Kyma Ambiences [USO003]
is the third sound effects bundle created by Matteo Milani (U.S.O.
Project). The generation of these "Artificial Reality Ambiences" starts
entirely in Symbolic Sound Kyma - during the development of projectgenesismovie.com
- from the processing of white and pink noise by filtering - in the
time/spectral domains - and convolving these sources with custom FM,
additive, formant and granular synthesis.
The
composition’s resource of sound material is drawn solely from these
processed stochastic sound elements: coloured noise is a raw material
already full of life and can be sculpted into a variety of temporal
forms, movements and textures. The interaction with Kyma was typical of a
composer who explored a device’s potential for sound transformation
like a musical instrument. The goal was to obtain an organic and
acoustic quality using only a restricted sound source, in order to evoke
real spatial characteristics attached to each invented sound.
The sound effects collection is published @ 96kHz (native), plus a budget version @ 48kHz (resampled). “Kyma Ambiences vol.1” is not only available in these two packages, but also as dual-layer separated “Elements”,
suitable for recombinant stratification, varispeed and spatial
positioning in the surround field (for a total of 112 files @ 96kHz).
Unseen Noises is the second sound effects bundle created by sound designers and electronic composers Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi (aka Unidentified Sound Object - U.S.O. Project).
Electromagnetic informations are invisible and omnipresent. In every city, especially the big ones, an infinite number of electromagnetic waves is hidden: we can't hear them, but they're everywhere! We explored this invisible noise pollution transducing electromagnetic fields into audio signals with a telephone pickup: it acts like a radio antenna for hum and weird electromagnetic noises.
We plugged it into a SONOSAX SX-R4 recorder, moving it close to electrical devices - like a stethoscope - to locate interesting and curious sounds, just like LCD television, internet antennas, lighting systems, transformers, game consoles, tablet, electronic security systems, scanners, computer monitors and hard-drives, printers, navigation systems, fax machines...
All of the audio files have been embedded with metadata for detailed and accurate searches in your asset management software.
As the previous library, this collection has not been peak normalized, but loudness normalized. Through loudness normalization, the gain of a signal is modified so that the signal’s loudness level equals -23 LUFS. Loudness normalization helps us solve the problem where we wish to balance the loudness level of multiple sound files.
Hologram Room is the first bundle of the abstract Sound Design Collection produced by sound designers and composers Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi (aka U.S.O. Project).
These two gigabytes of “ready to use” original sound elements are designed to help you sweetening and enhancing your sound production. The whole library is organized in eight main folders: Active Drones, Alarms, Blips, Buttons, Communications, Ignitions, Telemetries, Transitions. It provides a selection of out of this world drones and ambiences, futuristic sound effects and electronic tools.
We have been spending hours composing, editing, mixing these categories in Symbolic Sound Corporation Kyma and Avid Pro Tools. All of the audio files have been embedded with metadata for detailed and accurate searches in your asset management software.
A note about the mastering: the library has not been peak normalized, but loudness normalized, based on the recommendation by the European Broadcast Union. What does it mean? During the audition of your samples, they will have the same loudness level when played through monitors.
This work has been made possible by the aid of LevelOne, a program developed by Grimm Audio.
EBU TECHNICAL provides all kinds of information about the EBU R128 loudness recommendation. The official R128 documents and guidelines can be found online, as well as introduction papers and videos.
Mamori Sound Project
6th Annual Workshop/Residency for sound artists & composers
@ Mamori Lake (Amazon, Brazil) / October 2011 / 2 weeks
This Kickstarter Project is to assist in funding eight US sound artists to participate in this year's Mamori Sound Project and, by doing so, help this whole exceptional project in the Amazon survive. This project will only be funded if at least $25,500 is pledged by Tuesday May 31, 1:00am EDT.
Mamori Sound Project is an independent residency/workshop that has been carried out in the Brazilian Amazon since 2005 by a small non-profit organization, integrated by sound artist Francisco López and the cultural association Mamori ArtLab, based in Spain and Brazil. Mamori Sound Project supports the local community at Mamori Lake (Amazonas state, Brazil) by providing jobs every year for a significant number of people in this community.
The Mamori Sound Project is a 2-week workshop/residency for professional and semi-professional sound artists and composers with previous experience in the area of sound experimentation and field recordings. It takes place at Mamori Lake, in the middle of the Brazilian Amazon, and involves theoretical/discussion presentations, field work and studio work. The workshop/residency has a special focus on creative approaches to the work with field recordings, through an extensive exploration of natural sound environments. It does not have a technical character but is instead conceived and directed towards the development and realization of a collective project of sonic creation with the interaction of all participant artists/composers. The activities of the workshop/residency include: Introductory theoretical/discussion presentation sessions on field recordings and sound creation, with a historical/philosophical perspective.
Field trips (both diurnal and nocturnal) for extensive listening and recording of sound environments.
Collective listening and discussion sessions of the sound materials gathered. Sessions of studio work (with laptop) using these materials.
Development and realization of a sound piece by each participant (or in small groups), as part of the collective project.
Public presentation of the finished pieces for both the participant artists and members of the local community at Mamori Lake.
All these activities are organized in a daily schedule according to the changing sonic environments of the rainforest. This typically involves many hours of field and studio work but there is also flexibility to allow participants to choose from several schedule options and to have the opportunity to carry out other activities related to the daily life in this environment, such as fishing for food or interacting with the local community.
International festival of music, mixed media and experimental electronic art
[a project by AntiTesi (Domenico Sciajno) and U.S.O. Project in collaboration with O' and Die Schachtel]
Live!iXem is a well established event that explores the relationship among sound, music, electronic arts and new technologies. iXem is a project conceived and produced since 2003 by AntiTesi, an organization founded and directed by Domenico Sciajno based in Palermo. Center for self-documentation, research and interdisciplinary development for new forms of Arts, Antitesi focuses on contemporary arts in its diverse expressions, coordinates and organizes cultural events, festivals and exhibitions in music and art.
Festival Live!iXem in October 2010 is divided into two events, a 'preview' in Turin on October 8th, organized with Hiroshima Mon Amour, and the main festival in Milan including live performances, installations and a workshop, organized in conjunction with O' and Die Schachtel.
The field is transverse. The common denominator is not the genre but the experimentation and research to innovation, helping to explore the variety of approaches to aesthetic guidelines, tools and technological solutions adopted by selected international artists and involved in the contemporary music scene.
After the introductory event in Turin, October 8th - with Live! IXem Preview - the festival appointment in Milan will take place in the Isola area, between the spaces of O', Medionauta and VisualContainer on Friday 29th and Saturday 30th October, from morning until late at night, offering a busy schedule of events.
Among these, the workshop 'Movement of acoustic images' - whose theme is the field recording, its transformations and its reproduction in acousmatic space - will consist of three different phases: the first by a technical approach, the second one by listening to environmental sound sources chosen as points of a hypothetical ideal sound map and the third one with 'on-site' recording of sound events.
"The RAI Studio of Musical Phonology is the outcome of the matching between music and the possible new means of analyzing and processing that sound has" - Luciano Berio
After more than fifty years since the birth of analog magnetic recording, on the 17th of September 2008 at the Castello Sforzesco's Museum of Music Instruments in Milan, took place the inauguration of a new space dedicated to Rai Studio of Musical Phonology - "musical instrument of the 20th Century, extension of human thought". Such an event was made possible thanks to the International Music Festival MITO, in collaboration with the Civic Museum of Musical Instruments and RAI.
