Category: Creative Sound Project 2

Quantum Listening

Notes on “Quantum Listening”; a recently published book containing a speech by Pauline Oliveros from 1999.

I could recite the whole text as a list of important quotes. I feel Deep Resonance with Oliveros’ philosophy.

Quantum listening is about listening in multiple ways, as many ways, to existence, being, surrounding, soundscape. To Oliveros, the multiplicity of listening is essential. Listening is not the ear as an objective reciever getting closer to an external reality. It is an observation of the cascading reactions to the external, internal and imagined sounds of being. Through observation the sounds themselves change. Like in quantum physics, Oliveros claims that observation changes reality.

“Quantum Listening is listening in as many ways as possible simultaneously – changing and being changed by the listening.”

“One focuses on a point and changes that point by listening.”

Pauline is fascinated by the potentials of new technologies. To her, new biotech such as ingested nanotechnology could assist in our hearing abilities. “What would you want to hear if you had a bionic ear that could let you listen to anything, anywhere, any time?” She is imagining a technology that gives us live access to microsopic sounds, like the sound of a cell dividing in our body, or macroscopic sounds, like the gasses in deep space. Someone deeply imbedded in the somatic practices of Qi Gong and Tai Chi, and the awareness practices in Buddhist cultures, who carried out most of her retreats in natural environments, is excited about the hybridization of human and machine. What would Oliveros say today?

TikTok is like our bionic ear. We have access to the larger world in rapid time. A global culture connected through sound and moving image. Here is a lovely quote from Adam Greenfield: ““In our time, even the most seemingly transgressive visions of technology in everyday life invariably fall back to the familiar furniture of capital investment, surplus extraction and exploitation. We don’t even speak of progress any longer, but rather of ‘innovation.’”

Is Pauline excited or rather, aware of the inevitable. “Soon we will be faced with an unprecedented, exponential acceleration in technology.” And here we are. My deep admiration for Oliveros is her fascination with the new worlds and the future, as someone who embodies ancestral knowledge. It takes courage to carry both. It takes wisdom to understand nuance and complexity. For her we must recognize the implications and potentialities of new technologies. The human-machine epoch has already begun.

I am imagining how to implement the digital into my compositional work. How does the digital dimension overlay our perception? My recent compositional work and that for my final project discusses perception, and music as perception. I wonder how music can respresent states of being and also attract one to the materiality around them. The entity that calling out to us is also within. This is a reaction to the common function of popular music today, as a seperation from the world. What is the world, if it does not include the audio from our earbuds? More accurate language is necessary.

This project I am currently involved in, of music as perception, melodies above field recordings, music that exists within a space, outdoor music: what ideologies are present in these respresentations? Perhaps it began as a purism, of the’natural’ world as something to return to. Throughout the course and after reading Seth Kim Cohen’s book, ‘In The Blink of an Ear’, I imagine this purism as an essentialism. A nostalgia for better times, that we never experienced. Today, new technologies are imbedded in our perception. How can these be incorporated into the composition. In my new composition, I represent the digital (or the elsewhere-ness of the digital) as a sine wave, slightly irritated and distorted, but able to navigate with the environment. For now. It doesn’t consume the heart melody.

Performance

The next assignment went over my head as I have been busy in other activities. I often have the feeling that I am not studying enough while also learning much outside of the coursework. I want to allocate more time for study and research to gain more from the course.

I thought I would discuss some other elements of my practice. Recently I have been performing regularly and have had some interesting realisations around my work. I play live electronic music, often in dance settings, with music that could be described as euphoric, wholesome and hyperfolk-ish. Other buzzy words are oaty jigs, celtic hardcore and cute music. I’ve felt by describing my music in terms that stand out and perplex people is effective in giving homage to my unique sound and vision. It also makes people curious and wanting to come to an event. Until recently I would give more open terms like electronic or ambient, which do not tend to excite people. Being humble is attractive but is it a powerful agent of our times? I like more the idea of creating excitement and positivity around the work. I would even claim that fake humility is prevelant in some electronic music genres that are male dominated. So my agenda is to do homage to my work by imagining that others could benefit from listening. There is clearly ego here, bubbling away, as I run around meeting people, but I believe that is neccessary for carving out the space and platform that I want for my music. It is a tender juggling process to not get consumed in an individualist mindset.

Buzzy buzzy. After performing I have feelings of emptyness and sadness. I wonder what really happened, did I say what I wanted to say?

