Jack Palmer : Sound Studies and Aural cultures

This session was more to do with getting accustomed with routing the speakers in the sound room, this week using a piece by John Chowning – the inventor of FM synthesis – and figuring out the best listening method for listening to it. Gareth made it a focus to be thoughtful of where you position the chairs in the room as that indicates to the audience an ideal spot to listen from when listening as a group, which allowed us to experiment with where we would stand in relation to the speakers and adjust our positions accordingly. We tried also alternative routings to have it so we could split ourselves into 2 lines while listening, with the left and right of the front and back channels of the composition being spread wider across the room, with each line having their backs to eachother. This proved interesting, with the now larger are betwee speakers the sounds were now flying past as they travelled back and forth, giving the sound a grander scope but sacrificing the sense of depth from behind us because of it.

One bad thing about this session was that I really did not like the John Chowning track, the dissonance was nauseating and the textures banal and unappealing, so it made this session far more difficult than I would have liked it to have been, listening to a 12 minute or so piece that I very much was not enjoying gave me a headache after a while, factoring in it being blasted from 4 speakers and it felt a little cruel. It does bring into mind thought the possibilities of hightened physical response to this kind of thing when it is more present in the room than just stereo, with my response I’m very sure being mostly because of the ugly discordant sound completely filling the space. I guess this could be something to use for my advantage but rarely ever would I want to create something like this, if I am making something Noise oriented I would want it to be ecstatic not annoying.

I still haven’t thought much of what I want the concept for my piece to be, a lot of my personal practice at the moment has been further exploration of Noise cultures across the world as well as learning about English Folk Music, I think it would be nice to keep this piece seperate from my own personal projects but at the same time these things are kind of all absorbing, and will most likely weave their way into whatever I’m making regardless. It is something to keep in mind but it feels like by now I should make a start, especially because I had such strong feelings about the Chowning track.

The session this week was focused on setting up an already existing multichannel work within the M108 space, learning how the patch bay works and how the speakers correlate to eachother, how we can send sound across each in Ableton and ect. This more practical look at engaging with the medium and finding out how it functions and where it falls short (the letup in Logic was barely functional it seemed) allows for me to think about constructing something that utilises the medium to a full enough potential without being too overambitious. Especially because I don’t have a copy of Ableton myself where a lot of these plugins for multichannel seem to be tailored to, and I am still kind of stuck with the old version of FL Studio I’ve had forever, most of the work I can see myself doing will I guess be creating things to later spacialise when it feels ready.

In this session we were also asked to diagram a kind of setup we could imagine composing for, which I found particularly difficult to engage with without much of an idea of what I would like my piece to be in any way. I think I ended up just writing Speaker somewhere on the page before losing focus, and I think for this reason I’m going to stick to the octo ring speaker setup that is already provided.

As for more inspiration as to what my piece could be, I remembered that one of the first gigs I got to see last year at Cafe Oto was a Multichannel performance by John Wall with less speakers thatn we have available, but had him sitting at the back of the room on a laptop throwing sound around the room with a kind of gleeful belligererance that had such massive power that it was amusing when the set ended with the sound playing quietly back through the laptop speakers. That kind of approach though of using every single thing immediately available to send sound to, and the kind of erratic strobing he was creating would be a good medium to explore with this setup, with something like glitch, microsound, or cut up noise if I am to be a little more self indulgent. These things are still in their infancy ideas wise, but it is helpful to start thinking about how these ideas that we are learning about can be applied ourselves.

This first class was a general introduction to the module and what we are expected to produce by the end of it, and with my understanding of multichannel works being very small there was a general excitement about a new way of working with sound as a means of consuming and creating. The class was focused on compositional differences between multichannel and working for stereo, giving examples of songs with interesting stereo fields and creating a baseline to start thinking about how speaker systems can create interactions between the speakers, how sound is percieved and how to compose based on less traditional “musical” elements and think more to do with spectrum and movement of sound. Something I found particularly interesting that was brought up was the idea of Diffusion based composition, where the “performance” element of the piece is splitting and unionising the sound within the stereo field (which would also be possible with more speakers, but stereo is the example we were given).

