NIME

The Infinitesimal, it is. 

Honestly speaking, I don’t think that I have fully understood Éliane Radigue, both her work and her thoughts, but I felt something, like a feeling of connection. 

As a pioneer artist, she has been working hard to illustrate the power of the Infinitesimal, the power from the small and tiny things that may seem to be powerless. I think this has led her to the path of exploration for minimalism, where she can create masterpieces from the Infinitesimal. When I first listened to the music file, I was immediately attracted. (Actually, it is now my favorite song when doing the assignment.) It directly delivers the strong and pure energy of simple frequency. It conveys the art of the Infinitesimal and reminded me of one line from the article, “the freedom to be immersed in the ambivalence of continuous modulation with the uncertainty of being and/or not being in this or that mode or tonality.” Truly, I did immerse myself in that. 

There were no variations of the frequency, and yet the variations happen everywhere. When I focused on attention solely on the part that I am listening to right now, I can only describe it as a flow of frequency, but when perceiving the music piece generally from parts to parts, something interesting happens. The music becomes alive, and this is not necessarily because that the variation happens slowly and gradually. It is because the general transformation is carefully interwoven into every note. I am, therefore, listening to something alive. 

 

Firstly I would like to apologize for my absence last week. I didn’t feel well on Wednesday and Thursday and therefore decided to carry out the performance in the form of recording. 

Here is the file. 

The music begins with a high frequency open and then ends with it too. There are basically four parts to this music. A piece of white noise used for background music. A high-frequency melody realized by LDR and two kins of beats with different paces realized by using the human body as the resistor. When I was exploring the possibility for the elements for this performance, I wanted to incorporate something that is better delivered with recording. I have, therefore, included different levels of music into this piece. The higher frequency was created by LDR, and I shaped my hands like a bowl and moved around to create a kind of sound like echoes. The powerful beats, on the other hand, are found by attaching the wire to my fingers. 

The general music piece flows gradually faster, with the beats moving quicker and quicker. I wish to create a state of nervousness by doing so. I wanted to hold the audience’s heartbeats and after the music reaches the climax part, suddenly release them. I was relatively satisfied with what was delivered. It can be considered as OK, but there is more to elaborate on. 

The first thing left for me to improve is the musical instrument, or in other words, the source of the sound. I should make my own circuit and make everything more integrated and a little more complex. Currently, the sound is still a bit simple, still having a large possibility to polish. 

I am now working on this week’s performances and will keep all of these in mind to make a better delivery. 

    The article Towards (a Definition of) Experimental Music, is mainly based on John Cage’s descriptions and breaks down the components of experimental music into three different parts: Composing, Performing and Listening. I don’t want to summarize the article and discuss what that article tells in what parts, but I do have something to say about some key elements that this article puts forward. The description of the time involved in the part of composing really got my attention. It conveys that our composition of a music piece shouldn’t be linear. (I think our perceptions shouldn’t also be linear.) Rather, “Beginning and ends are not points on a line but limits of a piece’s material” (Christian Wolff). This actually indicates how we should value music composition. For experimental music, music composition is actually not a process like creation. It is a process of selection freely based on time. The music starts not because it starts from that point. Instead, it starts because that is the part you hear this music. Beyond the starting and ending point, the music is infinite. The job for composers, on the other hand, is to find that part. They are selectors. 

    Apart form this point, I really appreciate the description at the end of the listening part. It uses the way we appreciate a painting to illustrate the way we appreciate a music piece. Our attention could start at any part, and end at any point, just like what we do when we focus our eyes on the canvas. This is, at least, especially true applying to Ground. When the audience is appreciating the music, there is not necessarily a prearranged starting point left for them to place their attention. They can jump in anywhere, any sec. There is, also, no strong emphasis in the general music piece, which means that there won’t be too much distractions for their appreciations. The relationship between the performer and the audience is equal. Nothing is done for the audience and everything is prepared to them. Through the creation-appreciation harmony, a piece of experimental music was born. 

Vibrations

Instead of the exploration of the purity and peculiarity of the sound, this week’s material’s focus is on the vibration, or to be more precise, the visualization of the vibration. 

I really enjoy reading the Hearing Essay by Glennie. In the last week’s essay, I put forward the idea that sound and vision coexist harmoniously, but I really appreciate Glennie’s description that hearing is about touching. Hearing is about feeling the vibration of the air and this gives a new trait to sound. Sound, therefore, has become something produced and transported in the form of vibration, received by the ear, processed by the brain to leave a picture in your head, and eventually gives you direct feelings, feelings about hearing. Being a profoundly deaf musician, Glennie is offered the ability to directly learn more about this process. Maybe the concept of interpreting the way how deaf people hear would be an intriguing topic for NIME.

The Black Hole Horizon by Kubli, on the other hand, is a great way to show this concept. I like the method used to illustrate vibrations caused by sound waves by bubbles, which allows the audience to directly feel and see what they are listening to right now. We are able to get the shape of the sound by directly perceive the shapes of the bubbles. This led me to think more of the visualization of the sound waves. Using bubbles shall be a brilliant idea, and I am wondering whether using powder can yield similar outcomes. Perhaps piling powders in advance onto the speaker and then perform the music will also get some dramatic effects, which is something I wanna try this week. 

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.