Category: Specialising and Exhibiting: Spatialisation for Installation & Performance

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.

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.

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In the process of developing this piece, I have been straddling two concurrent versions. The first iteration being more interpretive of the construction experience. Here is this initial, experimental version of the work, as far as it had been developed:

My concern is that by texturally experimenting, by evoking the spirit of the trades and emotional character of building a house, that I am inevitably binding the listener’s ultimate takeaways from the piece to my own go-to sound creation techniques and capabilities. As I think on this, I detail a number of the elements that comprise the more inherently interpretive and artistically-forward sections of this iteration below.

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Foley Percussion

In something of a crossover with the Sound for Screen specialist unit, I performed percussive elements of this version as a Foley artist would. I knocked old, dirty bricks together and heavily employed sidechain compression to clack through the mix. I used bricks to reflect a significant trade that went largely unrepresented in the original field recordings from the site.

Metallica Sample

I took the resampled, looping portion of the chorus of Metallica’s ‘Seek & Destroy’, and re-amped it from Ableton onto cassette tape. I then slowed the sample with the Walkman’s speed control and ran it through a reverb pedal, further distorting the sample. Upon placing it in the project, I found it sonically complementary to the harsh shriek of the Makita cordless planer that features prominently in the original field recordings. A rendered, wholly created version of that sonic experience. Dynamically I also found it to resemble the tinny sound Makita lithium ion batteries make as they charge.

The Transformer “stress frequency”

I recorded a discordant synthesizer drone from my Roland JV-1080, treating it heavily with Waves’ LoAir, a subharmonic generator. I am concerned however, with its visibility in the mix as I will not be using a sub-bass speaker. In my processing of the source signal with LoAir, I attempted to accentuate the more perceptible frequency range in the recording, rather than submerge it entirely. I was attempting to mimic the dark resonance of the site transformer, vibrating through the plinth the house rests on during construction. The company owner described it as “the stress frequency”, which I sought to elucidate with sound. Attempting to underline the sense of stress, I thought to place this sound behind the listener in order to discomfort. Ideally, I would follow my own diagrams and place it on the floor, facing up at the listener.

Sweeping LFO

Taking an ambisonic recording I had made by sweeping a broom around the base of the tripod upon which the recorder stood, I utilised a random LFO with a jitter in order to create an anxious, organically glitch-oriented panning character in the left and right channels of the quadrophonic environment. The sweeping broom passing from left to right. I then finally situated it in the Logic Pro project.

Building upon prior plans, I drew up a mock configuration to act as a guide in the performance of my piece.

It may seem plain, but I believe that this configuration is the most pragmatic solution suiting the nature of my piece. In the work, I am less trying to create a dynamic ethereal movement of sound on a blank speaker canvas, like many of the spatial sound works we have encountered, but more recreating and reflecting a real space.

Pursuing a quadrophonic multichannel format has meant that I have had to find creative solutions to problems that arise during arrangement, especially when I already have 4 distinct channels from the original ambisonic recordings, which are each critical in detailing the environment. I think this is also why my idea to do as much possible of this project analog, to tape, just isn’t practically feasible. I’ve run into significant phasing problems, having to re-amp each stem in mono to the temporally elastic medium of tape, so much so that recording and composing in Logic Pro makes the most sense with the time I have. Balancing the mix with numerous sonic The goal remains: The ultimate bounce will result in 4 stems, or channels of sound with clear directionality, a front, rear, left and right.

I also made one diagram of a more experimental configuration:

This version intends to capture the varying elevations of sound on the building site. The raised front speaker perhaps conveying sounds emanating from unseen works on the upper floors of the house, or from the ladder propped in the branches of a tree outside. The floor speaker, which I haven’t strictly denoted as only being a sub, could project sound from trench digging, and the weighty, low resonance of the transformer, often found on the floor.

I do not wholly intend to use this configuration, largely out of a practical consideration of the speaker configurations available to us, and the nature of the piece as it currently stands would create gaps in the aerial flow of the sound. Despite that, it is a dimension I could consider exploring further in the formation of a gallery installation for the following unit.

Instead of Logic Pro’s own method of decoding the ambisonic files, I experimented with Zoom’s proprietary Ambisonics Player software. This helped enable me to explore the spatial properties of the recordings I had made with more accuracy and delicacy, attuning each perspective to resemble the spaces they respectfully came from.

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In how I’ve sourced material in the grit of the earthen work life, I see parallels with land art; trying to convey the sensual experience of working in the rural cold, with a medium shackled to the necessary equipment and infrastructure of the sanitised institution. Many works in the land art field (haha) are often geographically and semantically decentralised, that’s what inspires me. Photographic evidence of the piece may be all that returns to the civilised art gallery world, an emissary for the distant artwork crouched alone on the ground somewhere. That kind of resolute engagement with the earthen world outside of the institutional bubble appeals to my perspective, and calls back to my earlier post concerning multichannel installations.