The pace is so fast that I have little time to prepare a set. I only use a launchpad and my laptop so there is a reduced space for expression. I realised I want to step back from performing and implement more tools of expression to make the performance more live. Also, after a recent set the sound was so distorted, and my vision was not shared with the audience. I have a lot of work to do in sound design and mixing to handle bigger sound systems.

A few days ago I played in Iklectik in the garden space. I really ejoyed playing outside.

Now with some friends we are planning outdoor events. With a portable stereo system and radio system, we have a center output of sound with different outputs dotted around, from radios and bluetooth speakers with recievers. All will be connected to a pirate radio frequency. We will set up in public spaces, with a battery since the set up is small, and invite performers and DJs to play. In our utopian vision, members of the public will dance together outside in an unexpected sound and movement experience. Performers will have an opportunity to express themselves without the restrictions of club spaces. Little money will be needed to set this up. I am thinking of the tem sonic flocking. Body body body! Sound arts needs to prioritize embodiement to harness the healing nature of sound and movement experience.

To continue the revolution folx will dismantle their phones into garden robotics to assist the new food growing communites.

My most recent performance:

Natural Soundscapes

I’m reading The Soundscape by R. Murray Schafer.

A soundscape is a combination of sounds that lead to the immersive sonic environment. A soundscape is the accumulation of sounds that exist in space. The sonic features of an area of land. Or ‘the acoustic environment as percieved by humans, in context.’ (Wiki)

The relatively new term soundscape was popularised by R. Murray Schafer in 1977. It rolls off my tongue. The term has been criticized first for it’s vagueness and also it’s relation to the historical description of ‘landscape’: as an object percieved externally (where subject is detatched from object). Schafer wanted to protect the object of ‘soundscape’ from the excess noise of modern life/industrial civilization/mechanical noise. He describes the object as a dexterous fusion of natural sounds and human sounds, or biosphere and technosphere (Oliveros), which comes out of balance as civilization expands. The word ‘natural’ is prevelant in his writings.

It’s fascinating to read a book on the affect of new technologies, that was written in 1977. This era is pre-digital and pre-internet. Some criticisms that Schafer makes seem so imbedded into our lifestyle today that to be without them would require an impossible shift of human activity. Or, more accurately, to imagine their absence seems impossible. What is possible to imagine is that placing value on the high-fidelity of the acoustic world would be irrelevant to future urban populations. They may be reliant on noise-cancellation for navigation and communicative purposes. Schafer’s utopia of a human society politely and quietly blending with larger non-human ecosystems seems further away.

What is Schafer’s utopia? In claiming some noise as noise-pollution, does Schafer construct categories of natural and unnatural? Through the lens of critical theory we can begin to question his positionality and ability to claim a common utopia.

The book is heavily reliant on literature and the arts for the human experiences of the soundscape before the 20th century, which is a narrow representation of experience. The book contains uncomfortable quotes from old intellectuals like Tobias Smollett: “…I go to bed after midnight, jaded and restless from the dissipating of the day-I start every hour from my sleep, at the horrid noise of the watchmen bawling the hour through every street, and thundering at every door; a set of useless fellows, who serve no other purpose but that of disturbing the repose of the inhabitants.”

A painting is printed in the book, depicting an upper-class musician wearing full victorian attire, glaring with rage outside of his window at the hoard of children, women and beggars who seem to be making a racket. Schafer doesn’t comment. Unfortunately Schafer’s vision of a more peaceful world has reflections of countryside bourgeouisie aesthetics that were only possible due to surplus leisure time and luxuries. This bed of material wealth cannot exist in a more equal society.

I don’t disagree with Schafer’s urgency around noise-pollution. It is hard to untangle it from the classism of his sources, when class struggle is rarely mentioned in the book. Schafer does not ignore social issues but their exploration is premature. He is too quick to define what is natural.

OATCORE

Oats as the vessel for change. Oats + core imagines what oats can give to the memetic complex of internet and rave cultures. Oats are wholesome. People are ashamed of the wholesome. They rightly criticize it. But are they also afraid of bodily functions?

Currently I am finding MIDI of old Irish melodies, and producing them above industrial bass, with deconstructed reggaeton and club rhythms.

Acoustic Approaches To Ecology

Notes on a lecture from David Toop and Lawrence English on acoustic approaches to ecology.

