Voice and Acoustic Feedback in Performance

Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

Surname/Family Name : Normoyle Given Name/s : Kusum Abbreviation for degree as give in the University calendar : MFA Faculty : Faculty Art & Design School :

Solid (Loud) Matter: Voice and Acoustic Feedback in Thesis Title : Performance

Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE)

This practice-based research project investigates the material relations of the voice to amplification and spatiality. In particular, through both live performance and its mediatised documentation, I explore my embodied production of non-linguistic vocalisations. As these are transduced through audio amplification at volume, I ask: what can be generated for different ‘vocalic spaces’ through the combinations of acoustic/amplified feedback, non-linguistic vocalisation, and bodily performance?

Through my performances S.I.T.E: Tension Sets (2013) and Magnesite Norway (2016), I discuss my techniques for voice and audio amplification and their interrelation in space, in concert with an analysis of approaches by Robert Ashley and Joan La Barbara who employ the voice as vibrational force. Motivated by a reconceptualisation of sound, voice and listening as vibration – with reference to Nina Sun Eidsheim’s concept of intermateriality and her rethinking of sound via vibration – this research seeks to come to terms with what can be experienced via these interrelations. I also draw on the concept of sonic dominance developed by Julian Henriques to further situate how amplification contributes to a practice of intermateriality.

Further, this research identifies tensions between the multisensorial experience of sound in live performance and its documentation. Exploring processes of technological mediation used by myself in video installation Accord with Air: Tjentište (2012), I trace various signals through their transductive paths of transmission in works by artists Joyce Hinterding, David Haines and Robin Fox. I generate vibratory, visual supplementations of sound on screen as a means of affective transference. Through an exploration of the syncretic relation of sound and moving image, I distinguish the importance of sound’s transmission in physical space and its embodied experience for the creation of the sonic ‘grounding’ pursued in my performances. Examining the relation of these vocal acts to space, this project investigates the ways in which the voice makes space in varying acoustic fields and technical assemblages that traverse inside and outside contexts.

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This thesis has publications (either published or submitted for publication) ☐ incorporated into it in lieu of a chapter and the details are presented below

CANDIDATE’S DECLARATION I declare that: • I have complied with the UNSW Thesis Examination Procedure • where I have used a publication in lieu of a Chapter, the listed publication(s) below meet(s) the requirements to be included in the thesis. Kusum Normoyle 08/02/2021

Solid (Loud) Matter: Voice and Acoustic Feedback in

Performance

Kusum Normoyle

A thesis in fulfilment of requirements for the degree of

Master of Fine Art

Faculty of Art and Design

2020

i Acknowledgements

This thesis was conceived across a number of years, exhibition projects and diverse geographies throughout which I received the support of various friends, peers, and institutions. My sincere gratitude goes to my supervisors Douglas Kahn and Anna

Munster for their insight, guidance, expertise, and patience. I also thank the curators and festival directors who have supported the development of my work, Emily Cormack,

Robert Cook, Lawrence English, Caleb Kelly, Thomas Supple, Joel Stern, and Dani

Zuvela. I thank the technicians at UNSW Art and Design, namely Ant Banister and Toby

Gilbert for their time and generosity of spirit. The projects within these pages have benefitted from the creative input, skill and support of my network of friends and peers.

I thank Ella Barclay, Hethre Contant, Luke Dearnley, Nicholas Garner, David Haines,

Joyce Hinterding, Astrid Lorange, Ivan Lysiak, Matt McGuigan, Emily Morandini, Gail

Priest, Mette Rasmussen, Mikhaela Rodwell and, Lasse Marhaug. Gratitude goes to my family for their encouragement and curiosity, with special thanks to Anne Normoyle and Karsten Hansen for their steady support and practical generosity. I am indebted to my friend, collaborator and copy writer extraordinaire, Peter Blamey. This thesis is infused with our conversations about sound and music, and, is a by-product of your steady, unassuming wit and intelligence. Finally, thank you to my husband Dave

Fernandes. This project’s completion is owed to your kind-hearted patience and loving support, financial and otherwise.

ii Abstract

iii Further, this research identifies tensions between the multisensorial experience of sound in live performance and its documentation. Exploring processes of technological mediation used by myself in video installation Accord with Air: Tjentište (2012), I trace various signals through their transductive paths of transmission in works by artists Joyce

Hinterding, David Haines and Robin Fox. I generate vibratory, visual supplementations of sound on screen as a means of affective transference. Through an exploration of the syncretic relation of sound and moving image, I distinguish the importance of sound’s transmission in physical space and its embodied experience for the creation of the sonic

‘grounding’ pursued in my performances. Examining the relation of these vocal acts to space, this project investigates the ways in which the voice makes space in varying acoustic fields and technical assemblages that traverse inside and outside contexts.

iv Documentation

This thesis is accompanied by a webpage (via the link below) that provides images and video documentation of each practice-based element completed towards this research.

Documentation of works pertaining to each chapter is presented on separate pages within the link below. Although the thesis is written to be intelligible in the absence of documentation, it is suggested that examiners consult documentation of each of my works as they are raised in the thesis. Additionally, time references are provided in body text and image captions where particular aspects of performances and artworks are discussed. www.kusumnormoyle.net/MFA

v Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ii

Abstract iii

Documentation v

List of Figures vii

Introduction 2

Chapter One: Voice in and as Space and Feedback 23

Amplified Vocalisations 24

The Vocalic Space of S.I.T.E: Tension Sets 33

Composing with Feedback: The Wolfman 43

Chapter Two: Voice to Video Mediations 52

Performance Mediatisation 55

Accord with Air: Tjentiste 57

Chapter Three: Playing in the Field, Grounding the Voice 70

Joan La Barbara and Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas 72

Magnesite Norway 78

Two Acoustic Fields and their Outcomes 82

Conclusion: Amplifying the Body Beyond 2020 95

Reference list 103

vi List of Figures

Figure 1. Kusum Normoyle, Solid (Loud) Matter, 2019. 1

Figure 2. Kusum Normoyle, S.I.T.E: Ljubljana, 2011. 31

Figure 3. Kusum Normoyle, S.I.T.E: Sound Full, 2013. 32

Figure 4. Kusum Normoyle, S.I.T.E: Tension Sets, 2013. 33

Figure 5. The Museum of Contemporary Art, foyer, Sydney. 35

Figure 6. Three-way amplification assemblage for S.I.T.E: Tension Sets, 2013. 38

Figure 7. Kusum Normoyle, S.I.T.E: Tension Sets, 2013. 40

Figure 8. Kusum Normoyle, S.I.T.E: Tension Sets, 2013. 41

Figure 9. Hard Hat performance still, 2014. 43

Figure 10. Robert Ashley, The Wolfman, album cover. 45

Figure 11. Robert Ashley, The Wolfman (1964), ‘The Voice Part’, instructions. 46

Figure 13. Kusum Normoyle, Accord with Air: Tjentiste, 2012. 57

Figure 14. Kusum Normoyle, Accord with Air: Tjentiste, 2012. 61

Figure 15. Kusum Normoyle, Accord with Air: Tjentiste, 2012. 61

Figure 16. David Haines and Joyce Hinterding, The Levitation Grounds, 2000. 66

Figure 17. David Haines and Joyce Hinterding, The Levitation Grounds, 2000. 66

Figure 18: Robin Fox, Backscatter, 2004. 68

Figure 19: Robin Fox, Backscatter, 2004. 68

Figure 20. Joan La Barbara and Alvin Lucier rehearsing, at Merce Cunningham’s studio, 76

1974.

Figure 21. Google map of Magnesite Norway driving route, 2016. 80

Figure 22. Kusum Normoyle, Magnesite Norway, 2018. 83

Figure 23. Kusum Normoyle and Mette Rasmussen, 84

Magnesite Norway: Skjervsfossen waterfall, 2016.

vii Figure 24. Kusum Normoyle and Mette Rasmussen, 87

Magnesite Norway: Skjervsfossen waterfall, 2016.

Figure 25. Kusum Normoyle and Mette Rasmussen, 87

Magnesite Norway: Skjervsfossen waterfall, 2016.

Figure 26. Norwegian Museum of Hydro Power and Industry, exterior. 89

Figure 27. Norwegian Museum of Hydro Power and Industry, internal hall. 89

Figure 28. Kusum Normoyle and Mette Rasmussen, 92

Magnesite Norway: Turbine Hall A, 2016.

Figure 29. Kusum Normoyle and Mette Rasmussen, 92

Magnesite Norway: Turbine Hall A, 2016.

Figure 30. Kusum Normoyle and Mette Rasmussen, 93

Magnesite Norway: Turbine Hall B, 2016.

Figure 31. Kusum Normoyle and Mette Rasmussen, 93

Magnesite Norway: Turbine Hall B, 2016.

Figure 32. Kusum Normoyle with Peter Blamey and Hethre Contant, 100

Slow/ Dark (publication), 2016.

Figure 33. Kusum Normoyle, Solid (Loud)Matter, 2018. 101

Figure 34. Kusum Normoyle, Solid (Loud)Matter, 2018. 102

viii

Figure 1. Kusum Normoyle, Solid (Loud) Matter II, at Borderlands, Dark MOFO, Hobart, Australia, 2019. Photo by Jesse Hunniford.

1 Introduction

Performativity, properly construed, is not an invitation to turn everything (including material

bodies) into words; on the contrary, performativity is precisely a contestation of the excessive

power granted to language to determine what is real.

Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity:

Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter”

This thesis is an exploration of the relationship of my voice, body and its immediate world as manifested in a series of performance and video artworks I made between

2012 and 2019.1 My performances undertaken during this research are amplified voice events that take place in a range of indoor and outdoor locations, and the video installations draw on the documentation of these performances to create discrete artworks. However discrete the outcomes, they all commence with my voice and a repertoire of non-linguistic vocalisations I perform through a highly physical performance technique, which I amplify at volume, creating audio feedback and signal over-modulation or distortion.2 The purpose of this research, especially this written

2 dissertation, is to discuss what happens in my work when these elements combine and to investigate their relation to the spaces within which they occur.

My practice takes screaming, acoustic feedback, sonic resonance and intervention, and puts them to work in outdoor, gallery, experimental and dance music contexts. My work is particularly focused on the relation of body, voice and acoustic feedback to audio amplification systems of scale. As alluded to in the above quote from Karen Barad, the actual physical act of performing in my work is taken up as an opportunity to locate the powers of voice beyond the remit of rationality and language. Through my work, I am interested in placing myself within the circuit of amplification, simultaneously existing between the input and output of signal as a radical and personalised form of energy experience. It is my aim to impart to the reader of this dissertation and the viewer of my documented artwork that in my practice I am preoccupied with the cultivation of circumstances in which a limited set of elements—voice, body, audio amplification, and space—combine in order to exert, transmit and receive embodied, acoustic and vibrational energies.

To varying degrees, all of the vocal practices explored in this research are associated with the term extended vocal technique. Developed to describe technical innovations in vocal musical expression throughout the 1960s and 1970s post-war American avant- garde, the term is a descendant of extended technique—unconventional methods for using musical instruments to produce new sounds— and covers techniques and characteristics

3 such as vocal harmonics; embodied resonance, glossolalia, timbral modulations, trills, ululations, volume modulation, pitch intonation, and screaming.3 Key proponents of extended vocal technique in performance and composition include Luciano Berio, John

Cage, Cathy Berberian, Joan La Barbara, Meredith Monk and Yoko Ono. The Center for

Music Experiment and the linguistics department at University of San Diego formed the

Extended Vocal Technique Ensemble in 1972 with the aim of pragmatically devising a lexicon of vocal sounds, which would represent the new possibilities for vocal sounds that emerged during this period.4 Therefore, extended vocal technique as a term signifies attempts to name, quantify and catalogue the extra-normal vocality of the avant-garde, however, the vocal slippages on which these practices hinge can be traced to numerous Indigenous and traditional musics around the world, as well as animal- tending vocalisations, and also historically more recent developments such as vocal jazz improvisation.5

Another non-semantic tradition of vocal performance occurred with what poet and theorist Steve McCaffery describes as a second phase of Western sound poetry, including the Russian and Italian Futurists, and Zurich Dada, who bridged music and poetry within the context of the avant-garde.6 Another phase commenced with the commercial availability of the tape recorder in the 1950s, allowing the voice to not only be easily recorded, but also to be cut up, sped up, slowed down, layered and manipulated.7 French artist, musician and pioneer of the poésie sonore (sound poem)

Henri Chopin (1922–2008) was responsible for a number of experiments at the

4 juncture of voice, body and tape that are crucial to the history of voice and materiality.8

Placing the microphone in his mouth and down his throat, Chopin captured the ordinarily imperceivable sounds of vocal physiology to reveal what he described as the

“natural qualities” of the voice and its sonic “micro-particles.”9 The physicality of

Chopin’s work extended to his live performances in which he would reproduce the studio compositions, using multiple tape recorders and loudspeaker arrays in real time to multiply his voice.10 For Chopin, live performance was an opportunity to present his work “directly—not so much in terms of its composition—but in terms of its existence as something emerging between the tape-recorder, the loudspeakers, and the dimension of physical presence.”11

Scholarly attention has been cast across the diverse ways in which the voice operates to express, communicate and make meaning beyond language.12 Roland Barthes’ “The

Grain of the Voice” is an early declaration of the powers of the voice beyond the semiotic realm, suggesting that in order to grasp the significance of the voice beyond the message it delivers, we must listen to the articulations of the body or the vocal “grain” in vocality.13 Similarly, Steven Connor has detailed the sundry guttural, fricative hums and hisses produced by the material physiology of the voice in non-linguistic utterance.14

However, while Barthes and Connor are have contributed to scholarship on voice and materiality at different times, both provide fundamental contributions to the primary sense in which the materiality of the voice is understood as encompassing all that passes

5 across vocal physiology; including the mouth, tongue, throat, larynx and their relations to a more extended corporeality involved in vocal sound production.

Likewise, the voice at the intersection of technology and conceptions of materiality has gained traction in recent media studies scholarship. The paradoxical nature of voice as both embodied and disembodied, the voice as a medium by way of its interrelation with processes and technologies of recording, and the performativity of the voice via technological mediation are just some of the subjects explored in a collection of essays edited by Norie Neumark, Ross Gibson, and Theo van Leeuwen.15 Milla Tiainen in her reflection on Neumark’s discussion of the alterity of the voice states that by “physical vibration and audible sounds and signs, voices irrevocably exceed the subject or body— whether organic or technological—that acts as their source. While doing so, they by the same token interrelate bodies, subjects, and spatial, material-social milieus.”16

The burgeoning field of voice studies also provides useful insights to the discussion of the materiality of the voice.17 An initiative by Nina Sun Eidsheim and Annette Schlichter,

Keys to Voice Studies: Terminology, Methodology, and Questions Across Disciplines, is a cross- disciplinary collective of researchers working to develop tools for interpreting “the material production of the voice” across contingent fields of research.18 One of the ‘keys’ of this project, labelled “materiality,” they characterise through “Amplitude; Authenticity;

Consonant; Fundamental Frequency; Grain; Language/Writing/Text; Loudness;

Metaphor/Figure; Pitch; and Power.”19 The inclusion of these elements supports an

6 argument central to Eidsheim’s analysis of intermaterial vibration: that sound and voice are dependent on the materials through which they are conducted and realised.20

There has been increased focus on the multifaceted ways that voice functions in contemporary culture and society through numerous exhibition and festival programmes. 21 In 2008, Hey Hey Glossolalia: Exhibiting the Voice presented a series of events based on a diverse set of approaches to exhibiting the voice across forms.22 The

Voice is a Language was a performance and screening programme based on the legacy of avant-garde pioneer Meredith Monk, first staged at Tramway, Glasgow in 2010 and later reconfigured by Electra’s Her Noise Symposium in 2012 at Tate Modern.23 Presented in 2013 by the Performa Institute, New York, concert/symposium Loudspeaker: A

Symposium for Extra-Normal Vocals considered “the historic grounding of extended vocal technique as well as current developments within contemporary avant-garde performance.” 24 The Voice Studies Now conference in 2017 explored interdisciplinary approaches to the voice in practice, culture and scholarship.25 Developed initially by the

Wellcome Collection in 2016, This is a Voice explored the ways in which the “unique grain of our voice locates us socially, geographically and psychologically.”26 To the

Australian iteration of the exhibition This is a Voice, I contributed the video work Accord with Air: Tjentiste (2012) for installation and a commissioned live performance, Seeking

Isolation: Breath of a Building (2017), which was presented at the opening of the exhibition at the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney.

