After finishing the pieces I needed to do a rough mix and master, for me that meant just EQ, compression, limiting on the master and doing some more graphic EQ’ing. Checking the metering, LUFS and phasing issues that have occurred. As well as making sure all tracks have equal LUFS so when you hear one from the other there aren’t any issues with volume differences. These are things I’ve been reading from my mixing in the small studio book I purchased. I didn’t do much in terms of creating mixing as in my improvisations I did fade-ins and FX on the fly live so all this session needed was some surgical EQ and raising levels, making sure not too much compression is present.
Here is a screenshot of my final mix/master touch-ups.
And the final bounced tracks, now it’s time to create the artwork and create some track names and the overall project name.
Lena Ortega Atristain aka Leena Lee is a Mexican sound artist, researcher, designer, and teacher specializing in nature/culture relations with a focus on soundscape ecology, bioacoustics, and field recordings. Through practice-based research, she aims to cultivate the community’s ecological consciousness by involving listening practices, field observation, recording, and soundscape composition. Her main focus is the bird population/individuals of nearby surroundings and how they relate to and are part of their territory. She approaches these inquiries by incorporating other dimensions of care and relationship with non-human animals and the environment that open possibilities to think critically about the spaces we inhabit and how we are environmental beings. She has been a visiting artist and researcher in different countries, participated in national and international exhibitions, and has published articles in collective books of philosophy, design, and sound art magazines. Member of the Arte+Ciencia research and production group of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and currently teaching at the Environment University in Valle de Bravo, Mexico.
I think this lecture will help me with my dissertation and current prototype project. As soundscape ecology, bioacoustics and field recordings are the main interest. She also has the idea of how field recording and listening can help bring environment awareness and allow us to think critically within these spaces, something I’m also doing research into! I hope it’s as good as I think it will be.
BIRD ENCOUNTERS
This project is centred around the current environmental climate that we exist in. It discusses the need for nature with humans and how we should focus our attention back towards the relationships between humans and the non-human world that exists. One way of doing this is through soundscape ecology, listening, and field recordings. The project proposal outlines a framework in which these acts can be obtained.
One of the main products of this project is to develop a transdisciplinary-experimental protocol that incorporates other dimensions than those typically considered in current listening research and the study of bioacoustics and soundscape ecology such as: dialogue, care, and accompaniment. We will use field recordings in artistic compositions with the intention of communicating ecological themes to listeners’ bodies, rather than discussing concepts, representing or reconstructing soundscapes. Instead of working with hypotheses, we will open experimental fields with no fixed direction and no previously established purpose.
It then goes on to discuss the steps that took this project into actuality. Firstly a conference to locate and understand current issues within the climate and discuss critically how and where these issues are occurring, finally hosting a sound workshop with participants that will lead into a sound concert and installation which combines the field recordings from both the sound walks and field recording trips with soundscapes of the cities to create a sonic piece that communicates emotions.
I find myself fitting very much within the same ideas and frameworks presented here. I want to create a sound walk booklet guide for my field recording process after researching this. I think alongside the finished pieces I want to create a booklet that explores the issues within the area and a few tasks to listen to and explore further within the space.
SONIC ALLEGORIES
Sonic Allegories is a project that seeks to explore the atmospheres in-between spaces, sounds that are barely perceptible, and areas of transitional space. The artists responded to two different locations within this framework of thinking one Cantera Oriente reserve in Mexico City and the other in TerraAstroCene a sonic walk in Evora at the Cromlech de Los Almendros.
Cantera Oriente reserve of Mexico City which was recorded is called the A3 buffer zone that sits in an ecological research laboratory from the UNAM university. Originally the site was a quarry and an asphalt plant which after being exploited for 25 years turned out to enclose a natural spring. When this was discovered the plant was closed down and returned back to the university. After the closure, the 16ft holes were covered in the soil so that plants could grow once again. Field recordings taken from this area were used in the compositions, they each tell a story of the place. Sounds of air and water, stories of above and below.
The second location Cromlech de Los Almendros, Evora Portuga, recorded soundscapes of the largest megalithic monument of the Iberian Peninsula. The sounds were composed into a sound walk in Mexico city and deals with the presence of the monument, the idea that because it dates back to Neolithic times and it has had to withstand so much change in the world makes its sonic presence interesting.
I found this piece to be captivating, and the motivations to be similar to my own work for my prototype project. I’m curious to do further research and to critically reflect upon my work and learn from their project as well. The two 15-minute tracks and video results are beautiful.
Post-Lecture Reflection:
She begins by wanting to do a Pauline Oliveros exercise. She asks us to sit on the edge of the chair, put our feet on the floor, have contact. Try to bring your mind to this moment present, focus on your breathing and take a couple of breaths together. Put your hand on your chest and feel your heart, tap the rhythm lightly.
She loves this exercise because it gives us an opportunity to be in the same place even though it’s virtual and everyone is far away in these online meetings.
She works in the intersection of nature and culture through sound. An environmental approach to sound, care, dialogue and accompaniment.
Listening is an act of relating to the world, listening is about resounding with the world of which I am part.
Nan Shepherd was someone who pioneered accompaniment In environmental activities. The idea of going to nature just to be there, not for a reason. To reach a summit or to hike across it but to simply be and accompany the space.
Hildegard Westerkamp the pioneer of sound walks created sound walks and the concept of simply being within the space, establishing a respectful relationship within the space you are entering.
Niebla was an album released in march 2022, this album explores the entanglements of nature and humans and non-humans. Situating the listener within the forest ecosystem. A place not of alienation but of consideration. This explores the symbolic relationship and engagement of the users and non-human species in the forest.
