Arrival in Brno

After 8 months on my largest project yet, Written in Water: Portrait of a Town (91 audio tracks linked via GPS across an English coastal landscape), I brought last loose ends together last week, including a 30 minute radio version of what you might hear on a hypothetical soundwalk (to be broadcast shortly, more details to follow...) [additional blog post here] 

So I thought a change of scene was in order, to cleanse the brain, stretch the ears, pace some new streets. A prolonged online faff about destinations and cheap getaways led me to the conclusion that package 'deals' are not what they're cracked up to be and I got 50% off the cheapest city break I could find by booking the hotel and flight independently. 

A memorably insane return from Innsbruck with Nastyjet in October last year (after a wonderful trip to the 1^st ESSA conference in Berlin, meeting my newborn niece in Austria and a chance meeting with the finest post-New Orleans jazz band I've ever heard, on a train, followed by an equally memorable and insane evening with them at Treibhaus, Innsbruck), had me forswearing budget airlines forever, even if it meant doubling the cost and multiplying the journey duration by an unknown factor.

 I succumbed again though to the budget airline ticket, this time with their Irish counterparts

(although deeply wary of their colourful CEO, a feeling increased by the erudite description of O’Leary’s entrepreneurial persona by my friend Dr Lorraine Warren.

Being an infrequent flyer, my estimate of driving in 2 hrs to Stansted for a 2 hr flight to central Europe for less than the Eurostar to Brussels

overlooked the confusion of airport parking (add an hour)

and the purgatory of labyrinthine queues at security to half undress into a tub, have your deodorant sent back for a 2^nd scan then put in a sandwich bag to prevent it being used as a bomb. 

(Really, guys? Have you made aircraft hijacking history with that one?)  (add an hour) 

And the queue by passengers for two different countries at a single gate, (add 30 minutes)...  leading to the memorable announcement on the plane that we were flying not to Billund, Denmark, the home of Lego, but to Brno, Czech Republic.

One rather short man with a round yellow head and cup-like hands confusedly got his luggage and disembarked before we taxied onto the runway.

A wonderful sleep, coiled like a slinky spring into a space for an eight-year old, then staring down through thinning clouds at star-like clusters of red-roofed villages, between irregular polygonal fields and immense woodlands strafed with thick interior lines of bare earth; an apparently thoughtful and selective use of such natural abundance.

The eight huge cooling towers of the Soviet era nuclear power station at Dokovany rise in an impassive stare above the flat greens and browns, the invitingly meandering Jihlava river, the promontories of its steep bends surmounted with angular steep roofed

Image: Luboš Motl

villages.

I learnt this from comparing the view from my seat to a scan of Google Maps, which led to the discovery (not seen from the sky) of another wonder of energy sourcing, the hydroelectric dam at Dalešice.

It is these combinations of conservation and guardianship with high technology that are one of my strongest foreign impressions of the new Czech republic.

I was here (Czechoslovakia as was) aged 18 in a youth orchestra on tour, in summer 1989, about 3 months before the dour misery of endgame Soviet Europe imploded, supplanted with a decade of wildly optimistic, often gallumphing political and economic reforms that changed the country and perhaps most of all Prague forever.

From a place of poverty and intimidation, secrecy, surveillance and suspicion, the new Czech Republic is a place of fantastic artistic, theatrical and musical innovation where tradition and cultural heritage are continually renegotiated, not simply supplanted with transatlantic commercialism. (You saw raincoated men behind newspapers in every hotel lobby – those cliches and the less funny, grotesquely corrupt and abusive police, an all-powerful state machine of censorship and control were everyday realities for a frightened and bullied people.)

My last trip here (well, to Prague) was as a removals man, six years ago, in deep snow. Today it is sunny and hot and the colourful ancient city of Brno awaits.
Although it seems a shame to put my boots back on and leave the air-conditioned cool of my home for the next few days... 
Probably an afternoon in the pool and sauna, a sausage supper and early to bed, although plans may change.
After all, I have come here also to work and some wonderful unexpected ideas arose for a one-woman web-based opera cinecast amid my crazed in-flight dreams.

Written in Water - a noTours soundwalk with the Mayor of Gosport

A fun morning with Mayor John Beavis and Mayoress Christine Beavis of Gosport, walking around the town on a lovely Spring day to demonstrate my recently completed geo-located, virtual audio soundscape Written in Water: Portrait of a Town, commissioned by New Dimensions and built using noTours software for Android, that allows you to paint a landscape with sound.

In the hour or so that we walked, we chatted about the large number of local people who'd been involved, how their varied and unique reminiscences and thoughts were edited and placed among music in virtual circles throughout the town centre. 

