Overview
New media and technology can extend data into our material environment through sensors and interfaces, as well as with content and draw upon the immediacy of bodily movement, gestural expression and physiology. The artist explores this through improvisations with a custom built interface exploring the boundaries of two "communities" of synthesized audio in a sonic “environment”. The interface, called S.M.I.L.E. or spherical media instrument for live environments, uses various sensors, tracks movement and produces light and sound in real-time. The outcome of the project is the convergence of audio-visual content with physical movement, as well as how an “intelligent” software environment can respond to the player’s activity in the production of a soundscape. The content and apparatus is an expressive extension and prosthesis of the performer’s hands, arms and body, encouraging movement through technology, sound and light. S.M.I.L.E. breaks new ground by the use of light (LEDs) to augment the performer’s gesture in improvising with audio-visual material.
What is an ecotone?
What is green sound or green noise? What is the ecology of listening, of sonic experience in augmented or virtual improvised environments? How can sound bring awareness to social being and our relationship to other species and environments?
Meaning is construed with the perception of sound as information (communication) is modulated with sound, via cues to location, proximity and environment or with the multiple narratives or experiences of each individual listener. A good metaphor for thinking through the complex sonic ecology in a performance is an ecotone. An ecotone is a transition between two adjoining ecological communities, such as the transitional area between a forest and a prairie. This is the “ecological” transitional space or environment of sound, improviser and listener. How can this feed back into our appreciation of more abstract, experimental performance practices? One means is via open listening. Open listening comes with the experience of our attachments: our expectations, reactions, emotions, visualizations, etc. as we are listening. With open listening we focus on the experience of sound itself. As Pierre Schafer states in his discussion of listening related to acoustics and acousmatics, there is a “deliberate placing-in-condition of the subject. It is toward it, then, that the question turns around: ‘what am I hearing? What exactly are you hearing?’- in the sense that one asks the subject to describe not the external references of the sound it perceives, but the perception itself. Becoming aware that sound is always simply fluctuations of air pressure moving the eardrum and our experience of aspects of frequency, intensity and timbre in space and time can help us begin to free ourselves to the vastness of sonic production.
This work creates an improvisational system to explore the boundaries between sound as object, information and environment, as well as performer and guest. The improvisations use sound to unfold for the listener, not only as predefined narrative or socio-cultural reaction, but also as the direct perception of the momentary interchange in the boundaries of the production in ecotones of sound, improviser and listener. The elaborate milieu of the sonic ecotone creates the potential for the listener to “move about” the complex listening environment during the perceptive act.
Sonic Impetus and Inspiration
The sonic environments I have create are a product of an interest about what sound performs, represents, as well as the sensation and perception of sound. The work often contains repeating, complex sonic structures. I view them as process-actions, where sound unpacks not as a predefined narrative, but as the direct perception of the momentary interchange in the equation of sound, performer and listener. This can be quite unlike the traditional method of sonic production, where the composer denotes by plotting out narrative structure with rising and falling intensity. I take a more open view of sonic production by conceptualizing the basic design aspects of sound with the acronym of twins: FITTS and OATEE. FITTS refers to basic elements of sound, such as Frequency, Intensity, Timbre, Time and Space. These can be paired with OATEE or Objects, Actions, Transitions, Environments and Emotions.
With improvisation the framework of form is much more pliable. The interaction of the performer and the listener’s intellect to the complex, abstract and repetitive timbres of these sounds contain an inherent indeterminacy. One that hopefully encourages open listening or sonic awareness, whereby the listener is attentive to the sensation and perception of sound and sonic features with a gentle awareness of her or his thoughts, reactions and/or prejudice. R. Murray Schafer conceptualized environmental sound as being comprised of “keynotes” as background sound (environment, space, place, location, room tone, etc.), “sound signals” as sounds attached to objects or actions and the features of the listener’s experience in the environment as “soundmarks,” from the idea of a landmark. Breaking down sonic production in improvisation into these three categories can help both in terms of composition, improvisational practice, as well as how the audience can conceptualize their experience.
Do we process environmental sound differently than we do sound attached to communication or actual objects and how do we use these to make sense of our experience? Some of this work is an attempt to create a portrait of sonic environments and the boundaries between sound as object, information and environment. As more and more languages, environments and socio-cultural sonic practices become extinct and as corporate produced culture infiltrates and replaces this indigenous, spontaneous, non-dollar centered culture, we may be left with recordings of these sounds as artifacts. Asking questions can encourage us to think about preservation. What is the ecology of listening, of sonic experience? What is our experience of these sound “shells” or artifacts that exist between environments, which are lost in mainstream/corporate produced culture? How will we derive meaning from this loss?
Technical Details
The piece uses the open source multimedia programming environment Pure Data called ECOTONE using sound synthesis techniques. This is controllled with the S.M.I.L.E. interface. The work requires AC and stereo monitors. Thanks to Tom Erbe for his creative PD objects!
Performances
Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, Atlanta; MOVE>SOUND Festival in San Francisco; AUDO Festival in Lafayette, Indiana
