostile, scattered in time without a perpective, without a
thread that ties them together. The conclusion I have reached is that
[listening] is an operation without object; or that its true object is
itself. The [music] is an accessory aid, or even a pretext."
--Reader #3 from Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler (adapted)
Rhythm and Duration Study
October 7, 2014
It's been some years since I've developed a collaborative performance
piece and this one is a proud return. While still retaining aspects of
the netmusic concept, working with Rolando Hernández allowed us to push
this project into some different areas in both process and outcome.
We both have experience as improvisers and composers, which I think lent
us some flexibility in working out the details of the piece over the
course of several days. It was a rare mix of clear and thorough verbal
communication and a type of parallel collective intuition that guided
our process. It seems we've both arrived at similar milestones--
ethically, aesthetically, personally-- despite our very different
starting points and possibly different future trajectories. I think the
evolution in this piece is a nice outward display of those affinities
and the moment when they emerged.
A surface example of this is the necessity to create a piece starting
with language. In the past my solo works have gestated in non-languistic
areas of my consciousness; where I've been able to write about my work,
the words have come after the fact. But in collaboration some language
is necessary to delineate certain preliminary structures, to come to
agreements about the terms of the non-discursive elements that will
follow. This has been unfamiliar to me recently, and I have to thank
Rolando for making the transition here pretty seemless.
From the beginning we were both interested in exploring the same things:
time as a function of rhythm and duration. To summarize our piece very
simply, we created a rigid structure of five equal-duration sections,
each with a different rhythm/duration concept. Each section beginning
would signal a return to synchrization for our two "voices," which would
then diverge in some way through the length of the section. The first
two and a half sections dealt with rhythm; exactly midway through the
piece an imaginary axis of symmetry signals a switch from rhythmic
concepts to durational concepts that are mirror images of the preceding
rhythms (durations being the negative image of rhythms). The next two
and a half sections proceed as rough mirror images of the preceding
sections. Below is a score for this general structure.
We premiered the work at a night of music at my apartment in Colonia
Roma, Mexico City. It was the final set of the evening after very
different performances from Mario de Vega and Gudinni Cortina / Enrique
Maraver. My part, programmed in HTML and Javascript and played from a
laptop, was built of only two sounds: an electronic metronome-style
click and a short sample of a rainstorm recorded in my apartment. It was
the most technically difficult program I've ever executed. My laptop
was set on one side of the room while Rolando played a discman
acoustically (using small objects on the spinning disc). My
interpretation of the score was necessarily very tight while his
incorporated some of his own conceptual interpretations in each section.
I don't know whether the score concept was easily discernible from the
performance, but it was certainly audible that we were executing a
highly structured plan. That the piece lends itself to such a varied
range of interpretations is good reason, we both believe, to continue
interpreting it and invite others to do the same. As such it feels like a
living thing, an ecostystem for performances to inhabit.
The software part of this piece occupies a precarious space musically:
It is an independent program, a website, a score fragment, a document of
the performances, a generative backing-track to future performances,
possibly a stand-alone piece. It's complicated.
This past Friday I performed a solo version of the Study in Richmond VA
using my laptop, a powered speaker for amplification, brushes on a snare
drum, and claves. Though it was the first time since 2008 that I
performed on percussion, I felt reasonably confident in my abilities
because of my kung fu practice. It turns out that the two practices are
very transferable. Most of the performance was captured on this recording,
courtesy of Bryan Eubanks. Unlike the first performance where listeners
were focused entirely on the music, this realization was subject to
plenty of background conversation, as I had anticipated for this First
Friday opening at Black Iris Gallery. I find that there's no other way
to deal with this type of "sound competition" than to focus, continue,
and treat it like any other type of environmental sound. Eventually the
performance generated enough focused attention among those present that
the conversations naturally faded.
In this interpretation I decided to read my own line backwards rather
than playing Rolando's. This realization foregrounds more the negative
image concept than the divergence-in-each-section concept-- a welcome
variation in what I hope will be a fertile future for this piece. Rather
than a first half of entirely pulses (computer pulses, claves) and a
second half of entirely durations (rain sample and brushes on snare
drum), this version featured contrasting material elements throughout.
I want to take this space to thank people who made the above possible:
Rolando Hernández for his friendship and continuous work on the
composition and performance; Bryan Eubanks for encouraging me to pick up
percussion again and attempt a solo version; Martha Alvarez Montero for
co-hosting the apartment concert with me; Benjamin and the Black Iris
Gallery in Richmond for hosting the second one; and Andrew Lafkas and
Todd Capp for further inspiration and support.
On image circulation, but equally pertinent to netmusic:
"We are as unable to stabilize a copy as a copy as we are unable to
stabilize an original as an original. There are no eternal copies, just
as there are no eternal originals. Reproduction is as much infected by
originality as originality is infected by reproduction. By circulating
through different contexts a copy becomes a series of different
originals. Every change of context, every change of medium can be
interpreted as a negation of the status of a copy as a copy-- as an
essential rupture, as a new start that opens out a new future. In this
sense, a copy is never really a copy, but rather always a new original
in a new context."
-- Boris Groys, "The Topology of Contemporary Art"
It Is What It Is
August 25, 2014
"We live most of the hours of our lives in enclosed spaces; thus our
acoustical lives are governed by the effects of these large resonators."
-- Everett & Pohlmann, Master Handbook of Acoustics
It Is What It Is
August 15, 2014
The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you've gotten the fish,
you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit;
once you've gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist
because of meaning; once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the
words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a
word with him?
