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Microphones and Loudspeakers As Musical Instruments. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017

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Microphones and Loudspeakers As Musical Instruments. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017 Eck, Cathy van. "Introduction." Between Air and Electricity: Microphones and Loudspeakers as Musical Instruments. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. 1–8. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 29 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501327636.ch-001>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 29 September 2021, 06:56 UTC. Copyright © Cathy van Eck 2017. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. Introduction Are microphones and loudspeakers musical instruments? This question is the starting point for my book Between Air and Electricity which tells the story of how microphones and loudspeakers have changed music over the past 100 years through artistic experiments and innovation. It is very common nowadays to have microphones and loudspeakers used on stage next to musicians and conventional musical instruments. One of the initial seeds of inspiration for my book was how these elements of a musical performance contrast with one another. The sound producing relationship between a gesticulating musician and a musical instrument is obvious. Even without knowing much about the violin or piano, it becomes immediately clear by hearing and seeing a violinist, what this person is doing and how the sound is changed according to her gestures. On the contrary, the sounds emitted by a loudspeaker can theoretically be any sound: a musical instrument such as a violin; environmental sounds such as the sea; or machines, such as car sounds. And what might have been originally a very soft sound whispered by a performer into a microphone might be diffused very loudly through loudspeakers. Besides, whereas the musician is also able to communicate visually with the audience, the microphone and loudspeaker on stage are just seemingly immovable devices, often painted black to remain as unnoticeable as possible. Microphone and loudspeaker technology is omnipresent not only in music but as well in our everyday life. Here, also, these devices are often designed to remain invisible and sonically transparent; that is, ‘inaudible’ in the final sound result. We hardly seem to notice them anymore – how often are our voices transmitted through a telephone receiver, do we hear the latest news on the car radio, or are simply listening to music through our headphones? These are all microphones or loudspeakers. Microphones and loudspeakers are employed in almost all music we hear nowadays: to amplify the voices and electric guitars of a rock band, to facilitate the production of a ‘perfect’ recording of a symphony orchestra, to reproduce that recording in the living room, and as an essential component of many modes of presentation, from the Jamaican sound system to techno parties. All music has now become available everywhere and is available at any moment. This is in contrast to the way it had been in all music cultures before sound reproduction technology, which was created by musicians only for their own society and in its own specific context. Inventions such as the phonograph, radios and telephones – usually grouped under the term ‘sound reproduction technology’ – changed our relation to all sonic events in society. But the invention of microphones 2 Between Air and Electricity and loudspeakers using electricity for amplification particularly changed musical performances, since their quality of sound reproduction is ameliorated extensively in comparison to the horns used before. This made their sonic quality good enough not only for communicating speech through the telephone or reproducing well-known music through the radio but also attractive to composers and musicians who wanted to use these devices that were able to reproduce all kinds of sounds on stage. I started the research for this book as a composer, and this is the main role I tried to keep during the whole process. Coming from instrumental music with written scores, I soon started to work with recorded and electronically produced sounds, and consequently I had to deal with these microphones and loudspeakers. What I remember of my early days using this technology is how different, not only visually but also sonically, the sound of live musicians playing instruments or loudspeakers is on stage. My first attempt to bring both together was by literally binding them together: the musicians were given a loudspeaker attached to their backs through which the live processed sounds of their instruments were diffused: my composition Actions of Memory (2004) was the result. As a result, I became interested in other compositions using microphones and loudspeakers in unconventional ways. Composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and David Tudor created their well-known compositions Mikrophonie I and Rainforest, respectively, from the desire to treat microphones and loudspeakers as musical instruments. To consider these devices as actively determining a musical performance similarly to how a common musical instrument determines a performance became my main research topic. I searched for compositional situations in which microphones and loudspeakers added their specific characteristics to the final composition, comparable to how musical instruments influence the resulting sound. This book thus takes the artistic use of the devices that bring air pressure waves (sound waves) into electricity and back as its central focus point. For this reason, it is entitled Between Air and Electricity. But the title of this book also refers to what is essential for human beings – air – and a common energy source for machines: electricity. Microphones and loudspeakers can be seen as the interface between human performers and listeners, and all kinds of electronic machines for sound shaping, such as synthesizers and computers. These devices processing electrical signals would not be able to communicate with mechanically produced sound without getting their input signal from microphones, and would remain silent, if their signal was not diffused through loudspeakers. This book could easily have become a list of descriptions – and it would have been a very long list – of musical works in which microphones and loudspeakers are manipulated, often in very spectacular ways: pieces using microphones which have been frozen in ice, swallowed by performers, or catch the softest noise made by audience members; pieces in which loudspeakers are thrown through the air, hundreds of them covering walls and ceilings or drifting in lakes. Instead I arrived at different categories of interaction with microphones and loudspeakers, derived from my analyses of microphone and loudspeaker use by other artists and my own practice as a composer. These different categories are meant to be tools not only for analysing compositions but also for composing new pieces with microphones and loudspeakers. Introduction 3 As I outline in Chapter 3, acoustic feedback became the sound that was most intrinsic for me when using microphones and loudspeakers as sound shaping devices. Starting from a set-up causing a feedback sound, I analysed different ways of interacting with microphones and loudspeakers. By moving them, changing the material through which they vibrate, and position them at a specific place in the performance space, I could change this acoustic feedback. These three categories – movement, material and space – became my main categories for composing with microphones and loudspeakers and form the main trail I elaborate on in Chapter 4. After having broken down each of these three categories in another six possibilities, I started to look for suitable compositions as exemplary models for this way of interacting with microphones and loudspeakers. As a result, there were microphone and loudspeaker uses for which I could have numerous examples, as was the case for moving loudspeakers, which now focuses on works by Gordon Monahan and Annea Lockwood, and which does not mention works by Benoît Maubrey or Steffi Weissmann, both of whom also have a very interesting approaches towards this subject. Similar to this is the use of contact microphones for the development of new instruments, as described in new instruments through amplification. From each of several artists – for example, Alvin Lucier and Hugh Davies – I chose more than one composition, each for a different category. These artists have worked very intensively with microphones and loudspeakers, and someone such as Alvin Lucier has made so many fascinating works with microphones and loudspeakers that it would undoubtedly be possible to cover a whole book solely on his work with these devices. Some very famous pieces are omitted: the Polytopes by Iannis Xenakis, for example. Sometimes it was really difficult to find compositions or musical works that would fit a category, such as, for example, acoustic feedback through objects. Finally I found the piece Nodalings by Nicolas Collins as an example of this idea, but evidently the lack of compositions in this category made me doubt my analysis of microphone and loudspeaker use (or my lack of knowledge of the repertoire. Evidently there are still many pieces using microphones and loudspeakers I do not yet know). To try out for myself the possibilities of this category acoustic feedback by objects, I composed Music Stands (2011) for acoustic feedback through a note stand. Over the years, by exploring these compositions, as I describe in Chapter 4, and through my own work as a composer, I realized
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