Soundtrack.

A few years ago in early 2020 I visited Senegal as part of my research on the trans Atlantic slave trade.

My guides took me to N’der, a village close to St. Louis.

I was told a story about a group of women who had immolated themselves- refusing to be captured/kidnapped into slavery by marauding Moor slave traders who had come from the north. I was told that the men of the village had been in St. Louis fighting against the French.

That was the year 1819 or 1820.

This was years… ~3 centuries… ~300 years since the commencement of the transatlantic slave trade… but it’s not clear how many years it had been since the start of the trans-saharan slave trade. It was for me a mind freezing encountering, a junction where the two slave trades met… and met also with the colonial capture of the region… the terror… and considering the various types of resistances enacted by people… for over 300 years… resistances on land, in water, over water, internal implosions and external detonations… and self immolations…

I was in N’der village with 2 guides, a historian, Aicha and a facilitator/program producer Marie Cisse from RAW materials co.

We were hosted by a family of one of the descendants of the women…

They took us to the site of the tree where the women had burnt themselves. I spent time with the tree and the soil of the place. We walked around the village. Afterwards, we were invited for a home cooked lunch in one of the homes of the descendants… we were treated with such kindness and honour. We ate collectively - the best, tastiest thieboudienne ever, and It was very heartwarming… a day I will never forget… a generosity of spirit I will always remember.

I spent some more time visiting other parts of Senegal with Marie Helene Perreira, who was at the time the director of RAW.

After Senegal, I had visited various parts of Ghana, guided by Mantse Aryeequaye, where I was also shown and taken to sites related to the transatlantic slave trade including forrests, forts, castles, villages as well as the state archives.

When I returned to South Africa, I visited Tlokwe Sehume, a great musician who lives in the outskirts of Tshwane. I told him about my research and where it had taken me… what I had seen, what I had felt… what I was told… how the descendants of the Nder women had been so generous in their hospitality. I asked that he help me compose something- that would add to the soundtrack of the animation film I was working on- which was shown at the ICA at VCU in Richmond, Virginia in 2021 and at Prospect New Orleans.

The sounds herein include sounds recorded in the various places I visited… several sites in Senegal… in Ghana… CapeTown, South Africa (also known for its slavery history via the Dutch Indian Ocean pillages- later I found out about the Paul Kruger story- but that’s a story for another day) and also a few of the many key sites in the USA- waterways and forests traversed by the enslaved people in Richmond and Nola.

Tlokwe and I made sounds together, he coached me on how to practice an ancient throat singing technique which you might hear when listening to the audio. I spent the day at his musical instrument filled studio at his farm… if one has a really good ear, once in a while one might hear the distant bleed of a goat or 2.

This sound is the soundtrack separated from the animation film, “Master Harmoniser” 2021. The animation film is made up of around 1000 drawings of water using clay from the places I travelled to. I have shown it thus far in Richmond, in New Orleans at the African American Museum and also in Seattle at the Henry Gallery. Some songs I recorded with Tlokwe were also ‘exhibited’ as part of the work I presented at Artes Mundi.

The name of the work “Master Harmoniser” was inspired by the writings of Nnedi Okarofor, she so beautifully wrote about that idea in the Binti trilogy- the idea of a “master harmoniser”…

When I began the work, it was about 400 years since the commencement of the transatlantic slave trade. Around the time when the idea of making a work about this history had come to me, I had found myself weeping about what had happened to the millions of people- abused… and the tentacles: the aftereffects on the descendants of the enslavers, on African descendants of enslaved people living in the diaspora, on Africans living on the continent in post colonial states, the effect of these traumas on the rest of the world’s people… and I found myself curious about what the earth remembers- the various lands on which the tears, blood and sweat fell, landed, evaporated… what the waters remember… and the wind…

- DSB

The work was generously supported by luminous strong beautiful ancestors; Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU, Virginia; Raw Material Company, Dakar; Prospect. 5, New Orleans; Menokin Foundation, Virginia; Artes Mundi 9; Special thanks to Matty Monethi; Lily Cox-Richard; Nontsikelelo Mutiti; Joy McMillian; Mantse Aryeequaye; Marie Helene Pereira; Amber Esseiva; Tlokwe Sehume; Mongane Serote; TBAcademy; The waters of Solomon Islands, and the spirit of Lucky Dube’s music(everywhere I went) and my earth vehicle: my dear body.

Fragmentation as the process or state of breaking or being broken into fragments [1]

as the disintegration or breaking apart of a cohesive narrative, structure, or form, often conveying a sense of dislocation, chaos and discontinuity [2]

a socially anchored process of deliberate breakage and reuse [3]

as feeling

I moved to New York City in August 2024 for a year-long research fellowship. The last few months have been intense, characterised by numerous personal changes and emotional ups and downs. Time has felt incredibly slow and expansive one moment, rapid and overwhelming the next. Both over-excited and overwhelmed, I found myself needing to find a way musically to explore these intensities of feeling, and to understand how my internal experiences connect to broader ideas about change.

Fragments 1 is part of a larger project of four (work in progress) pieces exploring different states of change: stasis, fragmentation, emergence, and equilibrium. These concepts appealed to me because of their relevance in both musical and non-musical contexts—ranging from the psychoanalytic and literary to the technical, scientific, and metaphorical—as a framework for understanding the relationships between time, change and feeling.

The concept of fragmentation informed my musical decisions on multiple levels. The sound sources include three different iPhone recordings of improvisations using playing metallic materials (such as a metal filing cabinet, radiator and the metal rim of my snare drum). I approached each improvisation as constellations of fragmented gestures and irregular phrases (inspired in part by the generative and fluid, yet fragmented rhythmic structures of computer music). In Ableton, I chopped each recording into fragments – some extremely short, others longer. I then played around with simple EQ and tempo manipulation to enhance micro-rhythmic and sonic details. Together, these recordings and processes create satisfying ambiguities between acoustic and digitally enhanced and rhythms, between rhythm and texture, material and immaterial.

Versions

It hadn’t been my plan, but I sent three different versions of Fragments 1 to Eric over the course of a few weeks. The first was intense, chaotic, somewhat disorientating. The last (this version) is much more subdued. Version one explored the idea of fragmentation as a sort of brokenness where I layered the original recordings of my improvisations and let them play simultaneously, without any structural intervention. For version two, I added one new recording of my radiator and cut small sections from the previous version. I mined these fragments for interesting details, textures, rhythmic patterns or timbral qualities and arranged them in new configurations. This version meandered for long stretches, followed by sudden changes between dislocated fragments.

The final version built on this disjointedness by focussing on sections where interesting relationships had occurred between sounds contained in the fragments from the previous two of versions. The chaotic, high frequency sounds from the first version (and therefore the intensity of my initial reactions to lived change) are still there, but their prominence in the mix has drastically shifted. The rhythmic disjoint and feeling of dislocation articulated in version two shaped the pace and mood of the final version. Rhythmic snapshots from all versions became the repetitious structure which abruptly ends the piece (but could easily continue indefinitely).

Fragments 1 reflects the final stage in the evolution of my understanding of fragmentation and its limitations or potential as an aesthetic device. The process of making it became a way to articulate my sometimes-contradictory emotional states over the past few months without forcing an unrealistic coherence between them.