Zhuangzi (Chuang-Tzu), Section 26, Trans. B Watson
Louder is better / Compression profiles for times of day
August 14, 2014
"Hardware multiband compressors are also commonly used in the on-air
signal chain of a radio station, either AM or FM, in order to increase
the station's apparent loudness without fear of overmodulation. Having a
louder sound is often considered an advantage in commercial
competition. However, adjusting a multiband output compressor of a radio
station also requires some artistic sense of style, plenty of time and a
good pair of ears. This is because the constantly changing spectral
balance between audio bands may have an equalizing effect on the output,
by dynamically modifying the on-air frequency response. A further
development of this approach is programmable radio output processing,
where the parameters of the multiband compressor automatically change
between different settings according to the current programme block
style or the time of day."
It Is What It Is
June 14, 2014
James Tenney: Composition, Communication, Creativity
Composition for me is mostly motivated by curiosity. First of all, an
interest in answering the question: what will it sound like if I do such
and such? But then, also, a desire to hear it. It's a desire for a
certain kind of experience, a certain kind of sensory experience, which
does not involve communication. Now, you speak of just about anything
involving the senses as a communication process in an abstract way, but
when I say communication, I mean something involving intention. There is
an intention on the part of the sender to produce a signal which means
something specific to the receiver, and the receiver is made to
understand something through the receipt of the signal.
The only way in which that is relevant to my work is to say that what I
want to be understood is just the message itself, the signal itself.
It's not about something else. It's simply the basis for an experience.
And I make music with the awareness that other people are going to hear
it; so in a certain sense, I make it for other people to hear, but
primarily because I want to hear it. Although I could imagine
being quite delighted to sit in a studio and produce music that
interested me, I'm a social being too, so it's part of my way of being
in the world.
[...]
I think we're all channels, in a certain sense, for a creative process
which already exists in the universe. There is what could be called a
creative process involved, which historically has led from, you know,
the world of elementary particles to atoms, to complex molecules, to
complex organic molecules, to simple living cells. Biological evolution
is a manifestation of a creative process which is inherent in matter, or
inherent in the material world.
I am not thinking of a separate creative agency that puts these
together. There must be a tendency in this direction-- which is, of
course, countered by the opposite tendency of entropy-- but it exists,
evidently. What you want to call it, and how inherent you wish to
believe it is in just plain old matter and energy-- that's where the
questions arise.
[...]
We're all vehicles for creative intelligence. But it's not something
that comes through us from outside of the material world; it's something
that's inherent in the material world itself, I think.
The promiscuous openness of the ear, a hole that takes all comers, means
that we as living systems are open to and invaded by the world. Sound
queers the self/world boundary, all day, every day. It blurs the edges
of any self that the subject-machine cares to hail; even in the midst of
'Hey you, here's your House music,' there are other noises afoot, other
sounds playing, other ways to become something more or less than one
more obedient minority subject.
[...]
Sound-- not music but sound-- can let us hear what is not yet
locatable on the available maps of identity. Hearing the queerness of
sound might help us echolocate the edges of subjection and encounter
everything that stands outside the hailing process.
Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life, so why
not say that any total reaction upon life is a religion? Total reactions
are different from casual reactions, and total attitudes are different
from casual attitudes. To get at them you must go behind the foreground
of existence and reach down to that curious sense of the whole residual
cosmos as an everlasting presence, intimate or alien, terrible or
amusing, lovable or odious, which in some degree every one possesses.
-- William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Notes on Two for Umbral
May 9, 2014
I performed a third site-specific netmusic piece
this past Tuesday night at the cafe Yume in Mexico City's Colonia
Escandon. The situation was considerably different from previous
performances: the venue was an indoor space, more of a small concert
setting than I've ever played previously; and it was the closing act of
the three-night series Umbral, which featured ten sets of musicians from
Europe and North America. This felt like a departure from my first
performance in DF, a one-night event where I performed on the rooftop
after two very different indoor sets by Mexico City natives.
The main challenge this presented to me was tuning to this space-- both
because there was little time to listen and test my work without the
regular activities of the cafe (music, conversation, daytime noise from
the open-air doorway), and because ears and bodies would be a bit
fatigued after two sets (or nine, counting the entire series) at
midnight on a Tuesday. Since my process typically involves highlighting
certain acoustic elements in the performance site, isolating the
elements on a busy cafe Monday morning that would be present on Tuesday
night concert was somewhat tricky.
But certain elements were solid enough to work from, and I started with a
few field recordings in the space. From these I worked out a set of
pitches that would harmonize-- in a both literal and abstract senses--
with the ambience. Again, after hours of listening and tuning, I
deferred my urge to devise a structure immediately. Instead I tested
out various playing positions around the cafe, combinations of tones,
and sequences of recorded material. Acoustically notable were the
space's high ceilings that trapped certain high tones, drones of
multiple refrigerators, and the periodic crunch of ice dropping in the
ice machine. Plus the pleasant taps, hums and hisses of various
espresso drinks being made.
Eventually the structure materialized into two main parts separated by a
long pause. The first part begins with the only field recording from
inside the space, a harmonic and noisy drone from the bathroom vent. The
recording is unprocessed with the exception of volume adjustments and
conversion to decent quality MP3/Ogg files. Another file begins at a
variable time interval as this first one fades out-- it is the same
recording, but converted to a low quality (48 kbps) MP3 file. Since the
MP3 algorithm was designed to render file compression noise less
audible-- hiding it under the recording's already predominant
frequencies, I'm interested in highlighting and listening to this "less
audible" noise. On a cultural level, I also find it necessary to attend
to the processes that transform routine experiences, especially those
that act in a subliminal way; foregrounding MP3 conversion noise is one
straightforward way to accomplish this.
Somewhere in the middle of the this low-quality MP3 recording a set of
six tones begin to repeat themselves at variable volumes and intervals
of time between repetitions. After a few minutes, the long pause. Then,
a different set of six tones, also tuned to aspects of the performance
space. The low-quality MP3 recording fades in again, but to my ears
sounds different as it emerges for the second time-- without the prelude
of the normal-quality version of itself and with a different set of
tones sounding. The computer sound ends when this low-quality MP3
recording fades out. At this point the afterimage of digital sound and
the drone of the performance space continue to interact. The
performance ends when I walk over to the laptop (which has been perched
on a metallic countertop next to the espresso machine) and close it.
