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https://soundcloud.com/madison-major/sets/recipe-for-baking-two-humans-together/s-QAD8h

Other than school this has been my sound work this semester. (This is a private link it comes out June 1st)

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Excercise 5:

Event score for Fluxus movement, original artist G. Brecht 1959.

I did this at work, so that felt like it was in true Fluxus fashion. The next event is me gets tting fired.

George Brecht was interesting because he was also a chemist. He called his own art the study of the everyday, I found this concept really interesting. Scores like drip music almost study life on this cellular level, and having a listener participate in that is moving. It is really a distinct level of attention. My performance was not near as theatrical as it can typically be seen, but I think that exposes another aspect of the score, which is the mundanity of moving parts.

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Fluxus Score pt 2

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Fluxis Score

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Text score exercise:

Me (a barista) making a drink and handing to angry New York coffee drinkers.

Sounds featured: espresso machine whirrs, buzzes, and pushes. Also, the sounds of the espresso being pulled and placed.

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(These are the pages from the book I used for my final.)

Original Photography, Collages, and Scans by Lily Engelmaier

Text by Madison Major

2019

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(Champ Major)

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Final Project: “In the spring, my house became infested with lady bugs. They lived in the window sill. There were hundreds. I held as many as fifty in my hand. Was it good luck? “

For the final, I was interested in exploring how sound can ignite memories in the brain, like seeing a picture or smelling something familiar. Along with that, trying to get an emotional response from that recollection was an aspect of this project. I was seeking to find a whole picture of fragmented moments of memory from my childhood.

I wrote a series of documentary poems. This has been an ongoing project. Most of the memories are from a time in my childhood that required a lot of emotional energy. So, the project was more about digging up repressed images that didn’t have to do with the traumatic events that I was experiencing. I became really obsessed this year with wondering about what everyone else in my life was doing and feeling when I was seven/eight. And, for a long time I couldn’t recount the everyday details of my childhood because of the extremities that my family and I faced in 2006, 2007, and 2008.

This project was somewhat about reclamation and reclamation of innocence, but also about documenting the memory of others presence in my life, and my presence in my own life.

I used voice as the primary sound manipulation device. It felt symbolic of change in the physical. My voice has obviously altered since I was a kid, but it is still my words that I am choosing, basically in an adapted vehicle, my body. I also chose to use voice because I feel that reading someone else’s words can actually rob them of the qualities and specificities of their actual tonal voice.

I was inspired by the Aura Satz reading Shapes with the Sound of their Own Making. It begins with a description of the Chladni Plate Phenomena. “The abstract forms are an indexical trace, and yet they appear to point to a symbolic code that cannot be easily deciphered. in observing these sound scripts, one has an experience that suggests both an intuitively genuine synchronicity and simultaneity, and, at the same time, a language which remains perceptually obscure. it is as if the close interlocking of the sense of hearing and the sense of sight might reveal something of the true nature of their connection, a language on the threshold of formation, and yet in perceiving it one remains unable to apprehend the code or read it back.” (Satz 2)

The perpetually obscure aspects of my project, and the inability to apprehend the code or read back the form is actually something the project is built on. I was trying to build an amorphous space to house a representation of image and the difficulties of memory through sound.

To me, this was the cornerstone of the work I was trying to do with this project. I understood that only writing the fragmented memories would only extenuate the obscurity of my experience, but by combining it with sound and with photos and photo recreations done by my photographer friend, Lily, that maybe a whole sense of the world around me at that time could be felt. The relationship between sound and sight is essential to this project. There were a lot of things that I wrote about in this that I would do a lot to make more real again, and also at the same time I didn’t want to obscure their realness in poetics and recollection. Although, I am sure that I did.

But, to find that relationship between the sound and the sight to give life to these places and people again, was an obsessive mission for me.

Before me, there was a long path of thinking that utilized these ideas, notably Margaret Watts Hughes’ Ediphone, theosophists Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbeater, film-makers Walter Ruttman, Hans Richter, and Viking Eggeling, instruments makers Mary Ellen Bute and Thomas Wilfred with help from Leon Theremin, and finally John Cage. They all explored the relationship between physical and tangible things and images, and their correlating sound make up/ relationship.

Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbeater thought  that sound and writing could match up in such a way that it would be memetic of the universe as a whole, or of creation and God. That sound could create a shape just so, enough to make someone believe deeper in the form, or higher forms of things. That, if there was a relationship, specifically between sound and word, it could conjure a more complete picture of all the inner workings of the Universe. “The synesthetic correlation between sound, form, and color held the promise of rendering a highly subjective experience as objective.” (4)

So, if sound, object, form and color could come together to make a highly subjective experience objective, this is what I sought to do. If only to make them alive again for a moment.

Other than the theoretical aspects of this project, I also used some technique we discussed in class. I think that the voice reflects heavily the ideas of acousmatics, and the inability to perceive at an exact moment the source and subject of the sound. I relied also on the idea of acousmatics that it would make up an environment or soundscape that is indecipherable, so that the listener could live in a kind of imaginary space to be able to recall my memories. It also could be categorized as drone, since it is the repetition of certain sound.

To make this piece, I used Spear (Sinusoidal Partial Editing Analysis and Resynthesis). Spear works by dividing up the partials to an inputed sound, and then it is able to resynthesize the sonic waves frequencies, placements, and duration. I made this piece with a lot of cutting and adding of different sections of the partials. I slowed down a lot of the audio, and using Ableton, I added a very heavy layering of filters. I used different granular synthesis filters, and did a lot of arranging so that the small individual clips from Spear would be timed effectively to create sonic interest. It was sang in my voice. The arranging was done based on the arrangement of the book and photographs.

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Midterm Proposal

For the midterm I am composing pieces to accompany a documentary poetry book I am making with my roommate who is a photographer. It is based on memory fragments that I have from my childhood. My roommate recreated certain visual scenes from my fragmented memory from the writing, and I will recreate sound pieces from her images and the writing of the fragments of memory. 

The philosophy behind this is the appeal to fragments and fragments making up larger pieces. Also, the idea that if something fragmented is altered than the whole will be altered as well. 

Sonically, I am taking fragments of sound and using Spear to remove harmonics and replace harmonics. Using, this technology I can add, subtract and move layers of sound waves and harmonics. 

I am using Ableton to rearrange bits of it, to suit the visuals and text. 

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(Champ Major)

I have never thought of Phonography as theft. Perhaps, because I grew up in the age of digital sharing and sampling. As sound becomes more accessible, I guess the more willing we have to be to share it.

Obviously, there is a line. I don’t know many people who would like to take work that is already made by someone else and claim it solely as there own if there were no creative changes to it. I think that the reward comes in making the project, not putting it out so to me there would be no value in just taking another person’s work for what it is claiming it to be mine. But, I think if real creative effort was put in to differentiate the new project from the original, it is anyone’s right to own. Giving credit is of course polite, but also in the age of information we could very easily find out if work was not original and I’m sure that it wouldn't be widely accepted if someone was claiming unchanged work as their own. “Professional developers of the musical landscape know and lobby for the loopholes in copyright. On the other hand, many artistic endeavours would benefit creatively from a state of music without fences, but where, as in scholarship, acknowledgement is insisted upon.” (Oswald)

As far as making things go, once you give the art to the world it no longer belongs to the artist. But, on the other hand, I don’t think anything would be made if the artist wasn’t taking in other people’s work as well. So, really it is a balance and questions we have to ask ourselves. What is the intention here? I am giving something away, but I am also taking a lot as well.

(Iv’e always really liked John Oswald’s website design and how you have to click on different letters to get to his essays.)

From John Oswald’s Plunderphonic Essay:

“All popular music (and all folk music, by definition), essentially, if not legally, exists in a public domain. Listening to pop music isn't a matter of choice. Asked for or not, we're bombarded by it.”

Proposing their game plan to apprehend the Titanic once it had been located at the bottom of the Atlantic, oceanographer Bob Ballard of the Deep Emergence Laboratory suggested "you pound the hell out of it with every imaging system you have."