There’s something very humanly structuralist about English sculptor and landscape artist Richard Long’s work, taking the sprawl and dissolution and wildness of natural elements, of the land, and straightening it. Aligning it in lines and circles, colour and texture arranged and curated. In some hyperbolic sense, it’s an almost offensive practice. In another, wonderfully childlike and pure. It reminds me of collecting rocks, grasses or feathers from the land as a child, (and still now and always) the gathering of the world in an ordered way, out of a fascination. In many ways, I feel like this directly correlates with my project, and field recording as an act. It’s taking the land and transmuting it. It’s taking.

I also seek to problematise my work, or interrogate it. Why choose building as a subject, and why there? I want to engage the bias that ripples through the project. The rurality of its setting is integral to my aesthetic view of it, a dwelling coming up, out of mud and clay and staking a claim on the territory. The people erecting the building, structuring the material, are held indeterminately on that land, divided in responsibility. I think I am also drawing a line between art and life. I want the art to just be a portal, holding open a window, enabling what can ultimately only be the briefest impression of that life. I might perceive the art life as necessarily distinct from material life to help us survive, depending on what day you ask me.

Making a work surrounding an observation and structuring of the labour of others, (in which I would rather be participating) discomforts me. Yet, in a sense, the piece is about survival; it’s a running, flowing briefing and debriefing of this kind of employment it can be for me, and a psychoacoustic, cursorily sensory version for the listener. Bringing the outside in, and bringing the inside out. Knotty, trying to make sense of these facets for myself.

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A (lengthy) anecdote/side note:

Something I found interesting in a parasocial sense; Richard Long created A Line Made by Walking while he was a student at what is now UAL’s Central Saint Martins, and during his regular and lengthy commute from Bristol to London, he stopped in a random clearing in Wiltshire to walk back and forth, photographing the resultant path. On a recent Thursday guest lecture I had every intention of attending, my 70 mile commute from Sussex ground to a halt 50 miles from London, because of a now-routine train failure. The expense being what it is, and my schedule already ruined, I gave up and traveled back to a random station and walked the remaining 13 miles home through lane, forest, field and dark. I think I’m pulling at the tenuous thread connecting me to Long’s story, UAL, the commute, the importance of being in the land, walking. It also connects to the following guest lecture that I’ll write about in more detail later. All that to say, I find great inspiration and enrichment outside in a wandering meditation, connected to the land and the physicality of engaging with it by happy, motivated circumstance.

An issue I take with spatial sound is its relative inaccessibility. Simply put, if you don’t have the speaker system, you can’t do it. Collectively, as a cohort, all our assignments have to be necessarily filtered, mixed and finalised through the octophonic ring and the speaker system in M108. To me, this is somewhat emblematic of the unevenly-weighted practice; in favour of the expensive and industrial and the gallery. That being said, algorithmic systems for headphones, like that which Dolby Atmos or Dear Reality provide, bridge that gap with more equity. But it’s still inescapable that they remain an emulation of real-world aural phenomena, experienced solitarily.

I have previously thought about how I’ve found Dear Reality’s VR plugin to sound artificial, but I perceive that view as more of a taste mismatch. It’s a paradigm often suited for game audio or diffusive, electronic music, both worlds I wouldn’t say I have carved out a hollow to sit within (yet). My instinctual first-thoughts when I create art for my own sake find enough immersion, a slippery term, in stereo. Even mono! I have been listening to the newly released Night Palace (STEMS edition) by Mount Eerie, and I have deeply enjoyed the bounce down of a single, mono stem. Close details, unmastered, noticing each faint punch-in through long stretches of nothing at all. Besides my enduring investment in the artist, and indulging the part of my brain that likes taking things apart to see how they work, I think it’s also a reaction to a recent overload of sound.

The spatial sound pieces we have encountered as a cohort have been busy. A critical problem with the availability of spatial audio, is that it is not only difficult to make works independent of an elaborate speaker system, but it is also difficult to source and experience artists’ works independent of an elaborate speaker system. Outside of cinema sound, the only artistic works I have encountered have been in lecture. The spatial work of John Chowning which was introduced to us was somewhat baffling to me. Scientifically, Chowning’s research into the simulation of spatial effects is eminently useful, (2004, pp. 2) ‘in order to simulate the distances cue one must synthesize and control the reverberant signal as well as the direct signal such that the intensity of the direct signal decreases more with distance than does the reverberant signal’. Despite Chowning’s clear technological understanding of the medium, compositionally speaking, I don’t profess to ‘get it’.

It may replicate the expressive qualities of a ‘space’, but to what end? I don’t find it a space I wish to linger in. The randomness and discordance makes me feel like trapped in the most underwhelming

we have heard the work of high frequency scatter of beep boops that wander.