- RB

[1] Generic dictionary definition

[2] Generic literary perspective

[3] Katherine T. von Stackelberg, Review of The Fragment: An Incomplete History by William Tronzo, Canadian Art Review 35, no. 1 (2010): 98–101: https://www.jstor.org/stable/42630827?seq=3

Campo Bishop Split Attention

What is attention ? What is attentive listening ? And conversely, what is unfocused listening ? Fuzzy, lateral, peripheral ?

What do psychoanalysts, sitting in their comfortable, disheveled chairs, surrounded by books and fetish objects, do when they lower their gaze and appear to sleep in front of the patient ? When they let their listening become unfocused, and sink into a wide backstage from which the opinions and projections that swirl on the surface seem only distant reflections and where an unexpected analogy, a coincidence or a spark of beauty allows itself to be caught on this side of reasoning ?

What form of attention inhabits a compassionate listening and let us remember, it turned toward caring for the fate of the other, the patient who is now speaking ?

( A kind of lucid fog from which figures emerge ).

( A movement reminiscent of the spontaneous gesture of someone walking in the countryside, picking a flower on the side of the road, snatching it in fact, without even slowing their pace and apparently without criteria - it is a lateral, peripheral gaze, to have seen it - instantly making it a symbol, a figure, a memory. )

Unfocused listening is what leads to cledonomancy, a divinatory practice that finds answers and omens in words caught fortuitously on the street, spoken by strangers who pass us by. At a traffic light in Piazzale Loreto two girls pass by me and to my ear comes only “my father does not like seafood risotto.” Why do I remember only that very phrase ? Why in the midst of my distraction something — someone — paid attention? What about seafood just now ? From whom does that message come to me ? From where does the attention flow ? Why did I catch that very sentence ? Maybe the figure of the father who rejects something. The dish that brings together the sea and the misty plains ( an unsolvable contradiction of my life ). Possible interpretations are already sprouting and I am the one making them sprout. What did those girls know about me ? That sentence was not meant for me and yet my attention picked it up.

For Johnatan Crary western modernity has demanded that individuals be defined and trained by their ability to ‘pay attention,’ that is, to disengage from a broader field of attraction, visual or auditory, in order to isolate or focus on a reduced number of stimuli” [1], exactly the opposite of what I thought I was doing as I — unfocused and inattentive, relaxed and content with my flanerie in a familiar landscape — navigated the wide, teeming field of Piazzale Loreto. Unexpectedly, however, something in me “paid attention” and the sense of the world contracted into a mysterious seafood risotto.

I live at the turn of two centuries and am undecided about which form of attention to adopt. Deep attention in black boxes ( theaters ), white cubes ( galleries and museums ) careful readings and deep - and engaged listening ( often with headphones ) have shaped my individuality. However the parceling of attention that began with the early television zapping and advertising non sequiturs of the 1980s and continued with the atomization of attention enforced by social media have in turn had an effect of which I do not know whether to resist or adapt to.

I now try, as a pure exercise and with this bifurcation between two time periods and two modes of attention in mind, to bring into dialogue with each other two figures who succeeded each other, and whose dates of death and birth slightly overlapped in the 1970s — Claire Bishop and Cristina Campo — and I’ll do so focusing on two texts : “ Disordered attention ‘ by the former, from 2024 and ’ Attention and Poetry ” by the latter from 1961.

In the transition era between the respective twenties of the 20th and 21st centuries revolving around the 1970s, the concept of attention seems to go through multiple semantic twists by contracting and expanding, like someone's consciousness going through states of sleep and wakefulness.

Moving within the framework of performance studies, Bishop argues that modern spectatorship, premised on fully focused presence and deep attention, no longer seems appropriate or necessary [2] arguing further that attention and distraction are a false binary [3].

For Campo, on the other hand — a fervent proponent of what had yet to be named deep attention, and whose writing is interwoven with spiritual concerns — to ask somebody never to be distracted, to withdraw tirelessly his faculty of attention from the equivocation of imagination, from the laziness of habit, from the hypnosis of customs, is to ask them to embody their highest form. It is to ask of them something very close to sanctity in a time that — with blind fury and chilling success — seems to solely pursue the total divorce of the human mind from its own faculty of attention [4].

For Campo, attention and distraction are opposing and irreducible polarities while Claire Bishop — who instead moves more cautiously into the minefield of a complex contemporaneity — takes her cue from Crary's position that attention and (...) distraction cannot be thought of outside a continuum, within which the two states are constantly intermingled, in a social field in which the same imperatives and forces demand both attention and distraction [5].

From an ethical standpoint, for Bishop to allow oneself to escape the grip of attention imposed and put to profit by capitalism is synonymous with freedom and inclusion ( not everyone necessarily wants to pay attention to the same things) .

Shifting our gaze, shifting our attention to a collective, shared plane can be an antidote to the post-Fordist pressure that compels us to exploit every bit of our attention and the desire that animates it.

For Campo, however, it is still deep attention that acquires ethical value and leads those who practice it on an ascetic path of intensity and even pain.

To have accorded something extreme attention is to have agreed to suffer it to the end, and not only to suffer it but to suffer for it, to place oneself as a screen between it and all that may threaten it (...) Here attention reaches perhaps its purest form, its most exact name: it is responsibility [6].

Campo writes from a posture of isolation, an almost hermit-like position ( forced by her illness into a suffered solitude ) while Bishop — for whom attention is always collectively constructed as a field of dynamic relationships [7] — embraces the social and collective aspect of the alternating pulsations between attention and distraction and if she recognizes the creative intensity of the one she also highlights the antagonistic and resistant potential of the other.

But what did Campo presage of the fate of attention in what for her was a distant future and for us is our contemporaneity ?

If we really pay attention to her discourse we find in it a singular semantic shift : what she was most concerned with was not so much the opposition between attention and distraction, but rather that between attention and imagination.

And the imagination she speaks of is a stroboscopic imagination that vaguely prefigures the flow of images that frame our present.

Today's art ( and let's remember, Cristina Campo's text is from 1961) is overwhelmingly imagination, that is, chaotic contamination of elements and planes. All this, of course is opposed to justice ( which in fact is of no interest to today's art ) [8].

What does Campo mean by this statement ? At the beginning of her text Cristina Campo counters attention understood as readiness for revelation and thus mediation between all that “silently cries out to be read differently [9]” to imagination that is “arbitrariness (...) and violence to the reality of things.[10]”

Justice ( and responsibility) are for her attention, readiness to grasp, rather than imagination i.e. a violent, potentially devastating fabulation.

So if attention is expectation, fervent, fearless acceptance of the real, imagination is impatience, flight into the arbitrary: eternal labyrinth without an Ariadne's thread. This is why ancient art is synthetic, modern art analytic; an art largely of pure decomposition, as god befits a time nourished by terror. For true attention does not, as it might seem, lead to analysis, but to the synthesis that resolves it, to symbol and figure — in a word, to destiny [11].

How can we not think of the scrolling, the deluge of images, the endless, depthless collage, on whose smooth surface it has become impossible to carve a fissure, a wound or a gateway leading to transcendence.

