A brief history of futures past: musical exploration of the impossible

I've been digging through a long-ignored tape cassette collection with which I have moved house around a dozen times in fifteen years and yet haven't listened to since before around 2000.

Remembering the essential octagonal bic biro, for pulling up slack, to prevent the whole thing being chewed in the doggy jaws of an old tape player. 

I'm trying to compile a story from unearthed bits and pieces I composed or recorded or wrote a long time ago. 

The story is this: 

why the ‘bebop-romanticism-klezmer-highlife-cinta-baroque’ hybridity that I tried first to transcribe then to convey to academy-trained musicians, for them to play on a stage in front of an audience of at most a hundred expectant classical-canon conformists 

turned into 

simulating impossible, acoustic, performance with early commercial digitalia

then into 

collecting sounds on the street and recompiling the street inside an enclosed space, with glimpses of  the original hybrid crowd's voices

then

finding ways to walk inside it so it's always different, unrepeatable.

I’m still working on telling that story through some peculiar digital sound objects and rambling, utterly inappropriate words.

<.~<.~<.~ <.~<.~<.~ HTTP://BASIC.FM  ~.>~.>~.>~.>~.>~.>

<.~<.~<.~ Watch this space for my first radio broadcast  ~.>~.>~.>

<.~<.~<.~ on augmented reality and music composition  ~.>~.>~.>

<.~<.~<.~ <.~<.~<.~ S e p t e m b e r  2 0 1 3  ~.>~.>~.>~.>~.>~.>

Meanwhile, I discovered some striking archaeological evidence of the 'shift', the evolution out of learning to play the standard repertoire in a regional orchestra, through keeping up with incredible street bands in Belgrade, Budapest and Paris, and capturing live events for the bubbles to build fleeting dreamscapes in sound.

A major influence on my shift away from notes on paper for people, toward the construction of musical junk-sculpture, was the improvising pianist John Law. 

Nearly twenty years ago, I went into a large echoey room with a Steinway, intending to record my Piano Sonata.

A master of digression and procrastination, even then, I instead recorded this. 

Exhibit A: “In Walked John Law”, solo piano improvisation, September 1994

Dismantling an engine powered by the energy in dreams

Excerpt from "Room": more info at http://benjaminmawson.com

Can we quote words in music without owning the statement?

I don't believe in God and I have difficulty understanding faith, particularly the acceptance of solutions to seemingly intractable problems of human nature and mortality.

I don't propose answers or seek here, with little knowledge of theology, to criticise.

On the contrary, I envy the religious the reassurance they get from an ability to immerse in devotion and the commitment to renegotiation of faith and deity that religious folk have shown me.

The question I ask is this: is it irresponsible, insulting or sacrilegious to search for the sacred or the numinous through music without personal commitment to a given faith?

As a composer I seek authentic expression of confusing, conflicted experience and perception.

A search for commonality of experience and expression between devotees - something fundamental to us all regardless of faith.

Are not artistic expression of confused wonder at the commingled beauty and horror of life and the expression in devotional song of hope for transcendence, very similar responses to the question of mortality?

In seeking to explore some essence of devotion, I composed a digital "plunderphonic", convolving song from many faiths, which began with a Christian chant - Credo in Unum Deo - I Believe In One God.

I was attempting to explore both the beauty of the singers' expression of their faith and to find expression for my own fear of God, of faith, of eternalness, exterior omnipotence, of the incomprehensible plan of God or Gods who can have allowed the earthly condition of Man.

Is quotation of the words "Credo in Unum Deo" an act of theft, or disregard, or insult, without owning the statement?

Is this artistically irresponsible, like Seamus Heaney's famously explained fear in "Nero, Chekhov's Cognac and a Knocker" that singing without a moral right to sing is fundamentally to abandon the rules that govern socially engaged artistic expression?

"Credo" did not make conscious reference to other musical approaches.

It was not a composition that answered (at least I was not aware of doing it) other composers' work.

It was a spontaneous and unplanned improvisational collage which took around four days of complete absorption in the material to realise the quarter of an hour that it takes to hear.

There are things I would change now, but there it is - a record of a short exploration, like a diary in sound of encounters with strangers and my attempt to structure their own, often highly structured but now fragmented expressions of very specific devotion, into a picture of their words, voices, ideas perceived from outside their perception.

Like a photographic record of the people one met on a journey, this composition tries to order the images captured into an abstracted narrative of the mind through these places, dark as they seem to me, though which I know to be filled with light, the essence of existence, for the voices captured.