My immediate ideas during this class was regarding the Phil Niblock tribute I saw last year in Goldsmiths, where the multichannel setup was used as a means of compeltely maximizing the sound, which made walking within the space noticably transform the sound as the harmonics would change depending on where you stood, and creating this aural sweet spot around the center of the circle where the sound was unbelievably rich in scope. I was thinking a similar maximalist approach would suit the sounds I usually enjoy but multichannel feels as if there is more possibilities I might miss out on then, such as stark gaps in space, extreme differences in sound (pitch, timbre, ect), experimenting with replicating real world space with emulation of distance, experimenting with perception based on distance to speakers and achieving a “sweet spot”, there’s kind of too much possible to kind of just do loud monolithic loud sounds and sit in the middle. Will take further sessions to figure out what I would like to do with my piece.

This week we went back over the critereas for this project and went through some some of the crit for people who weren’t able to play last session. I particularly liked Vic’s track based on 8 recordings of a snare composition that she said she was suprised the didn’t have the technical ability to play anymore, because she couldnt get the octo ring setup working the snare channels all blended into this huge stampede of sound, I found it quite an exciting accident.

As for my own progress, I tried again to get the quad setup working to no avail, I am guessing there is something wrong with the setup or maybe I’m just doing something horribly wrong. Something I did change though is I found a sample that I think was the missing piece holding everything together, I rewatched the ITV documentary “The Man With The 7 Second Memory”, which is about Clive Wearing who’s memory span was reduced to 7-30 seconds, meaning that he was constantly restarting, waking up after every 20 seconds or so.

I am sampling a collection of voicemails that he left Deborah (his wife) of mostly his overwhelming excitement that he wants to see her again, which because of his amnesia would not be very far apart. My intention with using this sample is to get across a kind of infinite divine love even while immobile, or as Clive says, dead.

(Interviewer) “Is it very hard?” , (Clive) “No. It’s exactly the same as being dead, which is not difficult, is it? To be dead is easy. You don’t do anything at all. You can’t do anything, when you are dead. It’s been the same. Exactly.”

I made the decision to remove the clarity from the Kath Bloom sample using EQ and Reverb to reduce is to just a soft hum, mostly because I felt like the lyrics were most likely in bad taste when paired with the Clive sample, which I want to avoid being. There is a fine line between exploitation and tribute/dedication, and I want to be careful that I’m not accidentally being insensitive or doing anything that could be misconstrued as cruel. Ethics are a difficult thing to navigate if you want to include real world samples, especially real world injustices or cruelty, and I find a lot of media (particularly Documentary or News media (I don’t find this to be a very controversial opinion)) because of the monetary insentive and disgraceful need to make a spectacle of these topics. I feel like that is a digression though, even though the sample is buried I think it gets across the feeling that I want to get across when it pokes through, I really like the title Deborah used for her book about him, Forever Today. Anyway I find his story beautiful and I have been having mental warfare trying to gauge if the incusion is disrespectful in any way and have asked a few friends and have been told to stop worrying, so I hope it comes across well enough, I feel the need to be careful with these things.

I booked out the composition studio as a means of finally getting to spatialise my track, the setup is 7.1, which means 7 speakers surround and 1 sub, so I can approximate what can be used for the 8 speaker circle this way using Logic’s surround panner. I went through the ideas I have had when making the sounds as well as finding new ways to organise things in practice, Logic is very well suited for this I feel, and I am already comfortable with the interface after using it in 6th Form Music Production classes, so it was not much of a learning curve after setting up the speakers and the surround panner mode, can easily send different channels to different channels and automate them. I found that I didn’t really want much movement between speakers with the sounds, I like the seperation where welcome. A main change I made was with the vocoded morph channel, I used the GRM SpaceGrain which was mentioned by Gareth prior, so automate the track into gradually becoming far noisier while being thrown around all speakers in all directions toward the end, which is quite a nice climax I think. I exported each note of the Henry Flynt sample seperately in FL Studio as well so I could hard pan each, so that they create a kind of swarm around the listener, as well as adding a fade in for each note to make up for the lack of an envelope on the Fruity Granulizer.

A stereo version (before putting it into Logic, which when I bounce to stereo now misses out a lot of sounds (and the new use of the Kath Bloom sample so it’s kind of a mess…)

I’m very happy with this piece at the moment, I think it gets across a lot of ideas I care about, an equal balance of ecstatic love and melancholy with a mix of tape warmth flutters, hums and shimmers, so I guess aesthetically it hits every single mark that I am trying to achieve with my music at the moment whilst being within a new medium. I also got to include a piece of a documentary that has not left my mind since I’ve seen it a few years ago, so I guess I get to excercise the fear a little and maybe share that experience with others.