7 My voice in this practice-based research project does not operate in isolation but rather enters into an interconnected relation with four invariable features: the microphone, loudspeakers or amplifier, acoustic feedback, and space. Described simply, a microphone’s function is to convert variations in air pressure into an electric signal.

Amongst the various types of microphones that exist, the dynamic microphone is the most common used in my practice. Received on a diaphragm, sound waves cause a coil to move, converting mechanical vibrations into a low-level signal.

The loudspeaker is based on the same dynamic principle as the microphone, only reversed. In the loudspeaker, an electrical current sent to a diaphragm causes it to vibrate and transmit acoustic energy, or what is commonly described as sound.27 At their most fundamental, both microphones and loudspeakers are types of electroacoustic transducers, in that the microphone converts acoustic energy into electrical energy and, the loudspeaker, electrical energy into acoustic energy.28

Acoustic feedback is the audible result of the return of acoustic energy from an output to an input. This electroacoustic phenomenon occurs when a microphone is directed toward the output of a speaker and the microphone picks up the air pressure waves of the speaker causing a constant re-amplification of the signal.29 This generates sustained oscillations of a frequency, resulting in a constant sound.30 The particular sound of acoustic feedback depends on the resonant frequencies of each of the elements themselves involved in its production, such as the microphone, the amplifier and loudspeaker, the physical dimensions of the space within which the wave form

8 oscillations occur and the distance between the input and output.31 As noted by Dario

Sanfilippo and Andrea Valle, in feedback, “the causes are fed back to themselves through their effects, and the effects are the result of their combination with the causes, thus breaking the input-output linear proportion.”32 Acoustic feedback is therefore endless in its potential sound quality, an element of the phenomenon I exploit throughout my performances. In this dissertation, I use the word space to refer to the physical dimensions of a performance location or environment which impacts the transmission, refraction of sound waves and, correspondingly, the quality (frequency and amplitude) of acoustic feedback. Borrowed from architecture and geography, my use of spatiality refers to the physical dimensions of the space combined with the properties inhabiting and qualifying it.33

Describing the functionality of microphones, speakers and acoustic feedback and their contingency on electroacoustic transduction serves two purposes here in this introduction. Firstly, I aim to orientate the reader toward their concrete necessity within the practices of this research. Secondly, by describing them in a stripped-back manner, I intend to establish that it is in their combination that these variables produce the exchanges, relations, mediations, transferences and transmissions I explore, as they conjoin with the voice. In this way, they do not function as stable elements in my practice but rather generate a network that I knowingly engage as they influence each other: in my approach, I am cognisant of the way in which they produce forces and intensities possible only through their coalition.

9 As I will describe in detail throughout chapter 1, the purpose of this network of elements or variables—or, as I will call it, the assemblage—in my work is to amplify the conjoined efforts of my body, voice, and the space between the inputs and output of the system. This I refer to throughout the thesis as an amplification assemblage.34 The concept of assemblage has been used to understand the interaction and productivity of agents in systems extensively.35 In my use of the term, I invoke John Macgregor Wise, who states that “assemblages are not static structures but events and multiplicities; they do not reproduce or represent particular forms but rather forms are expressed, and each expression is the emergence of something creative and new.”36 Similarly, Jane Bennett asserts that to understand an assemblage simply as a “series of fixed parts,” organised to serve as a tool is inadequate. 37 Bennett’s account of the blackout that struck North

America in 2003 and her analysis of the electrical power grid as an example of an assemblage serves as a scalable model for my interpretation of the amplification assemblage at work in my performances. Her claim that the electrical grid “is a material cluster of charged parts that have indeed affiliated, remaining in sufficient proximity and coordination to function as a (flowing) system,” resonates with my understanding of the variables in my amplification assemblage.38 Combined, the variables in my amplification assemblage–body, voice, microphone, amplification, loudspeakers, acoustic feedback, and spatiality–have a dynamic, multiplying effect, of which the recursive activity of acoustic feedback is a signifier of how this network both is my practice, and also how it permeates my practice.

10 The theoretical aspects of this thesis are based on scholarship that thinks through sound, rather than about it as an object. The relational materiality of sound, for Steven Connor,

Nina Sun Eidsheim and Julian Henriques, is navigated through the lived, cultural circumstances of its occurrence. Furthermore, their respective perspectives share the notion that sound and space are co-constitutive. For these scholars, voice, sound, listening, and amplification are action-based processes, centred on a conceptualisation of the body as a multisensory substrate through which they are to be understood.

Steven Connor’s interpretations of the voice, its relationship to space and perception, and what happens when the voice and sensorium conjoin with “technologies of amplification” are central to my research.39 For him, the operations and effects of the voice are never singular, but are instead always interpreted through its relations, be they spatial, technological, historical, cultural, embodied, philosophical or otherwise. Intended as a “subtheme of the history of the social production of space,” Connor explores “the inalienable association between voice and space” to develop the concept of vocalic space.40

In this concept, the voice is understood as having import excessive of its sonorous, communicative or significatory powers. Rather, what the voice is “may be grasped as the mediation between the phenomenological body and its social and cultural contexts.”41 In vocalic space, the voice not only takes up space by virtue of going out from the body, but also “procures space for itself,” a central argument I take up to investigate how my voice—by way of amplification—distributes itself within and makes space.42 The concept

11 of vocalic space supports my interpretation of the operation of voices within the numerous spatial conditions discussed in this research.

Connor’s analyses of the interrelation of feeling and cognition at the experiential junction of loudness produced by technological amplification is also important to this research. Through a phenomenological approach, he reflects on the “privileged role” hearing has in the creation of feeling. Compared to the eye, which Connor notes is concerned with discernment, “the most dynamic of the senses,” hearing “exposes the listener to the passage of time.”43 Importantly, he names noise in two senses: firstly, noise as excess and extraneous to signal, as in information theory; and secondly, in quantitative terms—“noise as loudness.” 44 The experience of sound as noise, for Connor, belongs to modernity and the technological amplification of its invention. He suggests that the conditions of modernity have stimulated the organisation of an “audiophonic self,” a self-conceived of not as a node, “but as a membrane; not as a picture, but as a channel through which voices, noises and musics travel.”45

Motivated by a desire to better come to terms with “how we forge relations to one another” in the material realms of singing and listening, Nina Sun Eidsheim posits a vibrational theory of music.46 She critiques the suitability of musical conventions such as pitch, scale, time, duration, and genre, or the “figure of sound” to understand singing, listening and music, arguing that these tropes reduce the complex multisensory event that is musical production and experience.47 These “sonic reductions” assume that sound

12 is a stable phenomenon and prioritise the utility of music eluding the “complex material interactions” underway within singing and listening. The figure of sound, maintains

Eidsheim, renders sound an object for analysis, obfuscating the “dynamic, multifaceted, and multisensorial” experience of sounding.48 Countering this, Eidsheim invokes

Clifford Geertz’s notion of a “thick description”: an interpretation of events that emphasises the inclusion of diverse, content-rich, contextual factors in order to capture a scenario comprehensively.49 Eidsheim applies the methods inherent to a thick description to the interpretation of events such as singing, listening and music. Her notion of intermaterial vibration (mentioned earlier) involves an opening-up of musical experience and knowledge creation to perceptual multisensorality, the sensation of vibration and an acknowledgment of the materials through which these encounters are produced. Drawing on acoustic science, sound and voice studies, Eidsheim encourages a shift in the perception of sound from a strictly aural mode to one based in the sensation of mechanical vibration. A practice of intermaterial vibration requires a consideration of the energetic transformations, transductions, and transmissions involved in the production and perception of sound events.50

The voice too follows this vibratory reconceptualisation. Shifting from its symbolic and representational anchors in vocal pedagogy, Eidsheim tenders the notion of the “voice as an object of knowledge,” which she states offers “an opportunity for questioning processes that help create and perpetuate the object and idea of voice.”51 Through this framework she conducts in-depth investigations and case studies, namely that of the

13 underwater singing and performance work of opera singer, Julianna Snapper.52 For

Eidsheim, Snapper’s work is an exemplary challenge to the misnomer that sound transmits only through air arguing that, her practice of singing underwater reveals the contingency of listening and singing events on the material conditions of their realisation.53

Julian Henriques has developed several ideas centred on the culture, technologies, strategies, and embodied experience at the heart of the reggae sound system session that are valuable in a discussion of my practice. Sonic dominance is a term developed by

Henriques to encapsulate the experience of being in the “hard, extreme and excessive” acoustic environment produced in reggae sound system sessions.54 Here, sound amplified at volume by customised loudspeaker systems takes on a wholly physical presence, vibrating all in its path of transmission:

The sound pervades, or even invades the body, like smell. Sonic dominance is both near

over-load of sound and a super saturation of sound. You’re lost inside it, submerged

under it. This volume of sound crashes down on you like an ocean wave, you feel the

pressure of the weight of the air like diving deep underwater. There’s no escape, no cut

off, no choice but to be there. Even more than music heard at this level, sound allows us

to block out rationale processes, making the experience imminent, immediate and

unmediated… Sonic dominance is visceral, stuff and guts.55

14 Although the reggae sound system session is exemplary of sonic dominance, Henrique describes large crowds and raves as sites in which the phenomenon may also be encountered.56 Central to the concept of sonic dominance—wherever it may occur—is the notion that sound’s physical force is so great that the sonic medium overrides the dominance of the visual medium, effecting a reordering of the perceptual hierarchy. In the sonic order, where the perception of sound is dominated by the body’s reception of vibrating air pressure, it becomes the primary apparatus for spatial engagement and orientation.57 To locate the implications of sonic dominance for the body’s relationship to its environment, Henriques invokes the out-of-body experiences associated with sonic underload or sound deprivation, positing that the sonic overload has the opposite effect in that it “ground(s) the body” in place.58

Henriques further develops the relational praxis of the vibrational framework activated by sonic dominance in Sonic Bodies.59 As in Christopher Small’s term musicking, coined to recognise the active contribution of all participants and their actions in a musical setting to its outcome, Henriques’ analysis of the reggae sound system session is careful to include DJs, musicians, technicians, amplifiers, loudspeakers, dance crew, and audience members.60 Drawing on Bruno Latour’s elaboration of Michel Serres' notion of the quasi- object, Henriques states that “the danger of a technological focus is that it can lead to technological factors being considered, if not as determining, then certainly as separate from the social and cultural relationships”.61 Therefore, rather than merely facilitating a

15 unilateral exchange from composer to audience, he identifies the reggae sound system session as a complex social, cultural and technical network, or assemblage.62

In his explication of the mechanisms and processes involved in creating the reorganisation of perception in sonic dominance, Henriques states that the reggae sound system “offers several ready examples of transduction.”63 Defined as the action of leading or bringing across, transduction is pertinent to a range of disciplines including, but not limited to, electronics, genetics, psychology, physiology, biophysics and information theory. Of the three types of transduction Henriques identifies, two are electroacoustic.

The first occurs within the loudspeaker, a device that “without [which] no sound system could function”; the second is the microphone, used by the DJ to “build the vibes.”64 The third, however, “is not concerned with electromagnetic flows but with bodily currents.

The human body can be considered as a sensory transducer—in dance.”65 This involuntary event, states Henriques, is a transformation of “sonic energy into kinetic energy.”66

Each of these three theorists establish frameworks that engender an account of sound, voice and amplification as spatiality, materially and phenomenologically orientated.

Drawing on the work of Connor, Eidsheim and Henriques facilitates the situation of my practice in this research through a multisensorial approach to the production, interpretation and experience of sound and voice. Finally, these contributions aid my analysis of the experience of loud, amplified sound.

16 This dissertation is divided in to three chapters, which move through the three contexts my performances and artworks occupy: the art gallery and public museum, the postproduction computer editing environment, and the expanse of the outdoors. The artworks that comprise the practical aspect of this research and their documentation are woven through each chapter and discussed in the context of the literature outlined above and compared to other artworks that catalysed the direction of the present research.

Chapter one, “Voice in and as Space and Feedback,” attends to the specific production of my vocality and the historical context of practice significant to its development over the course of this project. I define the specific means of technological amplification of my voice and introduce my approach to the conceptualisation of the voice as a practice of intermaterial vibration within an amplification assemblage. I extrapolate the vocal amplification techniques I use in performance to cultivate and engage with acoustic feedback, exploring their relationship to the spatiality of the contemporary art museum through a discussion of my performance S.I.T.E: Tension Sets (2013). Introducing the importance of vocalic space and sonic dominance in my practice, this chapter argues that the interrelations of voice, amplification and space in my work not only occur in space but also make space. Alongside my own practice, I examine Robert Ashley’s The

Wolfman (1964), one of the first creative uses of acoustic feedback as a compositional element, which employs the voice and amplification in ways that contrast with mine.

17 I identify an experiential tension between my live performances and their video documentation in chapter two, “Voice to Video Mediations.” Here I am specifically concerned with the absence of the physicality of sound’s vibration. Considering the mediatisation of performance, I discuss my experiments with animation and video effects to supplement the quality and experience of immersive sound in my live performances through Accord with Air: Tjentiste (2012). I analyse art works by Joyce

Hinterding and David Haines, and Robin Fox, tracing the processes of mediation and signal transduction used by artists in the exploration of sound that correlates to image and environment. I reflect on trends in audiovisual practice contemporaneous with my preoccupations at that time that sought to bind image and sound in the aesthetics of perceptual synaesthesia. Through this chapter, I locate the importance of sensed vibrations and the role of location and space in the creation of these exchanges in my practice.

In chapter three, I consider the ways in which different artists, namely Joan La Barbara and myself, use the voice to orientate the body within it, and to relate to specific spaces.

Through a discussion of La Barbara’s collaboration with Alvin Lucier on the development of Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas (1974), I posit that her use of the voice exemplifies it as a material, phenomenal force. In this final chapter, my work emerges from the influence of digital mediations to an amplified voice in the acoustic conditions established by different kinds of spatiality—from the outdoors to the indoors. Through an account of performances from the series Magnesite Norway

18 (2016) in two distinct acoustic fields, I explore my use of the amplification assemblage to create a sense of grounded connection with location and environment that drives my performances.

Over this dissertation, I demonstrate the specific ways in which my vocal practice is both focused on and arises from its engagement with amplification and the various material circumstances of its occurrence. Beginning with an exploration of questions of voice, space and acoustic feedback, I describe the performative strategies and conceptual frameworks that underpin my practice as illustrated through a series of performances and artworks. Through this, I seek to convey the relationality of voice and body to sound’s physical vibration in my practice.

