Jack Palmer : Sound Studies and Aural cultures

From Milo’s class (which I unfortunately missed some of) I was able to have a deeper introduction to the course’s themes and the overall concept of the audio paper, as before I had just assumed it was something akin to bargain bin nature records with a narrator serving to describe the sounds and the environment they inhabit before playing each recording; not that that is entirely wrong mind you, but I am realising it can be more than that. During the session, the ideas that stuck out to me the most from memory were thinking about “What genre hides and what it articulates” as Milo put it, genre as language and guidelines and what it means for it to “hide” something, maybe regarding genre purity restricting personal expression. Milo stuck to a point regarding explanations of Ontology (being) and Epistemology (knowing) regarding art and academia, explaining the two as “let’s bring something into the world” and “lets articulate/understand it” which an audio paper embodies both of in how it is structured and assembled.

After the session, I read the Audio Papers Manifesto from the seismograph site, which outlines the features and beneficiary factors of the Audio Paper format with 8 main points;

1. The audio paper affords performative aesthetics.
2. The audio paper is idiosyncratic.
3. The audio paper is and partial.
4. The audio paper renders affects and sensations.
5. The audio paper is multifocal; it asssmbles miscellaneous and often heterogeneous voices.
6. The audio paper has multiple protagonists, narrators and material agencies.
7. The audio paper brings aesthetics and technologies together in mediation.
8. The audio paper is a part of larger ecologies.

Something that seems to reoccur a lot in this piece is the form’s self refferencial possibilities, with our proposed sound piece in particular being “sound about sound” making it more clear. A lot of the points regarding making an academic piece into something performative particularly appealed to me, as I feel sometimes with academic work I struggle to focus because of the kind of inhuman characteristics of the more “pure” language by making the narrator present as a spoken entity (I was also using a text to speech program while reading this manifesto which should also get across what kind of medium appeals to me). The performance of the words also carry more emotional resonance with the listener as a key aspect of langauge is how it is delivered, which will create its own kind of feelings and sensations when spoken.

Another appealing factor other than having the information spoken is that it is mentioned that the medium allows for the environment and other non language based sounds can take a key role in the presentation and get across more complex ideas, conveying the intended emotions through pure sound, allowing for a kind of expanded academic medium bordering artistry and academia. As well as this, it is made explicit that the Audio Paper format should remain a loose term and should be flexible to any changes that feel appropriate by the artist, which I find quite an exciting proposition for a manifesto of an art form to have a sense of openness.

This manifesto got me more excited to start working on this piece as I was prior, as it leaves more openness to what I can achieve within the genre confines, but at the moment I am still unsure what I could base my piece on as a topic, nothing is springing to mind other than maybe certain music scenes I like but that wouldn’t be really taking as much free reign of the medium as I feel like I should do.

This was my first choice when looking for an example of an audio paper on the seismograf website, and I must say my initial reaction was a strong cringe to the amplified snorting sounds, which gave me a false impression for the first couple minutes that this was a maybe purposefully obtuse sound work I would get nothing out of, but over time it unwravelled itself as more multi layered than I thought, drawing on ideas of recorded sound’s uncertainty and nature. The idea of microphones being prothetic ears (which has been reoccuring in lectures already mind you) was focused on, creating a kind of landscape through elongated breaths, as well as using environmental recordings with german speaking to highlight differences in perception of sound through experience (perhaps, it is not made so explicit) in a way that makes it very abuntantly clear, as my first reaction was confusion but overtime I felt like I was starting to understand. I guess the entire point is that it is impossible to have others hear in the same way that I would as a recorder, highlighting the individuality and indefinite nature of a supposedly objective medium. I would need to give it another listen to pry any deeper, which I might be doing soon mind you, these things feel like they stick in your mind long after the fact…

Milo’s class this week was clarifying more to do with the hand-in regarding what we are expected to have done as well as what an audio paper can take form as, and some of us showed off the work we were prompted to make last week as a “Reading Aloud” practice, as well as discussed the Audio Papers that we went off and heard on our own.