This week was the crit, I hadn’t realised it until I got to the classroom so I was very unprepared sadly, but it wouldn’t have made much difference anyway because the setup that was being used for the speaker system was using only a USB-C, which my laptop doesnt support, so after unsuccesfully trying to find a workaround I had to play it out of my laptop speaker, which didn’t really get across much of anything. The level of critique I got was that Patrick liked the tonality, which I appreciated because I couldn’t really get much to play properly so anything at all was nice. Anyway, something I noticed with other people’s works that I think might have been lacking with my own is a sense of concept, creating something based on personal research and being able to articulate that meaning in a concise manner. I particularly was fond of Mouse’s field recording of where they know that they will be buried, and presenting the recordings without any kind of manipulation as a way of honouring the land, makes me think about field recording practices more, being at peace with ideas of dying, notions of purity, ect, it conveys so much because of the context that the land carries with it…

I don’t think my piece is devoid of meaning, I like to think that everything I make is maybe overly personal, it is all personal aesthetics after all, this one in particular is a kind of ecstatic desperate melancholy I’m still working out how to articulate into something outside of just the sound, it makes sense to me but I just need to get it onto a page so it makes sense to other people.

Anyway, this week I decided I would simplify the piece to being 4 speakers, as I doubt I will ever have the opportunity to use the octo-ring for long enough with how things are going right now, and a lot of the rooms on campus have quad speaker setups anyway. I tried it in the main Mac room though and couldn’t get the quad working whatsoever, so I guess next week I will have to try again. I did make more changes to the track though in that session, as well as got some feedback from Milano in the first year that I should try to make more of a balance with the wetness levels, and there becomes a point where the sounds become indestinct and chaotic, but I’m not sure if this is a fault of it being stereo while being made with more speakers in mind. Worth keeping in mind though I would think.

I also noticed for myself that the chord change genuinely sounds really bad and jarring, so I made the decision of reducing its presence, stretching the first two notes only and looping that so it still adds to a development of the track but it less horribly jarring. I also tried to make the ending a bit more coherent, the Morphed violin tracks now get desynced towards the end as the vocoded one gets overly distorted, the other one gets low passed. The main violin starts to strip itself down and the piano leaves way for the resonator tracks, it is a sudden stop but I wouldn’t want it any other way, feels the best this way I think, not over dramatic and phony, just a soft dying out. I also trimmed it to exactly 5 minutes as per the brief, as I have been marked down for overindulging before. I am quite happy with it in this state to he honest, but I still think a spoken sample would greatly benefit the track, other than that I just need to spatialise it (without overdoing it really) and do the writeup for next week, quite happy.

This week’s session was concerned with alternative setups for Multichannel, particularly making us think about what we are composing for and how it should influence our composition choices, reminding us to be mindful of how we treat the medium when creating for it and how to use it to our best advantage. A lot of the session though was more running through ideas already discussed as well as talking through Gareth’s own tree based composition as a means of inspiration for ourselves, as it showcased a minimal live approach whilst still being compositionally and texturally rich.

I started to add more to my piece than the draft I showed last week, thinking about what is missing from my track compositionally and spatially, while still not being able to book a slot to spatialise my piece because of my current work situation meaning in only in London for 2 full days a week, the spatial ideas are still just concepts rather than reality which I am finding kind of irritating. Something I noticed is that the track kind of gets into a meditative stagnant state that I feel like might need some kind of revising to suit more general appeal, so I put the violin sample through the plugdata plugin Morph, which I have been using a lot for a really excessive psychedelic pitch shift effect on a lot of things I’m making at the moment (mostly for Nightcore purposes), which fades in toward the end.

I also added a variant of this with a vocoder on so that there is some more depth for the stereo pair, I am thinking of having them desync at some point in some way but it isn’t so much a solid idea.

I also have been thinking of adding a chord change at the end for a more impactful cathartic ending, I always think that the start and the end of a track are the most important points, and at the moment the ending is lacking quite heavily. Even with this, I am a bit unsure it even works and might end up trying to find something else to satisfy reaching a similar effect, but at the moment I think it works. The loop itself is another section of Piano Music by Simon Jeffes, and I just really like the loop, too much to not use it for something really.