Thanks to Rolando Hernandez and Gudinni Cortina for producing an
excellent series (and asking me to play) and to Silvia and Yume staff
for enduring test tones in all corners of the space.
It Is What It Is
April 24, 2014
"Auto-curating"
The main idea in this short essay
by Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is an argument against sound art curators
privileging "sound objects" in exhibitions and in favor of exploring
"the cognitive-associative thought processes triggered by sound, drawing
lines between the source of sound and the listener’s mind that
apprehends it." In other words, in my interpretation: presenting sounds
to stand on their own so they are unencumbered by visual or material
referents. Further:
"I agree with sound-theorists that sound is less closely tied to the
Kantian category of substance than vision, and therefore any attempt to
frame sound within an artistic object or artifact poses problems of a
philosophical nature."
Who says this and on what basis? I read this argument as a
justification for sonic-exceptionalism without much depth. It is only
since the electronic age that sound might have appeared removed from
substance-- from instruments, voices, objects, nature. But in fact,
it's just gained a layer of mediation (physically, transduction) and
it's still, even at its most abstract, dependent on the material
hardware of its transmission: vibrating media, amplification, speakers,
room acoustics, bodies, etc.
Sound is not just waves. It has become easy to look at waveforms on a
computer or oscillator and say "that's sound," but it isn't-- it's a
graphical representation. Sound originates from one vibrating medium
and resonates through others. To deny sound's involvement in the
material world is paradoxically quite materialistic: treating sound as a
pure, sensuous, autonomous phenomenon removes it from the real and
material particulars of its existence. Sound as such is thus easier to
objectify, commodify and disconnect from the conceptual baggage, both
positive and negative, of its production and transmission. Smooth jazz
is a favorite example of a music that began as a radical political and
aesthetic expression of the Black American experience (early jazz) and,
through abstraction and clever production over several decades, led to
an innocuous surrogate for itself that helps us shop easier and relax in
the dentist's waiting room. This is what happens when we detach sound
from its history and origins. On an elemental level, perhaps we can say
that this A-flat or that white noise is semantically abstract in
itself, but the processes that enabled you to hear it are not.
I can get carried away on this topic. The further we abstract things
from their origins, the easier they are to manipulate in nefarious ways.
Think about the abstraction of money from labor, electricity from
fossil fuel extraction, meat from living animals... and the importance
of understanding things on ecological rather than isolated terms is
apparent. Sound is no different. Chattopadhyay even compares the
abstract flow of sound to that of "big data," suggesting that our
exposure to the latter would make the former seem "less esoteric" in
contemporary times. We all have good reason to feel hesitant to
surrender to the abstract flow of big data; it makes sense to remain
aware of how things are connected. Why is sound any different?
Chattopadhyay suggests that curators need to approach sound-oriented
work with a level of sensitivity that comes from experienced listening.
And that this entails selecting work based on its merit and
appropriateness, not on whether it leans "on a visual 'prop' to anchor
its sonic experience." This, we both agree, is responsible curating.
However, if the presentation format or physical particulars of audio art
are to blame for limiting the experience of sound in an exhibition, the
problem is not the art's objecthood, but more likely insensitive
curating.
It seems like a concept of "auto-curating" would entail giving the work
enough space and time for an audience to experience its full perceptual and
conceptual range. If the work is a recording limited physically to its
digital encoding or recording medium, it might not belong in an
exhibition. If it requires a special hardware installation, then the
physicality of the installation is undeniably part of the work. Rather
than excluding materiality from the curating and consequently the making
of audio art, it's worth looking deeper into why these aspects of the
work seem at odds.
I should acknowledge that there is plenty of compelling 'sound art'(?)
whose only physical anchors are software, hardware and playback
platforms. And I do get the sense that this is the type of work that
Chattopadhyay's essay is treating. An important distinction should be
made, and it was this omission that got me going writing this response
in the first place: Some sound work does demand a neutral listening
space free of visual distractions, but this is a necessity for a
particular and relatively narrow genre within a larger group of artists
who make so-called sound art. I'd like to believe that these artists
wisely recognize this "sound only" approach as an historical convention
of the genre and wilfully work within it-- not through a philosophical
belief in sound's autonomy from the rest of the world.
Concepts of listening and sound-oriented curating can be inclusive-- of sound's "cochlear" or "associative" phenomena and its material and conceptual relationships.
It Is What It Is
April 17, 2014
Who can be interested purely in sound, however high its 'fidelity'?
Improvisation is a language spontaneously developed amongst the players
and between players and listeners. Who can say in what consists the
mode of operation of this language? Is it likely that it is
reducible to electrical impulses on tape and the oscillation of a
loudspeaker membrane? On this reactionary note, I abandon the topic.
News has to travel somehow and tape is probably in the last analysis
just as adequate a vehicle as hearsay, and certainly just as inaccurate.
[...]
Integrity: What we do in the actual event is important - not only what we have in mind. Often what we do is what tells us what we have in mind.
The difference between making the sound and being the sound. The professional musician makes the sounds (in full knowledge of them as they are external to him); AMMis their sounds (as ignorant of them as one is about one's own nature).
What you can look at and see are forms and colors; what you can listen
to and hear are names and sounds. What a pity! - that the men of the
world should suppose that form and color, name and sound are sufficient
to convey the truth of a thing. It is because in the end they are not
sufficient to convey truth that "those who know do not speak, those who
speak do not know." But how can the world understand this!
Zhuangzi (Chuang-Tzu), Section 13, Trans. B Watson
It Is What It Is
January 16, 2014
"Moving Into"
Jennifer Gans is a clinical psychologist and researcher who specializes
in this kind of therapy for tinnitus. She calls it mindfulness. Sixteen
years ago, Gans was hit by a truck and sent into a five-day coma. That
accident, and the painful recovery that followed, made her especially
attuned to managing pain. She has since developed a mindfulness program
for tinnitus, modeled after techniques used for chronic pain. Key to the
program is accepting the tinnitus, she said. Focusing on it, rather
than pushing it away and turning inward to harness existing powers of
healing.
