Radio and Transmission Art

Chuffed to see that we arrive in Toronto at roughly the same time that this starts:

A month-long celebration of radio and transmission art including performances, installations, radio broadcasts of commissioned works on CBC radio's Living Out Loud and the Radio Without Boundaries Conference. Featured artists: Götz Naleppa and Frank Kaspar (co-presented by the Goethe Institute-Toronto), Charles Stankievech, Gregory Whitehead, Andrea Dancer, Emmanuel Madan, Anna Friz, Rebecca Singh, Erik Laar, Shannon Cochrane and many more.

I've no doubt - radio is important to Canada and Canadians. The first thing that struck me was the shear number of stations. As well as the numerous, vaguely differentiated, commercial stations, there are community stations – First Nations, & Chinese, University Stations and CBC radio 1 & 2. I’ve not encountered any pirates yet. Canadians (well, Albertans at least) seem to spend allot of time in their cars and invariably listen to their radio when they are. Radio does seem to be the ambient medium of choice out here - a couple of times I’ve come back to someone’s empty house to find a tinny radio playing to itself (like in the Gaddis novel JR). Hopefully this festival and conference will help me understand the nature and history of this love affair better.

Edmonton Sounding

The first recording was taken at Rutherford House on the University of Alberta campus - in the parlor there sits a gramophone. The second was taken five minutes away under the Waterdale bridge. And finally, there's a recording of the periodic spectacle of West Ed. Mall's fire breathing dragon.

I.T on Film Music

The excellent Nina Power turns her attention to film soundtracks:

Increasingly film music seeks to lend humanity itself a veneer of the cinematic, an eco-friendly soundtrack to dampen the fears of the antagonisms and asymmetries of everyday existence. Coupled with the painful loudness of Dolby surround sound and the brutal atonality of sounds of cinematic violence - explosions, car crashes, gun shots - the modern cinematic ear is trained for nothing less than the sickening, yet omnipresent, combination of cruelty and fake humanism that characterises contemporary life.

Glad she mentioned Shutter Island as an exception to the general 'Revenge of the Visual'. At times while watching the film I felt that the sounds were more significant and divulging than the images. Generally the music choice displays similar paternalism and philanthropy to the Golden Age of British public broadcasting discussed in this essential Quietus review.

Sound Diary #1

The Canadian Rockies 23/03/10 – 26/03/10

We followed the Maligne Lake road up to Maligne lake – It’s between seasons now so no tourists are around. The lake is completely frozen. There is a profound stillness to the place. Those sounds that are audible – the ravens shouting at each other on the other side of the lake, the pine swaying and creaking behind me are amplified by the otherwise absolute silence. Coming from the city I’m unused to this degree of quiet. It’s unsettling and reminds me of those passages in Heidegger on anxiety where he talks about those revealing but unnerving moments where there is nothing to hold onto.

I never get used to this feeling -seeing so much and hearing so little. At Peyto Lake the silence is broken by a weird intrusion. There is a wind up audio guide to the glacial formation of the mountains and lake below. I gave it a go in English and then in Japanese, the Japanese version has a short piano piece playing in the background. When the pieces finish the immediate silence was even heavier.

The great sound of the Candian Rockies at this time of year is the Spring thaw. We visited a number of falls and rivers that were, depending on environmental factors, at various stages of deliquesence. The great roars of the Athabasca and Sunwapta falls are reduced to nothing in winter. Frozen, the falls make very little sound. In Spring the water begins to forge new channels beneath the ice surface and you can hear this filtered flow sound.

At Johnstone’s Canyon the river was largely frozen, a layor of ice covered a water flow of indeterminate size and strength. In places, where the surface ice has melted away, you can glimpse the clear waters flowing underneath. Wallace Stegner’s Mountain Water with its ‘ roar that shook both the earth and me’ is not there at this time of year. The river’s sound more like mountain streams when exposed. At one point the river’s water treated the ice’s underside like a drum, hitting it repeatedly, creating an arythmic bassy thud. As well as water flow you hear a lot of dripping. Not particularly interesting or pleasant for the most part unless the dripping was in a cavern when it took on wholly new reverberant qualities.

Summer must sound completely different, louder here.

We spent a lot of time on the road. We drove the 230km from Jasper along the Icefields Parkway to Banff. This must surely be one of the most scenic drives in the world. For the most part the radio was off. We had no cassettes so the only sound in the car was the sound of the car. For those drivers distracted by the scenery and veering over to the other side of the road there is an ingenious piece of sonic technology occasionally deployed called the rumble strip. The first and only time we strayed onto the rumble strip I was shocked. The whole car reverberates and the almost pleasant hypnotic whirr of the car changes suddenly to a much more vigorous shaking. The sound, which seems to occur after the initial shake and shock, is loud. The rumble strip works via what Steve Goodman terms sonic affect, it utilizes pre-perceptual vibrational force to bring about an immediate response – attention!