19 Notes for Introduction

1 The candidature of my MFA occurred over a number of years, during which I took leave and also undertook part-time enrolment. All works to be examined in this thesis submission were undertaken while I was enrolled as a candidate. 2 In audio terms distortion refers to the loss of audio signal fidelity that occurs due to an imbalance between the levels of an input and output signal, resulting in the alteration the original signal’s waveform shape. In signal processing theory, distortion is understood in terms of nonlinearity, whereby the proportional changes between input and output of a system are not equal. When the input is large enough such that the amplifier exceeds its linear dynamic range; it becomes overloaded causing the output to have additional frequency components or artefacts and exhibits, i.e., nonlinear distortion. Paul Crilly and Richard Hartnett, "Using Audio Amplifier Distortion Characteristics as a Pedagogical Tool to Explain Signal Processing Theory," in FIE '15: Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), October 2015, 1–4. 3 Ted Szántó, "Extended Vocal Techniques," Interface 6, no. 3-4 (1977). 4 Szántó, 114. 5 Michael Edward Edgerton developed the term extra-normal voice to account for contemporary vocal techniques in an acoustic and anatomical framework based on practical implementations. Michael Edward Edgerton, The 21st-Century Voice: Contemporary and Traditional Extra-Normal Voice (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004). In “Circuits of the Voice: From Cosmology to Telephony,” Frances Dyson considers the meaning of the voice in different epistemological systems, such as the Dogon people who inhabit the Upper Niger in north-west Africa. "Circuits of the Voice: From Cosmology to Telephony," Sound Culture, 2004, accessed 18.03.14, http://www.soundculture.org/texts/dyson_circuits.html. 6 Steven McCaffery describes three phases of Western sound poetry. The first phase is comprised of “archaic and primitive poetries,” such as the multiple instances of “chant structures and incantation, of syllabic vocal utterances and deliberate lexical distortions still alive among many North American, African, Asian and Oceanic peoples.” Occurring roughly between 1875 and 1928, the second phase is more Eurocentric and includes the Russian Futurists Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh; the inter-media activities of Wassily Kandinsky; the Brutist poems of the Dadaists Hugo Ball, Kurt Schwitters, Jean Arp, Raoul Hausmann, and Tristan Tzara; and the Italian Futurist’s parole in liberta (words in freedom) exemplified by F.T. Marinetti. McCaffery describes the sound poem—characterised by an emphasis on the phonetic aspects of the voice (onomatopoeia, rhythm, and the non-sensical)—as being developed during the second phase. Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate (1922–32) is a key example of sound poetry from before the introduction of the tape recorder. Steve McCaffery, "From Phonic to Sonic: The Emergence of the Audio-Poem," in Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies, ed. Adalaide Morris (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 155. 7 Steve McCaffery, 155. 8 Cédric Jamet, "Limitless Voice(s), Intensive Bodies: Henri Chopin's Poetics of Expansion," Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 42, no. 2 (2009). 9 Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, "Speaking of Microsound: The Bodies of Henri Chopin," in Speaking of Music: Addressing the Sonorous, ed. Keith Chapin and Andrew H. Clark (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 196. 10 Nicholas Zurbrugg, "Henri Chopin: Interview by Nicholas Zurbrugg (Paris: 12 January, 1992)," in Henri Chopin, ed. Nicholas Zurbrugg and Marlene Hall (Morningside, Qld.: Queensland College of Art Gallery, 1992), 40. 11 Zurbrugg, 40. 12 My understanding of the voice as it pertain to notions of materiality in this thesis is indebted to the scholarship of Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); The Voice as Something More: Essays Toward Materiality, ed. Martha Feldman, Judith T. Zeitlin, and Mladen Dolar (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2019); Adriana Cavarero, For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005); Frances Dyson, "Circuits of the Voice,"; Norie Neumark, Ross Gibson, and Theo Van Leeuwen, Voice: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000); Steven Connor, Beyond Words: Sobs, Hums, Stutters and other Vocalizations (London: Reaktion Books, 2014); Brandon LaBelle, Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary (New York: Bloomsbury,

2014); and Nina Sun Eidsheim, Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 13 Roland Barthes, "The Grain of the Voice," in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 179–189. 14 Connor, Beyond Words, 10. 15 Neumark, Gibson, and Van Leeuwen, Voice. 16 Tiainen, Milla. “Revisiting the voice in media and as medium: New materialist propositions.” NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies 2, no. 2 (2013): 383-406. 17 See, for example, the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies; Jody Kreiman and Diana Sidtis, Foundations of Voice Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Voice Production and Perception, ed. Diana Sidtis (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011); and Nina Sun Eidsheim and Katherine Meizel, The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 18 Nina Sun Eidsheim and Annette Schlichter, "Keys to Voice Studies: Terminology, Methodology, and Questions Across Disciplines," University of California Los Angles (UCLA), 2018, accessed 28.03.2020, http://keystovoice.cdh.ucla.edu. 19 http://keystovoice.cdh.ucla.edu/keys/materiality/ accessed 20.08.2020. 20 Nina Sun Eidsheim, "Considering Site Specificity," Sounding Cultures: From Performance to Politics, Cornell University, Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, October 14–15, 2011. 21 In addition to those listed, other festival and exhibition programs centred on the voice include Talk Show (2009), held at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London and curated by Will Holder, in collaboration with Richard Birkett and Jennifer Thatcher of the IC, which featured a polyphony of vocal- centred contributions from linguists, speech therapists and voiceover artists, https://archive.ica.art/whats- on/talk-show-0 accessed 14.08.2020; and also Voice–Creature of Transition (2014), hosted by Studium Generale Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam: a series of lectures, performances, exhibitions, and masterclasses dedicated broadly to the voice as phenomenon https://voicecreatureoftransition.rietveldacademie.nl/, accessed 14.08.2020. 22 Hey Hey Glossolalia: Exhibiting the Voice was curated by Mark Beasley and hosted by New York City cultural institution, Creative Time in May, 2008. https://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2008/heyhey/index.html. 23 The Voice is a Language, was coordinated by Isla Leaver-Yap as part of Glasgow International, 2010. https://voiceisalanguage.wordpress.com. 24 Curated by Mark Beasley, Loudspeaker: A Symposium for Extra-Normal Vocals, considered the ways vocal experimentation during the New York avant-garde have been adopted and adapted by pop form. http://11.performa-arts.org/recent-news/may-17th-2013-loudspeaker-a-symposium-on-the-voice, accessed 14.08.2020. 25 Co-chaired by Nina Eidsheim and Katherine Meizel, and administrated by Barbara van Nostrand, the Voice Studies Now conference ran January 30–31, 2015 at University of California Los Angles. https://voicestudiesconference.wordpress.com/conference/conference-program/, accessed 14.08.2020. 26 This is a Voice (2016) https://wellcomecollection.org/exhibitions/W31tHikAACgAP5gi; This is a Voice (2017) https://maas.museum/event/this-is-a-voice/ accessed 14.08.2020. 27 The dynamic principle core to the functionality of microphones and loudspeakers is described in physics as electromagnetic induction: the ability of an electromagnetic field to create electrical current inside a conductor. John Appel, "Electromagnetic Induction," in The Gale Encyclopedia of Science, ed. K. Lee Lerner and Brenda Wilmoth Lerner (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2014), 1552. 28 M. L. Gayford, Electroacoustics: Microphones, Earphones and Loudspeakers (London: London, Newnes-Butterworth, 1970). 29 Cathy van Eck, Between Air and Electricity: Microphones and Loudspeakers as Musical Instruments (New York: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2017), 55. 30 Maryanne Maltby, "acoustic feedback," in A Dictionary of Audiology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780191830822.001.0001/acref- 9780191830822-e-0001. 31 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_feedback. 32 Dario Sanfilippo and Andrea Valle, "Feedback Systems: An Analytical Framework," Computer Music Journal 37, no. 2 (2013), 15. 33 Susan Mayhew, "spatiality." in A Dictionary of Geography, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), accessed 15 Aug. 2020. https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100521647. 34 Assemblage is the common English translation of the French term agencement, used initially by philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari to theorise the arrangement and organisation

21 of a variety of heterogeneous elements. John Macgregor Wise, "Assemblage," in Keywords for Media Studies, ed. Laurie Ouellette and Jonathan Gray (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 16. 35 Benjamin Swift, "Becoming-sound: Affect and Assemblage in Improvisational Digital Music Making," paper presented at the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Austin, Texas, 2012. 36 Wise, "Assemblage." 37 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 20. 38 Jane Bennett, "The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout, " Public Culture 17, no. 3 (2005): 446. 39 Steven Connor, "Feel the Noise: Excess, Affect and the Acoustic," in Emotion in Postmodernism, ed. Alfred Hornung and Gerhard Hoffmann (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1997), 147. 40 Connor, Dumbstruck, 12. 41 Connor, 12. 42 Connor, 12. 43 Connor, "Feel the Noise," 148. 44 Connor, 151. 45 Connor, 151. 46 Eidsheim, Sensing Sound, 3. 47 Eidsheim, 3. 48 Eidsheim, 2. 49 The term thick description was borrowed by Clifford Geertz from Gilbert Ryle to address the interpretation of culture in ethnography. It describes the results of observing an event through multiple material, conceptual, scientific, cultural and experiential means in order to comprehend the totality of a situation. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, 3rd. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2017). 50 Eidsheim, Sensing Sound, 161. 51 Eidsheim, 3. 52 Julianna Snapper is an American opera singer and vocal researcher known for her exploration of the voice in unusual conditions. Eidsheim, Sensing Sound, 29. 53 Nina Sun Eidsheim, "Sounding Cultures: From Performance to Politics," a workshop sponsored by Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, October 14–15, 2011. https://vimeo.com/74485444. 54 Julian Henriques, "Sonic Dominance and the Reggae Sound System Session," in The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Michael Bull and Les Back (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 451. 55 Henriques, "Sonic Dominance," 452. 56 Henriques, 451. 57 Henriques, 452. 58 Henriques, 458. 59 Julian Henriques, Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing (New York: Continuum, 2011). 60 Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998). 61 Henriques, Sonic Bodies, 32. 62 Alexandre Fintoni and Anna McLauchlan, "Assembling the Dance: Reggae Sound System Practices in the United Kingdom and France," The Senses and Society 13, no. 2 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2018.1483655. 63 Henriques, "Sonic Dominance," 468. 64 Henriques, "Sonic Dominance," 468. 65 Henriques, 468. 66 Henriques states transduction exemplifies the way in which sonic dominance “can reveal the often- hidden functioning of the senses.” Henriques, Sonic Bodies, 32.

22 Chapter One: Voice in and as Space and Feedback

In this chapter I am concerned with how my voice enters into relations with the spaces in which I perform and generate sound. My performative utilisation of amplification and acoustic feedback as sound sources in my practice are examined within the context of the rich (recent) history of experiments with vocality. I examine my performance for voice, amplifiers and acoustic feedback, Tension Sets (2013), which produced a highly sonic, intervention into the formal opening proceedings of the biannual exhibition,

Primavera 2013: Young Australian Artists, at the Museum of Contemporary Art. I discuss how a three-way amplification assemblage in this performance illustrates the importance of my body in this activity. This is explored through the lens of Julian Henriques’ concept of sonic dominance, Steve Connor’s vocalic space and Nina Sun Eidsheim’s practice of intermaterial vibration.1 I invoke American composer Robert Ashley’s composition for voice, amplification and acoustic feedback, The Wolfman (1964), as a seminal precursor for the use of acoustic feedback in combination with voice. Through an extrapolation of the creative strategies and acoustic realisation of these two works, I argue that they perform an interrelation of body, voice, and audio feedback that not only occurs in space, but makes space.

23 Amplified Vocalisations

Over 15 years of experimentation and professional practice I have developed a repertoire of vocalisations that emphasise extended technique, vocal texture and improvisation, including guttural screams, growls, tongue trills, ululations, abstracted vowel sounds and sundry mouthed utterances in between. Invariably amplified, I combine these vocalisations in rhythmic phrases, producing short vocal compositions, executed in performances that begin and end abruptly. These vocalisations are deployed from my body with physical force and by their necessary means of amplification, are dynamic in amplitude, complex in tone and texture, harsh, shrill, and always loud. This way of working has developed by experimenting and improvising with my voice through numerous scenarios and arrangements of audio amplification, and investigating the creative potential of intentional acoustic feedback that I generate between the input and outputs of the systems of audio amplification I use.2 My candidacy in this research project has allowed me to refine the execution and delivery of my vocalisations, explore the scale of their amplification and investigate their relationship to different types of locations. It has also afforded me the opportunity to reflect on their intersection with screen-based mediations (which I will discuss in chapter two).

24 Drawing on a range of historical influences, the vocalisations in my practice utter a complex genealogy.3 The extended vocal techniques that evolved within the American avant-garde, what Nina Sun-Eidsheim identifies as the “first generation” of artists experimenting with the voice, such as Laurie Anderson, Cathy Berberian, Joan La

Barbara and Meredith Monk, resonate with the non-linguistic, gibberish and distorted syllables I vocalise.4 The influence of the voices across Japanese noise music, such as

Junko Hiroshige, Massona and Keiji Haino are also heard in the formlessness of my screams and violent force of their delivery.5 In a less intentional way, the low growls and high-pitched screams distinct to Norwegian black metal and some industrial music arise as a comparison.6 However, while these musical traditions and their associated vocalities have exerted varying degrees of conscious influence on my practice, I ascribe exclusively to none.

The loudest of my vocalisations—the scream—calls for attention. At its most elemental, the scream is a loud vocalisation produced by the expression of an amount of air through the vocal physiology in excess of what is required for normal speech. It is also a complex form of vocality: it is instantly identifiable, explicit in its audibility, and yet has many reasons for being. Although no more affective or affecting than other sounds, screams, as described by scholar and musician Marie Thompson, are “an exemplary mode of affective communication.”7 Thompson defines affect as both a distinct bodily state, and also as it is understood as a pre-personal, intensive force encountered prior to conscious interpretation or validated by personal experience and knowledge.8 Identifying

25 three modes of the scream, she describes the first as the scream as affection—a sound made to give ‘voice’ to an affected body, associated with states of horror, suffering, anguish, fear, pain, but also of pleasure, excitement, and joy.9 If, following Brian

Massumi, affect concerns ‘aliveness,’ then as an expression of an affective state, the scream, states Thompson, “can be thought of as a sonic… expression of life, of vitality.”10

In Thompson’s second mode, the affecting scream, the scream is both affective and affecting, increasing affection in other bodies. She notes that this is exemplified in horror films or torture practices, where the scream can be understood as a transmitting affective force, and other bodies are the receivers of this force. Here, the scream is transformative in its ability to mobilise and impact others, their “acoustic noisiness” pierces and cuts through the aural landscape.11 Considered by Thompson as the most speculative of the three modes, the scream can also be an affect in and of itself: “an impersonal, affective, sonorous force that is entwined with—but also distinct from—the affections of expressing and affected bodies.”12 She notes that this requires both a shift in attention to the irregular, severe material properties of the sound and a move from a

“somatic to a metaphysical notion of affect.”13 To locate the scream itself, Thompson adopts Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of art as a ‘bloc of sensations,’ so that “we can think of the scream-sound as a sonorous compound of affects.”14

26 The scream in my practice resonates most with Thompson’s third notion, the scream itself, in which, amongst all vocalisations, it is the most forceful, charged and energetic, as both output from my body and as its amplified reproduction. Furthermore, following

Eidsheim’s proposition that, like all sound, the voice and singing are best understood as vibration, the scream in my practice might be interpreted as bodily vibration enacted at its most excessive. Configured within Eidsheim’s practice of intermaterial vibration, the scream in my practice is inseparable from its technological means of reproduction and amplification.15

Screams can also be thought about in the context of a particular kind of delivery of vocalisation—as an ‘art scream’. As described by Douglas Kahn, “art screams bank on emphasis, amplitude, and affect, but they mute significance and deafen us in other ways with their rhetorical force.”16 The rhetorical force of Greek-American soprano sfogato and composer Diamanda Galás’ screams provide the most formative and lasting influence on my practice. Described by Connor as belonging to an “ecstatic tradition” of voice inundated by “animality, noise, dirt,” Galás’ catalogue constitutes a most rigorous and sustained endeavour to exploring the technical limits of the voice as an instrument in the service of politically charged, conceptually distinct musical works.17 Drawing on her heritage and its ritual of lamentation, she conceptualises her “voice as a fighter, a weapon and a shield,” dedicated to the interpretation of subject matter associated with the suffering of historical and cultural minorities.18 Plague Mass (1990), her pioneering live performance work, which drew attention to the physical and psychological suffering

27 of victims during the American HIV AIDS crisis in the 1980s at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Devine, New York City, is a definitive example of this aspect of her work.19

As detailed in her book The Shit of God, from 1975 onward Galás developed what she describes as an “unmatrixed production of vocal sound as the most immediate representation of thought.”20 In this methodology she is concerned with the execution of extreme states of concentration, of which vocal sound is the most “fundamental physical coordinate.”21 To theatrically materialise the mental diffraction engendered in her performances, Galás devised a set of variables she navigates in performance:

Physical body effort and shape; changing light series which are choreographed; vocal

timbre chains; incremental change of room reverberation; manipulation of sonic spatial

coordinates and trajectories through the use of four to five microphones distributed

through a quadraphonic sound system. With exception of the changing light series, the

performer has control over all the above during the performance.22

Galás’ debut studio album, The Litanies of Satan (1982), is an embodiment of these variables, which she consolidated into the term “the electronic voice.”23 Combined by studio post-production and multitracking techniques, the artist’s high-pitched wails, glossolalia, hissing, and the scarce emergence of intelligible phrase, processed by four microphones—each with a different reverb, delay or filter—can be heard.24 Listening to

28 The Litanies of Satan was my most revelatory encounter with the scream as a young vocalist. I have the distinct recollection that Galás’ voice did not fit into the speakers that reproduced it; her voice at once consumed and was in excessive of my home speaker system.25 It was as though her voice had become the loudspeakers and the loudspeakers themselves had become Galas. In response to this concept, I began vocalising and screaming into loudspeakers from in front of them in an effort to materialise what I had imagined.