I imagine Campo alone facing a destiny to come and surrounded by her vast library as opposed to Bishop for whom destiny is now, and whose attention is porous to a whole range of other stimuli and connections :

Today I quickly switch from one mode of attention to another. In a typical visit to an exhibition, I get lost in long periods of attention and presence. But I also scan the QR code to read the exhibition booklet later. I wonder if I can ask the curator for a link to stream the video at home. I take pictures of the installation and a few close-ups. I respond to messages from my partner or companion about childcare. I take pictures of the labels. I send an image to a friend and tell them they were right, this is (or is not) a good exhibit [12].

If Bishop encourages us to give free rein to distraction since in it it is possible to build a habitat for survival, Campo invites us instead to pick up on signs, symbolic gleams, unforeseen analogies or synchronicities since it is only by allusions concealed in the real that mystery manifests itself [13].

Attention must be paid to the trivial clue, to the magic of the simple form, the barely hinted at allusion.

The symbols (...) that for millennia have nourished and consecrated life, are clothed in the most concrete forms of the earth: from the Burning Bush to the Talking Cricket, from the Pommel of Knowledge to Cinderella's Pumpkins. ( and, said en passant, to a strange seafood risotto ). In the face of reality, the imagination recoils [14].

For this to happen, however, reality must come ablaze, enter into resonance, vibrating together with fervent expectation, and activate a feedback.

Where does attention flow from ? Bishop tells us that Attention is so valued because it is rare and unstable, continually unravelling from within [15].

While Campo points out that : It matters little whether this creative moment, in which the alchemy of perfect attention is accomplished, leads to long and painful pilgrimages, or whether it springs from enlightenment [16].

I often feel envy for those chosen spirits — I think I know a few — who create on the spot, free of reference and research, in complete freedom. They open their mouths, they pick up their pencil, they come up with something when in contrast I spend longer and longer periods of time reading quibbling, copying — and this text is yet another example of that — in search of an hypothetical ecstasy, in the hope that by holding it all together until the end the explosion will happen, the unity of the figure will emerge.

And as if this were not enough there are the journeys, long, tortuous, exhausting even in exhilaration, intoxicated by the dizzying accumulation of listening, visions, readings, encounters and experiences.

Such quests, such journeys become more and more imposing, branching out, sometimes the moment of fulfillment, of synthesis, seems to recede into the fog despite never failing the faith and fever that spur one to pursue them.

Instead, I envy those who are naturally attentive to an as yet unknown object, free we might say, always clear-headed and ready to catch a sign or, to use Paul Valery's expression, to fecundate boredom [17].

To conclude this diachronic pas de deux between Campo and Bishop I try to include them in the impossible image of them embodying the two characters of a 1972 performance by Dan Graham : Past Future Split Attention in which Two people who know each other are in the same space. While one continually predicts the other's behavior, the other recounts (from memory) the former's past behavior [18].

The exercise is exhilarating, the two people are talking almost at the same time, they don't really have time to focus — to pay attention — to what the other person is saying but are nevertheless affected by it : why did he say I will do this ? How does he describe what I just did ? Both people continually escape the other's prediction or description of them but are nevertheless conditioned by it.

It is the warmest, most precious form of attention : attention to the other.

The image is impossible because Campo and Bishop inhabit different eras but it is thought-provoking, Campo telling us about attention from the past, Bishop telling us about it from the future, and Dan Graham, in the short ( and curiously convoluted ) text/ score describing the performance associates attention with present time. Graham makes the existence of a present dependent on the double figure-eight feedback — which you can imagine similar to an infinity symbol — between past and future, and thus for one to see the other in terms of the present (attention), there is a mirror reflection or closed loop of figure-eight feedback/feed ahead of past/future [19].

In the text the notion of attention appears furtively in parentheses but is central, and in fact we also find it in the title : Past Future Split Attention.

We would be inclined to say that this is a performance about the tension between past and future but in fact the present, the elusive focus of the action, is made to coincide with attention, and it is attention that is the central and most enigmatic object. Both performers, despite being hopelessly “distracted” because they are overwhelmed by the task of describing in real time the other's past or future are completely enveloped in attention to the other and from the other. And what is particularly touching and in tune with Crary and Bishop's thinking is that this is a perfectly shared, collectively constructed [20] form of attention.

It is precisely attention, flowing simultaneously from the past and the future, that gives rise to the present and creates a double loop ( what Dan Graham calls “figure-eight” and which he has enacted several times with recursive circuits between mirrors, microphones, speakers, cameras and monitors ). A double loop that once entered into resonance or feedback, sets attention aflame.

The two characters in Past Future Split Attention collectively construct attention in a mix of the focused and unfocused. Those who have tried to interpret this performance know that while striving to maintain full concentration, one cannot help but be affected by what the other says in a continuous evolution of causal reactions.

One person's behavior reciprocally reflects/depends upon the other's, so that each one's information is seen as a reflection of the effect that their own just-past behavior has had in reversed tense, as perceived from the other's view of himself [21].

The ear that on the one hand chooses, or chooses to exclude, on the other hand registers everything, brushed by everything else, and is nevertheless affected.

The gravitational loop between the two poles of the performance oscillates between distraction and attention, between conscious and unconscious listening, between past and future. The tension between before and after is what produces an ardor.

It activates a complex game that includes the ellipse ( the unspoken and the form-eight ), the void ( absence to oneself ), indeterminacy ( what comes to mind, or what rains down in high fantasy), and, ( most interestingly), the suspicion ( or comfort) of a secret.

“If you were really paying attention you would notice that — ” says a professor of Italian literature who seems to give more importance, while reading a text, to hidden messages — irony, coded messages, meaning-laden pauses — seen as possible tools of resistance, of protection from abuse, of those who know how to choose their battles by reserving to strike later, limiting themselves for the moment to sharpen their weapons in silence. Caute.

Marseille, January 2025.

- AB

[1] Jonathan Crary, Attentional Capitalism, in Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 2016

[2] Claire Bishop, Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today, Verso Books, 2024, pg. 6

[3] Claire Bishop, Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today, Verso Books, 2024, pg. 18

[4] Cristina Campo, Attenzione e poesia, 1961 L'Approdo Letterario, VII,13, 58-62. Poi in Gli Imperdonabili, Adelphi Edizioni, Milano, 1987. Translation by the author.

[5] Jonathan Crary, Attentional Capitalism, in Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 2016

[6] Cristina Campo id.

[7] Claire Bishop, Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today, Verso Books, 2024, pg. 103

[8] Cristina Campo id.

[9] Cristina Campo id.

[10] Cristina Campo id.

[11] Cristina Campo id.

[12] Claire Bishop, Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today, Verso Books, 2024, pg.

[13] Cristina Campo id.

[14] Cristina Campo id.

[15] Claire Bishop, Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today, Verso Books, 2024, pg. 9

[16] Cristina Campo id.

[17] Paul Valéry, Le bilan de l’intelligence (1935), in Variété, Œuvres, t. 1, Gallimard, Pléiade, p. 1076.

“Nous ne supportons plus la durée. Nous ne savons plus féconder l'ennui. Notre nature a horreur du vide, — ce vide sur lequel les esprits de jadis savaient peindre les images de leurs idéaux, leurs Idées, au sens de Platon.”