She then plays the album for us. Twenty minutes in length.
She used very simple materials to create it. The multi-media piece is thought to be watched on a screen and she used stock photography from the internet. She wanted the audio to be the main guide and so she created very simple visuals.
This piece is inspired by the practice of sound walking from Westerkamp.
The research takes a life of its own for her when researching projects. It allows her to focus and use binaural beats and field recordings which are great for her.
She was recently invited to a series of sound meditations inspired by Pauline Oliveros. It’s a program that has been going on for ten years. What she likes about this project is that it opens up something so specific like sound arts and something so specific like meditation to the public. Mothers, fathers, dogs, children. Everyone of all types attends.
They tried to move from the acoustic part of the presentation to the electronic part back to the acoustic part. She shows us a work file to listen to.
This piece was one part of two parts of performances, she likes to always include narratives and storytelling but she never tells anyone what the story is. It just helps her build structure and where it should go. She won an investment in their work and they went directly to the forest. Her room was over a place where the frogs would sing all night and this made part of the recordings, she also discusses the idea of sharing works in progress and hearing the process is important and helps, even more, to understand where we are at.
She finally moves to the last piece of work she wishes to show us.
This is another project in collaboration with her artist friend. They only focussed on one field recording, their process was that they decide on one tone that they want to base their whole performance on and explore that. For her also gestures are very important, she had a really beautiful fish bowl with water and used one of these controllers and put a few tones into the controllers and it’s her touching the water triggering the controller.
She also likes to work with lighting to create a sense of atmosphere, her PhD studies were focused on atmospheres and the reaction bodies receive from light.
Overall this lecture was thoroughly interesting, her ideas around the Anthropocene and capitolocene as well as the dichotomy of humans and non-humans. Ways of listening as understanding and situating. To give time and space to understand our connection with the non-human world, something similar to biophilia. I do wish perhaps she discussed more into this than just playing long pieces but I did still enjoy it. I will take some ideas presented into my own works as I finish off the compositions and editing, and perhaps make a booklet guide.
Anna Friz is a sound, transmission and media artist, and media studies scholar. Her work reflects upon media ecologies, infrastructure and environment, time perception, radio and transmission art histories, and critical fictions, with a focus on listening, improvisation, site-specificity, and repurposing technologies. Since 1998 she has created self-reflexive radio for broadcast, installation or performance, where radio is the source, subject, and medium of the work. She also creates large-scale audiovisual installations and composes for film, theater, and contemporary dance. Her most recent works include the outdoor transmission sculpture Solar Radio (with Absolute Value of Noise) at Wave Farm, NY; the 22-hour live radio performance Fog Refrain, and We Build Ruins, a series of media art works expressively considering mining and industrial corridors in the high altitude deserts in northern Chile. Anna is currently Associate Professor of Sound in the Film and Digital Media Department of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Anna’s work and uses of radio and sound interest me, especially the radio section. I’ve been doing reading into radio sound-art work as I wanted to incorporate radio within one of my portfolio works for next year. I think this should help give me some inspiration.
BREAKWATER
This project is an 8-channel installation piece that explores the breakwater in Vienna Austria. It uses field recordings of underwater sounds taken with a hydrophone and contact mics. Short wave recordings and electromagnetic recordings. Open air as well. It explores the idea of where multiple points meet, and swell together to create a communal experience.
I didn’t manage to find audio links to listen to this work but it does sound interesting, I built an electromagnetic microphone this year and find its usage of it super interesting, the sounds are there but we don’t see them.
GHOST IMBISS
Ghost Imbiss is a collaboration with other artists using limited minimalist broadcast technology to see if they can transmit small delicate sounds. Sounds used were saliva, mouth feedback device. AM/FM transmitters and receivers. Walkie-talkies, glass bottle and the voice.
This project sounds really interesting. I hope she plays some of this work in her lecture!
Post Lecture Reflection
Anna starts by speaking about her background, she began playing with sounds in her early 20s on a community radio station in Vancouver Canada. Working in the studio was the first chance she got to use sonic equipment. Using old equipment gave her hands-on experience. She very much thought of the studio as a performative space.
Because they only had a two-track reel-to-reel player, when creating anything she had to perform into the tape machine and use the mixing desk as a performative tool instead of having multi-track recorders.
She very much began being used to having a silent audience. This habit has stuck with her, even today thinking about what sounds to play, she finds herself doing the same as she did back then. Layering up layers and making a piece in real-time.
She has had a chance to present her sound work in many different places, from outside in the field, concert venues, installations and even more industrial places.
The pandemic has pushed her to be back on the radio, especially because of being at home. So she’s been interested again in radiophonic questions. Radiophonic has returned to the foreground for her. She decides to play us a piece which discloses her current electromagnetic interests.
She took part in a project where artists were asked to create a piece that reflects their position on transmission. She is really interested in thinking about media ecology and ecology more broadly and she is drawn into looking at depth into things that are underground and in the air. The surface tensions in the space. She says it comes from listening in boundless radio and areas of noise and rhythmic sorts of interference. Embodiment is also important to her, she doesn’t like that the radio voice is disembodied. There are bodies everywhere in the voice, you couldn’t habit a voice If you haven’t inhabited your body.