This strategy, in which I sought to close the gap between my voice and its system of amplification, has been developed during my MFA candidacy into a performative technique. Performances S.I.T.E: Ljubljana (2011) at the 29th Biennial of Graphic Arts:

The Event in Ljubljana, and S.I.T.E: Sound Full (2013) at Sound Full: Sound in

Contemporary Australian and New Zealand Art, at Wellington City Gallery are evidence of this (Figures 2 and 3). In this way, it could be said that the physicality and purity of intention that defines Galás’ work set the ultimate precedent and informed the lengths to which I take my body and voice in practice to this day.

One of the important distinctions between Galás’ electronic voice described above, and my own vocality is the absence of digital and analogue signal processing. As exemplified by The Litanies of Satan, Galás capitalises on the multiplicative and atmospheric capabilities of live and studio-based electronic signal processing to theatrically convey the states of mental diffraction she embodied.26 Her virtuosic voice is elevated into

29 another realm of psychological influence through a highly specific employment of electronic processing and multitrack tape.27 I, on the other hand, do not use effects such as delay, echo and reverberation, distortion and overdrive, equalisation and filtering, phase control, frequency modulation, harmonisation, chorus or autotuning in my practice. Designed and manufactured to augment and modify audio signal, these processes and devices uniformly expand and extend an instrument’s sound palette and produce artificial simulations of any audio signal or sound source routed through their circuitry. Such modifications have varying musical ends; however, I perceive that these processes subject my voice to a homogenisation of sound, masking and obstructing what is fundamentally at work in my practice.

Rather than modify, tune, manipulate or reshape what might be traditionally thought of as vocal qualities, I am concerned with the use of audio technology to raise the amplitude of my body, voice, and the air. This occurs primarily between the input and the output of the amplification assemblage and its relation to and distribution in space.

In this configuration, my voice pursues vibration and the bodily experiences that result from this. Here, I explore Eidsheim’s concept of the voice as an object of knowledge, rejecting a predefined notion of the voice’s utility.28 The tropes that emerged from Paul

Hegarty’s analysis of material, volume and the body in Japanese noise music here, too, work in parallel. For Hegarty, the “noise body” is a body in the receipt of noise, removed of its bounded subjectivity and placed in “something like ecstatic noise consumption.”29 Throughout in this chapter, and indeed this thesis, I show how my

30 practice is not simply exemplary of an extended instrument; nor is it strictly an event of noise music; nor performative gesture. Rather, by revealing the relational dynamic between my voice, its system of audio amplification and the spatial acoustic circumstances of their interaction, I convey the ways in which I make space through these interrelations.

Figure 2. Kusum Normoyle, S.I.T.E: Ljubljana, at the 29th Biennial of Graphic Arts: The Event in Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2011. Photo by Jaka Babnik.

Figure 3. Kusum Normoyle, S.I.T.E: Sound Full, in Sound Full: Sound in Contemporary Australian and New Zealand Art, at Wellington City Gallery, New Zealand, 2013. Photo Marnie Vaughan.

32 The Vocalic Space of S.I.T.E: Tension Sets

Figure 4. Kusum Normoyle, S.I.T.E: Tension Sets, in Primavera 2013: Young Australian Artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Photo Alex Davies.

S.I.T.E: Tension Sets (2013) is a performance for voice, amplifiers and audio feedback, conducted in the main entrance foyer of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art to mark the opening event of the exhibition Primavera 2013: Young Australian Artists, which exemplifies my vocality (Figure 4). It represented a culmination of a number of key issues explored through my MFA candidacy, including my physical relationship to acoustic feedback and the way in which I make space in my performances through

33 amplification. Documented by a single DSLR camera, the performance began with a succession of vocalisations that rang out through the amplifiers and across the conversational chatter of the exhibition guests. Lunging groundward, my body could be seen to begin its ritual, athletic movements. I wielded the microphone above me, tuning my listening to the acoustic feedback frequencies that emerged. Striding around the museum foyer, I ran between the amplifiers throwing myself in their direction as I performed improvised vocalisations. Midway through the performance, the microphone disconnected from its XLR cable and, with casual disregard for the mishap, I reconnected it and continued the performance with increased forcefulness, generating audio feedback, intense vocal noise, and distortion that churned throughout the hall-like space. After four minutes, the performance ceased as quickly as it began.

Located at Sydney’s Circular Quay, the Museum of Contemporary Art is one of the city’s largest cultural spaces. Its entrance boasts high ceilings, polished concrete and glass surfaces, and is a cavernous invitation to passing foot traffic. In the manner of contemporary museums of scale, it is characterised by a sense of grandeur, architectural openness and—to the attentive listener—acoustic reverberation (Figure 5). Made from the same hard, reflective surfaces, the material composition of the museum’s foyer is remarkably similar to that of a reverberation chamber, an acoustic facility in which a

‘diffuse’ sound field is engineered—a region where the reflected sound, rather than the direct sound dominates.30 Chronicling a history of sound practices in the art gallery, curator and theorist Caleb Kelly describes the acoustic conditions of the contemporary

34 museum as “harsh,” noting the absence of the “multitude” of materials and technologies available to manage sound waveform reflections in their design.31 Connor too, describing the art gallery as ocularcentric, states that acoustic energy, “like odour,” breaches the boundaries of the gallery by virtue of vibratory transmission, betraying its

“Euclidean straight lines.”32

Figure 5. Ground level entrance foyer at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, featuring, Untitled (2014), Daniel Boyd. Image courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art.

35 By harnessing the conditions identified by both Kelly and Connor, I suggest S.I.T.E:

Tension Sets reversed the perceived acoustic inefficacies of the art gallery, folding them into the intended outcomes of the performance. I achieved this by deploying a three-way amplification assemblage (Figure 6), which describes both the arrangement of three

Marshall JCM900 guitar amplifier heads and half-stacks throughout the Museum’s foyer, and also the results of this strategy. To form this configuration, I placed one amplifier on the ground level next to the museum’s entrance from the Circular Quay concourse, and the second and third amplifiers at the top of the twenty-two-step stairway leading up to level 1 where I would perform. Positioned to form a right-angle triangle that spanned the museum’s foyer, I angled each amplifier toward the other so that the acoustic transmission of each crossed paths, as illustrated by the green, blue and red circles in Figure 6.

The three-way amplification assemblage effected several outcomes that support the argument that I employed the museum’s acoustics productively. Firstly, by directing the amplifier’s transmission toward the center of the triangle I created the perception of increased loudness over the stairway. Secondly, the multidirectionality of the amplifiers caused my vocalisations and acoustic feedback to chaotically refract off the building’s internal surfaces and reflect around the foyer. Combined with the sheer volume of the performance, the acoustic conditions enabled an enlargement, bifurcation and distribution of my voice. Charging and filling the museum with acoustic energy through three-way amplification, enacting Connor’s concept of vocalic space, my voice, not only

36 took up space but became space. This was achieved by the experience of my amplified voice throughout the space at such volume that it was encountered as physical and thus connotative of the physical structures that determine space normally.

Henriques notes that a three-way loudspeaker set-up as also occurring in the reggae sound system, an assemblage comprised of speakers, amplifiers, record decks, and crew

(technical and crowd), explicitly designed for the creation of large volumes of sound.33

He describes three “banks” of speakers that are configured to point inward, toward the crowd, to create an immersive field of air pressure that the dance crew occupy. 34

Inversing the proscenium in this way to cultivate a region in which the bodies in the reggae sound system assemblage encounter sonic dominance provides a salient parallel to my intention to create an intensification of sound through the three-way amplification in S.I.T.E: Tension Sets.

Figure 6. Topographical floor plan of the main foyer of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and the three-way amplification assemblage for S.I.T.E: Tension Sets, at Primavera 2013: Young Australian Artists.

38 Three performative techniques key to the structural organisation of my performances, my experience of sonic dominance and cultivation of audio feedback are evident by looking at the documentation of S.I.T.E: Tension Sets (see video documentation, 1:00).

First is the way in which I vocalise into the amplifier while my face and body are directly in front of the speaker output (Figure 7). This results in the simultaneous and entangled audibility of voice and audio feedback. The second is my vocalisation at a distance from amplifier output, where the transmission of voice and audio feedback alternate, and are discrete in their audibility (see video documentation, 00:46). The third is what I refer to as tuning feedback, which involves the athletic, gestural wielding of the microphone at different proximities from the speaker outputs in order to generate and emphasise the emergent audio feedback frequencies (Figure 8).

Figure 7. Kusum Normoyle, S.I.T.E: Tension Sets, at Primavera 2013: Young Australian Artists, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia. Image: Alex Davies (see video documentation, 00:52).

Figure 8. Kusum Normoyle, S.I.T.E: Tension Sets, at Primavera 2013: Young Australian Artists, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia. Image: Alex Davies (see video documentation, 1:00).

Employing these techniques, I experience several elements vital to my practice. As my sensorium is dominated by the sound’s materiality, I transit the threshold of what can be immediately cognised, encountering instead a liminal state where, as described by

Henriques, “different forms of rationality occur.”35 In the absence of visual and temporal cues, I adopt a mode of thinking founded on the physical relation to vibrations on my body to navigate the dynamic terrain of air pressure throughout the museum, using sound’s vibrational force as spatial information. This multisensorial navigation involves an encounter with sonic dominance, where sound’s energy is at once going out from my body—in the form of vocalisation—and coming back into my body as amplification. This

41 transductive relation between my body and the system of audio amplification reflects the powers of the sonic body in one of three transductions Henriques identifies within the reggae sound system. As noted in the introduction to this paper, Henriques observes that this mode of transduction is related to the transformation of sound energy into kinetic.36

In this dynamic, I contend with a disintegration of the distinctions between my body, voice, its system of amplification and the air between, where acoustic feedback is the generative signal for the decomposing and recomposing interrelations. Henriques invokes Marshall McLuhan’s term acoustic space to account for a disintegration between the body and its spatio-temporal environment, “a kind of space you are inside as well as outside and it is inside you as well as you, being inside it.”37

In his delineation of the body’s implication in vocalic space, Connor returns to a pre- scientific conception of the body during the Western medieval period, in which, “the body is seen as both open to and in complex interchange with manifold external influences, agencies and energies, natural, divine, and demonic.”38 Vocalic space in my practice is instigated from and perpetuated by a different kind of fluidity of interior and exterior than described by Connor. Illustrated by the physical articulation of my body together with the acoustic transmission of amplifiers consistent across my performances my body opens to energies of the acoustic (Figure 9). I now move to a different implementation of becoming engaged with acoustic energies and spatiality in the work of another experimental musician, Robert Ashley.

Figure 9. Hard Hat (Peter Blamey and Kusum Normoyle) performance still, Liquid Architecture 2014: Sydney, UNSW Art and Design (see video documentation, 2:50–3:00).

Composing with feedback: The Wolfman

The Wolfman (1964), by Robert Ashley, illustrates a different relational mode of engaging with voice, acoustic feedback and amplification for performance and recording.

Ashley (1930–2014) was renowned for a body of work spanning experimental music, performance, electronic composition for film and television, and ‘experimental’ or,

‘intermediated staged operas,’ developed throughout his involvement with the American avant-garde.39 A founding member of the Sonic Arts Union, Ashley’s transdisciplinary body of work exemplifies his motivation to disrupt the “rituals,” of mid-twentieth

43 century concert music, and The Wolfman is no exception.40 First performed at Charlotte

Moorman’s Annual Avant Garde Festival in New York in 1964, the composition—for amplified voice, tape and acoustic feedback—was born of Ashley’s interest in using acoustic feedback as a musical sound source, and is considered one of the earliest works to do so.41 Its score is comprised of strict directives summarised in their titles: “The

Voice Part,” “Amplification,” “Procedure” and “Performance and Presentation.” It is realised by a performer improvising on four vocal operations to the backing of one of two tape compositions: The Wolfman Tape (1964) or The 4th of July (1960).42 The recorded version of The Wolfman, on in which Ashley himself performs the vocal part, uses The 4th of July as its backing—an eighteen-minute tape composition based on an audio recording of a backyard holiday celebration that incorporates tape-head feedback and loop-layering tape manipulation processes (Figure 10).43 Over the course of 18 minutes, The Wolfman gradually builds from an ambient field recording into a full spectrum, dynamic, and highly distorted composition through the incorporation of the vocal performance and associated acoustic feedback.

The piece is based on the transmission of the two sound sources—the voice part and The

4th of July backing composition—within a performance environment, by separate and multiple speaker outputs at “very high levels of amplification.”44 Ashley states that the volume levels on which the piece is contingent are “unattainable” without electronic amplification, an element that is shared by my practice.45 Although primary accounts of the performance do not mention volume in terms of measurement, Ashley claims that it

44 had “gained considerable reputation as a threat to the listener’s health,” implying that the sonic volume of the piece felt dangerous to experience live, another element that resonates with my performances. 46

Figure 10. Robert Ashley, The Wolfman, album cover.

45 The voice part contains four vocal components: pitch, loudness, vowel and closure, which Ashley instructs are to be treated as “approximate divisions” that occur and emerge on an even continuum of vocalisation.47 In the recording, these result in sustained articulation of vowels, each held for the length of one breath, and alternate in pitch, loudness, vowel and closure on each breath cycle (Figure 11).48 The voice builds dynamically over the course of the piece through gradual increases of the microphone input level, which is set “so that very high levels of amplification of voice are possible before feedback occurs, but excess amplification to produce feedback must be available through a potentiometer control held either by the singer or by an off-stage assistant.”49

Figure 11. Robert Ashley, The Wolfman (1964), instructions for ‘The Voice Part’, The Wolfman, liner notes.

46 Critical to the vocal aspect of The Wolfman—its precise execution, an understanding of how the feedback functions, and by way of comparison to my voice in performance—is the volume of the vocal sounds themselves. Although the performance instructions feature volumetric principles and the recording offers a legacy of loud sound, Ashely maintains that the vocalisation in The Wolfman to “have to be probably the softest vocal sounds ever performed in public.”50 Rather than using loud vocalisations to make an even louder amplified outcome, as in my vocal amplification work, Ashley employs soft vocalisations, which he instructs should be produced whilst the tongue is touching the roof of the mouth and with a lot of air; two features that determine the cultivation of acoustic feedback in the piece.51 By keeping the tongue on the roof of the mouth and using excessive amounts of air in the production of the vocalisations, Ashley turns his mouth into a kind of resonating chamber, “making possible both the characteristic sound of the vocal part and the continuity between the voice phrases and the feedback tones.”52 By changing the vocal function on each breath cycle, Ashley effectively uses the shape of his mouth cavity to modulate the feedback frequencies. Secondly, the soft vocal tone ensures the voice does not “block” the acoustic feedback generated between the performance space, the loudspeakers, Ashley’s mouth cavity and the microphone input.53

The blocking of feedback by voice that Ashley avoids in The Wolfman is what I describe as occurring in the second of three performative techniques core to my practice earlier in this chapter, whereby vocalising at a distance from the speaker output, acoustic feedback and vocalisations alternate in their transmission from the speaker output.

47 Standing still on the stage in front of the microphone, Ashley represents a judicious and incremental approach to the control of feedback and sound volume that offers a contrast with my practice, in which both the body and microphones move within the performance environment in the cultivation and modulation of acoustic feedback. Also, by vocalising quietly, Ashley’s voice, in light of Eidsheim’s notion of the voice as an object of knowledge, became the axis at which the relation of the performance spatiality and the system of audio amplification—through acoustic feedback—was controlled.

Accordingly, I argue that both Ashley’s voice in The Wolfman and mine in S.I.T.E: Tension

Sets, are representative of vocal practice invested in and contingent upon the material elements within their respective (simple) circumstances of realisation. Furthermore, both adopt a positive conception of acoustic feedback in vocal performance, and in contrasting ways use it as an indicator of spatiality. In the following chapter, I follow the circuit of my voice from a discussion of its relationality to space, to its translation on screen and the subsequent implications I encounter in my practice through processes of mediation.