I'm working on a permanent page about the soundscape with 
** downloadable maps with suggested routes  
** sound previews and  
** a list of the wonderful individuals who helped make the project the exciting, diverse experience it is.

One of the technical challenges of making the sound map was using a landscape  - of streets and open spaces criss-crossed by roads  - to create a coherent, pleasing audio narrative, whichever direction you take.

I've been hearing feedback from lots of visitors to the project and while most prefer to navigate the soundscape purely by ear, some have asked for a visual guide as well.

New challenge from the Mayoress: design a postcard-sized guide to the sound map with suggested routes and some teaser clues about what users will find….

The project is going to be a free download from the Google Play store very shortly but if you want to try it out now - it's completely free! - come to the Gosport Discovery Centre, borrow a handset, and walk around to listen wherever you choose.

My website (Benjaminmawson.com) will shortly contain all the files and info you need if you want to put together a DIY sound walk for your own Android phone…..

and there will also be a version you can use anywhere. . . . . . . 

~~~ inspired by listening to #Satsymph's geo-located Hermes on a Welsh hill-top earlier this week, (previous post).

The Mayor's blog post about his firs geo-located virtual audio experience: http://www.mayorofgosport.co.uk/2014/05/02/

 

Geo-located soundscape at an Iron Age Hill Fort

#Satsymph: Hermes
GPS-based soundscape on Google Play

HERMES:
A prankster and inventive genius from birth, Hermes was the messenger of the gods and guide of dead souls to the Underworld.  

He aided the heroes Odysseus and Perseus in their quests. Hermes was the son Zeus and a mountain nymph. 

Hermes was the son Zeus and a mountain nymph. As a newborn he was remarkably precocious. 

On his very first day of life, he found the empty shell of a tortoise and perceived its utility as a sounding chamber. Stringing sinews across it, he created the first lyre. http://www.mythweb.com/encyc/entries/hermes.html 


After months of work in studio headphones, walking in urban Hampshire landscapes to test geo-located audio circles for "Written in Water", I'm spending a couple of days in the luminous, green and stony Brecon Beacons. 

Today I had a wonderful walk from Mynedd Illtud (St Illtud's Common land)
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/search/Mynydd+Illtud/@52.405331,-4.1599484,8z/data=!3m1!4b1

to the top of Twyn-y-Gaer and the still visible earthwork fortifications of an ancient hill fort.
http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?x=329400&y=221900

It was the most peaceful time I have known in months, entirely solitary but for sheep and a military jet that filled the sky for a single minute like the apocalypse.

Pen y Fan to the north, from Mynedd Illtud

The thousands-year old grass path rose and fell gently over undulating pasture and gorse until the last, panting steep stretch demonstrated to this breathless walker a brilliantly defensible site.

At the top, I wanted to investigate a colleague's geo-located music app - how  would it work at this random spot. 

I set the app's area centre as the triangulation point - the highest point on the hill and, no accident, clever Iron Age builders, the dead central point of the fort. 

The radius was defined by the perimeter of the earthworks, below which, on the north side, was a steep drop of several hundred metres.

#Satsymph app for iPhone, their new project: Hermes. 
Surreal two voice, spoken welcomes to the Greek god's temple begin to overlap with music by Marc Yeats. 

Yeats' style is endlessly surprising, adaptive, resourceful.  The musical language is complex and multi-layered, filled with strategic, mimetic reference but free of the 'memes' that guide listening to a specific narrative or state.

on Twyn-y-Gaer

Above the windy peak, no human movement visible in the vast primeval landscape, clouds sweep and curl above, in streaks and swathes of lightness.

The crisp air bristles at this high spot, a cone almost, with higher peaks to the north and a near sheer south drop.

Sense of the place was mediated by the music and words imported there on a digital handset. 

#Hermes is often beautiful, sometimes absurd, lush and wistful and coupled with the location made for a remarkable, unrepeatable performance that I will cherish.

While thinking about what happened to me on the hill, listening to Hermes, I discovered a new word: Engram, a "lasting trace left by psychic experience"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engram_(neuropsychology)

My experience both of hill forts and of geo-located media has been shifted: the 'Engram' has been etched and will feed my musical piranhas.

(I love hill forts, trying to really see the huge labour that went into establishing them, the organisation of people and resources to build these ring mounds of earth at the highest viable point for a self-sufficient settlement…. who the community within were, their beliefs, fears, daily struggles…  sudden violent, terrified, furious defence against attacks from without, what they did in the evenings, what made them argue, laugh, fall in love….) 

'Hermes' project is portable.  One can take it and listen anywhere. 

My work so far has been very specifically geo-located. The reason: re-engaging people with place - to *feel* a place they thought familiar.

How can we use these tools to transform environment? I had a strange and delightful experience of #Satsymph's Hermes. 