To me, this means that actively pursuing and repurposing sound, music, and sound art will help to achieve a greater sense of purpose and dive deeper into its truest and most pure form, when we distort it by passing it through body to body.

Creative Response:

I made a short sampled sound piece using Ableton and Spear. I used various distortion exercises (bit reduction, tube distortion, chopping the samples) and I also cut out many harmonic layers (Spear), sped things up and slowed things down. In Spear, I also took harmonic layers and patched them around.

Materials used:

How Will I Know Isolated Vocals Whitney Houston

A Live Set of “Smiling” by the band Cross Record

Sufjan Stevens Untitled All Delighted People Side D

Why?

Because I’ve been listening to these things.

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Exercise #6

Tape Loop Process Piece

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I worked on a process based piece with Jack. We made a tape loop that was as long as the apartment, ran it through the kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom. It was a process based piece because we planned it’s destruction. We used knives, sandpaper, rubbing against the wood that was used as a capstan. We worked on this together because it was such a physically involved and large thing that we needed four hands. I served as the runner and followed the tape splice so that we could see how long the loop was so we could measure the time effectively. 

It was complex because the slow gradual process of destruction, made it very tedious. Dealing with long pieces of tape was difficult and required precision to keep it running while maintaining the pureness of its process destruction without much human interference. 

As the tape looped, it became more and more destroyed. 

______________________________________________________________________

Duration: 46 mins 

Tools: Tape, Razor Blade, Sandpaper, Wooden Cabinet, Splicing Tape, Cutting Block, Mic Stands, Electrical Tape, Pocket Knives, Uher 4000 Report Monitor

Partner: Jack Follansbee

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Exercise #7

What is sound art? 

Sound art stretches the imagination of the listener/viewer and stretches the utilitarian use of sound. Sound used in everyday life becomes signals, and in music it is a temporal art form and gathers meaning generated as a collective whole. Sound art can allow meaning to be generated by an individual and loses the temporal aspects of music. Like looking at an abstract visual the listener can become lost in time while hearing sound art, and can choose to focus on subjective items within it. Sound art takes a risk to become art freestanding with no other factors needed to generate meaning other than itself. Sound art can be uncategorizable. It is based on pure sonic interest. 

What does a sound artist do? 

A sound artist manages possibilities and boundaries within sound, in an attempt to make a piece of art in itself. 

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This piece is called Chicken Soup. 

(The yellow highlighted graphics above are excerpts from Christoph Cox’s Sound Art and the Sonic Unconscious. p. 19, 20, 21, 22, 25)

I wrote most of this while I was in an airplane. I am a nervous flyer, and it feels very unnatural to me.

I was in a tiny turbulent regional airplane, and I was trying to distract myself so I started recording the sounds of the airplane. I am very cognizant of the sounds of the airplane while I am flying, always trying to make sure everything sounds as it should. Since I have to travel so much by air nowadays, I find that I always notice airplanes up in the sky, there is a path airplanes take flying over my street. Sometimes, I will sit outside and watch them and remember when I was that high up in the air, and it seems so unnatural. I shouldn’t have been that high up.

As I was arranging the different pieces of noise, I found that I began to frame my ideas in Cox’s idea of “pure becoming”, and the aspects of sound that are dependent upon the position in which the sound is created and the sound is then perceived. Like all art, the positions that occupy the creation and the reception determine an entirely unique situation, almost impossible to replicate, and function to serve an aspect of art that I find essential. Which is condition and function. More than that, I find most of the work in a piece of art to be so separated from the artist or the goal itself that you end up with a piece entirely made of chance circumstance, imitating life. I felt very connected to that when making this piece, because I felt as the maker so out of control to the finished project. I also didn't want complete control, it is more fascinating to ride it out, rather than dictate each choice sometimes.

I used Ableton. My inspirations from class and beyond were Christoph Cox’s Sound Art and the Sonic Unconscious article, the soundscapes of Pierre Schaeffer, the vibrations of La Monte Young’s Dream House, Maryanne Amacher’s melodies and low reaching and high screeching, and Meredith Monk’s vocals and video for 16 mm Earrings. I also saw Julia Holter and Jessica Moss at Warsaw and it has taken up a large portion of my brain space since then, and I’m sure has inevitably creeped in.

