thesoundofand

I was interested in electronics and sound for a long time. My first memory of electronics was trying to repair cheap digital watches with Prestik when I was around seven. My father would buy me these watches from street vendors in town. I thought they were fantastic and mysterious objects. Invariably I would take off the back plate and try and see how these amazing devices worked. Obviously, I never really figured anything out and I generally broke the watch. I was convinced that this other wonder material – Prestik – would help me put it back together again. I don’t think I’ve ever lost this urge to figure things out, to open them up and see how they work.

While I was playing drums with Incurable I struck up a friendship with someone from my high school, Mark Van Niekerk. Mark would later become Fingerhead’s second drummer. Mark and I spent a great deal of time amusing ourselves by making audio collages on cassette tape. It was an obvious and cheap choice. We had access to a couple of double tape decks and source material was abundant on the airwaves.

We would record hours of radio shows and songs, and carefully sift through them to find snippets that we found amusing or could be edited to achieve optimal hilarity. Although it was just a bit of fun, we became progressively better at audio collage technique using our tape decks. For example, we could produce fairly good “loops” by painstakingly re-recording the same snippet repeatedly. It was difficult to do at first, but we eventually developed a feel for it, and could loop material quite quickly.

It was only years later that Mark and I became aware of the work of John Oswald and his seminal paper Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative (1985) and his album Plunderphonic (1989). Oswald’s work was not just about sampling other people’s music. Usually it was about making a comment about that sound source itself by sampling it. Take for example “Pretender” on the plunderphonic album.

The song itself is rather simple. Dolly Parton’s Great Pretender is used in it’s entirety – it is not edited at all. All that is done is that the songs starts fast and ends slow. The funny thing about Parton’s singing is that she sounds believable as a person regardless of what speed she’s played at. Great pretender indeed.

References
Oswald, J. 1985. Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative.
-    as presented by John Oswald to the Wired Society Electro-Acoustic Conference in Toronto in 1985. http://www.plunderphonics.com/xhtml/xplunder.html
Oswald, J. 1989. Plunderphonic. Plunderphonic – no official distributor/not for sale, Canada     http://www.plunderphonics.com/xhtml/xdiscography.html#plunderphonic

Gans, D. 1993. The Man Who Stole Michael Jackson’s Face. Wired 3.02, 1993.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.02/oswald_pr.html

“My body of work investigates the systems we utilize to attach value and meaning to the objects and things with which we surround ourselves. It is thorough my choice of materials and the seemingly disparate relationships between object and the self that I construct my own narratives around memory and mortality. The integration of video, photography and installation position these narratives between our immediate environment and the larger contexts in which we find ourselves. Built into my work is the ability of artificial light to manipulate and alter these objects and spaces, revealing only the aspects that are deemed suitable or necessary. This careful illumination acts as a mediator between the personal narrative and the social acceptability of the everyday.”

Vaughn Sadie (Sadie, undated)

Early in 2009 I was invited by Vaughn Sadie to consider some kind of a sound intervention for his upcoming solo show, Situation. It was a strange request, Sadie’s principle medium is light – quite removed from the physicality of sound. Sound and light are complementary, to be sure, but not related. You can’t make a recording of light without some intermediary to make it possible.

I had already decided that I would do a quadraphonic sound piece performed live in Audiomulch. Problem was, I had to try and think about what kind of sound I could gather in his exhibition. So I decided to hang around at the actual setup of the exhibition, I figured that at least the physical act of setting up the space might produce something interesting to work with.

I went to the setup at the bank gallery with my minidisc recorder, and I certainly did collect a great deal of bangs and loud noises you’d associate with setting up an installation.

The revelation however, was that Sadie’s work did make noise. The relays that drove his huge fluorescent clock, the cooling fans on his projectors & the sound of a dying fluorescent light bulb, and so on. The sound of the components of the installation thus became the basis of the field recordings I worked with for the quadraphonic piece.

The piece followed a walk about by Sadie of his exhibition.

The response to the piece was surprisingly excellent. I had concerns that it may be a situation where people don’t actually listen. I expected they may be more concerned with the level of their drinks. This didn’t happen. I was overjoyed to find that the audience sat down on the floor of the gallery and listened. And then spoke about the experience in critical detail. One of the overwhelming observations was that the piece was not an alienated sound spectrum, but rather a melodic re-interpretation of the installation itself.

