A tribute to the recently passed pioneer sound artist.
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Month: December 2021
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Trevor Wishart
Trevor Wishart is an English composer and sound artist.
I found his book ‘Audible Design’, i’ve been finding it extremely interesting , really admire his view and philosophy on sound.
His exploration on granular synthesis is unlike anything ive seen. Using his own voice as his only sound source, and finding all the nuances by exploring the grains. In his talk ‘composing the real’, he elaborates what syllables and sounds can be used as different elements in his music. Really inspiring guy!
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Deep Listening
Deep Listening, as developed by Pauline Oliveros, explores the difference between the involuntary nature of hearing and the voluntary, selective nature of listening.
I fell really ill a couple weeks ago and was bedridden. For the whole day, I felt extremely overwhelmed by music or TV. – but I needed a source of distraction, so I decided to open the window and lose myself to the sounds of the environment – it was both meditative and entertaining and I felt like I could find many nuances to the sounds but none of the sounds I was listening to were intrusive to my thoughts. I felt like they just came and went. I felt connected to the practice of Pauline Oliveros which I studied last year.
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Dream Work
Tscherkassky’s films are as much about light and darkness in their purest physical forms as they are about any of the action one sees on screen. Rather, it’s light and darkness that interferes and intrudes into the lives of the characters on screen.
Tscherkassky looked to find a new direction for the Surrealist film tradition, by returning to Freud’s theories of The Interpretation of Dreams and the aesthetic principles laid down by André Breton in his original manifesto. Specifically, Dream Work (the final CinemaScope film) adheres to Breton’s conceived exploration of “Psychic automatism in its pure state”, investigating “the actual functioning of thought”.
Dream Work’s footage was copied by hand, frame by frame, on to unexposed film stock. It opens with a woman falling asleep.
TouchDesigner is a coding language, intended for multimedia and realtime visual art.
I enjoy using this program because of the user interface, it works in a similar way to a modular synthesizer. It also allows me easy use with Ableton.
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Alva Noto
Carsten Nicolai also known as Alva Noto is a sound artists and designer from Germany.
His work for his label Raster-Noton has been exploring minimalism in sound art for the past 20 years. This label was influenced by Bauhaus.
They were trying to find the most pure and minimal form of electronic music, only using the two most basic waveforms: sine waves and noise.
Nicolai’s work explores high frequencies. I particularly find interesting his audio-visual work, he started of by connecting a CD player into the video input of a TV, and managed to make the TV respond to his music. By using plucky high frequencies and interesting rhythms he got the TV dancing kaleidoscopically to his music.
This idea has expanded into his recent work, now in a bigger scale.
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Burnt Friedman
He’s been making some of the most interesting electronic music for the past 2o years, combing electronica, techno, idm, jazz and dub.
He’s music is intricate and complex but still communicates the universal language of music.
Friedman has collaborated with all sort of musicians, Atom TM, in their duo ‘Flanger’.
He has collaborated with legendary drummer Jaki Liebezeit from ‘Can’ and Mohammad Reza Mortazav
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No input mixing
Toshimaru Nakamura is in my opinion the best example of no input mixing. The music is experimental and beautiful.
Using the philosophies from Onkyo, and ideas from free improvisation.
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Ryoji Ikeda
Summer, 180 The Strand, Immersive RYOJI IKEDA exhibition
Ryoji Ikeda as for long been an influential audio-visual artist.
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Glitch Art
Ive explored data-bending and data-moshing.
I started off by using Audacity, which I originally thought of as a simple audio editing platform, i discovered that you can import files as RAW data. Using any sort of file in your computer and converting that into audio, then editing that audio with effects, time stretching, etc. And then exporting the file as the original extension not as audio.
Meaning that a .mp4 or a .jpeg file can be edited as audio an exported as a video or photo file.
This is crazy, all files are 0 and 1’s. So a wav file and a pdf are in their core the same thing. This gave me some fun and experimental digital techniques.