Before heading to Banff we spent two nights in Jasper. The dominant sound here is that of the Canadian national freight trains moving slowly through town. The trains are exceptionally long, some of the world’s longest I’m told. Carriages are as far as the eye can see in both directions and the chain takes over 20 minutes to pass by. The freight is mixed - there are single stacked inter-modal cars, what looks like oil tankers, and wooden wagons, each is rich in its own sonorous quality. One night I got to stand next to one as it moved by. The sounds emanate from the car’s wheels pressing down on the track, this resonates in the container’s materials and reverberates through its empty space. These creaking, groaning, screeching sounds are tempered by the pulse of the labouring locomotives.

On Wednesdays and Sundays the Whistle-stop pub hosts an open mic night. We had a seat in time to hear a guitarist tuning his four guitars; he’s an excellent slide guitarist. The agenda for the evening was simple: anyone could come along and perform, if they needed accompaniment there was a house band consisting of guitar, bass, drums and Moog organ on standby. It was the house band who started things off with a few rockabilly numbers. Other local artists performing on the night were diverse – there was Willie, a stalwart of the local folk and blues scene, who played harmonica and sung, two young rappers who sung about summers in the city, several anodyne acoustic guitarists, and a local country band with soft female vocals. An influx of migrant workers from the Philippines has meant that karaoke has become more prevalent in town. Here two Pilipino lads picked up bass and guitar to give us a rock cover.

Sonic Warfare: reading notes.

Currently reading and enjoying Steve Goodman's Sonic Warfare. More than anything I like the way it thinks sound in terms of vibration - terms that lie beyond the current, fairly lacklustre philosophy of sound. My intention is to engage more deeply with the book's metaphysics, particularly the idea of a virtual unsound, but for now here are some of my expanding reading notes.

Chp. 8 Sonic Affect vs Sonic Effect

What's the difference between the sonic effect and sonic affect?

First - what is a sonic effect?

It is the product of a number of researchers working out of the Centre for research on sonic space & urban environment at the University of Grenoble. Their work is distilled into the book Sonic Experience edited by Jean Francois Augoyard and Henry Torgue. There are various effects – drone, ubiquity, filter and so on. But they all share the same general structure, diagrammatically the sonic effect is:

The effect is the totality of what is shown above. It is the sounding object; the environmental influences shaping and forming the sound spatially - which is the subject of audio-architecture; the positioning and speed of movement of the listening subject; and finally the cultural and aesthetic priorities that determine how a sound is interpreted. Language offers a good example of this kind of determination. Everyone who can hear can hear a word, but how you determine the meaning of that word is dependent upon your cultural upbringing. It is this last part that I have had most difficulty with - how do you rigorously think an audio-culture? Isn’t that too broad a thing to be of any use?

Anyway, what’s the difference?

Affects are immediate responses to vibrational stimuli, they precede the delineation of subject and object, phenomenological notions that the effect is grounded on.

They are the products of two differing things: sounds have effects and vibrations have affects. Vibrations may be heard, but may also be beyond the threshold of perception. And so an affect can occur without any sound. Is the term experience suitable for thinking about affect? Are affects subjectless experiences?

In Harman’s terms – affect is an ontological concept as it refers to the make-up of every being (is Goodman going to develop this idea that everything is composed of vibrations?) And effect is metaphysical in that it discusses only a particular type of being – sounds (the sonic effect is an alternative theory to the objet sonore and the soundscape). This raises the question of the possibility of sonic realism for me in an admittedly rather vague and undetermined way – how can you think sound independently of anyone hearing it?

Finally - they have different relations to causality. The effect has a situational or contextual or even occasional cause (must re-read Harman on cause). The cause of the effect is not simply the sounding object, but additionally the space it sounds in and through, the subjects positioning and the culture of the individual listener. All these factors shape and to a degree cause the effect. I’m not sure what the cause of the affect is. The affect seems to function in part by not having a cause – where’s this feeling coming from? Affects appear to dissociate from the cause. What is this process of dissociation? How is the affected implicated?

So what is Goodman’s problem with effects?

