Lucia Chung is an experimental sound and sculpture artist based in London. In her sound works, Chung has a fascination with noise and feedback generated by analogue equipment. One of her mediums of improvisation is no input mixing. This technique consists of using a mixing desk as an instrument, by connecting the output to an input of it and creating a feedback loop. This loop is then is modulated and altered to create a performance.
Above is a video showing Chung doing no-input mixing. For this improvisation Chung uses two mixing desks and then process the output through different pedal effects. The sound design Chung is able to create with this limited amount of gear is insane, the sound sources are so simple but the final outcome are powerful electronic drones and textures.
Havin a visiting Lecture with Lucia Chung was very interesting. I had heard in the past about no-input mixing but I never met anyone that actually does it. Noise music and experimentation has been a growing interest of mine. I have looked into artist such as Merzbow but I had never seen more contemporary artists.
Nicole Raymond a.k.a Nick Nack, is a Leeds based experimental turntablist and sound artist whose work encompasses different influences and themes. In her early DJ stages, she was deeply involve in electronic dance music scenes such as the dubstep scene. Originally influenced by the early British rave culture and the sound system culture. It could be said that Nik Nack’s work has now shifted into the experimental realm, exploring creative ways of using turn tables and vinyl, composing sound art pieces and performances. Her work has led her to meeting and collaborating with big names in the music world, like Madlib and Yves Tumor. Nick Nack won the Oram Award in 2020, and she’s a leading voice in promoting experimental turntablism across the UK.
Compass – Is a piece that I really enjoyed from Nick Nack. In this piece she uses atmospherical field recordings and manipulates them with her turn table and a delay pedal. By this she deconstructs the environment where the field recordings where taken, emphasising their rhythmic nature.
In the past, I just knew about Maria Chavez in the world of experimental turntablism so finding Nick Nack was a great thing for developing my knowledge in that field of practice. I would love to some day being able of use turntables in a performative way, either could be DJing or experimentation. I’m a great fan of vinyl and without a doubt is an area I have not indulged before.
The work of the Austrian sound artist Sam Auigner regularly follows the theme of hearing perspectives. The concept of thinking with you’re ears, instead of leading yourself from visual stimuli. His work is lead by collaborations with mediums outside the sound art canon, for example urban planning, architecture and design. His great talent has made him win multiple awards, from prizes of art organisations to residences at culture institutions across Europe.
As discussed before, Auigner work is deeply linked with architecture and urban design. His pieces are always set in out of the ordinary spaces, abandoning gallery spaces and opting for churches, factories and even public spaces like bridges. In the video below we can see a sound installation by Auginer where he explores the acoustic nature of the mythic and controversial Berlin venue, Berghain.
This installation is quite interesting because the sound is design to mirror the aesthetic of the place. Long industrial drones are played towards the walls of the venue, mimicking a sine tone test for acoustic measurement. The drones slowly increase in volume until a threshold where the sound violently cuts itself, leaving a resonating reverb tail.
I thought that it was fascinating targeting an installation to a specific building design, this makes sound interact in communication with space, resulting in a unique installation that could not be reproduce again in the same way. For a while now I have played in my head with the idea of contacting spaces or venues that are not linked with artistic purposes, and try convincing them to let me experiment in the place with a gallery. For the moment I have mainly thought of contacting churches, I will try contacting the priest that I interviewed for my audio paper to see if he is open to the idea.
Today I went across city of London, near by St Paul cathedral, in search of churches where I could find a priest to interview for my audio paper. After a deep thought I decided to shift the topic of my essay, focusing in contrasting DIY sound practices from the individual and the collective. For the collective I thought of spirituality and it’s connection with calmness. I decided to go to a Christian church and interview a priest that could give me an insight to what he thinks in the relationship of spirituality and calmness, and how sound can be the medium between them. I chose a Christian temple because Christianity is the most popular religion in the UK and I thought that it would connect better to what the individual might say. The interview took place in the church of Holy Sepulchre, where Reverent Nick Mottershead accepted to talk with me. Interestingly the church is considered as the national musicians church, making the practices of the temple deeply connected with sound. I went through my questions with the reverent and I got excellent responses, the reverent is quite an extraordinary man and he treated me with the finest attitude. We discussed the themes of my investigation and it seem that he was really engaged with the topic, as the church has a lot relevance with music he told me that he has indulge in ways of using sound as a medium of health and expression.