Toop and English discuss technology as a fascillitator for measuring and understanding the world. Certain technology can “expand the bandwidth we are in contact with.” We can tune in to frequencies that are previously inaudible as a way to reveal something about the world. These tools are tools for navigation on a micro or macro-perspecitve. As an approch to ecology, Toop and English beleive that by revealing previously inaudible information we can change the way people relate to the world.

Our capacities for field recording and acoustic ecology is shaped by the technologies we have available. During the discussion, capacity is discussed in regards to listening. When the capacity has widened, we tend to listen to the flaws of previous work. The flaw becomes more audible as the capacity has changed. For example, many old recorders had to cut out low frequencies due to machine noise. Only certain voices succeeded in hitting the right notes to be audible through the machine. The capacities of technology affect the personality of the media. Toop says that “with every stage of technology we become adjusted to the new normal. It becomes neutral. Then 10-15 years later we see it’s personality.” It is interesting to examine how these personalities are fetishized are marketed by the fashion and music industries. Contemporary artists seem more forward focused.

English discusses his field recording practices. Field recording can be a technical craft, but also artistic. English admires the personal touch that is audible in the recorded. These are imperfections that are audible to the listener, that perhaps create intimacy. “Field recording is about sharing a moment… the listener’s listening… coming to the world through someone else’s ears. “

In field recording we become concious of those events often missed. Technology can expand our experience of the world. Recording is to take a space with you. It can examine our potential of what it means to be human.

There was no time for me to ask my question: ​How do you feel about the sourcing of materials for field recording equipment and can that contradict the ambitions of acoustic ecology?

Toop and English are passionate about the non-human lifeworlds we interact with. Much of their work could be reduced to ‘climate activism’, but it is more complex that that. I appreciate their ethics and I am curious about how they approach these contradictions of acoustic ecology and the sourcing of materials for field recording. Technology can help us; technology can hinder and destroy us. Perhaps by remembering it as a tool we can use technologies without getting lost in their seduction.

The Agency To Heal

The key to access the psychotropic forms of being is to reduce that noise we have agency over. By reducing noise, the desaturated environment starts to brighten and we become fascinated by a colourful sentient reality. I’ve found that reducing listening time to recorded music is a way to amplify the music of everyday soundscapes.

We live in a sea. We are soaked in media and images, overlapping symbols and language. We are distracted and cannot focus. Lots of people remain in the sea. Music is often here, an anaesthetic to calm oneself and take oneself inside when the world is a scary place. Living in London requires a gentle anaesthetic to cope with the stimuli. I cannot embrace my fellow neighbours as we march through the tunnels underneath. The city goes deep and blocks the sky with it’s pollution.

How do we reduce noise? Is some noise harmful in it’s materiality? Or is it in the way we approach noise that we harm ourselves? Stoics would say we have free will in how we relate to the world. Perhaps if you bury yourself somewhere deep in the intellect. Some frequencies of sound make the body stressed. Some sounds are too loud. Reducing external noise requires massive changes in the way we live and organise.

The inner world reflects the outer world. The binary of inner/outer is only useful for certain theory and communication. Inner noise often comes from those bodies in pain. Bodies distract themselves from traumas too painful to sit with. We think in words about other places. Is everyone in pain? It seems like pain is unfairly distributed across our species. Some demographics of people experience more harm and danger in the world than others. Some carry more trauma that has been passed over generations. How do we claim presence as a solution, when it’s access is inequal?

Healing occurs in safe spaces. Everyone deserves to heal. Everybody needs someone and deserves protection. Sometimes the safety occurs in a gated community, or absorbed in virtual symbols and images.

I believe healing also occurs outside, and in the reduction of noise we have agency over we begin to learn to be present and comfortable with the environment. The colours begin to lift and in their brightness they heal too. They pull the fascinated body further along a path of recovery.

How do we participate in the collective path of healing? I try to take responsibility of my own pain and to stay present with the world. I reduce those behaviours that numb me when I am able to. Then give attention outwards, and try to accept and support whatever position a friend might be at. To access beauty we must go through pain.

Ugly healing world.

Anti-correlationism

My learning direction has propelled out of sound as primary. I’ve been wondering how to approach environmental issues without the essentialism criticised by Seth Kim-Cohen. The essentialism as a smokescreen behind which social constructs are maintained for comfort. The research does not feel like a detour since my music is often about ecological issues and I use environmental recordings to create effect. The aesthetic of nature is hyperised, like the effect of looking through a small window onto another world. I am wondering about the critical messages we can send and how music can help us cope with feelings of ecological grief.

