Carrie Swinson
The
first sense humans are introduced to in their life is sound and from that
moment on they are constantly surrounded by it. Even during moments referred to as silence, there are the gentle hums
of our own bodies as they are constantly involved in their work to keep us
alive. How we perceive the sounds we
are subjected to, however, varies in many ways. We use one set of ears to listen to a piece of music, another to
listen to speech, and yet another still that picks up the sounds we are barely
conscious of surrounding us. In the
realm of audio art, artists strive to take this variety of sound available to
us and to present it in a way so that it is transformed from being mere sound
into what we know as art. There is not
a simple definition for what audio art consists of. In its broadest terms, audio art is any creative work that
involves sound. This includes musical
performances, nature recordings, computer-generated works, or even physical
structures designed with an aural element in its presentation. For the purposes of this study, I have
limited myself to three types of audio art- music, speech, and audio art that
attempts to bridge the gap between what we consider noise and audio forms we
understand as having organized structures (speech and music.)
With the understanding that music is by far the most
dominant audio art, it is interesting to note how its prevalence can effect the
perceptions of other sound. If we break
music down to some of its barest components, we find frequencies (a.k.a.
pitch), rhythm, dynamics, and timbre.
What is interesting, and not often given much attention, is that almost
all the sounds we encounter share these qualities with music. When walking to class, one hears to the
shuffle of footsteps, the roar of the engines of passing cars, and perhaps even
the ringing bell of the bell tower.
Considering that most people in the modern western world have had their
ears saturated with music, it is not unreasonable to suggest that in some way
our minds are organizing and recognizing this ‘noise’ as a musical piece. To take this even a step further, it seems
fair to say that music itself is created based on the noises that we hear in
everyday life. In many ways, music is
simply a consolidation of the most exciting things we hear in each day,
recreated in two to ten minutes.
It is
important to ask ourselves what makes us enjoy hearing something. One of the most obvious pleasures of sound
is that it gives us a physical reaction.
It sends chills down our spines, takes our breath away, makes us bob our
heads and tap our feet, and even makes our hearts beat faster or skip a beat
altogether. Music causes us to react
like this. It is not the only aural
form that has this ability. By studying
music we can learn the secrets to presenting sound that causes the same
reactions.
The past
several hundred years in the development of music has not been traveling down
the wrong road, but has indeed been traveling down a narrow one. Finding the origins of the creation of
music, and perhaps all audio art is an
important step in understanding how to create audio art that is just as
beautiful and breathtaking as a Beethoven symphony, but in ways they we were
not even aware were possible. We do not
want to limit our audio creations within the confines of music, but at the same
time, it would be tragic to lose all the understanding of would we can gain
from studying the structure of music.
If we do not recognize the virtues of music and also its limitations,
audio artists are doomed to continue down narrow roads of audio exploration.
When studying
audio art, we can see how music and speech influence the creation and
perception of audio art. Musician Paul
Lansky is an example of one artist who has experimented heavily with the
musicality of speech. Lansky, a
professor of music at Princeton University, thinks of his work as pieces of
music. He confesses that he does not
try to get outside of music in his works with speech, but rather is attempting
to impose music on the sounds of the world so that familiar musical conceptions
might enhance our perception of these sounds.
In his pieces Idle Chatter, just_more_idle_chatter, and Notjustmoreidlechatter,
Lansky blurs the lines between music and speech. One of the most important principles these pieces illustrate is
that perception largely affects what will be heard by the listener. Because the Idle Chatter pieces are
not entirely speech, but not entirely music either, the listener finds
themselves constantly changing their perception- first attempting to understand
the words that are being spoken and other times trying to pick out the melodies
and harmonies created in the piece.
Each time the focus is changed, the entire sound of the piece is also
changed. It is very likely that one
could listen to the piece repeatedly never hearing the same thing twice.
Other ways
Lansky attempts to impose music onto speech is by aurally augmenting recitation
of poetry. In these pieces, the speaker
can be heard and understood very clearly.