Maddalena Novati, RAI Radiophonic Production's musical consultant and responsible for the Phonology archive - thanks to the decisive contribution from Doctor Massimo Ferrario, Director of RAI TV Production Centre (Milan) - was able to transfer all the Studio equipment from Rai Turin to Milan headquarters. This is the very first plan of recovery, storing and refurbishing electrophonic musical instruments.
Maddalena Novati does in fact describe this niche of the Museum as the "20th Century lute shop". The idea of conceiving this space as a sole instrument in its whole, is moving: there are so many experiences enclosed in those devices that it is actually still possible to perceive the residual energy that characterized the entire handcraft process of sound-writing. The Milan Institute of Musical Phonology, designed by physicist Alfredo Lietti, was created in June 1955 at the RAI headquarter in Corso Sempione 27, by Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna. During that year, Milan was on the verge of becoming a pivotal point in the international electroacoustic music post-war scene, through a new expressive language, which was a synthesis of the concrete and electronic experiences happening in Europe at the Studio für Elektronische Musik (WDR) in Cologne and at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in Paris. Among the electronic music experimental productions at the Studio of Phonology, we must mention works such as Visage by Luciano Berio, Notturno by Bruno Maderna, Fontana Mix by John Cage and Omaggio ad Emilio Vedova, the only entirely electronic work created by Luigi Nono.
"...in the opaque Milan of the '50s, Berio and Maderna found a hostile, apathetic environment, while opening the Phonology Studio. In a completely different situation from the newborn Studio in Cologne, the two masters, built their ideas on the strong basis of their French experiences, through a different technical method which was free and imaginative. Creatively, it has been the most relevant experience in the whole Old continent…" - Giacomo Manzoni
I always close my eyes and try to jump backwards in time, inside that Studio, imagining the noises, dialogues and sounds coming out the loudspeakers: living and breathing the miracles happening in that far age. We now have the possibility to touch by hand what I always used to see only in photographs and videos, how many protagonists of that time have lived (eminent musicians like Luigi Nono, Giacomo Manzoni, Aldo Clementi, Henri Pousseur, John Cage). In fact, in room XXXVI of the Museum of Music instruments, thanks to a glass structure designed by the architect Michele De Lucchi, the back of the eight famous frames containing the circuits are open for everyone to enjoy, allowing spectators to get the heart of the analog technologies with a 360° vision. Based on original pictures and videos from the time, the atmosphere of those years has been recreated.
Further information about the sounds that characterized the second half of last century, are available to the public of devotees and researchers, thanks to four computer stations with multimedia applications, and a digital library with photographs, footage, sound examples and scores (cured by the LIM Laboratory of the Università Statale di Milano).
The Studio, a patrimony fundamental to understand electroacoustic music writing, in the beginning has been experienced by composers as a mean to emancipate themselves from traditional instruments, with its 9 oscillators, the noise generators, different modulators, filters and the Tempophon (a device with rotating heads that allowed to vary the duration of the playback of a previously recorded sound, while maintaining the original pitch).
Those were the times of technicians in white lab coats, yet one particular person changed this professional's profile: Marino Zuccheri. Born on the 28th of February 1923, he was hired by EIAR in 1942; in the following year he left his job because of the war, but was re-hired a few years later by the new-founded RAI.
"... I like remembering Marino in his Phonology Studio, master among masters, master of sound among masters of music, because sound for him did not have any secrets, since he was trained in auditoriums while working for the Radio together with the most famous directors of the time. He would always recall how he begun working in Phonology by chance, but it is certain that it wasn't because of chance that he continued during the years, considering he's been the only holder of the Studio from when it was created (1955) until it closed down (1983)." - Giovanni Belletti, "Marino Zuccheri in Fonologia", 2008
He did not have any obligation to give advice, contributions or suggestions, yet musicians would follow his instructions on how to realize musical compositions: without him, much of last century's music would have never been born.
"... All the protagonists of Neue Musik passed through the Studio, and it is fair to say this: many of them were in Milan through scholarships, and had to present a final composition at the end of their term, and sometimes the stay had not been long enough to master the nine oscillators' secrets, so the great Marino Zuccheri would put together an acceptable composition with a few touches, thus many of electronic music "incunabula" are his works, and not of those who signed them." - Umberto Eco, La Repubblica, 29 ottobre 2008
That has been an amazing adventure for many years, until 1983 to be precise, year of his retirement (Zuccheri then passed away in Milan, 10th of March 2005).
"Marino Zuccheri's demise was a great loss, not only for what he meant for Contemporary Music, but moreover for what he still could have done: he was to be involved in an important project by RAI, in order to catalog tapes (as himself defined the work) that would have given us a fundamental technical, artistic, musical and cultural insight on the history of the Phonology adventure (another of his own definitions), but not to restore the sound itself (which could be done by others when needed), rather to revive the ideas and technical intuitions that made possible the creation of that sound: Marino (along with the composers) was the only one that could help us!" - Giovanni Belletti, "Marino Zuccheri in Fonologia", 2008
"[..] Two of the first electronic works in my record collection - Berio's Visage from 1961, and John Cage's Fontana Mix from 1958 - were created there with Zuccheri. Even today, both of these pieces sound impressively vivid and dynamic, and what we should now recognise is that such qualities should be attributed to the technician as much as to the composer. [..] Zuccheri appears to fit the profile: Parete 1967, composed for painter Emilio Vedova for the Italian Pavilion at Montreal Expo, 1967, was his only known work. [..] Luigi Nono was his first choice as composer, but Nono's schedule prevented that, so Zuccheri stepped in to assemble a 30 minute continuous work using previously recorded sounds built up from long intersecting tape loops. Zuccheri's modest opinion of himself was that he was no composer. Certainly there's very little sense of form in Parete 1967, but the dramatic contrasts of harsh noise, perhaps sourced from piano strings and struck metal, and shifting, modulating drones suggestive of vocal choruses, have something in common with the ritualistic side of Iannis Xenakis, or the best horror movie soundtracks. To the regret of his label Die Schachtel, who have produced another of their sumptuous limited edition vinyl releases here, Zuccheri died before seeing the publication of his only record." - David Toop, The Wire, 2008
After the Studio closed down, the equipments were disassembled and exhibited in Venice for a short period, on the occasion of the temporary exhibition called Nuova Atlantide, organized in 1986 by the Biennale (with the collaboration of Roberto Doati and Alvise Vidolin) and in Milan for I piaceri della città - Iconografia delle sensazioni urbane in 2001, where Il risveglio di una città was displayed through music thanks to the futurist composition of the same name by Luigi Russolo, and to Ritratto di città, the first electroacoustic composition of the Fifties (voice and tapes by Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna, lyrics by Roberto Leydi) created in order to convince the direction of RAI to create the Studio.
At the end of the Eighties, there still was no awareness of what the Phonology Studio had meant historically, at the point that all the documentations had been deposited (packed and cataloged) in a storage room at the RAI Museo della Radio in Turin, together with all sorts of disused equipments such as video-cameras, tape recorders, record players, microphones, with no plans to be restored or rebuilt.
Thanks to Maddalena Novati's interest, in 1996 the Studio devices were displayed in Turin's Music Salon and in 2003 they were brought back to RAI in Milan and located in a room on the fifth floor which is adjacent to the one where the Phonology Studio originally was. On June 20, 2008 they were officially transferred to the Castello Sforzesco.
It was a great pleasure for me to interview Maddalena Novati to talk about what the unique experience of the Milan Institute of Musical Phonology was and meant, and to understand what consequences and developments this process of recovery could lead to.
