In an effort to consciously bind the process of the work’s making to its inspiration, walking, I taped a contact mic to my shoe and walked my familiar footpath. What drew me to this idea was the rhythm and momentum it could provide; knowing the actual recordings would be abrasively unlistenable, using it as an impulse for sidechain compression affecting another aspect of the composition appealed to me. An invisible, unpredictable motion through the work. Hollowed out, yet the key driving force within it. This way, I could thread a walk through the work, hang it from its footfalls, tie it directly to its thematic and literal stimulus.
The setup: Old trainer, contact mic taped to it. Hosa adapter and Zoom F3
I used a Zoom F3 for ergonomic reasons, with the simple contact mic we made in our first year so I wouldn’t damage the higher quality JrF contact mic I own. Taped simply to the heel, knowing that I tend to stomp unconsciously when I walk, I thought would be the most effective place to record clear, transient-heavy steps instead of staticky, consistent tones. I tested it by walking around the garden first, examining its responses to varying surfaces, testing its durability. Surprisingly, grassy, hard-packed earth seemed to be the loudest, rather than stone or tarmac. Because I could only record one ‘leg’ at a time, I decided to record a left foot pass and then transfer the contact to the other shoe, recording a right foot pass. How, and whether, they would align was a total mystery at this stage.
Idiot artist testing foolish contraption
I then walked the path, taking a series of recordings approximately five minutes each; a left and a right. Holding the Zoom, wire trailing around my legs, made me think of an insulin pump. Carrying necessary equipment with you everywhere, its perceived burdensomeness. I felt grateful to be able to walk uninhibited, and also more comfortable than I expected. As my gait started stiff and tentative, unwilling to let the input clip and distort, I eventually settled into my normal walking gait and pace. Representing it wholly honestly, I thought. However, as I glanced at the readout on the screen, it became apparent that my right side recordings were consistently louder than my left. I tried changing the mic’s placement, walking with more emphasis on my left, but nothing notably changed. I suspected at the time this was because I must heavily favour my right side, walking somewhat lopsided, years of bad posture bearing its weight. I still place credence in this observation, I physiologically learned about the nature of my own walking in this project, understanding sound art’s potential for useful knowledge production. I also think the mic was simply dying.
The destroyed mic, giving in at last
Bringing these recordings into Logic, I realised the initial idea inspiring me to try this: Panning the left foot left and the right foot right, the aural simulation of walking started to take shape. It sounded familiar, but would require extensive editing to make it usable. I wasn’t concerned about the peaking or clipping, as they would ultimately be muted to serve the sidechain compression, but the stereo balance badly favoured the right, reflecting my steps. Presented with the ethical compositional challenge of leaving the recordings untouched as the truest reflection of my walked condition, or ‘fixing’ the imbalance because it made for uncomfortable listening. Walking (haha) this line between audio professionalism and field recording ethics as detailed by Mark Peter Wright is a continual struggle. I settled on duplicating the right channel footsteps and shifting them to the left channel, ensuring that it was impossible to tell that they were repeating. If much of the rest of the composition was going to rest on the transients these recorded provided, it needed to be balanced.
Title ideas: Interventionism of the Soundwalk, Efficacy of the Soundwalk
‘The ordinary practitioners of the city live “down below,” below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk-an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of the urban “text” they write without being able to read it.’ (pp. 93)
‘In the framework of enunciation, the walker constitutes, in relation to his position, both a near and a far, a here and a there. To the fact that the adverbs here and there are the indicators of a locutionary seat in verbal communication – a coincidence that reinforces the parallelism between linguistic and pedestrian enunciation – we must add that this location (here-there) (necessarily implied by walking and indicative of a present appropriation of space by an “I”) also has the function of introducing an other in relation to this “I” and of thus establishing a conjunctive and disjunctive articulation of places.’ (pp. 99)
‘Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories of it “speaks.” All the modalities sing a part in this chorus, changing from step to step, stepping in through proportions, sequences, and intensities which vary according to the time, the path taken and the walker. These enunciatory operations are of an unlimited diversity. They therefore cannot be reduced to their graphic trail.’ (pp. 99)
‘What this walking exile produces is precisely the body of legends that is currently lacking in one’s own vicinity; it is a fiction, which moreover has the double characteristic, like dreams or pedestrian rhetoric, of being the effect of displacements and condensations. As a corollary, one can measure the importance of these signifying practices (to tell oneself legends) as practices that invent spaces.’ (pp. 107)
DeCerteau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ual/reader.action?docID=922939&ppg=4
‘Discourses of fear are maps of a social reality perceived as problematic in moments when we are unsure what direction to take: whether to fight or flee, where and how to live, where to invest. The reality of city fear is always mediated by these discourses or representations of it.’ (pp. 231)
Sandercock, L. (2005) ‘Difference, Fear and Habitus: A Political Economy of Urban Fears’, in J. Hillier and E. Rooksby (eds.) Habitus: A Sense of Place. New York: Routledge.