[18] Dan Graham, Past Future Split Attention, performnace, 1972 "Two people who know each other are in the same space. While one predicts continuously the other person's behavior, the other person recounts (by memory) the other's past behavior. Both performers are in the present, so knowledge of the past is needed to continuously deduce future behavior (in terms of causal relation). For one to see the other in terms of the present (attention), there is a mirror reflection or closed figure-eight feedback/feedahead loop of past/future. One person's behavior reciprocally reflects/depends upon the other's, so that each one's information is seen as a reflection of the effect that their own just-past behavior has had in reversed tense, as perceived from the other's view of himself."

[19] Dan Graham id.

[20] Claire Bishop, Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today, Verso Books, 2024, pg. 103

[21] Dan Graham id.

*Plane Talea, an archive/instrument that Alessandro Bosetti has been building since 2016, made up of anonymous voices - to date more than 80 - sorted into thousands of utterances. Each Plane Talea performance is preceded by individual recording sessions/encounters in which volunteers donate their voice and accept that it can/could live autonomously, becoming a living, fictitious and real object. The collected utterances are ordered in an idiosyncratic taxonomy that arranges them in organum and constitute an instrument, then played to create a purely utopian vocal music, a polyphony that builds teeming textures starting from the multiplication of the details and imperfections of which the voices are carriers. In FasFari this device becomes a closed but vast universe. Vocal sounds are never electronically transformed but only recomposed, recombined, juxtaposed or superimposed (no sound processing, cloning or selection through AI). All sentences begin and end naturally.

The Nomadic Listener is an augmented publication project involving aural drifting and auto-ethnography, exploring migration, urban experience, and sonic alienation. The work stems from psychogeographic explorations of a number of contemporary cities through embodied listening, situated writing and field recording traces made between 2012 - 2020. Each text is an act of contemplative listening on-site, where the author records their surrounding environment and attempts to attune to the sonic fluctuations of movement and the passing of events. What surfaces is a collection of meditations on the minutiae of life movingly interwoven with the author’s own memories, associations, desires and reflections. The project draws up a tender map of contemporary urban experience, and the often lonely, surprising, and random interactions found in the quotidian.

- BC

The audio recording is an improvisation with the Syntrx II synthesizer and processed voice.

- EL

The lockdown in New York began the day after Gryphon Rue and I held what would be our last concert for over a year, though neither of us knew it at the time. We'd been on the verge of canceling the event, as events throughout the city were getting postponed amid concerns over the rapidly spreading new virus, but we ended up performing for an audience of four. Afterward, on our way home through the eerily empty streets of Manhattan, we glimpsed the first signs of the ghost city New York would soon become. The city that never sleeps was finally taking a break.

Over the next two months, I experienced a strange dissonance: everything I was hearing and reading described the world outside my apartment as a breathable death threat, but the view from my window was of life in full bloom. Spring had arrived, the trees on our block were bursting with blossoms, and – unless an ambulance's siren was cutting through the silence, which was often – the uncharacteristically hushed soundscape of Brooklyn had filled with a greater diversity of bird calls than I'd heard in all my previous 13 years as a borough resident.

In my local community of musicians, the onset of Spring was especially dissonant with the fact that we couldn't do one of the things we loved most: sounding together. Online jam sessions felt unsatisfying, so Gryphon and I started scheming ways we could meet in person for socially-distanced musicking. We masked up and brought our musical saws to various Brooklyn parks, brandishing our blades at each other from opposite sides of a bench. During our initial sessions, it was often challenging to hear each other over the wind and other ambient noise, so we began scouting for outdoor areas with good acoustics. Prospect Park, with its network of hilly paths, supplied a series of tunnels which turned out to be perfect rehearsal rooms. Our favorite, Cleft Ridge archway, soon became a popular spot for local musicians who were also looking for ways to sound together.

This audio clip contains fragments of recordings I made in that tunnel, with sounds of my voice and my partner Michael playing tenor saxophone. I had decided to compose a piece that would be staged across a series of locations in Prospect Park, to celebrate the haven the park had become for musicians during those times of sonic isolation. These sounds were my initial sketches. I based the piece on field recordings of local bird calls, as an homage to the birds whose voices comforted me during lockdown by connecting me to the living world outside. After selecting my favorite birdcalls from the recordings, I transposed them to be performed on two euphoniums by Christopher McIntyre and Weston Olencki. Christopher and Weston would follow two predetermined paths through Prospect Park, crossing at different junctures before ultimately converging at Cleft Ridge archway for the final act. The audio here, recorded in the archway, includes some first attempts at imitating the recorded birdcalls, as well as other exercises I asked Michael to perform on saxophone to test the tunnel's resonant frequency. The piece, “Mo(u)rning”, was performed in Prospect Park on the second Saturday in May, 2020, World Migratory Bird Day.

*I recommend listening to this piece with headphones, as I recorded it with binaural microphones.

- MB

- “The Cybernetic Hypothesis” Tiqqun

Torvald clutched the jagged edge. With one final desperate attempt he pulled himself up onto the rim of the escarpment. His head spun. His vision faded in and out with the labor of his breathing. He lay on his back and groaned, finally breathing deeply, heart rate slowing.

His monitor implant let out a shrill beep. Hastened by the missive he struggled again to stand. His legs trembled. His iter-suit hung in tatters, patches of his exposed skin seared by the var-beams of the algo-blats.

The blats! He spun around peering over the edge, his gaze sweeping frantically across the twisted labyrinth that lay below him. Here and there swarms of the hideous media-blats swooped in and out of the mangled and mind-bending patterns of corridors, arches, stairs, and chamber-ways. He trembled again, remembering what other horrors waited, concealed there in the maze.

His cranial implant buzzed lightly. A trace of his stack-path blinked into overlay on his view; a thin, glowing line marking his crooked trail through the circuit-skein.

His monitor toned it’s shrill signal again. His muscles tensed. He felt a synth-gland release a flood of chemicals into his system. Coursing through his blood, the stimulants washed the pain away. His vision cleared and tightened. A cold gust blew in from behind him. He looked up and around, aware now of the arch above his head. The metal gleamed dully, no seams visible in its unforgiving surface.

Facing away now from the valley behind him he glanced down. His mind reeled, his jaw clenched. The same perplexing plane of skein-circuit stretched out before him. Another buzz in his head, the same trace, rotated now 360 degrees blinked onto his view. He gave a sharp inhale and squinted into the distance and there, at the limit of his sight a ledge rose up above the plain. And likewise an archway peeped through the wall. Was it possible? Was there a figure poised there in the center? A ragged, tense shadow; an echo of himself, gazing out through it’s own arch onto another identical skein-circuit.

The monitor skreeched again in rapid succession. “Initiate skein-circuit cycle engagement.”

Stairs leapt up ahead of him, spiraling down into the valley.

“Stack-trace compulsory completion timing 3.3973 parcels.”

A full parcel faster than the last cycle! In a surge of recognition it dawned on him then. He would complete the feedback loop, faster and faster again; compelled by the algo-blats and node-beasts, fueled and guided by his implants.

A thick mist emitted from the arch, swirling around him. A fresh iter-suit congealed on his form. He lept off down the stairs into the labyrinth, his mind a fleshless envelope.