Here’s my mean-spirited joke comparison I stumbled across, to round this out. I can’t help but hear Resident Evil’s infamous ‘Basement Theme’ in Chowning’s ‘Turenas’. One is held in regard as the creative expression of an audio and synthesis polymath, the other is a weird internet meme from a Playstation game. Which is which?

As an artmaking and compositional tool I have had very little contact with, it felt prudent to research multichannel composition from its arguable conception. Karlheinz Stockhausen’s impressionistic 1955-56 electronic composition Gesang der Jünglinge, is a major early work in musique concrete, designed to be performed in a multichannel format,

I’m struck by its relative agelessness. Gesang der Jünglinge could very easily slip into the tracklist of a Oneohtrix Point Never or Galen Tipton album; a forward-thinking, futurist apogee of what we could call glitch today. Incredible to consider, given that it was composed just a decade after the second world war, fourteen years before the moon landing.

Revealingly, Metzger (2004, pp. 705) describes Gesang der Jünglinge: ‘The piece clearly holds to the idea of purity. Out of all the depicted means of securing that state, it adheres to one: refinement. The biblical story is not lost on the work. Gesang, however, rewrites the tale – yet more blasphemy. Having brought in outside materials, be they pure or impure, the work must make them suitable for the pure realm of electronic sound. Gesang surrounds the child’s voice with electronic fire.’

The blaspheming characterisation Metzger observes in the work is interesting; Stockhausen allegedly intended for the four-channel piece to be installed in Cologne Cathedral as a sacred mass, despite a lack of evidence. This subversive, yet seemingly enthusiastic perspective for his work is unusual, and inspiring. I also like his interpretation of electronic sound as fire, it helps me see an elemental quality in Gesang der Jünglinge.

Despite Stockhausen’s serially defined, carefully plotted work, I do feel the piece lacks a compositional cohesion. Yet, I also feel utterly unjustified in saying that. Who am I to qualitatively judge cohesion in avant-garde art? I think my brain has been somewhat fried with prolonged exposure. What is up and what is down? Questions rise continually, and my eyebrows arch. Cornelius Cardew (1974, pp. 36), a once-assistant to Stockhausen, surveys the effects of the hollowing-out of signifiers on the audience in a way I find interesting: ‘Any content, as well as the dynamism that is characteristic of ‘saying something’, is automatically lost if one aspect of the language is systematically altered. But the resulting emptiness does not antagonise the bourgeois audience which is confident of its ability to cultivate a taste for virtually anything.’ Cardew’s cartoonishly Maoist fixations aside, I believe his observation of the avant-garde audience’s omni-acceptance to have a validity. I return to my joke comparison. I don’t mean to denigrate, this random flash of comparison actually raises some questions for me about audience. Why is one atonality held up as achievement and the other ridiculed? How much procedural obscuration until a ‘point’ dissolves for the listener?

While I feel it’s naïve to assume everyone is, or will be, on board with your cultural movement, I feel it’s equally naïve to hold artists accountable for tangential, wider systemic societal problems. Yes, Cardew is seeking to target the very audience he criticises, but he’s also yelling into the same very select ant farm. I think this is why I want to engage with a subject matter more grounded, more earthen and identifiable.

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References:

Chowning, J. M. (2004) The Simulation of Moving Sound Sources. Stanford: The Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) Stanford University

Metzger, J. M. (2004) ‘The Paths from and to Abstraction in Stockhausen’s Gesang der Junglinge’, Modernism/modernity, 11(4), pp. 705

Cardew, C. (1974) Stockhausen Serves Imperialism. London: Latimer New Dimensions Limited

As a human with uncertain vocations, I have always egocentrically mythologised myself as being a ‘normal, regular person’ looking in on the absurd art world. I think it is all too easy to dehumanise those of us working in the trades as unsophisticated, especially when (we) artists position themselves (ourselves) as interrogators of the world. The reverse is also true, the fiscal world will endlessly I suspect this is where my certain bone-deep resistance to, and discomfort of, banal theoretics comes from, because I never had anyone to share these ideas with. Everyone works, in some capacity, and that work shapes us. I wish to avoid the unavoidable by drawing from my own lived experience. While I may be extractively treating this world as subject, I am definitively not the other, an ignorant outsider. I assimilated into this hard-edged world filled with pride and dysfunction, and only by ascending through the mundanity, brutality and challenge of the work, can I now actually see the pregnant space that it is for artistic exploration. A great, refreshing voice that was shown to me was that of Tim Ingold (2013, pp. 47). His writings intersect the art world and material reality in a revealing way, as he observes: ‘Building is an activity; it is what builders do. Add the article, however, and the activity is brought to a close. Movement is stilled, and where people had once laboured with tools and materials, there now stands a structure – a building – that shows every sign of permanence and solidity.’

