Reading Response Week 6:

In the first reading from this week, John Levack Drever first establishes the “in-here” vs “out-there” of an acoustically controlled studio compared to the “complex and generative” soundscape which exists outside the studio. In going out into the field to record elements of this soundscape, Drever notes that his spatial awareness is often impaired through the technology required to record these sounds, when listening through a pair of headphones as opposed to the sound itself with nothing in between. He explains that a distance is created in this way and the technology forms a barrier. In the history of field recording, he mentions that the value of portable tape recording “cannot be overemphasized,” as without it sound artists would have to bring musicians or anything making the sound they wanted to capture into their studio. Finally, in describing soundscapes Drever states that the soundscape of any given field is not simple or coherent, but rather “complex, diffuse, and messy.” He introduces Schafer’s metaphor of soundscapes as an all-encompassing symphony, which are “unfolding around us ceaselessly.” What’s more, because we contribute to the soundscapes of our environment we are not simply audience members to the sound, but instead carry the responsibility of also being its “performers and its composers.” 

In “On the Voice and Lucier,” Brandon Labelle first makes the note that sound and space are connected. This is apparent as the sound occurring in a given space reveals the characteristics of the space, through reverberation and reflection of the sound after it is emitted. The example of “I Am Sitting in a Room” demonstrates that connection between sound and space, as the compounding of the recordings over each other increasingly highlights the resonant frequencies of the room and the words spoken become less and less clear. In Adriana Cavarero’s “Multiple Voices,” she first tells a story about a king listening to all the voices he can hear in his palace, trying to make out what the people are saying. Eventually he hears a woman singing, and rediscovers life and having something to desire. Some takeaways from the story were that the king discovers that the voice can be “the equivalent of the hidden and most genuine part of the person,” that the uniqueness of a voice is capable of attesting to the uniqueness of each individual. Another point Cavarero makes later on is describing orality vs vocality. Orality is how the voice functions as a “bearer of language,” and vocality is “the whole of activities and values that belong to the voice as such, independently of language.” Therefore, vocality involves an  analysis of the voice which avoids its being more traditionally associated with language. 

I admittedly found much of these readings to be quite dense and difficult to interpret, as philosophy can be at times. However, I did find it interesting to see the degree to which people have philosophized about sound and the voice. It made sense that the qualities of the voice and the idea of the voice being connected to identities would be a concept to ponder deeply.

 Reading Response Week 5 - (Published 10/17/23):

In Schafer’s introduction on soundscapes, he addresses the idea of the entire soundscape of the modern world, and how to approach the changes occurring within that soundscape. A key issue he brings up immediately is noise pollution being a global problem. In managing noise pollution, he suggests that resisting it with noise abatement is a negative approach, and that rather we must seek ways to make environmental acoustics a positive study program. That is, which sounds should we preserve, encourage, and multiply. Later he suggests that the world must invent a new subject, following industrial design, which we would call acoustic design. This would be an interdisciplinary where musicians, acousticians, psychologists, and sociologists would study the soundscape of the world together, and make recommendations for how it can be improved. Methods would include documenting important features, noting differences and parallels and trends in sounds, and collecting sounds which are threatened with extinction. I found this last point particularly interesting as I had never considered the idea of a sound going extinct. That said, I now agree that it seems like a valuable idea to preserve or archive sounds which might disappear over time. Another method was studying the effects of new sounds before they are indiscriminately released into the environment, which I thought was a very interesting description of “releasing” sounds into the world. The other methods listed included studying the rich symbolism which sounds have for humans, as well as studying human behavior patterns in different sonic environments in order to plan future environments. 

Following this description, Schafer raises an interesting question of is the soundscape of the world an indeterminate composition which we have no control over, or are we its composers and performers and are therefore responsible for giving it form and beauty? This was another question I had not previously considered, as I had only thought of control over sounds besides music to be simply noise abatement. In studying how the soundscape of the world has changed over time, Schafer points out that in pursuing a historical perspective we can only speculate how the soundscape has changed. We do not know by how many decibels the ambient noise level may have risen between periods of time, and can only rely on ear witness accounts to draw any comparisons.