Matteo Milani: Maddalena Novati, why in your opinion the Studio became a myth?
Maddalena Novati: In 1955, to own 9 oscillators tuned on different frequencies, as opposed to the single one that was in Cologne, was like having a "whole orchestra" at your disposal, that could generate many sounds simultaneously like in a chord. This way, you already had a handful, a palette of sounds that killed production times. Human ear was the only judge which decided whether a sound was good or not, and after several attempts and mistakes, interesting tapes would be recorded and stored and this process would continue until a result was achieved. Berio would broadcast on radio each new composition from other Studios around Europe in order to spread the repertoire. The 11 TV episodes of C'è Musica e Musica (1972) on the history and ways of making music, sound fascinating with explanations by Luciano (Berio, n.d.a.). He was a great teacher on top of being a great composer, a person that could communicate and bring music to large audiences.
Berio developed an intense activity as a teacher in the United States and Europe, offering courses of composition in Tanglewood (1960 and '62), in Dartington Summer School (1961 and '62) in Mills College in California (1962 and '63), in Darmstadt, Cologne, Harvard University and, from 1965 to '72, in Juilliard School of Music in New York. From 1974 to '79 he collaborated with IRCAM in Paris. Berio's "Un ricordo al futuro - Lezioni americane" published by Einaudi is a beautiful book, which collects the lectures on aesthetics he gave in the US.
MM: When and how did Phonology's decadence period began?
MN: After the Sixties, at the beginning of the Seventies, radio is not anymore the core of research (not being an experimental mean anymore). Computers came up, and research centers moved elsewhere: large calculators are owned by universities and musicians depend on the physics and science departments. The computing machines had to function day and night, and only when physicists would leave their workplaces, musicians could take their place at night in order to perform calculations for their compositions. The radio was not involved anymore, as the broadcasting media did not yet use computers and their respective courses were different. Due to the lack of updates to its equipments and technology, the Phonology Studio was less and less attended by composers. Moreover the defection of some big names (Berio moved to the IRCAM of Paris, Luigi Nono to Fribourg, Maderna passed away prematurely in 1973) had an influence on an inevitable decline.
Active Conservation
It’s again Maddalena Novati who tells us that today the archives (original master copies) of the Phonology Studio, hold 391 ¼ inch-audio tapes with one or two tracks, as well as one inch tapes with four tracks, plus 232 digital copies from acquisitions (copies of works coming from other studios, centers for electronic music, recordings or concerts or plays of the main authors and interpreters who frequented the Studio during its active years). Since 1995 the custody of tapes continues to be her primary objective as well as their cataloging and digitalization in cooperation with Casa Ricordi (the oldest and most important Italian editor), together with the central Nastroteca of RAI and Mirage Laboratory of the Gorizia University.
No real decay of the tapes has occurred, thanks to the good quality of the tapes from BASF, that were selected instead of other brands like Scotch or Agfa. Survival of the audio documents is possible only by separating them from their physical support, and periodically transferring them to new supports. The second digital transfer at 96 khz/24 bit is currently ongoing at the Centro di Produzione TV and Produzione Radiofonia of Rai Milano, in cooperation with Mirage laboratory.
As for the restoration, the most common task is the elimination of noise of the analog tapes and, according to the tape conditions and the specific nature of the music, there are other interventions to be decided on a case by case basis. As a start, one has to perform an initial search, in order to detect the possible existence of other copies of the same music, as it would then be possible to exploit the best parts from each copy, and with suitable techniques, improve the effectiveness of the cleaning work.
In many works of electronic music, the original tape contains scratches and joints glued with adhesive tape whose glue loses its adhesive properties after a few years. Therefore it often happens that one has to paste various pieces of tape before copying it on a new support. On some tapes, it happens that there are some detached magnetic fragments, while on others, parts of material or protective film might have melted, and therefore deposited on the sound head thus blocking the progress of the tape. On top of these mechanical problems, there might occur electromagnetic problems or problems due to the type of equalization used during recording, and the fact that the oldest tapes could only support a proportionally lesser quantity of magnetization.
Reconstructing the laboratories
As I already had the chance to point out, very often the production of electronic music is not linked to a specific instrument like it happens with traditional music, but rather to a whole of equipments commonly called a system. Hence the conservation of a single element of a system does not give a full testimony of the modus operandi of a musician in a given period. Without doubt, the most effective solution is reconstructing a lab where one can reproduce all the phases of the production process of a musical work. In Cologne for instance, they reconstructed and brought back into function a lab for electronic music with the same configuration it had in the Fifties. In a similar way, this is what is happening at the Aja museum for the study of Sonology Institute of Utrecht University in the Sixties. In Paris at the Parc de la Villette, they are setting up a large section dedicated to the musical electrophonic instruments, until the experiences of computer music in real time of the Eighties.
[Vidolin A., "Conservazione e restauro dei beni musicali elettronici", in Le fonti musicali in Italia - Studi e Ricerche, CIDIM, year 6, pp. 151-168, 1992]
[the italian version of the article is also available @Digimag 55]
[listen: Ricordo di Marino Zuccheri | ITA - via Radio3 Suite]
by Federico Placidi - U.S.O. Project, June 2010 / Eng: Valeria Grillo
The works of Agostino Di Scipio include compositions for instrumentalists and electronics and sound installations. Some of these explore non-conventional approaches on the generation and trasmission of sound, including a special focus on phenomena of noise, turbulence and emergence. Other works implement dynamical networks of live sonic interactions between performers, machines, and environments (e.g. his Audible Ecosystemics project).
FP: Let's talk about your early works, before the 'ecosystemic' paradigm. How different was it from your more recent work?
AdS: Well, I had a very early phase when I gathered as much knowledge as possible about computer music techniques and digital signal processing. That included a special for algorithmic composition, too, the question being how I could formalize musical gestures of use in writing for either usual music instruments or electronics. In retrospect, I view that time as one of broad explorations in sonic materials, which eventually took me, later on, to focus on granular, textural and noisy materials, of a kind I later described as "sound dusts". It took me, in short, to micro-composition, i.e. to focus on the finest temporal scales in sound - with various degrees of densities and consistencies among sonic grains or particles. The idea was that micro-composition would let macro-level, gestural properties emerge at larger time scales. I tried to determine a process in sound in a way that lower-level processes would bring forth larger sonic gestures.
Along this path, I even developed new synthesis techniques based on the mathematics of nonlinear dynamic systems, as found in the so-called 'chaos theory' - that was end of the 1980s and early 1990s, and chaos (or better: the mathematics of nonlinear dynamical systems) was not as popular as it later became. I came across it and studied it quite in depth for some time.
Now, all those efforts usually provided me with sound materials for studio works. But at some point I felt a need to find my own way into live electronics performance. I had stayed far removed from that, because I was completely dissatisfied with how live electronics, including real-time interactive computer music, was approached at the time. Or, at least, I didn't want to follow those paths...
FP: What made you unhappy with extant approaches?