"There's a Buddhist saying: pain in life is inevitable, but suffering is
optional," she said. "I'm working with the people on their suffering
about their tinnitus, helping them to change their relationship to the
tinnitus or whatever pain in life comes their way."
She calls it "moving into" the tinnitus, and compares it to driving on ice.
"If you turn away from the skid as we're not supposed to, the car spins
out of control," she explains. "But if you move into the skid, there's
this moment of skidding with it where all of a sudden, you reestablish
balance, eventually. And so that is essentially what I see as what's
helpful for tinnitus -- it's not pulling away from it."
Netmusic Performances, Post-Performance
December 28, 2013
In recent months I began to present my netmusic pieces as live performances. As I wrote on specific pieces below (Chord 2013, Agujero),
the composition process begins with several days of tuning to the
performance spaces. For the concert I then present the finished
composition in that space, performed by a web browser on a laptop. At
this time the relationship between the composition and the surrounding
space is clear: the composition was created for, tuned to, and in some
cases built from found sounds in this place. Though I've written a fair
amount on these pieces' lives during the performance, I haven't gotten
into what happens afterwards.
The same day these pieces are performed, they're posted online here at
topiel.info, joining the previous set of netmusic works that exist
online only, not as IRL performances. Through this project one area
that has interested me is the way they transform, confuse, and merge
space. As space is a necessity of sound's existence, all sounds in
these netmusic pieces are related to the spaces of their origins.
Whether these sounds are field recordings (as in Sometimes) or tiny electronic signals transduced to acoustic ones (as in Nibbles),
the original spaces are encapsulated in the sound material of each
composition. Then several translations occur: I digitize them, convert
them to MP3 and Ogg files, and upload these to a server whose exact
physical location is unknown to me. Then when someone accesses them in,
say, a motel room in Pensacola, their browser reads the files in a
particular way, sends them to a sound card that converts them back into
electrical signals for the speakers to transduce again into acoustic
waves, then this sound resonates in the motel room, between and in the
objects and bodies that are there to listen. Though a number of
parameters in these compositions are determined, this process that
happens during each instance of playback is never exactly the same
because of the inherent variability in this transmission.
An interesting consequence of this series of transformations is that the
work becomes an artifact of its spaces and processing. This is
something that I find compelling about the internet in general-- that
despite its seeming global uniformity, there are still perceptible
traces of the local, the original physical origins and pathways that
signals traverse.
What does it mean when a geographically site-specific composition
becomes a virtual site-specific composition? In this case the original
sonics of these works are tailored to their environment with the
knowledge that they will be performed there. But then these specific
characteristics are exported to very different environments. This is
one way of articulating a very exact location in a different one, a
grafting of one sonic environment's trace onto another space. Robert
Smithson's Nonsites come to mind as similar in their abstract
representation or mapping of places. It isn't really a concern whether
this space-on-space phenomenon sounds good in a conventional musical
sense (what criteria of musical taste should apply here anyway?).
Rather, I find the value in experiencing these traces of a highway
overpass in Queens while I listen from a laptop in a Pensacola motel
room. This potential of grafting one site's acoustic character onto an
entirely different one demonstrates in a very corporeal way the everyday
geographical displacements that the internet constantly enacts. To
listen to this process is to become sensitive to its resonances with our
places, routines, bodies, and work.
Paralell to the online displacement of space is the displacement of
time. Each of these pieces was performed for and at a specific time.
Since I uploaded them online, they can now be played whenever they're
accessed. Each playback session has a different duration within a
predetermined range (for example Agujero is always between 18:00
and 30:20 in total duration, with subsections of varying durations as
well), so each playback constitutes a unique performance of its own.
This is unlike playing a recording as recordings are always the same
each time they're played. There is an ambiguous relationship between
the original 'live' performance and all subsequent playback sessions in
different times and places. Though the live performance was the first,
we can't say it's original or any truer than the other plays. It's the
first, but it's also just one of many which are all generated from the
same files and code. There is no browser or hardware or space that
performs the piece "better" and no playback is a ever a reproduction of
any other. Is this the beginning of generative documentation? That's
one way to imagine it, although how can documentation be equally primary
as the event that it documents? Perhaps a better way to understand it
is as an obsolescence of documentation. Or maybe the entire work is
documentation of an elusive or theoretical original.
In the same way the performances aim to highlight existing elements in
acoustic space, the online dimension of these pieces do the same with
virtual space. Sound catalyzes a process of listening to the
environment. I consider this work less an intervention than a tuning
and sympathetic resonance with what's already going on. As always, it
is what it is.
It Is What It Is
December 18, 2013
Statement (1969)
Hans Haacke
A blanket of snow may be used like paper or canvas on which marks and
traces can be made. Snow also lends itself as inexpensive, although
ephemeral, construction material for shape-oriented sculpture. Neither
approach goes essentially beyond what is traditionally conceived of as
painting or sculpture.
Another attitude, however, would be to consider snow as part of a large
meteorological system determined by humidity, temperature, air pressure,
velocity, and direction of winds as well as topographical
characteristics of the earth. All of these factors are interrelated and
affect each other. Taking such an attitude would lead to working
strategies that could expose the functioning and the consequences of
these interdependent processes.
For a formalist the resulting situations might appear as just another
black-and-white drawing or three-dimensional composition to be judged
according to standard rules of formal accomplishment. However, formal
criteria bypass the systems concept and are therefore irrelevant.