I am reading “Humankind” by Timothy Morton. Morton’s work explores the intersection of object-oriented thought and ecological studies. Object-oriented thought rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of non-human objects. Objects exist independently of human perception. This philosophy relates to deep ecology and also the way indigenous cultures approach nature (as percieved by western culture). The point of these philosophies is to radically redefine nature to change our interaction with the planetary ‘resources’.

How can we approach environmentalism without the environment being “pure” or separate from the human? Without the human in the void of the centre, this is a planet at war with itself. Also! destruction is not far away but all around us. With focus on our proximity we can remain in dissatisfaction as a potency for action. Opening ourselves to the unhappiness is a delicate process, but essential for bright burning hearts!

Morton discusses a planetary situation of symbiotic entities: a biosphere: the symbiotic real. In symbiosis the relationship between beings is unclear. With the borders blurred between the human and nonhuman we can start to see our position as one of interdependence. For example let us remember the gut. Non-humans compose our bodies.

How to we imagine a world of interdependence without it having an essential essence, the one we call nature? What is in between beings as they rub against eachother? What is in common?

In “In The Blink Of An Ear” Cohen disproves the faith in a fundamental stratum of experience; some essential ontological state. But in the idea of universal beings there would be an essence of conciousness that is shared between all beings. It is not affected by the borders between things. If this were to exist it does not define my current subjective experience. I believe it is not a question of IF but moreso questioning our definitions of conciousness, sentience and matter. I believe in these other worlds, the other beings, that make up our shared world, and there is no essence to it. There is no inbetween spaces, just a tetris. This is the ecological perspective.

The ecological perspective does not have to be the natural harmony of life, but simply seeing a material surroundings that we do exist in, and we can no longer reject. These material surroundings are our source, our bodies, our microbiomes, the food we eat, the material structures that we walk in, etc. Contemporary culture pretends like these materials do not exist. There is discomfort, ugliness and shame around these topics. We walk around the city and dress up instead.

In the state of discomfort we make big theories about the world to prove our position, to prove anthropocentrism as natural.

Morton explains correlationism: there are things in themselves but they aren’t realized until they are correlated by a correlator. “The subject tends to be found hovering invisibly behind the heads of only one entity in the actually existing universe – the human being.” In contemporary art, recognition of the correlator is the major event. Kim-Cohen writes about the movement towards deobjectification, post-structuralism and non-cochlear ways of thinking. The mistakes in art to claim a purity without the human subjectivity prove wrong. However! What about the worlds without the human? How do we approach them with a human art? Let us expand the correlator to the nonhuman until it dissolves!

Can we expand the category of the correlator to also include the squirrel who perceives the tree branch in effort to move along? It does move. Then let’s include the tree as a correlator, as a being that recognises the light and moves toward it. A lesson in mental health. With this method the world becomes a net of unique worlds that all share a common space. Do all of these worlds have value? They must have value because they compose our world too.

I’m imagining this anti-essentialism trending in contemporary thought as a correlationism that is only defined to the human. A discomfort with our sources. Therefore why would we want to protect other species and other ecosystems? Valuing the nonhuman requires having something in common, which I believe is the world. “Having something in common is exactly what culturalism sees as reactionary primitivism.” Morton.

So why is contemporary culture so uncomfortable with the nonhuman, and so eager to write complex theories to disprove any attempt to protect the nonhuman? If we see culture as a progression of thought then we are totally right to disregard the source. But if we see it as a replacement for our relationship to the source, then we can understand this eagerness to prove the legitimacy of our direction and disprove a connection to wider planetary systems. Do we write theories to avoid pain?

Morton describes the “severing” as a “foundational traumatic fissure between reality (the human-correlated world) and the real (ecological symbiosis of human and nonhuman part of the biosphere.”

In my music I want to embrace the pain and create joy in the forward motion of the procession. It is a procession that we walk in. There is hope in our ability to make joy from even this!

Embodied Art

There was a movement in the art world beginning, people say, in the 1960s, aiming for the dematerialization of the art object. In 1968, Lucy Lippard and John Chandler called this “ultra-conceptual art”; which “emphasizes the thinking process almost exclusively” and “may result in the object becoming wholly obsolete.” This is a conceptual art where concept moves to the foreground, often at the expense of other aesthetic elements. In his book ‘In The Blink Of An Ear’ Seth Kim-Cohen writes, “Art became text based, moving from appearance to conception, from era of taste to era of meaning, from the specific to the generic.”