AdS: It was mainly because of the obvious linearity in the unfolding of time. And the fact that peculiar electroacoustic possibilities and artifacts - for example Larsen tones (feedback sounds) - were exclusively understood as a problem in audio engineering, stranger to the wanted sounding results. I felt they could rather be taken as the very resources, to be controlled and exploited in a truly live electroacoustic situation. I was dissatisfied with the usual notion that the technology was there to 'neutrally' represent and convey musical signals, as if the tools and their hydiosincracies were not part of the experience; instead of pretending to set them aside, I felt they could be studied and turned into sonic resources, the medium itself of experience. Then, and maybe more importantly, I realized that the processes I was dealing with in a formalized manner, were abstract models rid of any surrounding space, separate from any source of noise and risk in their own unfolding. They were models, as it was, not the thing itself. That confined me to performance as representation, as the (imperfect) replication of an ideal. I realized I could use the electroacoustic equipment and computers to implement dynamical processes, to make real nonlinear systems, exposed to ambience noise and the hydiosincracies of the electroaoustics, exposed to these sources of uncertainty and change. No more software modelling of abstract dynamical systems, but the implementation of a self-regulating sounding system in contact with the surrounding environment. In a way, this was a move from models of existing, and usually extra-musical, systems or processes, to the design of a kind of living sound organism in contact with the surrounding space, one that grasp in that space the energy necessary to stabilize itself, grow and change.
So, that was how I moved on towards my more recent work. Some compositions are a significant testimony of this journey. For example, take the first string quartet (5 difference-sensitive circular interactions, 1997-98): it already had a strong relationship with the surrounding space, although clearly the instrumental material still had a predominant role. Another work, Texture-Multiple (started 1993), for small ensemble and electronics, represented for me a kind of a long-lasting workshop (it didn't know a final version until recently); born of a sketch for a smaller scale work (Kairos, with saxophone and electronics, 1992), it soon 'conquered' the 'collective', the ensemble dimension (3-6 instruments), and then, with the mediation of real time computer processing, it took contact with the surrounding space (since 1994). At each new performance of that work, I would try ideas concerning the interactions between human performance, machinery, and space, that would later become central to the 'ecosystemic' pieces.
FP: The two works you mentioned, call for a kind of multiple-level interaction: on the one hand, we have a written score which remains quite flexible in terms of how one plays the notated materials; on the other hand, there is a programmable DSP unit transforming all instrumental sounds; and furthermore, we have the room, whose resonances to the music somehow drive the computer processing that in turn affects the interactions among instrumentalists. So all components, one way or another, are constantly transforming each-other, in a rather flexible or elastic temporal and spatial dimension.
AdS: Yes. Let's pick Texture-Multiple as an example. The instrumental material is notated in separate, independent instrumental parts. These are similar among themselves (not identical, each is tied to the specifics of the particular instrument), so actually all instrumentalists involved play the 'same' thing, in slightly different and flexible manners, seldomly in synch. When the performance starts, the instrumentalists are not really an 'ensemble', they are separate individuals, no sense of community. The role of electronics consists in bringing to their attention, as they play, the higher or lower degree of communion of their independent intents. The computer alters their sound, to different degrees, depending on features of the instrumental gestures. In turn, depending on the sonorities the computer gives them back, the instrumentalists may get to know better whether they are acting together or not, and accordingly change their playing, following simple interaction rules. So gradually a sense of 'ensemble' takes shape throughout the piece. The unity of the members is not given for granted, is not pre-determined, it comes forth as they actually play, with the mediation of the electronics. I must add that, to some extent, the computer processing is also driven by specific features in the total sound in the room space; 'space', here, is an ineliminable liaise of the relations among the involved players. For some people, the compositional process in Texture-Mulitple is reminiscent of Christian Wolff's music. However, different from Wolff, the electronics intervenes to alter the instrumental sound, making a larger sound texture dynamically depending on the peculiar resonance of the surrounding space, thus emphasizing the active, or pro-active role of the room acoustics in the gathering of the ensemble community. An important implication, that is not found in Wolff music, is that, for the good or the bad, here human relationships are profoundly mediated by the technology. (Which is what happens in our daily life, nowadays).
FP: If I remember correctly, there is a 'attraction point', a high F-sharp, and the closer the instrumentalist get to that pitch, the less their sound is subject to electronic transformations.
AdS: Yes, that's a fair approximation. The F-sharp is quite frequent in the six instrumental parts, so it fills the resonant space. If it grows too much, and the room acoustics reinforce it, the comptuer will 'avoid' getting more of it. That way, a bit of information that is relevant to the piece, doesn't saturate (intended symbolically and musically, not signal-wise) the surrounding space.
FP: I remember well, it regulates the level of the signal sent to the recording buffer.
AdS: Indeed, a more general idea I work with in that piece is: the louder the instrumental material resonating in the room - or, the denser and quicker the instrumentalists' gesture - the more heavily processed, 'granulated' ('spliced-up' in tiny bits) and finally 'evaporated' and thus attenuated, the sound flow from the computer; until the moment where grain density is so small that there is sound no more. The score binds the overall process to an overriding direction, so I know that sooner or later there will be the sense of 'communion' or 'common intent' that we were mentioning. And I know that sooner or later the ensemble members will play loud enough to inhibit any further electronic processing and reduce the computer sound to silence. To some extent, in that work the score notation predetermines an overall narrative: when a sense of ensemble is finally achieved, the total ensemble sound may be strong enough as to silence the computer, but that very event negates the mediation they were leaning on. However, one can't really say how the network of interactions will eventually develop during the performance, but one can be sure it will come to achieve the goal. Like in other works of mine, a rather open interaction network operates under the spell of a higher-level force or guide (in this case, stipulated by the composer himself in his notation).
FP: And how is the musical writing conceived of, in such a case? Is it linear? Does it develops in time? Do you read it from left to right?
AdS: In Texture-Multiple you do, yes. Except for local loops, repeats whose variable duration depends on local intentions on the part of each of performer. In large sections of the string quartet score, you read from left to right, as you say; at a certain point, though, the four guys settle on material that has to be reiterated (again a loop-based notation, but on much larger spans). At that point, their playing techniques vary depending on what they hear from the electronics - and what they hear is an articulated texture arising from the computer processing of their own sound. The four members have special rules of behavior: if they, on subjective basis, hear the computer processed sound as a rather dense and continuous texture, then they have to gradually slow their tempo down and decrease the sound level, until they come to silence, making the playing gesture but touching none the strings. Viceversa, if they hear a sparser texture, they keep playing, adding more material, eventually decreasing in level, but speeding up the tempo (that will provide the computer with more materials to work with, reinforcing the rather foggy or dusty texture). The idea is, local behaviors compensate for the activity of the system, 'system' being understood in its whole entirety, including human beings, space, electroacoustic apparatus. Simple local mechanisms may become a quite intricate net at a global level. It gets really difficult to hear out the specific agency driving the performance - who affects whom, who has the lead and who is led. You could speak of an 'emerging agency'. In cybernetics and complexity theory, one speaks of distributed causality. The performance system is no more decomposable into independent parts, it becomes a holon - using an awful term put forth by some scientists.
FP: Going back to sound, we could say that, with these works, we move from the usual situation where sound is raw material transformed or projected in space and time, to a peculiar situation where sound takes on an informational, communicative value, maybe more essential, and yet often subtle and feeble, as it eventually gets to thin noise events that verge on background noise, while at the same time affecting further gestures and developments in both the human and the machine components.