At the end of the interview I unfortunately turned of my microphone but we continued talking. He told me that in a near future the church was going to organise some sound practices, specifically creating a labyrinth inside of the church where the people passing through it will have to guide themselves through the sound and music of the church. He also invited me to come to that event and participate or even document it, he told me he was interested in my work and would like to read works of mine regarding the subject.
Without a doubt that has been the best interview I have ever made and I feel so grateful of that experience. Even though I consider myself an atheist I would like to get more in contact with the spirituality realm, to investigate its relationship with sound. Reverent Nick is a great contact to orientate me in that field of practice. The pictures below are from the church where the interview took place.
Last Thursday I attended the MA Sound Arts postgraduate show that took place in a very interesting venue called Dilston Grove, an old church converted into a gallery space. In the show, I experienced both sound art pieces and performances from the MA course students. I was deeply impressed by the pieces displayed in the gallery and I thought that every artist featured in the gallery was extremely talented. A few pieces stood out for me, the first one can be seen in the picture above, it consists of a digitally animated ball displayed in a screen and a microphone hanging from the ceiling in front of the screen (the microphone is not very visible in the picture). The microphone was connected to the visuals parameters of the animated ball, when anyone approached the microphone and talked to it the video would react to the sound source, creating weird alterations to the ball. It was a quite interactive an amusing piece of art and I found it very interesting how visual stimuli would make people change their voice when interacting with the microphone.
The picture above is another piece that I found interesting. It consisted of a turntable playing a vinyl of one of the artist of the gallery, what made the piece interesting was that people where invited to play with the velocity of the turntable, creating unique tempo alterations to the original composition of the record. A speaker was connected to the turntable and it spat the content of the vinyl to the open atmosphere of the gallery, fusing with other sounds made from the other pieces displayed in the gallery.
Finally the picture above displays my favourite piece of the gallery. This piece combines visual art, sound art and textiles into a single interactive piece. The cloth that can see in the middle between the two speakers, display a distorted map of the world, in the back of the cloth different movement sensors are attached to section of the map and then connected to a theremin that is hidden behind the curtain. Then the signal of the theremin is sent to a Pure Data patch that modulates and sequences the retrived signal into complex sound synthesis. In the bottom section of the piece a small screen was allocated in the ground displaying the Pd patch. The piece related to imagery of water and space, focusing in the textures and connotations behind maps.
The space and venue of the place where great factors in making my experience in the show very special. Every sound produce by each individual sound pieces resonated in the tall walls of the building, creating a thick texture of surround sound. I would argue that the sum up of the sounds made from the individual art pieces with the natural space of the gallery created an independent art piece it own. When focusing in each individual piece I notice how almost all shared an interactive interface, this made the exhibition accessible to any visitor. From what I learned from that exhibition I would say that Sound pieces in contrast with visual art, embrace an individual conjunctive experience, allowing for a communication and interaction between person and art.
Recently I started learning granular synthesis in SuperCollider, reading help sheets and reviewing patches from other artists. Mainly I’ve been using the UGen: GrainBuf and then experimented with different samples and modulators. I’ve mainly used samples of human voice, for example some ancient Arabic chants or even a recordings of my own voice. With human voice, the effect of the grains becomes really interesting because it shifts between understandable words to weird experimental glitches. Also with slow modulation rich evolving textures are created, a great source for ambient material.
Above is a picture of the script I was experimenting with. I used a sample of me reciting a poem in Spanish and then inputed that buffer into GrainBuf, where with different algorithms manipulated them. I use both Impulse and Dust to trigger the sample. The outcome of this experiment was outstanding, I’ve never heard sounds like this and I thought it could be a great sound Fx for the film of Sound for Screen.
I used the same scripts as a move but with a lot of different sample to compose the end section of the film. I jammed testing different parameters while the scene was running, that way I could react with what was happening in screen . For this part I didn’t use any generative practice because I wanted to focus more in each individual sound, exploring the capabilities of layering a bunch of different granular sample, to create a thick layer and a more precise composition. Sound and image managed to intertwine quite well for my last scene, the granular sound helped convey the industrial atmosphere of it and it’s harsh glitch helped express the mood of the main character.