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“A Warm Bath for the Ears, if that’s what you choose.”

A graphic score I made using Harmonic Partials, Time, and Amplitude. 

It is a duet for two people I made using a Harmonic Series Partial Generator on Max MSP.  The duration is written in time marks on the side, loudness is implicated, as well as fundamental duration and partial duration. 

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Graphic Score Work

I chose a piece called “Tuning Score for the Nervous System (An Experiment to Envisage New Sound)” by Kathleen Anderson on Copper Foil, Paint, and Paper.

This piece was written in response to John Cage’s quotes on being in the anechoic chamber, and the two pitched sounds of his body being heard. The high pitched and low pitched noises of his nervous system and blood stream.

The philosophical idea behind this piece is that different “tunings” of our nervous system can be indicative of our state of being. With that, it is possible to tune precisely to a zero point and recalibrate our own “sound” to produce inner healing.

The red band represents a body’s spinal cord dividing the right and left sides of the body. The artist says, “As all things exist in a symphony of major and minor keys of polarity, the human body polarities are described as: left side/negative feminine and the right side/positive masculine.”

“The ideal nervous system tuning is the Perfect Fifth with a frequency ratio of 3:2, an interval of seven semi-tones between notes. Sympathetic Vibration, the communication of sound from one body to another, as in tuning forks, acts as transmitter and receiver tuning to the same frequency of vibration.”

https://soundcloud.com/user-75162967 (Examples of Interpretations of the Graphic Score) 

https://kathleenandersonblog.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/tuning-score-for-the-nervous-system-writing.pdf (more information and artist’s blog)

I put this in conversation with George Cacioppo’s Cassiopeia that was in John Cage’s book Notations. I chose to compare these two because of the symmetrical qualities of the score and the line work that follow some sort of time scheme up to the player and listener. Cassiopeia was made in 1962. It is described to have “an extraordinarily efficient encoding of how the notes move from one to another”.

“"CASSIOPEIA is a kind of improvised music. As in other improvised music, decisions are made about pitches, loudness, speed and rhythm articulations, and selections of instruments.The one-page score is a chart of possibilities. It is also a psychovisual stimulus. It supplies the performer with possible pitches, possible ways they follow one another, and relative loudness. The brainlike image at the center is pure 'Rorschach.' The performer plays whatever the image conjures in the mind. The score does not provide precise rhythm and duration. The way the score looks influences the way the performer interprets the music."

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Response To John Cage on Nothing

Response to 4′33″, Future of Music Credo, and Music of Changes

John Cage had a distinct personal philosophy on the function and purpose of music. His musical philosophy had various connections to Eastern religious ideas, like chance controlled music and indeterminacy. Cage also began to think of musical practice as meditation to create space for the divine because he couldn’t accept that music was for the purpose of communication. He felt his early works were misinterpreted. He was also interested in Ananda Coomaraswamy’s writings that offered the idea that the artist’s job was to imitate nature. He came to the conclusion that there was no distinction between sound and silence, music and non-music, humanity and nature. I interpret this to mean, that like nature the purpose of anything (in this case music and sound) is left up to chance or unknown devices to humanity.Cage calls it the “principle of organization or man’s common ability to think.” The thought this sparks for me is that it is up to each maker or listener of music to decide the world in which the work lives. Each sound or lack of, including the order of them, contribute to a space or world that the piece lives in. That each act of silence is space for a sound to be heard or pulled from, and each act of sound is a chance for silence. This mimics nature, or community, in which the individual contribution eventually makes up the whole. That, like living, there is a small bit of control, big responsibility, big acts of searching, big acts of listening to relate to nature and being a part of humanity, and big acts of being open and aware. A whole balance that has to be achieved, in theory and musically.

Quotes:

“what we require is silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking.”

“our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing. anything therefore is a delight.”

“if there are no questions, there are no answers. If there are questions, then of course, there are answers.