ITP Audio Art Class

2.28.07 7:00 pm

I just stepped off the grate between 45th & 46th Sts. on the island centered in Times Square, after some hesitation. It's not that the experience was particularly hypnotic, but for the first time I was paying attention to a sound that happens because of the sounds happening around it. Certainly the build up of the day's events must have gradually brought the vibrating chamber below to where its sonic point was at the time I arrived. This is what I contemplated as I took it in. The sound was not nearly as loud as the sound of traffic or people passing by (contrary to what I expected based on sources that said it was "competitive" with the surrounding environment), but for those who do take notice it can offer a point of focus in a sea of randomness and be quite full sounding (I unfortunately was the only one who took notice - an entourage of prep school boys also stood on the grate for a while but didn't seem to be taking notice - I think Neuhaus states he hopes for 50% not to notice, though in that instant it was about 95%).

I began by standing in the center and keeping still for 5 minutes to see if anything changed... mostly what changed was the perspective, where at moments the strength of the signal was "leaning" a little more to the left. After a couple times where this happened I gave in and turned to the left and experienced the sound much stronger - even though I was still standing in the same place, my orientation made a difference in the experience. At its strongest, the bassy fundamental frequency came through optimally. If I started to walk in a circle around the grate, the effect wasn't instantaneous, but I perceived different emphases on different frequencies at different positions - the 12th, the double octave, the 3rd above that, etc. When a subway train passed underneath, I said "here it comes", but again, I think the sound generation is more gradual than that. The character of the sound is steely but warm and resonant at the same time, that is, it never felt harsh like a power tool, but low and vibratory like a battery-powered massage implement.

I would have to classify this installation (as I'm annoyingly prone to do) as the kind of art that makes you think about our relationship to the modern world, and the questions you ask as a result - in turn these generate emotional responses, rather than a direct emotional intervention by the piece itself. There is obviously a deep conceptual bent behind it, and while on the one hand it says something about modernity and noise, on the other hand it makes reference to the older concept of turning one's focus to the natural world - or rather the world of "non-intentionally musically" created sounds - and the psychoacoustic and philosophical repercussions that come with doing so. It's also a statement with slightly egalitarian undertones, that art should no longer have to be a commodity to be bought, dissected and analyzed, but shared by all on one's on watch and experienced to whatever extent one chooses.

Posted by Matthew Steckler at 11:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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My sound levels may not be high enough for an optimal experience. Basically, I live in fear of feedback when dealing with the biquad. It does not respond well to sudden shifts in signal strength, oscillator source or filtering via the preset, and that's unfortunate, because I wanted to get closer to a sequencing environment within Max. What I was able to accomplish was presetting various envelope shapes of the carrier signal on the left side of the page. I also set the signal to a 16 channel select module, for a basic rhythmic pulse, and then improvised my own interferences using an external MIDI controller. I recorded two takes, one with a cycle~ carrier that really gave way to the white noise of the biquad, and another with a cos~ carrier and a lowpass filter that had more discrete pitch recognition.

Cycle-Noise Version

Cosine-Low Pass Version

Saw Version

Posted by Matthew Steckler at 11:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have taken longer than most to work on this first week assignment for Audio Art, mainly because a) I'm stupid in general, b) I wanted to buy gear and did a lot of comparative shopping, c) I stupidly spilled wine on my laptop and was out of commission for over a week, and d) I tend to get overly stressed because I hope this will be a creative outcome. I also took this as an opportunity to experiment with some smaller scale applications, like Audacity and Garage Band, so I'm posting a different collage for each program. For some field recordings, I used the school's AT 8220 stereo mic, and more recently I used Core Sound's binaural mics with the Microtrack 24/96.

Bell Tones & Water

Confluence of Nature and Urban Culture

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This is what I got from combining Peter's RM-AM and Additive patches with my own playback of a subway field recording. I modified the Additive patch by taking just half of it and using rect and tri oscillators instead of a cycle, and for the RM-AM patch I put a phasor in as the carrier signal, and made a line object with a list to make the note a short note with an envelope.

The result on one pass sounded like this:

RM/AM/Add/Play

Posted by Matthew Steckler at 06:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Matthew Steckler
Audio Art
2.8.07
Readings Response: Modulation Synthesis

I've read through passages of this reading a few times
through so that I may sound more intelligent, or at
least relevant, when I respond herein. The truth is,
though, that I possess a slow learning curve with the
application of technical topics in music, or anything
really scientific. I can loosely grasp the concepts in
the abstract, but until I sit and run the gamut of
trials and errors in Max I'm as good as lost. I look
forward to this process now that my old computer seems
to be working and I have a new machine and some new
recording gear to boot.

I think the ability to understand synthesis processes
will be more important to my music than I've
previously given it credit for. I've always trusted
others to generate my patches for me, my role as the
musician was to discover the best ones, then figure
out how to organize them (again, reference to the Cage
and Russolo readings). But even if I never make great
patches from scratch, understanding the underlying
techniques and their audible results will help me to
find the patches I had in mind and modify them to my
taste (my previous experience with them prior was with
virtual rack soft synth apps like Reaktor and Reason
with the little knobs and faders, but I realize now
that's cheating, ha ha... but really? Each person only
has so much time... oh, but I digress...).

