Passing Sounds

10th November 2023
by Alicja Barczuk
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John Cage – surrendered chance and aleatoric music – indeterminacy and uncertainty in composition.

While John Cage is not typically associated with the development of chaos theory, his work often incorporated elements of chance and indeterminacy, which could be seen as somewhat related to certain aspects of chaos theory.

His exposure to Indian, East Asian and Buddhist philospies resulted in Cage’s exploration of aleatoric or chance-controlled music and development of his distinctive formulas for composition. He believed in incorporating elements of randomness and unpredictability into musical composition, allowing for a more open-ended and unconventional approach to creating and experiencing music.

Cage’s most famous piece, 4′33″, exemplifies his exploration of silence and the concept of ambient sound. In this composition, the performer(s) remains silent for the entire duration of the piece, and the sounds of the environment become the “music” that the audience experiences. This concept challenged traditional notions of what constitutes music and encouraged listeners to consider the ambient sounds in their surroundings as part of the musical experience.

John Cage: Atlas Eclipticalis (1962)

Cage composed a number of his works using the I Ching – an ancient Chinese deviation system, explained in this video:

His compositions were not simply randomised. The use of chance involved complex processes, each of them was composed using a unique one. He explored indeterminacy

Musa Circus – cagean concept that involved multiple musicians and groups playing simultaneously, each following different specific time periods and instructions, superimposed on each other. It created a type of cacophony that had not been heard before and challenged the present day conventions regarding playing, composing and listening to the music.

9th November 2023
by Alicja Barczuk
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Aaudioreactive storm and L-systems

Thinking of an image makes me think of sound at the same time. It is not always the original sound of the source, sometimes it’s the music or soundscape. I feel, most of the time, the reason for imaginary juxtaposing sound with visual aspect and vice versa, is to bring an ease. This of course can mean as many different combinations as there are people participating in this global audio-visual imaginary mapping. The possibilities are endless.

I feel like for me after the visual the sound comes, imagining (or seeing) an image brings the sound after. On the contrary, sounds come more unexpectedly, and they are more subtle in creating images, it’s rather colours and shapes.

https://nathan.ho.name/posts/sound-synthesis-with-l-systems/

31st October 2023
by Alicja Barczuk
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The multimedial origins of ego. The sounding of the mirror stage. Psychoanalysis and the art of noise – notes to the article.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/44030652?searchText=synchresis+in+therapy&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dsynchresis%2Bin%2Btherapy&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3Ad3a2ba4896453276e0812c48e8bc22cf

Broca’s – expressive a., Wernicke’s (sensory) – receptive a. ). Wernicke distinguished the perceptual activity of language comprehension from the motor activity of speaking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=uEEbeTEEgRk

Mirror Stage. (Lacan) : The young child’s identification with his own image (what Lacan terms the “Ideal-I” or “ideal ego”), a stage that occurs anywhere from 6-18 months of age. – The ego creation is happening via multimedia (the child sees itself and its mother says: “It’s you”), via perceptual coordination. This synchronization of the different signals from different data streams is understood as filling the gap within different psyche apparatuses rather than the gap between different senses.

9th August 2023
by Alicja Barczuk
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Synesthesia and Cross-Modality in Contemporary Audiovisuals

Computational analysis of sound driving generated visual elements – are widespread in contemporary media arts, and its aesthetics are more diverse.

In custom-coded audio visualizations artists such as Marius Watz and Robert Hodgin construct visualizations tuned to specific soundtracks; the automatism of digital synesthesia animates specific, constructed worlds of form and image. The algorithm becomes an endlessly variable and dynamic intermediary between sound and image.

Marius Watz’s generative art workshop 2007

An art installation including audio-visual work by M. Watz

Roberts Hodgin’s workshop

In a simpler, (omitting or significantly reducing the computation) approach, artists like Carsten Nicolai or Robin Fox are connecting the audio and video directly. This method can be referred to as transcoding, sound and image are linked through a direct transfer of signal, a simple cross-wiring.

In his work “Backscatter”, Australian artist Robin Fox used a custom-built digital synthesizer and plugged the audio into an oscilloscope. This hybrid instrument enabled Fox to explore a territory in which a signal is simultaneously heard and seen. Each and every sound is a form in motion, every form is a sound. This direct cross-wiring of sound and image manifests the sensory cross-over of synesthesia or even induces the synaesthetic actuality. The interchange between sound and image is immediate and intense; the audio-visual relation is completely fluid, somehow self-evident and obvious, yet perpetually astonishing.

Exerpts from “Backscatter” by Robin Fox (2005)

It may seem that most of the contemporary audio-visual work is based on transferring the audio signal into an image. Andrew Gadow proceeded to explore the same audio-visual relationship from the opposite side – transferring the video synthesizer’s signal into sound, which becomes modulations of a 50Hz hum.