She’s also been further interested in this question raised by radio, this experience of distance. In communication media there has been this obsession with overcoming distance, She’s interested in the opposite, enjoying the distance between the transmitter and the receiver. During this time of covid, she’s been listening to a two-way radio, a place of practical communication. If it’s air traffic control or anyone else using a walkie-talkie or a two-way radio. The idea of useful radio is a way of digging into the evidence of human presence without looking at street traffic or other things that people might see.
She was invited to a festival with lots of other creatives for a 22hr festival performance. Some created pre-recorded and some created live pieces. She decided to make a 22hr performance, she was working with the notion of acoustic and electromagnetic sounds in the fog line on the bay area coast.
The fog is a super important part of the ecosystem she lives in, a lot of plants and trees rely on the fog as moisture in her area. Climate change is diminishing the amount of fog and this has affected the forests severely. The fog is this balm for the dry landscape and accounts for most of the moisture the plants need. The fog establishes space in this area, but also this ambiguous medium, it’s difficult to pin down its form.
She’s interested in morse code beacons that would help navigation in boats. These would give boats easier ways to navigate. Most are still discontinued but there are a few that get triggered once the fog begins.
In her 22 hr piece, she worked with field recordings, people and creatures within this sphere and electromagnetic sphere and radio workers using walkie-talkies. She then shows us a part of the piece.
She discusses the walkie-talkie field recordings that she uses within this piece, she’s interested in how this represents humanity without photos of traffic for example.
She now wants to show us another piece that also has a visual element, but she’s interested in the nonhuman element of this previous idea she’s discussed. She created a live performance video that she was doing during covid at home through Twitch.
She now wanted to show us the video as now we know what’s going on in the air, this piece shows us what is going on underground.
She’s also been thinking about radio and transmission systems, and she’s been researching this desert in Chile. It’s well known because high-powered telescopes are located there, and star viewing is incredible there. It’s also a place historically been fought over during colonial times as a site of extraction, salt mining and also ongoing massive issues of copper and lithium mining. This area has undergone a real transformation in this industry, and as a medium maker this is the materials that she uses, the demand during the pandemic has increased for these materials. When she is recording and filming in these mines the scope is expanding and expanding.
She then says she will play us a multichannel installation with three screens, one screen is focused on the salt flats and a part of the desert that isn’t transformed yet by human activity and is adjacent to the location of a huge lithium mine. This area was once the bottom of the sea but now is at a very high elevation.
When working on Longform projects she wants to create a tenant on how to approach the project. Her project in the desert has been about attention to time, duration, and the interplay between soft and hard power. This isn’t just human and non-human, but hot air rising from the desert, that the turkey vultures use to cruise on. The dune is about to collapse into the close city. How the desert outlasts everything.
In her discussion, she also talks about bodies being a field recording device which is interesting itself, something I’ve been thinking myself for a while.
I found her talk overall thoroughly interesting and relatable towards my practice, the Anthropocene is definitely a large issue within this work and other pieces of hers. The uses of two-way and short-wave radio and the thoughts around the silent listener and the imaginary listener are of interest to me. She also discusses using pieces of equipment within her work that create the problems, recorders and laptops with lithium batteries from the minerals that are extracted within the desert. The question that ponders is if the field recording and the works are self-aware and can justify a balance between the need to listen as a way of understanding and wanting to create environmental change and or if this adds to the problem.
I decided to look more into tape and cassette as a medium to critically reflect on theorists and writers further than my current readings. To take my reflections as far as possible. I found this interesting essay that discusses Tape and the ideas behind the human alike abilities of tape and how tape can be understood In different ways and what tape offers that other technology does. Here are some quotes and reflections that brought interest from reading.
The difference between analogue and digital recording resolves in a difference between a continuously varying waveform, in its various physical analogies and a discontinuously-encoded form.
Something I’ve always understood about analogue to digital recording and playback is that waveforms are what is played in analogue and digital are the same but converted into ones and zeros. There is more ease with analogue distortion due to this, as it’s not a linear one or zero. I think this does create a more human idea of tape when one understands this analogue perspective within it.
The idea that one might be able to read off sound from the scorings in a phonograph record might always have been a fantasy, but gramophone records do allow for a certain kind of quasi-legibility, sounds of greater amplitude resulting for example in visibly deeper and wider indentations; djs are able to drop the stylus very accurately on to a particular point in a piece of music using this kind of legibility. Tape offers much less opportunity for this, since the dispositions of the magnetic particles on the tape are not visible, meaning that one length of tape looks and feels pretty much identical to another. One of the reasons that magnetic recording was not adopted as quickly by editors of film sound after the War was precisely that it did not offer a visible set of undulations on the film print as the optical soundtrack did (Morton 2004, 126).
I think that the idea that tape has recordings embedded but blind to our eyesight is another interesting point. Vinyl has obvious grooves and one can easily distinguish the separations between audio and tracks. Tape is all magnetic and more difficult but it’s still there. What does this mean for the user and the experience? Ideas of letting go and giving things time to breathe become apparent in my thoughts.
Record ‘scratching’ allows one to interfere with the reproduction of a recorded signal; tape editing allows one to start again and produce a new signal entirely. As N. Katherine Hayles observes, ‘whereas the phonograph produced objects that could be consumed only in their manufactured form, magnetic tape allowed the consumer to be a producer as well’ (Hayles 1999, 210).
This is something I’ve read in other sources that tape was the first time a consumer could also become a producer and engineer all at once. Due to the nature of tape being re-recordable and erasable this created an unwanted outcome. Giving the listener control, as well as a playback device and recording device. Brian Eno also discusses this as the time when he felt that he could create music by non-musicians.
