Tag: Sonic Doing + Thinking

After lecture I made a recording with the contact mic I made, rubbing it on the fabric of chair and using only digital signal processing. Employing Logic Pro’s default amp modeller, delays and a compressor side-chained to a fast sub-bass kick pattern, I gave it a fluttering, tremolo-like effect:

I find purely digital workflows challenging, interfacing without touch control affects the way I perceive the sound I’m making. I’m a kinaesthetic artist, so working this way feels inorganic to me, almost regardless of the quality of the results. Maybe I’m yet to find ‘my’ program or ‘my’ plugins. This recording sounds like an alien language, alien radio chatter before the invasion. It’s neat! But, it’s clipping and I hear the unsatisfying process in the outcome.

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Once home, I experimented with recording more resonant sound sources through the contact microphone. I included pedals to further manipulate the sound too, a ProCo Turbo Rat and Electro Harmonix Cathedral reverb. I beat a 20″ ride cymbal with the contact mic taped to it, rhythmically experimenting with the decay of a reverse reverb, a very wet echo and distorting the input signal:

The most exciting textures come when the masking tape loses his hold, and the contact mic audibly falls to the rim of the cymbal. I then hit it directly with the soft beater. It’s a seismic, explosively percussive sound, and the way the attack is so immediate and distorted is exciting. Perhaps there are rhythmic applications for the sound, in a transitionary, overwhelming sense within a composition. One of the most formative things I’ve ever read was David Lynch describing the half-speed drones and sound beds in his work as ‘firewood’. It’s not just evocative of the actual sound of his work, but a perfect descriptor for its purpose. It’s exactly the feeling I try to evoke; an undercurrent, the kindling that the composition rests on and grows off of. All while maintaining the consistent, hot core of the original firewood base. These experiments sound like the low frequency popping and cracking of a large fire. A mountainous industrial fire.

What surprised me about these recordings was how much more they gestured toward melody and tonality than, for comparison, a dry recording of the same cymbal made with the Zoom H1’s condenser microphones:

The resonance has a musical, fluting quality on the contact mic recordings. So much of the sonic character of a cymbal is its vibrational qualities as it resonates, which can be lost when recording with conventional microphones.

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Further mining the idea of a musical resonance, I experimented with fixing the contact mic to the body of an unplugged electric guitar:

Recording through the resonance of the body and neck of the guitar, as opposed to recording through the pickups, caused almost all the high frequencies to be muffled or cut. It lends it a distant, subterranean quality. Paired with a reverse reverb, this becomes eerie. Through experimenting, I learned how different the approach of mic placements is when working with a contact mic, how important those unique techniques in definitively shaping the sound of vibration, rather than moving air.

Each day for a week, I made recordings from Tent Hill in Ashburnham, East Sussex. It’s a place with a lot of emotional significance for me; many memories, shared and alone, have been made watching the sunset or moonrise there. It’s a place I often find myself at, whether I mean to or not.

The first day, I noticed the presence of jets going over. Most flights to Gatwick and Heathrow circle and make their turns above the hill. Recorded at 9pm, this sound is inescapable and almost constant. In terms of making a recording of the natural environment, this sound is hard to avoid. It informs the dialogue between the ancient, feuding history of the hill’s past, and the smallness of its place in the interconnected modern world.

The second day, I captured the sounds of rushes blowing in the wind. Placing the recorder on a stile against a wire fence created some heightened and textured wind effects. The exposed nature of the hill means that, even with a wind shield, sometimes the high wind occasionally distorts the recording, leading to that unmistakable baffled effect. For many foley artists or documentarians working to capture natural sound, that kind of distortion is undesirable; it almost betrays a cheapness. I actually feel that I appreciate the rawness of its texture, in principle. Our ears and hair create much the same effect if you were to face the wind. There is a through-line between wind and distortion that I feel deserves exploring more. The recording ends with the distant, oncoming drone of a jet, almost unrecognisable. It’s interesting to me how subtle differences totally transform the imagined perception of the space recorded: The early approach of a jet sounds alien and mysterious, then when directly overhead, banal and ruinous to the wild, dewy and comfortingly solitary atmosphere the hill creates.

The third day there were prominent owl calls in the treeline, which on the recording are on the left of the stereo field. Besides that, purely wind, some distortion and white noise. White noise is a space I love to exist within.

On the fourth day, loud and clear Canada geese cries reflect and echo from the trees to the lakes below. Their calls have a romantic, lyrical quality, it’s a melancholy sound, the reverberation serving as a reflection of the human emptiness of the environment. A space for the listener to enter wholly. In flight, Canada geese represent ideas of migration, journey, leaving and returning home. Perhaps with manipulation of the stereo field, I can further experiment with spacial movement in this way.

