Sound produces space

[imomus]

For the last couple of years I've been interested in the way sound produces space in the mind of the listener.

I say "the last couple of years", but really this goes way back. I remember an embarrassing misunderstanding in music class at school. I must've been eight or nine. The teacher played a piece of music and asked "What does this remind you of?" I put up my hand and said "A lake!" Well, that wasn't the kind of answer the teacher wanted; she meant, does it remind you of Beethoven, or a hymn, or the national anthem? For me, though, the important thing was that the music made a landscape in my head. It created space.



I think most people experience sound this way. It's much more evocative than movies, because you have to do some of the work yourself, bring your personal experience to the production. Radio is better than TV because "the scenery is better". Of course, the person making the sound has to relinquish some control and allow the listener to insert a personal landscape filled with private associations and memories. It's powerful, but out of control. Language can specify spaces more precisely, but what it gains in detail it loses in openness. As a teenager I immersed myself in David Bowie albums, seeing them as fantastic spaces, little planets made of words and music. The great thing was that because the space these records allowed me to create was at least 50% my own work, I could continue to occupy it when I started to make my own albums. Taking control of these created worlds, I could help people to create spaces in their minds just as David Bowie had helped me to.

Recently, I've moved beyond traditional singer-songwriter records into projects which play with this idea of sound producing space. This started in earnest in 2000, when I staged an exhibition at LFL Gallery in New York. Called Folktronia, the show was an extension of my 2001 album Folktronic. There were hay bales, teepees, and a video-projected walkthrough of a forested Appalachian landscape. There were birdcalls and donkey cries and people's voices. I was in residence in the gallery the whole time, making up folk tales and recording vistors singing their interpretations of the songs they heard in the teepees.

Earlier this year I was artist in residence at Future University, Hokkaido, experimenting with what R. Murray Schafer calls "schizophonia" (the splitting of sounds from their natural environments). I'd make recordings of pure sound in one location and play them back in another, imposing a layer of virtual sound on an environment already filled with its own real sounds. This very simple method allowed people to produce unexpected and dreamlike landscapes in their imagination. Standing at the back door of the university, for instance, smoking while they surveyed a snowy landscape of mountains and sea, people would be listening to the summer sounds of Korean insects, creating hybrid winter-summer landscapes of personal associations in their minds.

For I'll Speak, You Sing, the 2005 show at Zach Feuer Gallery, I want to do something slightly different. My idea relates to two projects, the Summerisle record I made with Anne Laplantine in 2003 and later turned into The Summerisle Horspiel (now hosted on audio art site ubuweb), and a sound project Vito Acconci made in 2001, The Bristol Project (also hosted by ubuweb). My Summerisle Horspiel created an imaginary Hebridean island somewhat related to the one in cult horror film The Wicker Man. Acconci's Bristol Project is a hypnotic spoken walkthrough of a futuristic world which contains many of the buildings Acconci has made with his architectural practise, Acconci Studio. I've listened to this amazing piece dozens of times, and see it almost as establishing a new genre: the sonic walkthrough. But unlike a CAD software walkthrough, these sounds evoke very personal landscapes in the mind of each listener.

This is the kind of "space-producing" narrative I hope to be improvising in real time for five hours a day during the run of I'll Speak, You Sing in New York this summer. It'll involve a double collaboration: with Mai Ueda, who'll place her song-objects in my narrated landscapes, but also with the visitors to the gallery. My main relationship, though, will be with Mai. She'll be an unknown, slightly risky recipient for these spoken spaces: a non-English speaker, a woman, a Japanese person, another performer. Mai and I have not yet met at this point, and we're planning this intimate three week experience as a sort of "Platonic Love": an unpredictable encounter in a space that we both share and create.

Comments

Sounds of the Silent Age

[(Anonymous)]

I found the Tim Hecker 'Haunt me, Haunt me, do it again' album one of the best recent examples of space in sound. The ambiance in ambient.

[(Anonymous)]

actually sounds produce INTERNAL psycho-acoustic space.
space itself produces EXTERNAL tangible sounds.
but who IS counting?