AdS: I agree with that. Sound sets the conditions of its own existence and development. Which actually brings us to the works in the Audible Ecosystemics project (2002-2005), where probably the approach is more fully crafted. The project includes a variety of concert piececs and sound installations. More recent works are like further extensions of that project (e.g. a series of works named Modes of Interference). Sometimes I think that the words Audible Ecosystemics refer more to a way or attitude of making sound art, and less to a set of pieces. Anyway, we are talking of live electronic solo works, i.e. performed with specific live electronics set-ups, no music instrument involved. They explore sound materials existing in the given room, such as background noise, in different ways. Or Larsen tones (i.e. the accumulation of ambience noise mediated by the room acoustics and the electroacoustics utilized) deliberately caused by the 'electronic performer', i.e. the person or people in charge of preparing the equipment and tweaking the overall audio infrastructure. In the Background Noise Study (Audible Ecosystemics n.3a) you start from this 'nothing musical' (background noise) and make something out of it. If this 'something' is interesting and keeps your attention, then it can be defined as music. However, that chance is never granted beforehand: the performer does his/her best, particularly in the rehearsals, in order to establish a sufficiently varied system dynamics, the crucial rerequisite for something of interest to happen; yet, the variables are so numerous - the audience walks in after reheasals, so the room acoustics change; there might be some accidental sound events in the room, or from outside, that were not there before… you know, all such marginal circumstances can modify how the performance turns out in the end. Now, strictly speaking that is not a problem. My directions as a composer, and the performer's own skills, cope with such circumstances and strive to ensure that some music eventually emerges thanks to such accidents. In fact all that is there prompted to make that happen is purely potential, the performance itself has to turn it into actuality, and that is only possible by feeding the process with some little energy, however musically insignificant.
I do have some works of a rather different kind. Take the Book of Flute Dynamics (also known in Italian as Per la meccanica dei flauti). It is not based on the kind of sonic inter-connections we have mentioned between the electroacoustics, the musical instruments and the room acoustics. And still, it is another an example of how you can work with the usually unwanted, in the particular case, with several small noises a flutist makes never blowing into the flute, simply holding the instrument in her hands and lowering the keys, etc. Again, attention is turned to residual, with hardly-noticeable noise, understood as artifact traces left by human interaction with a piece of (mechanical) technology, the instrument, and work with that. A bit like in the Background Noise Study in the Vocal Tract (Audible Ecosystemics n.3b), the method may be different, yet the purpose is obviously of a similar kind: in the flute work the ‘space’ is a small tube of varying length, manipulated with a finite set of keys and fingers; in the Audible Ecosystemics works, on the other hand, the physical space, itself mechanically and culturally connotated, consists in the room environment where we set to present the work. In the just mentioned Background Noise Study in the Vocal Tract, the idea is to experience the resonances and unwanted noises of a smaller but changing room (a mouth) and the resonances and unwanted noise in a larger room (concert hall).
FP: How do you experiment and gradually finalize an 'audible ecosystem'?
AdS: Things often are born out of trial and errors. It can last quite a long time. Say, I start with an idea about how sound should originate and develop, setting the minimum requirements for some sound to be there instead of silence.
Based on that, I slowly shape up a process that, beside bringing forth some sound, articulates the thus generated sound in time. This requires extensive experimentation. I assemble a small-scale set-up in my own studio, smaller than the one eventually to be set in a concert hall or performance space, and live with it for months, trying it, listening, refining, testing it under different conditions, technical and environmental: during the day and the night, with open or closed windows, more or less cars or else in the distance, voices or birds in the street, the plane passing by, the telephone ringing, the neighbors cheers, etc. And then different microphones and microphone placements, maybe soldering some speaker or piezo, and certainly refining the software, etc. Up to a point where I can see that the process works (sustains itself) and changes (generates significantly varied sound textures and patterns). Being satisfied with it, doesn’t mean that the whole thing works in a musically, aesthetically rewarding way: it simply means that it shows the ability to self-regulate for some time in an autonomous way, such that, by feeding it a little noise, it can behave in a non-destructive way.
Now, that’s empirical evidence of what I mean saying that music is never there before you make it, or that music doesn’t exist until it emerges to existence. It may sound as a philosophical statement about music, a statement from a nonobjectivisit and constructivistic perspective, yet it's very practical, too. As a general criterion, I’m happy with the process that I set-up when, as a result of the inherent system dynamics, it unfolds through as many as possible system states: perceptually that means that you have a variety of textures of changing density, with several degrees of tactility to them, with internal timbre variations, changing across frequency regions, variations in micro-rhythmical (granular, random or patterned) activity. Things are probably at the most clear when listening to a performance of Feedback Study (Audible Ecosystemics n.2a). Let me explain. I don’t usually pay too much attention to musical pitch and pitch structures. But in Feedback Study I can hardly avoid a sense that pitch is important, because the only sound generating device is there a, is a feedback loop causing Larsen tones, often coming with a clear pitch quality. Their frequency (or frequencies, as sometimes they come in clusters) depend on roon acoustics and the mic-to-speaker distance (as well as on the mic and speaker characteristics in electro-acoustic transduction). Therefore, one of the things in this work is how the system dynamics allows for developing different harmonic fields based on the Larsen tones: the variety and the redundancy in frequency regions and pitch relationships project the system dynamics in the dimension of pitch, making it audible to the ear.
At a different level of discourse, the general idea behind such works is that the identity of a work is captured in the array of determinate relationships and composed interactions, including the connection between microphones and loudspeakers, their placement in the room, how the software itself works and what role the performers take on as they handle the gear, etc. At the same time, the potential to express this identity lies in the variety of random stimuli coming during the performance from the hall, and other, often random, particulars of the available electroacoustic equipment. My understanding and appreciation of the results is less grounded in aesthetic evaluation, and more in the sense of a convergence or coming together of room, people involved, and the whole equipment (hardware and software).
I don't mean that the aesthetics of the sounding results is of little significance to me. Yet, the focus of experience is about this vergeance, this coming together of all too often reputed independent components. The network of interactions I devise is usually enough open to the surronding environment as to change in time, wander and develop; at the same time, it is closed-onto-itself enough to preserve its identity, retaining its structure notwithstanding the random events in the ambience. It gives something to the ambience, and it gets something from the ambience, in a truly structural coupling. Action and perception: two faces of the same coin, tossed in a determinate environment, where some random events happen. This mutual exchange is what we seek, it’s what we hopefully obtain during the performance, the richness. The goal is to provide an experience where everything is connected to every other thing, in sound. Nothing, in a given space, is foreing to sound and hearing. The ear knows that nothing is disconnected, that nothing is neutral to what it hears.
FP: Turning to technology, how relevant is for you the computer programming environment, its flexibility, its peculiarity? And what role does it play?
AdS: Well, first it is important to stress that "technology" here is more than the computer and the software involved. As should be clear, critical is the array of transducers, be them loudspeakers, membrane microphones, piezos, or other sensors (I am fond of the accelerometers I was allowed to work with, two years ago in Berlin, for Untitled 2008 - Soundinstallation in two or more dismantled or abandoned rooms). Not to forget the mixer console, which I tend to consider as a performing device. Essentially, all analog gear included is really crucial, so possibly one has to consider it part of one's own designs. And I am not necessarily referring to the quality of high-end professional equipment: even lousy speakers and cheap microphones can do a good job, if used in sensible and informed ways. What is important is your awareness of the role and function you assign to them as components in a larger infrastructure.
Now, as far as software is concerned, I use real-time DSP programming environments that allow me to develop a variety of automated functions. "Automated" is not the same as "predetermined", it means "able to extract information from the signal and to turn this data into variable control signals". I make a distinction between what is usually named "audio signal processing" and what I often refer to as "control signal processing". Sometimes my computer patches are more voluminous and complicated in their control signal processing subpatches than in the audio signal processing ones. Sound processing and trasformations can be kept rather simple and can still yield quite interesting results, if driven and articulated by properly shaped, "adaptive" control signals generated in real time.