New York City, February, 1969
It Is What It Is, Inverse Perspective
December 8, 2013
"Only from the perspective of the represented can surrounding space be
understood. Everything is oriented to it. That which is represented is
no longer an observable object, but rather the sole mediator of the
entirety of the place. I believe one could say that in an inverse
perspectival music this "represented" leads to an identification with
the individual listener: precisely BECAUSE here one cannot speak of a
"represented." A "that which is represented" is missing in sound. In
its place a space is left open as in a mirror. Sound, music, becomes a
portrait of its individual perceivers.
[...]
(...Inattentiveness implies open-ended wandering. And only this can
lead to the "encounter," to that which might still not be established a
priori.)"
*These notes are a follow-up to notes on Chord 2013,
which describe some basic conceptual origins of the netmusic
performance projects. These notes directly below are more specific to
the performance of Agujero / Hole. For an introduction to the Netmusic project, click here.
"A thing is a hole in a thing it is not" --Robert Smithson quoting Carl Andre
I had the privilege of performing the second site-specific netmusic
piece in Mexico City on November 23, at the home of Maria and Lats
(elusive last names) at Dr Atl 217 in Santa Maria la Ribera. Rolando
Hernandez, who graciously coordinated the night of music (titled "Error
404"), set me up with Lats and Maria after the originally planned venue
fell through. Though I only began working on the piece four days before
the concert, I was given enough hours each day to deal with the space
and eventually present something I felt enthusiastic about.
My process began by a long period of "tuning," something that's become
essential to my concept of practice. It entails a combination of
listening, recording, playing tones in the space, walking around to hear
different acoustic perspectives and material characteristics in the
space, more listening, etc. In this case the space I chose was the
rooftop of the house. I do this for hours and try not to have any ideas
until later. I find that trying to not have ideas (which is
impossible), the ideas that do pop up later on are the ones that are
right. They've given the space and my tuning/listening process enough
time to breathe before they assert something. Then I hold on to those
ideas loosely with the understanding that they still might not be the
best ones for the situation. Because with time the environment changes.
The fountain in the park across the street, for example, was a
prominent sound there in the afternoon, but later it shut off and gave
way to candy hawkers, evening traffic and distant covers of Pink Floyd.
The space was extremely rich acoustically. As the house was situated on
a corner and across from a park, an interesting mix of teenagers
skating, voices, birds, sirens, dogs and steady auto traffic mixed with
other nearby light-industrial drones (drills?). The nearly chest-height
concrete wall that enclosed the roof, as well as the full-sized exterior
walls of the bedroom built on top of the roof, had a significant EQ
effect when crouching or sitting on the roof's floor. Many sounds were
filtered out while higher-frequency sounds produced inside the walls
reverberated off the walls and floor. Through this acoustic enclosure I
had the idea to cut a virtual hole in the roof space, imagining that
sounds from an alternative outside world were finally allowed to
resonate freely inside this space. This idea became clear to me on the
second day of tuning.
The hole, while composed mostly of sounds that I found outside/below the
space, was strictly metaphorical. Like my previous netmusic
presentation in July (see Chord 2013 below),
this one was executed by a laptop placed on the floor. My web browser
read a page that I programmed and whose sounds I recorded and uploaded.
It included sine tones that were tuned to different aspects of the
environment and very loosely formed a sequence of chords, just like the
July piece. This one also included a white noise element that I gleaned
from a fountain in the park across the street (a very prominent part of
the daytime soundscape here). A gradient of MP3/Ogg compression
bitrates changed the quality of this noise as the piece progressed.
Here is a schematic of the samples used in the composition:
Samples were cut and exported at durations and volumes that felt right,
not according to any formal system. The compression gradient
(progressively lower quality audio from Section I to III) might have
been too subtle to notice over the 25+ minutes of the outdoor
performance, but it is very apparent when listening indoors. And since
Firefox defaults to reading the Ogg files while Chrome and others
default to MP3, the sound character of agujero / hole diverges
pretty sharply by the end of the piece depending on which browser you
use to read it. Below, for example, is one compressed sample from
section III, "fountain9," converted to WAV files for comparison in
whatever browser you're using right now:
MP3
Ogg Vorbis
I've been interested in dimensions of white noise for some time now--
not for its connotations of signal failure or decay, but because of its
immersive qualities and musical-semantic ambiguity. I could get into
more detail about my relationship with noise elsewhere (it's a serious
relationship), but for this piece I was interested in 1) the limit
between hearing-as-noise and hearing-as-recording (a fountain), 2) the
way this type of full-spectrum sound demonstrates the coloration of
compression codecs like mp3 and Ogg, and 3) the way these particular
samples interacted with the surface material of the roof. There are
probably other reasons, but I'll save it for later.
I'm grateful to Arcangel Constantini
for the first set of the night, an improvisation using a homemade
instrument that converts electromagnetic induction signals into densely
textured sound. And also to Antonio Dominguez
and Juan Garcia who then improvised together on visuals and bass,
respectively. The quality, variety, conciseness, and good vibe of these
two sets lent considerable momentum into the beginning of mine, which
closed the night. Between twenty and thirty people climbed the stairs
to the roof of the building. We waited and mingled for about ten
minutes before starting the piece. Once I placed the laptop on the
floor in position, opened it and loaded the page, the audience became
silent and listened intently. It wasn't until a few minutes later that
people gradually began to move around freely and train their ears on the
expanded space rather than the laptop speakers alone. It was very
clear the way that this adjustment mirrored my own process of tuning in
preparing the piece. As listeners moved, the pattern of reflection on
the concrete walls and floor changed; as we changed our perspective to
hear from different positions, we changed the acoustic character of the
space itself.
At the time of the performance the ambient sounds described above were
joined by more dogs barking, train whistles, nearby church bells, and
music passing by on car radios. Visually the illuminated laptop screen
on an otherwise dark roof created the appearance of a negative hole,
parallel to the positive hole that piped in sounds external to the
enclosed space. After 20 minutes the screen faded to dark and left only
the acoustic hole for us. Then the sounds ended a few minutes after
that. Allowing a deep breath's worth of rest after the sounds' end, I
walked slowly to the computer and closed it. As with the previous
netmusic performance, applause and my thanks were followed by quiet
lingering in the space.