Acoustemologies of Space

No more time
Considering timelines in musical construction and the role of recall, remembrance or the search through 'sound art', 'musical composition', for full form of partially reconstituted former experience,  we might imagine the possibility that a musical object does not necessarily evolve over time,  or only over linear time.


Monophonic lines
The monodic phrase may be an extension or exploration of a finite set of pitches. It is an investigation of the relations, by sequentially altered permutations between those pitches and what may be conveyed or perceived, metaphorically, within those pairings or groups and they range covered by them.

In denser sonic structures however the interplay between distinct elements is important also. 
Texture happens over time?
Is it possible entirely to remove time from the musical work, for all pitches, timbral characters and separation throughout a physical space to be simultaneously heard?

Soundwords and Story-telling
The monodic line, the developmental polyphonic texture and the orchestral climax belong to species of sonic narrative where our conditioned associations presuppose a quasi-linguistic exposition of ideas whose correlative is founded in the same ancient urges whence mythic, religious and metaphorical representations of existence and experience emerge. 

Other forms
In the visual and plastic arts, in film, literature and dance, the design of buildings and their interiors, of objects functional and decorative, it has become accepted that form may in many instances equate to, be the sum of, the work’s content.

Stories and just Things Themselves
If, with the removal of temporal development or change, we are able to extract from the work its shackled association with ‘expression’, forms are inevitable to emerge that will permit the listener possibilities for transcending communication altogether.
In this way, the musical artifice speaks, if it speaks at all (for why should it, having no words?) solely of what it is, rather than a pale mirror to other forms.
But since all events must have duration of some perceptible value for there to be agreement that they occurred at all and arguably a somewhat greater durational value  than merely the perceptible, for the senses to take the opportunity to receive, process, respond, remember the occurrence, is the negotiation of change over time unavoidable?
Yes and no.
The slightest sonic pinprick may in fact be represented by fluctuating horizontal lines, describing continuous variations in the frequency and amplitude from opening attack through its decay, sustain, release or disappearance. 

Universe in a bead
Even the note produced by a plucked string or struck bottle, singular and momentary as this may appear, has a duration, albeit so small as for the duration not to be considered to constitute a primary characteristic.
However briefly though, each note or sound perceived of course still has a duration.
With the changes that occur during that time it may be said that rhythm, with all its generative, evolving, progressing patterns, originates or is at least suggested.

Time standing still, machine rumbles on

It is equally possible that the passage of time be used as a tool for the depiction, evocation or replication of stasis, in sorts of counter-developmental resistance. 

Examples of change within repeating patterns, or unaltered wholes whose constituent parts continually change, are to be found in the mechanical, electrical and digital as much as the natural.

Music in a cemetery toilet
Working many years ago at a cemetery office, my most pleasing diversion from the macabre mundanities of my working duty was to sit shivering in the vast, catacomb-like porcelain-lined lavatory, listening to the endless shifting and yet never changing balance between two echoing water drips, never ceasing, never simultaneous, flowing like parallel microcosmic waterways reduced to sequent enumerations of  their minutest parts, like a coastline falling through a miniature hourglass.

The music of roundabout systems
Eight years earlier, a comparable experience occurred from the chance discovery of an entrancing sound kaleidoscope both random and the result of collective, simultaneous mass action and response.
The inside floor plan of the Arc de Triomphe is a church-sized cross with similar acoustical properties but for the missing four end walls, arched ears to the acoustical convulsions of the city.
At its centre, the listener is as though inside an enormous resonant stone head, drawing from all around passing snapshots in sound.
They are so fleeting and frequent as to form a continuous flow of impressions.
They are so dense as to be opaque, so infinitely numerous, small and diverse are its elemental constituents as to constitute the river itself, where only the fluctuations of the whole can be quantified.
The Arc is at the centre of L’étoile, the star-shaped intersection at a monumental centre point of six of the city’s largest thoroughfares.
Six lanes of rotating, competing traffic of all sizes continuously swimming around, across, alongside; wheels on tarmac, revving engines, coughing exhausts, squealing brakes and above all, a mechanical mayhem of klaxons, despairing, warning, cajoling, threatening, pleading, celebrating, echoing.

Tuning of French klaxons
By the way, these horns were for the most part, diatonically attuned. My only explanation was the French preference for cars by one of their two principal firms and the possibility therefore that the klaxons’ slight variation from diatonic unity was based on (almost) any given vehicle being one of two makes, pitch-limited to the white notes of the piano, depth depending on size of the vehicle. 