Simply that human audition is given primacy. He calls CRESSON on their correlationism. And not it seems from some ontological argument but from its inadequacy in accounting for ‘post-cybernetic warfare’, which I’m not sure I get yet. He’s right though - integral to the theory of sonic effects is the correlation between sounds and listeners. Sonic effect cannot be a realist concept. (Unless, can we think it in terms of a series of Latourian translations?) He does however like the encompassing evental structure of the effect. The way the body is implicated in the production of sound effects as much as the medium, environment, sounding object and so on. This is for him (and me) a welcome development of the outdated idea of an isolated listening subject.

Field Noise

My field recording of last year's Bridgwater carnival squib.

Roberto Trotta on the Big Bang sound fossil

The following extract was taken from an interview with theoretical cosmologist Roberto Trotta published in Collpase II :

C: Another line of evidence is indicated by your work on accoustic oscillations of the early universe which are 'frozen' into the fabric of matter - a sort of primordial 'sound fossil'.

RT: Yes these acoustic oscillations are, in a way, a natural fossil. The relevance of the sound waves of the early universe in general for cosmological parameters is that it's relatively simple to calculate, because the universe was fairly young, and these density fluctuations which eventually grew to galaxies were still very small - actually one part in a hundred thousand. So they were so small that we can calculate them with very high accuracy, and we can follow their evolution up to the point where the CMBR was released , very accurately. And so from this we can confidently infer several properties of the time, for instance how much dark matter there was, how much visible matter there was, what were the characteristics of the seeds, how the seeds were sprinkled with scale, whether there were more seeds on small scales, on large scales, or whether they were uniformly sprinkled on all scales and so on. These sorts of things can be inferred from sound waves in the CMBR, because we know the physics very well. And so it's a nice spot between the very high energy physics of the very beginning, which we don't fully understand, and the messy, non-linear physics of gravitational collapse and evolutionary structure that we do understand, but which gets difficult to follow because it gets very complicated, as you can see from the filamentary structures you obtain through the computer simulations we discussed.

C: How do you go about reading these 'recordings' of the Big Bang?

RT: We saw that the CMBR is very homogeneous because of its cosmological origin. But now we have very sensitive detectors, telescopes and satellites that measure the background radiation to a very high degree of accuracy. And if you look carefully enough, you will see that this CMBR is not perfectly homogeneous; it has temperature differences in it. So if you look with your telescope in this direction, we see a slightly colder spot, if we look in that direction we see a slightly hotter spot. We can build a map of the sky, showing the temperature distribution of the background radiation. In order to measure the differences between the hot and cold spots with your telescope you need a sensitivity that's equivalent to the sensitivity you'd need with an optical telescope to see a mouse walking on the moon from the earth. So it's very tough. The guys who first did it in 1992 got the Nobel prize in 2006. These fluctuations you see in this map are the sound waves from the early universe, that's exactly what they are. When you throw a pebble in a pond you've got waves that go out in all directions; if you throw many pebbles in a pond you get a nice superposition of waves. In our case the pebbles were quantum fluctuations in the early universe, and they got frozen in at the moment the image was produced, and this is what we see - we really image them with our telescopes.

C: Calling them 'sound waves' is not just a figurative way of speaking, then?

RT: No, it's a technical definition: they're compression waves. The universe at this point was a plasma, that's a hot gas of electrons and protons, seperated by the temperature because the temperature was so high. So those were really accoustic waves, just like the waves in the air now as I speak, only they were travelling in the primordial plasma. And we can see them, as we can see in this map: it's real, it's been predicted and we find this fantastic agreement with our models...

Unabashed sound

I went down to the recent collective listening event at the ICA. The idea, that a group gather (historically in a gallery but it doesn’t have to be one), sit and listen carefully to an extended audio piece at reasonably high volume and afterwards discuss the work and their responses to it, is one that has caught my imagination so I wanted to write something about it here. The event’s organiser: theorist and music critic Mark Fisher, outlines a genealogy of his thinking on collective listening here.

The piece or ‘audio essay’ as it was termed on the night was The Latecomers (1969) by Canadian pianist and radio artist Glenn Gould which is the second part of his Solitude Trilogy and focuses upon life in Newfoundland . The work begins with the overwhelming noise of crashing waves and the North Atlantic Ocean, in various degrees of agitation, is present for the duration. At the forefront are fragments of speech: at least 10 Newfoundlanders, mostly male but of differing age, discuss their lives and the place they live them. There are amusing anecdotes, fond memories, childhood songs, lucid descriptions, personal histories, and lots of ideas. Ideas on politics, economics, change, community, modernisation, urbanisation, leaving and isolation. Although these ideas are often conflicted there didn’t appear on first listening to be any dialectical ordering of the fragments. What slowly emerges is a sense of the singularity of Newfoundland as an environment, and a distant intimacy with those who live there. And despite its focus on Newfoundland at a very specific historic juncture – the period in the 1950s and 60s when the provincial government, keen to reduce the cost of providing dispersed public services, encouraged outport communities to urbanize - the piece has universal signification in its treatment of being-in-the-world. The way we relate to place; what it means to love the place you live and how we relate to the past when building a future.

