May 4
Assignment:

Choose chapter from one of the following texts, or a text that we agree on in class:

• Audio Culture by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner.
• Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde, by Douglas Kahn, Gregory Whitehead
• The Conversations : Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, by Michael Ondaatje
• The Soundscape, by R. Murray Schafer
  

Write a short summery describing how you can leverage the ideas presented in this text as part of your final sound installation . You can write in Italian or English. Email this summary to no later than 24 hours prior to the beginning of class (Aprile 26 ore 16:00 deadline). I will add your texts an online forum featuring our findings.

Michael Nyman’s Towards (a Definition of) Experimental Music
A short survey by Marco Braggion

In order to define and to summarize the essential components that an experimental music piece should/could have, Nyman uses John Cage’s 4’ 33’’ as a starting point. The main issues found are divided into three main areas:

1. Composing
2. Performing
3. Listening

The experimental music composer has to find a musical notation for ideas, rather than for sounds; s/he usually generates a situation where the outcome is mostly unknown (i.e. s/he can use chance and/or repetition processes, suggestions to players, etc.), so her/his identity is almost obscured by the process that generates the composition. The more the composer does not refer to sound, the more the composition will be good.

The performer is involved and responsible for the outcome of the piece: her/his freedom is not real, because it is influenced by his/her culture, (musical) background, social life, etc. Instruments are used as sound sources rather than normal ‘playable instruments’. The performer is demanded to be more creative than during the usual classical concerto setting.

The listener is also active. S/he can modify the composition, even if s/he does not see it! The listener can judge the artist’s work only with her/his perception. The experimental music piece should have an open structure at its core. Judgment becomes a natural complex phenomenon: in this way music becomes an ‘organism’ and ‘musical priorities’ vanish.

carissimi vi scrivo due idee su un'installazione possibile. neil if my italian is too much complex, please ask me and i'll translate in english. oh beh io ho un po' di idee ma non so se attualizzabili.

1. andare in giro con una macchina e recitare con la voce di 'è arrivato l'arrotino' poesie e versi in italiano

2. riprendere un orologio per un minuto e poi sovrapporre il minuto dopo un secondo.. una specie di cosa a la steve reich. il tutto con un crescendo fino alla fine... ma ti spiego meglio.

3. mettere un microfono all'interno di un frutto che decomponga abbastanza velocemente. riprodurre il suono e il video del frutto che decompone.

altre cose solo a voce

TORU TAKAMITSU on JAPANESE AESTHETICS
Summary

Daria Trevisian

In the extract “Noh and transience” talks about the inner connection between Japanese culture and nature. It seems that strangers can’t understand or interiorize at all this principle that all is related to a constantly changing nature. So the author says that the Japanese prefer an artistic expression as close as possible to nature, while our “western” culture tried always to (re)create and elaborate the “artificial”, trying to erase the natural and accidental aspect of things, and of course of music.

Japanese culture is more interested in noise and nature pure sounds than we are, also because of its spiritual and religious background that is tightly connected with all aspects of nature, it’s nature itself, Japan is in fact blanketed in an ancient spirituality. In his experience with Japanese performers the author says that they are more interested in discovering sounds rather than expressing by sounds, this because to them natural sound isn’t a source of expression but an expression of the world itself. I think we could use these principles in these ways:

• We could use nature recorded sounds to create our performance. As Janet Cardiff said, we don’t listen to recorded sound as we would do if the same sounds were actually surrounding us, but everything becomes amplified because senses get extremely raised. So I’d like to set a sound installation in a crowded place, it should be tree-like with hidden speakers, people should stop and notice that they are hearing sounds of nature in a city, crowded, nervous place. They should find out their inner connection with nature, with a lost level of spirituality.
• We could use processed sounds of nature (as my group and I did with the sound of water) and set the installation in a park, create a non-conventional form of nature with its own sounds and noises, but all processed.

Florian Matteo

Reading the chapter by Pierre Schaeffer, I found interesting the definition of Acousmatics: is said of a noise that one hears without seeing what causes it, moreover the theories about the Sonorous Object are very interesting too.
This is my idea for the final presentation: working in Parco Iris, which is full of young students, we’ll put some hidden speakers (for example on the trees), then we’ll play not – natural ambient sounds. Machinery sounds, automobiles, trains, boats, tanks and shoots, will be played not at the same time, now and then, also modified too (slowly, faster, distorted, harmonized) so that they can pass unobserved in the ambient.

The base idea is that people don’t understand the sound source and ask to themselves: “what kind of sound is this?” “Where is it from?”.

Andrea Liuzza

Referring to some ideas of Composition as Process: indeterminacy by John Cage, I thought about a piece composed by musicians and performed by the audience. We need some registered sounds and some space. The audience, moving around the space, which we monitored before with a software and a camera, will play our sounds and will determine some defined variations into the sounds themselves: variations of pitch, duration, timbre, amplitude and so on. The piece starts when the first person enter in the first monitored area, and won’t end until the last person is out.