- LS

Overactive sound

Events weave and unravel

Frayed pulsar threads snap

Pulsar Threads is the latest of a series of works that aim to inject the sound and morphology of pulsar synthesis into my practice while maintaining active continuity with prior work. This music is about 17 minutes long. This music is also about 17 years long, the length of my practice so far of working with different kinds and orders of improvising with an established but still evolving performance ecosystem (1) in ways that are influenced by both early tape works and modern turntablism.

Specifically, Pulsar Threads explores, often simultaneously, buffer scratching, corpus scrubbing, waveform scuffing, live sampling and a range of time-based, spectral and neural transformations of material sourced from the New Pulsar Generator (nuPg) (2). To borrow a phrase from Bolt's work on practice-led research, if there is any magic to be found here, "the magic is in the handling" (3) and concerned with material thinking. This music is characterised by fast moving detail, development and interactions between sound objects and embodied technique to make connections in material through superimposition, stratification, juxtaposition and interpolation.

I love the sound of pulsar synthesis, it can be pushed to so many different kinds of sonic places, but I just can't play nuPg fast enough, or really, I can't play it fast enough with the required precision and agility for creating responsive real-time onset, continuation and closure of sound events at multiple time-scales that cluster and collide then fragment and dissipate, with varied and morphing envelopes, arcs and sharp changes in direction. Maybe I just need to practice more!

Keep's concept of "instrumentalising" is the discovery of the inherent character and opportunities for manipulation of sound in sounding objects (4), and since 2007 I've been working towards instrumentalising high resolution multidimensional surfaces in combination with MaxMSP software and digital sound files in order to achieve rapid gestural and textural transformations of pre-recorded sound files of varied character and differing durations, from milliseconds to minutes. Beginning with a graphics tablet and what has been described as 'mixed sensing' I've explored a range of typical tablet gestures (5) which, together with scrubbing and scratching, include dipping and bowing across different kinds of sampling and synthesis methods and material. Additional interfaces augmenting the system include a USB turntable, pressure and location sensitive pads, and a compact midi controller.

With time the graphics tablet has given way to a multitouch device offering greater opportunity to explore simultaneous contrasts and traversal of timbre and temporalities in material. Different approaches to creating and manipulating sound include sample segment triggering and microlooping, spectral resynthesis, granulation and more. The system uses a range of mapping strategies and design in the interaction of the different DSP layers such as non-linear controller values, and (un)control and unpredictability in the live sampling processes as my attention and intention shifts between simultaneously sounding layers of points, lines and planes in motion. A point might be a moment of pause or a moment of action. A sequence of points forms a line. Massed points create textures of varying density. Lines have a descriptive function as the material trace path of a moving point. Massed lines create shifting planes and curving arcs of lines under tension.

As the system has developed for different use cases or works, it's generally followed Cook's principle of "Instant music, subtlety later" (6). There's an immediacy to triggering sounds, but also a complexity to shaping them, even before we begin to process them. The more I practice the more my 'bandwidth' increases, both cognitively and physically. The performance system here meets a number of Croft's conditions for instrumentality (7). The scale of physical gestures on the multitouch surface affects the scale of audio output in a fine-grained way, the responses of the software outputs are tightly synchronous with my gestures and generally my dsp processes follow or match the energy motion trajectories of the input audio. The relationship between my actions and the computer is (mostly) stable, and for people watching a performance, there's a visible relationship between action, effort and sound.

I've designed in "explorability and learnability" (8), and occasionally 'bug' becomes 'feature'. One example of this is polyphonic voice stealing. Reflecting on some glitching that was the result of too many simultaneous multitouch points and too few available voices I thought, "Oh, OK, increase the voice count", then, after a reflective pause, "Oh, no, leave it, because it gives me another place (distortion, saturation, and stuttering overload) to go". This is playful, what my Raw Green Rust bandmate Owen Green might describe as a decision to not use tools 'properly' (9), but also results in opportunities to create emotionally and expressively charged "highly aestheticised digital bits" (10).

This work also explores processing of sound in ways that my previous work with nuPg material has not. In part, this is a result of working more deeply and regularly with nuPg itself, spending more and better time with it. Having moved from initial exploratory sessions to arrive at informed improvisations with shaped sound output, there's more causal understanding and detailed control of nuPg, leading to a more varied palette of pre-recorded material for further typological and transformational discourse and development of sonic morphology (11).

There's also more extensive experience of improvising with the already improvised outputs from nuPg, in mapping them to surfaces and software processes, in understanding the possibilities for threads of connection and combination in and of material. These performed sounds are then sent to multiple auxiliary destinations for further temporal and spectral processes of stuttering, scanning, freezing and looping, of which, these processes can also send to each other in an extended feedback network. These are all things I've been doing for a long time, just not with this material, and it's that material thinking that is at the centre of this, the tacit 'knowing' that comes through handling materials (and tools) in extended and sustained practice.

Beyond the auxiliary processing, there's a final couple of developments explored here that aren't present in my earlier solo work in any form. The first is the use of the Fluid Corpus Manipulation (FluCoMa) toolkit (12) for corpus based similarity analysis, dimension reduction and clustering of fragments of sound across a series of newly developed multitouch controlled software instruments, creating an interpolation space for highly expressive sounding action.

The same kinds of corpus analysis can be used for live input audio matching, where sound input triggers further sound output that is related to the original material across different descriptors. In addition, this work employs neural style transfer, where sound is resynthesised using the timbral characteristics of a trained model. In this case the model has been trained on an improvisation by saxophonist Franziska Schroeder (13), and I've given myself control of four out of sixteen latent vectors so that I can direct the output character in real-time while keeping sound output roughly proportionate to the energetic characteristics of the input audio

Overall, there's a rich set of possibilities for monophony and polyphony, precision and instability, simplicity and complexity, but all these often conspire to create what Waters would call a "rate of information" (14) problem in my work. I've tried hard here to address this and relax a bit, but one element in particular was gifted to me. Owen has previously suggested that agility might be found in performing with or through uncooperative and failing tools and processes, and in this case nuPg was more or less frozen. All I could do was make a spectral intervention by changing the harmonic structure of a high register metallic drone accompanying regular rhythmic pulses, so I did that, for a long time, and for this release, improvised with and around that recorded improvisation for a long time too.

- JR

(1) Waters, S. (2007) Performance Ecosystems: Ecological approaches to musical interaction. EMS : Electroacoustic Music Studies Network – De Montfort/Leicester 2007 (available online at http://www.ems-network.org/IMG/pdf_WatersEMS07.pdf)

(2) https://www.marcinpietruszewski.com/the-new-pulsar-generator

(3) Bolt, B. (2007). The Magic is in Handling. in Barrett, E (Ed.). Bolt, B (Ed.). Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, (1), pp.27-34

(4) Keep, A. (2008) Responsive performance strategies with electronic feedback: Shaping intrinsic behaviours. PhD Thesis, p.29 (available online at https://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/1470/)

(5) Zbyszynski, M. et al (2007) Ten Years of Tablet Musical Interfaces at CNMAT. Proceedings of the 2007 Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME07). (available online at https://www.nime.org/proceedings/2007/nime2007_100.pdf)

(6) Cook, P. (2001) Principles for Designing Computer Music Controllers. Proceedings of the CHI'01 Workshop on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME01). (available online at https://www.nime.org/proceedings/2001/nime2001_003.pdf)

(7) Croft, J. (2007) Theses on liveness. Organised Sound 12(1): 59–66 2007 (available online at http://john-croft.uk/Theses_on_liveness.pdf)

(8) Orio, N., Schnell, N. and Wanderley, M. (2001) Proceedings of the CHI'01 Workshop on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME-01) (available online at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.01571)

(9) Green, O (2011) Agility and Playfulness: Technology and skill in the performance ecosystem. Organised Sound 16(2): 134–144 (available online at https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1017/S1355771811000082)

(10) Rodgers, T. (2003) On the process and aesthetics of sampling in electronic music production. Organised Sound 8(3): 313–320 (available online at https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1017/S1355771803000293)

(11) Smalley, S. (1994) Defining timbre — Refining timbre. Contemporary Music Review, 10:2, 35-48. (available online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07494469400640281)

(12) https://www.flucoma.org/

(13) https://huggingface.co/Intelligent-Instruments-Lab...