In this regard, I find that Kyma is a truly remarkable computer workstation, that I have been using for 15 years now (fifteen!). It is extremely powerful, and the programming environment is efficient for both rapid prototyping, and for deeper programming technicalities. I also work with PD. In my "scores" (instruction booklets?), I usually document all necessary signal processing in a machine-independent notation, partly graphic, partly verbal, eventually referring the reader to well-known digital signal processing technicalities. That allows other people to re-create the algorithms using programming languages and computer systems they prefer. Baed on such documentation, works of mine have been performed by colleagues who work with software I tend to avoid (like Max/MSP). From what I can hear, the results are rather consistent with my own performances.
FP: It seems that you have a modular approach on preparing your codes, avoiding redundancy, and creating meaningful connections among extracted signal features, or their psychoacoustic equivalents.
AdS: I spend quite some time with designing feature-extraction algorithms. I have an ‘arsenal’ of them. Also important is the array of mapping functions from extracted data to control signals to apply in ways consistent with their perceptual reality. I change or refine these software modules, tuning them depending on context. I mean not only compositional or musical context, but also physical context. Suppose we have the computer track, during a performance, the most resonant frequency in the total room sound (via microphones). Suppose we use this data to attenuate that very frequency in the computer output signal routed to the speakers, thus compensating between input magnitude and output. One aim for that could be to avoid or limit strong feedback peaks. Now, if you go like that in a 10mt x 10mt room, the code you come up with may not be working in much smaller rooms. In the installation Stanze Private (ecosystemic sound construction), the rooms I work with are glass bottles and vessels, with volume ranging in the few squared centimeters. In which case, the trackers necessary to establish the inverse amplitude relationship I was describing, have to be tuned to work in a very peculiar way, their reaction time must be much shorter just because of mere physical dimensions and reflective properties of the room surfaces. The general criterion is the same (inverse i/o relationship), but it doesn't work regardless of dimension. The timing of the ‘followers’ or 'trackers' must be properly studied. Therefore, in general, at each new project I may re-cycle tools I have already developed, but depending on many factors, specific extensions, implementations or refinements are also necessary.
FP: Let’s go back to the performance paradigm: it is clear that your music - or your work more generally – lives on symbiotic relationships between the performance space, the sound events produced in it and the people that establish a connection with that space. That implies a social dimension, taht is essential to make the experience ‘sensible and REAL’. Nowadays, we live in a historical timeframe where the experience of the real is often replaced by a paradigm of the simulacrum, an extreme, sometimes violent virtualization of life, where the real space, the physical space, is depicted almost as a social problem. People prefer to interact through virtual social networks, more often than in the ‘real world’. This being so, I wonder: in a society where experience is becoming more and more virtual (literally reduced to purely binary information), what will happen of your works, which need a real venue and environment in order to exist?
AdS: I am myself interested in research dealing with how we perceive space and all that is around us in space. As I see it, that is done in two ways: either in observing what happens in the very moment of lived experiences, here-and-now; or via simulation tasks and technologies, pinning on as many aspects of perception as possible among those having a role (biological, biocybernetic, ecological aspects). The latter approach, pursued among the tidy walls of research labs, leads to virtual reality. Thanks to it, it is possible to expand our knowledge of what is and what isn’t relevant to the process of human perception. Now, in my view, it is important not to misunderstand the data we gather from the scientific approach for unique and unambiguous representations of reality. They only add a bit of rationalistic analysis of what it means to be living beings. It may be great to be able to synthesize virtual spaces and use this technology to ‘travel’ to inexistent spaces, or anyway to spaces other than the space where the living body is. But, again, that's only good in order to gain a bit of knowledge on the organism’s behavior. Once we have that knowledge, we must turn to real life, and see how it can be a relevant part of lived experience. A ‘fake’ life, a virtual dimension may be ok for entertainment purposes - with entertainment mass-media, we always shift from perceiving the content of human communications, to perceiving the medium presumed to communicate that content. That is only interesting if you strive to appropriate the medium, or even to design the medium. Otherwise it is of little interest and even verges on the totalitaristic, when sold as the predonominant or exclusive manner of human communication.
My opinion on these matters is highly conflictual and critical: while rational knowledge is acceptable and desirable, it must not prevent people from ‘feeling’ and experiencing reality. That's all the more true when speaking of artistic endeavours. The risk of setting-up for ourselves an utterly synthetic world in the name of a kind of body-less notion of aesthetics leads in fact to the opposite: the body is ‘anaesthetized’, not empowered (as some people claim, instead). The triumph of re-presentation kills all presence. Let me say it, ‘too much aesthetics anaesthetizes’.
FP: What would happen to your works if one day there were no more possibility to perform it in a socially shared space? Where could it migrate, and how could it reconfigure itself?
AdS: If one day there were no more transducers (I mean microphones, loudspeakers, the tympanic membrane of human ear, even the skin maybe…) acting as interfaces between air pressure waves and nervous-electrical measures, my work and the work of a lot of other people would stop existing, it would cease. Fine so! It happened so many times in history. The music of the British virginalists, a few centuries ago, disappeared because of the extinction of their very instrument (the virginale, existing in several fashions across Europe). Then, just like it happens today with Renaissance music, at some point so-called 'philologically informed' interpretative approaches would be proposed, and these older technologies would be revived and again built.
FP: A last question. What is the Utopia of your work?
AdS: …mmmhh… hard to say. Well, actually there is one thing! For quite some time I have beein living with this fixed idea in my mind, just a concept for the moment, as I don’t possess enough competence to make it real. I envision a sound-generating device capable of producing, beside sound, the electricity that is needed to sustain itself as a sound-generating device. A kind of ‘aural living being’ which, through a closed circle, would use its own vibrations, or the air vibrations it causes, to allow for the power supply necessary for its own function. This ‘aural being’ wouldn’t probably be musically very interesting, it would be a kind of ecologically self-sufficient or self-sustaining device. I sketched a little drawning of this concept a few years ago, in Berlin, as my signature on a friend's guestbook, as a gift. Your question makes me think that that's a kind of Utopia underlying my work. Yes, the draft lays in a Folkmar's guestbook, somewhere in Berlin! And it's not a draft of musical Utopia…
These have been busy days here at NIU, especially for the speakers who showed to all the symposiast each method of working with Kyma.
A lot of participants came from different sides of the world, it was great to be immersed in this colourful community! Carla Scaletti and Kurt Hebel (the creators of Kyma) introduced their new hardware Paca(rana) - you can find a lot of information here @ SSC - and the latest features implemented in Kyma X.70 (where 'X' stands for the last letter in 'six' - 6.70).
Carla and Kurt did a wonderful job to develop a state-of-the-art "recombinant" workstation, which gives any user the freedom to explore unknown sonic territories without hitting the DSPs (there's plenty of headroom in processing power).
During the morning of the first day, Carla showed us how to control Kyma with external devices like the Wacom Tablet and the Continuum Fingerboard, then with Nintendo Wiimote+Nunchuck and SpaceNavigator (via OSCulator by Camille Troillard).
The AC Toolbox presentation by Hector Bravo-Benard, revealed to us an algorithmic approach to sound composition with Kyma. By using the LISP language, it is possible to structure an entire composition and have Kyma play it. It is possible to make use of strict algorithmic procedures like probability distributions, Markov chains, tendency masks, and many other techniques used by composers of the likes of Paul Berg, Gottfried Michael Koenig.
