Category: Expanded Studio Practice

“Acoustic Arts was originally established in 1990 as a community arts organisation aiming to promote outdoor learning and creative play and to improve access to music-making for people of all abilities. 
Since that time, our team of musicians, artists and teachers has created award-winning musical installations and provided workshops for educational, arts and environmental organisations throughout the UK.”

I came across Acoustic Arts during my research of outdoor musical instruments. They fascilitate workshops for children with learning disabilities and/or sensory impaired. They install instuments in public spaces with the aim to fascillitate musical learning for those who rarely have access to it. They are the creators of the outdoor music garden at the Horniman Museum.

I chatted to John Walls, the founder of the organisation. He told me of his development of the project, starting with yoghurt pot trumpets to eventually building permanent installations. Recycled or renewable materials have always been a key element of the project. John told me he was awakened to the value of materials we often discard after a research trip to West Africa, where he witnessed trading markets for cardboard boxes and plastic cups, and met scavengers who made a living from what Western countries label as obsolete. This conversation is another reminder to me on the subjectivity of waste; when material is labelled as waste, it means it is only in the wrong place at the wrong time, and there needs to be better systems to recycle that material, turning it from waste into a valuable resource.

As part of the statements I want to make as an artist, I will try to recognise the materials I am using in a project and their personal histories. Second-hand materials are a great place to start, through which our money does not finance a network of events that can be collectively defined as harm to people and non-human entities.

John told me of a project they did a few years ago, where they simply left an xylophone with some beaters attatched on a public cycle path. The instrument stayed there for two months, and had queues up to it on Saturday nights, where members of the public were eager to play. I like this simple project that gives trust to a public. Whatever happens next is a statement, a voice, to express a desire. John is passionate about the durability of an installation, but I feel like I also want to prioritise an openness to interaction and even destruction of an installation. John also told me that a common structure of people’s interaction with an installation is first an expression of rage and noise. After they let out some steam then comes an opportunity to play song or rhythym, and work together. It is interesting and telling that people first want to make an aggressive statement. I am imagining these mediums not only as transformative to a social space, but also something that can sonify messages from that space.

And finally, use familair materials to make the instrument more inviting. The point is an invitation.

The beginning notes in my research and reading of “Eco-Sonic Media” by Jacob Smith.

(Sorry if my writing is hard to read. I love writing on paper! As part of my media studies, I am trying to step outside of the use of dominant media technologies to get a different perspective of their affect on our states, bodies, spirits :D. Inspired by “Medium is the Message” by Marshall MacLuhan I am imagining that the medium itself as an activity is transformative to the way we think and feel. I am enjoying not using a smartphone in public and writing paper maps.)

Questions I am deriving from the beginning of Eco-Sonic Media:

Can we make a critique to contemporary sound media while still being able to listen to recorded sound and appreciate the value of sound cultures today? This involves discovering more sustainable methods for sound recording, producing and distribution.

Do we value SONIC FIDELITY over SUSTAINABILITY? If so, what does this mean about our sense of place and how it is defined in sound cultures?

Can we disturb or resist the direction of technological progress? We fail to understand the materiality of our technologies at a crucial moment of global extinction and systems collapse. This point is very valid to my feelings in the course. This is why I want to critique “spatialisation” ideology and try to imagine it as a more sustainable practice that is less energy intensive and more focused on bringing a sense of place and connection to the listener over high fidelity artificialities.

Can we explore obsolete technologies as potentials for more sustainable media consumption in the future?

and finally, How much communication and entertainment media is enough to attaina system that serves everyone on the planet fairly without contributing to ecological suicide?

My attempt to share my notes on two papers that turned into my new concept 😛
“What is noise? An inquiry into it’s formal properties” by Saeed Hydaralli and “Considering sound: reflecting on the language, meaning and entailments of noise.” by Khadijah White

Moving on from Murray Shaeffer’s affinity of [pure] soundscapes and [natural] sounds, contemporary noise theory recognises the subjectivity of noise. For example, the sound of a club space is perceived as pleasurable for those within it, and an annoyance for those outside. Noise is power for those who claim it. There is a need for some to reclaim their noise, to make noise, as in to demand their territory with sound. Sometimes silence and quietness is not peace but the sound of oppression.

I wrote a poem a few years ago.

Lost trapped, the boxen glow,
Boxed weepings, thin outlines:
people wisping, and for show.

Remove this to love nest,
Your fellow species walking about.
Shout!

Walking around London I can hear the silence of our species. The sounds of traffic and machinery is the loudest while humans tend to block their aural sensory awareness with headphones and noise cancellation. The decision to remove one’s sensory awareness in public space is a sign of our times. The snake of technological development eats itself. This digital space we enter with our listening devices is out of time and place. It’s a personalised space, more desirable as the physical reality around us becomes louder and alienating. Alienation cycles: if I sit in a cafe without my phone, I almost feel anti-social. To be looking up, looking around, becomes intrusive. Alienation feeds itself.