(14) Waters, S. (2000). The musical process in the age of digital intervention. ARiADA Texts, 1(1). (available online at https://pureadmin.qub.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/17255926/2000musical_process_libre.pdf)

I’m drawn to the intimate and erotic relationship between the human body and technology in live performances. Starting in 2022, I began exploring the possibility of playing with microphone-speaker feedback and placing contact microphones within bodily orifices to amplify the sound of muscle movement, footsteps, and bone-conducted sounds. After a series of experiments, I started to sonically augment the body - by placing a customized speaker in my mouth to create feedback with a headset microphone and place a geophone sensor within my anus to amplify my body movements, and using a pair of Chinese bass drum sticks to play my body as a drum.

The in-mouth speaker plays back audio samples of gun sounds and is automated to create feedback at specific points in the performance. My mouth filters and mutes the playback samples and creates multiphonics and beatings when singing with the speaker's feedback tone.

The geophone sensor transforms my body into an instrument, incorporating the room into my acoustic body. My position in the performance space, the speaker’s volume, the muscle movements, and the room's layout all contribute to the sound-producing process and change the tone of the physical feedback system, which happens occasionally. The sound is conducted from the subwoofer on the ground through my body to the microphone. Because of these variables, the resulting sounds become intertwined with my relationship to the room through my choreography, which is improvised live. Thus, the audience in the room becomes physically connected with me through the haptic low frequencies.

The resulting solo performance consists of choreographed, ritualistic improvisations that build on ancient Chinese drumming traditions and explore body dysmorphia, self-harm, sexuality, spirituality, and mortality, linking sound, movement, and violence in divine ceremony.

The audio is an excerpt from my solo performance at E-Flux Bar Laika in NYC on January 31, 2024.

- QLL

[ the music of history ]

Tonkin was one of the 5 protectorates of the 'Union Indochinoise', to the northeast and with Hà Nội as its capital. On January 1st of 1882 the colonial governor opened the 'Manufacture d’Opium de Saigon' in order to control the entire opium production in the 'Union Indochinoise' and its sales, financing the colonial regime to a considerable extent. The french exploitation of coal in Tonkin began in 1884. Soon after, 1894 onwards, the private 'Société française des charbonnages du Tonkin' intensified the exploitation in the extended open-pit deposits of Hongay. On June 27th of 1908 Vietnamese nationalists attempt to assassinate French military of the Hà Nội garrison by poisoning their meals, the start of a general uprising in Tonkin to drive out the colonial regime. The strata of image and text in the postcards follow in their economy the economy of power, their 'truth' is a commodity. The postcard with the beheading scene seems to have as its source photographs signed with "Exécution capitale à Quan Yen Tonkin le 7 Mars 1905. (Coll. J. Chinh)" from which the postcard publisher produced postcards with a variety of legends, testing the sales market.

Postcard 1

Postcard 2

Postcard 3

"For the historical index of the images not only says that they belong to a particular time; it says, above all, that they attain legibility only at a particular time. And, indeed, this acceding „to legibility“ constitutes a specific critical point in the movement at their interior. Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each „now“ is the now of a particular recognizability. In it, truth is charged to the bursting point with time. (This point of explosion, and nothing else, is the death of the intentio, which thus coincides with the birth of authentic historical time, the time of truth.) It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation."

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project [N3,1]

- MW ( 2019 - )

These 12 minutes of sound are a combination of a recording of waves and wind at the rocky breakwater beach at Belle Côte in Cape Breton, Canada and a recording of me piling up wood on the porch on the following day in December 2023.

Sometimes we think that to live in the present with no memory is an escape, has a freeing quality.

To be so caught up in the sensuous now that we live completely, completely live.

Sound as sense beyond sense that keeps reminding us of its ongoingness. In and out as quickly as we hear it.

But what’s the way that sounds also maintain or hold us, suddenly point to themselves and to other things?

Everything is piling up.

Memory sifts time’s accumulations.

Sound piles are what must be left out so that we can make sense.

But our little bodies and lives are also records of these forgotten (and never even known) heaps.

Sounds accumulate around us, through us, in us. Neither pure narrative nor pure sensuousness.

There are the sounds we don’t and can’t parse but that still exist in us: a mass, a weight, an unwritable history. The frequency splatter of everydayness.

All around us, there’s this music of amassing, different densities of sound piling up, a relentless sound that is always there, will be there, has been there.

In Derrida, Egyptian Peter Sloterdyk suggests the pyramid is a monument always already built to be a ruin.

"It stands in its place, unshakeable for all time, because its form is nothing other than the undeconstructible remainder of a construction that, following the plan of its architect, is built to look as it would after its own collapse."

A pile of monumental ruins built to be “as it would after its own collapse.” It’s the made unmade just at the edge of composition, improvisation, constructing a life, dying, forgetting.

To record piles of sound is to record nothing much and not do much but hear the sound of the falling monument, simultaneously forgotten and forever.

As I record the sound of moving wood from one pile to another pile, I want to listen to stored energy relayed from one place to another. Armload from the yard pile to the porch pile, from the porch pile to the fireside pile, to the fire, to the atmosphere…

As I listen to wind and breaking waves I want to listen to the meeting-point between air, water, and land, to where solidity falls apart in foam and scribble. Water, rock, sand gets moved. Waves like pyramids. Falling in the very act of their emergence.

I tried to escape composition with these piles—but can’t. I can only begin, and then begin again. No gesture but the poverty of means, of attention, of capability, of memory as a starting ground. Aimless gathering.

And in that?

- JM

As animals with smell, so are humans with voices1

– Anne Karpf

In the summer of 2012 I conducted an exercise called OWN VOICE, consisting of interviews on the perception of one's own voice. After gathering basic information, participants were asked three key questions:

1. Do you like your voice?

2. What do you like (or dislike) about it?

3. Can you describe your voice?

Most interviewees found it challenging to articulate why they liked or disliked their voice. The phrase "I don't know" was a common response. The following are excerpts from six interviews:

- Nataly (19, Spanish): "Yes. I don't know what to say about my voice. I think it's more high-pitched than low, I don't know what to say."

- Jean Carlos (17, Dominican Republic): "Yes, I like it. I don't know, I see it as normal. It's sensual... beautiful."

- Rejep (20, Turkey): "I like my voice. Because I like to sing... and... I don't know what else to say. Not so strong, normal, baritone, male voice... I don't know what to say."