‘Many people and many processes are involved in producing place qualities. These qualities are both material, in terms of the conjunction of built and natural forms into landscapes through which people and other life forms move as we go about in our lives. They are also mental constructs, ‘imaginaries’, created as we infuse particular places and their qualities with meaning and memory. In this way, we come to recognise places and realise why we care about them.’ (pp. 106)
Healey, P. (2015) ‘Civic Capacity, Place Governance and Progressive Localism’, in S. Davoudi and A. Madanipour (eds.) Reconsidering Localism. New York: Routledge.
“I like this image of a mirror. From the very beginning I’ve known that the work is first of all a mirror of our mind: depending on our mood, our perception of the work is altered. That’s incredible. There was one point when I was completely rejecting everything and at the beginning I got angry and I started to destroy things, which was silly. Because when I looked for some kind of shape it was there. Now, i’d rather go for a walk and let the work exist. And I know it’s exactly the same for the listener, depending on their mood.” – Eliane Radigue https://www.soundportraits.info/eliane-radigue/
Thoughts to pursue: Alisa Oleva – ‘A walk to the edge’, cassettes thrown from car windows
‘Researchers in the World Soundscape Project, founded in the early 1970s at Simon Fraser University in Canada by composer R. Murray Schafer, engaged in listening walks, which were often undertaken for orientation purposes during initial visits to places where the group intended to document and study the soundscape… Public soundwalks were led by acoustic ecologists to sensitize people to the sounds of the environment.’ (pp. 39)
‘More recently, soundwalking has taken on an explicitly artistic dimension. Viv Corringham records her conversations with a person who takes her on a “special walk”; later, she retraces the walk while recording her own improvised vocal responses to it. Andrea Polli traced repeating neighborhood soundwalks with GPS, the thickness of traced lines underlining her habitual walking patterns. A focus on environmental interaction in these walks is shared with other kinds of walking art, such as electrical walks (Christina Kubisch), audio walks (Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller), micro-radio walks (Michael Waterman; Kathy Kennedy), and walking performance (Christopher Long)… In this way artists and sound-walkers becomes cocreators, improvising with their environments.’ (pp. 39)
‘…to hear how it is being shaped by the space, weather conditions, and the sounds that are heard there at the moment; and by thinking about relationships between sonic moments. Sometimes in planned walks, that feeling of discovery is gone because the experience has become predictable, the route set… The risk of such preplanning is that the soundwalk becomes a spectacle, the walkers more like an appreciative audience than active participants.’ (pp. 42)
‘For me the answer lies in thinking about listening in soundwalks as a form of creative improvising. Ellen Waterman (2008b) defines creative improvising as “an intersubjective and dialogic practice in which past histories and future aspirations are conjoined in the immediacy of musical creation.” She goes on to say that “while it is almost impossible to pin down stylistically, creative improvisation by definition demands a reciprocal exchange among all participants… improvisation’s potential to model new social relations is dependent on the degree to which it disrupts discourse while maintaining fluid and unfixed” (2). I want to find a way of making soundwalks that encourage this kind of listening Waterman describes here, “intersubjective and dialogic,” where the focus is less on sensitizing numbed listeners to the sound environment and more on exploring the multiple ways people listen and how those ways of listening are conjoined, during the silence of the walk and the flow of the conversation after it, in reciprocal exchange.’ (pp. 42)
McCartney, A. (2016) ‘How Am I to Listen to You? Soundwalking, Intimacy and Improvised Listening’, in G. Siddall and E. Waterman (eds) Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound and Subjectivity. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 39-42
‘Peter Cusack, a London-based sound artist, sees a number of problems with the “world as human composition” analogy common to soundscape work. He believes it places too much emphasis on preconceived ideas about what might make up a “good” composition based on “natural” sounds, distinct and in balance with one another, instead of embracing the aural complexity and creativity inherent to chaotic urban soundscapes. Cusack asks: “Should we really try to hear the acoustic environment as a musical composition when it clearly isn’t?”‘ (pp. 58)
Caines, R. (2016) ‘Community Sound [e]Scapes: Improvising Bodies and Site/Space/Place in New Media Audio Art’, in G. Siddall and E. Waterman (eds) Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound and Subjectivity. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 58
‘All silences are uncanny, because we have become estranged from absences of sound. An uncanny silence falls when it overlaps ‘
‘US-based sound artist and vocalist Viv Corringham also revoices other people’s words. In her longstanding series Shadow walks she invites local people to take her on a walk that is special or meaningful for them in some way. Apart from being a good way of engaging with the geography, history and culture of an unknown place, this methodology is a shortcut to intimate exchanges with relative strangers as, in the course of the walk, they divulge aspects of their lives, thoughts and feelings to Corringham.’ (pp. 210)
Lane, C. (2020) Encouragements, Self-Portraits, and Shadow Walks: Gender, Intimacy, and Voices in Sound Art.