48 Notes for Chapter One

1 Connor, Dumbstruck, 12. 2 The type, brand and model of audio technology I have used in performance varies greatly and is contingent on curatorial, logistical, and financial factors specific to the context of presentation. However, there are invariably two kinds of sound devices involved: a vocal microphone (input) and audio amplification technologies (output). The microphone input is always a standard dynamic vocal microphone, such as the Shure SM58. Loudspeaker outputs in my work have included, but not been limited to, valve and solid-state guitar and bass amplifiers–in both half and full stack assembly–in varying numbers and arrays, powered speakers, front of house personal address systems and foldback wedges. Coupled with other elements such as audio mixers and cables, these two devices are constant across all instances of my vocal practice. In other areas of my art making practice, such as the installation works Vibron (2012) and Slow /Dark (2016), I have amplified my voice using custom-built speakers presented in customised sculptural formats. 3 The word voice has multiple meanings and connects to a wide range of issues and dimensions of the human. Anthropologist Amanda Weidman eloquently captures its vast interpretations, stating that, “voice is both a set of sonic, material, and literary practices shaped by culturally and historically specific moments and a category invoked in discourse about personal agency, communication and representation, and political power.” In her review of the voice, Weidman argues for the importance of maintaining the co-productive alliance of the sonic, material, cultural, political, subjective and literary associations of the voice. Furthermore, while the overall ethos of my research project concedes this approach is ideal—for purposes of specificity—in my thesis, voice refers to the embodied, material, physiology used in the expression of sound and language, by an able-bodied, human individual. Amanda Weidman, "Anthropology and Voice," Annual Review of Anthropology 43, no. 1 (2014), https://doi.org/doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-102313-030050. 4 Eidsheim, Sensing Sound, 29. 5 Japanese noise music is a diverse set of musical practices, approaches and artists that use noise in various ways in the production of music beginning in the 1970s. Noise musician Masonna (Maso Yamazaki), was of particular influence on the development of my vocal performance style. Renowned for physically cathartic, loud, and often dangerous performances, his performances were marked by a misuse and abuse of the voice and system of amplification, and by a constant, hypnotic physical momentum. The voice, in Masonna’s brand of harsh, loud, violent noise music was, to borrow Paul Hegarty’s description, “caught within electric and electronic circuits.” Paul Hegarty, Noise/Music: A History (New York: Continuum, 2007), 148. 6 Screaming in black metal is characteristically harsh, raspy and atonal. Michael Moynihan and Didrik Soderlind, Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground New Edition (Los Angeles, CA: Feral House, 2009). 7 Marie Thompson, "Three Screams," in Sound, Music, Affect:Theorizing Sonic Experience, ed. Ian Biddle & Marie Thompson (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), 147. 8 This exposition of affect is developed primarily in the scholarship of Baruch Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and more recently, Brian Massumi. Brian Massumi, Stanley Fish, and Fredric Jameson, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 28. 9 Thompson, "Three Screams," 159. 10 Thompson, 159. 11 Thompson, 159. 12 Thompson, 158. 13 Somatic affect is equal to an understanding of affect as it relates to the body whereas a metaphysical notion of affect. Thompson, "Three Screams," 147. 14 Thompson, 159. 15 Eidsheim, Sensing Sound, 2. 16 Douglas Kahn attends to Antonin Artaud’s screams of madness, gender and animality, played out through, “a metaphysical staging of psychosis” in works throughout The Theatre and its Double and his manifestos for a Theatre of Cruelty. Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A history of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 4. 17 Connor, Beyond Words, 29. 18 The vocal lament is the vocal practice undertaken predominantly by women to assist a spirit’s transition between life and death. See Ann Suter, Lament Studies in the Ancient Mediterranean and

Beyond (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) and Theda Weber-Lucks, "Electroacoustic Voices in Vocal Performance Art - A Gender Issue?" Organised Sound 8, no. 1 (Apr 2003): 61–69. 19 Plague Mass, is a live album by Diamanda Galás. Performed across 12 and 13 October, 1990, at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Devine, New York City, this pioneering work drew attention to the physical and psychological suffering during the American HIV AIDS crisis in the 1980s and was initially released in 1991 by UK record label Mute. 20 Diamánda Galás, The Shit of God (London: High Risk, 1996), 2. 21 Galás, 2. 22 Galás, 2. 23 Weber-Lucks, "Electroacoustic Voices" 63. 24 Galás, The Shit of God, 9. 25 Diamanda Galás’ first studio album, The Litanies of Satan, is comprised of two compositions: The Litanies of Satan (17:46) and Wild Women with Steak-Knives (12:04), and was originally released on Y Records in 1982. The artist has since regained the recording’s publication rights in 2014 and has re- released it on her own record label, Intravenal Sound Operations. "The Litanies of Satan," accessed 18.05.2020, https://diamandagalas.myshopify.com/collections/frontpage/products/the-litanies-of-satan 26 Galás, The Shit of God, 3. 27 Diamanda Galás has worked with select audio technicians and producers on including Richard Zvonar and more recently Daniel Neumann. http://kalvos.org/zvonarr.html accessed 20.08.2020. 28 Eidsheim, Sensing Sound, 3. 29 Hegarty, Noise/Music, 145. 30 "Acoustic Glossary," http://www.acoustic-glossary.co.uk/definitions-r.htm. 31 Caleb Kelly, Gallery Sound (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 4. 32 Steven Connor, "Ears Have Walls: On Hearing Art," 2003, accessed 22.04.2020, http://stevenconnor.com/earshavewalls.html. 33 Fintoni and McLauchlan, "Assembling the Dance," 34 Henriques, "Sonic Dominance," 454. In Sonic Bodies, Julian Henriques also uses the concept of triangulation as a framework to explain numerous “three-fold relationships” he identifies as occurring in the reggae sound system session i.e. sociocultural/material/corporeal; sound in time/music/object in space. 35 Henriques, Sonic Bodies, 32. 36 Henriques, "Sonic Dominance," 468. 37 Henriques, 459. 38 Connor, Dumbstruck, 13. 39 Arthur J. Sabatini, "Robert Ashley: Defining American Opera," PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 27, no. 2 (2005): 46. 40 Larry Austin and Douglas Kahn, Preface to Source: Music of the Avant-Garde, 1966–1973, ed. Larry Austin and Douglas Kahn (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), 12. 41 Robert Ashely, liner notes, The Wolfman, compact disc, (Milano: Alga Marghen, 2003), np. 42 Ashley, liner notes, np. 43 I refer to the recording of The Wolfman featured on The Wolfman CD that employs The 4th of July as its backing (the album also includes three other early Ashley compositions: The Fox (1957), The Wolfman Tape (1964), and The Bottleman (1960)). The Wolfman recording was originally issued as the A side of Source Record Number One, a 10” record included with Source: Music Of The Avant Garde Issue #4, July 1968. Side B was David Behrman’s Wave Train. 44 The Wolfman instructions establish the need to use a high-quality directional cardioid microphone and speakers with high efficiency. Robert Ashley, "The Wolfman, for Amplified Voice and Tape," in Source: Music of the Avant-Garde, 1966–1973, ed. Larry Austin and Douglas Kahn (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,2011), 145. 45 The “Performance and Presentation” instructions for The Wolfman, gives an example of the “minimum power rating for each system,” necessary for an accurate execution of the piece. Ashley says that “a total of .5 watt of available power for every seat in the performance space. (For example, for a 1000 seat auditorium the microphone system should be rated at 500 watts and the tape playback system should be rated at 500 watts.)” Ashley, "The Wolfman," 145. 46 Ashley, liner notes, np. 47 The Wolfman, composition instructs that the voice part should move across one octave or more, varying in dynamics or loudness from pp (very soft) to ff (very loud). The vowel component instructs that the tongue presses on the roof of the mouth and moving it forwards and backwards so as to create changing vowel consonants, which should be heavily respirated, and to keep the lips pursed or the jaw closed. Ashley, "The Wolfman," 144. 50

48 Ashley, liner notes, np. 49 Ashley also states that, “the level of tape amplification should be pre-set to match, at its highest point, the loudest sound from the microphone before feedback occurs.” Ashley, "The Wolfman," 144. 50 Austin and Kahn, preface, 12. 51 Ashley, "The Wolfman," 144. 52 The Wolfman performance instructions state that between each vocal phrase, the singer or an off- stage assistant should gradually increase the amplification of the microphone signal until a, “steady feedback sound is produced,” thus effecting a progressive and “smooth”, increase in volume and feedback. Ashley, "The Wolfman," 144. 53 Ashley, liner notes, np.

51 Chapter Two: Voice to Video Mediations

Three-dimensional, interactive, and synesthetic, perceived in the here and now of an

embodied space, sound returns to the listener the very same qualities that media

mediates: that feeling of being here now, of experiencing oneself as engulfed, enveloped,

absorbed, enmeshed, in short immersed in an environment.

Frances Dyson, Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture

In the years preceding this research project, I framed the outdoor vocal performances I made as an ongoing series titled, S.I.T.E: Screaming in the Everyday. These provided the lead up to the performance as part of my MFA research, S.I.T.E: Tension Sets, discussed in detail in the previous chapter. Short and improvised, the original incursions broke a sonic homogeny I perceived in the post-industrial city environments I occupied. I conceptualised them as aural spikes in the varied acoustic circumstances within which occurred and reflected on the capacity (or failure) of loud sound to have a causal relationship with its context of realisation and transmission. Recorded in a single channel video work under same title, S.I.T.E: Screaming in the Everyday (2009), a consequence of creating this series was the emergence of a tension between my live

52 performances and their documentation. While documentation allowed the performances to ‘live on’, it fell short in translating qualities integral to them. Live, they were vibratory, loud and highly physical incursions that elicited affective responses associated with the embodied experience of amplified sound, within me and audiences alike.

Intense and visceral, these events played havoc with secondary representation. They could not be restaged, rewound or relived, nor their affect simulated. In attempts at their documentation, these fundamental elements became void, their sense of embodiment exteriorised and overdetermined by their mediation. I perceived that their documentary framing transformed these otherwise disruptive and energising incursions into distant propositions. Exhibiting their ‘raw’ documentation as discrete installation works felt insufficient and lacked purpose.

In an effort to make this tension both explicit and productive, to regain these vibratory elements, and to accentuate the specificities of mediation that the documentation brought, I began to explore various visual means to convey the physical force of sound’s pressure as experienced in live performance. I embraced the gap between the experience of the live performance and that of its mediated form as an opportunity to explore the translation of sound to image and the fate of the audio signal path in my practice. The capacities of digital software for sound-to-image processing, which I saw being explored by artists concurrent with my performative practice, presented an opportunity for the transduction of the sonic energies of my performance. This transduction would make its

53 way to an audio-visual format generated through visual processing of video documentation. Fuelled by innovations in the gaming and entertainment industries that became available during the early 2000s, artists fused what theorist Mitchel Whitelaw described as “the most unremarkable ingredients in the new media arts”—sound and image—to produce a perceptual link between what viewers saw and heard.1 This link has been defined by film theorist Michel Chion as synchresis, “the spontaneous and irresistible weld produced between a particular auditory phenomenon and visual phenomenon when they occur at the same time.”2

In this chapter, I discuss Accord with Air: Tjentiste (2012), the first of a series of video works I made that resulted from experimenting with the incorporation of digital supplementations in the documentation that correlated visually with the sound of my amplified voice. These, I hoped, would transduce, in onscreen space, the mesmerising material qualities of sound in my performances. I will locate this work within a context of artists who used documentary, generative and transductive strategies to create varying degrees of synchresis. I consider the combined mediation of environmental phenomena with digital animation and compositing by artists Joyce Hinterding and David Haines in

The Levitation Grounds (2000) to form an uncanny representation of a remote outside location in a primarily screen-based installation.3 Robin Fox’s Backscatter (2004) will also be discussed, providing an alternative media assemblage for linking sound and image through the direct transcoding of signal audio via a cathode ray oscilloscope

(CRO).4

54 Performance Mediatisation

The secondary mediatisation of performance and the tension between embodied presence and its documentation has been extensively examined in scholarship. In a survey of several historically seminal works of performance art, including Carolee

Schneemann's Interior Scroll (1975), Yayoi Kusama's Self-Portrait Photographs (c. 1960) and Annie Sprinkle’s Post Post Porn Modernist (1990-93), historian Amelia Jones claims that her absence from the live delivery of these performance events does not obstruct her interpretation. She grants witnessing a performance live an enabling of “the phenomenological relations of flesh-to-flesh engagement,” and states that the

“documentary exchange” between viewer and document is equal to the lived experience of performance in its “intersubjectivity.”5 Jones argues that viewing the documentation of a performance as compared to being physically present at its realisation is no less privileged in its relation to the historical authenticity of its making.6

In his fittingly titled analysis of the matter, The Performativity of Performance

Documentation, Philip Auslander identifies two categories of performance documentation.

Analogous to Jones’ notion of the documentary exchange, Auslander’s documentary category first apprehends documentation as evidence and record through which performance is interpreted and consumed, albeit lacking in elements accessible through experiencing the original.7 This indexical correlation between performance and

55 documentation ensures the reliance of performance on documentation for its existence.

His second category, theatrical, is exemplified by instances of performance that occur because of and for the sole intention of being documented, in which the documentation records an event that occurs only in documented form.8 Before reflecting on the implication of these perspectives on the mediation of performance in my work, Accord with Air: Tjentiste, I must acknowledge the process of mediation taking place already in my practice, before its documentation, in the form of the audio amplification of my voice. This mediation of the sono-acoustic by the electronic can be traced back to the invention of the phonograph in 1887, which, as described by Douglas Kahn,

“represented a new day in aurality through its ability to return virtually any sound back again and again into the sensorium and into the historical register.”9 Although fundamental to my practice, what I have sought to explore in the mediation offered by performance documentation (as discussed in this chapter) is the analogue-sonic mediatisation that had not initially been transduced through video documentation.

56 Accord with Air: Tjentiste

Figure 13. Kusum Normoyle, Accord with Air: Tjentiste, 2012. Single channel HD video still.

Accord with Air: Tjentiste is a single-channel video and stereo sound work that incorporates visual effects into documentation of an amplified vocal performance at the

Tjentište spomenik in the remote south-eastern corner of Bosnia and Herzegovina

(Figure 13).10 Built from poured concrete and rebar and standing 19 metres high and

25 metres wide, the Tjentište spomenik is an impressive structural feat. Designed by

Serbian sculptor Miodrag Živković and architect Ranko Radović in 1964–1973, it was commissioned by former Yugoslavia’s communist leader Josip Tito to commemorate the

57 Battle of the Sutjeska, an offensive lead by the German, Italian and Croatian Axis

Alliance forces against Yugoslavia in 1943. The battle marked a turning point for

Yugoslavia during World War II and the success of the Yugoslav Socialist National

Liberation movement led by Tito in the defence of the Sutjeska region from the encroaching Axis Alliance forces.11

Characterised by gravity-defying proportions, angular geometry, sharp lines and a style distinct to brutalist spomeniks of the era, the form reflects Živković’s understanding of a peregrine falcon taking flight from the valley below; a metaphor for Yugoslavia’s freedom from its German-Italian Axis occupiers during WWII. Otherworldly in its presence, the Tjentiste spomenik appears to tear from the ground that supports it, performing a visual rupture against its dramatic seasonal backdrops. Conscious only of the monument’s most fundamental historical significance before embarking on my solo field trip, my interest in it as a prospective performance location was based on an attraction its geographical remoteness and the sculpture’s singular and severe form. Its visual elements echoed the harsh, fractious and ecstatic quality of my sound. To me, the spomenik looked as I sounded, and in the early winter of 2011, I sought it out to improvise with, as if together we might sonically and architecturally perform a duet.

58 Accord with Air: Tjentiste presents a single locked-off camera shot in which, positioned at the base of the monument, I am dwarfed by its wings (Figure 13). Against the quietude of the valley, my gut-emptying screams and shrill audio feedback rise as I perform around the amplifier for one minute. As I thrust vocalisations from my body, the sculpture’s fractal faces begin to move in time with the dynamic peaks in my improvised phrases. Sections of the spomenik momentarily jut out from the concrete structure as though in correlative resonance with the sound I produce alongside it. With the increasing intensity of the performance and a sub-bass rumble added in post-production to emphasise the vibratory transmission, the ground and air around the spomenik take on a green, red and blue hue in the video to represent the resonance of amplified voice and sculpture (Figures 14 and 15). Visually expanding and vibrating in temporal synchronicity with the sound of the performance the spomenik comes to rest as the performance ceases.

