Functional Sounds
1st Conference of
European Sound Studies Association
Humboldt University, Berlin, 4-6 October 2013
Day One - four of many speakers at this eclectic conference of the newly formed ESSA.
First keynote, "Earth's functional sounds" from
Douglas Kahn
(National Institute for Experimental Arts, UNSW,
Australia)
sets the scene for an eclectic cross-disciplinary
discussion on Functional Sound,
its reading, writing, emplacement,
significative or narrative role in explaining space
and time and
uses from the political to torture, story-telling
and cultural ecology.
"With the nineteenth century advent of modern
telecommunication technologies,
noise and odd little sounds, some of them musical,
existed alongside
the conversations and information exchanges of
communications.
Many were considered to be interference but others
were recognised as
the sound and music of a new nature, an
electromagnetic one,
the knowledge of which also evolved significantly
with the nineteenth century. . . .
Instead of a default Olympian gaze, this talk will
present only
the smallest sonic breaches in the ideal,
veritable Pythagorean commas in communications
dreams of a
complete annihilation of space and time, as they
have been engaged in the arts.
Commas in music, after all, were an adaptation to
the noise of the real."
Frauke
Behrendt (University of Brighton) spoke entertainingly on
“Making Cycling Sound(s)”: bicycles
own sounds and 'political' uses of
air horns like those of lorries (which cause 50% of
UK cyclist road deaths).
I wonder how placing cone horns and compressed air
tanks
on an adapted bicycle (now capable of 178 decibels)
will persuade
truck drivers to stop killing cyclists and if the
biggest,
most dangerous machines on the roads are only
killing half of the
cyclists who die, what unforgivable idiocy and
neglect
of fundamental duties to good sense are causing the
other half?
The talk moves into more fecund, more sonic
territory, where
elements of designed environmental sound are
considered:
these may be individual or collective.
They may have social, political or artistic
motives.
By contrast to the usual practice of creating sound
in spaces -
"designing sound in"- they may also
constitute cancellation
or removal of sound - "designing sound
out"
to create "privatised listening
environments" with headphones.
Or using sound as a controller of spaces and their
users:
programme music used to code a space,
making it unattractive to non-consumers. (Stern)
see Frauke
Behrendt: "The
Sound of Locative Music", Convergence 18 (3)
Anette
Vandso (University of Aarhus) gave a wide-ranging talk
with excellent examples on "Political Potentials of
Sound Art"
How does sound art permit and/or lead us to
- Explore -
Interrogate - Intervene
in a political and/or social context?
Where the designed-in exclusion of sound
exteriority was
breached by importing 'noise' sounds, this was, in
its earliest stages,
a highly subversive and resonant act:
permissive of a hitherto absolute aesthetic and
political taboo.
Luigi Russolo called the concert hall a
"hospital for anaemic sound" (Art of
Noise, 1913)
It is increasingly hard to imagine living and
working in this cultural situation.
The shift from music to noise-sounds invites and
incites a new democratisation of sound
communication.
Some political potentials of sound art identified
by Vandso
- Participation
- Representation/aesthetic indeterminacy
- Eventness/Becoming -
Power/Control
Examples discussed/shown:
* Hom
Kai Wang (2010) "Music
While We Work"
Taiwan
Pavilion, Venice Biennale
* Yu
Hsien Su (2010) "Sound
of Nothing"
Taiwan
Pavilion, Venice Biennale
* Anke
Eckhardt (2010)
"Between
You and Me is a Wall of Sound"
* Dick
Higgins: Danger
Music No. 17 (1962)
A
musical score containing only instructions to the performer to scream.
Mark
Grimshaw (University of Aalborg) presents
"Living between the virtual and real worlds"
- prefacing the talk with the warning that
since committing to the title some months
previously,
his thinking has moved on - he challenges the
accepted distinctions between, asking whether
listening to any recorded sound is not a virtual
experience.
Phonomnesis, remenances, other auditory illusions.
Problems with definitions of sound as either wave, event or perception of event,
the cross-functionality of senses, being at once autonomic, perceptual and affective.
The perception of having perceived sound can after
all be obtained from other senses
than hearing: the cochlear implant converts acoustic signals to electrical energy
which stimulates the cochlea.
The sound itself is therefore no longer being
perceived….
The animated pub discussion that follows with
Kevin Logan
(http://theearoftheduck.wordpress.com) and
Fergus
Kelly ((http://livecomposition.wordpress.com)
sees us trying to formulate our own distinct
positions on a
continuum between these ostensible poles of "live" and "virtual".
Kevin is the most extreme, arguing that all live listening being mediated by
memory and associative reference, only first encounter with the
entirely alien can be
said not to have elements of virtuality.
Grimshaw also touches on Game Transfer Phenomena
(Gortari, Aaronson, Griffiths, 2011, International Journal of Cyber Behaviour,
Psychology and Learning), characterised by
(1) delayed release of immersion on
returning to the physical environment and
(2) temporary obscuring on returning
to physical environment of distinctions
between reality and virtuality.
GTP is based on studies of actions - is game sound
different?
Action/behaviour transfer has palpable consequences
whereas sound or perception
transfer need not and is less easily quantified.
That sound is both perceptual and virtual was
touched upon, the distinction
between virtual and real only relating perhaps
to the sound's provenance.
Environment, memory and affect arguably essential
to comprehensive definitions of sound.
Treating sound as potential, as virtuality can
engender new approaches.
Bio-feedback for user-centric sound design
development: EMR, ECG, etc
Direct Brain-To-Brain communications in humans?
A pilot study (video shown) at
University of Washington, Seattle, August 2013 (NSL
with CDDL).
Literally mind-blowing.
Conversion of user 1's deterministic thought
patterns send
guiding signal to user 2, who presses a keyboard
button:
It was unclear whether the required information was
for
User 2 to hit the target or the correct time to
press the trigger -
Anyway, whoops and hollers came from the young
geeks as
User 2 consistently appeared to act correctly on
receiving telepathic instruction.
Situated cognition, argues MG
primarily comprises
* one
or more continual feedback loops
* between
stimuli in the environment as perceived and
* responses
to subsequently experienced sense of
* cumulative
context of that which has already occurred or been perceived to occur
I would add that augmentation of the environment,
specifically in situated listening that blends real
with virtual
necessarily makes recognition of those feedback
loops impossible.
WIthout blurring of the two, no augmentation can be
achieved.
Arguably, memory can also be tricked, in this
context,
to re-identification of familiar as new, new as
repetitive, other combinations:
not just loops but all manner of cognitive shapes
can be made
to appear momentarily, like hallucinatory audible
bubbles,
before vanishing upwards into the sky.
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.
The only way you can hear it is by walking in the landscape with an Android handset with the app on it. 
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.
