SOUND GENERATION edited by alexis bhagat & gregory gangemi dummy lfirst page. Essentially we’re going to install hundreds of these seismic sensors into the building, so the whole building ecomes a giant microphone. All that sounds will be brought down to kind of a control matrix system where the auto mated live mix will be played into two pu blic elevator cabins. The elev ator becomes the listening chamber. Th ey’re interesting cabins beca use you enter on the street on one 11111111.000o.99998w9 contents Colloquy 6 Before Beginning: Origin 10 Before Beginning: Origin 16 Categories and Contexts 19 Cinema and Radio 28 Composition 39 What is Sound? Who is Listening? 47 Recording and Playback 57 Distribution 66 Sites of Performance 72 Bridges as Bells 77 The Soundscape 88 Rhythm/Power 98 Listening Essays 100 Just Between Us 110 The Energetics of Sound 120 On Sound Art and Other Terms 133 Bibliography about this book The pages bound here are reconstructed traces of a conversation involving some two dozen voices, a conversation that focused upon sound as shaped and deployed by two generations of artists who have seized upon developments in phonography and synthesis to bring forth new forms of sonic art. We would like to make clear that book you are holding in your hands is a map and not a history of sound art, though we had set out in search of a history. Our aim: a broad survey of contemporary sonic arts practices with focus on the role of recording technology, the relation- ship of sonic arts to traditional artistic disciplines, and the political ramifications of individual artist’s processes. What we gathered was a dizzying 400+ pages of interviews, as we invited artists working both in sound art and experimental music contexts, at various stages in their careers, widely spaced across the territory we aimed to traverse. Sifting through those raw transcripts, a history seemed more elusive than when we began. A comprehensive geneology of the class of art-object is out of the question; the idea that the constructional sustainers (the frameworks used as a support for art-objects) originate from a system of fundamental postulates is difficult to even imagine, let alone to trace. However, some boundaries and divisions within the art-area could be mapped out and, without attempting any systematic analysis, the attempt might be made to assign fairly definite positions to some of the concepts in this area: this, rather than hypothesize about a comprehensive geneology which would consist of tracing more than what is here considered applicable. And so we cut up the 400+ pages of interviews, and allowed the fragments to cluster and crystallize into the chapters which here follow. Considerations of personal history and training coalesced into “Beginnings.” The sound art/music question and other issues of tax- onomy became “Categories & Contexts.” “Cinema & Radio,” “What Is Sound? & Who Is Listening?” and “Composition” deal with self-evident topics. “Recording & Playback,” on the other hand, points to how wide the definitions of microphone and speaker may be stretched by artists. “Distribution” goes into depth with the history of Generator Sound Art, a storefront performance space in New York’s East Village, and discusses physicaliza- tion of sound in a variety of distribution contexts. “Sites of Performance” takes note of two tropes—appearance and immersion—through the work of Brenda Hutchinson and Francisco Lopez. The next three chapters are imaginary roundtables. “Bridges As Bells” puts Jodi Rose, who wanders the world listening to bridges, next to Mark Bain, who “treat[s] architecture as a bell.” “The Soundscape” puts acoustic-ecology pioneer Hildegard Westerkamp next to the duo O+A. In “Rhythm/Power,” Gregory Whitehead, tobias c. van Veen and Grey Filastine talk about danger, authority and beats. The three essays which follow the Colloquy further explore questions of context, technology, perception and power. [NEED MORE HERE] [ipso facto after two hundred end of the world how about it this is wait give me not two hundred sixty just sixty no eighty, seventy or eighty words ipso facto after two hundred end of the world how about it this is wait give me not two hundred sixty just sixty no eighty, seventy or eighty words this is it just about enough space, okay final copy to go in here, after the end of the world, don’t you know that yet?] ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: The editors would like to thank all of the contributors to Sound Generation for taking the time to share their experiences and perspectives with us, and for dealing with the many revisions of this text. Among the contributors, we would especially like to thank Ken Montgomery and Annea Lockwood for their intellectual generosity. We also would like to thank Experimental Intermedia, OfficeOps, Diapason Sound Gallery and Free103point9 for their support in the fundraisers for this publication, as well as all the performers at Aspects of Jupiter and Crystal Hearing. We must especially thank Tianna Kennedy for making these events possible. We also must thank Jason Quarles of Chronoplastics for his participation in the curatorial selections and for his interviews. Finally, we thank those individuals without whom this book never would have gone to press: Luisa Giugliano, for introducing the two of us to each other in the first place; Ben Meyers, for the immediacy with which he understood our project and for the very long time that he has shepherded us; Erika Biddle for her insights; and Atom Bobbette for catalyzing the completion of this book. Could you tell me about the beginning? Artist: How far back do you want to go? Wherever or whenever you locate the beginning. We’d like to designate an origin, to keep us from becoming lost. Artist: Well, origins are a tricky subject. Are you looking for something authoritative? Authority prohibits conversation. This is a conversation. Artist: Can you tell me something before we start? We’ve already started. Artist: Point taken. Now that we’ve started, could you tell me where you locate the origin? The origin of the entire terrain is an occurrence BEFORE BEGINNING: ORIGIN on a hot July day in 1877 in Menlo Park, New Jersey. Thomas Edison was singing “Mary Had A 1 “Edison understood. A month later he coined a new term for Little Lamb” into the first phonograph. Maybe. his telephone addition: phonograph. On the basis of this experi- ment, the mechanic Kruesi was given the assignment to build We’re not certain that everything is so simple, but an apparatus that would etch acoustic vibrations onto a rotating that remains the most useful origin for the terri- cylinder covered with tinfoil. While he or Kruesi was turning the tory in question.1 handle, Edison once again screamed into the mouthpiece—this time the nursery rhyme ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb.’ They moved Artist: Nothing is so simple. Of course, you the needle back and let the cylinder run a second time —and the first phonograph replayed the screams.... ‘Speech has could not be making a book like this without that become, as it were, immortal.’” Kittler (21) recorder of yours. 2. Deleuze & Guattari (4) 3. Marina Rosenfeld, ARTFORUM Have you heard that “there is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made?”2 Artist: Have you heard that “sound is the closest thing to a diagram of thought, in the sense that, to actually hear it and apprehend it, you have to simultaneously forget and remember, instant by instant?”3 Have you already forgotten what we’d asked sound generation you? Or are you ready to begin now? BEGINNING janek shafer: Basically, I was born an inventor. francisco lopez: I was born in Madrid, in Spain. pamela z: I’ve been doing music all my life. I knew from a pretty young age that that was going to be my area. janek: I always said to my dad that I wanted to be an inventor when I grew up, and it turns out that I am. christopher delaurenti: When I was 11, my only music teacher—my father—gave me piano lessons. Once, rather than perform my weekly assignment, I asked to play a piece of my own, “Daybreak in the People’s Republic of China.” I pinned the sustain pedal to the floor and improvised, slowly pressing and trawl- ing along the black keys with a few dissonant dips into the white keys. My father, a restaurant pianist, listened as he listens to all music, with eyes closed and fixed attention. “That wasn’t good,” he decreed, “but it wasn’t bad.” Since then, tactile, corporeal improvisation has remained the root of my music. tobias c. van veen: Saying anything on beginnings tends to give wrong impres- sions as there have been so many. Yet, as this concerns sound, and technology, I do wish to say that I took Suzuki violin from when I was seven. It gave me an apprecia- tion for learning by ear. I never learned to read note music. I learned to hear music. Becoming a DJ was made easier as I was used to hearing things and playing them back, to repeating cycles, loops, phrases, to connecting my ears to my fingers almost in the absence of visual clues. pamela: In high school I was doing music and writing songs. I played guitar and also sang in concert choir. And then I went to college, where I studied classical voice, bel canto. At the same time I was beginning this burgeoning career as a singer/song- writer. hildegard westerkamp: I studied music—piano and flute—in Germany.