The fifth day was comparatively quiet. Less wind and distortion than the days before, but more animal activity. An owl, dog, distant waterfowl and Canada geese are heard throughout. Largely across the left of the stereo field, and far away. To me, it is less interesting when one sound isn’t foregrounded or spot lit in an ocean of largely white noise. Perhaps if purposeful or constructed, there’s an application for deep listening in this way, but for me this recording is rendered a little flatter by the subjects being entirely distant. Despite that, it’s a peaceful soundscape.

The act of ritual in field recording the same place repeatedly, especially in the evening or night, opens you to a hyper-sensitive awareness of not only the raw sound in that space, but their frequencies, routines and localisation. Every time I walked there I felt intentionality slipping away a little, finding myself engaged more with the temporality of sound. I came to learn what sounds to expect; how to plot them and situate myself as the artist within them, along with surprising myself with each new or rarer sound I recorded. One place can hold multitudes, especially one so rich with animal life.

In class we encountered and investigated lingual music, verbivocovisual expression or extended technique.  Though it carries many definitions and a wide range of stylistic applications and compositional techniques, the common focus is on the human voice. Very experimental, often meticulously structured vocal exercises; examining and breaking down the core of language.  Vocalising in this way is something I feel very conflicted about.  Taste is often, maybe necessarily, separated from learning when a new art practice is introduced.  While I am undeniably interested in the concept of voice-as-instrument, (especially the extremity and range of vocals across various metal and experimental music sub-genres and how they came to be) instinctually I cringe at the execution of many lingual music or verbivocovisually expressed sound artworks.  Taken superficially, the trilling, childlike, sound effect-adjacent performances of Lily Greenham or Maggie Nichols struck me as indulgent and mildly embarrassing.  Perhaps its freeform alienness is so radical and confrontational and often delivered with such fervour, that it badly shocks my base, monkey-brained perceptions of quote-unquote ‘acceptable’ social behaviour.  I’m partly ashamed of my reaction, but it’s important that both intellectual and emotional responses hold equal and honest status.  These are challenging works, and they really test me.

Of all the artists I encountered, I find Meredith Monk to be the most interesting; her angular interplays with other singers and minimalist instrumentation are always engaging, evolving through shape and structures, playful with phasing.  I was almost worried that my view of her was spoiled by a certain Red Letter Media skit dunking on the deeply weird ‘Turtle Dreams’ from 1983 I saw years ago, but upon further study I find her admirable and ambitious, almost maximalist among her peers.

I was raised a somewhat alienated Christian, and have unfortunately borne witness to the incontrovertible power many creepy pastors have when they speak.  I’ve been stranded in crowds moved to speaking in tongues.  So while my very initial reaction is to laugh when I was confronted by lingual music, I flashed back to the scary conviction with which suspect faith leaders bark and babble and flail as they talk.  I shocked myself a little making this connection as we walked around in class, slowly repeating our mantras until they sounded like zombified glossolalia.  I had been there before, and I met the same uneasy meld of amusement and fear in lingual music.

As an exercise, I recorded moving from inside my house to the outside. Using the Zoom h1’s condensers I was able to hear the movement in stereo, creating an immersive, surrounding feeling. The kitchen clock fading as the heavy iron latch opens the back door gestures towards the age of my house, suggesting a homely environment. My home is in a quiet, rural area, and the recording reflects this; little is heard outside except some wind, birds and faint chainsaw noise. Above, an airplane passes lazily. Apart from the transition of sound as I open the door, the sound is almost directionless because of the distance of their sources. It is almost ambient noise once I am outdoors. Maybe I can create a recording with more granular detail?

We took part in a blindfolded Soundwalk in Dulwich, led by Jose Macabre. It was a novel exercise for me, attempting to reach a meditative, focused listening state. The quietest sounds were distant, indiscernible voices, the soft wind in the trees. In the busier park I could hear children, curious about our weird procession. Twice I heard chimes to my right and left. Booming thunder on the periphery, followed by a shimmering downpour. Particularly harsh, high-pitched birdsong and alarm calls. I could hear the regularly scheduled air traffic roaring low overhead, passing from right to left, drowning out everything else. Our footsteps a constant reminder of the communion of the activity; hard to stay mindful without solitude or stillness. Hearing other students’ feedback made me think how rare it is for many to hear birdsong with clarity, which made me a little sad. Where I live, the wind in the trees, falling rain in the woods, and birdsong are all not just common, but expected sounds. Experientially, deeply listening to these familiar sounds being interrupted or drowned out by the voices of strangers, traffic and low-flying jets was a little uncanny and disquieting. I felt each unexpected urban sound to be almost intrusive, violent. I have always had difficulty embracing discomfort and seeing it objectively. The causes, urban noise, my brain being distracted by walking unsteadily linked to someone I didn’t know, made me feel some aural disconnect from my surroundings. Perhaps out in the world, seeing is believing? I connected the softest sound; the immediate, frontal rustling of clothes and shoes, to the loudest; thunderous rain and planes above, in an immersive, spatial experience.