Last night I met a man called Gideon. He was praying out loud on the street, by telegraph hill. He was singing about God and we talked for a while. For me these connections are uplifting. Public space is where we encounter difference and where humans have always build collective movement. I beg to claim that the digital space is not enough.

“Noise… is a sound that reorients our attention away from that with which we are or wish to be engaged… Noise is always reflexively determined.” (Saeed Hydaralli) Who decides what is noise? What power structures are evident in policies around noise and sound making?

[My ideas around silence are not isolated to sound. There exists a silence in presence and connection. Whether it is noise or something else that brings us together, let’s experiment! Sound studies can look beyond sound as the only medium for change. ]

Perhaps with sound making we can break through the social alienation in public space. I have an idea!

{{{{{{{{Outdoor instruments.}}}}}}}}

Building public installations with acoustic instruments. Reusing old instruments and crafting new ones from waste materials. Not tied only to Western scales. Simple tones to heal the soundscape. Or noise to awaken attention and bring people together. Sounds to inspire listening. Some can be interactive, some will interact with the elements like wind and rain. A project, a community. Can these be made without electronics? Windchimes. A kalimba tied to a streetlamp. A guitar deconstructed and tied to a bench. A bike bell piano, all tied to a pole. A tibetan bowl, swaying from a tree. A set of glasses that fill in the rain. The instruments can encourage interaction with eachother and the environment.

Attatched can be a sign: “Hello there! Play a song for your neighbours.” “If you would like to send a recording or have a conversation, get in touch via email __@mail.com” Something like this. Imagine a compostion made from recordings of the public. Or a tiny book with reactions and thoughts about the project. Perhaps a map to explore the different instruments.

I am excited about the beginning of this very simple concept. It meets at an intersection of issues I am trying to understand and feel passionate about. It can return our attention to the environment around us. It recognises the issues in material sourcing for sound electronics, re-using as a sustainable pracitce and the simplicity of acoustic instruments for sound making. It can act as a noise maker, breaking through the “silence” of public space and encouraging interaction and expression. Perhaps it is an inversion of “spatialisation” ideology. Instead of composing an interior world for the listener to sit within, the object brings attention to it’s exterior. Listeners will come from all walks of life. Rather than being perched up in our sound labs in LCC, listening to high-concept sound art while poorer communites in Elephant and Castle are trying to survive day by day, can we try to interact more and return artistic artefact to a wider community? How can I understand my position as an artist who wants to reach out to pluralistic cultures outside of my own experience? Should I be able to reconstruct public space to fit my own vision of the futre?

Aesthetically it can be cute, simple, accessible. Perhaps people will come and destroy them. That will be another sound making event!

To research: outdoor instruments, public instruments, deconstructing instruments, windchime design, eco-sonic-media, listening in public space

Notes on “The matter of numbers” by José Cláudio Siqueira Castanheira.

Digitized sound is an inaccurate representation of reality as it pushes it through a mechanical grid. Biological listening neither has the capabilities to get a “whole” perspective of reality. Perhaps the defects in digital listening is in the activity of production and listening; sounds have no origin in space and time; the maker is lost. However realistic and accurate a virtual reality is, it extends the body out of time and space. The complexity of this infinite potentiality is overwhelming. We become lost.

Is it possible that technology will not save us?

The tools within us?

I am interested in researching how technologies affect our relationship to place, space and landscape. If we understand all developments of human behaviours as new technologies, we can see that “progress” includes a cycle of technologies finding solutions to the problems created by technologies. Social alienation is dampened by instantaneous connection. Noise pollution is blocked by noise cancellation technology. I am interested in these issues of social alienation and disconnection with the environment around us.

How can we study the affects of technologies such as the internet and mobile listening devices when we live within their functions? How can we remember what is forgotten?

My sense of urgency has been amplified by what I am learning in this year’s modules: multichannel and the digital sound design of environments are two examples of how we aim to create immersivity. To immerse in an art piece is to connect. The tools and levels of immersivity in art and entertainment develop as we live in the cusp of metaverse experience, or augmented and virtual realities becoming more integrated into daily experience. My urgency is a rejection of this development, so how can I express these feelings through the mediums we are learning in this course, when those mediums themselves go against my feelings? I use feelings to identify my practice as primarily an artistic one.

I think I would like to pursue the point that the environment is the most high fidelity and immersive medium of spatialisation we can find. I will build on my long walks around the city as a research practice and wellbeing practice, as I believe we can express and encourage wellbeing through art when it comes from a state of wellbeing.

Some points of research: noise cancellation, audiophilia, technology and memory loss, psycho geography.