The animation and visual effects in Accord with Air: Tjentiste were produced in Adobe

After Effects using manual keyframe animation techniques, a nonprogrammatic software-based approach to the transfer of sound information (amplitude) to image information (movement and visual effects).12 To animate sections of the spomenik, I outlined a series of areas to create masks and layers that formed digital objects isolated from a background layer. The multicoloured hue in the second half of the piece is made by employing masks and keyframe animation that drive the red, green and blue alpha channels of a colour effect. 13 By manually mapping the peaks in amplitude throughout

59 the audio waveform with keyframes and assigning position and visual effect properties to them, I caused the masks to change condition over time, thus creating a correlation between the documented sound of my vocal performance and the image of its representation.

I argue that the performance in Accord with Air: Tjentiste, by entering the postproduction media environment and generating aesthetic elements based on the event it documents, makes a counter proposition to Jones’ theorisation of the documentary exchange. Rather than posit that witnessing the document is a sufficient exchange due to in its intersubjectivity, I maintain that it is not equal in its capacity to convey the physical quality of sound in my performance. On the contrary, my use of animation and visual effects aimed to acknowledge the audience’s absence from the event of performance by bringing attention to the vibratory experience of my performance; its sonic absence now conveyed in mediatised, visual means. Furthermore, I suggest that digital supplementation invokes a fictive, liminal perceptual space, in which the onlooker is invited to momentarily suspend disbelief and speculate about the invisible forces of the amplified voice through encountering the monument visually vibrating. Recalling

Eidsheim’s voice as an object of knowledge, I propose that the animation in Accord with

Air: Tjentiste becomes a mechanism for understanding the relation between amplified voice and its mediation in video documentation.14

Figure 14. Kusum Normoyle, Accord with Air: Tjentiste, 2012. Single channel HD video still.

Figure 15. Kusum Normoyle, Accord with Air: Tjentiste, 2012. Single channel HD video still.

61 An artwork that adopts a range of approaches to mediation and transduction, and which provides context for my experiments, is the four-channel video installation The

Levitation Grounds, by Australian artists Joyce Hinterding and David Haines (Figures 16 and 17).15 On two screens, Australian gumtree branches, as though magically raised, levitate horizontally and shiver with ghostly life-force above a grassy floor. Built and rendered in modelling software 3DS Max, Haines and Hinterding composited the branches into video documentation of Bruny Island bush lands.16 Similarly, a third screen presents a composite image of 3D modelled rock face and sea cave, lashed by the

Tasman Sea waters captured on video. The fourth screen features a vertical scrolling compile of weather satellite imagery recorded on Bruny Island from the Low Earth

Orbiters (LEO) weather satellites as wide band FM radio, which the artists fed into software WXtolm, transducing the radio signal into a digital image.17 Haines and

Hinterding animated the satellite images to reflect their recollection of their reception, a process that involved live decoding and reconstruction for the installation.18 Finally, the stereo audio composition featured in The Levitation Grounds was produced from late- night VLF (very low frequency) recordings that captured sounds transmitted from the

United States NOAA polar-orbiting and Russian Meteor satellites, as well as other sources, such as “strange radio interference and signals” recorded over the period the artists were on the island.19

62 In her essay about The Levitation Grounds, Ann Finnegan describes Haines and

Hinterding’s initial intentions to engage with and ‘tap’ the Bruny Island landscape through a series of technical meditations and interfaces triggered and driven by the environment so as to “record the event of Nature in progress.”20 However, “tuning into the landscape” proved both technically and affectively overpowering and, geographically isolated on Bruny Island, the artists found themselves enveloped by the environmental forces of their location and the various signals into which they tuned. Navigating the gap between initial intentions and the reality of mediating a complex environment resulted in an uncanny, audiovisual exposition of Bruny Island, guided by invisible forces that exceeded the artists’ tools of measurement.21 Whilst the specific technical processes vary between Accord with Air: Tjentiste and The Levitation Grounds, they both combine documentation and digital supplementations to reflect artists’ affective relations to location and the invisible and visible phenomena inhabiting site. Haines and

Hinterding’s employment of analogue antenna and digital software to transduce weather satellite radio transmission as image and VLF recordings into digital audio illustrate their use of medial strategies to draw energy and phenomena into the artwork.

Alternatively, their compositing of 3D modelled levitating branches and a sea cave reveals a speculative projection of the artists’ imaginative psyche onto the landscape.

There is not so much a synchronisation of sound and image in The Levitation Grounds as a reproduction of sound and image transduced and captured from the same location and time, which is then experienced in a shared installation context. Therefore, what is heard

63 and seen at any one time on the four screens in the work does not affect synchresis, but rather is conducive to speculation about their relation. Similarly, the manual synchronisation of audio amplitude and visual effects in Accord with Air: Tjentiste, allows for a slight, momentary mis-registration between image and sound that activates the most hallucinatory element of the work. In the same way that the animations in Accord with Air: Tjentiste invite the onlooker to imagine the connection between voice and spatial structure, The Levitation Grounds, as described by Fran Dyson and Douglas Kahn,

“leaves it up to the viewer to activate the hallucinatory spaces it creates.”22]

The nonprogrammatic approaches taken to producing strong resonances between sound and image in Accord with Air: Tjentiste and The Levitation Grounds contrast with other audiovisual practices emerging during the early 2000s. These practices linked the two modalities by a direct transduction of signal. Described by theorist Mitchel Whitelaw as

“transcoded audiovisuals,” these practices offer an alternative model to the trope of

“digital synaesthesia” he notes as prevalent in personal entertainment systems, dance music environments and the media arts, in which audiovisual unity is guaranteed by an algorithm.23

Australian artist Robin Fox’s works for DVD, Backscatter (2004), exemplifies a transcoded approach to audiovisual synchronicity. It was the first audiovisual artwork I encountered in which I saw the direct and immediate transformation of sonic energy into image. In Backscatter, Fox routes the left and right channels of an audio signal to the

X and Y axes of a cathode ray oscilloscope (CRO), a common laboratory instrument for

64 measuring time and amplitude of voltage signal.24 In doing so, the stereo audio signal of

Fox’s sound composition activates an image in the graphical interface of the CRO that pulses, scatters, buzzes and oscillates in direct association with the audio of its making.

Rather than simulating a link between sound and vision using postproduction techniques to create synchresis, Fox devised a causal relationship between the two stimuli where, electrical audio signal is transduced into electrons, beamed through the cathode-ray tube onto the vector monitor (Figures 18 and 19).25

Critical of the tendency to associate transcoded audiovisuals with the perceptual neurological phenomenon of synaesthesia, Whitelaw states that these practices are more significant in directing audiences to “the signal that underpins both sound and image, as well as to the map, or domain of correlation, between modalities.”26 In this way, audiovisual practice founded on the direct transcoding and transduction of media signals such as Backscatter has greater implications for the relation of media types, signal processing, and the systems that house these relations than the creation of synaesthetic effects in the viewer. Furthermore, Fox’s assertion that Backscatter is but one of various creative investigations he has made into “the abstracted geometry of sound visually” destabilises the authority of the synesthetic analogy in accounting for this work.27

Figure 16. David Haines and Joyce Hinterding, The Levitation Grounds, 2000. Four-channel HD video still, courtesy of the artists.

Figure 17. David Haines and Joyce Hinterding, The Levitation Grounds, 2000. Four-channel HD video still, courtesy of the artists.

66 Although these two works engage varying technical processes and register in the sensorium with different kinds of specificity, the vibrational force that is sound makes its way to the screen and is visually present in both words. Fox, by way of the CRO and electromagnetic transduction, measures the frequency and amplitude of sound and presents this visually. In Accord with Air: Tjentiste, I measure the amplitude of my vocal performance by manually mapping the waveform recorded in the performance with keyframes that then animate and ‘move’ the spomenik. I chose the amplitude of my screams because they were the most visually identifiable in the postproduction process.

Fox explores the geometric characteristics of sound through image, just as my work realises the vibrational materiality of sound absent from video documentation through animation.

Figure 18: Robin Fox, Backscatter, 2004. Single-channel video still, courtesy of the artist.

Figure 19: Robin Fox, Backscatter, 2004. Single-channel video still, courtesy of the artist.

68 Though The Levitation Grounds and Backscatter have a range of more prescient preoccupations beyond those I have named here, I suggest they converge with Accord with Air: Tjentiste in their curiosity of the mediated association between sound and image in contemporary audiovisual practice. Moreover, in the exploration of their respective curiosities, each practice illustrates attention to the dynamic and various energy types that produce this association. This MFA project afforded me the exploration of animated mediations to supplement the physicality of sound absent in documentation such as in

Accord with Air: Tjentiste and other similar works created during candidature. In doing so, I concluded that screen-based mediations of sound would always fall short of the sonic dominance I sought out through my practice. These screen-based mediations eventually taught me that what I was most interested in my performance practice was the real-time, physical encounter with acoustic feedback and the embodied experience of amplification and noise. This led to my refocusing toward the exploration of my vocal amplification assemblage in further, remote locations and acoustic contexts, which I consider in the following final chapter of this thesis.

69 Notes for Chapter Two

1 Mitchell Whitelaw, "Monsters and Maps," Filter, Synchresis 2007, http://archive2019.anat.org.au/2010/06/synchresis/. 2 The synchronisation of sound and visual media triggering a synthesising connection in the perceptual sensorium of the audience is ubiquitous across film and animation, and one of the anchors of Western media culture. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 63. 3 David Haines and Joyce Hinterding, The Levitiation Grounds, 2000, Artspace, Sydney. 4 Robin Fox, Backscatter (Synaesthesia Records, 2004). 5 Amelia Jones, "'Presence' in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation," Art Journal 56, no. 4 (1997): 12. 6 Amelia Jones makes the critique that observing the original act of performance as superior to its documentation is a “modernist” fantasy that renders the subject “fixed” and not open to re-representation, claiming that an unmediated relationship to any kind of cultural product is not possible. Jones, "Presence," 12. 7 The documentary model of performance documentation offered by Auslander is connected to the ideological framework established in photography that the image is a substitution of reality. Philip Auslander, "The Performativity of Performance Documentation," PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 28, no. 3 (2006): 2. 8 Examples of Auslander’s theatrical category include Marcel Duchamp’s photographs of himself dressed as Rrose Selavy, Matthew Barney’s Cremaster works, and Cindy Sherman’s portraits. Auslander, "The Performativity of Performance Documentation," 2. 9 Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, 5. 10 The etymology of the Serbo-Croatian term spomenik stems from the root spomin, meaning memory and translates generally in English to monument. Yasmin Nurming-Por, "Speaking of Time: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Framing Yugoslavia’s Spomenik Post ’89," Drain, accessed 20.05.2020, 2020, http://drainmag.com/speaking-of-time-the-ethics-and-aesthetics-of-cultural-mortality-the-politics-of- framing-yugoslavias-spomenik-post-89. 11 "Spomenik Database: Tjentište, The Battle of Sutjeska Memorial Monument Complex in the Valley of the Heroes," accessed 01.05.2020, https://www.spomenikdatabase.org/tjentiste. 12 Adobe After Effects is a computer application made by company Adobe Systems, which is used for animation, visual effects, compositing, motion graphics and other moving image post-production related purposes. Accord with Air: Tjentiste, was made in 2012 using the Creative Suite S 5.5 version of the software. 13 Keyframe animation is one of the most common forms of digital animation and involves positioning, by means of drawing, a series of anchors on a timeline to which an invariable number of position, movement, effect properties can be assigned to control an object over time. 14 Eidsheim suggests that by reconceptualising the voice as an object of knowledge within a practice of intermaterial vibration, as contrasted to the figure of sound, it is possible to “understand that voice and the states it has to offer are multifaceted and sometimes contradictory.” Eidsheim, Sensing Sound, 2. 15 The Levitation Grounds was developed during a residency at Bruny Island Lighthouse off the south coast of Tasmania in 1999. 16 Compositing is the combination of visual elements from separate sources into a single image and is common throughout film and animation. 17 Low Earth Orbiters (LEO) are weather satellites that orbit from pole to pole, taking about 15 minutes to travel from horizon to horizon, passing over Haines and Hinterding’s Bruny Island residency location approximately twice per day. The LEO polar satellites carry several instruments, including cameras for both visible and infrared light. The cameras scan back and forth at right angles to the ground path, like a broom sweeping side-to-side, taking picture strips that cover an area 3000 km wide. The satellite makes a continuous picture as if it was a tape reeling out from an endless roll. They are operated by the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Joyce Hinterding, email to author, 25 June 2020. 18 Each image strip captured by the LEO is broadcast from the satellites in the analogue format APT (Automatic Picture Transmission) toward the earth on wide band FM radio signal at approximately 137 MHz. Haines and Hinterding received these transmissions with an omnidirectional discone antenna installed on the roof of their residency studio and a computer running the radio software, Winradio. The ATP transmission was recorded as audio and extracted into image using the application WXtolm. Joyce Hinterding, email to author, 25 June 2020. 19 Joyce Hinterding, email to author, 25 June 2020.

20 Ann Finegan, "The Levitation Grounds," accessed 20 August, 2020. http://www.haineshinterding.net/2000/03/08/the-levitation-grounds. 21 Finegan, "The Levitation Grounds." 22 Frances Dyson and Douglas Kahn, “Levitation 23 Mitchell Whitelaw, "Synesthesia and Cross-Modality in Contemporary Audiovisuals," The Senses and Society 3, no. 3 (2008), https://doi.org/10.2752/174589308X331314. 24 The cathode ray oscilloscope is an electronic test instrument that analyses various signal waveforms such as frequency, amplitude, rise time, distortion amongst others, and displays these measurements in luminous green on a graphical interface. The X axis (horizontal) measures time and the Y axis (vertical) amplitude of a signal. http://boson.physics.sc.edu/~hoskins/Demos/CathodeRay.html 25 Robin Fox, "Sound and Light Simultaneity," Filter 66 (2007): 10. 26 Whitelaw, "Synesthesia and Cross-Modality." 27 Fox, "Sound and Light Simultaneity," 10.

71 Chapter Three: Playing in the Field, Grounding the Voice

Amplification is the sign of the passage of real into constructed or manipulable space, in which

distance and origin lose their meanings. Hereafter, everything can be heard, in a process which

both makes sound immediately present to the hearer, and rips sound apart from its every

originating source.

Steven Connor, “Feel the Noise: Excess, Affect and the Acoustic”

The first chapter of this thesis is preoccupied with a consideration of the way my amplified voice makes space within the confines of the gallery walls in S.I.T.E: Tension Sets.

In chapter 2, again, my amplified vocality is drawn inwards to an exploration of its relation to screen-based mediation, suggesting that the strategies employed by Haines and

Hinterding in The Levitation Grounds similarly constitute an active drawing-in of landscape and environmental phenomena to the audiovisual exhibition context. It can also be said that The Levitation Grounds presents a scenario in which the artist departs the studio and the Euclidean spatiality underpinning contexts of postproduction and exhibition. With their tools of capture, Haines and Hinterding go into the great outdoors where they are engulfed by a profusion of environmental forces, which they then navigate and interpret.

72 It is from this outward-facing counter submission that I begin this present chapter in order to locate my work spatially, both inside and outside, with special concern for the way the amplification assemblage works within these location types.

I examine a scenario in which American avant-garde vocalist Joan La Barbara gives an account of using her body and voice—unamplified—to locate herself within specific acoustic conditions during a collaboration with Alvin Lucier on the development of Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas, in 1973. The subtle affect of Haines and Hinterding’s trees floating in the southern hemisphere in chapter 2 is also in this chapter, met by the throttling force of Norwegian fjord water in my project Magnesite

Norway (2018). I compare three instances of performance that occur in two opposing acoustic fields from the collaborative performance series I undertook with Swedish saxophonist, Mette Rasmussen, throughout the fjordlands of Norway.1 One outdoor performance at the base of the Skjervsfossen waterfall—a complex and already loud acoustic environment—is compared with two performances indoors at the Norwegian

Museum of Hydro Energy, the main hall of which forms a long, highly reflective chamber producing an 8-second reverb.2

I continue to examine sound in these environments through Eidsheim’s notion of intermaterial vibration to explore how my practices of listening and vocalising are contingent on their materialisations.3 Henriques’ sonic dominance is recalled, helping me to show how I am grounded in and by the circuit of amplification and acoustic feedback.