- Paolo (54, Brazil): "Honestly, no. It seems a bit metallic. I don't know, it seems not very modulated, sometimes a bit monotonous."

- Gabriela (17, Spanish): "No (laughs). I don't know! I hear it is very weird. It's very serious (laughs). I don't know! It's very strong (laughs)."

- Alameda (16, Spanish): "Yes. I don't know how it sounds and all. I don't know, sometimes it sounds high-pitched."

After this exercise, questions arise: Why is it so complicated to talk about one's voice? What happens when we speak about our own voice? Why do we lack linguistic resources to describe the voice?

Thomas Trummer's2 statement provides a clue: "Our own voice is our own most trusted familiar, more trusted than our own appearance, for which we at least need a mirror. Although it appears to be so close to us, the voice is in a strange place surrounded by many other voices, and sometimes it gets lost there." And Haytam El-Wardany3 wrote in How to disappear (2013) "Your inner voice is the sound of the external world resonating within you."

The last of the interviews conducted for OWN VOICE was with Valentina, a woman who studied journalism, worked in Chilean radio, is an academic, and an artist. Even she had a bewildered reaction when suggested to describe her voice, and later reflected on it:

Valentina (38 years old, Chile)

1. Yes.

2. I don't dislike it. But the truth is, I've never really thought about what I like about my voice.

3. It's a soft voice, I would say. Mhmmm, yes, I can't think of more adjectives. It's difficult because one doesn't generally hear oneself speaking. I could describe other people's voices, but my own voice is different. The thing is, one doesn't really hear oneself when speaking, I believe.

Talking about one's own voice is a rhetorical peculiarity: it is both the medium and the material of analysis. Qualifying one's own voice is also listening to it cautiously, and in this process, there is something similar to what a signal delay in a phone produces, where the delay increases, and we hear ourselves a little after saying a phrase. Trummer introduces the Voice&Void exhibition catalog with the reflection: “The human voice can say something about itself, and therefore it is a vehicle for speech and, at the same time, its own-reflective commentary, because talking about the voice always takes place in and with the voice."

In Western culture, the process of socialization is mainly carried out verbally. We use the voice as a means of exchange; it is the instrument with which we shape our identity in relation to others, expressing our feelings through it. Guy Cornut4 explains that there are two links that connect the voice with someone's personality: 'the voice as an instrument of self-expression' and 'the voice as an instrument of self-assertion.' The first responds to the need to manifest emotions through crying, shouting, laughing, while the second is explained as follows: 'Every person who speaks tries, to a greater or lesser extent, to have an effect on their interlocutor. The more one seeks to obtain the listener's agreement, for example, to make them obey, convince them, or seduce them, the more a high level of energy is needed, which will translate into a modification of the various characteristics of vocal emission: intensity, tone, timbre, articulation, speed or slowness, associated gestures, etc.'

For Cornut, voice intonations are acts of self-affirmation. The act of 'having an effect on one's interlocutor' is a way of confirming one's presence in a specific place and with a specific person. By expressing through the voice, we reaffirm ourselves in the present, leaving evidence of our connections with others and the environment. This opens the door to considering that the occurrence of human communication (through the voice) circulates in deeply intimate implications, activities that go far beyond the transmission of concepts. Anne Karf writes about the human voice:

'The voice isn’t just a conduit for language, information, and mood: it’s our personal and social glue, helping to create bonds between individuals and groups.'5

That the voice has the power to create bonds between the individual and their community has been exploited in various political and mass communication applications.

However, we also utilize it in personal and ordinary use: every small detail of the voice functions as a link in the everyday seduction between two people.

In 2006 I did an experiment which essentially involved staying silent. I set this goal on a Monday, wanting to see how many days I could go without uttering a single word. At that time, I was studying at the University of Buenos Aires, and this location facilitated the experiment: a foreign city where nobody knew me. The plan was as follows: always carry the exact change to board the bus, arrive a bit late to class, leave as soon as it ended to avoid exchanging words with classmates or the teacher. Bring a snack and eat in the park. Coffee: from a machine, as ordering it would require speaking at the cafeteria. Return home with exact change. Don't answer the phone, only respond to text messages. If I had to leave the house for another reason, do so with headphones on. On the first day, I felt relieved, immersed in an egocentric sensation, yet still content and satisfied. The second day brought difficulties: I began to experience the desire to communicate, to say at least a "good morning," so I started writing: everything I wanted to say went into a notebook. I realized that, although I was not contradicting my initial plan, I was engaging in a dialogue. While writing, I heard my own voice dictating what remained on paper. I also started singing internally and formulating speeches in the way I speak... I mean that, while thinking, I was listening to myself speak, as I usually don't compose my ideas the same way I construct speech; instead, I do it through images, isolated words, some phrases, abstract elements, clusters of sensations. The third day was truly challenging; I started to lose the enjoyment, feeling like an excluded woman. I continued writing in the notebook, and the writing style became more introspective and boring. On the fourth day, Thursday, I broke the rule. I remember how it happened: I was on the bus back home, and a lady sat next to me; winter was just giving way, and that day the sun was setting on Rivadavia Avenue. She said, "Look, what a beautiful day!" Although that statement wasn't a question, and there wasn't much to respond to, I couldn't stay silent. I remember feeling great relief when I heard that lady's voice because, even though her words weren't directly addressed to me, she assumed that I was her listener, her interlocutor; it was a way of including me in her world, in a snippet of her life. That final realization was the most valuable takeaway from the experiment, contrary to what I initially thought I would achieve: a Vipassana meditation-style introspection, where I could enhance inner tranquility. Instead, the result I ended up with was truly different; those three days of remaining silent made me think that speech is an almost necessary human action for perceiving oneself in the social world, evidence of synchrony and nowness.

- APS

—

OWN VOICE was carried out in the summer of 2012 in Barcelona at the Center for Studies and Documentation MACBA. And re-edited in January 2024 for Lateral Addition.

The Rain in Maine b/w Two Girls finds the artist capturing his aural environment, partaking in song with a friend.

- EL

The kernel of ?M Fra* is a set of files that were generated by Marco Pasini’s musika software from a dataset of audio files by Ian M Fraser and myself. Like teratomas — rare tumors that can sprout fully formed teeth, hair, bone, or other somatic structures — the output of this system featured familiar musical figures jutting haphazardly out of a more primitive, inchoate sonic mass. They register less as hybridizations of Ian’s work and mine than as para-musical found objects: stylistic markers from the corpus of royalty-free techno music used to train musika are audible, distended and compressed by the opaque compositional logic of the generative adversarial network, while the timbral dimension was characterized by a fuzzy indefiniteness that gave the impression of distance, that the sound was partially inaccessible due to the interposition of some occluding medium, never fully present but merely overheard in its state of virtual elsewhereness. These files were subjected to various source separation tools, each of which imposed its own spectral gestalt. Although the term source separation implies a genealogical protocol, a retrograde movement toward earlier, antecedent elements, the encounter between the musika products — a sonic object generated holistically rather than by summing discrete instrumental tracks — and the source separation algorithms yields novel entities, false histories ontologically posterior to that of which they are the putative “source.” By recombining stems from different source separation methods, the pattern recognition function of the various machine listening paradigms is subverted: new patterns emerge as a result of the juxtaposition of non-complementary stems, while reciprocal regions are riddled with gaps and spectral remainders.