[freesurfboards.livejournal.com]

ive got news for you - for the observer, there is no external
if you've ever heard some good binaural recordings you'd know what i mean - close your eyes and you're there

[(Anonymous)]

Personally, one of the best open-to-interpretation records I've heard in recent enough times was Mileece's 'Formations' (And I have to point out that I bought it before I heard you tell everyone it sounded like Chlorophyl bubbling in a wok)

Rob

[(Anonymous)]

>>
Mai and I have not yet met at this point, and we're planning this intimate three week experience as a sort of "Platonic Love": an unpredictable encounter in a space that we both share and create.

Interesting ;)

Antonin

The space of a sound...

[eric-the-right.livejournal.com]

Well, there is a very long tradition to all of this...check out the idea behind the antiphonal brass choirs of Giovanni Gabrieli's "Cazoni" and the cori spezatti techniques used at St. Mark's basilica...it's the original "Space Music." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Gabrieli , if you must...)

[(Anonymous)]

""Mai and I have not yet met at this point, and we're planning this intimate three week experience as a sort of "Platonic Love"""

-- I might have known were this was leading. You dirty swine, you.

[(Anonymous)]

>>
an unpredictable encounter in a space that we both share and create.<<

I hope Hisae creates an 'unpredictable encounter' between a rolling pin and your stupit heid! Shame upon you, you treacherous ferret.

Ewan McEwan, Corrymore, Beag

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It is assumptions such as yours Ewan McEwan of Corrymore, Beag, which continue to keep women out of the workforce! Should we shun them, despite their talent, merely because they are also beautiful? Shame upon you, Ewan McEwan of Corrymore, Beag!

[(Anonymous)]

It is not the shunning of them because they are beautiful that is to be faulted, it is the choosing of them for that very reason. Do you promise to us now that your intentions towards this young lady are honourable? Have you asked the permission of her father to engage her in employment and given him assurances as to her well-being? It would be a rare enough occurence in this day and age, so it would.

Ewan McEwan, Corrymore, Beag.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I have read my Plato through and through from cover to cover, Ewan McEwan of Corrymore, Beag, and nowhere that I can for the life of me see does he advocate wanton strumpetry, monkey business, or rumpy pumpy.

[(Anonymous)]

So your intentions are honourable, that's certainly nice to hear.

Best wishes for your work and your marriage.

Ewan McEwan, Corrymore, Beag.

[becki1111.livejournal.com]

I seriously hope you are kidding!

"Have you asked the permission of her father to engage her in employment and given him assurances as to her well-being."

What I'd like to ask, is where does the woman artist, in this case, Mai, get a say in whether or not she wants to collaborate with Momus in all of this? Is it a deal to be worked out between Momus and her father?

Please tell me you were being sarcastic and this comment is a joke.

[(Anonymous)]

Are you a father yourself? Imagine you had a daughter and you found that her future employer was publishing pictures of her in her underwear on the internet. You wouldn't find that funny at all, so you wouldn't. You'd want to throttle the bugger with his own guts. Imagine it was your own mother in her bloomers? Or your great-great granny done up like a butcher's window? Maybe womenfolk are not important and not worthy of protection, but thank goodness they are or none of us would have a safe place to be born from.

Ewan McEwan, Corrymore, Beag.

[becki1111.livejournal.com]

As a woman and an adult, I would put enough respect in my own judgment of character to determine who I would and would not wish to work with. I would not leave it up to my father or some other male supervisory figure to decide who is appropriate for me to interact with.

I find it interesting that you use the the term "employer" as though it is assumed a woman would have a boss and could not enter into a working arrangment as an equal.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, I didn't want to say this, but if a girl allows herself to be stripped in public she is sorely lacking in both self respect and judgment of character. I'm not saying this is all the girl's fault - it's her father's and mother's as well.

I do not always assume that a woman has a boss, it's just that here she is submitting herself to low and degrading activities. I know that she will be getting something out of it herself (money? attention? adulation?) but these are not worth a fraction of the price she is paying.

Ewan McEwan, Corrymore, Beag.

[becki1111.livejournal.com]

I was wondering if you would even dignify that comment with a response. I'm glad you did with the response you did.