Recommended to hear by classmates were “THE SECOND SOUND OF INTEGRITY”, which was mentioned by Tal. I have now just listened to it and was very much left quite dissapointed, from just listening to it I got out of it basically nothing more than thoughts about the etymology of the word Integrity, and connections with this idea of Integrity as Wholeness to Black communities/charities. Only after reading the writeup I started to get it being intentionally vague as per the belief that “Formlessness is an anticolonial strategy, a method of solidarity.” I appreciate the sentiment and diversion from the typical format of an audio paper but I found that it just flat out didn’t work, the synth music that was playing was incredibly annoying as well and the audio effects sounded quite ridiculous, doesn’t say anything on it’s own and needs the writeup to tell you anything at all, I’d say that’s a failure. There were a couple ideas I liked though “Is integrity enough?” , “What has integrity done for you?”. Both questions are not answered clearly (intentionally I’d assume), and after listening a second time I didn’t get much more out of it.

Jez recommended “TO WHOM IT MAY SPEAK”, which I found to have a much better use of the medium and to be a much more impactful experience. The idea is to use the audio paper as a way to unify Ukrainian voices, some moments before death and others closer to the narrator, friends and family speaking and recording the space. A large part of it is the phrase “Slava Ukraini” being an assurance of Ukraine’s being, and with Russian soldiers seeking to remove the phrase from being by killing anyone who speaks it, using clips of real deaths with the phrase spoken. It also gets into how their language and music is being targetted, the danger of speaking, and the unifying properties of sound, how when sound is spoken it puts a person into a state of appearance, and the sound becomes a part of the whole. I got most out of it that sound can be rebellion, and it doesn’t have to be in any kind of drastic way, the narrator multiplies the Ukrainian voices and dulpicates her own voice to get across the unity sound has as a plea for help. I found it very beautiful and eloquent, and is something that I don’t think could be articulated in any other medium as the topic is particular to sound itself, and descriptions will not do justice what she is getting across.

Something Kit mentioned as a key factor of an audio paper is having a premise that starts vague and gradually unwravells, which I have found the examples that I have heard so far all do well or attempt to do, and I don’t think this is so much a hard set rule moreso a structure that works to engage the listener the most, and is something to take on board when creating my own. Vic showed off something she’d made which I found very beautiful, refracting her own voice “like you’d refract a prism” using ableton effects and stacking the layers until it was a colourful mess, quite beautiful.

As for my own work, I still haven’t really formulated a solid idea, I have ideas about writing something focused on genres I already like, Harsh Noise Wall, Drone Ambient and the like, but it might be more fun to engage with something new, or maybe abstract one of my interests down into something more interesting to engage with than a kind of “history of” kind of essay…

I found this audio paper about something I am quite enthusiastic about, and was hoping to mostly just have certain records from my own personal canon mentioned to get excited over to be honest but I got something different. Mike Callander discussed Pierre Schaefer’s discovery of closed grooves and quite beautiful description of the action as “the phonograph needle doubles back in the groove, it causes us to hear an object that does not evolve, that congeals within time,” “A sound fragment that has neither a beginning or end, a slither of sound isolated from any temporal context, a clean edged time crystal made of time that now belongs in no time.” The treatment of a loop in such romantic terms makes me reflect on the noise loop music I enjoy, that kind of freezing a state of entropy in time that GX Jupiterr Larsen focuses his work on (as a way to measure the Polywave as he calls it, the distance between nothing and something, which is an absurdist idea but strangely applicable to his work).

“Chris Cutler likens a loop to the walking dead, captured and fixed, he describes a loop as an artefact rather than an action.” Chris Cutler is used in the essay as a kind of counter to Mike and Schafer’s excitement about the looping excitement, with Chris referring to the “deadness” of a locked groove compared to a tape loop or digital loop ect, because of the fixed amount of time set the loops are more irritating than a longer loop that can have more emotional weight. I kind of get what he means but Mike says his workaround is by having multiple turntables to create a gradually desyncronising experience extending the loop outside of the second long barrier (also mentioned is that Mike is a techno DJ and really enjoys the small loops).