* * *
There's probably more to write about the different dimensions of the piece's title, the ways in which agujero / hole
functions as a hole, both as a performance and a website as it exists
now. The Smithson/Andre quote above seems related, though it didn't
come to mind until writing these notes. Perhaps my thinking about
Ablinger's passage below also had me thinking about holes as black
squares... Anyway, I got into some pretty minute technical detail here;
certain things I'd rather leave up to interpretation.
"'Liberation of sounds' (Varese, Cage) is necessarily connected to the
techniques of isolation and de-contextualization. On a more
philological or abstract level, however, I am wondering whether the
rhetoric of liberation is hiding something: The intended
individualization-- only subjects can be liberated!-- in truth is an
objectification.
[...]
It is the black square aspect of music, however, which is the less
explored, the less exposed, and that must be treated carefully. I
believe, though, that history itself has already delivered enough
reference points to indicate the black square's relevance and true
existence.
[...]
But I'd like to add one further thought related to my own research and
to the 'totality' aspect which can generate effects of high
individualization. As soon as we shift our attention to its perceptual
consequences, as soon as it is no longer about treating the sounds as
individuals to be liberated-- then white noise is a wonder field for
experience and exploration. In particular, the field of (individual)
projection, interpretation, and acoustic illusion, is well suited for
examining the area of listening and the constructive role of our brain
in that process.
What I learned from my own work-- and especially its black square
aspect, is, that listening has nothing to do with an outer world that we
receive passively. Rather, listening is a creative activity which
forms both what we hear and how we hear. We are creating, therefore,
nothing less than: ourselves."
It Is What It Is
October 10, 2013
Michael Asher critiques Robert Irwin, Dan Flavin (indirectly) and himself
"In response to works such as [Robert Irwin's "Disc Paintings"], my work
employed a formally comparable point of departure, but was manifested
in real space and time. The materials and the structure prevented the
work from being perceived in exclusively visual and objectified terms.
The constructed space functioned as a container for perceptual phenomena
leading beyond the usual wall and floor references in the placement of
works of art in a gallery.
The light in this installation, rather than highlighting any one point
of the display walls of the container, was directed away from them and
dispersed over the floor into the room. All of the elements-- the
spread of tinted light, the walls and the equipment generating light--
were easily visible and accessible and existed on the same spatial level
as the viewer. This was in contradistinction to installation work
where colored light emanated from specific objects and materials, and
where the light source was contained in objects or concealed as
constructions.
It becomes apparent to me in retrospect that the experience of the work
was based on a contradiction of principles: nonvisual material had been
treated and organized according to principles that had been derived from
formal-visual aesthetics. The work served to aestheticize those
contradictions. At the same time the work became problematic: instead
of the work's being developed from and contingent upon existing material
conditions, it was based on, and developed by the use of preselected
materials and principles."
From Michael Asher, Writings 1973-1983 on works 1969-1979, p.18-23
"November 7-December 31, 1969: La Jolla Museum of Art Full PDF
Notes on Chord 2013 September 18, 2013
On July 13, 2013 I performed Chord 2013 on a public plaza in
Woodside, Queens. The work fulfilled a dual function: to constitute a
site-specific performance at the place and time of its premiere, and to
exist as an online netmusic
piece (like many previous pieces) thereafter. The concept of site
figures into both of these functions. For the former function, site
presented the performance venue and the environment for which I composed
the piece-- chose the material, pitches, densities, time intervals of
each section, volume ranges, etc. These musical elements that determined
the performance were then exported to their second context for the
online version. In this sense the online piece takes on traces of the
physical site of the performance. It's a site-specific piece, migrated
to a different site. As I've discussed in previous texts (below)
about the netmusic project, this new site is unique to each instance of
access; so the trace of an original, physical performance site then
resonates in the ecosystems where the online piece is accessed and
heard.
This is typical of post-Internet time and place (Vierkant, McHugh).
Original events or things often start as IRL phenomena, then are
exported to an online holding place. At the point of online access,
traces of the original site enter the site of access. The mixing of
site traces, some obvious and some more liminal, is a trademark of our
time. (I started the netmusic project partially to explore the sound
dimension of this phenomenon.) Some IRL events these days are more
aware of this than others. A famous earlier parallel was the 1960
American presidential debate between John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon.
By most reports, Nixon looked terrible on TV partially because he
refused to wear makeup (which probably looks ridiculous in real life).
His lack of preparation for the TV screen, even if his appearance was
completely normal for real life, turned out to work against him.
Similarly, contemporary events are more or less aware of their afterlife
on the Internet. Composing for both IRL context and online afterlife
seems to be a necessary aesthetic adaptation at this point.
* * *
The physical site of this performance was a special one for me. For
about a year I would cross this plaza for my daily commute and marvel at
its emptiness and lack of function (several other plazas and
full-fledged parks with nicer benches were built just across the
street). Very few people ever spent time on this plaza, though it was
often strewn with a moderate dusting of trash. The plaza sits at a
crossroads of Broadway, 37th Avenue, and 69th Street, and overhangs the
Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and a freight railroad line. The heavy auto
traffic here probably intimidates the less determined pedestrians from
crossing through. Languages heard here, when audible, are Bengali,
Nepali, Tibetan, Spanish, and Urdu much more often than English. Most
prominent sonically is multidirectional auto traffic: cars, buses and
trucks at highway cruising speed below and city stop-and-go speeds on
the upper levels. The complex traffic pattern requires these autos to
stop often so that brake squeaks and releases are frequent. The concrete
ground and fence enclosure amplifies some of these sound elements and
provides some interesting reflectivity for the high-pitched sine tones
of the piece.
