Archives for March 2021

There won’t be any deaths in our performances this week. 

Last week’s performance was about the assassination. I was the guy using the inductor and accompanying Ken’s melody. The whole performance started with the inductor and ended with the inductor. Generally speaking, I think we managed, to some extent, to convey our concept because the strong strike of the knives Ken was playing had given the audience a hint about what was going on, but there are still some places we can do better about our delivery. 

To start with, I think we did well at the beginning and the ending. The beginning was introduced by the sound of breath simulated by the inductor and the ending was brought by a continuous scream, also by the inductor. However, the successful parts are based on the fact that Ken’s loud melody had stopped, allowing the audience to hear the faint sound from the inductor. The unbalance between the sound from the inductor and the sound from the piezo disc is the biggest problem in the performance. 

The NIME performance should be in a state of harmony, without too much exaggeration on one single performer. Even if there is a difference between the accompanying part and the strong melody part, that should only be a difference of volumes, not the difference of existence. We will adopt this part in our next performance. 

After these weeks’ reading and listening materials, the pattern is already obvious. A great many musical artists have declared that there is a contradiction between vision and sound. 

  

Imagination

    When Oliveros described the term “imagination,” she pointed that this word is so visual that there is even a dissonance when it occurs. She is a person who pushed forward the development of the industry of sound art and proposed “Deep Listening” to give people a better way to feel the sonosphere and their bodies, which are the receivers of the sonosphere. Maybe, this can provide a way for people to recognize the sound world once again, feeling the vibrations and echoes within the sonosphere. She was a pioneer, one of the extraordinary, but I was wondering whether her initiative was a little bit problematic. The motivation of starting a campaign like “Deep Listening” is obvious, that she wants to awake the consciousness of sound in us, which had been overlooked for a great long time. However, one thing here that makes a contradiction is what Deep Listening will eventually bring us—the visual experience. 

    Let me explain this idea. First of all, it is our brains that process sound, not our ears. Therefore, any kind of music piece will eventually formulate imagination inside our heads. As mentioned before, “imagination” is a visual term. The result is that we see, virtually, what we hear, instead of hearing what we hear. The fact that people are creatures with thoughts matters. It is true that the sound world, compared to the visual one, has been neglected for a long time, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that the way to the renaissance of sound should be built upon the gravestone of the visual world. The vision and the sound coexist, very well. Honestly speaking, when I was doing the deep listening meditation using Oliveros’ masterpiece, I closed my eyes and saw what I was hearing. I saw the flow of time, across dimensions, travel along with the cosmos. Well, after all, these aren’t told in the sound directly. 

     A brief conclusion here. What I want to show is that there is not a contradiction between the vision and the sound. We see why we hear and we can even sometimes hear what we see. The really important thing matters here is that, whether we have gained the ability to learn to see what we hear or to hear what we see. Maybe this is the deeper meaning of deep listening.