a commission from Open Space - Victoria, BC
Sound, music and speech all carry, embedded in them, profoundly deep cultural encodings. These encodings express the environmental, material, social, and spiritual aspirations of a people and are sites for exchange and discussion among their practitioners.
In the spirit of Gregory Bateson’s characterization of information as “the difference that makes a difference” these sonic processes navigate the cultural information that arises through an articulation of the sonic differences among cultures: the spaces between cultures, the navigation among cultures, the tensions between notions of tradition, innovation and the post-traditional. Sound has a role to play in actually performing these differences and allowing the listeners themselves to “play” with these nuances and engage in the sounding of an emergent cultural information.
"A poem is a machine for inducing the poetic state of mind." (Valery)
The work presented here might be considered a playful response to Paul Valery’s characterization of poetry’s machinic nature by way of an inversion of the statement thus: “A machine is a poem for inducing the poetic state of mind.” Part perpetuum mobile… at once cultural and machinic… ideal and crippled… a compromise between imagination and nature.
A set of twelve Pythagorean voices crippled with beat frequencies after the fashion of the Balinese method of tuning instrumental voices in pairs to create waves (ombak), results in the shimmering background texture.
Procedures
Improvisatory processes
Novelty
Repetition
Tendency masks
Parameter modulation over time
Transposition
Granulation/Glitch
Orchestration
Materials
Code – using JSyn classes for audio synthesis in Java enabling the control of sonic processes from a web-browser.
Beating pure tones
Tuned noise
Samples from previous compositions, and sounds of personal significance: Balinese gamelan music, a fragment of a Bach violin sonata, my son, Ashlan, singing a cheerful song of death and rebirth ("And then... it is the end of the world... but we come back again another time!"), as well as reciting a fragment from a dream of physicist Wolfgang Pauli (“A voice says… ‘But you are still a child!’”), a fragment of Drum & Bass percussion,
Fragments from a variety of other compositions of mine: Infinite, These Islands, Fathom (featuring the voices of Patti Clemens and Anis W. A. Sutrisno), string orchestra textures from our (Aleksandra Dulic and myself) Metro performing cinema work.
The soundscapes of imperialism? Footsteps of multicultured visitors mounting the marble steps to view the statue of Nike of Samothrace, recorded in the Louvre of Paris.
Samples of early communications technology: The horn of the BC Royal Hudson steam engine and the squealing brakes of a train in the Paris Metro, creature calls in the Brazilian rain forest.
References
Paul Klee: Twittering Machine
Alexander Calder: mobile
John Cage: Composition as Process
Umberto Eco: The Open Work
Brian Eno: Generating and Organizing Variety in the Arts; Music for Airports
Martin Bartlett: Software for a Microcomputer-Controlled Synthesizer for Live Performance; Sir John Franklin’s Entry Into Paradise
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari: Plateau 11. 1837: Of the Refrain (A Thousand Plateaus)
Pauline Oliveros: The Roots of the Moment
Kenneth Newby
Computational Poetics—Media Performance—Interaction Design
Emily Carr Institute of Art, Design & Media
knewby@eciad.ca