‘This duration was answered by a stillness and passive receptivity of the audience, which included a new awareness of everyday life taking place around the performance. Furthermore, the performance created an awareness of the social and political situation of the site, its past and futures, and the awkward situation of being reminded of an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ – a situation created through the awareness of being an audience to an existing reality when the inhabitants walked by, and a situation created in the sound performance when LaBelle in the second part addressed an ‘I’ and a ‘you’.’ (pp. 107)
Krogh Groth, S. and Samson, K. (2017) ‘Sound Art Situations’, Organised Sound, 22(1), pp. 107
‘Cut loose, specialized Homo economicus could move around in society, exploiting possessions and skills as the market offered, but at a price. Moving around freely diminishes sensory awareness, arousal by places or the people in those places. Any strong visceral connection to the environment threatens to tie the individual down. This was the premonition expressed at the end of The Merchant of Venice: to move freely, you can’t feel too much.’ (pp. 256)
Sennett, R. (1994) Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
The principal work the Sensingsite collective showed was an in-progress audio-visual patchwork titled ‘In the Westfield’, concerning the Westfield Shopping Centre in Stratford, its “economy of distraction” and occupation of the hyper-capitalist landscape. Through their methodologies developed through working with site, they question the meaning of landscape, the field, collective work and field recording as terms and practices.
The “scrappy and awkward” presentation, arbitrarily shuffled, echoed the impermanence of the fetishised, ever-shifting neoliberal consumer landscape. I understand the upending of traditional, bucolic interpretations of ‘landscape’. Yet, as artists or passersby, none of us can be outside the economy of extraction, consumption and exploitation. The “recordist is not unbiased”.
I actually ran the gauntlet of Korea’s Shinsegae Centum City* flagship store a few times, the largest mall in the world. Nightmarish experiences, needless to say. Korean hyper-consumerism is a different beast. But I understand the primal, anthropological substrate that they are exploring. Perhaps nowhere am I more out of place than when dragged through luxury goods, grass-stained, hair mussed, slack-jawed and tight-fisted.
I just felt this another pretty flawless example of my frustration with research-forward projects; where the ideas are thick, the artwork is thin. Am I seeing this everywhere unwarranted, proposing we suggest nothing? What is wrong with me? Riled continually, why do I idiotically bat for the apparent reduction of language?
What is it that I want, if not this? I think transformation of stimulus into art piece or composition demonstrated in Dorothee Schabert’s guest lecture resonates more with me than this nominative, memetic pointing at things. That perceptual experience isn’t simply reiterated, it’s reshaped.
They key expression they brought up, is that art is a “host” for research and theoretic resonances. Interestingly, Sensingsite stated that they had reached an evolved freedom from theory by having “disaffiliated” from institutional models. For an emphatically non-institutional collective, Sensingsite sure moved like one. Couching works in these unsubstantial terms of place, space and site is a convention so deeply attached to the ontological landscape of the art institution, as I see it.
Maybe that’s why I involuntarily roll my eyes and grumble watching a member of Sensingsite walk purposefully past Vodafone and JD Sports, vocalising above the hum, drawing curious reactions. I felt a connection to my reading of Peter Cusack, his problematisation of artists’ use of the “world as human composition” in soundscape works. Examining these aural and visual “thresholds” of perception, through the insertion of the artist as public performer, creates a sense of othering in regards to the shoppers around them. It struck me as a mild, facile kind of provocation.
Transparently, or tellingly, in discussing the ethical and semantic concerns of ‘In the Westfield’, the collective noted a tension in the ratio between “memetic recording exercise” and participatory performance. Instinctually, I felt the former coursing through the work more, yet perhaps they are symbiotic. In Sensingsite’s agenda-less, unintentional method of recording, memetic recording is a conduit for repercussive, perceptual discoveries as a group.
“Times are tough.” The unnamed ghouls of war and politics circle the room again. During the second Presidential Debate in September 2024, Trump infamously said “I have concepts of a plan.” Risible as it was, and continues to be, I think it somewhat apt in relation to these densely researched, ‘social-science-but-not’ projects that we often engage with.
The themes interrogating notions of landscape that Sensingsite brought up align with a curious lineage of recent lectures and self-directed research that I have attended. I am certain that pursuing this field will prove inspirational in this project.
*Note: THAT’S a place/space/site/landscape/hellscape that I would interested in a study of. It’s like the spaceship from Wall-E.
In my initial thinking about a theme to examine, I want to continue my focus on sociopolitically discursive work, with a predication for the earthy. Previously, construction, decolonisation, religion and physical labour were major themes I explored.
I wished I had had the opportunity to go deeper discussing the ethical, political and social relations that I mined in construction, with sound as the operative, transliterating tool. But, also I’m concerned about repeating myself too much, digging over old ground. I’ve consciously sensed a recurring interest not in harnessing properties of sound itself, but in external cultural themes or issues, then coming to sound to comment, replicate or transfigure. My audio paper, for instance, acted as a critical bridge between Christian colonisation and the church organ. Without being (too) snarky, I’ve been wanting to avoid the ‘science fair’ vibes that sound art can stray into, in my subjective view. Physically manifesting aural phenomena in that engineered way has yet to capture me. I wonder why?
A blog post I wrote for Element 1 of Specialising & Exhibiting resurfaced, striking me as a potential avenue for exploration. In it, I detailed walking 13 miles home from an abortive train journey. Walking is something I find deep meaning and purpose in, a physically-engaged practice, drawing connection between the feared “other” places and home, reaching beyond inhibition and exhaustion.