[facehead2k.livejournal.com]

I found I had associated soundscapes with records I listened to very early. When I first heard Talking Heads FEAR OF MUSIC I'd imagine a lush black swamp with too much oxygen. The Raincoats did that for me too, so I guess Eno doesn't always need to be involved, but he helps.

I'LL SPEAK sounds very interesting. Most people don't think consciously about the relationships between sound and context. Imagine the airplane safety instructions delivered in Middle English or a reading of Coleridge over samples of digitized washlet flushes, like the Matmos stuff and radio teleplays, it gives listeners an opportunity to re-examine the relationships that form created spaces.

[(Anonymous)]

How do you know if a swamp has too much oxygen?

Yours curiously.

[facehead2k.livejournal.com]

I suppose it's a euphoric swamp that slows ones breathing and leaves one drifting. Byrne's vocal on "Drugs" in conjunction with bird sounds, the voices on "Air", I'm certain that the record is haunted.

[(Anonymous)]

Are you familiar with the circle of the elements? Your observations seem to fit.

[facehead2k.livejournal.com]

No, could you elaborate?

[(Anonymous)]

The ancients used a circular progression of air->water->fire->earth->air->etc. to explain things. All the words you use are more on the air side of this circle: fear, music, black, drugs, air, slow, drifting, birds, haunted. Excess oxygen is consistent with this direction.

[zenmonkeykstop.livejournal.com]

you should check out Boodler (http://eblong.com/zarf/boodler/index.html). It's a nerdy soundscape-producing program. Might be of some use.

Art of Sound

[thetemplekeeper.livejournal.com]

Did you see the Art of Sound exhibition at the Hayward Gallery a couple of years ago?

It was wonderful: one "exhibit" that seems particularly pertinent was located on the Hayward's balcony overlooking Waterloo Bridge, where wires transmitting different live ambient sounds (eg, rain, wind, crowds...) ran overhead, and the noises could be heard through rather comfortable supplied headphones, changing in nature as one wandered the balcony; I will always remember the startling effect of watching the dismal road traffic on the bridge whilst hearing the gentle trot of horses pulling carriages...

Best wishes for the exhibit: it sounds like a lot of fun to listen to!

Simon

Re: Art of Sound

[auto-appendix.livejournal.com]

It was Christina Kubisch's 'Oase 2000'. Beautiful.

Re: Art of Sound

[auto-appendix.livejournal.com]

From the catalogue:
"The cables, green and yellow like electric earth wires, form a tent over the sculpture court, each transmitting a different sound rescued 'from the last, natural acoustic paradises'. Walking round the court, visitors are able to reconstruct in full view of London's urban sprawl a personal, romanticized rural sonic idyll, moving from the sounds of the Brazilian rainforest in one cable to the babble of brooks in springtime in another; from the rhythms of crickets in summer to the calls of elephants, lions and other exotic animals. The sounds are all natural, but may sound artificial in the context of the sounds of the metropolis, the viewer shifting in and out of different registers of sonic reality."

It gave Londoners a tropical feel for its globally-warm future.

Re: Art of Sound

[thetemplekeeper.livejournal.com]

How excellent that you have the catalogue to hand: very interesting for me, as I misinterpreted the horses as pulling carriages because I was looking at the metal mayhem on Waterloo Bridge and hearing the clatter of hooves. >Thinking about the "intentional fallacy", decontextualisation and recontextualisation of sound<

The thing I loved best about that exhibit was the way it wittily redesigned and misread London by presenting an alternative audio narrative to accompany its visual appearance.

You don't happen to know the name of whoever filmed the electric guitar slowly disintegrating as it was dragged behind a pick-up truck for about ten minutes? The sound it made and the instrument's random fragmentation made an extraordinary description of movement!

Re: Art of Sound

[thetemplekeeper.livejournal.com]

Oh dear: I seem to have left ten virtual comments (perhaps all still existing in parallel universes, which must be why I can still talk of them when they no longer are) when I meant to leave just one "solid state" remark. Apologies!