Partly because it was where it shouldn't be. But then all virtual art is somewhere and its locus was almost never imagined for that purpose.  I enjoy the superimposition of the virtual upon the physical: presently called 'augmented reality' it will hopefully find better names in time. 

Having listened on Twyn-y-Gaer to #Hermes, I am surprised by the shift in my sense of this necessity of a specific location: it comes as a kind of relief, in fact. 

Specific geo-location of specific media is useful, interesting and revelatory.

But it is not essential either to enjoyment of a space or of the work experienced within it.

The questions I will now be asking, as I walk around landscapes, will include
- is this a suitable locus for something I can imagine bringing here virtually
- why would it be suitable or not
- are there not in fact infinite ways to combine virtual and physical experience 
[that spawn additional objects, 'heterodyning' in acoustics (where two tones generate through combination their sum and difference, new incidental artifices)]

Does my piece based at St Paul's Cathedral, re-processing and evoking its environs, historic and present, have to be solely there?

I thought that it was good to bring people to a place to resocialise the experience of the digital, but on a hilltop today I understood that it was not artistic but social practice that requires the shift - and artists need to be as flexible as possible to continue capturing the spirit of our time and turning it into lasting art.

Download #Satsymph today. Follow them on twitter for updates about their work. 

And go somewhere amazing to listen to Hermes. You Will enjoy it!

Written in Water: Portrait of a Town

This is a long story and I'm not going to tell it all now: here's the main thing -

it's the story of a town founded 800 years ago that supplied the British Navy, surrounded by water, on the end of the land.

a story in sound about the town of Gosport, once  principal supplier of the British Empire's naval fleet, 
a main departure point for the D-Day landings, 
the origin of deep sea diving, 
home to both a historic and beautiful organ played by G.F. Handel and 
a rare electric Compton cinema organ, delicious and multifarious beasts, both. 

Marge, 92 worked making bombs when she was 17, in the munitions factory.
Tony voyaged under the North Pole in the first nuclear sub, during the late 1950s.

Sometimes planned, often randomly encountered individuals and places of this incredible location have been a source of eviscerating joy and sadness. 

I'm attempting to paint a thickly coloured sound portrait of a town whose history, present and future embody the flux of the late 20th, early 21st century Britain.

It isn't just a bunch of stories and vox pops: the project assimilates the sounds of the place, now and historically, with music captured in the street and in concert. The incredible sound of some fine local music makers: amateur bands, professional performers and historic recordings.

It is a musical composition built from thousands of audio fragments: captured, generated and borrowed. 

The only way you can hear it is by walking in the landscape with an Android handset with the app on it.  
The GPS signal locates you and lets you hear the part of the sound in the space you are walking through or sitting in to listen deeply to.

As you walk, you reconstruct the whole from all of the stems I have lovingly compiled over months of walking, recording, interviewing, listening and dreaming about this wonderful town's strange and uniquely resonant past. And what it's future might be.

What you will hear is nothing like any recording, broadcast or electronic composition you have ever encountered.

Fifty plus circles in the landscape containing unique miniature broadcasts are interlocked, overlapped, sequentially linked.

You need a GPS-connected handset with noTours software and our project "Written in Water: Portrait of a Town". We will provide.

Come to the launch... or any time (Gosport Discovery Centre)

You'll walk inside a sound portrait of the town and its long history - 

moving through the landscape 

with its own living auditory personality 

always changing and shifting around you,  

as you navigate the virtual composition.

Contact us for more details or visit
http://www.newdimensions.org.uk/current-projects

Player Piano Study No.8 ("Ignoratio Elenchi")

I awoke this morning before first light, having been dreaming some of these patterns: this is the eighth of my essays in virtual piano performance, part played, part programmed. 

Edited as score, graphs and 'piano roll': 
the music is an approximate recall of the repetitive arpeggiated cycles of my dream, in bright yellows, oranges and greens.

During rhythmic periods of equal length, speeds of harmonic change overlap between the two parts. 
Cycles are established then eroded or asynchronously phased before rejoining and again diverging incrementally in pitch, by octatonic degrees.

These are the ways that continual falling and swooping motions described themselves in the dream, suddenly broken with a different thought. 

Fluid Narratives of Virtual Music

When I started building an engine (3DBARE) to allow the listener to walk inside a piece of music, I thought it was a tool to help me carry on doing what I was doing – just a better way of listening.

Listeners at geo-located music with noTours for Android

But allowing a listener to determine the temporal content of music by their position and route through space means that all or many of the former controls held by the composer / performer / producer are removed.