Socially I found that this was a space where people pass and sit very
occasionally, but do not gather so there was no risk here of disrupting a
hangout or someone's temporary home, but there was the possibility of
catching and engaging public passersby. People did stop and listen--
and in one case ask about what was happening. That this interaction
felt positive for the performance was proof that the piece was not too
fragile for its context.
I placed the performing laptop on the ground close to the rear of this
unusual stage, at a visually and acoustically central point on the
plaza. The idea of a laptop as a surrogate for a performer is one that
appeals to me and seems eminently normal for our time. A few weeks
prior I attended a wedding where some of the groom's family members
participated via transatlantic telepresence. The scene of a laptop
sitting in a chair, turned to the festivities, occupying a
place-setting, guests greeting and speaking to it intermittently, stuck
in my mind. The next logical step would have been the laptop eating and
drinking, maybe dancing. In a laptop performance I would rather give
performance credit where it is due (to the laptop) than sit behind it as
though I have any control over the sound once the program begins.
Because I really don't. What I did do was choose the musical material
(sine wave samples, in this case) and wrote the program that outlines
how they are realized over time. I decided on this set of pitches and
durations after auditioning them on this plaza. As for the structure of
the composition, the idea was based on my previous piece Chord (2012) which very simply looped a set of five sine tones at various volumes, separated by various intervals of silence. For Chord 2013
my purpose was to expand this idea to an indeterminate but finite
duration so that it could be performed live. For this piece, the "chord"
operates in three sections of variable duration (each lasting around 8
to 16 minutes). Five tones are heard in the first section. Two of
these tones remain in the second section, to which three new tones are
added. The third section drops the two remaining tones from the first
section, keeps two from the second section, adding two new tones and
reprising one from the first section again. A total of nine tones (see
figure below) with a maximum of five heard at one time. The total
duration of the piece is between 24 and 48 minutes; the July 13
performance was on the longer end of that range.
A modest but committed audience gradually arrived a little after 8 PM,
standing in different areas of the plaza and sitting in benches that
face the street, away from the performing laptop. Because of the
high-frequency material and the plaza's enclosed walls, the sound varied
somewhat subtly depending on listeners' position and orientation.
Though most of the laptop sound carried well over the plaza's ambient
sounds, it became more difficult to distinguish which was which as the
piece progressed. This was an intended effect. Socially and
architecturally the openness of this venue brought the music closer to a
feeling of everyday life: some people walked by the plaza without
noticing, others stopped and listened for a bit, dogs wagged and barked,
listeners chatted occasionally. This effect of music and life bleeding
into one another also manifested in the performance's understated
beginning and end. The same bleeding effect, between mundane online
activity and Music, operates in the web version. Finally, the light on
the plaza also shifted dramatically as the sun set during the
performance. When a period of enough silence suggested that section III
was over, I walked over to the laptop and closed it. We listeners
dispersed from the plaza after 20 or 30 minutes, as though the end of
the performance was no reason to leave.
It Is What It Is
July 3, 2013
"If we must curve and plumb line, compass and square to make something
right, this means cutting away its inborn nature; if we must use cords
and knots, glue and lacquer to make something firm, this means violating
its natural virtue. So the crouchings and bendings of rites and music,
the smiles and beaming looks of benevolence and righteousness, which
are intended to comfort the hearts of the world, in fact destroy their
constant naturalness.
For in the world there can be constant naturalness. Where there is
constant naturalness, things are arced not by the use of the curve,
straight not by the use of the plumb line, rounded not by compasses,
squared not by T squares, joined not by glue and lacquer, bound not by
ropes and lines. Then all things in the world, simple and compliant,
live and never know how they happen to live; all things, rude and
unwitting, get what they need and never know how they happen to get it.
Past and present it has been the same; nothing can do injury to this
[principle]. Why then come with benevolence and righteousness, that
tangle and train of glue and lacquer, ropes and lines, and try to wander
in the realm of the Way and its Virtue? You will only confuse the
world!"
Zhuangzi (Chuang-Tzu), Section 8, Trans. B Watson
It Is What It Is, Antonyms
June 12, 2013
A skeuomorph is a physical ornament or design on an object made to
resemble another material or technique. Examples include pottery
embellished with imitation rivets reminiscent of similar pots made of
metal, or a software calendar that imitates the appearance of a paper
desk calendar.
I came across this article
today in which the writer, Sophie Heawood, claims that music has "died"
for her "because she started listening to it on [her] laptop." After a
move that prompted her to get rid of her CDs and only listen to music on
Spotify, she is left with no other choice: "It's not so much that my
laptop made all other physical forms redundant, it's that it made music
so dull that I lost interest in music."
I'm grateful that someone-- especially a pop culture writer-- would take
on this topic so candidly, as cursory and diaristic as the article is.
This attitude is similar to one that I've heard from self-proclaimed
music devotees, audiophiles, and record junkies; music culture is
declining further (as it always has) to a lower-fidelity,
higher-convenience state where the dying craft of recording-making is
losing out to devious industry executives and their fickle or
indifferent target market. But since the first shift of this kind, from
the edison cylinder to the disc record,* this has been a recurring
phenomenon in the perennially mass market-oriented music tech field.
It's completely reasonable to hold this attitude-- to listen to records
on hi-fi stereo systems and embrace the dying arts of quality recording
and quality listening. We should certainly preserve this part of our
musical heritage. But to lament the demise of these arts as the "death
of music" is to underestimate the agency we have to change our
relationship to the music-technological present. (The article cited is a
particularly good example of this helpless lament as the author
describes the sequence of events that carried her from music enjoyment
to music death.) There are positive and creative ways to deal with this
problem, or rather, to understand that this is less a problem and more
an inevitable change in the way our culture deals with music.
