At Berlin’s tuned city festival it was possible visiting two acoustically manipulated rooms at TU Berlin: the reverb room (in german “Hallraum”) and the anechoic chamber. The contradiction here is that the smaller room has a very long reverb time of up to 8 sec. due to the surface of the walls and the unsymetrical geometry of the room leading to a diffuse field of reflections. In contrast the anechoic chamber, which is probably 2 or 3 times the size of the reverb room, has no reflections at all. The experience is quite interesting because it turns expectations upside down: big rooms do not necessarily have more reflections than smaller ones and there are loads of possibilities for architecture to “tune” rooms and incorporate spatial acoustic design already in the planing of buildings, which is mostly not highly regarded by architects. The tuned city festival tries to build bridges between sound art dealing with spatial qualities and architecture dominated by visual aspects. 

On a symposium about experimental radio art last weekend, I found the conceptual work of german artist Christoph Korn quite interesting in the context of this blog. Since three years he deals with automated audio erasing processes. He presented one piece that will be broadcasted later this year on german radiostation HR3 and is actually a reverse version of Alvin Lucier’s “I’m sitting in a room”. Instead of replaying the audio into the room again, Korn wrote a patch for MAX/MSP which automatically erases fragments of audio with every repetition from a spoken text quite similar to Lucier’s classic piece. After about 15 min. there is no audio anymore, the piece ends in silence. A similar concept, only over a much longer time period, was persued in his piece “waldstueck” that is based on a 24-hour field recording of a forest section close to Dachau, a former nazi concentration camp. The audio recording has been transferred to a web server and will be successively deleted, randomly and automatically, over a period of three years. The deletion process began on February 5, 2008 and within three years there will be nothing to be heard. A protocol of disappearance, one might say, over the impossibility either to say, or not to say anything about or around Dachau.

In a brilliant essay in The Atlantic Nicholas Carr wrote about the effects of screen-reading on our brain and the changes to our media consumption through web-based technologies. Carr received a lot of approving feedback on his article, many admitted having problems to read deeply, to focus the concentration „ necessary to wrestle any text longer than a paragraph or more intellectually demanding than a TV listing“. The collection of search engines, news feeds and social tools encourages us to link to, follow and read only that which we can easily assimilate. It seems that the exploration incentives of internet use (finding new information) is far stronger than the incentive for reflecting and exploiting synthesized information in order to come up with fresh ideas. The same might be true to blogging: it can be corrosive and we might loose a sense of quietness and depth in our literary and intellectual and spiritual lives.

How does this apply to music, do we need more deep listening as well? I have to admit that my attention span listening to unknown music has decreased in recent years, I easily get impatient if some music does not attract me in the first place, I often just don’t give it the time to develop and make its point. Sometimes, on a day off with a lot of time for random listening to demo CDs or downloaded stray MP3s, I discover music that I really like but had dismissed on first hearing. It seemed that information overload and time pressure just didn’t opened my inner ear enough to appreciate the music that I was exposed to. On the other hand I also have the strong feeling that a lot of music on the net – and I’m talking about more experimental music from the fringes, the underground sound art mushrooming in the niches of net labels, you tube and the likes – is brought out without much editorial time, has a cursory character or just lacks a compositional statement. Most digital music (especially drone music, not to speak of the many permuatations of the techno and house genre), I feel, gets historic only through the type of sound processing software that was used, the musicians/composers assemble snippets of a stream of ubiquitous audio without historic reference. It is some kind of pancake music, spread wide and thin, a permanent nervous aural flickering of the net. Is this what Jacques Attali recently predicted: the work (the concept of a closed composed structure of organized sound) will die soon as the music industry is disintegrating? I have no answer, but I’ll try to listen, as deep as possible.

Playing a metal door with tuning forks of different pitches, the sound was picked up by contact microphones…

In China there is an old tradition to attach little light whistles to pigeon’s tail-feathers that produce a pleasant sound during flight. They have simpler forms like pan-flutes and more sophisticated ones with a body of ornamental gourd-shells, separated in two compartments producing a deeper “male” tone and a higher “female” tone at once. The most complex flutes can omit up to 30 tones in one instrument. It seems that the Chinese didn’t had any military purpose for this craft, as the Europeans had with pigeon post being an important means of comunication in the last centuries. Rather it is assumed that the Chinese used pigeon whistles for amusement above all, as they did with the related craft of kite whistles. Please check the website of Uli Wahl, that is abundant in information about every aspect of wind-produced sounds (and thanks to Uli for the picture). Finally here is a very nice recording of Fausto Caceres, who lives (or lived) in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang Uyghur Automomous Region, in the northwest side of China and who catched these pigeon whistle sounds of the occasional flock droning around his 6th floor apartment. Apart from that Fausto collected a lot of brilliant field recordings that focus on the “folk music” of the Turkic muslim culture in this area, a culture that is under threat due to the modernization of the chinese society. You can hear a beautiful live mix of his recordings here and also other interesting stuff under the label Royal Oculus & Gramophone Company.