I tweaked the track a little more, but it still doesn’t really feel finished, I think I need some kind of spoken word sample to hold this together, I really enjoy the harsh reality kind of sampling employed by certain noise groups, drone groups, tape obsessives, ect, feels like brute forcing a reaction which is a lot of what I find appealing anyway.

Here is the draft for this week’s iteration;

This week there was intended to be a tutorial with Gareth, but had to work on the day and could not really justify missing any when things had been so rough this year financially. In my own time though, I continued forward with my track, adding some extra sounds that I would invision in a multichannel iteration of this piece, creating iterations of the Piano loop within VCV rack, mostly using the Supercell plugin to apply Granular effects mixed with feedbacks. I also added some Resonators to add more sustain drones from the Piano sample that I would imagine coming from behind, left and right speakers. A main Supercell channel was added that has a warm, pretty kind of percussive quality, kind of steel drum adjacent sound that I think elevates the piece from more of a pure melancholic dirge piece to more of a pastoral beauty, which is something I’m more interested in conveying than something more of a full on “Sad” track, I find that stuff quite corny.

For the first resonator track the sound is far softer than most other sound – the overdriven violin sound for example, so extra compression will be needed to have it stick out in the mix but the sound is quite beautiful I think so I don’t want to overdo it as to distort the characteristics, just enough for it to be heard.

The second resonator track is also very subtle but more bassy so it will most likely stick out more in the mix, the swells formed from the resonators I always love but I like how this sits next to the clean piano sound, sounds like they are part of the same as they start to desync as the loop lengths are disconnected, very happy I am able to excersise these techniques I’ve been using for drone ambient in a more Song-like format.

After putting all these elements together I started to structure everything, it has the usual Quiet -> Loud structure I seem to always gravitate to, I guess its a connection to the kind of Post-Rock associated music I grew up listening to that it always feels like things should go from small to large. I am straying away from Noise here though I think, I’m trying to expand on past projects and connect the dots between the ecstatic beauty and the sombre without any clumsiness or phoniness, I guess trying to convey my my aesthetic ideals in their purest form, which of course is probably impossible but it is worth making an effort.

Anyway the first draft is here;

Another session based around practical application of plugins within the octo ring speaker setup, demonstrating how you can create effect through dispersing sound between the speakers frugly, leaving space to fill over time as a means of Diffusion based composition, and exploring how sound can travel between speakers using Ableton surround panning. A lot of this session though was a lot of dead air with files exporting and whatnot, so I started to expand on what I had laid down last week by adding a string part to the loop.

First, I don’t think MIDI synth sounds would suit the kind of piece I want to create as they will either occupt a space thats too grandiose or too corny/thin (I’m sure there might be some plugins somewhere that might do what I am after but right now I am unaware), and I have recently moved a majority of my music gear back to Liverpool (including the guitar and violin that I would usually use for something like this) for a gig so I couldn’t record any material myself. After trying a Serum patch and finding it horribly unsuitable I decided to take a small clip from Henry Flynt’s album Ascent to the Sun, which I had been intending to do for a while because it is all violin, no backing unlike it’s sister album You Are My Everlovin, so it’s great for taking a small snippet of and putting into the built in Fruity Granulizer.

The mood kind of completely changed after this addition, which I think is a positive thing. I’m not so knowledgable about music theory related things but the key that is playing now with the Piano and Violin samples is a very strange, difficult to work with key it seems, but ultimately rewarding because of its melancholic yet pastoral bliss. The Granulizer also spreads the grains throughout the stereo space, so I can maybe isolate this drone to two speakers, maybe the front left and right with the Piano playing from the middle/behind? I started adding to the chord so that there is more a sense of progression to the piece as a frame work, the high notes get added over time, as well as adding a variation to the piano loop later on in the track. I’m thinking about adding a spoken word sample maybe to be isolated to one speaker, at the front maybe, I think that would be an interesting sensation if the Kath Bloom sample is playing from a speaker behind and something spoken is coming from the front, or vice versa, I’m not sure.

Things have been too hectic at the moment to book out the Zoom recorder so do multichannel field recordings, so I’ve decided to just do without entirely and just stick to the Laptop sounds, which I guess is a shame but at the same time art is nothing without compromise I guess.

This week’s session I will be honest, I was not so engaged with. It was mostly to do with plugins that can be used to automate spatial panning effects around the octo ring speaker setup, as well as plugins that can emulate height through headphones. The only thing is that we were shown some of the headphone oriented plugins last year and I didn’t find any of them particularly convincing or helpful, so I tried to go of on my own a little and think about my own piece in this session so that I have a basis to start working at.

