"Sometimes sound summons the world with more certainty than my verse ...secretly, like twilight. The world seems lost in listening, trying to validate itself in each solitary sound." - Akio Suzuki
While looking for some information on Max Neuhaus (who unfortunately passed away last year) I stumbled on the very good blog Audible Affinities. Matt Marble apparantly stopped blogging last summer. His latest post was on a Luke Jerram project I haven’t heard from before. Here’s the post from Audible Affinities:
A recent New York Times article made me aware of the work of Luke Jerram. Since March of 2008, this Bristol artist has been planting pianos in public spaces in major metropolitan areas, most recently throughout London. Luke collected discarded and used pianos, decorated them, and inscribed the name of the project “Play me I’m Yours” on their body and/or keys. Passersby find themselves with a private moment of musical play or a spontaneous concert. On a google search images and videos abound.
Luke’s project is similar to David Byrn’s recent Playing the Building 2008 project at the Battery Maritime Building in New York.
In both cases the artists have set up a context of possibilities, open to and encouraging public interpretation. While Byrns project relies on the novelty of his instrumental extension of the piano interface, Jerram relies on the original placed in novel contexts. Jerrams work is unique in the generation of personal performances and documentation that have followed from it (Seed Work). Where Byrns project evades more immediate stylistic interpretations to feature the playful enjoyment of the building itself as it is played, Jerrams pianos beckon for the diversity of styles that can be brought to a familiar instrument.
2 weeks ago I visited the fascinating exhibition Wach sind nur die Geister at Hartware MedienKunstVerein, one of the best places for (media) art I know. One of the highlights for me was Magic Lantern (1987) by Susan Hiller. Magic Lantern is one of the many works of Hiller’s that use apparently simple forms of illumination. It is a sublime slide projection, in the dark, generated by three discs of coloured light driven by electronic pulses. This technical device has been taken from it’s original context as an early scientific experiment. This is not a benign return to the discovery of a source, for as in all of Hiller’s work, her sources become fragments torn from their context. This is also the fate of Magic Lantern’s synchronised soundtrack of recorded ‘ghost’ voices - they are the experiments of Latvian scientist Konstantin Raudive who believed he had recorded the voices of the dead. Hiller’s voice too is here as she whispering invites us into the realm of story-telling, ‘ ..10 minutes of silence for the dead starting – now’. (text from Index the Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation)
I saw another interesting work of Hiller at the previous Berlin Biennale. The Last Silent Movie (a 20-minute audio work translated and subtitled on black screens) opens the unvisited, silent archives of extinct and endangered languages to create a composition of voices that are not silent. They are not silent because someone is listening. The work sets free some of the ghosts and spectres haunting the unacknowledged unheimlich of sound recording which allows us to hear the words and voices of people mostly now dead. In The Last Silent Movie, some of them sing, some tell stories, some recite vocabulary lists and some of them, directly or indirectly, accuse us, the listeners, of injustice.
Close to where I live there’s a street with a constant annoying noise. Maybe it’s something to keep people away from there? This reminds me of the Mosquito, a way of keeping young people (under 25) out of a certain area by playing a very high ‘zooming’ noise, older generations can’t hear the sound. Is it still used somewhere?
check the video made by the Volkskrant in 2007 (Dutch only)
The British designer Simon Elvins has many fascinating projects on mapping / notation of sound. In Silent London he plotted the most silent spaces of the city on a map, based on information that the government collected on noise levels in London. The map intends to reveal a hidden landscape of quiet spaces and shows an alternate side of the city that would normally go unnoticed.
Notation is part of an ongoing exploration into sound, print and notation, and looks at ways of linking sound to the printed page. Using a pickup shaped like a pen, tonal values of pattern and drawing are directly translated into a tonal scales of sound and music.
FM RADIO MAP is a site-specific map plotting the location of FM commercial and pirate radio stations within London. Power lines are drawn in pencil on the back of the map which conduct the electricity from the radio to the front of poster. Placing a metal pushpin onto each station then allows us to listen to the sound broadcast live from that location.
