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So I read just the first section of a Michel Chion online publication that can be found at the ElectroAcoustic Resource Site here:www.ears.dmu.ac.uk.

The part that I read was called In Search of The Sound Object, and basically is just an overview of sound art.  It was really helpful for me to have this base knowledge all in one place that I could quickly soak up in a couple of minutes. I finally found out the “by the book definition” of acoustmatic (indicating a noise that is heard without the cause being seen) which was both confusing and helpful. 

So if acoustmatic is just a sound that you cannot see the source of, does that mean when you close your eyes life is an acoustmatic experience?  Or if you are blind do you live acoustmatically ¿?¿? So my mind is a little miffed about that, because I thought that acoustmatic pertained only to the sonic arts, not an ordinary everyday occurrence. I realize that when Schaeffer and Peignot coined the term it was meant to be applied to radio, tape, and other listening tools, but I cannot help but see a connection between that and reality.

The next couple of paragraphs went to explain how if you separate a sound from the “Audiovisual Complex” (which I am pretty sure means the combination of seeing and hearing) then you open yourself up to reduced listening which is listening for the sake of sound. There is one quote in here that I really like  alot it is:

“We discover much of what we thought we were hearing was in reality only seen and explained by the context.”

I believe in that 1000% because as humans we are very visual, and if you take an example from sound design for movies or games the sound you want is not necessarily the sound you see. Like a door slamming might have more of an impact if the noise you use sound big and heavy like a cement block being dropped or a car crash and mix it in with the original sound.

I view sound as a direct line to the subconscious; whether or not we recognize a minor chord or not we know it makes us feel sad or anxious. So if you take away the visuals and just have sound, as in one of these reduced listening situations, it makes the brain identify with things that it usually does not recognize. This is one of the reasons that contribute the lack of popularity and attention that the sonic arts get. When you mention art people immediately think of paintings and sculptures because it is visual, and something that we are programmed to identify with. I have had to devote entire conversations explaining to people what sound art is, and even then there are looks of confusion and a general lack of interest. Sonic art and intense listening makes people connect with audio stimulus that they usually do not have to, so it feels strange and avant-garde to a lot of folks. It is not that the sonic arts are a lesser form of art (which I am sure I do not have to argue), it is just different than what we are used to. It is like when Battleship Potemkin  came out and utilized montage for the first time in a film, it was different and strange plus took years for people to understand, accept, and start to enjoy.

This essay was written by a man named Steve Reich, and is about minimalism and his views about composing music. Before reading this article I have always thought that minimalism was a polite way of saying not good. I have only really been exposed to it in more popular music, for example, Meg White the drummer of The White Stripes. She is a “minimalist” drummer… and whenever I listen to The White Stripes I just get angry that all of the drum parts could be played by a 6 year old. However, after reading this article and watching a half hour or so documentary about Reich’s composing style I am a lot more forgiving of minimalism, and am actually quite a fan of his work. There are a couple of quotes from the reading that I really liked and provoked a bunch of thought:

1) An interesting tape is an interest tape

Pretty self-explanatory, would make a great fridge magnet… or something?

2)”What I’m interested in is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one and the same thing.”

I was really confused about this statement until I listened to a couple pieces by Reich, and his style of writing music is very minimal, but at the same time as you are listening to his music you can hear the very complex composition that is going on. Many of his earlier works have just one section or loop being played on top of itself, and what he does with these 2 sections is slowly phase them apart. Now I am not talking phase like one goes to the left speaker and the other to the right speaker; what I am talking about is phasing them back and foreword in time. This slow separation between the loops creates a natural evolving “pulse” which acts as a rhythm section to the rest of the piece. It was really really interesting for me to experience the outrageous amount of complexity that is happening inside a piece of minimalist work.  Reading Reich’s article and listening to some interviews with him, I had a mini revelation when I realized that minimalism is not about creating something simple sounding, it can also be using very limited resources to make something extraordinary.

3)”Material may suggest what sort of process it should be run through(content suggests form), and processes may suggest what sort of material should be run through them(form suggests content). If the shoe fits, wear it.”

I took a slightly different angle on what Reich is saying with this, and I interpreted it as: the material you have affects the process you use to create, and inversely the processes you use affect the material you get out. So it made me think about the way I compose, and  it gave me the chance to look at some of my old works, and decipher exactly what was driving the piece. Was it my sound clips or melodies that made the rest of the piece turn out the way it did, or was it the process in which I made those sounds behind the wheel?

There is one piece that I am starting to make sounds for right now, and for some reason I have used the same  technique (reverse the clip, add effects, then reverse it back) for most of the sound files I have edited. A by product of this way of doing things is that everything I have so far sounds very ethereal, ghostly ,and strange. Thus my processes is suggesting the form and feel of my piece, and it is not being led by material I am creating. However, all of my source content has been on the darker and vulgar side of things, so it also has had a certain amount of influence of the direction of the final piece. SoOoOo with Steve Reich as my jump off point I have came up with a theory about composing: A piece’s artistic identity comes from where it sits in this balance. Was it driven by the process( such as the taking two identical tracks and phasing them through time) or was it driven by its material ( like Pierre Schaffer’s Etude Aux Chemins de Fer, which was inspired and born from trains). This opens a wide spectrum in which the artist can say “I am going to let the sounds take this piece wherever it wants to go” or ” I am going to do step one, then step two, and see what comes out.” I know that I am inspired more by materials than process, but I have also never tried to make a piece by using a structure as a guideline, maybe I will someday.

