This week was another session with Salome, we were asked to bring in a sound and a quote in last week’s session and I brought in a piece related to the accent removal AI Sanas.AI which was mentioned in a previous guest lecture, taking a quote from their product description as my selected quote. The sound I chose was simply just the minute long showcase of what the product can do, I found the video really unsettling thinking about homogeneity being imposed to serve a capitalist function, with this service being used to mask accents on call centers, quite disgusting and infuriating.
I was paired up with Cameron, who had a quote related to AI leading to a dystopian future, so it felt a good fit. His chosen sound was actually an Ableton instrument he had built over the weekend that made quite exciting hyper digital noise, so when asked to assemble our audio paper on the spot it kind of came together without much issue.
The result we got was quite satisfying, leaning into the AI dystopian aesthetic quite heavily with the use of an AI narrator and a very digital approach to sound design, as well as using some AI generated music as backing, which we put through further effectors. The main advice we got back was to be more analytical with the quotes rather than just presenting them which I will take on board, the purpose of an academic work should be primarily inquisitive after all, not passive. This is something I might struggle with though, I usually rely a little too heavily on simply presenting ideas without inquiring too much because I find that engaging.
This week’s audio paper listening;
Something about this was incredibly unengaging, I can’t quite put my finger on it, I had to stop it early because my notes were empty, nothing he said really interested me even though I am very much interested in improvisational music and use of laptop in live settings, doesn’t feel like he’s saying much rather than just describing how he performs in a way that feels near completely redundant.
This one stuck out to me because of the gorgeous cover image, as well as the karaoke theme, which is something my friend in Pakistan has always loved and made a theme of his work, so I think maybe I have inhereted that fascination by proxy. The paper itself though I was quite dissapointed by, the production especially kind of negates any kind of love put into the research and the tonality of the narration is so dull it is difficult to pay attention. There is a particular moment I found kind of amusing, the male narrator starts listing off the most used words in pop songs per decade, but applies a reverb effect that nearly completely masks what he is saying, which I don’t think intended at all because he goes on for a couple minutes this way. Beyond the delivery and awful production there is really annoying “stock” sounding music playing throughout nearly the entire thing which might be my least favourite utilisation of the audio paper format I have heard so far, I guess after finishing it, it is most likely a joke about the pop song “earworm” idea, but in practice it just makes me want to stop listening.
I did enjoy some of the ideas presented though, the karaoke box as a modern communual singing space akin to rural folk music circles but in a modern “globalised capitalist hyper technological society”, which I guess links back to the one I listened to last week. I also like calling a karaoke box a kind of archive of pop music of all decades, I always get that kind of feeling when using these or a Jukebox that they are made to just add songs to rather than modernise in any way, like piling up the new hits instead of substituting any for others, I guess as a means of mass appeal to all age demographics. The song they played at the end was quite amusing, I liked the obvious copy-paste job of the chorus, made me smile.
As for thinking about my own paper, I am thinking about exploring something related to loops, I kind of just remembered the locked groove related essay from a couple weeks ago and found that I could probably discuss that medium in a different way, as he was coming at it from clearly a more techno-head angle, and I am more concerned with noise and ambient musics. The only issue is loops are such a broad topic that I don’t know what really to fixate on within the medium, it is possible to create something by drawing as much from the medium itself but in 10 minutes only so much can really be accomplished I feel.
Because of this kind of sudden inspiration though, I decided to look through Google Scholar to see if there is any writing related to anything I’m already passionate about, and sure enough I found an excerpt from a book called Ambient Drone and Apocalype, with a section being devoted to an artist who I am myself completely obsessed with, that being Celer. The author of this section Joanna Demers writes in a way that articulated my thoughts on the work better than I feel I ever could really.
- “This is not just a touristic celebration of beautiful sounds. This is the moment when one’s toes clench the precipice shortly before jumping.”
- “I now look to the end, but while searching for moments of joy that stop time altogether. The music of Celer intimates what such happiness might feel like.”
- “It sounds like what it is to watch the moon set over the ocean at night, or to see one’s beloved enter the room after a long absence.”
- “Their duration does not matter, for this music has bestowed on me a happiness that no one, not even someone blessed with contented old age, has experienced.”
It is not all just appraisal of the work though, it is connecting the music to Aristotle’s eudamonia idea of true happiness only being achievable at the end of a life well lived and the satisfaction that would bring. Not mentioned specifically however is the looping nature of the music, but a couple parts I can draw the effect being written about being a result of, being the stopping of time, the durationlessness, the prolonging of the moment. I don’t really just want to write about Celer in terms of what everyone usually does, “this is like this because it is related to grief” or the likes, it is not just depressive, it is prolonged states of bliss as well, it depends on the perspective.