I think walking can create a healthy balance between physically-inhabited work that I am stimulated by, and the practice-based research approach required by this unit. Projects heavily weighted in the favour of practice-based research also place higher stakes on the veracity of the artwork produced. There’s been many lectures where the clouds of references, conceptual ideas and assertions part to reveal “experiment with beer can”, forty stark minutes of a can rattling around, bald and amateurishly recorded. I’m being facetious, and more than a little hyperbolic, but I can’t be the only person to cringe reading samey Eraserhead analyses. The institutional expectation of an evidentiary dossier that comes with an artwork, designed to quantify it, I find both practically realistic and spiritually perverse.
By chance, I read a new Tim Hecker (2025) interview that struck a similar chord: ‘But I was always against even someone like Brian Eno. In his new work, the question is, like, “what art does?” It’s such a British empiricist, pragmatic question. I’m not interested in the function that art’s serving in our society. I’m more interested in how it overflows and can’t be explained by pragmatism, empiricism and scientism. I don’t know if I’m a mystic, but I go against a lot of that stuff.’
I think I have half the brain of a mystic, and the other half a ‘British empiricist’. They seem to be in constant conflict. This dully myopic view of art, maybe humanity’s only ineffable, transcendental pursuit, to have literate, binary function is depressing. Reflexively bending it back on itself just to talk about human systems and structures, implying verifiable conclusions.
Maybe I’m taking the wrong tack. Research is the undeniable web within which we locate and align ourselves, it’s unavoidable and normal. Critical debate has certainly made me more articulate and dimensional in my thinking, plus it’s fun! Contradictions, everywhere. Yet, perhaps practice-based research attempts to annihilate contradiction, to even out ambiguity. I also don’t wish to assume an anti-intellectualist posture here, I do like research, and thinking I like even more. But I softly reject the institutional turning-over of the mystery at the centre of artmaking, and then do it myself anyway. What a mess, artmaking is a mess. In the spirit of Polyani (2009, pp. 4), ‘I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell.’
Hecker, T. (2025) ‘Tim Hecker Isn’t Afraid To Slow Down’. Interviewed by Ted Davis for Stereogum, 20 February. Available at: https://www.stereogum.com/2297752/tim-hecker-shards/interviews/ (Accessed: 22 February 2025).
Polyani, M. (2009) ‘The Tacit Dimension’. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
I am speaking from St. Michael the Archangel Church in Penhurst, East Sussex, in the United Kingdom of late 2024. So adjacent and outside the expansionist missionary world, this place is as innocent as it is ignorant. Among the tens of thousands of churches dotting the British landscape, making up the vestiges of a staging ground for international cultural domination.
The foundations of imposing colonial rule bring the people into a space designated for changing minds and hearts. The church is as much a ubiquitous building, whether wood, stone or daub, as it is a force, slow-moving and considered, and by extension the church organ has been central to wider cultural takeover. Faith unites, and to turn, to subsume a populace, they were to be united under faith. The Christian church, altar in front and organ behind, forms an enclosure.
This audio paper will explore the smothering cultural effect of missionaries’ introduction of the church organ as a tool in a wing of colonial measures, and its proponents’ efforts to multiply international influence and suppress indigenous sounding through its use.
‘The organ has always been considered, and rightly so, the king of musical instruments, because it takes up all the sounds of creation… The organ’s great range of timbre, from piano through to a thundering fortissimo, makes it an instrument superior to all others… The manifold possibilities of the organ in some way remind us of the immensity and the magnificence of God.’
So said Pope Benedict XVI at Alte Kapelle in Regensburg, Germany on 13th of September 2006, blessing the installation of a new organ. Recurrent through histories of the church organ’s distribution through the Christianised world, and the ongoing collaborative processes uniting Christian conversion with colonisation, is the perceived supremacy imbued within the instrument. A superior belief system manifest through music, projected not just to Heaven, but to the indigenous peoples missionaries encountered. Thereby creating grounds to forcibly supersede those groups missionaries considered lost or heathen, enabled by song. Storch (2012, pp. 224) relays how Francisco Cabral, superstitious xenophobe and Portuguese Franciscan missionary, on his ‘first journey to India, where he arrived on 13 September 1500, was already accompanied by eight Franciscans; among them was the organ player Frei Matteu, who is said to have been able to play an organ on one of the ships.’
This organ music, the hymnals it accompanied, were not purely worshipful, but extensively functionalised music. Songs of convincing, modalities of control. Providing those scarred by the colonisers with a ritual security, in a cycle of violence and spiritual emancipation designed wholly by the coloniser. In this case, the organ’s reliability as an export is conveyed, on long voyages and in foreign climates, its robustness ensured its longevity of use. For Cabral and the Franciscans, prolific missionaries active in widespread colonisation in the Americas and Asia, the organ’s vibrational resonance provided a strong footing to gather the unconverted in union.