The disk is a fossil record; the tape is much more like Freud’s Wunderblock, susceptible at any point to modification and erasure. The disk lays sound out for manipulation and modification. Tape allows sound to turn back on, and in on itself. This could sometimes happen without human intervention. One of the most mysterious effects of old tapes was the phenomenon of ‘print-though’, caused by the fact that, when wound on top of one another, the magnetic patterns imprinted in one part of the tape could print themselves by induction on a neighbouring part of the tape. Normally this faint ghosting of the sound is buried by the principal signal, but it can become audible in blank passages of tape, causing a curious anticipation of the first second or so of a track before it actually begins. Tape embodies not just the stopping of time, but the spreading and thickening of the present moment.
This concept laid out here that tape embodies not just the stopping of time but the spreading and thickening is an interesting quality to give to an object such as tape. Tape being seen as possessing the qualities to control time isn’t wrong, The dynamic difference between vinyl and tape separates from the fact that vinyl is waiting to be played and manipulated. The tape wanted to be erased and re-recorded. When erased it still holds fragments of the past and ghosts within it. The thickening of the present moment is real.
In the early 1950s, Francois Poullin invented a device known as a ‘morphophone’. The morphophone played a loop of tape in a circle, in which were set an erasing head, a recording tape and ten playback heads, the positions of which could be adjusted, to allow different kinds of delays. Another technique devised by Brian Eno and Robert Fripp was called Frippertronics. This involves hooking up two tape recorders alongside each other; an input is recorded on the left hand machine, and the tape is fed to the right hand machine, which plays back the sound that has just been recorded, though with a few seconds’ delay. This signal can then be fed back to the first tape-recorder, and replaced by or mixed with whatever new sound may be being played.
These early ideas with tape and techniques have fabricated a current future we exist in, and at the time were very revolutionary. I searched for a morphophone and decided to see what it looked like. Really interesting, and the concept in itself is hilarious but also gives a sense of the technological advancement that was available at the time. The other technique of Frippertronics is also something similar I did with tape loops within my machine and within my final prototype hand-in.
Morphophone
Burroughs sees language itself as a kind of tape system, meaning that thinking itself is a kind of playback, or perhaps even a simultaneous recording and playback. Burroughs is not the only person to have borrowed from the tape-recorder to understand mental functioning. Recent work suggests that these kind of hallucinations may have their origin in some kind of distortion in the perception of time, for which the tape recorder has sometimes provided an apt analogy.
I think once again this idea that tape and human characteristics have similar qualities is true, and also can give us an understanding of tape as a medium and what it can offer that digital doesn’t. Being aware of similarities can help us draw conclusions and link ideas and thoughts together.
In fact, the relation between the right and left brains has often been understood in terms, not only of the circulation of recording and playback functions, but also of the difference between two different kinds of recording, namely the analogue and the digital
Again, the left and right brain relating to digital and analogue, playback and recording. The same way our brain works with retaining information. There are numerous connections within this.
I think this has been a great essay explaining some ideas about the temporality and corporeal abilities of tape, the connection with human-like qualities and the differences between vinyl and what tape offers the creator, as well as what tape did at its time.
Alex De Little is a sonic artist and researcher with bases in Leeds and London, UK. His practice encompasses installation, composition, performance and workshops; it is concerned with the interrogation of listening as a way to understand environment, self, and social relations. Alex’s work and collaborations have been featured at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Tate Modern, Somerset House, Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Health Museum (Houston, TX), Den Frie Centre for Contemporary Art (Copenhagen), The National Science and Media Museum, London Contemporary Music Festival, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Walmer Yard, and the Hepworth Wakefield. Alex completed a practice-based PhD with Scott McLaughlin and Martin Iddon at the University of Leeds, and postdoctoral research fellowships at the Universities of Leeds and Nottingham. He is a member of CAVE (Centre for Audio-Visual Experimentation), and an honorary research fellow at Goldsmiths Centre for Sound Practice Research.
Based on this bio I think Alex saying that he is interested and concerned with the interrogation of listening as a way to understand the environment, self and social relations to be very critical. I also consider this a lot and within my time studying for my three-year degree I have found myself accidentally leaning towards my entire focus being on these ideas and questions that present themselves when one listens a lot. I’m keen to know more about his ideas on the same questions that I have.
Floating –> Radialsystem (with Sonic Acts of Noticing and Soft Agency) [2021]
This project was in collaboration with Sonic Acts of Noticing
It was an extended listening and reading walk in Berlin that followed a flow of water from the university to an ex-pumphouse on the edge of the River Spree. The walk was said to engage practices of collective reading and listening as an approach to engage with the flows of water.
The walks were set up in a silent disco fashion with one field recorder broadcasting its sounds whilst someone else lead the walk. The sounds would shift between hydrophone recordings and contact mic recordings. The idea was to amplify or be present in the context of environmental sounds.
I think this idea of unified sound walks is something I’m fond of. The shared human experience certainly amplifies experiences and discussions, especially with something precious as the natural world, after all, it’s not anything one person owns but the whole planet that enjoys it. I’m curious about the setup and further ideas for this piece.
Eastside – What If? (with Hannah Beard) [2021]
In collaboration with Hannah Beard, Alex created a billboard and sound walk that imagined an alternate future for the east side of the city centre of Leeds. A city centre that amplifies people rather than road traffic and is a direct response to the climate crisis. Again with a similar silent disco approach Alex created soundscapes of the proposed future sounds of this newly changed east side city centre if the plans that his collaborate Hannah Beard created became true. A sonic postcard of the potential future. They would walk around the current locations and listen to what they could be and if they take off the headphones they listen to what it currently is.