‘These definitions, however, belie the creativity of the ‘messy practices’ that give rise to real buildings. Whether of sketching, tracing, modelling, staking out, digging, cutting, laying, fixing or joining, all involve care, judgement and aforethought, and are carried on within worldly fields of forces and relations. None can be placed unequivocally on one side or the other of any distinction of fundamental ontological import, such as between intellectual conception and mechanical execution.’ (pp. 59)

I booked out a Zoom H3-VR from the ORB and brought it home to Sussex, seeking to explore the ambisonic paradigm within a sonically active environment. Spatially representing a construction site, I felt, could be enhanced by ambisonic recording; situating the listener on site, to simulate the effect of being among the workers. To become, even just tangentially, without any expended effort or blood, sweat and tears, one of them.

I was concerned about inadvertently demeaning them and their work by treating them as a curious subject. However, the emptiness of the moments and sounds captured, the unguardedness of the conversation renders the recordings as an authentic capture of only that moment, as it happened. That is not to forgo all problematic qualities of the act of field recording, but I was disarmed by the men’s receptiveness to the process.

I recorded in a number of disparate locations across the relatively small site, (three to four distinct plots designated for building, with two complete and a further two in the planning phase) with a view to capturing distinctly differing activities, and reflecting the wide range of works occurring on any given day. First, I recorded Dave fitting door liners, then Will and Dalo cutting and glueing floor tiles, and then Jorge, Ryan and Rees carrying out tree surgery and digging a trench. Alongside these broader physical activities are subtleties of conversation and interpersonal dynamics, these smaller facets are almost what excite me more. Relating one character to another, authentically, for the listener is a conceit I want to explore.

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References:

Ingold, T. (2007) Against Soundscape. in A. Carlyle (Ed.), Autumn Leaves: Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice. Paris: Double Entendre.

Ingold, T. (2013) Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Oxon: Routledge.

I started by recording a sequenced passage of a Roland JV-1080 synthesizer preset into Ableton, then with the Radial X-Amp sending that signal back out through a Marshall AS50D guitar amplifier, as well as Turbo Rat distortion and Electro Harmonix Cathedral Stereo Reverb pedals. I have been increasingly engaged with this cross-pollinating mode of making; relating the digital and analog together symbiotically. A large challenge, particularly with the Radial X-Amp, is controlling feedback when re-amping. I’m unsure if it’s a quirk of the hardware itself, or central to the nature of re-amping, but balancing an adequate line level output without overloading the input is difficult. I also feel it’s rich for colouring, harnessing and exploring new facets of previously recorded sound.

I then experimented with recording that re-amped signal from Ableton to tape on the Tascam 424MKIII, then drastically slowing it down. This process has a way of rendering a hitherto comprehensible sound as unknowable and mysterious. I think, however, in the case of this experiment, the results seemed a little too science fiction. The feedback in particular, sounded like a computer in the original Star Trek, or Bebe and Louis Barron’s work on Forbidden Planet. The compression of the tape only adding to that quality. Also, some ice scraping sounds snuck in by virtue of using an older tape. Interesting!

Alongside these, I took another sequenced refrain from the JV-1080 and sampled it with Ableton’s Simpler. What was a slow, uneasy orchestral passage that wavered in pitch became a high, fast phrase when applied in Slice mode. It almost resembles what could be a beat, which is not my forte at all. This is also to say, I presently have no idea how a beat, or any overt synthesizer music could be thematically applicable in my more ecological, spatial field recording project, but the processes used in experimenting will help inform and inspire me as I configure this work.

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‘First and foremost, ambient poetics is a rendering. I mean this in the sense developed by the concrete music composer Michel Chion. Rendering is technically what visual- and sonic-effects artists do to a film to generate a more or less consistent sense of atmosphere or world… This rendering, like Jean Baudrillard’s idea of the simulacrum, pertains to a copy without an original.’ pp. 35

‘In Thoreau’s Walden the distant sound of bells brings to mind the atmosphere in which they resonate:

All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. There came to me in this case a melody which the air had strained, and which conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph. (Thoreau, Walden, 168-169)

In this remarkable passage, Thoreau theorizes the medial qualities of ambient poetics. Notice how “strained”, “air” and “melody” are all synonyms for music. Thoreau is describing how sound is “filtered”-a common idea since the advent of the synthesizer, which electronically filters sound waves.’ pp. 39

Morton, T. (2007) Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press

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‘Nevertheless, the stereotype contains some truth. Blue-collar jobs are seen as physically taxing, often dangerous, tedious, and, for the most part, mindlessly repetitive. A popular song of the mid-1950s, “Sixteen Tons,” by Tennessee Ernie Ford, neatly captures the spirit ‘ pp.32

Gini, Al. (2000) My Job, My Self: Work and the Creation of the Modern Individual. New York, London: Routledge.