An eminent interlocutor enabling the church organ as a colonial tool was Christian Ignatius Latrobe, active in the nineteenth century Moravian Church. Latrobe worked to construct a self-replicating network of Christian colonial missions, encouraging indigenous dependence on settler missionaries, where the natives’ survival depended on the assimilation conversion brought. Dodds (2023, pp. 77) observes: ‘At the different stations, the policy increasingly became to train local members of the congregation according to Latrobe’s advice, so that the instrument, the canon of tunes and the performance conventions were exported uniformly from Europe, embodied in the organ and the organist. Crucially, this uniform and standardised imposition of music-although always resisted and never fully achieved-required the violent outlawing of existing musical practices and styles.’
Latrobe’s didactic, standardised organ arrangement and performance modes furthered his envisioned homophonic uniformity of congregational control. Materially, his export of a European organ was crucial to furthering colonial aims. Independent of local resources and means of instrument manufacture, not only would the organ gain wider influence as the congregation inevitably grew, but also expedite the dying out of local instrument-making skills and song. Marrying with the coercive brutality of the colonialist practice of suppression, was the church’s conscious imbuing of the organ with a sacred character.
Christian colonists mythologised the organ as manifesting the voice of God in music, the physical sensations it could summon across its broad frequency range lending credence to their assertions. On the organ player’s control over a congregation, Latrobe’s son, John Antes (1831, pp. 366) colourfully illustrated; ‘According to the tenor of his performance, their minds may be solemnized or dissipated, their devotion elevated or repressed, their thoughts sublimed or secularized. He holds over them an enchanter’s wand, powerful as the lightning, and almost equally destructive.’ This empirical, mythic characterisation harkens back to the organ’s history framed as a theophanic force, a catalyst for religious subjugation. Aligning with this, Jasen (2016, pp. 99) writes how ‘it would have also confronted non-participants and non-believers – those not in the church but in its proximity, permeated by modulations – with a striking, perceptual encounter combined with the promise/threat of something altogether more transformative ‘inside’.’ From a marginalised, native perspective, how could this new, purportedly sacred building be resisted when it resonated with the very voice of a God? A scale and formation of sounds fundamentally unheard of, or felt, prior to the arrival of the missionaries.
However, outright assumption that indigenous assimilation was corollary to the organ and church sound culture applying purely duress would be too simplistic. Eyerly (2020, pp. 11) states, ‘Although Moravian hymn singing and the soundscapes of mission communities were a form of colonialism, on an individual and community level, people were modifying hymns and adapting them. Native Moravians were not passive actors enmeshed in colonial processes.’ Assessing the impact of the church sound culture on an individual basis is complex. Native populaces’ lexicon was adaptive, in their interval merging with Christianity. Yet is this not the success of the self-replicating model Latrobe sought to instil? The natural progression in conducting cultural change on the scale Latrobe envisioned, lead to the enlistment of the local populace through training to play the organ. Irrespective of whether missionaries were subject to external threats of their own, or the organic adoption and adaptation of hymnals by native congregations, the placement and use of the church organ in these territories represents an act of orchestrated, colonial erasure of pre-existing culture.
Colonial missionaries like the Franciscans and Latrobe of the Moravians expressly denoted their own supremacy and requirement of expansion and replication in order to leverage influence, and the export of the church organ provided them with a unifier; a sonic monolith under which non-believers could be aligned and transformed to their will. This deliberate enmeshing of the organ’s theosophic, magnificently resonant character ascribed to it throughout Christian history with colonialist suppression of indigenous language, song and worship practices left native populaces with little choice but assimilation.
Engaging with the organ’s hymn became an act of survival; those from the Cherokee in Pennsylvania, the Mi’kmaq in Labrador or the Khoisan of South Africa for instance, were shepherded into conversion in the pursuit of a land grab. Organ music accompanied their shedding of instruments, songs, performance conventions, ways of life, violently discouraged and destructively replaced in the ancient, now-transformed, sacred sonic landscape; supplanted by the church organ.
Bibliography:
Montagu, J. (1979) The World of Baroque & Classical Musical Instruments. Great Britain: David & Charles Limited.
Pope Benedict XVI (2006) Apostolic Journey of his Holiness Benedict XVI to München, Altötting and Regensburg (September 9-14, 2006) Blessing of the New Organ, Greetings of the Holy Father [speech]. Available at: https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060913_alte-kapelle-regensburg.html (Accessed: 16 November 2024).
Storch, C. (2012) ‘How the Pagans Became ‘Convinced’ About Christianity: Four Conclusions on the Relationship Between Music and the Missions in Early Colonialism’, in M. d. R. G. Santos and E. M. Lessa (eds) Música Discurso Poder. Minho, Portugal: Universidade do Minho Centro de Estudos Humanísticos.
Dodds, P. (2023) Music and the Cultural Production of Scale. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36283-5 (Accessed: 17 October 2024)
Latrobe, J. A. (1831) The Music of the Church Considered in its Various Branches, Congregational and Choral: An Historical and Practical Treatise for the General Reader. London: R.B. Seeley and W. Burnside.
Bergland, B. A. (2010) Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation and the American Protestant Empire, 1812-1960. Edited by B. Reeves-Ellington, K. K. Sklar and C. A. Shemo.