Following on from the first piece to this one, I’m excited to hear his extended lecture on these topics and the climate crisis, the use of field recordings in this context and how he has pieced together these landscapes. His ideas and intentions within his work and how he responds to a few of my questions.
Post Lecture Reflection
Alex starts by speaking about his background, his undergraduate was in music and experimental music. He became more interested in sound influences after finishing both. He became interested in sonic phenomena and acoustic phenomena and their behaviour in their environments and if you can create a compositional practice around it.
2014-2018 he was doing a PhD in sonic arts and sound studies at the University of Leeds. It was in sound practice and situated ways of listening in acoustic phenomena and to critique ocular visually dominated modes of production. He wanted people to engage not necessarily through space or aesthetics but through intensities of vibrations.
Just before the pandemic in 2019 is what he will start with, the offshoots the tendrils and the things that come from this are what this discussion will become.
He’s led through listening rather than sound, listening as a broad practice, giving and taking attention. A practice is subjective.
Listening as relationality, how we relate to others, ecologies and urban, non-manmade environments. He sees it as a reimagined way of listening, potential transformation through listening is how he considers how we can change ourselves. His craft through the result of this is setting up situations of listening and how we can develop practices that take from what is already there, from existing practices, and new practices such as deep listening. Listening as offering a time for reflection.
Since finishing his PhD his projects have become super collaborative, he believes perhaps it came from doing a PhD and being sat alone for a long time which has spiked this.
He starts with his collaboration, Listening in Spaces.
British High Street of Exchanges, (with studio Polpo) [2020 (2021)]
In late 2019 he was invited by studio Polpo to join the installation. They are a social architecture practice, and they’re interested in the social dynamics of creating and building. Considerations are climate and social justice.
Could the high street become a place of cultural exchange, they wanted to see the high street, not as a place of exchanging capital but how can we draw attention to social solidarity on the high street. He brings up again listening as a way of paying attention, they wanted to convey that in an array of loudspeakers in this form. Studio Polpo set up a lot of access around the city to collect these recordings. They hid microphones around places of interest in the city, one was an afro barber. His task was to take these field recordings and allow the listener to immerse themselves in these spaces, to sit in the barbers and hear these conversations. To hear these interactions that were taking place.
Another project he was involved in was titled Deep Listening Certification Training (2020-21)
He was really interested in the practice of deep listening. He became interested in Pauline Oliveros’s project Deep Listening – Sonic Meditations.
He studied a formalised way of working within listening, and gained his certification. It took him two-three months and he learnt numerous skills within it. After receiving his certification Alex went on to create his own listening circle within lockdown, he created sessions where everyone wrote journals of thought and ideas from listening. And sharing field recordings within sessions.
Sonic Acts of Noticing (with Julia udal and Jon Orlek 2021)
They wanted to do more from the audio from that project, and drill down on the idea of listening in public spaces as a way of reclaiming the spaces. Sonic acts of noticing developed from the ideas that stemmed from this.
We listen to the city at a macro scale, as an ecology of diverse lifeforms and resources and habitats, we might recognise a dynamic, vital system to be stewarded for future generations of humans and other species.
He engaged this framework at certain places, using sound walks, and a field recording with a radio transmitter with everyone on silent disco headphones. Using contact mics hydrophones and then after create listening sessions
Listening With 2020
listening as a way of relating a way around us,
He was calling it material agency and instruments, how instruments have ways of listening to themselves. Listening allows us to see what instruments want to do, and the acoustic behaviour within each instrument. He then created a project in reflection on all this reading and theories,
Listening in the Cthulucene: sound practices for survival
His last project was in collaboration with landscape architecture, Eastside a common ground (with Hannah beard)
The concept was this, remove cars and increase pedestrian crossings. Creating public realm infrastructure for bikes, and feet. Exposing the coveted river that runs through the site. And create a new urban forest.
The city has improved based on the city centre exposing itself. The possibility of sound as a way of articulating space. In response to this Alex considered how to propose ideas of landscape planning through sound. He instead creates and proposes a landscape of sounds which the architectural plan will become.
The power of convincing, the power of actualising. Share the environment that might help actualise the design.
He then created a fake sound walk to help bring more awareness towards the plan they have created.
Overall this was a hugely inspiring visiting practitioner lecture that has brought up a few issues that I’ve been reading about for my dissertation and my portfolio works. I found his passion for sound and the curious ways in which he uses it to be inspiring. I also felt that he brought ideas to my brain I wouldn’t have considered. Sonic planning permission? Sonic Architecture? Excellent!
I once again am chipping away at my proposal document, at the beginning, I discuss my current prototype and two portfolio pieces in-depth, I need to get clarification once I return on January 9th if this is correct or if I shouldn’t include my prototype within the proposal.
I saw a few spelling errors and grammar issues, as well as in general getting the order of portfolios one and two in the wrong order. Currently, the radio portfolio piece will inform the second portfolio piece so it needed to be in the correct format.
I also changed up a few sentences that didn’t make sense and added more context as I have been reading more into other frameworks and essays.
I have one refresh session on this portfolio before I receive feedback so I hope Milo has a spare 10 minutes on the 9th so that I can share my portfolio proposal with him.
I am finally set up my circle of equipment around me. Had my tape loops ready. My field recordings were edited and chopped. The right cables and equipment and began setting everything up.
It took me a bit of time to get everything working smoothly. I ended up having a few cables short and had to get creative, instead of stereo the JU-06A was going in mono, and I midi-synced the Juno to the Volca FM. I also set up effects send from the mixer to the SP404 MK2.