Mike also talks particularly about the vinyl medium and brings up a point I’ve never heard before by using the record Ghost Hemiola by Stefan Goldman, which is a double LP of empty locked grooves (which I feel like I need to get a hold of myself for my ASMR wall noise material), and he uses it to show how the needle amplifies the sound around the turntable, tapping the edge of the table and breathing into it. He argues this translates in a live setting which makes DJing with wax superior in some way, as it creates a kind of positivity feedback loop where the vibrations from the crowd are being played back into the audience under the music. Very interesting idea.

Generally really enjoyed thinking about loops a lot more because it is a massive part of my practice and what I listen to, made me think more about what it actually is that I’m doing and what others do, particualarly thinking about The Haters as a mode of freezing a state of erosion to create a kind of forever eroding object, and maybe Celer and other loop based ambient music as a method of freezing a point in time, fixing a memory into sound. A quote was used from Brian Eno that I found quite poignant, “almost any arbitrary collision of events listened to enough times comes to seem very meaningful”, I start to think about the ideas of audio shelter brought on by Noise Wall and generally by monotonous musics, an encouraged mode of relistening to albums you own if you didn’t enjoy the first time and how things are typically not made to immediately click, or why things don’t immediately click. I don’t know, I think this might be something fun to explore for the paper.

This week’s session with Salome changed the outlook I had on what an Audio Paper can be quite drastically, with Milo’s teaching being clearly from an artist’s perspective and concerned with how the format can be experimented with in order to be the most satisfying creatively, Salome’s teaching is that of a more purely academic standpoint of working within stricter confines and not approaching the paper from an artistic standpoint. In my notes I took down some ideas I found interesting;

• Art is ambiguity, it doesn’t want to not mean, it wants to find meaning in the audience participation.
• Ambiguity is not anything goes, it is very careful and orchestrated plural conclusions.
• You are composing an audio paper with artistic skills and competency but it is separate to art because you yourself are asking the questions rather than creating them for the audience.
• A scholarly form is presenting, discussing and engaging with a researched topic.

I haven’t heard a seperation between academic and artistic forms worded so eloquently before, and has started to kind of complicate things further in terms of what I want to base my own work on, as I didn’t even have an idea before so now it feels like even more needs to be taken into account than I originally thought. I am thinking it should be related to something I am doing or something I am listening to, I am listening to stupid amounts of music every day and before University I was making stupid amounts of music every day, I guess figuring out something related to my interests that I can dig further into to accomidate for me not really having so much time to research something so extensively because of my current work situation not giving me so much free time. I don’t really want to just do more work on noise though, there’s other things I like that help keep me grounded.

An audio paper about finnish folk music is right up my alley, this being particular to a style called “laments” which is traditionally for solo voice, but in this paper they discuss that these songs have been adapted to include more instrumentation overtime. The style is typically Karalean and has songs passed down through lament circles apparently, which the songs serve to be “inter therapeutic self expression”. Modern performers of the style Viliina and Emmi discuss the themes of the laments, being that of sorrow and grief, but with “behind the grief, there is love and happy memories, sorrow comes from being apart from loved ones.” A main theme for the singers as well is that laments are not just performing the music, it is performing the emotion attached, and not always are they in the headspace to convey genuine sadness so it is mostly something trained to perform.

“I noticed I can’t force myself to tears”, “I imitate the feeling of actual crying by wrinkling my face, I also change my breathing and the lament might make me feel breathless.” Performative sadness is a kind of amusing way to frame any kind of practice but can be applied to so many, but this style seems more intense than most, apparently feeding a lot of the emotion from the audience interaction. If an audience member is brought to tears, it is easier to perform, so there is a kind of oroborous relationship in this way, or a kind of feedback loop being strived to initiate with the performance.