Re: Art of Sound

[auto-appendix.livejournal.com]

'Guitar Drag' was by the plunderphonic Christian Marclay, who had the exhibit about novelty Christmas records outside Tate Modern late last year. 'Guitar Drag' was great. As you say, extraordinary in itself to watch and hear the object destroyed but also a cheeky pun on instrument smashing in rock'n'roll. More sinister, that handy catalogue alludes to lynchings in the deep south where the piece was filmed.

According to the latest issue of 'The Wire' there's documentation of Marclay's Christmas event on Ubu but I can't find it.

And finally Esther

[auto-appendix.livejournal.com]

http://www.christinakubisch.de/english/english.htm

Re: And finally Esther

[thetemplekeeper.livejournal.com]

Ah: thanks for that link, as well... now I can visit more of her installations. How much do you suppose her electric field-amplifying headphones might cost?

I wonder if you could re-wire them to play a different sound to an electric hum when picking up the fields... maybe different notes to different intensities of hum, or different effects for those separate intensities (crickets, waves, erupting volcanoes...!) How extraordinary that we can so easily play with our environments in this way; and how marvellous!

Re: And finally Esther

[auto-appendix.livejournal.com]

I gather they are simple headphones and wires that just work as radio transmitters and receivers. Very simple for the electronically savvy (which I am not!)

I think you might be right about the sound of trotting horses. I seem to remember them too. The whole piece was a kind of aural 'detournement' and produced fascinating hallucinations. The heady sound of the rain forest made London feel instantly hotter. And calmer.

You might be interested in Hildegard Westerkamp, a sound ecologist who has made some fantastic recordings:
http://www.sfu.ca/~westerka/

Ambient sounds

[thetemplekeeper.livejournal.com]

Oh, by the way: if you're interested in using a whole load of unusual, often spookily beautiful ambient recordings, David Toop might be a good man to get in contact with - his website is here (http://www.davidtoop.com/).

Exploding balloon animals

[dirtburn.livejournal.com]

The elder brother of a buddy of mine worked wrote his VR senior thesis on the way sound produces space.

He conducted an experiment by filling long, thin balloons with hydrogen, making balloon animals out of them.

Then he'd blow them up.

Different than what you're talking about, but your post made me think of sitting in my buddy's backyard, as his brother made balloon dogs and swords and flowers, eyes closed, trying to hear the shape of the explosion.

[sparkligbeatnic.livejournal.com]

This book is worth a look.

Would love to hear those recordings of Korean summer insects.

[(Anonymous)]

That book is worth throwing away. Some interesting ideas buried under a mountain of tedious culturally conservative prattle.

Haunted Weather

[auto-appendix.livejournal.com]

Did anyone read David Toop's last book 'Haunted Weather'. Great title and a very pretty book, but I'm not sure a single idea stayed with me after I put it down.

Re: Haunted Weather

[thetemplekeeper.livejournal.com]

No, but "Ocean of Sound" is brilliant: have you read that (it's a little old, but his description of his time in the Amazon rainforest is vivid and imaginative)

Re: Haunted Weather

[auto-appendix.livejournal.com]

Agreed.

I'm seeing Yoko Ono at All Tomorrow's Parties this weekend. Both excited and apprehensive.

Re: Haunted Weather

[thetemplekeeper.livejournal.com]

That sounds very exciting: have a great time!

...um... what is "All Tomorrow's Parties"?

NOW I feel []!

Re: Haunted Weather

[auto-appendix.livejournal.com]

It's a (relatively) small music festival:

http://www.atpfestival.com/what_is_atp/index.php

with an ever-changing 'curator' who picks the bands:

http://www.atpfestival.com/archive/index.php

The UK one is held in a holiday camp, which means you get a bed and a shower and kitchen but also some surreal sights as the bands stay there too. Play crazy golf with Flavor Flav or see a chalet set by Lightning Bolt!

[freesurfboards.livejournal.com]

I've been intrested recently in video games made for blind people - a lot of them work on direct x's 3D sound modeling system (I don't know of any mac algorthmns that are as good...) which makes it feel like you're walking around in a world only using sound. It's amazng how much sound dictates presence.
However most of the games end up being quake-like clones in the sound domain, but I feel like there is great potential beyond that, if only I could think of a good concept . . .