Barry Truax investigates a similar topic, asking the question “how do we know what we come to know through aural experience?” In other words, Truax is examining how we interact and interpret the soundscapes of the world which Schafer is describing. Truax says that this happens in two processes, the first being the listener's ability to recognize patterns and structure within sounds. This also includes the information we extract from those sounds, such as the basic pitch, timbral recognition, binaural localization, and the ability to separate streams of sound from competing background sound. The second aspect of this process in making meaning of the sounds we hear, is the listener’s contextual knowledge which is developed through experience. This involves identifying the source of a sound, and the socially constructed meanings which we attach to those aural experiences. 

 Reading Response Week 3 - (Published 10/4/23):

The “Pioneers of Power'' article published by Gramophone in 2017 examines the composers who have been creating new ground-breaking works of art with electronic music in the last century. Much of this shift towards using electronic music techniques was driven by a desire to create something new and quite different from previous music with conventional instruments. For instance, Ferrucio Busoni argued that harmony had “become a slave to equal temperament and could only be refreshed by subdividing the octave into third (not semi) tones.” I found this idea quite interesting, given that I have heard instruments that use a quarter-tonal system. However I cannot quite visualize how the octave would be divided into third tones, and am curious to see a visual representation of this and to hear what it might sound like. Busoni also argued that conventional instruments are “fettered by a hundred limitations,” and proposed new technologies to overcome those limitations such as tuning, timbre, and range. 

Edgard Varèse suggested a similar idea, of using electronic means to subdivide the octave into “the formation of any desired scale,” and to create dynamics, cross-rhythms, and extreme registers not achievable with the typical orchestra. I was slightly skeptical of the idea of using electronic instruments to enter new registers, as the first reading on “Sound and Hearing” explained that there is a limit to what frequencies we can hear. What’s more, even those we can hear will still be more difficult to appreciate. The chapter explains that the human ear, depending on loudness, will not hear low and high frequencies as well as middle frequencies, where you will find the more conventional instruments playing. I also found this section in the first reading to be helpful in the practice of orchestration, as it explained how certain instruments will naturally be overpowered by others depending on their frequency range, as well as the attack at the start of their sound envelope which helps define their sound. 

I am also now curious to hear Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge. The reading explains that the piece is words from the Book of Daniel sung by a young boy, but dispersed across five speakers and with the words broken down into syllables and phonemes. Stockhausen also builds the voice into a “lusty choral mass,” such that the music starts to feel “joyous and ecstatic.” The article states that this is regularly cited as electronic music’s first masterwork, so given the description of the piece and the prestige surrounding it I would be eager to hear it. 

The google doodle article on the Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne Germany was also very informative, primarily because I had not considered the origin of much of the modern electronic music I am familiar with today. The article stressed how important the facility is, given that it is hailed as “the first modern music studio,” and that all modern dance, house, and trance music were influenced even partially by the aural experiments conducted there. What’s more, the studio was equipped with the monochord and melochord which were precursors to the modern synthesizer, and it was the first time they were made available to musicians. 

 Reading Response Week 1 - (Published 9/21/23):

The key concept in the first reading was, as the title suggests, what is the definition of sound. The reading begins by providing the most simple definition of sound that is commonly used, the acoustic definition. In its simplest form this definition states that sound is a sound wave, and more expanded that sound is a pressure wave traveling through a medium such as air, whose properties of position, frequency, and amplitude are perceived by the ear. The text calls into question whether two people can hear the same sound, which introduces the potential factors of subjectivity in the listener. Such a topic arises in psychoacoustics, although they explain that psychoacoustics uses the same definition of sound itself as the acoustic definition.