The listener is in charge: they are attracted or repelled by sounds and their combinations, and they negotiate a path ‘blindly’, feeling without signposting for a way through the experience.

If the ‘work’ presented tells a story or – now more likely – allows a series of associations between the materials experienced and personal memory, visceral responses to these, thereby giving the listener the tools to construct their own narrative, how can we determine the outcome, some aspects of the whole?

Luigi Russolo's Intonarumori

The narrative of a ‘classical work’ is necessarily abandoned. Its message resides as firmly in form as in tonal colour and harmonic content.

The formula – of embarking on a sometimes choppy but ultimately protected journey before returning to the comfortable shores of the original key (and ‘tune’) – has, for all but a few music-makers, become necessarily historical.

The scope which we now enjoy for example of the exploration of textures was simply impossible in the pre-electronic age.

Digital transformation of the familiar and unfamiliar into and through each other lets us explore weird new identities.

The skewed reality of dreams becomes communicable, merging and overlaying in impossible but plausible juxtapositions allows music to reflect the complexities of our sensory and cognitive experience.

Music is not something we present people, like a cake or a pair of shoes.

Music is the ordering into communicative structures of sound.

You cannot touch, see or smell sound.

You cannot write anything about it that approaches the reality of hearing those sounds.

So why have we spent a couple of centuries telling ourselves that the musical composition was an object like a cake, like shoes, like a painting?

I refer you to the million-word discussions of others on this thorny matter.

Morton Feldman

My business is struggling to make the er, not-stuff, that music is.

So if we want a narrative in our music, let’s put one there.

I witness stories on the top deck of London buses, as I drive through landscape, sit in a city square.

Amalgamations of snapshots, overheard snippets, accents, phrases, references, calling up an un-knowable back story from every voice, each noise that flashes past and evaporates.

Composers cannot hope to control the tale they tell: there is no more agreement about the import of a Mozart string quartet than those of Morton Feldman.

We do though, have access to an unprecedented level of complexity in the material we present to our audience and the combinations in which these may, endlessly, be sensed.

The big issue for me has been how to deliver all this magical, vertiginous potential: no one can play it, read it, hum it.

Sounds that cannot be reproduced.

Combinations that cannot be heard if sounding all at once.

Varese composing Poeme Electronique

Here’s what we do: let the listener combine the materials as they proceed, like Amelie collecting photo booth snaps, or Cage with his same-different-same seas of traffic.

Why don’t we present the listener with a shoebox full of letters (maybe some distractions thrown in, certain pages strategically removed) – and ask them to tell us the life story of the unknown protagonist?

Then we can proceed beyond the need for a narrative altogether: removing the imposition of structure, particularly the temporal, is not an act of abandonment, of irresponsibility – it is the most generous gift you can make to an audience.

To present them with a collection of the most closely, finely wrought pieces of work possible, in placements and combinations that have been tested, over and again, until the swirling whole, this whirlpool of memory and desire, amusement, terror, revulsion, meditative curiosity, rage, sleepy contentment, laughter become not a fixed structure but like the inner and outer worlds flapping like Einstein’s dimensions against each other as we walk between them.

Painting landscape with sound

It is the fluidity of virtual narratives that can bring the virtual to life.

Annotating Landscape with Audio: 6 December, Soton.ac.uk

You are invited to join us this Friday 6th December for a practical training session on geo-located soundscapes tool noTours.  
Please email lw4 [at] soton [dot] ac [dot] uk to book a free place.
Lunch will be provided and parking is available on site.

ANNOTATING LANDSCAPE WITH AUDIO

Introductory seminar on

notours software for Android

presented by Benjamin Mawson

6 December 2013, 10 am – 4 pm

Avenue Campus (Building 65, Room 2149)

University of Southampton

http://www.southampton.ac.uk/visitus/campuses/avenue.html

Outline of Day – approximate timings:

A mix of short introductory talks and hands-on development.

10.00 Welcome and Introduction:

- Concepts and background to situated soundscapes

- Technical and editorial issues

- The editor interface

- New software developments

- Starting to work with the editor Interface

11.00 Break

11.15 First practical session:

- getting used to the interface

- creating project zones and editing sound behaviours

12.15 Site visit and discussion

- assessing the situational setting for your soundwalk

- topography, function and routes

- ambient noises & acoustic responses

12.30 Lunch

13.00 Second practical session:

- building your first geo-located soundscape

- GPS and open spaces

- managing files and folders

14.00 Field test 1 (Test your design in situ using gps-enabled Android):

- what was most and least effective

- feedback and discussion

14.30 Break

14.45 Third practical session and field test 2:

- Editing and developing your soundscape

15.45 Summary

16.00 Close