In his piece, Word Color, the passage from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself
is completely recognizable. Lansky adds
a variety of sounds surrounding the speech in ways that seem to augment it
aurally and symbolically. While these
pieces are interesting, they do not seem to be as successful in forcing the
listener to reconsider their perceptions of sound. Although his other works can be thought of as enhancing our
perception of speech through the use of music, the Idle Chatter pieces
are the most successful at doing so. In
these pieces, the speech becomes the music.
Or does the music become speech?
It is hard to tell at times and it is this confusion Lansky creates that
makes the piece so successful in helping us to better understand our
perceptions of sound.
An interesting
question that is raised while listening to a piece such as Idle Chatter
is the notion of listener expectations and how important it is that they be
fulfilled in audio art. In both mediums
Lansky is using, speech and music, there are strong listener expectations. In speech, the listener expects to hear
words. In music, the listener expects
to hear phrases and cadences. Having
these expectations fulfilled is what provides satisfaction to the listener. In Idle Chatter none of the listener
expectations are completely filled, but it does not seem to matter. Instead of getting bored because we cannot
immediately understand what we hear, we have a tendency to immediately begin
trying to reorganize the way we listen in order to make sense of the new aural
candy we have been given. This implies
that humans are not limited in their capabilities of understanding sound only
within the confines of current forms of aural organization. I will return to this idea of organization
of sound in more depth at a later time.
Blurring the
boundaries of music is not limited to speech.
There have been many other audio artists that have done so using
everyday sounds and then manipulated them in such a way that we hear the
‘music’ in them. Wayne Jackson, the
creator of the compact disc Later Days, is just one artist we can look to for
an example of this. It should be noted
that Jackson has an extensive background in musical training and that in
creating this piece he was doing so as musical composer. No doubt he was consciously aware of the
ways in which he created this piece so that it resembled a piece of music. It may seem a bit unnecessary to examine the
musicality of a piece that was created with the intention of the composer to be
music, but because of the nontraditional medium being used the piece lends
itself well to helping us understand what it is that makes us perceive
something as music instead of just a bunch of noise.
In his piece
“Kitchen Ghoulash,” he uses sounds from the kitchen, such as the rattling of
pots and pans, and creates a piece that sounds very musical. The beginning of this piece is almost
entirely percussive and sounds akin to John Cage’s work for “The City Wears a
Slouched Hat.” True, there are no
harmonic rhythms that we can trace, but the piece presents itself as a piece of
music. The driving forces that make
this piece sound like music are its varying rhythm, variety of timbres, and
even the varying pitches even though they do not form what we typically refer
to as a melody. The rhythm seems to be
the most obvious factor that creates a sense of music. The percussive sounds repeat some of the
same rhythms and allow themselves to be identified as motives in the
piece. There are moments when the tempo
tends to speed up and raise our anxiety level in the same way music does. Another parallel that can be drawn between
this piece and music is the variety of timbres that are used. The piece begins almost entirely percussive,
but this gives way to a baby’s laughter.
The baby’s laughter then becomes the solo and a variety of contours are
created with this sound. One can almost
think of the percussion giving way to the laughter in the same way the harsher
brass section gives way to strings in some orchestral pieces.
The most
important element that seems to hold this piece together as a musical piece
seems to be that there is a clear organization of themes. As previously noted, there are rhythms that
are repeated as motives and these rhythms are even repeated in different
instrument, e.g. first appearing in the percussive elements and then in the
baby’s laughter. All the sounds are
presented in a way that makes it easy for our minds to organize and categorize
the information being given to us.
Understanding audio art as an organization of sound is very helpful to
understanding why so often audio art tends to mimic music. Considering the prevalence of music in our
society, it should come as no surprise to us that any time we attempt to organize
sound, we do so in a way familiar to us.
For most people this is speech and music. Looking at audio art that lies outside what we think of as the
realm of music, it is almost always based on a foundation of either speech or
music.