The reading states that the acoustic definition of sound is non-experiential and a physicalist reductionism, and in order to argue against it provides several other definitions which different writers have provided. Gaver, for example, takes an ecological approach to sound which combines the acoustics of the sound with the auditory system that enables an organism to hear it. He also describes a distinction between everyday and musical listening. Everyday listening involves perceiving the events or objects which produce the sound, while musical listening focuses on perceiving the sounds themselves. 

Pasnau examines the traveling of sound from an object to the medium and then to our ears, and claims that we should consider sounds as residing within the object which produces them. He considers sound as the “property” of the object which makes it. 

The text provides a few more writers’ definitions, before suggesting that sound waves are not necessary for sound to be perceived. The primary argument in favor of this is the idea of thinking or imagining sounds, claiming that even auditory illusions are in themselves sound. They also discuss the idea of sound being the relationship between the sound wave itself and the listener. The second reading examines this more deeply, claiming that the relationship “is not between things but is the thing, is sound itself.” The second reading uses metaphors more extensively to examine the experience of listening, such as a viewer looking at a painting, and the experience of “being honeyed” and imagining the stickiness of honey or sourness of a lemon. 

I found the first reading defining sound to be easier to follow than the second, and the various definitions which were examined certainly made me rethink what I consider sound to be. I mainly subscribe to the simplest, acoustic definition of sound. However, the one that compelled me the most was the imagined sound. In recording sounds for our libraries, I will certainly keep that idea in mind by considering how listeners generally imagine certain sounds and how those expectations might be subverted. I also will be thinking about which sounds fall into the realm of “everyday” versus “musical” listening, and use the cataloging of sounds into either of those categories to help inform how I arrange the sounds in our pieces. 

 Reading Response Week 2 - (Published 9/24/23): 

In reading “Defining Sound Art,” Maes and Leman detail 13 criteria of sound art as their main form of defining it. The first is concept, which involves the degree to which sound is the focus of the work. The second is perception, which depends upon the space and how involved the audience is, whether they are separated from the stage or immersed in the work. The third is space, as the space can be used to varying degrees depending on its acoustics. Continuing off of that, four concerns site-specificity, as some pieces will therefore be dependent upon a certain space whereas others may have no connection to the location. Five discusses open form, as many sound artworks can have no clear-cut beginning or end and run 24/7. Six is interaction, measuring how much the visitors are able to interact with the artwork. Seven is production of sound, whether it be acoustic, electro-acoustic, electronic, or even there is no sound produced other than those from the environment and/or the audience. Eighth concerns whether there are performers, guides, or attendants present, or none of the above. Nine discusses narrativity, often meaning how much the piece has musical structure.

Tenth is the implementation of techniques and technologies, whether the work makes use of commercially available technologies, adapts them, or the hardware/software is all homemade. Eleven is how much there is a visual component, and whether those components are related to the production of the sound. Twelve concerns endurance, meaning how long the work runs for as some can be permanent while others are temporary. Finally thirteen is the place of presentation, be it a stage in a concert hall, a museum, a public space, or an alternative location. Additionally, at the start of this reading one of the all-encompassing statements made to define sound art is that it has both an aural and visual component, “but the production, muffling, or reflection of sound is the primary goal of the work.” 

In the reading on “Noises of the Avant-Garde,” Kahn examines the definition of avant garde noise, which he claims “both marshals and mutes the noise of the other: power is attacked at the expense of the less powerful, and society itself is both attacked and reinforced.” One interesting note was that Hugo Ball’s sound poems, which he describes, often potentially tried to break down the language barrier between the many different Europeans present in Zurich who came to observe the performances. Kahn also discusses simultaneism, where multiple sounds are played simultaneously which I found to be an interesting approach worth considering for my own sound art. Finally, Kahn discusses Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo’s art of noises, which he says was an “the most important single achievement in the early history of avant-garde noise.” I found the connection discussed between the piece and technology to be interesting, especially given its importance in the artwork. Kahn describes art of noises as an “ineluctable expression of the machines and motors of modernity.” Later he says, “[Russolo’s] invention relied on the theater of war, where the newest speeding metals cannot help but make an impression on their listeners…”