Listening is an active process. Though contemporary ears have gotten
used to listening to recordings as high-fidelity stereo reproductions of
studio or live acoustics, we don't have to keep listening as though all
music is produced and distributed this way. To many of us including
Heawood, hi-fi listening is a lost cause for most of the music that's
around us. Whether it's top 40, Mozart muzak or smooth jazz, music is
so often used as a placeholder-- as a statement that "there is music
playing here"-- as opposed to being treated as significant in itself.
Retail stores, transit hubs and "please hold, thank you for holding"
situations are proof of this phenomenon.
Rather than shutting ears and turning up noses to this treatment of
sound, we can listen. We might not immediately like the blatant
mistreatment of something so dear, but this is our culture and it is
what it is. We can close our ears and minds by blocking out the noise;
or we can continue, as good musicians are trained to do skillfully, to
expand our listening and see what happens. It's not going to hurt
anyone. What we get might not be more enjoyable or uplifting, but it's
definitely more real. And equally important, our practice of active
listening can remain boundless rather than delineated and exclusive, an
on-off binary. Listening to the real world is better music than anyone
can create.
This puts musicians in a really interesting position right now. Some of
us will continue to work in the tradition of stereo records, the
tradition of high fidelity recording, playback, and listening. This is
not wrong. What excites me now is the possibilities that stretch these
traditions: how do musicians deal with shitty audio quality, cheap
consumer playback hardware, streaming, compression noise, internet
distribution, loud environments, bad acoustics? When our safe listening
spaces are challenged, musicians have the power (privilege or joy,
really) to expand our aesthetic field, to fold in these challenges as
new concepts and contexts for music.
Hito Steyerl has written convincingly in defense of the poor image. A very similar argument can be made in defense of poor audio. Eric Laska
has an essay forthcoming outlining his "Thoughts on Bad Acoustics."
Steyerl and Laska both insist that declining consumer media quality is
unrelated to the demise of music quality. In fact, maybe it's a good
thing: low quality challenges musicians to open our ears and our
aesthetics, to allow for a richer repertoire of future musical material.
----
*this compromised the recording by creating a differential in the
stylus' angle to the grooves: with a cylinder, the stylus is always
perpendicular to the groove; with a disc, the stylus hits the groove at a
range of angles as it moves from the beginning to the end of a record
side, creating some variation in the playback. This shift, according to
my colleagues at WKCR-FM, was the first of many similar shifts in which
quality lost out to consumer and industry convenience.
]Blnkt Talk Series - With Eric Laska
March 15, 2013
Philadelphia, PA
Excerpt of conversation with Eric Laska and Jordan Topiel Paul in room with Impulse Blasts (impulse-blasts.com) and Wash (topiel.info/wash.html)
double sound installation. Thanks to John Paetsch for hosting,
Bertolain Elysee for recording and all present for participating.
Through a Pane of Glass
May 22, 2013
On researching the MP3 codec for various reasons, I came across this information on Wikipedia:
"The song "Tom's Diner" by Suzanne Vega was the first song used by
Karlheinz Brandenburg to develop the MP3. Brandenburg adopted the song
for testing purposes, listening to it again and again each time refining
the scheme, making sure it did not adversely affect the subtlety of
Vega's voice." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3#Development)
and
"Vega wrote the song based on a comment by her friend Brian Rose, a
photographer, who mentioned that in his work, he sometimes felt as if
'he saw his whole life through a pane of glass, and [...] like he was
the witness to a lot of things, but was never really involved in them.' "
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom%27s_Diner)
This is an MP3 of "Tom's Diner" compressed at the lowest bitrate available to me, 8 kbps. (Download)
It Is What It Is, "Specific Objects"
April 16, 2013
American artist Donald Judd wrote an essay titled "Specific Objects" (click for PDF) in 1964 (published in Arts Yearbook 8, 1965). Judd advocates a new type of work that operates in real space as opposed to the illusionistic 2-dimensional canvas. These Specific Objects are what they are; they represent nothing else.
It Is What It Is, HESPT
April 2, 2013
HESPT is a word whose phonetic and graphical appearance are the same as the word's meaning.
Every instance of hespt is hespt.
It Is What It Is
March 3, 2013
The Sufi mystic Rumi titled his volume of discourses "Fihi Ma Fihi" or "It Is What It Is"
What's the difference between faith and creative practice? Download PDF
Net Music (2011-)
In the fall of 2011 I began making Net Music "studies" as a way to
explore a native format for music on the internet. A few ideas guided
this project:
The internet is a relatively new medium, just like cylinders, discs,
tapes and CDs were at different points in the last century. Music has
always developed symbiotically with its media and spaces. Just as you
can point to a CD and say "this is music," I want to ask whether you can
open a web site and say the same.
The specifics of sound on the internet are also unique. With a single
html document that points to a few small sound files, these pieces
create resonance wherever they're opened. Similar to other Net Art, the
work physically lives on a server but is heard through a unique pathway
each time: through the internet connection, the browser software, the
audio hardware, and the ambient acoustics of the space. So a static html
file brings about an open and dynamic range of resonances.
A web site is a different listening context for music. What do you do
with a web site that's only sound and a color? Do you listen intently as
if it's a recording? Do you keep it as an open tab as you do your
other business? Do you try to peek at the source code to see what's
going on? How long do you listen before you lose patience, wander
elsewhere, close the tab? Regardless of your first time, do you ever
revisit that page? How do we listen to this?
It is what it is. Unlike a recording, each instance of Net Music is its
own acoustic thing. Just as many paintings simulate three-dimensional
space, recordings also usually reproduce the original or optimal
acoustics of a studio, concert hall, or stereo listening space. This is
true even with direct recordings of electroacoustic sound because
playback can have more or less fidelity to the original (ie. there is a
best way to hear it-- on these speakers, in this room, etc.). But Net
Music has no original acoustics to reproduce. Each playback is original
and specific to itself. No version can be better or worse.
Despite the conceptual workings, it's really all about listening.
Avant-garde music follows a pretty basic principle: the world changes,
listening changes. Of course listening is always the same but the
context for listening coevolves with life.