I tried looking for some solo voice based laments for reference outside of this audio paper and one short documentary, and came across this version of one with such gorgeous strings I couldn’t help but add it here. I very much liked the “lamenter circles” idea, that there have been (and apparently still are) groups dedicated to a pure kind of vocal performance that serves as an emotional outlet in such a visceral way for both audience and performer, it makes me think of modern examples of this devotional, confessional music practice, with Ambient being an immediate thought to maybe relate this to.

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.

This week’s session was mostly spent watching the film Bleep, which was about the history of game audio. I found some of it interesting regarding working within extreme limitations, but a lot of it was people saying the same thing over and over in different languages which kind of made my interest falter a bit. In this session though we did go through everyone’s concepts and where everyone was up to, and it made me come to the realisation that I am way further behind than I would like to be, because I still didn’t really have a concept nevermind having started working on anything particular. While the movie was playing, I started to read interviews with Will Long from Celer, doubling down on him being the focus of my paper in a way.

Celer

• “It seems to me that the most important thing to learn is that nothing ever changes.”
• “Eventual Needs is about realizing how much you need someone after they’re already gone”
• “Melancholy, memories, the passing of time… Would you say that are these the keywords and the interpretative keys of this release?” “Celer: And every release… or life, in general, to put it more simply.”

I don’t want to conduct any interviews myself, I guess this makes it more difficult because it would mean I would have to read the quotes myself and make it clear in some way it is a quote but, I am not that kind of person that could conduct an interesting interview I feel, the questions would run out quite quickly. I guess I am not so much as interested with what people have to say about their work, moreso with what is gotten out of it, I find these personal connections more poignant and interesting than completely factual facets of life. But I like Will’s work a lot because of the interconnection between his personal life and work, it feels like his music is like a kind of public diary to share however he’s feeling, wherever he is.

I can personally inquire into that idea myself with the paper in this way, I feel like the loop format of his work has an interesting interaction with this diary format, the endless repetition of his work being a kind of preservation of the time that the work is based upon. I can inquire into this relation created by loops with archiving of time and space in this way through the use of Celer’s music, might be interesting to over-extract from his music and would make the hundreds of hours I’ve spent with it feel justified outside of pure enjoyment.

I started to write down some ideas freehand without reference or purpose, just getting down some ideas to serve as a base point. A lot of it was a little vague and some was a little unpalletable, but some ideas work more than others;

“Audio loops serve as a medium to fix a sound in time, suspended mid air only to repeat indefinitely, of course the degrading loop serves an interesting function to convey real time death of something, but the fixed, true loop conveys the same moment in time over and over again, the time it was made, the thoughts and feelings happening at the time of making it, the time, the place. The indefinite loop extends beyond when the CD runs out, when the file ends, the recording is a document of the loop, the loop is ephemeral happening somewhere elsewhere after it has been stopped. If suspended long enough, it’s like I was never there in the first place, I change while it doesn’t, attention wanders elsewhere.”

The session this week was very engaging, related to histories of “world music” which is a term I have always found quite funny, but played various musics from various different parts of the world that I found very enjoyable, especially an english piece that I couldn’t get the name of featuring a small pipe instrument that created a constant gorgeous drone throughout the track. The reoccuring of this idea in folk musics to have a constant running drone throughout the track is something I found very interesting how it spanned across cultures, something to research myself possibly and styles of music I should indulge more in.

Anyway, outside of class I have been writing down any kind of thoughts related to the loop topic and assembling that into a longform essay, I haven’t had the time to record any of it yet and every time I read over it I end up making revisions, but its surpassing 2 thousand words so far which I think should be enough to fill the 10 minute slot.

