technologies and techniques
for extracting music from the world
in the world
It is a trivial matter to do all manner of manipulations to sonic materials in a studio setting. When in the field, however, a new story emerges. One in which control is relinquished to nature, and an artist needs to be prepared. It becomes an improvisation. A conversation. It would be nice to have a grammar available to make the most of such a conversation.
This is where my project comes in. As an effort to develop and utilize techniques and tools that will allow myself and others to converse with nature, in nature. I have several projects, past and present, that have touched on this idea. Traditionally this work is done in a studio, in a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), and is highly composed. Even when the organics of improv creep into such a work, it is still locked into a recording, or several recordings that are only later triggered at the right time.
My intention is to investigate techniques and technologies that can provide an artist the opportunity to act and react to the place they are in. My explorations will fall into four catagories.
sound sources
modulators
manipulators
deployments
Sound Sources
Analyze sites for possible sound sources. Try different microphone setups, placement and polar patterns. Survey sites for possible Electromagnetic field generators that can be picked up with EM microphones. Utilize spectral analysis and FFT filtering techniques to isolate particular sounds present at the site. Catalog sources of interest for future investigations.
Mount Rainier Soundscape Spectogram - wikipedia
Modulators
Analyze sites for modulation sources. Utilizing sensors and geographic data. Sensors such as Light, humidity, soil PH, wind, motion. Tap into weather and seismic data from public data sets provided by satelites and other sources.
Manipulators
How to stitch it all together. Develop delays and filters and connect the sound sources with modulators. Write the synthesis and sampling softwares to handle this web. Develop hardware interfaces utilizing single board computers, such as bela and rPi platforms, and other opensource hardware options, such as monome grid.
Deployments
Explore multichannel speaker configurations in situ. Wired speakers as well as wireless. Can noise cancelation tehcniques e used to mitigate unnecesary feedback loops with regard to microphone inputs? The use of resonators, to use the place itself as a means of amplification.
There will also be the development of methodolgies. That is to say, what should be done when approaching a site? Setting up systems, finding potential sources for sounds and modulations. Can a checklist be created? Best practices? Not knowing what a piece will or can be, at this moment, I can envision a situation where, I armed with a laptop and some mics and sensors, set up in a park, or on a sidewalk, and deploy a few bluetooth speakers in the vicinity, then begin to augment the sonic reality of the space. Is this preceded by visits to the site beforehand, once? twice? A week before? A day?
This endeavor is a journey to answer some of the questions that I have now, but, possibly more importantly, it is also an effort to learn what the best questions to ask even are. I have a vision, and I have a confidence that the technology is here, I am only trying to put together the time and focus to stitch together the disparate parts into a language that I will be able to utilize for my own future work. To also share this knowledge and resources with others so that I may hear what they have to say as well.
tenuis
This first excerpt is from a longer piece, 7:19, which I began in '21. It is using a looped field recording of a stream as a natural noise source that is filtered and delayed to extract the tones that we hear. This was my first hands on effort to manipulate the natural world. And it is a technique I have expanded into realtime sources for this current project.
shores:constant
This excerpt is the next in my journey, this time, instead of using real world sounds, I set out to synthesize real world sounds, in this case the waves on the shore. The piece has no beginning or end, except for when we choose to engage or not. It is built with a modular synthesizer and some custom software and when engaged, will play on forever, creating a world that feels similar, but is never the same. I liken it to opening a window that is facing the shore. More can be heard here.