I decided to create three pieces, as I had three different tape loop styles, and I would have the long-form tape loop running different drones for each piece. I also selected different sounds each time.
Improvisation number one would be waves and bird sounds with the long tape loop running a drone of the Thames. I had chorus and reverb in my sp404mk2 effects send and return. As well as an effect that is generative and randomises loops and releases. I wanted to keep the core idea of minimalism and ambient as well as generative in mind. i wanted to do as little as possible and let the FX do the work and then I would slowly bring in things and out over a period of 5 minutes for each improvisation. Because it’s all going into the Zoom H5 I didn’t have to worry about production or anything else. I wanted it to be raw and afterwards require little editing. I wanted to embrace the ideas I’ve previously researched in.
Performance number two was similar but had more bird field recordings and the noise pollution resonance from the turbines on the loop form tape loop. As well as switching between playing back the tape loop on the mixer and switching to inputs and driving the FX send and master creating feedback. I was controlling the FX with one hand and sending and adjusting with the other. Again I wanted to create this parallel between non-human and human existence that I saw at Stave Hill, this performance was my reflection from consistently going to the site and experiencing this relationship that is ongoing and self-reliant on each other. Reminds me of Gaia theory and other academic works that I’ve read in the Environmental Sound Arts work.
The third performance was the best, in my opinion, I’d really learnt to let go by this point and I went over my allotted time of 5 minutes but I enjoyed it so much, I forgot I was even recording. It was complex and simple at the same time, I allowed the sounds to breathe and take time between compositional changes. I switched between tape loops and line-ins. Minimal Synth sounds, arpeggiated and sequenced. After finishing the last performance I decided to listen back as I felt perhaps they weren’t that great.
After listening back to the three performances I was blown away. Something so texturally interesting and deep could be composed improvisational with minimal editing. Again not egocentric as I wasn’t impressed by the composition as such but more the sonic of the machines altogether. It’s generative it wasn’t about me, I was blown away but what the equipment and sounds did themselves. I simply set the parameters for the machines to create, the loops would keep recording over each other adding layers and layers, I did the trick of putting masking tape on top of the erase head and this allowed for constant layering to record. I’m curious to see what others think.
Finally, before going to bed I looked up AI text to photo programs as I felt like generative art would suit this work as the composition is the same.
I typed in words related to the project and ended up generating based on this sentence. “Anthropocene, Cuthulucene, Minimalism, Cassette, Tape Loops, Field Recordings, Noise Pollution, Birds, Human, Non-Human” and these were the outcome.
In particular, I really like the second photo. I think all that is left now is to do some research into Cuthulucene and the Gaia theory. The improvisations sound like an amalgamation, can the future soundscapes of our society become something like this? Will we become a coexisting lifeform, all-knowing all breathing?
‘In the history of technology, it is not all that rare for technological inventions to gain significance long after their inception’ Theodore Adorno (1969: p. 283)
It’s a great point to make that innovation in technology is considered better after an extended duration of time. The idea is that at the moment we fail to realise how great something is due to not having the context of what things will become.
Such organisations, trade shows and discussion sites have all contributed to a technology industry where, certainly over the last 30 years, new=good. Indeed, such utopianism surrounding the ‘new’ is ever prevalent in the sound and music technology press, which is much to do with their line of income so dependent on advertising revenue. Almost no recognition is given to technological precursors or vintage systems and is only acknowledged when mentioned in recordist interviews. The only exception to this is the magazine ‘Tape Op’, which – as the name suggests – gives more prominence to past and current analogue systems being used in today’s recording workplace.
This is something I myself have learnt the hard way, the idea the new=good is something really from capitalism, the idea that something new must be better because X Y or Z that we must constantly be upgrading our equipment to fill the pockets of the industry.
by following this quest for analog sound, digital technology helps to create an acknowledgement of analog aesthetics. This must not be seen as merely an act of nostalgia, but rather as a sense that the context of its use is what really makes a particular technology novel. (2007: p. 90)
The fact that modern digital technology has acknowledged and also create replications of analogue equipment is something that is of huge interest to me. What became the dominant hardware over analogue has become following and reproduction in a more accessible way.
In Ocean of Sound, David Toop criticises nostalgia in music generally, by suggesting,
…musics which attempt to make a nostalgic, exaggerated return (to past musics)…can only seem ludicrous at a time when computers think faster, clone replications at will and spread information over vast distances in intricate, often unidentifiable webs. (2001: p. 263)
Toop is correct here in saying that it is an exaggerated return. I never find nostalgiac music pieces to offer anything different unless progressed slightly or offer a different viewpoint form the pieces.
In his article, Analogue Artists Defying the Digital Age, O’Hagan reviews the work of Naomi Kashiwagi, a DJ using a gramophone and 78 rpm records, Claire Askew, a typewriter-dedicated poet and Lewis Durham. Whilst questioning whether uses of technological precursors in the wider creative industries is down to nostalgia alone, he cites the young artists’ decisions as being a reaction against digital culture, as he states:
The work of these artists is born of dissatisfaction with digital culture’s obsession with the new, the next, the instant. It values the hand-made, the detailed and the patiently skilful over the instantly upgradeable and the disposable. (2011: p. 2)
This I believe is a great point I also agree with, modern young people are dissatisfied with the current culture’s obsession with the new, the new and the instant gratification that digital media possess. There is a popular form of living called slow living in which people specifically decided to take time and enjoy the moment with their lives employing a more basic restricted pre-modern way of living. Most of these people will not have television or modern appliances in their houses. I think the idea of constantly upgrading is something that I dislike myself and find is not in the interest of consumers and users.
eBay has become a popular and wholly viable outlet for the sale of both current and second-hand sound recording equipment.