Jasen, P. C. (2016) Low End Theory: Bass, Bodies and the Materiality of Sonic Experience. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
In creating the music and sound design aspects for my audio paper, I decided that recording a real church organ was imperative in informing the meaning of the text. Thankfully, I have access to my local church and the key for its organ due to my employment history. During quarantine, I spent a lot of time playing the organ there alone, and in light of this project, I thought it should return to it.
St. Michael the Archangel, in Penhurst, East Sussex was built in 1390, far before the period of history that I focus on. That fact, combined with its rural isolation makes it less connected to active colonisation. I think in my text I will frame it as more of a precursor, part of the culture of the church; a staging ground.
In the church, long reverb tails are created from the organ positioned at the back. Alongside the organ, I recorded room tones in the space, to accompany the narration. I had considered for a long time recording the narration itself in the church, to further situate the audio paper within the culture of its making. However, due to transport concerns and being able to closely monitor recording, I settled on constructing it. Rendering the appearance of speaking in the church instead. The building is not solely mine, people are free to enter and pray, I did not want to dominate the space. Ontologically, also, I felt uneasy about reciting a diatribe about the cruelties of the church in a church. Less for any kind of religious reasoning, but more to avoid a sneering, puerile shock value quality. To do that alone would feel uncomfortable and weird.
Unlike the organs I discuss in the audio paper, Penhurst’s is electric. But with the diffusion of a few speakers, the emulation of pipes is very convincing. Listening to the recordings, I am reminded how it’s an instrument that is almost impossible to replicate through a sound file or physical media. It should primarily be experienced within the spaces they occupy. This brings me to the theoretical studies of Paul C. Jasen’s 2016 book, Low End Theory: Bass, Bodies and the Materiality of Sonic Experience.
In the book, there is a distinctly pertinent section referring to the church organ and its frequencies in manipulating sacred sonic space. He writes about listener perceptions of the organ, how it ‘would have also confronted non-participants and non-believers – those not in the church but in its proximity, permeated by modulations – with a striking, perceptual encounter combined with the promise/threat of something altogether more transformative ‘inside’.’ I believe this will prove useful in critically examining the organ’s affect when situated within the church, how that affects the community surrounding it. The symbiotic relationship between the organ, the church and the requirement of people to bodily experience it.
I used the Zoom H1n to record the organ, piano and room tones in the church. Previous experiences with recording this particular organ proved frustrating; I had used an AKG C451b, but the microphone placement became critical to the quality of sound. In the case of this project, extended time spent reworking inadequate recordings, especially when I am recording on-site with limited time, I saw fit to use the simpler Zoom to capture the larger picture.
I also created a number of recordings using the church piano. Unrelated to my organ thesis, yet closely related to the history of worship song, I felt it fitting to record this instrument as I was adopting the entire building and everything it contained as an instrument, in a sense.
Bibliography:
Jasen, P. C. (2016) Low End Theory: Bass, Bodies and the Materiality of Sonic Experience. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
In this post, I detail an instance of chasing valuable research material. In my key text, Phil Dodds’ 2023 book Music and the Cultural Production of Scale, a text by the son of Christian Ignatius Latrobe, John Antes is referenced. I sensed that this could provide a unique opportunity for counterpoint in my audio paper, to contrast the colonial father with the son, revealing a critical point about the mythologic language surrounding the church organ enabling its domineering presence.
I searched Google Scholar for John Antes Latrobe, first finding mention of him in Anna Peak’s 2010 dissertation, The Music of the Spheres: Music and the Gendered Mind in Nineteenth-Century Britain. However, it was only a reference in the footer. Still, this gave me more complete details surrounding the title and work of J. A. Latrobe that could enhance my search.
Quite miraculously, I found a scan of the very text I was seeking to reference, rather than an adjacent source: The Music of the Church Considered in its Various Branches, Congregational and Choral: An Historical and Practical Treatise for the General Reader, from 1831. I will assert that it is not for the general reader. It is for the most avowed enthusiast. Yet, a very specific section about the organ’s player’s power over a congregation was referenced in Dodds’ work, perhaps I could expand on that here.
The irony being that the exact page referenced, that I had hoped to expand upon and read further context of, had the only scanning error in the document across it. Finally finding a pdf of the complete book, I was able to read and cite the book in my audio paper’s bibliography.
Ultimately, I managed to verify the publishers through a portrait of them in the archives of the National Portrait Gallery. All this is to say, I am struck by the relative difficulty in referencing truly historical works. Online resources are often inaccessible, and it demonstrates to me the survival rate for information is often uncertain. Thankfully, in this case I was able to extrapolate upon the key text, which provided me with a core critical point of examination in my audio paper.
Finally, nearing the submission date for this spatialisation project, I carried out a final mix of my project, fully incorporating elements of both iteration of ‘Building’, as I have decided to call it. A large portion of the session was spent troubleshooting routing issues. I found the tactile hardware routing from the eight-channel interface to the speakers intuitive, despite the rat’s nest overwhelm of cabling. Inside Logic, however I was struggling with every channel playing from both it’s designated quadrant, whether left, right or rear, and doubling in the centre stereo pair. After some time diagnosing, I found it was quite clearly a bus that was causing the problem. To resolve this, I bounced each stem bypassing the bus, with the effects active on each respective track, before placing them back into a new project and re-routing them.