A special mention should be made for Bruno Liberda's lecture, where he explores subtle connections between his wonderful graphical scores and different kinds of ancient neumatic notation, making symbolic notation and symbolic sound computation converge. Cristian Vogel explained his latest creation called Black Swan for swiss choreographer Gilles Jobin. The 50 minutes original Kyma score was composed in Geneva and at the electroacoustic studio of the Musique Inventives d'Annecy. Here's a Swiss TV documentary about the creation of Black Swan.
What is Kyma?
Kyma is a sound design language that permits to manipulate, transform and warp any kind of sound source in realtime, but we already know all of this.
During these days in Barcelona - at the first Kyma International Sound Symposium - we have learnt something more specific and, maybe, unexpected.
As Carla Scaletti said during the opening lecture of KISS09, "Recombinance Makes Us Human". So, what does this mean? Actually each of the participants brought their own experience, point of view, modus operandi and creative talent to the symposium. This multiform epiphany allowed everyone involved to share the same time and space for 2 days, exchanging their ideas like sharing bits of code in a recombinant manner.
The symposiasts all came from different fields where Kyma plays a fundamental role in each of their activities (sound designers, composers, DJs, etc.). Each of them knows and likes different specific aspects of Kyma.
The lectures performed during these 2 days taught us something: regardless of their own personal skills, and of their own degree of Kyma knowledge, observing things from other users' point of view reveals unexpected surprises and creates new connections, on a mental and operational level, which were never considered before.
Even sounds commonly used in our everyday activity, if put in a different context (artistically or technologically), appear to us as new and unexpected, bringing back to our memory John Cage's famous concept: "(You have) to look at a Coca-Cola bottle without the feeling that you've ever seen one before, as though you were looking at it for the very first time. That's what I'd like to find with sounds -- to play them and hear them as if you've never heard them before."
The musical performances have contributed themselves to recombine new pieces of code, bearing different morphologies, sintax and structures.
With her liveset "SlipStick for Continuum and Kyma", Carla Scaletti explores the sound phase-space, in order to find new timber paths moving from materic aggregation to resonant chimes and back, without forgoing a "virtuoso gestuality" given by the nature of the instrument itself.
We have experienced the possibility of creating vibrating soundtracks for silent movies in real time, thanks to the contribution of Franz Danksagmüller's work, with the help of Berit Barfred Jensen's voice.
Concrete sounds produced by the friction of a Cello bow on different-shaped polystyrene objects, saturate the listening space thanks to the work of Hector Bravo-Benard, reminding us of some textures of Xenakis' work "La legende d'Eer". Marin Vrbica's "Tiger in the Jungle" immerses us into an exotic and rich spatial dimension made of revolving sound-surfaces and sliding glissando-like multiple trajectories.
In the end, we are surprised that the paradigma presented in the beginning by Carla Scaletti (Recombinance Makes Us Human), has actually acted as an invisible force guiding, transforming, rearranging our thoughts, knowledge and purposes.
So, after the symposium we observe ourselves in a different way. We have changed into new intellectual human beings, and this gave everyone of us a fresh new start, in order to discover new possible configurations and interactions between ourselves and the others, between what we are and what we will be until #KISS10.
We really enjoyed our first attempt to follow a live event via Twitter, we hope you appreciated our efforts to make you feel like you were in Barcellona with us, as part of the symposium.
You can track all of our tweets via search.twitter.com.
Here's a selection of related tweets of interests:
Now live #KISS09: Carla Scaletti - "Recombinance Makes Us Human" - Philosophy of Kyma #
...the problem of finding graphic symbols for the transposition of the composer's thought into sound." Edgard Varèse #
...without friction [...] there would be no music!"- Carla Scaletti #
For anyone interested in the Kyma sound design language, the book "Kyma X Revealed" is available here @ SSC. This document gives you an overview of the environment, gives you a strategy for approaching this deep system one layer at a time and then walks you step-by-step through each level of Kyma like your own personal tour guide. At the back of this guide, you’ll find several summaries and quick references that you can keep handy for refreshing your memory while working. This book covers the mechanics of how to use Kyma — not the art and science of sound design. However, if you love sound and are hungry for more knowledge on the subject, achieving fluency with Kyma is an excellent first step!
A great thanks to Cristian Vogel (Station 55 Productions) and Symbolic Sound Corporation for their greeting and organization.
USO: Did mass-culture and consumerism create a lack of “listening attention”?
CZ: I think the ear is intact, it is the demand that has to be discovered and awaken. Even if there is a mass culture, to establish there is a dominant thought in hearing. But the border is very narrow, between the dominant thought and the adventure, we can cross this border very quickly, we only have to open ourselves and to create bridges. Also here there are very serious issues, for example the dominant idea of rock - let's take this example - has built a peculiar "ear" and we can recuperate this ear by using experimental musics. So the world is not made of cases separated by inviolable borders, on the contrary, there is no interruption of continuity between sounds; I am very attentive about popular music, because I know that there are cases of recycling, of experimentation, and also a genre which can be experimented. We have to be attentive, we have above all to avoid being dogmatic, fundamentalist or categorical. On the contrary, we have to observe what happens, try to detect in every practice, in every thing something different from the variable design of music, the variable design of humans and see how this can be transcended.
USO: What has been the role of physical space in the sound projection practice in GRM history?
CZ: In the 1950s, when Schaeffer invents this music, musique concrète with his collaborators, they suddenly asked themselves how to let everybody listen to this music in a public space, in a concert hall. Schaeffer said, if we have to go to the Carnegie Hall, how do we do, we cannot use a single loudspeaker on the scene, this was a little ridiculous, and finally the dimension of the concert, the dimension of how to present this music to the public was created, little by little; there is also the cinema industry which plays an extremely important role, since in the 1960s the Dolby firm had already imagined the surround, due to the invention of the Cinemascope, and were forced to position many loudspeakers to occupy the screen, and many more surround loudspeakers all around. So, we have at the same time the desire of people to experience sound in a bigger dimension, and the technology which built that ear. Today, we follow this process, and people is happy to come to a concert, because we think that a concert is going to be a particular and privileged moment, maybe a show, and that there is a difference between experiencing music in a concert hall and at home, that there is something really spectacular in that moment which justifies the concert. So there are many ways to face the problem, we chose one, but there are others.
USO: Can you describe your compositional process? How do you go from the idea to the sound, to the elaboration, to the structure, to the shape?
CZ: This is a personal question, if you ask this same question to another composer, the answers are different. Me, I don't go from idea to sound, but the opposite, I go from sound to idea; that is I need to find the sound that touches me for different reasons - if I had the time I would explain these reasons and give examples, but I don't - and inside this sound there is a potential, and the idea born from the sound is not a sound subjected to an idea, it is the opposite. We can consider the sound like some kind of fugue, which means that there is potential for development, and to work I need to find a sound which will be at the base because there is an emotive shock, there is really something imposing, which will be the source of my work, and at that moment we can listen to the sound in depth, not for what it is, but for what it can become; we hear the sound as a promising element of a musical structure. But this is a personal answer.
USO: Do you work with stereophonic material and perform live spazialization or do you prefer to design spatial trajectories/position in the studio?