My hope is to harness these homegrown patches and put
them into a high-end DAW like Logic that can integrate
MIDI and audio, and become a Bjork-like male sprite,
churning out deliciously weird pop experiments in my
own home office. Is this possible? I don't yet fully
realize the potential of Max...

The diagrams clarify the reading much better than do
the formulae, but then I am a visual person. The FM
synthesis section was interesting because of the
connection to the Yamaha DX7, though I myself never
had a real attachment to those sounds. I would love,
by contrast, to find out what went into making those
classic Moog sounds, or even the Rhodes and B-3. I
believe that oscillators have something to do with all
of these.

I see now that this aspect of music is very much the
scientific inquiry model, whereby a hypothesis is
posited, "What would happen if... [enter a carrier -
modulator signal configuration]" and the results are
dutifully documented, but the music side of it is,
we're free to take our result or leave it to the dogs.
Much of the documenting involves identifying the
elements at play, and representing their relationship
toward one another with pictures and equations, so as
to fully appreciate the beauty of each sound
generation's guiding principles. Ah yes, this one
happens to carry a sideband with a negative frequency,
that one has a choppy waveform due to the "imperfect"
analog character of the diode, this one has infinite
spectra with equidistant bands, etc... as in science,
we love playing with shapes in our music and then
relishing most the mutant deviant bastard offspring.

One HUGE question I have: how do digital signals
begin??? Is there a vibration to make a frequency
occur, as in the natural world? I feel ignorant that
this most basic principle was not addressed in my
education.

My understanding of this reading is incomplete without
my trying it out, but one thing that made an immediate
impression was learning that integer ratios between C
and M create harmonic sound while irrational ratios
create percussive, inharmonic sound. Like the overtone
series, this has a beauty put forth by nature herself.

Posted by Matthew Steckler at 03:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Matthew Steckler
Audio Art - ITP
02.08.07

Reading Response: "The Art of Noises" by Luigi Russolo

This turn of the 20th Century crackpot is really
amusing in his manifesto rendering of the future of
music. I love especially his disclaimer at the end, "I
am not a musician". While I joined the class primarily
to learn musical ideas from non-musicians who in a new
technological age are able to make very effective
music, I don't get the sense that Russolo is really
seeing the full potential of the sounds he espouses,
musically-speaking. Sure, new sounds vs. old sounds,
it can be refreshing for a minute, but ultimately what
makes a lasting impression is the organization of
those sounds. The sounds alone cannot endure
criticism for mere novelty's sake. Interesting is his
view of the development of Western art music as one
that eschews vertical constructs in favor of
horizontal ones, but I do think the Greeks had an
acute awareness of the complexity within one sound,
otherwise they wouldn't have invented the monochord,
which visually and aurally outlines the harmonic
overtone series with clear, easy divisions of a single
taut string. Likewise, the development of polyphonic
music in the Middle Ages to Renaissance had
nonetheless great sensitivity toward intervallic
relationships, albeit this is when the subjective
divisions between consonance and dissonance ensued
(but not altogether unjustified - again, consonance is
a function of the harmonic series and dissonance is
merely a different, equally important state that
creates tension in music before it must be resolved,
according to early music theorists... nowadays it is
known that tension can be created using previously
assumed consonant intervals and their resolution can
be toward a harmony more traditionally accepted as a
dissonance, depending on the organization of these
harmonies). I am glad that the Futurists bring the
sounds of the natural world and the noises of industry
into the conversation, because I'm sure this had a
profound effect on the development of avant-garde
music, and I do agree that we humans have needed
centuries of musical evolution to acclimate ourselves
to these sounds for artistic purposes. But I don't
think their intentions were entirely wholesome; as
known fascists, Futurists professed a love for the
sounds of military might as a means to advance the
cause of war. Those sounds are, however, really
effective as part of a performance piece that makes
anti-war commentary, for example. So, subtext aside,
noise is perfectly valid as a tool - a new "pigment" -
in the creation of sound art/music, but it cannot be
left merely at that.

Reading Response: "The Future of Music: Credo" by John
Cage

Cage - as a trained musician seeking new directions in
music - is someone I am more willing to accept advice
from in bringing new sounds into the language of
music, and he even gets right to the point,
emphasizing "organization of sound" above all else. He
goes further than Russolo in espouses the manipulation
of these sounds so as to control each one's amplitude
and frequency fully, and to create rhythms as a
function of recording technology. I also agree that
new instruments should be played to sound like
themselves, not some traditional instrument. I think
it was David Bowie who said that the 70's progressive
musicians threw out the manuals to their synthesizers
because they wanted to see what could happen by
accident (paraphrased).

Cage is adamant about building on linkages to the
musical past in his quest to forge new musical
territory. The legacy of Schoenberg is to him quite
valid, in its egalitarian view of materials within a
group, and can be applied to any new materials as
well. He is also dead on with respect to percussion
and rhythm, for music of the last century, that has
stressed their importance, has also been the most
successful at introducing new, crazy sounds into the
language. Finally, he does not abandon form as the
Futurists seem to do, but sees new forms possible that
bear some relationship - whether congruent or
divergent - to the traditional forms that preceded us.
I will take his advice any day - a host of incredible
musicians and performance artists already have.