As part of my semester project, I not only looked at the
audio works of others, but also attempted to create one of my own in order to
better understand how audio art is created outside of the realm of music. Through my successes and failures in
creating this piece I was better able to understand what elements of an audio
piece make it interesting and deserving of an attentive audience. I found myself agreeing with Marcel
Duchamp’s ideas that it is the artist’s responsibility to challenge the
audience. What I found to be the most
important factor in creating an audio piece was that it needs to stimulate the
minds of your audience. Just in the way
that the jarring, repetitive alarm clock becomes quickly annoying, so do audio
works that have little or no variation.
The variation within a piece is what makes it unique. Listening for the movement of sound, subtle
or drastic, is a large part of what captures our attention and makes audio art
so interesting to listen to. At the
same time we are listening, we are also building relationships between how the
different sounds are working and learning to understand how the piece
behaves. Our minds are constantly
waiting to see what will happen next. Listening
to sound in this way is not restricted to music. Critical listening is of vital import when listening to audio
art. It is only after one realizes this
that they can truly appreciate audio art at its full worth.
Music did not
necessarily develop the way it did by chance.
It is possible that there are biological, physiological, and cultural
reasons as to why the language of music is the way it is. I cultures with oral traditions speech is
often arranged with regular rhythm and rhyming patterns that make remembering
the words easier. Music first began
with voices as the primary instrument, and even today we can see the influence
that the capabilities of our vocal tracts have had on the development of
music. Even more complicated to
comprehend is the specific ways our body reacts physiologically to sound. Taking these things into consideration it
becomes apparent that we do not simply like music because we are conditioned to
it, although that is a large part of it, but there is something inherent in the
structure of music that we find enjoyable.
This does not mean that music is the only or best means of representing
sound artistically, but it does mean that if we understand what those inherent
qualities of music that make it enjoyable are, we can repeat them in new ways
and come up with whole new languages to explain sound. If this is true, what that means is that our
perception of sound can be increased exponentially if we create a language that
is not limited to defining only music, but all sounds.
It is true
that one can listen to a piece of music without fully understanding the
language by which it functions.
Creating a piece of music without understanding the language, however,
is much more difficult. What this
implies is that in order to create successful audio works requires
understanding a completely different language of sound. This type of language already exists on a
small scale. We have associations that
we naturally create between different sounds.
We hear a bird chirping and automatically are able to identify what we
hear. In the same way, we also make associations
between more general sounds. High
pitched noise tend to be thought of as belonging to small objects, whereas
lower pitched noises are coupled with larger more powerful objects. The language of music had similar primitive
beginnings with its ability to consciously define sound. It has taken several hundred years to
develop to the level of complexity at which it is able define music today. It seems logical to conclude that the
associations we already create with all sounds around us could be the primitive
beginning of a more complex language that would help us to broaden our
perceptions of sound.
The introduction of audio art outside of music is a fairly
recent phenomenon. Before the invention
of the phonograph, we were limited as to how we could manipulate sound. Music and written text were the closest
thing to being able to record sound.
One of the reasons audio art has not taken as much advantage as
technology has allowed is a direct result of the long-standing supremacy of
music as the dominant audio art form.
There have been several artists who have attempted to incorporate the
changing technology of the modern world into their audio works with varying
degrees of success. The biggest
obstacle artists seem to face is creating an audio work that can successfully
stand alone outside of music. There is
much evidence, however, indicating that artists are successfully exploring the
possibilities of audio art outside of music.
As artists continue to investigate these possibilities, it becomes easier
to imagine a fully developed audio art from that is based on a type of
organization separate from music or speech.
Works
Cited
1. Readings and
lecture from Comm 141.
2.
Perry, Jeffrey. Perspectives
of New Music. The inner voices
of simple things: a conversation with
Paul Lansky. Summer 1996: p. 40.
3.
http://www.mp3.com/artists/73/later_days1.html