So in moving from the material to the conceptual I wonder about a further step. As the art object is dematerialized, it still exists as an art object; being a piece of text or a concept, rather than a painting or a music piece. What would be beyond object and concept? It feels impossible to think about.

Kim-Cohen writes “Art is primarily a situation in which one assumes an attitude of reacting to some of one’s awareness of art.” So art as an attitude is about framing: clipping a part of our reality into ‘Art’, and in doing so we get to explore it feverishly, often gazing/listening/experiencing intensely to find a meaning or even an essence. An example of framing is the frame over a canvas, symbolising some kind of importance of what is inside the frame. In dematerialization it has been shown that we can frame something immaterial, something conceptual.

Jean Dubuffet Soil Ornamented with Vegetation, Dead Leaves, Pebbles, Diverse Debris June 1956

I saw a Jean Dubuffet exhibition in the Barbican this year. In this piece, he takes something from the world, soil, and frames it by painting it.

How do we cultivate the attitude of art without an object of reference? How do we move beyond material and conceptual realms through art that encompasses the sensory experience? How do we explore the whole reality feverishly, an experience of the world without framing it in material and conceptual borders?

For example, why did Dubuffet not tell us to go out and look at soil, and experience it as part of a wider reality? As I stared at the painting, my body was conformed to an ettiquette of the gallery space.

Framing = context? Is this the decontextualised sensory experience, an array of light, sound, feeling? It begins to feel like a spiritual experience of connection, oneness, emptiness. In some schools of Buddhism, emptiness is “a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to, and takes nothing away from, the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there’s anything lying behind them.” (Thanisarro Bhikkhu). There is an idea of oneness beyond the frame of each item. The ‘raw data’ is the sensory experience without context.

Pauline Oliveros, a sound artist and composer, covers a similiar theme in her work. She started a movement called Deep Listening, which she defined it as “listening in as many ways as possible to everything that can possibly be heard all of the time… Deep Listening takes us below the surface of our consciousness and helps to change or dissolve limiting boundaries.” From engaging with her work, we can listen to sounds and let the thought of their source pass by, to be left with the sound itself and the memories and feelings that it inspires, like the ‘raw data’ insinuated by the Buddhist mode of emptiness.

I feel an urge to settle the mind out of intellect, into the body. Art in the body, art as experience. In the era of climate crisis, a disconnect with the natural? world and with eachother, embodied art can awake us into the reality of interdepence: where we rely on wider ecosystems and participate in their survival or destruction. – I feel – the border of my body / not my body is an illusion. I am this planet, I am an expression of life on earth, that being an expression of cosmic intelligence, oneness.

It feels amazing! I am God now!

The deepest experiencing of art is in creating. Pauline Oliveros wanted to spread the practice of Deep Listening, so people can have more creative engagement with the world. As we move away from art being a product to consume and being an experience, I worry that this experience is not equally accessible for everyone. If art practice is an enriching personal journey, why should (only) some people be artists… ?

Daphne Oram writes in “An Individual Note” that modern concerts are designed for the “releasing and excercising of the composer’s and performer’s brain mechanisms… for unclogging their feedback circuits and indulging their rationalising departments.” She requests “Can we also have some music for those not in need of psychiatric treatment?” Last week in Cafe OTO, I gazed at a musician performing improvised sound art thinking of Oram. If the audience is becoming irrelevant, then can we, as artists, try our best to share and facilitate the creative practice for others, to allow others to be artists? In Cafe OTO I wanted the border between performer and audience to disappear and everyone in the room the have the same ecstatic release that the musician was experiencing. I guess it is difficult to avoid a product orientation of art, here in London, in 2021.

Imagine a software that makes a listener a composer and performer. A virtual landscape designed to sound and sing in the preference of the witness. The witness paints a landscape of sound with mind and body. Rather than composed scores, a landscape is composed for the witness to move around in. An autonomist Spotify. An accessible DAW.

Imagine the attiude of art expanding to our whole awareness as an acoustic version of this software.

relational aesthetics, ultra red, after sound, artificial hells, claire bishop, participation documentary, hating peter thatchell documentary