Posted by Matthew Steckler at 03:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I found both readings useful in different ways.
The first is obviously good for basics in mic
connectivity and safety, although I was somewhat lost
on pp. 4-5 (fixed installations and grounding)...
perhaps some of this could be clarified in class. I
enjoyed learning some of the history of "classic"
mics, because it helps me on things to look for in a
cheaper mic with similar aims. The phantom power
explanation clarified some things for me too. I'm
beginning to compile a master vocab list because of
the reading (I'm that dense).

The Oliveros reading has its positives. It feels
loosely like it's building on John Cage's Silence. The
prose style can irritate me because I at times feel
like I'm being converted to a religion (somehow I
didn't feel this way with Silence though), but the
early sections certainly relate some truisms of
listening that we could all stand reminding ourselves
of from time to time. I gather that the focal/global
types of listening directly address this week's
listening assignment, which I'll do later today. What
I really think deep listening requires is an element
of imagination, to acknowledge the sounds that are
real and directly involved in the experience but to
also imagine what other sounds they could imply or
lead to. When she notes that babies are the best
listeners, it hits home because I need that license to
be naive, playful and first-time exposed in order to
find my own music, otherwise I will succumb to what
critics generally accept as real music and listen for
only those sounds as being valid. I also am in
agreement that protection of our hearing is severely
threatened, especially in big cities, and I plan to
make an audiologist appointment this month. I am less
in ethical agreement with the proposition that
technology should offer superhuman hyper-acuity in
hearing capacity... I think it would be too much on
our psyches and could cause insanity. I have enough to
deal with my own inner anxieties at night, this would
just be the tipping point. Better to let technology
offer means for creating new sound experiences that
can be turned on/off, the natural equipment with which
we were born will stand as the necessary human
component of that experience. I do support technology
that could regenerate hearing loss, however, as well
as supporting the aural facets of society on equal par
with the visual (I couldn't be a musician without
agreeing to this!).

Posted by Matthew Steckler at 03:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

“Musings on the Sound of a SonicCare Electric Toothbrush”
(a Local Listening Assignment, by Matthew Steckler)

I’m surprised and charmed they went with a C pitch… isn’t every practical appliance with a single tone tuned to A440 (don’t know where I got this assumption… ring tones?)? The C that is most constant in the tone from any angle is not the fundamental, but the first harmonic. You would have to pass the bristles past your ear to hear the lower fundamental. Also closer to your ear one hears the “ffffff” white noise sound associated with TVs. I experimented quite a bit with panning the toothbrush L to R, R to L, back and forth, by my ear and then center, etc., and a beating occurs from the fundamental become more, followed by less, audible. From center position, the higher harmonics are more audible, particularly the ones that start to form a diatonic scale in the 4th octave (the 9th and 11th in particular for some reason). I almost never hear the second harmonic in the series of most tones (the 12th ). Ironically it is more difficult to get this harmonic out clearly on a saxophone than its higher neighbor the second octave. I also heard my roommate using the brush on his teeth (it is his brush, not mine), and of course the variances in angle, pressure and muffling create changes in the timbre, and even a slight Doppler effect as he walks about the house with his damn brush, kind of like power tools in a metal shop. The physical vibration of the tone is quite pronounced as one might expect, making for a very impure, rich tone with many variances possible.

“Musings on Sounds From A Quiet Apartment POV”
(a Global Listening Assignment, by Matthew Steckler)

Would have gone to the park, but today is the coldest day of the winter so far. It isn’t hard to tell this even in my living room, where frosty gales thrust toward the window panes. The house is situated near a highway, and there are different layers of sound that this produces. One can always tell the unruly vehicles from the straight-up sedans; the latter produce a constant gentle hum (perpetual as there are always some of these in motion), while the former – the commercial trucks, motorcycles and such – produce an irritable disturbance in the peace. The calmer layer of the sedans mixes gently with the sound of gas heat emitting from the radiator, like two paint coats over the sonic void. Strange how the presence of sounds like these protects and comforts us against the fear of pure silence, and yet we try to get rid of them altogether in the recording studio. When the gas heat drops out for a few moments, the old floorboards are uneasy at the threat of pure silence, and let out a crack in protest. The bird chirps outside are more distant today, but as punctuated, staccato events they are most noticeable. As a hemophobe, my biggest fear if we strip all these quiet sounds away would be to hear my heart beat too much, to hear the blood coarse through my veins and even to hear the cells committing vile acts of osmosis with neighboring nutrients. Thankfully, I am a city boy and can always count on something louder than that. What I do hear, however, are the intersections where nature and artifice meet. While in some parts of town the man-made world dominates the natural one, here in this quiet residential area the balance is more harmonious, evenly engaged in a dialogue. What they say to one another may read something like a coming to terms, a world long since overrun by gadgets that finally wants to acknowledge the living things, though on its own terms. A city park is a bit like an Indian reservation, the government gives nature back a small piece of what was once all hers.

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