Also here is the documentary I watched it is broken into 4 parts and is pretty neat:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_pR1sHHeQU&feature=related

This is me digging a little deeper into Pierre Schaeffer’s Etude Aux Chemins de Fer. I am having all sorts of trouble trying to upload a Jpeg of a chart I made so I will try just to type my way through it and see what happens. First I will discuss how I think this piece is moving and evolving. A phrase I used in my last analysis was “organically-mechanic,” and I would like to clarify that a little bit more.

The chart I drew was basically a line graph, and what I used it for was visualizing the stress and release in this piece of music. What I ended up with was a complex wave that shows how the piece behaves. The “organic” part of my description is fairly apparent because there is, more or less, a repetition of stress and release, or a constant breathing. The way that Schaeffer builds and releases this is through a series of recurring motifs and changes in amplitude. He uses the constant rhythms of the train to build up to a train whistle then settles back down to another train rhythm. This adds both a vertical and horizontal space that the music breaths inside of.

The “mechanical” aspect of the piece comes mainly from the timbre of the sounds used, but also the unpredictability of what the song is going to do next. All of the sounds came from trains, so there is a lot of high end “ringy-ness,” but also there is a massive amount of weight and power that is associated with the train itself. The unpredictability arises during the transitions( the areas of train whistles and other noises) between the sections of train rhythms. So there is a very strange combination between the organic and the mechanical elements of this song, and I feel like it was done purposefully. I am trying to decipher what this piece is about, or even what it means to me, and I am having a fairly hard time. I have a lot of ideas:

• Bring awareness to the fact that there is music all around us
• Show people the stunning complexity that music concrete has to offer
• Use large lumbering steal beasts to create a piece that is full of life

But  I am not comfortable enough with any of these ideas to commit to one or the other, but I also  am entertaining the notion that he wanted to accomplish all of these things.  I think this is an important piece for many reason both technically and practically speaking. It would be hard to recreate a piece like this using a computer, much less tape, and it is something that many people could listen to and enjoy without being an audiophile. So maybe he wanted to show the thousands of people that ride a train everyday that they are participating in the grand symphony of life, and also challenge himself and other sound artists to make a masterpiece using only one subject. I do not know enough about Schaeffer to even speculate on why he created what he did, but if it were me, it would have been to capture a common object and show that it has an extraordinary array of audio characteristics that one might not think about on a day to day basis.

Peice by Pierre Schaffer

Name: Etude Aux Chemins de Fer

This piece is comprised using sounds from trains. I first heard this piece when my iPod was on shuffle, but I listened to it on purpose today ( about 4 times), and it is amazing. It seems to have a linear narrative aspect somewhere along the lines of “A Day in the Life of a Train.” Musically it is brilliant. It breaks you in with a loud whistle and then for the rest of the piece you are just mesmerized by the rhythmic and melodic qualities of a train.

 Schaffer uses train noise to create what sounds like an almost accidental rhythm, and by that I mean it feels like he recorded it and then stumbled upon these awesome natural melodies and percussive aspects. Pierre uses multiple cuts and recordings to give the sound a very organically-mechanic evolution. It is a massive paradox I know, but it really feels to me like the train is a living creature that just happens to be made out of metal. It feels to me like Schaffer treats it as an animal and we are just on safari and watching it move around. He breaks up the train rhythms with either jumbled cuts of the blowing of the trains whistle, it is really genius because it breaks you out of what you were just listening to so the following section sounds brand new.

There is most definitely a reason that Pierre Schaffer was the man that started the Music Conrete/Sonic Art movement. He is a genius, he is like Newton to Physics or Ron Jeremy to dated porn star jokes. This piece sounds completely effortless, it flows like a Bach or Brukner, but it was made using sounds from an F-ing Locomotive… possibly the most cumbersome brute of an object ever conceived, and that is why it is so powerful and moving … Pierre Schaffer made smooth ear butter using steel and steam

The first article that I chose to read was an excerpt  from Morton Feldman’s Sound, Noise, Varese, Boulez. I chose this article for 2 reasons: it was about one page long, and the name Boulez has been a pretty massive name in the little bit of the sonic arts that I have dipped my feet into. 

That being said, I thought this article was entertaining, bit of jargon here and there, and I am sure if I knew more about these two great artists (Varese and Boulez) it would have been much more profound. About three quarters of the way through I hit a sentence that sparked my brain pretty hard. Feldman writes: “… it is noise that we really understand. It is only noise which we secretly want.” I don’t know about you, but I had a super nova in my mind. I started to think of Music, and how music really is just an imitation of noise, and all people  want from music is to be reminded of real life noise. That might not have made sense how I just said it so I’ll try it like this:

Birds chirping= Flute= Full of life and energy

Everything starts with the real life noise (birds) then composers take the instruments at their disposal (flute)  and try and replicate the feeling that the real life instance give us(Full of life and energy)   People are wired to connect with noises, it was how we learned to hunt, communicate, and detect danger, so naturally one can tap into a person  psyche by utilizing instruments that sound like a particular noise. So when one masters the use of instruments or sounds to convey emotions they are really just finding ways to open our hard wired library of reactions to noise. I think that there is a reason everyone associates saxophones with sex or loud drums with danger, and that reason is that timbre of drums strike a nerve in our brain that reminds us of our inherited fear of loud crashing noises, like thunder or a large animal.

I am not sure if this theory makes absolute sense and I have not tried to apply it with every emotion that I encounter when listening to modern music, but it makes sense to me which is a start.