River <- Soundscape -> Machine
At other times, while the auditory river’s flow remained unabated, effectively unaltered, it was possible to tune focus to given pitches or rhythmic imitations and again, through the unending alteration and rotation of atomic detail within, there was above all a character of constancy, of unification, whose effect was to stay the very passage of time.

All perception of time passing or changing was removed during these peaceful meditations which in memory appear to repeat like time-phase photography or an acoustical strobe.

Therefore, given the fascination of these and other phenomena, what appeared like the sudden realisation of a new concept (new to me at any rate) emerged, like all others, from a combination of reflection over an extended period and the search for alternative solutions to questions of time found in much music of the past few decades.  

Centuries-long music
Perhaps one of the best known of these is John Cage’s conceptual composition for organ “As slow as possible”, performance of which began in 2001 and is scheduled to run for 639 years.

Arguably the performance did not begin until February of 2003 due to the seventeen month rest with which the current rendition began but perhaps this is a question for a separate enquiry.

Questions of how time is represented, ridden, distorted have always occupied composers.
It has been understood that music exists more in time than space, in waiting or remembering than in an extended present sensual interaction such as may be had with an image or sculpture.

Story-telling
To return therefore to a notion for music from which the passage of time - used to generate along its line, arrayed patterns and relations with a correspondence or analogue in verbal expression, the emotions, in narrative or figurative representation - is removed, carrying off these external, unachievable distractions, to permit the construction of pure sound, unencumbered by the minute semiotic histories of our finite range of sonic gestures:

Sound like colour and smell
Through the separation of sound from putative intentions to be of or fundamentally connected to other forms of communication or activity, perhaps we can permit, by infinite multiplications, the expansion of our 'sonabulary', our 'sonicon', a new 'acoustemology' beginning to grow from the threads remaining, which do not carry the weighty burden of impossible ambition to relate an art with no inherent meaning to systems of signification.

Unknown writing on ribbons of sound
3DBARE is coming. Time will no doubt have a role but this is about pausing clocks, holding one time river up against another and watching the combinations of signals blow out sound bubbles from their auditory embrace, across the wide open arena of a space filled with undulating voices, tones, beams of sound, infinitely variable in combination, unending, borderless like the ocean's horizon when the world was flat, like inner space and the dreams that float there.

Heart of a Dog

I've been off radar for some time, giving presentations and developing new collaborations of which more shortly...

Meanwhile, I couldn't turn down the invitation to create sound effects for a new adaptation of Bulgakov's incredible political satire "Heart of a Dog"

The production opens at the Old Operating Theatre, St Thomas St, London SE 1, on Wednesday 30 January 2013.

Set in 1920s Moscow and partly narrated by Sharik the eponymous mutt, it's the tale of his relationship with a medical Professor who experiments on him, turning him into a sort of man, with distinctly doggy traits.

While posing some glaring questions on the ethics of experimental medicine, the play is a darkly funny investigation of how we interact, view our miniature worlds with over-inflated importance and ultimately fail to hear each other speak.

The scope for weirdly combined, dreamlike sonic representations of a fictional, historic, foreign, bizarre, wintry setting was greatly appealing.

I have just enjoyed representing the Professor's affairs starting to get out of hand with a gradual perversion of a simulated gramophone recording of his favourite song.

Creating a snowstorm and a fumble for heavy keys on outside steps in a century-old street was another challenge.

Perhaps the greatest so far has been what the dog dreams as he is anaesthetised. I am still working like a dog on it and hope a reader or two may make it to the show.

Director Valeriy Simonchuk brings passion and assurance to this production and the gaudily talented cast bring this strange and compelling piece colourfully to life in the Old Operating Theatre's perfectly creepy surroundings.

It will also be on at the Old Theatre at the LSE "Space for Thought" Literary Festival 2013, on Monday 25 February.

Full festival programme here:

http://www2.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/spaceForThought/pdf/LSE%20Literary%20Festival%202013%20Programme.pdf

Mixing 'Virtual' Music With The 'Real' World

Locative and Geo-Located Audio: Editing a Place with Sounds

After my presentation at UoS Creative Digifest2, Guy Stephens of Cap Gemini invited me to speak at their London offices: Monday 22nd October, presenting recent musical and academic research on virtual sound in real environments.

Fantastic opportunity to discuss my musical and academic research with an audience at Cap Gemini yesterday, in their astonishing 8th floor "Accelerated Solutions Environment" - an entirely mobile arrangement of walls and furniture on wheels, capable of almost instantaneous transformation. 