References:
Sadie, V. undated. Info. http://www.vaughnsadie.net

Around June-July I was involved in a project called TIME_FRAME Durban / 2010. It was an international and interdisciplinary collaboration between dala and NIMk (funded by Mondriaan Foundation) focused on new media art and the intersection of people, and public space in the context of the World Cup.

Previously, I had been using a small cassette tape Dictaphone and a MiniDisc to make field recordings. I decided that for the TIME_FRAME project and with my exhibition with Vaughn coming up, I would purchase a better quality, more versatile field recorder.

I bought the Zoom Handy Recorder H2. It is a great recorder for its price range. It has 4 microphones so records a full surround image of two stereo files (Front Left and Right, Rear Left and Right).

I took the recorder to three venues during the world cup to make field recordings:
1.    Long Street, Cape Town for the opening of the World Cup.
2.    Moses Mabhida Stadium, Durban for the Brazil vs. Portugal Game.
3.    Coca-Cola Fan Park, South Beach, Durban for the Ghana vs. Uruguay Game.

Using AudioMulch I turned the source material into a live quadraphonic performance at the Durban Art Gallery (DAG). The purpose was to remix and re-interpret the aural experience of this international event. Bringing the public space and collective experience into the gallery setting. People cheered Ghana’s goals, despite knowing the eventual outcome.

Once Vaughn and I had our proposal to the Durban Art Gallery approved, we decided to do some testing of the space itself. We were quite fortunate in that Gallery 4 (nicknamed “the Red Room”) was mostly not being used for shows in the run up to our show. We had ample time to explore the space.

We went into the project without a clear idea of what we intended to do. We knew our own specialities and were very comfortable working with one another. We knew we would work out something that worked for both of us.

We made a number of visits to the gallery, and made a series of recordings. Our first visits were not just about the room itself, but also the building. We went through the roof and onto the rooftop, and made recordings and photographs in and around the building itself.

I initially thought that there must be something about the building, not just the Red Room that I could use for the exhibition. I realized that I was mistaken. The building is a great space, but audio documentation of the building was generic. Traffic, voices, air conditioning units – these were more about the building than the specific room inside it. I needed to concentrate on the space itself.

I figured that there were things about a room – its size, materials that would leave an audio imprint. Vaughn went into the room and did 5 recordings for me: 1 from each corner, the last in the center. Each recording was done in “silence”. That is, it was a recording to hear what the silent room sounds like. This may seem silly, but in reality there is no such thing as silence.

I took the resultant recordings and used Izotope’s Ozone software to analyse them. I intended to look for any trend in the frequency data. This is what I found. It was difficult to see distinct peaks in the low range (less than 102Hz), but I did spot what appeared to be fundamentals in higher frequencies. These were at approximately 172Hz, 303Hz and 617Hz. These aren’t perfect fundamentals, but I took these results with a pinch of salt for two reasons:

1. The tool I was using was as accurate as many professional analysis systems.
2. The room is quite complex – standing waves and other phenomena could alter the resonant frequencies at different points in the room.

However, even in a “silent” space there was evidence of resonant frequencies in the room.

I initially thought that I could produce simple circuits that could replicate these frequencies and enhance them. However, the complexity of the room would make achieving this accurately quite difficult. Additionally, the original recordings were made in an empty space. In theory any of the resonant frequencies in the space could be altered by adding equipment, people – anything into the room. It would be difficult to plan and install an exhibition with so many variables to account for in the execution.

Apply any sound to a space and what you hear is not just the sound itself but reflections of the physicality, materiality and context of the space itself. Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in room (1969) describes this phenomenon aptly. In a specific space, Lucier recorded a set monologue through a microphone into a tape deck. He would then play that tape back whilst recording it with the same microphone. He would then repeat the process. After many interations, the sound produced and recorded would be less and less intelligibly his voice and more and more the room itself.

I needed to find a way of automatically and in real time describing the Red Room. After much thought the answer became clear – feedback. Feedback is a real-time reaction to the system and context in which the phenomenon occurs. It also seemed to me that it would be a relatively easy system to control in AudioMulch.