We could choose a theme for our sounds, or not. Anyone could make his own sound. We could choose any place, garden church or room, and relate it with our sounds in some way. We could also make some indications into our space, to keep the people moving, or not. The indications could be visuals, or technical instructions, or written poetry. And so on. Is a thing we could do all together in so many ways.

Marco Gonella

I read again the chapter of oudio culture dedicated to R Murray Schafer and the music of the environment.
so, according to the idea of soundscape described by Schafer,
i immagined a sound installation that consist in a room installation, on the walls of the room there are some pictures for example of the city of padova, but it could be a collection of various ambients too, may be a beach, a mountain landscape, a field in the country,a river exc. every picture on the wall is considered like a observing, watching and listening station for the oudience.people stand in front of each picture and have a music source, may be a cd player or mp3 player and he can observe the picture listening to a sound recording of that place..creating a strange relation between a static visual information, and its relative dynamic sonic one..you can hear how does that picture sound like..it's strange and fascinating in my opinion; moreover the listener can be curious to make links between the object presented in the picture and the sounds heard in the recording...

THE EAR THAT WOULD HEAR SOUNDS IN THEMSELVES (JOHN CAGE)
Battagin Sara

John Cage (1935-1965) was an artist, composer, philosopher and a guru of avant-garde; his impact on thought and artistic practices of contemporary culture can hardly be overstated.
He certainly hurled music and yet at the same time he can be charged with recuperating music’s contest within a neo-romantic nostalgia for the prediscursive “in itself” of Nature.
Beneath the surface play, there is an anchoring of his philosophy of sound and life, within darker folds of a mystical and metaphysical notion of existence.
The artist is forced into a paradoxal play between the phenomenal and metaphorical determinations of aurality.
Cage developed his major compositional and philosophical strategies, taking as its point of departure his well-known desideratum: “Let sounds be themselves”.
With this four words the artist opened the musical establishment to a democratic ambience and semiotic ambivalence of authority, while the same time inaugurating the disappearance of the received category “music” for which he is now so famous.
He invokes metaphors of absence, such as silence, selflessness and nothingness, forcing those who would “let” sounds be themselves to occupy an impossible existential position and to speak in impossibly ambiguous and stunted discourse.
The involved abandoning of the primary principle of Western tonality, as a means of structuring compositions include: melodic development, expressivity and the ideal of musical movement.
Cage’s only option was to create a new form of music utilizing a new structural means. And this he did by using silence “to separate one section of a composition from another”, instead of the traditional structural device of harmonic cadence.
According with Cage’s thought, here’s his theory: “Sound has four characteristics: pitch, timbre, loudness and duration. The opposite and necessary coexistence of sound is silence.”.
In his hands, noise become a polysemic, multifunctional lever suitable for inching open the closure tonality and serialism presented and a palimpsest for the deeper philosophical regions he was now exploring.
Cage became fascinated by the idea that he could tell this noise (just an ordinary plink) was made by a key and not a tea spoon, scissor, knife, nail file or other comparable object in terms of size and material.
The idea that the sound of objects is capable of a certain articulation was interpreted by Cage as evidence of the deeper reality:
“When I was introduced to him, he began to talk with me about the spirit which is inside each of the objects of this world. So, he told me, all we need to do a liberate that spirit is to brush past the object, and to draw forth its sound.
That’s the idea which led me to percussion; in all the many years which followed up to the war, I never stopped touching things, making them sound and resound they could produce. Wherever I went, I always listened to objects.”.
With silence, sound, spirit, object, and organic rhythmic structure in hand, Cage confronted not only the structural mechanisms but the very space and instrumentation of tonality.
That was a particularly significant act, for the parting and muting of the strings, first with a pie plate and more successfully with screws, also symbolized the parting of the instrument with its history.
The piano’s “preparation” suggested also a readying for death, death of the crowning technology of tonality, annihilation of its fixed and claustrophobic temperament, and interpretable borders.
In order to produce sound, he uses technological sources, like television, radio and phonograph, which have traditionally inhabited the living room and form part of new instrumentally.
As an instrument, however the radio studio ironically produced not only sound, but the presence of the radio phonic apparatus itself and it sound becomes paradoxical, without origin.
Sounds connected to the object evoke a spirit, creating a silence that is not dead, whose essence is actualized.
The radio studio reconstructs an openness to the unrepresentable, mystical: the notion of silence and the void.
Within this sublime atmosphere, free from material commitments and unfettered by signification, sound becomes for Cage what music was a thing that represent only itself, of which nothing can be said with any certainty.
The representation of this sound is essential to Cage’s philosophy: he must speak them.
Speaking of sound in themselves, Cage presses against the limits of discourse, sounds are sounds, but paradoxically, they’re also indistinguishable from life, charged equally by natural processes as chirping birds in the forest or traffic sound of the cit.
So sounds are themselves and life is authentically lived. Cage had ample opportunity to interact with sound engineers and sound technology in the course of composing. He produced a lot of pieces using tape and microphones; that techniques generate a total sound space.
In the noise of everyday life, the ear rarely turns inward to ear the sounds of its existence, nor does it detach itself from the body in order to hear a sound “in itself”.

Bibliography: Wireless imagination by Kahn and Whitehead, cap XV