Today, there are few means by which precursors and vintage systems are sourced amongst the UK recording industry. The BBC Redundant Store and Abbey Road’s Sale of Century were instrumental in the resale of perhaps the first ‘batch’ of vintage technologies, particularly once 16-track analogue tape recording was superceded. Indeed, both outlets served as an important predecessor to the vintage market today. However, both outlets reinforced the perception that vintage sound recording equipment was either redundant, implying loss of meaning or function, or for collectors interest only. The use value of the second-hand equipment was largely ignored
Once again the internet due to access to communication has undoubtedly been key to the rise of analogue equipment in modern digital studios and recording spaces. Websites such as eBay have been critical to this distribution and locating. Old analogue equipment is difficult to find and tedious to fix, without such it wouldn’t be possible to even operate and maintain such equipment.
The certain ‘mentality’ Watson refers to is the wider cultural shift toward a technology-centric recording process as opposed to one driven by musical performance and/ or the influence of the recordist/ workplace. Such a shift can be traced back to the influx of affordable digital technologies of the mid to late 1980s and the rise of the music technology press. Latter-day online equipment fora such as Gearslutz focus almost entirely upon the technology itself, thus reinforcing a cultural perception that sound recording as a process is technology-driven.
the technology focuses on performance and musical influence is powerful, to think that the gear has more vice over the actual music and performance is an interesting take I hadn’t considered. Do we end up preferring the machines over the music and performances and end up doing this just to use the machines and listen to their effects. Are we more interested in the sonic palettes that these machines offer, the textures and tonalities than the recorded ideas?
Back in the early 1980s, proponents couldn’t say enough great things abut digital technology: how quiet it was compared to tape; how digital storage eliminated the problem of archiving; and how it made editing child’s play. All still valid points, a quarter-century later. However, it was easy to overlook one very noticeable shortcoming: digital didn’t always produce the most pleasing tones. (Simons: 2006: p. 14)
Similar to the last article but digital is clean, and analogue is warm. Digital is more convenient but doesn’t have flavour.
I’ve really enjoyed this short essay, I will definitely consider this for my work.
I found an article on arpjournal that seemed interesting. As I’m using tape for this prototype project and I intend to use old analogue equipment alongside modern digital for my second portfolio piece I felt this would give me some sort of critical argument for and against its usage.
Creativity doesn’t emerge out of a vacuum…creative talent requires a tradition so that it can learn how to go further within it or beyond it. Innovation should be understood by rejecting those approaches which set it squarely against tradition and established cultural practice. (Negus & Pickering: 2004, p.91)
Similar to my copyright and copywrongs book this is something I’ve heard a lot recently in texts, the sitting on shoulders of giants and considering how knowledge and ideas spread.
While some suggest that in employing the option to use older gear and processes this action can be simply explained as a form of ‘technostalgia’, a naïve longing for a better time, the reality may in fact be a little more complex.
Technostalgia is the first time I’ve heard of this, but certainly, it could be. I believe the argument that it’s just the idea could be the truth but also I agree with the end of the sentence, it’s more complex. Digital systems aren’t are natural feeling as the analogue realm, both combined are the preferred usage for me.
In becoming record producers and engineers these studio professionals acquire a habitus, a ‘feel for the game’ or practical sense of what works or what doesn’t (Johnson in Bourdieu: 1993, p.5). They immerse themselves in the traditions and conventions of recording until this knowledge becomes so naturalised for them that making a judgement call on the quality of a performance or what is the best equipment to use on a session is almost intuitive.
So one could argue that a lot of choices are based on habits and assumptions or considered as knowledge. knowledge in understanding the right application for the recording or habits as in being used to using the same equipment. Which one is better or worse is another question.
Analogue was very dirty. So everyone tried to be very clean. Then we had digital, and digital was really clean, and so it was kind of like a reverse process, you wanted to dirty it up a bit. Now, when you go to old circuitry, you’re including a lot of noise. Noise is good. Noise is not bad at all. It adds a certain character, but I think it plays with your mind, I think there’s a psycho acoustic affect to this. (Taylor: 2014)
This quote is something I’ve been discussing a lot with other engineers and you hear this a lot from older engineers who were around during the peak of analogue recording equipment when there was no DAW. They always said that it was noisy and difficult to use, always had restrictions and the budget for recording had to be huge. But I also believe that this isn’t an argument as to why digital audio sounds so clean and lifeless like this quote argues the middle ground seems the best.
Emulating the traditional use of mixing desks, the introduction of controllers such as the SSL Nucleus or the Avid C24 control surface were largely attempts to re-invent and re-purpose what was an ergonomically friendly working tool. However, Robbie Long has resisted this return to an outboard signal router not finding it necessary to use a mixing desk at all.
Another symptom of technostalgia I agree with. We also have the Avid control surfaces at university and I find them humorous, it’s attempting to combine both worlds and if it works for the engineer then why not. But for me it’s not something that does work or makes me come alive, I find when in the digital domain the idea that the controller doesn’t represent what is on the software is confusing and not representative of what I’m doing. If the controller has 8 faders but the project has 100 tracks how can this seem ergonomic?