I was more than a little apprehensive about speaking straight after the man from Google - Ed Parsons, Geospatial Technologist at Google Maps, on the future of Annotated Landscapes - who described some mind-boggling concepts for emerging mobile connectivity.

I presented the reasons for wanting to create music you can walk inside - how the studio lets us do extraordinary things that seem really to be happening but which are impossible - but we are then obliged to listen to music on speakers; aware of the sounds' artificiality and having a rather boring sensory experience, when compared to the highly visual psycho-drama of live performance.

So early last year I approached ISVR at UoS to talk about a system I wanted to build, that is now turning slowly into 3DBARE, a virtual spatialisation tool for immersive and interactive audio.

The audience saw for the first time the audio rendering engine drafted by ISVR's Miguel Galindo and Iyad Assaf's excellent user interface / control platform, which is going to be ready for prototype demonstration in the next few weeks, using a table-top version.

They also heard about the geo-located music tool, noTours, which I have been using to place music in a landscape works directly with the Google Maps API and has the potential for really immersive and interactive audio embedded into the main map search platform.

I'd spent the weekend at St Paul's Cathedral, recording interviews and the acoustic environment. Then I placed my choral piece "Take Me By The Hand" into the landscape and mixed it with the traffic, fountains, machines, bells, skateboarders, fighters, Big Issue sellers, tourists, lovers, wedding parties and historical reconstructions that were all around the area.

Met the inspired team of Unreal City Audio - and found myself on their tour "Hawkers, Harlots & Hacks" - thanks for the brilliant audio, guys!

I've been considering how to develop sharing of virtual soundscapes, distribution to listeners in diverse locations, multi-contribution work that can take place in several locations simultaneously (and each player can hear the other players, selectively as s/he chooses).

It seems that at the very moment of its first appearance, the album as software application is already a fleeting obsolescence, being only a fraction removed from the fixed format of the gramophone disc.

Perhaps this is the first time since the advent of recording that music has been a changeable, living entity, where as one walks inside it, the experience is controlled and determined by one's movement and position.

To dissect and spread a piece of music across a landscape anywhere in the world now permits listeners to download the music and map data then go there and enter the composition as though it were a physical object.

We are doing this not just with musical compositions but audio montages of a particular place and time - sonic snapshots of constantly changing acoustic environments.

Surround stereo clip from St Paul's Churchyard Audio Portrait here (with headphones please!)

For geo-located version at location of your choice, send me a postcode and I will attach the music to the place and send you a link to your private Music You Can Walk Inside download: @benjaminmawson

Painting the landscape itself. No, I mean really, actually painting it. Oh, and in sound.

If ever you decide to demonstrate your crazy, arcane research, the ideas you dream about and discuss with yourself, sometimes inadvertently aloud - then find you’ve accidentally instigated the biggest, most exciting and terrifying project of your life, don’t call me to complain. I will only laugh.
I was working on how to motion-track listeners so they can walk inside a piece of music - we’re getting there, with amazing work from composer-programmer Iyad Assaf, it’s called 3D-BARE.
I called music tech guru and composer Julio d’Escrivan for advice.
He put me in touch with Enrique Tomas, whose noTours software uses GPS and does a similar - well, different - thing to what I was working on but with such interesting results and rich possibilities that I was hooked.
noTours lets you edit a place with sounds: overlapped, interlocking, spliced, hovering in the landscape.
When a composition is complete, I now do something additional with it - splitting it into horizontal and vertical fragments, spreading it across a garden or along the Thames, then inviting people to come and listen.
I recorded singers a few months ago, one at a time, then combined them into a ‘virtual’ choir, in a setting of a poem called “Take Me By The Hand” for Southampton’s Musical Alphabet weekend.
There’s now a version spread between the paths and trees, buildings and water of the university campus. Singers and the place, sonically and physically bound together. Blurring and augmenting the heard reality of a place allows us to do strange and interesting things…
So I've been constructing musical compositions embedded in landscape and decided to make more systematic my approach to recording the landscape itself and, more importantly, the people in it.
Six months on, I’m coordinating the Audio Portrait of Southampton - to capture the place, the year, its noises, sounds and music. An immersive sonic montage spread across the green spaces of the city for listeners to walk inside and investigate, like a virtual city built only of sound.
Southampton Music Hub and Art Asia have recently come on board, bringing fantastic, diverse musical talent to the Portrait and I was recently interviewed by Xan Philips on Voice FM.
We’ll be demonstrating on 11th October at the University’s next Creative DigiFest, SXSC2. Come and hear for yourself!