CZ: I mainly work in stereo, because my studio is not multiphonic, but I have a lot of experience with sound projection in the auditoriums, with a stereo source you can give the illusion of a multiphonic work; I both do live concerts and acousmatic works. Finally you don't know what system we have, where it is, the space, and also the kind of concert we have been requested, but what we experience nowadays is that live practices and acousmatic practices are coexisting pacifically, and they enhance each other depending on the place, time, and project. The concrete music was born in 1950s, and it is about, after all these years, to create a new branch which will be the performance version, and the live version of this music. This evolution started in the year 2000, since today's systems (computers) are much faster than 20 years ago, and the tools for sound processing allow it. But these have developed because there was a strong desire to develop them. There are no technologies which arrive spontaneously, we look back into history, we observe, and what happens sometimes with dreams, there are dreams and conjunctions which make things possible. That's what it is going to happen in about 10 years.
USO: What are your working tools for non-linear editing and sound signal processing?
CZ: At the GRM there are more or less all programs - Pro Tools, Digital Performer - but there is a kind of consent on the tools to use, very quickly we can comment that today's programs are actually a direct-line consequence of the techniques from the 1950s, because with a tape or a disk we could go from a sound to another, create discontinuity, being able to superpose sounds, and create a verticality, and harmony; we have the mastery of time, thus on counterpoint and polyphonie, we could increase or decrease the volume; we need to check that there are the minimal conditions for the program to be exploitable, and finally, checking on today's programs; we have continuity. With the program, whatever that is, we can do anything - montage, superposition, regulate the volume, regulate the space and finally you do the same as it were a tape recorder. These are fundamental operations for the music's world.
by Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi, U.S.O. Project English translation: Valeria Grillo
Christian Zanési is a French composer and the head of the musical programming at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales. Zanési studied music at Université de Pau, then in Paris at the CNSMDP under Pierre Schaeffer and Guy Reibel. Since 1977, he is a member of GRM especially in charge of the production of radio programmes for France Musique and France Culture. He has been recently awarded the Special Qwartz at the Qwartz Electronic Music Awards (Edition 5). We met Christian Zanési at 104 for the fifth Présences Électronique Festival, organized in co-production with Radio France, which explores the link between the concrete music of Schaeffer and new experiments in electronic music. Since its founding in 1958, GRM has been a unique place for creation, research and conservation in the fields of electroacoustic music and recorded sound. The systematic analysis of the sound material Schaeffer proposed to his collaborators resulted in the publication of a seven hundred pages reference book, the "Treaty of Musical Objects" published in 1966. Michel Chion’s Guide To Sound Objects (PDF, English translation) is a very useful introduction to this voluminous work (via ears.dmu.ac.uk). In this very complete essay, Pierre Schaeffer develops the main part of his new musical theory of the sound object. It is based on two principal ideas, making and listening, and explores the first two levels of this theory: typo-morphology and classification of sounds. He uses various disciplines such as acoustics, semiotics and cognitive science to demonstrate his explanation of sound and, in particular, the musical object within musique concrète.
U.S.O. Project: You often mention that sound is the prime matter. How can we “orient” and recognize sounds we’ve already heard, without the cause-effect relationship?
Christian Zanési: The sound has to be considered in a musical context, it is not about recognizing the sound, it is an expressive matter, and every composer, every musician has some kind of personal sound, a signature sound, so when he transcribes it into his work, into an artistic project, the idea is not to try and play a guessing game, this is this sound, or this is that sound, there is a higher level that belongs to it, and this level is that of the musical relations, expressive relations. When you listen to a concert, for example for cello and orchestra, you are not pointing out each instant "this is a cello sound", you listen to music. And it is the same with sound. So, there is a second level which is a little more complex, it is true that some sounds reveal an image, from time to time there could be ambiguity, and this is also part of a rethoric, or of an ancient model, and it is possible that this provokes a kind of curiosity, and at the same time gets mixed into the expression. Composers are very strange.
USO: In the first 50 years of electronic music, has the absence of visual elements during performances limited or enhanced the listening experience?
CZ: Well, naturally us, at our festival Presences Electroniques, prefer to bring attention on the sound, sometimes there are some audiovisual experiences, but the nature, the physiology of it, makes the image a priority on the sound. So we, since we developed a projection system very very sophisticated, prefer that kind of listening experience, it is more complete, we don't need anything else, it is an orientation, it is one of the strengths of our festival; that is, to offer artists the best possible sound projection system, the best definition, and we think that is complete. We are very music-oriented, and I've often been there and I've seen musicians doing an audio-video performance, and I've been rarely convinced, sometimes yes, but it becomes something else, we go down to another level, and we want to explore the purely musical universe, sound and its programming.
USO: Can you give us a more in-depth definition of the concept of “l’ecoute reduit” (reduced listening) by Pierre Shaeffer?
CZ: The first time that... well in a few words it is difficult... when we recorded on vinyls, there were no tape recorders in the 1950s, when we reached the end of a disk, the last groove was repeated indefinitely, and it was a full modulation. In all vinyls today, there is a closed groove with a silence, to avoid that the stylus exits the turntable. All the disks at that time - all that were recorded in the 1950 - the disc, equivalent of today's vinyls, ended on a closed groove, and Schaeffer listened to this phenomenon, everybody could hear it, there was not a silence. The fact that the sound repeats itself, made him understand that finally we were listening to the sound itself, we wouldn't say "this sound is close or not, it starts this way, it is more or less acute, it is more or less brilliant, it is more or less thick, and in that moment he imagined that we could listen inside the recorded sound, which means we could verify, validate, objectivize the phenomenon by hearing the peculiar characteristics of the sound, how it starts and how it ends, in which tessitura it is, if it is light or if it is dark, it is loud, it is close or far. This is to objectivize the listen, this is "L'ecoute reduit".
USO: Can you discuss your vision of the sound organization principles? Definition of the sound object, objective and subjective aspects, articulation, iteration, quality of the information, musical language.
CZ: In classical music, the constituent elements of an opera function organically, that is there are consequences; when you put a sound together with another, this creates an harmony, for example a chord, and if you add another sound the chord completely changes in timbre, this is an organic principle. We can do the same with the sound the composer chooses, so to imagine music sometimes as a vertical relation, or as an horizontal relation; this is an organic system, and the organic system is a biological system, in some way copied from the living, and since we function following the living principles, we are particularly able and specialized to recognize an organic system, and in that moment something starts in our brains and there is some kind of a communion; this is what happens, how to organize the sound, why put this with that, and why after this, add that, they are organic relations.
USO: What do you think of hidden causality (between what the audience sees and hears)?
CZ: The ability to listen is a very complex phenomenon, so when a composer works, it is difficult to be conscious about everything, an artist works very much in an intuitive manner, intuition is a super-computer which gives us the answer immediately. But if we talk about the genesis, about why we made some choices, it takes an eternity. So, the relations, the sound is not inside a single "ear", there is a very ancient ear, for example, that is the ear we use to cross the street, it is the hearing of danger. Hearing is a prolongation of the sense of touch, imagine to be in the forest, when a predator hunts, if it touches you it is too late, you are dead. So hearing is a prolongation of touch, it allows you to foresee the arrival of a predator. There are various hearings - one which detects aesthetic information, one that detects information on the behavior of others, so when you work with sound you alternatively activate many "ears". When you begin a piece of music by having a sound turn around you, you awaken the ancient, the primitive "ear", the danger hearing, since in nature, something that turns around you it is something that tries to catch you, and a composer in some way is conscious of this mechanism and plays with it. It is very difficult to answer this question because the ear is very complex, and the reality around us is very complex. But we are all naturally gifted at hearing, since without it we could not cross the street, we could not hear something behind us, we could not see around us through sound.