Sketch I had made of the octophonic ring, as I figured out the routing problem
Alternately sitting and standing in the centre of the ring, made me feel the intangibility and fragility of the sweet spot. As I moved my head, even slightly, an acoustic effect I can only really articulate as slurring occurred. Over the hours spent mixing the work, it became somewhat dizzying. The sweet spot, as the octophonic ring’s current setup demands, is actually very small. It taught me a great deal about the dynamics of my piece, and about the potential applications of ambisonic recording.
Recording in tight, indoor environments in ambisonics is where spatiality is perhaps the least immediately evident. Closing my eyes for a prolonged time, I could trick my brain somewhat into believing it was real, that those voices were in the room with me. I think is some ways, that effect is more true to life. We, or perhaps I, don’t experience life as sensory IMAX Dolby sound, constantly immersed and awed by circling sonic wonder. The truer, closer to the ground average is a listening numbness in my experience. Perhaps this opportunity to create spatial work is the time to let fly and make sound dance and spin and somersault around my head, but that isn’t how this project evolved. I have continually felt the pull of temptation to do the masculine thing and upstage, or inflict sound in a showy, punitive fashion, (especially easy to do with the abrasion present in the work) but I resisted in the view that a spatial representation hewing closer to reality was more grounded. In some senses, that made mixing harder work. The sound from each quadrant was not remarkably differing, more filling out and realising the space. Outside, as Jorge, Ryan and Rees cut branches by the road, it was more immediately dynamic. The verisimilitude a more subtle perceptual creation, or recreation of reality.
What concerns me about this work, is this notion of replicating reality. In encountering spatial sound works, there is a detectable ontological difference in affect when a work exists to place you in a certain environment, to surround you in purported believability, and when a work uses the spatial system as a blank canvas across which to spray and dance, something altogether more ethereal. Of course, there is much bleed between these two approaches, and it’s reductive of me to allude to a categorical analysis, but the distinction is detectable. Is it possible to recreate reality with spatial sound? No, I don’t think so. It’s a print of a reality, but no medium can completely be reality, because that’s not what art is, in my view. What my project does is invite the listener into a reconstructed depiction of a real event, one they may be unfamiliar with.
I am disquieted by the
This is the ontological struggle I find myself wrestling; as much as I enjoy and appreciate more ambient works like ‘18.58’ by Oren Ambarchi and Zimoun on the leeraum label, both very established sound artists, I am unsure how to illustrate how employing spatial sound in my case can be described by any word other than ‘immersive’. That is the expressed intention of this field of environmental-recreation spatial sound, situating the listener at the heart of a new place. Yet, due to trending terminology, ‘immersive’ has been cast in a disdainful light. How to reconcile this, when it is central to my thesis of raising awareness? I partly wish I had more time to dig deeper into this work, exploring it thematically more thoroughly.
I had considered uniting it with visual media, yet quickly disregarded the idea due to time. In the argument of sound needing-or-not-needing the visual in order to convey meaning, (of course both can be true) I feel polarised. Often, I sense the pendulum of perception can easily swing back the other way, into visuals being considered actively detrimental precisely because of a historical association with sound as a lesser medium, or accompanying medium. It’s a reaction I fear, as meaning is so hard for me to parse with sound. I often find myself unaware of the listener, when spatial sound deals directly with their experience in a far more allied sense. Yet I imagine being able to see all the context lost with purely sound; the speed of movement, the pace of work, perceptible dangers, the cold. All aspects critical to informing the listener in a more rounded fashion of the factors involved in the hardship of manual labour, yet all very difficult to represent sonically without becoming performative. Thereby artificial.
I mixed live with pencil-drawn volume automation, both to save time and to engender a reactive approach in listening. First thought, best thought. In some instances where I knew a voice in the centre or left channels would require accentuating, I lowered a roaring car or room tone in the opposing rear and right channels. It surprised me how sculptural this felt, carving away at distinct areas to reveal other layers. Despite that, and largely I blame ear fatigue, I am still conflicted about spatial audio. I think it’s a matter of scale, I’m sure Francois Bayle’s Acousmonium sounds transcendent, but expanding from stereo into M108’s octophonic ring has not dynamically altered my perspective. I have yet to have an epiphanic moment where spatial audio replaced stereo as a truer or more efficacious means of sound creation and performance.
Example of the real-time mixing I conducted via volume automation
This was a heavy lecture. Rarely are we presented with artmaking borne out of mortal necessity. In Dr. Helen Anahita Wilson’s lecture she discussed sonic ways of being and knowing the human body, uniting the fields of sound studies, music and health. As she stated, “my body always takes the lead and shows me the way”, her work explores corporeal acoustemology.