73 To rationalise the ‘grounded connection’ that I argue is experienced through the amplification of my voice in this chapter, I invoke Jens Blauert’s term locatedness.

Developed in psychoacoustics, and also referred to as the precedence effect, the term describes the way that “we understand sound within closed spaces by distinguishing direct from reflected sonic signal.”4 Connor’s observations on the correlation between affect and audition at the juncture of technologies of amplification guides my description of the particular quality of these located amplified sound events.5 In doing so, this final chapter argues that the strategies of embodied voices are constitutive of a relational way of knowing and space making.

Joan La Barbara and Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas

Wherever sound occurred, it was always manifested elsewhere, or other things were

manifested through it; a sound had no autonomy but was always relational, being

somewhere or something else, a constant deflection that ultimately stretched out to

spiritually organize everything from essence to cosmos, always ringing with the voice

and music.

Douglas Kahn, "Introduction: Histories of Sound Once Removed"

74 American vocalist Joan La Barbara is renowned for her exploration of the voice as a multifaceted instrument, synonymous with the development of extended vocal techniques that arose from her experimentation and collaboration with the 1970s New

York avant-garde.6 Described by the artist as “both a statement of purpose and manifesto,” her 1976 album The Voice is the Original Instrument is a collection of recordings that reflect her exploration of circular breathing, embodied resonance, multiphonics, ululation, and glottal clicks.7 La Barbara’s embodied approach to the instrumentality of the voice and her work “with sound as a physical presence” precipitated a shift toward the resonant powers of the body in experimental vocal music.8

During the 1970s, American experimental composer Alvin Lucier developed Still and

Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas, a four-part composition based on the generation “of simple to complex and still to moving sound geographies with sine waves” and their interaction with other musical instruments and voice.9 Described by

Lucier as “existing almost completely on a spatial plane,” Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas is based on the acoustic phenomenon produced by constructive and destructive interference patterns, commonly known as standing waves, which Lucier considered as constituting “sonic geographies” within the work. Simply put, the phenomenon occurs when a sound wave propagated in a space reflects off a surface and interacts with itself. Depending on the phase relationship at the point of interaction, the wave is either amplified or cancelled out. The phenomenon—depending on the location

75 of the listener—creates the sense that sound is standing still in space.10 If a prospective listener moves around the space in which standing wave patterns propagate, they can both aurally hear and physically feel the sound filling the space changing dynamically.

Figure 20. Joan La Barbara and Alvin Lucier rehearsing, Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of

Hyperbolas, at Merce Cunningham’s studio, New York City, 1974. Image Mary Lucier.

76 Lucier and La Barbara’s collaboration on the piece took place in its early incarnations during 1973 and 1974 at the Cunningham Dance Space at Westbeth, New York City.

Within the enclosed rehearsal room, which reflects the spatial acoustic qualities of a white-cube gallery, Lucier configured multiple loudspeakers on its perimeters (Figure

20). To create the “sonic geographies” he transmitted sine waves of the same frequency to the speakers which, on reaching the walls of the room, reflected back toward the source of the original signal. Lucier then modulated the sine wave’s frequency until the refracted signals formed concentric patterns of sound pressure, producing standing waves throughout the space. 11 Lucier described these sound shapes as “hyperbolas.”12

By adding speakers and frequencies tuned microtonally to this configuration, the interference patterns became more complex, creating beating patterns, regular audible interference produced between closely tuned tones. To complicate things further, Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas and the acoustic phenomena involved in producing the dynamic listening experience of the piece exceeds simple standing waves. The behaviour of sound in these pieces—its refraction, appearance and disappearance—is surprising, unpredictable and conditional upon the space in which it occurs. Moreover, sound appears to emanate from ceilings and walls in ways that seem physically impossible, evoking the uncanny incantations of levitation invoked by The

Levitation Grounds (see chapter 2). Into the alternate sound sphere established by Lucier in Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas, La Barbara walked as she describes:

77 As I moved onto the wooden floor, I began singing very softly, changing my pitch

micro-tonally, causing the oscillator-produced sound waves from the speakers to beat

against the vocal sound waves, giving the impression that I could move them away from

me. After about twenty minutes, I stopped, and Alvin asked me what I had been doing. I

explained that I was locating myself in the sonic centre of the room by finding the place

where the sound waves were bombarding me equally from all sides, and I could push

them away from me by tuning my voice, adjusting the pitch to deflect the oscillator

waves.13

La Barbara’s description of her engagement with the propagating sine waves illuminates several pertinent details about her vocality. The notion that the voice is qualified by its instrumental utterance is negated by the fact that she is using her voice in such a way as to mirror the oscillations surrounding her body. Rather than employing the voice as a melodic, harmonic, or instrumental signifier—as in Eidsheim’s figure of sound—La

Barbara enacts a compelling strategy that realises the voice as a vibrational force capable of interacting with others within an acoustic field, exemplifying Eidsheim’s notion of the voice as an object of knowledge.14 Furthermore, as in Connor’s concept of vocalic space, where space “is very largely a function of the perceived powers of the body to occupy and extend itself through its environment,” La Barbara’s retelling of this vibratory encounter can be seen as a form of taking-up and defining space.15 Also, due to the intensely unpredictable behaviour of beat patterns, the manner in which La Barbara went about this would have necessarily been highly focused, incremental and attuned to her situation. Therefore, by using her body to feel where in the room she was 78 surrounded equally by sound waves, combined with the microtonal tuning of her voice to the sine wave frequencies to “move them away” from herself, La Barbara conveys an approach to vocality concerned with sensation, demarcation, and orientation.

Accordingly, I suggest La Barbara locates herself within the swelling, sonic geographies of Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas, by pushing sound away from her body using her voice. As I will now propose through a discussion of two locations from Magnesite Norway, I by contrast use my (amplified) voice to push sound toward my body as a means of location.

79 Magnesite Norway

Figure 21. Google map of Magnesite Norway driving route, 2016.

Across two weeks of the Norwegian summer of 2016, Mette Rasmussen (alto saxophone), Nick Garner (videography) and myself (voice and amplifier) travelled the fjordlands between Oslo and Bergen, scouting locations and undertaking performances in and surrounding the Hardangervidda National Park, Europe’s largest mountain plateau. Mette Rasmussen is a Danish saxophone improviser, internationally recognised for the rawness of her sound quality and stylistic agility.16 We developed a collaborative partnership when she contacted me after discovering my work online. For a year prior

80 to our first meeting, we devised a field trip around Norway, her country of residence, that resulted in our collaborative, improvised music performances in five locations: the

Norwegian Museum of Hydro Power and Industry, the Skjervsfossen waterfall, the

Utsikten lookout, a moss-covered dell at the crest of a small (unknown) waterfall, and a location atop the Hardangervidda mountain plateau itself. All performances were documented for the purposes of creating a video installation work, Magnesite Norway

(2018), which premiered at TarraWarra Biennial 2018: From Will to Form (Figure 22).17

Use of the word magnesite in the project’s title—a carbonate mineral named after the existence of magnesium in its composition—emerged after considering our traversal of the region’s rocky terrain. Heated to produce magnesium oxide, crushed magnesite is used as a raw material for the chemical industry, a refractory material for the steel industry, and as a source of magnesium.18

Whilst the two performance locations I discuss in this thesis, the Skjervsfossen waterfall and the Norwegian Museum of Hydro Energy, vary in their acoustic fields, the performances and material submitted for examination share fundamental territory. Both were recorded in dual-channel, high definition video, using two Canon EOS 5D Mark II

DSLR cameras, fitted with high quality Zeiss Cinema Prime lenses—an 85 mm to capture the near field image and a second wide 21 mm lens, the immensity of the landscape. Videographer, Nick Garner, used the 21 mm lens in a locked-off, stationary position, whilst the 85 mm was frequently mobilised to focus on either Rasmussen or myself during performance. Both performances were recorded in four-channel audio,

81 using one AKG C214 condenser microphone on each performer, and a Røde camera microphone on each of the cameras. In all of the performances in the series, I used a dynamic vocal microphone in combination with a Roland JC-120 Jazz Chorus guitar amplifier, a rugged ‘combo’ amp known for its clear, bright tone, and reverb and chorus channels.19

The collaborative sound-making is in both cases improvised, loud, and all performances in the series vary between three and 25 minutes. In both, I employ what author Caleb

Kelly has described as my “brand of pre-linguistic screams, hisses and mouth sounds,” amplification and acoustic feedback.20 Rasmussen engages the free jazz-inspired, textural sound work on the saxophone for which she is renowned. Contrasts running throughout the entire project are present in these two scenarios: the tension between my raw, unhinged vocalisations and Rasmussen’s training in the jazz and free improvisation traditions; the dissonance of our combined sounds against the visual ‘romance’ and beauty of the Norwegian landscape; even the colour of our hair. Both performances are demonstrative of one of our informal pursuits in the project, which was to improvise together in locations where we had the sense of being immersed, overwhelmed, or dominated by the environments in which we played.

Figure 22. Magnesite Norway, 2018, (22:40), installation view, TarraWarra Biennial 2018: From Will to Form.

Although the structure of our sonic relation was never predetermined, our style of collaboration might be seen to draw on the values and practices developed over decades of improvised music, such as absence from musical rhythm and metre, the intense momentum and the pursuit of novel sounds that we tease from respective instruments.21

There are moments when Rasmussen appears to follow and mimic my phrasing and sound quality; a technique familiar to those trained in the free jazz, improvisational tradition. Similarly, the influence of the various musical noise traditions that proliferated across the twentieth century, explicated by Hegarty, can be heard in the transgressive, excessive, disruptive and loudness of our respective sound qualities.22 Whilst the

83 historical traditions of free jazz and twentieth century noise offer a vocabulary for describing the sounds we produce, they do not account for my navigation of the affective relations between performer, technological assemblage and site, which I argue these performances generated. These two scenarios illustrate contrasting approaches to performing amplified vocalisations, which, I argue, are the result of my engagement with their respective and specific acoustic conditions.

Two acoustic fields and their outcomes

Figure 23. Kusum Normoyle and Mette Rasmussen, Magnesite Norway: Skjervsfossen waterfall, 2016. Dual channel HD, video still.

84 The waterfall at Skjervefossen, in the Hordaland region of Norway, consists of two successive falls that combined, descend 150 metres. In the documentation of the performance at this site, Rasmussen and I are grouped at the end of the small concrete walkway accessible from the road that leads to the plunge pool at the base of the first 60 metre fall. Approximately four metres from the base of the waterfall, the mist produced by water hitting the plunge pool reaches us and our equipment. Rasmussen, with her back to the waterfall and saxophone in hand, faces the two cameras angled toward the cascading water and I face her, the amplifier dividing us (Figure 23). The vertical face of the black rock, over which the water cascades, provides a dramatic visual backdrop; however, any acoustic reflections on the surface were obfuscated by the sound of cascading water and therefore indiscernible. Combined with the decreased sound velocity known to result from an increase in air moisture, the acoustic field at the waterfall is comparable to a free or open field—a disorientating and ungenerous environment in which to improvise.23

In an effort to orientate myself within these acoustic circumstances I initiated our performance by vocalising a series of trills I hoped would compete with the complex textural din of the crashing water. Frantically, we improvised, trying to direct our combined sound making into a shared moment of resonance. However, compositionally, the piece is imbued with a struggle, disclosed in its rapid fluidity of form and improvisations that momentarily join to oscillate, only to disconnect and intensify in vehement, chaotic momentum. My recollection of this performance—grappling with the

85 waterfall’s immense scale, its exhaustive noisiness, and the piercing ferocity of

Rasmussen’s saxophone and my amplifiers’ wailing feedback—is pervaded by the experience of affective and acoustic loss. This sense of loss was associated with having insufficient physical energy to exert vocalisations that would create enough force, so as to achieve the experience of sonic dominance on which my performative mode relies.

The way in which I repeatedly crouch down and run in the direction of the amplifier in an effort to engage its vibratory transmission over my body is evidence of this (Figures

24 and 25). Rasmussen too encountered the waterfall as a difficult acoustic setting to play stating it as being characterised by feelings of defeat: she describes her metal saxophone, contracted under the cold temperature, as highly “resistant” and as having little “give,” likening its sound to a “dead/dry wall experience.”24

In the wake of my failed efforts to engage and locate my body in the sonic dominance of the amplifier, I resigned to relinquish control of the performance and a secondary affect emerged from the experience of playing in this acoustic field. Rather, all of these sound sources and their various intensities registered across my sensorium in sheer excess and

I encountered pure, vibratory affect, manifesting what Eric Shouse describes as a

“moment of unformed and unstructured potential.”25 This encounter is evocative of

Connor’s audiophonic self: the self, he describes, as defined by the conditions of modernity and therefore hearing rather than seeing, making “the body a membrane, through which voices, noises and musics travel” 26

Figure 24. Kusum Normoyle and Mette Rasmussen, Magnesite Norway: Skjervsfossen waterfall, 2016. Dual channel HD, video still.

Figure 25. Kusum Normoyle and Mette Rasmussen, Magnesite Norway: Skjervsfossen waterfall, 2016. Dual channel HD, video still.

87 The acoustic circumstances of the Norwegian Museum of Hydro Power and Industry greatly contrast those of the Skjervefossen waterfall.27 Erected on the fjord in the village of Tyssedal, and ordinarily a tourist attraction, the museum became a feasible performance location in Magnesite Norway as a result of the high rainfall we encountered during the project’s period, presenting obvious technical challenges for the project

(Figure 26). We arranged access to the main turbine hall after business hours, evident in the low level of light present in the video documentation. The long reverberation naturally occurring in the turbine hall resulting from its length, high ceilings and hard, reflective surfaces, was immediately apparent to the naked ear throughout the hall, regardless of one’s location (Figure 27). This created a relative sense of quietude and physical protection absent from the waterfall location, but also capacious acoustic conditions.

Figure 26. Norwegian Museum of Hydro Power and Industry, Tyssedal, Norway. Image: Wikipedia.

Figure 27. Norwegian Museum of Hydro Power and Industry, Tyssedal, Norway. Image: Cultural Route of the Council of Europe.

89 As a result of these acoustic conditions, our two performances (A and B) at the Hydro

Museum contrast the ferocity, urgency and impulsiveness illustrated in the waterfall scenario. Approximately twice as long (performance A is 11:00 minutes; performance B is 8:00 minutes), the improvisations are marked by sonic composure, an ease of measure and compositional spatiality, as we play elongated tones that pass by and around one another. The fraught attempts to ground my body by running at the source of amplification, as illustrated in the waterfall scenario, is also missing from these performances. Instead, the naturally occurring eight second reverb of the Hydro

Museum resulted in our compositional exploitation of the acoustic refractions produced by its spatiality (Figures 28 and 29). Within the relative quiet of the turbine hall’s ambient noise floor, we slowly build the improvisations through short phrases and punctations. Our sound seamlessly transfers throughout the hall, expanding by way of its propagation through the resonant and reflective material conditions of space. The high degree of acoustic productivity of the hall is illustrated by a brief moment in performance B documentation at 00:47, where I scream with the microphone held at great distance from my mouth and my vocalisations continue to propagate as though still amplified. Furthermore, my intentional unplugging of the microphone from the amplifier at 1:04 in performance B documentation, so as to hear the circuit being broken, is demonstrative of my active listening to the nuances of the amplification assemblage in this acoustic field (Figures 30 and 31).

90 There is sound in excess here too, but of a different order. In contrast to the multitude of sound sources in the waterfall scenario, my perception is exposed to two categories of sound in the Hydro Museum: firstly, the direct transmission of our instruments, and secondly, their reflection throughout the hall. Examining experiments of auditory perception, psychoacoustician Jens Blauert developed the concept of locatedness to account for the complexity of sound as it is perceived in space.28 Also referred to as the precedence effect, locatedness describes the way “we understand sound within closed spaces by distinguishing direct from reflected sonic signal.”29 Developing this, I would suggest that my feeling of being ‘grounded’ during my performances incorporates the observational activity involved in Blauert’s locatedness with the embodied experience to acoustic feedback. The experience of sonic dominance also has implications for the relationship of body and its spatial and temporal environment, where its effects

“generate a specific particular sense of place rather than a general abstract idea of space.