He believes this confluence of analogue and digital ‘is going to be the future of it…so there’s an example of using something from analogue that has now become part of the standard’ (Taylor: 2014). For Taylor this confluence of both worlds is not, at its heart, novel:
With the advent of digital technology, there are a hell of a lot of processes that are new and there are a hell of a lot of processes that are old but just made in a different way. The older processes have become more ‘amplified’ because you have so much more control over it. So yes, of course, you’re always using a lot of the old techniques but you’re having to deliver them in a different fashion. Anything to digital now is all just sort of locked in to a specific zone. (Taylor: 2014)
Similar to the first section that discusses innovation being the offshoot of tradition and that both are beneficial to each other, without tradition we wouldn’t have modern recording techniques and vice versa. It’s a process of evolution and the analogue in the digital realm is more “amplified” as Taylor (2014) says.
When you go back to sitting in front of an SSL and a tape machine, like an analogue tape machine, it’s a different world, and you engineer it completely differently. You think about it differently and luckily I have all that in my head, but the kids wouldn’t know. They’d have no idea…Whereas, you know, it was a completely different headspace. You had to think differently. It was like a chess game. You really had to think in advance. You couldn’t say ‘Well, look, that will be fixed up in the edit’…And you didn’t have half of the ability to repair…So, yes, a completely different headspace. You would engineer completely differently and you would produce differently. (Taylor: 2014)
Different working techniques and abilities come from equipment, and limitations can define our processes. If you don’t have 20 inputs how can you mix 20 different signals? That’s when getting creative has to work and this for me is what I find interesting for audio engineering and recording. If you consider the mixing desk as a tool for creative audio rather than a tool for commercial recording and production processes it can be seen in a whole different light. Similar to Eno and his views on the music studio as an instrument and production as a non-musician way of making music a new outcome can reveal itself from using these tools.
He argues that with the number of young engineers being schooled in various audio engineering colleges around the world, with Pro Tools being the prime medium, those engineers who are mainly familiar with digital are often ‘romancing about analogue and they’ve hardly ever heard it or worked on it…They’re remembering something that they’ve never had anything to do with’ (Taylor: 2014). But as an engineer-producer who has seen a number of significant changes in the recording world, as Long and Latham also have, he knows ‘exactly what it does, and I can tell you there’s limitations’ (Taylor: 2014). Taylor agrees that there does appear to be a nostalgia for a period many people have never lived through but for him ‘it’s a remembrance of stuff that works and a remembrance of stuff that doesn’t’ (Taylor: 2014).
Something I myself fall into, I’ve never used a mixing desk more than a handful of times and I long for this need and nostalgia or romanticism or owning and using one. I should consider why I have this idea of wanting to use this and what it will bring me.
I thought this text and article overall gave me new ideas to consider the usage of analogue equipment within my own work and future work. As well as critically thinking about why I did use tape loops and what cassette as a medium offered me.
I decided to read the 17 pages titled Problems of Finishing by DeSantis. This did hit home for me as I sometimes struggle with finishing when I work alone. As a group I do fine but alone I struggle to sometimes push myself to finish and actualise projects. Hopefully, this can give me some insight into how to fix these issues.
It’s tempting to think of a song as being something like unlimited physical space, and that the way to fill the space involves adding more stuff. But in reality, musical space has boundaries, like a canvas there is a limit to how much you can add before you’re simply covering something that’s already there.
I agree I tend to do the same with my own compositions. I might take it too far and consider it always able to add more but I tend to be on the opposite and require simple more basic ideas that each one takes dominance in what it’s good at. I’m going to consider this with my performance I will do it later, how can make sure that enough is enough? Do I need to use all the inputs and sounds/synths? Perhaps one synth at a time?
Modern DAWs suggest a workflow that combines loops into larger arrangements and many genres of electronic music are defined by repeating patterns. But perfectly repeated loops can become tedious after a while. Here is one technique for creating a sense of surprise within an otherwise loop-based context.
This I couldn’t be against more than anything in compositions. I dislike using the grid, it clicks everything into place. I want my sounds to have a human feeling, not everything strikes at the same time due to quantization, I want things to be different and have their own existence within the track. Not a predetermined idea of rhythm.
Although modern DAWs blur the line between editing MlDl and audio there is still a huge range of latent possibilities (and thus distraction) available just by having access to the source instruments. By rendering to audio and then removing the instruments that has made it so you’re forced to change your mode of interaction with your material. You cant change patches anymore, or adjust parameters. This forces at least the “programming synthesizers” part of the sound design process to come to an end. By closing certain doors behind you the only way you can move is forward writing, arranging, and mixing the song. This Is essentially an Arbitrary Constraint (page 42) self-imposed for the sole purpose of eliminating possibilities.
Bouncing down ideas is a great tip. I remember Gareth educating me on the resampling function on Ableton which makes it easy to do. I will also note that using sounds as audio files rather than VST also has advantages in terms of compositional uses. VST act as a trigger and read midi notes, audio is malleable and can be time stretched, pitched, chopped, and even resampled back as a new instrument.
But what most producers don’t realize is that each stage of the music-making process is itself a thing that requires practice. We get to be better sound designers by designing sounds. We get to be better drum programmers by programming drums. And we get to be better song finishers by finishing songs. Because of this, the more songs we start but don’t finish, the more opportunities we miss out on to practice finishing. And as a result, we might continually improve in various aspects of the early stages, but we’ll never improve at actually getting things done.
Another great point, I should do it myself. Finishing is another skill, such as recording, producing and engineering. The more you work on an fail the more you succeed.
I really enjoyed this PDF. It will definitely sit and brew in my thoughts.