The Latecomers is a challenging listen: the immutable ocean often masks the spoken content and at times, when the voices are contrapuntally posed, a practice pioneered by Gould, it’s nigh-on impossible to make out what’s being said. In addition, as Fisher says in the piece linked to above, simply “being asked to concentrate on something for such a sustained length of time poses a challenge.”

Listening together helps overcome this challenge in a number of ways. First, and simply, the fact that someone else has chosen this work, considers it worthy of close listening, and has been troubled to organise, promote and deliver an event to present it, coupled with the presence of numerous others, leads to nervous anticipation, a build up towards something assumed special. Even before the playback, you’re ready to listen. Second, the social rules associated with public consumption help create conditions commodious to concentrated listening. For example, there were no rude disruptions from mobile phones, how many people turn their phones off when listening at home? Third, listening with others aids concentration: although Gould’s work was the dominant stimulus in the room, there were extraneous sounds, audible responses to the piece: chuckles, deep inhalations and so on. When not affected in the same way I found myself, determined not to miss out again, return to the work with increased concentration. In this way listening with others increased my individual receptivity.

Finally, listening together means you can talk about it afterwards. Feelings and ideas insinuated can be collaboratively teased out, elaborated and examined. As Lena points out in her review , the day’s discussion floundered a bit on the meaning and emotional import of Gould’s work. Lena’s suspicion that people were inattentively hearing as opposed to actively listening is well founded - listening is an acquired skill and our culture ill-equips us for it. Future collective listening events will give attendees a chance to develop and hone listening skills on challenging material, with practice we’ll get better at listening and better at talking about the wealth that it brings.

Listening to listening

In her book Deep Listening Pauline Oliveros provides a simple and useful distinction with which to begin thinking about listening:



"To hear is the physical means that enables perception. To listen is to give attention to what is perceived both acoustically and psychologically."



Here, rather than being synonymous terms, hearing and listening differ markedly. The first describes an automatic response to external stimuli: the conversion of physical sound waves into the neural signals that result in raw sensation. As such it's continuous, unconscious and occurrs whether awake, drowsy or in deep slumber. The second involves actively directing conscious attention towards sound, its acoustic properties, and the meanings, ideas and emotions embedded there-in.



This distinction finds a metaphysics in Bergson's subtractive model of perception, which is expertly elucidated by Meillassoux during the course of his essay on Deleuze for Collapse III. Here matter is thought as a vast collection of images whose interaction is governed by the constant laws of nature. Accordingly perception is the relation between an image or set of images and the unusual image that is the human body. The relation is one of impoverishment, as Meillassoux puts it:


"The living is not primarily the emergence of the power of interested choice, but the emergence of the power of a massive disinterest in the real to the profit of certain rare segments of the latter, which constitutes the whole of perception."



Perception reduces the infinite complexity of the material world to a few 'rare segments' via two radically discriminatory selections, the first made by the body, the second by the mind. In audition, the body effectively 'chooses' to hear certain sounds - those of a particular amplitude and frequency, and not others - those that fall outside the perceptible ranges. The 'physical means' that comprise hearing for Oliveros omit more sounds than they permit.


But what happens to those sounds we do hear? Heard sound provides the material for a second subtractive selection. This choice is made by consciously attending to a specific sound or group of sounds, again at the cost of others. The 'Cocktail Party Effect' theorised by researchers organised around CRESSON is an everyday example of these choices. A soiree attendee's attention is drawn to a voluble exchange occurring on the room's other side; they actively choose this conversation as the object of listening and the general clamour remains just heard. The example speaks of the localising power of concentrated listening, the observable fact that it can ignore so much sound.


The 'Profit' accrued by the diminutive bit of reality listened to is, for Bergson, generated by the labour of memory. It's memory that guides our decision on what to listen to. Let's say for example that the conversation our lonely socialite tunes-in to involves his ex-girlfriend. She's openly expounding her theory of 'where it all went wrong'. Here it is the listener's personal history that has drawn him to these sounds in the first place and furthermore it is his memory that enables him to understand the language of what is being said. So where the first choice, that of hearing, is biologically determined and as equally distributed as the human body, the second, that of listening, is socio-culturally determined and as diverse as world cultures are. Cross-cultural Listening practices differ in two ways: firstly, by the listened to sounds: different peoples consider different sounds significant; and secondly by the meanings attributed to those sounds.