Location
Classes will be held at the Pollini Conservatory, Aula 9, a classroom located in the central site (Via Eremitani) on the first floor.
Preliminary Assignment:
Read each of the following texts. PDF files and/or links are provided for each.
Luigi Russolo, L'arte dei rumor - [click here]
E. T. Marinetti and Pino Mansata, La Radia - [click here]
Choose one of these and write a 100 word summary on this text to present in class. Your summary can be written in Italian or English. Part of the first class will be devoted to a discussion of how these ideas could be explored in a sonic work.
Email to text to me no later than 24 hours prior to the beginning of the next class (Marzo 29 ore 16:00 deadline). I will add your texts an online forum featuring our findings.
WEEK 1:
Date: 30 Marzo ore 16:00-19:00 Aula 9 Sede Centrale
Topic: Survey of aesthetic and technical approaches to audio art
Assignment:
You will be assigned a text excerpt from a book listed in the bibliography or a link on the materials page. Read the text and formulate an idea of how you could explore one of the author’s points in a site specific sound installation.
Write a 100 word summery of your idea. You can write in Italian or English. Email this summary to no later than 24 hours prior to the beginning of the next class (Aprile 5 ore 16:00 deadline). I will add your texts an online forum featuring our findings.
Prepare a five minute presentation on the assigned topic to present in class next week. Your presentation can be delivered in English or Italian.
WEEK 2
Date: 6 Aprile ore 16:00-19:00 Aula 9 Sede Centrale
Topic: Pilot audio art piece
Assignment:
Choose at least one partner from the class and create a one minute sound work based on a literary excerpt that I will assign. Bring a CD of your original work to the next class for group listening and discussion.
Write a 100 word summery of your idea. You can write in Italian or English. Email this summary to no later than 24 hours prior to the beginning of class (Aprile 5 ore 16:00 deadline). I will add your texts an online forum featuring our findings.
WEEK 3
Date: 27 Aprile ore 16:00-19:00 Aula 9 Sede Centrale
Topic: Leveraging source material for a site specific sound work
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.
WEEK 4
Date: 4 Maggio ore 16:00-19:00 Aula 9 Sede Centrale
Topic: To be announced (TBA)
Assignment:
Hello Class,
Over the next few days I would like you to use this discussion thread to define, groups, concertps and sites for your final presentation.
The ideas that emerged in yesterday’s discussion were a good start but be have a lot of hard work and thinking ahead of us if these projects are going to become “anything more than a college exercise.”
NUMBER OF INSTALLATIONS:
ASSIGNMENT: Over the next 48 hours you must commit to a group of people to work with.
I am going to request that you form no more than three groups. We really do not have time to discuss more than three installations. One or two installations would be even better. Think about pooling ideas and skills to make these projects as striking as possible.
THEME OF INSTALLATIONS:
ASSIGNMENT: By the next class, each group should select a prevailing theme for the installation. This will be the idea that is listened to. With Lucier it was process – text being degraded by controlled feedback. Cardiff’s idea was personal narrative – non-linear story telling using a traveling disembodied voice. With David Tutor is was finding the composition inside dymamic electronic media.
SOUND SYSTEM:
ASSIGNMENT: Define your sound system by next class.
Plan on using portable sound systems that we own. Access to electricy seems dubious and setting up a serious sound system makes any kind of impromptu event difficult to stage.
If you are going to use an accademically controlled space (U of P or Pollini), then the Conservatory has a state of the art quadrophonic sound system that we can use. If we use an accademically controlled space, I can make the first call to Prof. Durante or Prof. Bernardini, but I need to know what this space is in the next 48 hours.
LOCATION:
ASSIGNMENT: By next class, your group must have choosen a site for the installation. If you like you can propose one site that we will use now, and a seconday dream site that we could use if we do this again in the future.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT:
Professor Nicola Bernardini wrote this note to Marco Braggion and I will quote it at length because I could not say it better:
“… in order to be really convincing on something like this it is necessary to focus really strongly on the meaning complex that you want to provide. Otherwise it is something that does’nt reach the emotional level necessary to raise whatever you want raise (fear, anger, disgust, sadism, voyeurism or whatever). I would'nt know how to proceed for this, but maybe you do.”
“… I think that here too a lot of work has to be done for any of these projects to really take off and not stay at the level of college excercise.”
“The difference is in the details. I'll take just the first one as an example: how is the car? Is it an old seicento or is it something fancy? is it a recording or is it a human? does the car have anything pasted on its body (like the spot cars have generally) or not? do you distribute hands out from the car running slowly around? and also: where does the car go? should it go into suburban areas with tall ugly buildings or should it go in the dead center of town? etc. etc. etc. To me, these are not details: they are at the core of an installation that has an artistic aim. And there are many other details I can think of but I don't want to bore you (and I don't want to do the job for you :); in a work of art, any detail counts.”
OUR IDEAS:
INSTALLATION #1:
Marco has Michael Nyman’s text as a source. Andrea and Sara, do Nyman’s ideas in this article overlap with to Cage’s ideas? If so, is Marco a good match for the work that you want to create? Again, Prof. Bernardini did a good job of presenting initial questions. You can find Marco’s writing on Nyman here:
http://classes.berklee.edu/nleonard/padova/journal4.html
INSTALLATION #2:
Daria has chosen the short text by Toru Takemitsu entitled “Noh and transience”. Marco G., Perluigi, Dario and Matteo, are Takemitsu’s ideas connected to Schafer’s?
ASSIGNMENT: Everyone should read this very short text in its entirety. A PDF file is posted on the class web site.
http://classes.berklee.edu/nleonard/padova/material.html
Also read what Daria wrote about the text on our site.
To quote Daria, “They [the audience] should find out their inner connection with nature, with a lost level of spirituality.” Do we use sounds to evoke this state? Is the recorded sound of a bird better than the expanding and contracting rhythms of a Japanese Gakaku ensemble, which is in fact one of the sounds that Takemitusu used. If we use that sound, do we use a fragment of this court music, or to we recreate this temporal effect using an electric razor on a stratocaster. If we use the razor live, does it swing across the strings of the guitar like Focults Pendulum that is installed in Palazzo de la Ragione. Again, to return to Prof. Bernardini’s text, “the devil is in the details.
INSTALLATION #3:
Sound activated by motion. Again, what is the idea that you find yourself obsessed with here? How do you want to infludence people’s motion in the space. Do you make them stop walking on the street? Do you make them accellerate the motion of their upper body in a room?
Then we have the practical issues: Do we produce this piece using Andrea as visual/concept director? Antonio as programmer? Matteo as sound engineer? Sara as instrumentalist?
CONCLUSION
These are just my suggestions for three very general points of departure. I expect you to define your own groups and select a theme or idea for each one. If we do this before next class, then we are on schedule. Feel free to write to this list with questions.
WEEK 5
Date: 11 Maggio ore 16:00-19:00 Aula 9 Sede Centrale
Topic: TBA
Assignment: Assignment related to the final presentation will be announced in class.
WEEK 6
Date: TBA
Topic: TBA
Assignment:
My Process and How I Leveraged the Readings/Discussions
Write a one-two page narrative that describes how you developed as an artists in the making of this piece. Describe how you applied the ideas in the readings/discussions to develop your work. This final paper can draw on your early writing assignments.
WEEK 7
Date: TBA
Topic: Final Presentation
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