I had the pleasure of meeting the Swiss composer and performer Manfred Werder at the fantastic organisation QO-2 in Brussels. Manfred is one of the participants in a collective chain-project that will be presented at STUK in February or March 2010.
Stück 1998 is a score of no less then 4000 pages.
From an email interview between James Saunders and Manfred Werder in 2004:
“JS:In the preface of the score of Stück 1998 you write the phrase ‘für sich, klar und sachlich. einfach.’. This seems like both a performance indication and an aesthetic statement which defines your work in general. In practice, how does this statement relate to the way your music operates, and your aims as a composer?
MW: The phrase replaced all further indications on dynamics, sounds qualities etc., since 1997. In general I wanted to write a music where the used material - sound and absence of sound - were just there as material (and not as an author’s composed preferences). The used material could be seen then more precisely as context specific material (the accidental qualities of performers, instruments, the site), as general conditions in a world, and itself as part of the world. In this sense every sound bears its precise dynamic and quality through its context.”
Later we will definitely post more on this fascinating composer.
Manfred is playing/performing/talking (I don’t know what he will be doing, but it will be interesting) in Brussels at Q-O2 on Sunday 21/06/2009 - 20:30.
Someone we would love to invite for one of the following Displaced Sounds evenings is Jonathan Sterne, author of the fascinating book The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Steven Feld, who was here in Leuven last March, recommended his writings to us.
“Today, we live in a world where telephone greetings, sound recordings, and broadcast transmissions continuously call out to us. Reproduced sound is one of the experiential bedrocks of modern life. But where did all this sound reproduction gadgetry come from? More importantly, why is it here? The Audible Past studies sound reproduction technologies—the telephone, phonograph, radio, microphone, etc.—as artifacts of a distinctively modern sound culture.
Sound reproduction bears the marks of the culture from which it emerged. Modes of listening developed in one arena moved to another: audiences for new telephones and phonographs unwittingly adopted techniques of listening that doctors and telegraphers had developed decades before. When, in 1878, Scientific American hailed the new phonograph as a machine that could “preserve the voices of the dead,” it extended an ethos of preservation that had been first popularized through canning and embalming during the Civil War. Even the very mechanism at the root of all modern sound reproduction devices—a vibrating diaphragm—was shaped by understandings of human hearing that had emerged over the course of the nineteenth century in acoustics, ear medicine, and the pedagogy of deaf children.”
Sterne doesn’t agree with the generally accepted idea that, in becoming modern, Western culture moved away from a culture of hearing to a culture of seeing. He argues that the importance of sound and hearing in our contemporary society is highly underestimated.
Another thing we would love to learn more about is a paper he presented at the Columbia University in New York: “MP3s get their small file size through a process called “perceptual coding.” An MP3 encoder scans a soundfile, estimates which parts of the recording will be inaudible to the ear, and disposes of those parts, thereby making the resulting MP3 file considerably smaller than the “same” song on a compact disc. In this talk, I will trace the origins of the ideas behind perceptual coding, and show how they traveled from psychoacoustics to communications and computer engineering in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of the key insights of psychoacousticians and engineers during this period carry strange and interesting parallels to key writings on music and sound in the humanistic tradition, most notably by Roland Barthes and Jacques Attali. The paper considers what Pierre Bourdieu calls “the homology of the fields” among psychoacoustics, engineering, aesthetics, architectural acoustics and political economy in an attempt to explain why perceptual coding emerged when it did, given that the technology and the theory were available for at least a decade before the process was first realized.“
At this site we’ll try to inform, collect information and research on the topics of found sounds, acoustical effects, ethnomusicology, sound ecology and field recordings,… Displaced Sounds is an initiative from STUK Arts Centre and label annex concert organisation Kraak. Displaced Sounds is also a series of concert evenings, lectures and artist presentations at Stuk, Leuven.
2 weeks ago I visited the fascinating exhibition Wach sind nur die Geister at 
I had the pleasure of meeting the Swiss composer and performer Manfred Werder at the fantastic organisation 
Someone we would love to invite for one of the following Displaced Sounds evenings is Jonathan Sterne, author of the fascinating book The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Steven Feld, who was