- RMF

musika by Marco Pasini

demucs by Alexandre Défossez

RAVE by Antoine Caillon

Mastered by A.F. Jones

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Have Been Going Again

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What happens when the ear is presented with ten independent melodic lines? Or twenty? Or a hundred? In a series of sonic-perceptual experiments over the past few years, I’ve found that beyond about eight independent melodic lines, we lose the capacity for perceptual discrimination and begin to hear nothing but mush. But if we go further still (between about 20 to 50 lines) one of two things happens: either we hear more mush (I.e., noise), or something clicks and the ear begins to gestalt things into groups. Et voilà: melodic-like shapes begin to emerge from the morass.

Our auditory systems are constantly doing this kind of analytical work. They do it every time we hear a phoneme or a note, for example, by fusing the many spectra into a cognizable thing. We also do it when we listen to music, separating out the various layers (drums, bass, guitar, and voice in rock music, for example).

Even so, I am surprised every time it happens: when going beyond about 20 lines yields something new, something with a kind of cognizable shape. Usually in a way that’s quasi-improvised (and using some kind of pitch set or simple harmonic motion), the shift from ten incoherent lines to the uncanny popping Gestalts of 40 lines takes my breath away. When it happens. It often does not, and I end up with something ragged and ugly that I erase immediately. Part of what I’m working on now is understanding what works and what doesn’t. The little audio piece in this Lateral Addition issue was my first ever attempt with this compositional process. (I recorded it in my lockdown living room on the 2nd of April, 2020.) Since then, I’ve done many other pieces, and I have advanced the process quite a bit, but there’s something about the freshness of this first attempt that I still find perceptually thrilling.

In the version here, I’ve attempted to make something out of the little fragment of 20+ independent melodic lines. My friend and collaborator Jim Sykes plays wonderfully chaotic drums over the thing.

I see this attempt as part of an approach to music composition (and to music generally) that I call perceptualism. The claim of perceptualism (and I will elaborate on this soon in various places) is that Western music has historically been divorced from questions of perception. This is so both in terms of making music (composition, performance, etc.) and theorizing music. But what do I mean when I say that music is divorced from questions of perception? Surely musicians care about nothing other than how the sound they produced is perceived? And surely academic types do nothing but try to explain how music is perceived and how it affects listeners? To some extent, yes, these assumptions are true. But we also know that historically Western music has had a deeply idealist or even mathematical thrust. Pythagoras’ hammers were merely abstractions rather than sounding bodies. The birth of “modern” instrumental music ca. 1800 also traded primarily in abstractions: of pure and organic form. The listener is often less than an afterthought.

I propose a perceptualist music: an approach to music making that engages questions of auditory perception directly.

I said that Western music has historically been divorced from questions of perception. What I have in mind can be expressed if we split that history into several trajectories.

1. Since the 18th century and the sedimentation of homophony, perception is mostly simple and unambiguous. Of course, there may be types of ambiguity at larger structural levels (the “hypermetrical” level, for example), or in other ways. But in the vast majority of music since ca. 1800 it is clear what the listener is supposed to hear: a melodic line (marked off by timbre and other aspects) and supporting harmonies. The listener knows what the melody is. In this sense, perception is not a real issue in this kind of music because we know what is meant to be perceived and, to a large extent, how. Music is pure perception: perceiving a melody with its harmonic support. This includes various emotions and affects.
2. By contrast, most “complex” music of the 20th and 21st centuries does not bother with the question of perception in another way. It explores other things. There will continue to be debates about whether it is possible to hear the tone rows in Schoenberg. And complex theoretical operations will continue to be developed to explain how the processes in Babbitt or Ferneyhough are “perceived.” But any honest person will admit that the question, “What exactly do you hear in this music?” is beside the point. The issue here is not that these composers do or do not “care” if anyone listens, but rather that the relationship between the musical structure and the human perceptual/cognitive apparatus are divorced from one another. We hear all kinds of things in Babbitt’s music, but the music is not designed to be registered in terms of the question of what an individual listener perceives at any given sitting.
3. The same is true of pre-1800 polyphony from J.S. Bach backwards to early organum. Going far too quickly over an enormous corpus, this music is not aimed at an external listener who might parse out a coherent perception from the whole. Think about 14th or 15th century polyphony (Machaut, Dufay, etc.) and its intricate interweaving of vocal lines. When I asked a prominent historian of this music how one is meant to perceive it, he answered that it’s a “black box” and that the question is not meaningful. I tend to agree. Certainly, the question of textual intelligibility was a huge one, as exemplified by the simplification of polyphony by the Council of Trent in the mid-16th century. It may be the case that listeners were meant to focus on individual vocal lines in order to apprehend the words. (Pedantic side note: Even in cases where to the modern listener it may sound impossible to disentangle melodic lines, musicologists have recently shown that in Medieval acoustic settings vocal lines might have been more easily tracked. See Anna Zayaruznaya’s “Intelligibility Redux” [2017].) Even so (and to riff on David Yearsley), the “meaning of counterpoint,” the meaning of the relationship between different vocal-melodic lines, was entirely something other than a perceptual issue—it was a mirroring of cosmic order in an earlier period, and in the time of Bach the intermingling of melodies was likened to the way an alchemist mixed metals in an attempt to produce gold. (A possible counter-example: Bregman offers a potentially genuine, if not especially rich, example of Baroque perceptualism: “Composers in the Baroque period (approximately 1600-1750) frequently wrote music in which individual instruments rapidly alternated between a high and a low register, giving the effect of two intertwined melodic lines (‘virtual polyphony’ or ‘compound melodic line’). While the performances were typically not fast enough to fully segregate the high and low melodic lines, it still produced a certain degree of segregation.” He then offers an example by Telemann as evidence.)

If we take these three trajectories as broadly paradigmatic of the main poles of Western music history, we see that perception is not an issue.

There was a moment in the 1960s and 70s when Western music took a near perceptualist turn. Buoyed by ethnographic analyses of non-Western music (especially East African and Indonesian music), the composer Steve Reich, the music ethnographer Gerhard Kubik, and the psychologist Albert Bregman simultaneously and independently developed Gestalt (or Gestalt-like) theories of perceptual grouping in music. Similar ideas, perhaps less ethnographically-oriented, are evident in work by Maryanne Amacher and James Tenney.

My compositional work takes stock of this moment in music history, trying to recuperate it and radicalize it. All I really want to do, at least at this stage, is to make music that sounds genuinely interesting. No theorization can produce interesting-sounding music, but at the same time I feel that we have tried too long to make interesting-sounding music without sufficient theorization. Beginning on a perceptualist footing is, I believe, a step in one possibly fruitful direction. We have many possible places to look in the past to help us, should we wish to. If not, we can continue making music that either offers itself nakedly, or is totally indifferent, to the listener. (The third option, which I believe is possibly the one taken by many interesting composers today, is to intuitively find some middle-ground. But intuition may have run its course.)

I don’t think I have succeeded in any very substantial way with this study, and I recognize the mismatch between the grandiose claims of this text and the slightness of the music. That said, perceptualism is not one thing, and I see this LA posting as an invitation to further creative exploration in this area.

- GS