In this quick week at home between vacations, I've thrown together the start of my new sound theory blog, with the idea that it's better to just start writing than to get finicky over every little detail (see: this blog). The new blog is going to be a mix of short-form media link posts, tumblr-style (with a little commentary sometimes), and longer-form sound theory stuff on historical examples and contemporary things. I'm going to use it to try out ideas for the thesis, and hopefully it will be interesting even to those who aren't into sound theory per se.

I'm going to try to keep metablogging to a minimum over there, so I have to focus on content (for another example of me messing that up, see this blog again). So, go visit www.noiseforairports.com, comment, and subscribe to a new RSS feed!

For a class last term, I found an artistic practice that played with what I called “the aesthetics of disintegration,” but might better be called “recursive remediation,” or something along those lines. For the benefit of the Internet (and mostly me), I’ve collected a bunch of examples of this kind of work, and interspersed my own comments on why I think they’re interesting. (RSS folks may have to click through for the second part until I get my full feed set up.)

I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.

So, that is what happens, more or less, and that is the basic core of what I am calling alternately “the aesthetics of disintegration” and “recursive remediation.” Lucier’s piece is particularly evocative, and many readings can fit comfortably with it (I tried a few on in my undergraduate thesis), but for now, I’m more interested in its structure.

Basically, you have a recording, which is then used as the input in a new recording, whose output is then used as the input in a new recording, and so on. Lucier says he is going to suss out the “natural frequencies of the room” through these re-recordings, but what he is primarily doing is revealing something about the recording machinery itself. The high-pitched metallic whine by the end of the piece is not the result of the room so much as it is a step on the way to the piercing noise of full-fledged microphone feedback.

By repeating his process, Lucier is allowing the reproduction technology to shape the material it reproduces, in this case sound, as if it were water being shaped into a river. The sonic material is refigured by the physicality of the reproduction process—a different microphone/speaker/room setup would shape the sound in its own specific way.

On Vimeo, I found a video that updates I am sitting in a room by adding a video component. In addition to the audio being re-recorded, the video is recaptured from the screen. The difference in sound between this and the original is pretty interesting, as is the introduction of visual feedback.

Digital reproduction is not immune from this practice either, as you can see in this video of successive JPG encodings of an image of text (although the method she uses is not entirely clear; if the person is just lowering the JPG quality manually, then it’s not as interesting, I don’t think).

A slightly different example is this piece by Jürg Lehni, called “Apple Talk,” which involves two computers running speech-to-text and text-to-speech programs. Starting with some beginning text, they read back and forth to each other, successively transcribing what they hear. Over time, of course, the message becomes technologically garbled by the recursive process, but in a different sort of way from the whine of I am sitting in a room. I think this difference is significant in some way, but I’m not sure how yet.

‘Apple Talk’ by Jürg Lehni, 2007 - installation view at ZKM, Karlsruhe (photo: Jürg Lehni)

and an earlier version, with text file transcripts!

The same idea is present in this contemporary work by Mohri Yuko:

‘Taiwa-Hensokuki’ 2006/08, Mohri Yuko

These two examples come from Ethan Ham’s blog post on telephone game art

It is interesting that these examples focus specifically on the degradation of language. We have a special cognitive relationship with our words, recognizing them even when they are severely distorted. As information transmission technologies, they are quite robust. (One might look to the fake Cambridge study about rearranging the letters in a word and retaining the meaning of the word, or better yet, to the real Cambridge website that analyzes the claims of the fake study.)

Their “robustness” is not a result of mediating technologies, but rather of our ability to interpret sounds as words. So, we can understand what Alvin Lucier is saying well into I am sitting in a room, but the process itself is a testament to how our machines cannot understand. When children corrupt messages as they are passed along in a game of telephone, they are shaping their statements into the contours of learned language. For the computers above, the shaping force is the algorithmic interpretation of sound and built in dictionaries. For Lucier (or the two more modern examples), the shaping force is the technical apparatus.

More to come, in less brainstormy form.

I finally got around to uploading the Processing project I completed a while ago in my Workshop class. My project goal was to create a navigable landscape, randomizing as many parameters as possible. You can play with the interactive version here.

I wanted to explore some possibilities of indeterminate artworks—art that has no specific final form. If you refresh the page, you’ll get a newly generated landscape. However, you’ll notice that the different versions are still recognizable as the same piece; this is a result of the specific ways in which I’ve allowed randomness into the work. For example, the line width does vary, but only within a range of a few pixels. The shapes of the peaks vary (by altering the control lines of their bezier curves), but each peak is still made up of a pair of joined bezier curves according to a specific function. This means that the peaks will vary, but you’d never see something like a cube pop up all of a sudden.

These possibility spaces are explicit in something like this computer program, but they exist in other works in more subtle ways. For example, I just finished a short paper on indeterminacy in Shakespeare: the script determines most of the action, but there is a lot that can be changed at will while remaining “loyal” to the script. So, King Lear can’t be abducted by aliens mid-play, but he could be wearing a space-suit the whole time.

Yeah, have fun playing with the landscape, and if you’ve got some Processing know-how, check out the source code.

So far, we’ve done some work in Processing, creating computational art (which I will put up here once I get it working on my new computer), made a personal page in html (you’re on it), and for our most recent project, we worked as a class to make an online version of a book.

The book chosen for us was Des Imagistes, a collection of imagist poems edited by Ezra Pound that rarely circulates, and wasn’t online! We made a pretty neat online version that just we just finished up this morning. So check it out, and read some poems!

(My favorites are the short images from Allen Upward.)

Glass has a reputation for sort-of cheesy, new-agey stuff, so focusing on Gandhi as a topic doesn’t do much to reduce the overall corniness of his oeuvre. My cynicism requires me to ignore the silliness of the “message” and the overarching themes Glass tries so earnestly to get to by focusing each act on Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore, and Martin Luther King, major literary figures with ties to Gandhi’s life. Luckily, the best part of the opera is not the story. (If you could even say it has a “story.”)

What is so great about Satyagraha is the way that Glass treats opera as a medium. Opera has a very complex history as an art form, and the recognizable components—what makes an opera an opera—have come together through a cross-cultural (though entirely eurocentric) and lengthy process. Basically, opera has a lot of baggage. You would too, if people like Wagner played such a large role in your development.

To set it up metaphorically, opera (the genre) is like a big and complicated building. Some of the parts are Italian, some are German, and they are all intertwined into a big, sort of messy, but still grandiose, thing. Any given opera takes these parts and rearranges them into a story, which, in spite of being a new story, tends to owe a lot to other operas in general structure. (Disclaimer: This is a big simplification of opera for the sake of getting me to Glass faster.)

What Glass does with Satyagraha is to take the building of opera, push it over, and just stack up all the bricks evenly. The whole thing, with its repetitive structures, is basically a bunch of tiny pieces of opera in a row. The singers, while retaining the operatic voice, get stuck in ostinatos, repeating small figures that seem to be the fundamental units of the operatic medium, divorced from their traditional structure. The same goes for the orchestra, and, at least in the case of the staging I saw at the Met earlier this year, the stage design. The libretto is basically just selections from the Bhagavad Gita, and the fact that it is in Sanskrit helps the typical opera audience to see the words more as abstract figurations than text.

We’ve been talking a lot about works that are self-reflexive in class, and I think Satyagraha shows a great and unique way for a work to reflect on its own medium. You would expect a self-reflexive opera to focus on narrative conventions, the larger-scale structures of staging, motifs, etc., but what Glass gives us instead is a look at the micro-scale units of opera, literally the building blocks of the form.