It Is What It Is

It Is What It Is
March 29, 2025

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.

--Sean Meehan, "On the Sensation of Tone," interview with John McCowen, Sound American, 2020

It Is What It Is
January 22, 2021

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.


--Sara Ahmed, "Complaint and Survival," feministkilljoys.com


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.

--Christopher Page, "In Praise of Drop Shadows" (BOMB, 2019)

It Is What It Is
January 27, 2020

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:

80, 40

Masking Study #2

Masking Study #3

It Is What It Is
December 20, 2018

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.

Click here to listen

It Is What It Is
March 27, 2017

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.



Soundwalk during Piece for Bustamante (excerpt)

It Is What It Is
March 5, 2015

"It isn’t what it looks like but what it is that is of basic importance."

--Sol LeWitt
Full interview here

Attenuation Study
February 19, 2015

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).

Faster, a pulse study in durational acceleration

Slower, a pulse study in perpetual deceleration

Louder, a pulse and white noise study in durational crescendo (~20 years)

Quieter, a pulse and white noise study in perpetual decrescendo

Nychthemeron, a 24-hour pulse study; most active in early afternoon, least active in early morning

Nychthemeron (two-channel version)

Pulse (minutes) -- alternates between random and metronomic pulses depending on the minute

It Is What It Is
January 6, 2015

"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.

A month in Green River, Utah
September 2014

My post-fellowship blog post was published here.

It Is What It Is
September 3, 2014

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

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression:

"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.

-- James Tenney on Intention, Harmony, and Phenomenology (PDF)

It Is What It Is
June 6, 2014

All Sound is Queer

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.

-- Drew Daniel, "All Sound is Queer," Wire (Nov. 2011)

It Is What It Is
May 16, 2014

Total is Religion, Listening as Religion

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); AMM is their sounds (as ignorant of them as one is about one's own nature).

From Cornelius Cardew: "Towards an Ethic of Improvisation" (1971)

It Is What It Is
January 23, 2014

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."


Excerpted from PBS.org, November 6, 2013:
"Neuroscience may offer hope to millions robbed of silence by tinnitus"

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

From Peter Ablinger, Inverse Perspective (link) Trans. Bill Dietz:

"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.)"

Notes on Agujero / Hole
December 1, 2013

*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.

It Is What It Is
October 29, 2013

From Peter Ablinger: Black Square and Bottle Rack (Full PDF)

"'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.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph

It Is What It Is
June 10, 2013

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.