Practicing. Practice mediator.

I am not an audio engineer. I’m more a media practitioner, which sounds nice. One of my motivations for taking honours was to further my technical skills. However, being the media practitioner I fancy myself to be, I need to keep a firm foot in the media bucket, which is where my practice comes from.

• Topic
• Question
• Significance
• Potential practical application

• Melbourne CBD’s aural environment and how we experience it and imagine/remember it to sound like.
• Will digital repetitions of a sound object instigate reduced listening? Do we become numb or indifferent towards familiar sounds?
• Reduced listening separates sound from source, offering a new way to perceive noise.

I keep getting stuck on the potential practical application of my fragmented ideas. Perhaps it would be helpful to start here instead, according to where my interests lie rather than where I want my aforementioned ideas to take me.

Stemming from some ideas from Seth:
• Contributing to the videodefunct online system. Seth is looking for a more poetic way to present video on the Internet and has devised an interface on which numerous categorised videos of a single topic may be played simultaneously. This offers the possibility of combining video with my audio work. If I go down the track of acousmatics, I wonder how sound and vision would interplay. Repeat sounds whilst showing an image of the sound source. Zoom in rhythmically until the image becomes colours and pixels and light, all the while the sound keeps repeating over and over and over and over till it becomes the sound of colours and pixels and light then nothing at all but the sound of noise.
• And so on to the suggestion of combining this sound mapping of Melbourne’s CBD with Google Maps. If I were to audibly represent Melbourne on the Internet, is an accurate soundscape necessarily the best way? Perhaps what it unique to every single location is the particular variety and intensity of sound objects, identifiable through the abovementioned audiovisual treatment. This can offer insight into a specific place according to its noises rather than subjective characteristics.

An old idea that didn’t work out.

I once had an idea for an installation that never materialised. The idea first came from experimenting with surround sound and investigating exhibition possibilities.

Two people would walk through a tunnel from either end, crossing in the middle. I chose the tunnel at railway square in Sydney since it was a walk I often took and it struck me as a pleasant aural atmosphere – traffic and people echoing through, train rumbling above, the various buskers I’d come to recognise. The two people would record both sound and visuals.

For the installation, I wanted to have two video screens placed back to back. Each screen would have its own surround sound speaker set up – so all this would be in quite close proximity. Each screen would display one of the filmed perspectives, accompanied by the respective audio in surround sound. Observers of the installation would be able to walk between perspectives, allowing a kind of body jump from one person to the other. The climax was to be when the two perspectives crossed and both surround sound set ups would play the same soundscape for an instant.

Problems came up from the very beginning. After experimenting with location recording, I never quite achieved two simultaneous recordings that were noticeably distinct from the other. Ideally I should have had at least five microphones per recording, but access to equipment hindered. I had had an idealised notion of the source material I was to collect. I realised that it would be easier to create the soundscapes from scratch – record my own busking samples, footsteps, trains, traffic, voices, then edit them all together in surround sound.

I was a bit disappointed with this prospect since I was keen to accurately capture the aural environment of that particular tunnel, not recreate it falsely. Since I only had a short time frame, I ended up using some of the recordings already made (and which were accompanied with a disjointed dialogue that merged and developed as the two perspectives crossed) and instead presented the two perspectives in a single surround sound set up. It was short and sweet.

I’ve just gone searching into yee aulde failing laptop, and whilst I can locate most of the original recordings, I can’t find the final version of this sound project. Hopefully it’s somewhere in a box of CDs. Hopefully.

I haven’t listened to these recording for over a year, it’s nice to come back to. It all seems so alien to me now. I happened upon some earlier sound recording experiments where I was skateboarding towards, through and away from the tunnel. Brings back nice memories, really. The recordings are now more appealing to me than I remember them to be. It seems trivial to try to remember a sound environment since so many different things influence our experience of it. What mood we were in, how much attention was being paid, other thoughts with their own imagined noise.

Simplifying.

I need to strip my project back to basics, cement where I’m coming from. My up in arms concerns have been put to words and now I need to answer questions I should have but didn’t ask myself to begin with. Start at the beginning, keep going till you reach the end, then stop.

Music dabblings:
• I took music throughout high school. I don’t consider myself a talented instrumentalist so I always chose to focus on the composition component. I remember doing a lot of listenings where we had to analyse a shopping list of 12 musical aspects; key, tone, tempo, rhythm, pitch, harmony, instrumentation, timbre, context and some others, can’t quite remember.
• I then did a music course during my first year of university. First semester was a recap of Western music history and theory and a wonderful wee bit of ethnomusicology. Second semester got really stuck into the mathematics of harmony and sight reading and public solo singing, which quite buggered me.
• Aphex Twin and Venetian Snares amaze me. They are my electronica pleasures.

Audio dabblings:
• My older brother went to SAE then on to do acoustics up to masters level in university.
• While doing my media degree, I practiced more on audio work than on video, animation or web design.
• I began doing sound tasks for short student films – location recording, sound design and editing. I did so much dialogue editing. I didn’t start off very well but I kept at it and reckon it reached a decency to please.
• My younger brother heads to university to a sound engineering course.
• I partner up with a freelance audio engineer in a similar boat but on the far horizon. We work on some masters of animations films, the sci-fi elements were probably the most fun

Sound dabblings:
• In high school I wrote a music essay on how the syncopation in ska music was derived from delays in radio waves, and almost failed and was told to write one that analysed the music, oops.
• I majored in film and began directing most essays towards analysing sound aspects, from film comparisons to exhibition practices.
• Media essays began to follow suite, as relations between media technology and social listening practices spurred further ideas.
• Surround sound, iPods, Guitar Hero, electronic music
• I enrol in media honours at RMIT and decide to do a sound project.

Stop listening to Kettles.

I have an awesome kettle. Brilliance. Look at it.

Wunnerful. I got it for $20 at the Surry Hills market in Sydney. Love at first sight. On the nozzle spout thing bit (?) there’s a little hole with a twiddley shebang (?) that you can change to alter the pitch of the water-is-boiled whistle. Every time I boil water I hear the sound of my kettle. It’s a constant reminder to STOP LISTENING TO THE KETTLE and listen to the sliding pitches, or glissando. Reduced listening is so difficult.

Some brilliance from the library.

I’ve begun collecting CDs of noise compositions to start inspiring my own composition. The first CD is particularly fucking brilliant, offering an insanely comprehensive anthology of noise and electronic music. It has rekindled, if not amplified, my love for noise compositions. In immersing myself in so much theory I tend to forget just how much the aesthetic appeals to me. As for the second CD set, I haven’t actually listened to much of Schaeffer’s work. Since I’m referencing him extensively, I can only benefit from involving myself in his compositions. As for Solfege de l’object Sonore, I have been needing and wanting to read this for a very long time. It will indulge my own personal investigation into and practice of reduced listening, something my project will only flourish from. I’m glad it’s translated into English. Thanks, Schaeffer.

An Anthology of Noise & Electronic Music / third a-chronology 1952-2004

AV 786.74 A628

Pierre Schaeffer, L’oevre Musicale

AVF 786.75 L826

Pierre Schaeffer, Solfege de l’object sonore (1 book, 3 CDs)

AVF 786.75 S685

TUDUU.

This is the abstract. I have four sentences. The first states the problem. The second states why the problem is a problem. The third is my startling statement (my solution/response). The fourth are the implications of my solution/response.

Why am I doing this?

Why does it matter?

When is this lunch that has been spoken of? Why am I no longer getting emails?