In Berlin’s “Großer Wasserspeicher“, a huge, old water reservoir turned into a place for sound installations due to it’s long reverb and distinctive echos, Arnaud Jacobs placed several rotating and low frequency speakers to wash the labyrinthine walls with a subtle atmosphere of dripping-like sounds and interfering textures of electronic tones. However, the key feature of this sound installation is that the audience is equipped with a device Jacobs calls the echolocator emiting a set of tonal, hissing and clicking sounds, that are reflected within the numerous concentric rings of the water reservoir. The visitor is enabled to navigate through the dark passages with the help of acoustic localization and “play the room” with this little device. Most fascinating are the short clicks that are synchronized with the dominant echo time of the place, the echos overlay each other and dissociate from the sound source, the sound colour of the environment is perceived in its own properties. I liked the installation very much, and its worth combining the trip with another installation of Ulrich Eller in the neighboring small reservoir (Kleiner Wasserspeicher, talking drums). Wednesday to Sunday 14:00 to 20:00, untill 13. 7. Read more about Jacobs echolocation here.

If you are into superlatives, here are two dealing with anechoic chambers. The acoustic anechoic chamber has an absorbing surface and is shielded from the outer world in order to investigate sound waves with all reflections being removed (more recently there are radio frequency anechoic chambers as well). The experience visiting such an anechoic chamber at Harvard University in 1948 and hearing his own blood pressure and nerve system instead of silence led John Cage to the famous statement: ”until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.” The most quietest place on earth is, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the anechoic chamber of Orfield Labs in Minnesota, Minneapolis, while the biggest anechoic chamber of the world is the Benefield Anechoic Facility at Edwards Air Force Base, California. I imagine what Cage would have said if the anechoic chamber he had seen at that time would have been a facility ”to support ground testing of electronic warfare systems on full-scale aircrafts such as the B-1B and B-2 bombers”… Thanks to Unidentified Sound Object for the link.

The drawings of Jorinde Voigt resemble complex musical scores for unheard rhythms, that many critics compare with the graphical notation systems develloped by composers like Stockhausen or Cage. Her works translate structures and patterns found in such diverse things like top-100-charts songs or kissing interaction into dense rhythmic textures with many layers of repetition and reflection. Underneath her mesmerizing net of mathematical likewise organic patterns lies a deep longing for order, which she confesses, can only be a projection, a dream for a day, that dissolves on closer contemplation. Read and see more here and here (german article).

Octavio Paz, grown up in an outlying neighborhood of Mexico City, wrote in one of his poems:

Between what I see and what I say 
Between what I say and what I keep silent 
Between what I keep silent and what I dream 
Between what I dream and what I forget: 
Poetry. 

One can easily replace poetry with sound or noise thinking of the Mexican habit of making noise in order to attract attention (as all the branches of street vendors have their own acoustic signals) and the composure towards noise that can be interpreted as ignorant or highly tolerant. Paz would have described this love of music, noise and crowds as no more than a compensation for a deeper, unconscious isolation and gloom. In “The Labyrinth of Solitude” Paz observes that solitude is responsible for the Mexican’s perspective on death, ‘fiesta’, and identity. Death is seen as an event that is celebrated but at the same time repelled because of the uncertainty behind it. As for the fiestas, they express a sense of communality, crucially emphasizing the idea of not being alone and in so doing helps to bring out the true Mexican that is usually hidden behind a mask of self-denial.

The following track is a collage of sounds I collected predominantly in Mexico City (some sounds are from Oaxaca) and might provide an aural illustration of the conflict of Mexican identity. 

David Byrne’s “Playing the Building is deceptive in its simplicity. Sitting in the middle of a vast 1909 municipal ferry terminal in Lower Manhattan is the most basic church organ—a little wooden one that looks well worn. Visitors are invited to take center stage and tinker with the organ’s black and white keys, which in turn ping, tap, and blow air through the building’s columns, pipes, walls, and windows through a series of low-tech cables and wires. The project is in no way grandiose; on the contrary, it has a humble presence within a formerly grandiose building.” New York Times reports as well.