My current situation with work means that of a weekend I am on a 4-ish hour train to Liverpool on a Thursday and the same back on the Monday, meaning I have plenty of time to start making music on my Laptop but not so much time to try and put it on the octo ring. I still have not got a copy of Ableton as well which doesn’t help, as the version of FL Studio that I’m using doesnt seem to have much use with multichannel works, so it is important that I still keep the spatial element in mind while creating on headphones and kind of of work more theoretically I guess, making sounds with intent.

Something particularly on my mind at the moment is the use of loops, it is something I have been very interested in with my own practices across all genres I have tried, I enjoy things that are endless, expansive or monotonous, so my first idea was to create something that maybe disperses variations of the same loop between the speakers to create a psychedelic cluttered strobing effect, but at the moment that is just a thought.

A lot of works that inspire my use of loops are usually focused with monotony, mostly the works of Celer who creates ambient music through tape loops of sampled music and synthesiser tones, and whose work rarely ever feels the need to go anywhere. The practice is not unique to Celer of course, but I feel his music has more power than others I’ve heard, his music in particular feels like an extension of what I wrote my essay about last year with Harsh Noise Wall and stagnant sound in general being a purification of a musical genre, like a chorus being looped indefinitely as a means of creating an Ultimate version of a music.

Because of this loop fixation that I’m currently riding on, I went searching through my audio library to find something I can sample that would suit the endless loop treatment. Something I have found is that the choice of sample is extremely important as a means of putting my track within a lineage with others, as the track that you are sampling has its own history, own space ect, so it is important to aknowledge the space that you are occupying when using a sample. I chose to sample the song Piano Music from Simon Jeffes’s album of the same name, as his music had a massive effect on me growing up as well as having more commercial connotations with the Penguin Cafe Orchestra (which he was the leading member of) being overused in TV Advertisements while he was alive, which I find quite amusing when recontextualising something like this to be bringing things in from completely different contexts that they are being used in.

I applied some compression and tape effects to get this more aged slowed down loop of a small phrase, which I find loops well and will be fun to work with in future sessions and try and extract as much as possible from the loop.

I also used a tool mentioned in one of the guest lectures last year, an AI Vocal Remover tool called vocalremover.org, which seperates the accapella track of any song to quite a scary degree of success. I am using this tool to extract Kath Bloom’s vocals on the song When I See You , which is one of my favourite songs but Loren Connor’s wailing guitar bends would get in the way of anything else in the track if not removed, so I felt like this would be an apt track to experiment with this tool using.

I guess the ethics of using AI at all is very ugly at the moment with its use in replacing the artist entirely in many cases, but I find this tool to be the opposite, and opens a lot more space for creative sampling when accapellas can be aquirred of any song. I pitch shifted the track down quite dramatically as well as applied some tape effects, convolution reverb and compression so that it has a dirtier sound further detatched from the original song. So far I’m liking the direction of things, but it’s a bit difficult to prioritise classwork at the moment when finding a job in London should be the main priority. Will see how things fare in the next couple of weeks.

This week’s session was focused on using multidirectional field recording equipment, splitting ourselves into two groups to use the Zoom F8 with a multidirectional microphone to go record spaces around campus. Our group went to the park by Elephant and Castle, standing in the middle of park water sprinkers as well as me sitting in a bush with the microphone while others rustled the leaves around me.

We could not get the files working after recording sadly but the experience itself was very different to usual field recording practices, less pointing a microphone to record something particular but more capturing the entire space, which I found particularly exciting as a new kind of practice. The park playground was very busy so I couldnt do it really today, but I was thinking about trying recording things on the playground roundabout to create a bizarre spinning effect, maybe putting speakers around it, but it is just a thought. I haven’t started working on anything at the moment so I’m not sure if that effect would even fit, and I’m not sure if there will be much time for much practical experimentation, most of my time is spent on the train right now so I can’t do a lot of recording, so my track will probably just be a result of sounds I made earlier or samples or something that I can make on my laptop.

I think I might try and book the Zoom H3 VR for next week and see if I can do anything myself when I have the time, will see how things go, there is a lot going on in my own life right now that is preventing me from prioritising University work so I need to try and stop myself from falling behind.