Excerpt from “Techne” by Andrew Gadow (2007)

In those works, we can clearly see the analogy to synesthesia as a neurological phenomenon. In digital media art sound and image are essentially the same thing – a piece of electronic information, bits, signals. The mapping of perceptual structures onto technical reality.

The analogy provides a mapping that aligns subjective sensation with audiovisual signals; maps perceptual or even neurological structures onto a technical format. For Robin Fox and Andrew Gadow, the map is found, rather than constructed; it is embedded in the medium. Fox plugs his computer into an oscilloscope, which automatically maps the left and right channels of the audio signal into the x and y axes of its display. This audiovisual relation is in a sense a readymade, existing cultural/technical artefact. Its process is literally hardwired, embodied in the analogue electronics of the scope.

9th August 2023
by Alicja Barczuk
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Hearing pure data, data bending, inframedia

Inframedia is, according to Mitchell Whitelaw, “a stratum below or within the mainlines of electronic
media”. Data bending can be used by sound (and other digital media artists), as a way of generating rather unpredictable audio sources relying on the method called ‘open any’. Any file format can become an audio source and this transcription is bi-directional which opens up a vast array of possibilities.

The Listening Post

This work is an example of advanced techniques of data bending and the use of pure, raw data. It retrieves its data from chat rooms and other online public discussions, rendering the text audible through voice synthesizers. It conveys its immediacy, volume (or scale), and content. I don’t know the exact techniques artists used here. Still, I can tell that this work is an example of the diverse possibilities of data-based art and that the possibilities are endless, assuming that only those two main elements – data and its mapping are involved. The functionality of those two elements is clearly distinct.

It is interesting, how this experimental techniques

https://mtchl.net/assets/HearingPureData.pdf

7th August 2023
by Alicja Barczuk
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Visual music – synaesthesia in art and music since 1900. Club as an art installation.

Quotes:

‘A further step in uniting visual and auditory experience has been developed in recent years through the medium of installation art.(…) While sound may be directional in origin, it can be perceived no matter what direction the listener faces; though the listener’s movement through space can affect the quality and character of sound. By contrast, a painting requires a more-or-less fixed gaze to be perceived, as does a film. Installations activate Bothe the space they occupy and the viewer. The psychical quality of “sound (loud enough, sound can be felt) is both approximated and augmented by the totalling character of the installation space.'(19)

‘If s. represents the unity of the senses, the dream of s. is the unification of the arts.’ (19)

‘In digital media, by contrast, music and visual art truly are united, not only by experiencing subject, the listener

non-representational art and music

15th June 2023
by Alicja Barczuk
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Paradigm shift in the storytelling dynamic. Are we about to give away out imagination?

Gabo Arora and Chris Milk – “Clouds over Sidra”

The above video, in my opinion, represents a rather traditional was of designing the sound, although we can see it slowly lurking into the future.

Virtual reality is shifting the paradigm of storytelling and can use sound as its director, the guide for the participant that shows the possible directions and influences their behaviour. Sound is seen as a main factor in leading the participant (often the protagonist) through a world that, otherwise, may be confusing.

Sound in VR is playing a crucial role in expanding the level of immersion as it can help to mimic the real experience (paradoxically) and with the plugins and technologies that are in use now placing the sound in 360 degrees space, directing the participant’s attention and therefore blending the real and the virtual.

The question that comes to my mind in all that striving for the total immersive experience is, can this endeavour contribute to the collective loss of imagination? In the (virtual) world, where everything is directed by the use of the newest technologies and the participant, sometimes called the protagonist, has an illusory impression of being in control but, actually, is under control? From emotions to directions of our journey, we are being led and shown, at the same time we have no choice over what we really see, even tho we may think that it’s us that lead this journey.

As long as the immersive experience can be beautiful and maybe even life-changing for some, I feel like it can contain a lot of negative ways in which propaganda of any kind can be spread, any subliminal messages can get encoded in one’s mind.

For the creators of those new worlds, ways of interacting and more specifically, shifters of the role of sound in storytelling this is a very exciting moment in time, but what about the audience? If we are being led on every level, from the direction we go to influencing our emotional bias, like in movies or games but with an increased (on steroids) level of imposed interpretation, can we then truly develop our own, personal ways of feeling and experiencing? It must be a different kind of imagination for sure and the processes that are happening in people’s brains while participating in VR experience are unknown to me. I know this is all very new and extremely exciting to the art and tech world, but I can not ignore the gut feeling I have and the possible dangers that the development of virtual reality may have on our old, real world.