Her PhD piece, TCH-P, was inspired by the cocktail prescribed to her for breast cancer treatment, iatrogenic experience as the enabling element in a challenge of the illness narrative. The South Indian konnakol, recited while gesturally expressing with a hand that clearly showed an IV drip inserted. She clarified that it was made retrospectively, after her treatment had ended, but it was still starkly convincing. It was a very moving piece. A quiet moment of solitude and positivity amid chaos and a health nightmare. The chant itself was very grounding, slowly morphing, fragmenting. Changing in tone, pitch and speed.
I recognised the rhythm from the wonderfully unfunny Tim Heidecker, Fred Armisen and John C. Reilly comedy show Moonbase 8, that no-one has watched or cares about. I feel ashamed, taking a sidebar about this delightful, mediocre fluff show during a blog post about cancer and life or death. Yet, personal context helped align me with the work itself.
In the other major project she showed, Linea Naturalis, Wilson affirms that we are all bioelectrical beings. Alongside Dr Sandra Knapp, President of the Linnean Society, she studied plants forming the basis for chemotherapy drugs. I think with time, I had lost the conception that plants were still so critical to medicine manufacturing. I found that mild realisation reassuring, much like those visiting the oncology gardens Wilson referenced. A grounding of the often synthetic-feeling medical world in the earthen reality is stabilising in a way. My fiancé was diagnosed in 2022 with Type 1 diabetes, and through GP visits, varying hardcore medications, and finally regular insulin injections, the nature of the human body as an ecosystem became apparent to me. Both how resilient, adaptable, yet fragile it is. A switch can unknowingly flip, and your body decides to try and kill you. From collecting data in the Chelsea Physics Garden, to creating the music, Wilson collated bioelectricity, biosignals, contact mic recordings, and then genetic data and biological analysis. She interpreted drones from genetic data, and frequency readings sent through tape echo. The Madagascan periwinkle as a harp, the devil’s trumpet compared to the brass of Amos Miller. I found the reinterpretation of plants used for chemotherapy treatment as music to be played to those undergoing that treatment to be poetic and meaningful.
It’s very very hard for me to comment on artworks informed by, drawn out by, manifested by near-death experiences. They change the way the brain sees the world, and to discuss taste feels tasteless. I have often found the artistic interpretation of sonification dubious, but I think that has more to do with perceptions of authentic sound. What I appreciated about Wilson’s work and presentation, was her expressed emphasis of the creative intervention occurring in the handoff between initial data and final music.
This also relates to her study of the Krankenhausfunk, or hospital radio. She described the absurdity of hearing the Bee Gees’ ‘Staying Alive’ during her treatment in the production of TCH-P, perhaps Linea Naturalis seeks to amend that, or enhance the experience. Soothing, plant-derived tones to calm the patient.
In her 2012 work, ‘Study for Strings’, Philipsz marries a deeply moving historical research project with haunting spatial sound diffusion, exploring the life and death of Pavel Haas. Haas was a Jewish Czech composer killed in Auschwitz in 1944, who composed ‘Study for String Orchestra’ by force for a Nazi propaganda film morbidly proclaiming the peaceful relaxation of the Thereisenstadt Ghetto; what was effectively both a transit facility for Jews being sent to death camps and a pestilent, disease-ridden prison.
Originally, as part of the dOCUMENTA (13) exhibition, Philipsz deconstructed ‘Study for String Orchestra’ and diffused it around the area of Kassel Hauptbahnhof. Yet in 2023’s ‘Study for Strings Sokol Terezín’ Philipsz brought the isolated cello and viola sections to Thereisenstadt, where Haas’ original work was performed before his murder. She films the diffused installation as her rearrangement of Haas’ music eerily resonates throughout the building.
It goes without saying that my piece I have developed does not comment on awful events like the Holocaust, but Philipsz’s usage of site-specific sound diffusion is inspirational. It casts long shadows throughout history, rendering an elegant commentary through sound. It’s bridging the gap between the gallery space and the space crucial to the context of the work, is also a quality I would wish to explore in the future, it could greatly inform my approach to installation practices.
I find the genius in this work, and an emotive use of spatial sound, in Philipsz bringing the music back to the site of its origin, haunting it. It’s not quite historically redemptive, more an act of mourning. Spatial sound works can often be solipsistically, technologically driven, but ‘Study for Strings Sokol Terezín’ is a remarkable application of selfless diffusion work, drawing out a reflective, reclaiming of dark history.
References:
Rhodes, D. (2023) Susan Philipsz: Separated Strings. Available at: https://brooklynrail.org/2023/02/artseen/Susan-Philipsz-Separated-Strings/ (Accessed: 20 November 2024)
Gural, N. (2023) Artist Susan Philipsz Commands Our Attention With ‘Separated Strings’, Conveying Truth Of The Holocaust. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/natashagural/2023/01/31/artist-susan-philipsz-commands-our-attention-with-separated-strings-conveying-truth-of-the-holocaust/ (Accessed: 20 November 2024)
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York (2023) Susan Philipsz: Separated Strings. Available at: https://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/exhibitions/694-susan-philipsz-separated-strings-tanya-bonakdar-gallery-new-york/ (Accessed: 20 November 2024)
The Museum of Modern Art (2013) Susan Philipsz. Available at: https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/soundings/artists/11/works/ (Accessed: 20 November 2024)