I went over this Youtube video to see if there was any obvious history I was missing and it doesn’t seem like it, I am already aware of tape loops in musique concrete and minimalism, I guess it is important to write about though as if I am presenting this essay to someone who presumably knows nothing about the history. Something in particular though that I have found when researching this topic is that I can’t seem to avoid William Basinski, it’s quite annoying, I remember finding The Disintegration Loops novel the first time I heard it but nothing more, I hate this kind of endless appraisal it gets and when the narrator of this video says something along the lines of “my favourite example of its use is The Disintegration Loops” I couldn’t help but laugh, maybe it’s the cynic in me I don’t know. Anyway, I haven’t mentioned it in my writing so far and I want it to stay that way.

I also read up on the broader utilisation of repetition to see what effects it has in popular music here; with the study showing that repeated listening increases the liking for music regardless of its complexity, “For example, popular music has become less complex and more homogeneous in terms of more restricted pitch transitions and less varied timber since the 1960s (Serra et al., 2012). If there is an inverse association between complexity and familiarity, less complex music will attract more listeners initially.” This study kind of reveals a parasitic nature to popular music, as the music has been distilled to what is more initially inviting and repeating more than what is more complex and obsessively worked over, and I guess that means the loop ambient frame work is an even further distillation of this to the absolute most basic for it could take, and subsuquently the most likable.

As well as more interviews with Will Long, I listened back to some more kinds of loop based musics that I could recall while writing up what I have now, and have tried to draw a connection between the loop ambient framework and the noise loop idea, with GX Jupitter Larsen being the main focus as just like Celer, I have spent an ungodly amount of time with his work already, so it is quite exciting to be able to write about his practice. GX’s interviews are purposefully nonsensically really so I don’t feel like they are necessary, I already have ideas I want to present about his work and the fixed state of erosion his work presents, I could contact him about this but I’m not sure if I’m that kind of person to do that. I’m already in contact with Ivan Senkevich who has a similar kind of practice but I don’t think there’s so much more to write about than GX.

The session this week was about Structialism and Post Structuralist ways of thinking, and way those ideas can be adapted to research practices. I very much enjoyed the session, the post structuralist ideas of being inquisitive about everything in life, especially things that are told to be “true”, and working out their inner workings and goals beyond the surface level. Now that idea seems kind of obvious, so it’s kind of bizarre to see that the idea as a movement is so young, being founded in the 60s, I’m certain there are precursors obviously but still quite strange.

Anyway, revising my draft over and over again and finally sitting down to record I noticed some glaring issues;

1. I stutter a lot when reading aloud. I wasn’t really aware of this until now and I’m finding it really irritating when recording, it’s made the whole process really difficult and I haven’t been able to record everything at the time of writing this because I was going until the University closed.

2. Because I was stuttering and stumbling over my words so much, I didn’t gauge how long my writing actually is until assembling what I had later, finding that even in its unfinished state it was around 15 minutes.

3. I can’t be on campus next week due to an effort to save as much money as possible, but because of the accommodation I’m in being quite useless my toilet does not stop flushing, the only soundproofing method otherwise would be to record in the wardrobe but that still has the inevetability of capturing that sound.

So what needs to be done is a revision on the writing in order to get across my points in a more concise manner to fit the time frame limitation set, which is kind of irritating at this late stage to do again but whatever. My idea at the moment is to create a section at the end after explaining the effects of singular loops, that has a lot of overdubbing, but it might be confusing if not executed well I’m not sure.

Now after coming back to the blog after recording in my wardrobe, I’m quite happy with how it’s gone to be fair, I taped the microphone to the top of the wardrobe so I couldn’t bump it and talked away from it assuming it would be loud enough anyway, the results were quite good I feel. I rewrote most of the work to be more brief and did the overdubbing part using a contact mic and a looper, the resulting sound I quite enjoyed because of how quickly my speaking became incomprehensible, I kept it like that because I found it exciting and interesting, like a bit of catharsis after trying to cram as much information as possible. I had to abandon some talking points for brevity sadly, that being the research I did on earworms, on repetition as well as most of my Celer section to be honest, but rules are rules, I have to adhere.