It’s unique, immediate and the place of tradition and ritual performance.”30

Figure 28. Kusum Normoyle and Mette Rasmussen, Magnesite Norway: Turbine Hall A, 2016. Dual channel HD left channel video still.

Figure 29. Kusum Normoyle and Mette Rasmussen, Magnesite Norway: Turbine Hall A, 2016. Dual channel HD, right channel video still.

Figure 30. Kusum Normoyle and Mette Rasmussen, Magnesite Norway: Turbine Hall B, 2016. Dual channel HD, left-channel video still.

Figure 31. Kusum Normoyle and Mette Rasmussen, Magnesite Norway: Turbine Hall B, 2016. Dual channel HD, right-channel video still.

93 Feedback has a similar locative function in my practice. As noted by experimental musician Nicolas Collins, feedback reveals “links between electronics and acoustics, between circuitry and instruments, between structure and sound.”31 And in my practice, acoustic feedback—its frequency and oscillation—links me to the position of my amplifier and its relation to the spatiality of a given performance. By adding my voice to this relational mix, I have the sense that I am in the circuit, vibrating and feeding back.

In the particular quality of excessive sound in this performance scenario, I encountered what Connor describes as the “unnameable and the immeasurable” pleasure experienced in the body excitation by amplified noise.32

Through this final investigation in my MFA I have explored instances in which the vocal artist’s body and its relation to spatiality is fundamental to a vibrational praxis of singing and listening. La Barbara’s collaboration on Lucier’s Still and Moving Lines of Silence in

Families of Hyperbolas highlights a method for listening and responding to sound through vocalisations that is an adaptive and materially contingent process. It also shows the capacity of the expressive voice—through the sensing body—to exert force against other sources of vibration while simultaneously acting as a process of spatial orientation.

Examining scenarios from the performance series Magnesite Norway in two acoustic fields reveals the importance of the amplification assemblage in generating the sound/vibration encounters that motivate my practice.

94 Notes for Chapter Three

1 The term acoustic field originates from audiometry and describes an environment or region through which sound energy waveforms disperse, and the acoustic properties of the materials through which the waves pass, or are impacted by. Maryanne Maltby, "sound field," in A Dictionary of Audiology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780191830822.001.0001/acref-9780191830822- e-0160?rskey=7mTxiZ&result=193. 2 There are no resources available online to verify the length of the reverb time in the Norwegian Museum of Hydro Energy. However, I remember that this detail was listed on a plaque on a small cubicle in the turbine hall, which was used by employees to speak to one another in a space removed from the loud operation of the hydraulic power station during its years of operation (1906–1989). 3 Eidsheim, Sensing Sound, 2. 4 Eidsheim, 175. 5 Connor, "Feel the Noise," 147. 6 La Barbara was involved in and a central figure of the mid-to-late twentieth century New York experimentalism. Alvin Lucier was part of the Sonic Arts Union, a collective formed in 1966 of like- minded experimental musicians in New York City (including Robert Ashley, David Behrman and Gordon Mumma) and was introduced to Joan La Barbara by John Cage, and invited the vocalist to collaborate with him on Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas. 7 Joan La Barbara "Voice Is The Original Instrument, Album Notes," Lovely Music, accessed 05.11.15, http://www.lovely.com/albumnotes/notes3003.html. Voice Is The Original Instrument was originally released in 1976 on La Barbara’s own Wizard label, and later reissued as part of a double compact disc compilation of the same name by Lovely Music in 2003. 8 La Barbara studied at New York University in 1970 whilst taking private lessons at the Juilliard School with Hungarian contralto Marian Szekely Freschel, who first encouraged La Barbara to work beyond the confines of Western classical traditions and learn yogic and expanded breathing techniques. The vocalist set about “stretching the boundaries” of established vocal technique on her own accord, improvising alongside other instruments, attuning her voice to their pitches, timbres and tonal qualities. La Barbara has composed many pieces of her own right and collaborated with many avant-garde composers, such as John Cage, Robert Ashley, Philip Glass, Alvin Lucier, Merce Cunningham, David Behrman, Morton Feldman and Morton Subotnick. Joan La Barbara, "Voice is the Original Instrument," Contemporary Music Review 21, no. 1 (2002): 35. 9 Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas, is a four-part work developed by Alvin Lucier that commenced development 1972–1974 for sine wave oscillators, speakers, spatial conditions, acoustic instruments, and voice. These parts were later recorded in 1983–84, by which time the compositions had developed significantly from their early experimental incarnations with which Joan La Barbara was initially involved. Due to the processual nature of the work and its dependence on spatial conditions and the resultant response by performers to sine wave phenomena in these varied conditions, the outcome of the piece differs in each performance. Parts I–IV of this piece are distinct: Part I is a sound installation in which closely tuned pure waves spin around the room at various speeds and in different directions. Part II consists of 11 solos and a duet for voice, clarinet, French horn, flute, string quartet, and four mallet instruments. Part III is similar to Part I, except that snare drums are sympathetically resonated by the passing waves; and Part IV is composed for dancers who discover and move in hyperbolic curves in space. Alvin Lucier, Reflections: Interviews, Scores, Writings, ed. Gisela Gronemeyer, Reinhard Oehlschlägel, and Alvin Lucier (Köln: MusikTexte, 1995), 358. 10 Standing waves are sound waves that have the appearance of to being stationary and result of the interaction of two sound wave forms of the same frequency. A standing wave occurs when a continuous sound wave is reflected from an obstacle and interacts with the incident (direct) wave in such a way that it has points of increased sound and points of silence. Increased sound occurs where the reflected wave increases the intensity of the original sound through resonance; these points are known as anti-nodes. Areas of silence occur where the reflected wave cancels the incident wave through destructive interference; these points are known as “nodes.” Maryanne Maltby, "standing waves," in A Dictionary of Audiology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780191830822.001.0001/acref-9780191830822- e-0165?rskey=7mTxiZ&result=198. 11 It should be noted here that creating beating patterns or standing waves depends on finding the resonant frequency of the room and experimenting with wavelength (frequency) within the given space of acoustic propagation.

12 Lucier, Reflections, 152. 13 La Barbara, "Voice is the Original Instrument," 38. 14 Eidsheim, Sensing Sound, 2. 15 Connor, Dumbstruck, 12. 16 Frane Odak, "Mette Rasmussen to support Godspeed You! Black Emperor in Zagreb’s Tvornica Kulture," Metal Jacket, 2019, http://metaljacketmagazine.com/mette-rasmussen-to-support-godspeed- you-black-emperor-in-zagrebs-tvornica-kulture. 17 The dual-channel video installation Magnesite Norway (2018) was published in TarraWarra Biennial 2018: From Will to Form, curated by Emily Cormack at the TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, Victoria, Australia, outside periods of my enrolment in this research project and therefore not included for discussion in this thesis. In this thesis, I discuss the unedited documentation of the performances captured during my enrolment in 2016. 18 “Magnesite.” New Oxford Rhyming Dictionary. Oxford University Press, January 1, 2012. http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199652464.001.0001/acref-9780199652464-e- 22622. 19 The Roland JC-120 Jazz Chorus guitar amplifier is a dual channel amplifier which outputs a total of 120 watts. A ‘combo’ amp describes an amplifier where the amplifier and cabinet are combined in one box. I use a 1000 watt pure sine wave converter partnered with a lithium car battery to power single amplifiers at locations remote from power mains. 20 Kelly, Gallery Sound, 87. 21 David Borgo, "Negotiating Freedom: Values and Practices in Contemporary Improvised Music," Black Music Research Journal 22, no. 2 (2002): 1. 22 Hegarty, Noise/Music, 5. 23 In audiometric terms the ‘free’ or ‘open’ field describes the manufactured acoustic circumstances in an anechoic chamber in which waveforms propagate away from a source without interruption. This acoustic situation is designed to engender predictable waveform behaviour and make waveform analysis uncomplicated in the measurement of acoustic and electromagnetic phenomena. F. Alton Everest and Ken C. Pohlmann, Master Handbook of Acoustics (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2015), np. 24 Mette Rasmussen, email to author, 21 May 2020. 25 Eric Shouse, "Feeling, Emotion, Affect," M/C Journal 8, no. 6 (2005), http://journal.media- culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php. 26 Steven Connor, "The Modern Auditory," in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1997), 207. 27 The Norwegian Museum of Hydro Power and Industry is dedicated to the cultural history of the former hydropower station, which made a significant contribution to Europe’s electricity supply. The hydraulic power station at Tyssedal was one of the largest and most productive in Europe during its years of operation (1918–1989), contributing 10–15 per cent of the European power grid. Built in 1906–1918 and designed by Thorvald Astrup, the building blends classical European architecture with the functional linear architecture necessary to house the water turbines. "Kraftmuseet Norwegian Museum of Hydropower and Industry," accessed 05.05.2020, 2020, https://www.erih.net/i-want-to-go- there/site/show/Sites/kraftmuseet-norwegian-museum-of-hydropower-and-industry. 28 Eidsheim, Sensing Sound, 175. 28 Eidsheim, 175. 29 Eidsheim, 175. 30 Henriques, "Sonic Dominance," 459. 31 Nicolas Collins, "All This and Brains Too: Thirty Years of Howling Round," Resonance 9, no. 2 (2002): 6–7. 32 Connor, "Feel the Noise," 150.

96 Conclusion: Amplifying the Body Beyond 2020

As I write this, it is six months since the World Health Organisation declared the

COVID-19 viral outbreak a pandemic of international concern. As the globe struggles to respond, group gatherings are restricted and correspondingly, every way of life is impacted to such an extent that accounting for it just yet—not less here—is futile.1 Peers and colleague’s exhibition and performance agendas, like mine, have been cancelled or re-routed to an online presentation context, and we hold our breath in deliberation over when and if, mass public cultural forums will to return to as they were prior to the pandemic.

Concurrently, this week, I have returned to watching a five-minute iPhone recording of

In the Name of the Earth, John Luther Adams’ choral work for 800 voices, shared with me by a friend present at its performance at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New

York, in 2017.2 On first seeing this video, three years ago, the work’s immensity, beauty and transformative power burnt into and haunted my psyche. The composition’s arrangement, comprised of multiple parts vocalised by masses of voices that transmit, refract and resonate throughout the heights of the Cathedral’s 54 metre high nave, is evocative of a temporal order and sense of scale that exceeds the human.3 Adams’ statement, that music “is a call to attention, an invitation to enter into sacred space, to be more deeply aware, to feel the presence of mysteries larger and older and deeper than

97 I can fathom,” is self-evident, even in this short, wobbly, hand-held, video recording.4

This video has also held me captive over this past week because of what it signals about our current moment. Despite the performance taking place only three years ago, it feels eerily distant, and embodies numerous performative, collaborative and collective experiential impossibilities at affective scale. It seems perfect material on which to meditate at the end of this research project with which it shares so much fundamental territory: the way voices take up and make space (vocalic space); the documentation of vocal acts and the mediated experience of its affective goings-on; the contrast between inside and outside performance environments; and how voice orientates us within these environments. Furthermore, as people around the globe isolated in their homes are drawn onto balconies in song with whatever instruments are in their house, it could be deduced that collective music-making has a socially unifying capacity during the pandemic.5 Equally, I am at a loss to keep up with the torrent of performances, concerts, workshops and round tables streamed into my own home weekly. In light of this ever- present frame, stuttering bandwidth and our apparent continuing desire to have sound and musical encounters in this context, I have cause to speculate about the implications of COVID-19 for the kind of performance and sound experiences I have described throughout this thesis.

98 While this research has solidified my approach to voice and amplification and its relation to the material circumstances of its making, future research possibilities continue to emerge at its conclusion. For example, what mediations might now be involved in conveying the spatially located amplified air pressure essential to my work in an online context? For the artist or audience attuned to these vibratory elements, a consideration of the loudspeaker technology in the transmission or screening environment may be necessary. How are the limitations of compression considered when distortion plays an important role in the sound quality? Also, how does the voice continue to take up and make space as in Connor’s vocalic space within the mediatised framework of online presentation? Will it again be necessary to explore the capabilities of documentation and software to convey loudness, embodied affect and spatiality specific acoustics?

My practice offers a number of responses to the limitations of a 2020 pandemic context.

For example, the extended documentation, drawing, planning and conceptual and technical marginalia I produce planning works and performances may emerge to play a more important role in exhibition practices (Figure 32). Also, the social distance already inherent in projects such as Magnesite Norway and the various other outdoor series I have created might mean that performances in remote locations find new meaning, agency or relevancy.

Figure 32. Kusum Normoyle with Peter Blamey and Hethre Contant, Slow/ Dark (publication), at Artspace Ideas Platform, Sydney, Australia, 2016. Photo Jessica Maurer.

Performances such as Solid (Loud) Matter (2018) offers a constructive response to a performance context in which audience members must maintain a 1.5 metre distance from one another. Conducted through six Marshall double-stacks on the external perimeter of the TarraWarra Museum of Art in the Yarra Valley wine region in

Healesville Victoria, this performance was the first to significantly elevate the scale of amplification in my work.6 Facing away from the museum’s sandstone wall, the amplifier assemblage emitted feedback and voice at extremely high volume across the natural amphitheatre of TarraWarra Estate Winery and the valley beyond (Figure 33).

For the 17 minutes of the performance, the audience watched from the grassy slope,

100 captured videos from the side of the duck pond, and walked wandered around the museum perimeter (Figure 34). Outdoor performance eludes the normative conditions set out by indoor music venues or art galleries that make social distancing difficult and promote viral transmission. They also maintain the embodied experience of loud amplification without any mediating interface and offer audiences the freedom to regulate their own perception of its volume by moving their distance from the performance.

Figure 33. Kusum Normoyle, Solid (Loud)Matter, at Will to Form: Activated, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, Australia, 2018. Photo Redfish Blue Fish Creative.

101

Figure 34. Kusum Normoyle, Solid (Loud)Matter, at Will to Form: Activated, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, Australia, 2018. Photo Redfish Blue Fish Creative.

Given that the response to COVID-19 has required a restructuring of social interaction and engagement, artistic practices such as my own, which have already investigated and enacted a restructuring of the physical relations between performer, space and audience seem particularly apt. Through the use of amplification, the physical nature of sound itself, rather than personal contact, can work affectively to produce embodied experience as a common medium of social interaction. This would not, however, simply act as a surrogate or substitute, but would instead be indicative of a shifting of register into something more phenomenal, more experiential, that happens when body, space, audio

102 amplification and voice coalesce to exert, transmit and receive embodied, acoustic and vibrational energies.

103 Notes for Conclusion

1 World Health Organization, “Rolling Updates on Corona Disease (COVID-19), accessed 19.08.2020, https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/events-as-they-happen. 2 According to John Luther Adams, In the Name of the Earth is a “musical map of North America—a refutation and a counterproposal to the official maps of state highway departments and the corporate worldview of Google—and a celebration of this beautiful continent where the only real borders are watersheds and coastlines.” John Luther Adams, "In the Name of the Earth," accessed 19.08.2020, http://johnlutheradams.net/in-the-name. 3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_St._John_the_Divine accessed 19 August, 2020. 4 Adams, "In the Name of the Earth." 5 Musical rhythm plays a privileged role in the brain’s neurology creating a sense of movement in the neural motor. Jessica Grahn, Anna-Katharina R. Bauer and Anna Zamm, “Music-making Brings us Together During the Coronavirus Pandemic,” The Conversation, 28.04.2020, https://theconversation.com/music-making-brings-us-together-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic-137147. 5 Solid (Loud) Matter (2018) was presented at Will to Form: Activated in association with Melbourne International Arts Festival 2018, as part of TarraWarra Biennial 2018: Will to Form. This performance was completed outside periods of enrolment in this research project and is mentioned here to facilitate a discussion about the future of my work. “Solid Loud Matter,” accessed 29 August, 2020, https://kusumnormoyle.net/Solid-Loud-Matter-2018.

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