Pervert’s guide to Cinema is a documentary by Slovenian philosopher and psychologist Slavoj Žižek where he analyses films through psychoanalysis concepts, to argument how Cinema is a medium where humans express their deepest and darkest desires. Žižek in this documentary also includes sound and music to his analysis and how it evidences his point. When watching this documentary I became aware of psychoanalytical traits in the narrative of the short film I am scoring and I decided to approach the sound design for it with this concepts in mind.
The most important concept and idea I learned from the documentary was between the 14:10 min and 31:00, where he discusses the role of the voice in films and connecting it to Freudian concepts. Žižek references films like The Exorcist, Mullholland Drive, Alien and Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. In a short summary Žižek argument that the voice is not an organic component of the body and that the voice works as an autonomous entity that live inside of us, humans have been constantly trouble by the internal conflict between the self and this autonomous entity and this concept is currently expressed in films. For example in The Exorcist, the voice of the demonic being possessing the girl changes from her normal voice and by so separating the two individuals. Žižek finishes his point explaining that the only way to get rid of the autonomous entity is to become it, referencing the psychoanalytic concept of catharsis.
Now connecting what I learned to my own project, in the movie I’m using the main character is always in conflict with the figure of the city and the isolation it provokes. There is a distinctive separation between the character and the city, this can be seen by a reoccurring motif of a building every time the character is in distress. At the end of the film the character faces the building and it that way becoming it, achieving catharsis. Even though the scene I’m working on is not the ending scene it is important to acknowledge this concept, specially because the whole film including my scene has no dialogue but only narration, that is in a way the voice that Žižek was referring to. The way I’m going present this sonically is to alienate the narrative voice to make it sound fake or unreal, but the effects I will use will be very subtle, so the audience only perceive it in the subconscious and not be distracted it. Aesthetically I’m gonna achieve this with some slight pitch modulation and phasing manipulation.
Rebecca Lennon is a London based artist that blends together different forms of media like video, sculpture and sound to create pieces of heavy symbolic meaning and aesthetic . Her work takes the form of video and sound, to create multichannel audio visual pieces in galleries, she is extremely flexible across the field of contemporary art.
One of Rebecca Lennon most common compositional tools is the voice. She explores how rhythm, timbre and texture of a voice can shape an art piece and express its themes and concepts. Communication is an important focus in Lennon’s work, she investigates the role of the voice in communication and expose psychological pathologies that are hidden in the structure of the way we communicate.
Liquid i – Is a multichannel sound and video exhibition piece that took place in a primary school in Nottingham. In the gallery a massive screen was positioned in one of the back walls of the space, in the screen a video art piece was played. The video displayed several images and short videos of different symbolic elements, that where placed in an ambiguous narrative. The videos showed images that had a connotation to liquid: mosquitos drinking blood, a fish spitting water and some performers mangling water in their mouths. Sound mirror the images, emulating the rhythms of the mosquitos or the texture of water flowing. All the sounds where created using the voice and then being edited to create complex rhythms. Spoken poetry was also a part of the soundtrack, hinting the themes of the video, with symbolic words and phrases. The correlation of audio and sound in Liquid i refers a lot to the theories of Michel Chion, added value and sincresis are currently happening across the exhibition, making the audience get deeper into the world created in that space. Place and space are carefully chosen in Lennon’s work and always in someway the space takes a place inside the narrative and themes of the piece. For example this piece was exhibited first in a primary school and then in an old abandoned church, everything except an art gallery. This could represent some of the concepts in the video, for example a fish out of the water to an art piece outside of an art gallery.
Its interesting to see audio-visual techniques used to build up a gallery piece because it helps consolidate all the senses in a single space. In the future I want to attempt designing my own sound gallery and inspired from Liquid i, I think I will have to think about a visual aspect in my gallery, and how it connects to my sonic intention.
As discussed in previous posts I will score a scene of a short film created by a director friend of mine. In this project I will use code as my main compositional tool, creating desired textures through genereative made music. In a short sum up of what happens in the first scene, the main character is walking through London to get to his job and then back home. The movie deals with the theme of isolation inside a big city and the social alienation that can occur because of it. The scene starts with a long shot of the main character walking through a wide street to get to his office. The shot is designed to seem as an optical illusion creating an endless pathway from the character to its destiny. For this first scene I composed an ambient generative piece called Aether using Supercollider.
Aether works as a medium to convey the theme of dreams and reality, creating a trance inducing feeling. I was inspired to take this approach from David Toop’s book Ocean of Sound that I have discussed in a previous post. I used different techniques to create this aesthetic, first of all and already mentioned I used generative practices to create the music. The hypnotic static nature of generative music helps convey a feeling of floating, creating an additive value to the optical illusion of the walk. The second technique I used to achieve the aesthetic is using the pelog scale, characteristic of Gamelan music. I’ve been recently obsessed with it and it is also mentioned in Ocean of Sound, because of its spiritual use and its implications inside the ambient canon.
Above is a draft recording of Aether. Heavy compression have been used with the same objective of creating the static aesthetic, limiting drastic dynamic changes through out the composition. Compression also helped to regulate levels of each individual synth voice, I have found adjusting volumes in Supercollider quite hard, making it hard to create a decent mix.
The picture above is a small snap of my script when composing Aether. I mainly used SynthDef’s and Pdef’s to create and sequence my sounds, this gave my the opportunity to create multiple synth voices that added texture and harmony to the piece. I also experimented using filters, both inside my oscillator and as an external effect. I found out the MoogFF.ar filter that is an emulation of the Moog ladder filter, it has a great sound and I used it through the piece. To further develop the use of filters I also added random numbers to decide the cutoff frequency of the filter, adding a more complex generative technique. The script uses extensive randomness parameters that are the main tool to create the generative nature of it. I modulated mainly patterns, from the steps used to the output sent, this was useful to play with panning and make the piece more interesting.
Aether will be used only in the walking scenes before the character gets inside of the underground. The music will be mixed very quietly in the overall soundtrack of the scene, so both the music and the atmosphere field recordings can be heard. This has the purpose of using aether as just a tonal colouring technique, hinting a melancholic emotion to the listener perceived mostly by the subconscious. For the next scene I will use another piece of music also created in Supercollider, but it will have a more aggressive aesthetic that will contrast the sound and music of the first scene for a narrative development purpose.
In 2012 Benoit and the Mandelbrots (a live coding band) rescored in a live performance the classic 1930 pre-war German film Menschen am Sonntag, in Karlsruhe. This performance is one of the few examples of a film soundtrack created with code, in this case Supercollider.
The combination of 1930 black and white german film with modern algorithmic synthesis techniques create a unique audio visual composition, creating a dream like texture and subtly hinting the theme of nostalgia; evoking profound emotions to the listener. The sound track for the most of the film, is composed of long evolving electronic drones and unreal sound effects that contrast the aesthetic of the film but mirrors its mood. The film translates to The Men of Sunday and its a classic romantic comedy featuring the Berlin summer and its lake culture. The evolving dream like drones fit perfectly to the narrative of the story and it successfully represent the pleasantness of the summer. Such sounds progress slowly in time, changing its timbre instead of its tones across a long range of frames. The video was retimed to match the sound so even unconsciously the effect of sound can be perceived in the image. This film its a portal back in time to pre-war times and its utopic nature. Berlin is not corrupted by the fires of fascism and men can enjoy a warm Sunday. Even though video is retimed to sound, the soundtrack fits so well with the film because it portrays the dream land that Berlin would be without the war. The hypnotic qualities of the music hint nostalgia because of its dreamlike aesthetic, a distant fogy memory floating in the aether of a pre war world.
It’s rare when a film sound track is composed through an improvised performance instead of pre-composition, and in this case code gives it an incredible versatile source of sound design. This approach inspired me to use improvised live coding to compose some scenes in the short film I’m working on. Electronic music in general could be categorised as not very expressive due to it’s robotic perfectionist nature. By performing myself instead of just programming the music, the sound will endow a more expressive voice communicating better the themes of the film.
