Category: Research

On the 4th of October I attended a live experimental night at the St Mary Le Wigford Church, here in Lincoln, as part of the Sonophilia festival festival; Lincoln’s festival of “sound and conferences for lovers of audio, both professional and amateur.” The evening was hosted by ESP2 (Extra Sonic Practice) a collective of Lincoln University artists and scholars. I took interest in attending this because of the experimental aspects of my desired project.

The first performance I watched was by Marie Thompson and Linda Kemp, who both used flutes along with amps and simply played. But they were manipulating the instrument so the sounds we were hearing were not the ones you would expect to hear from those instruments; if you were not there to physically see them playing them you wouldn’t of believed it. Surprisingly it wasn’t until after the performance when I looked on the website that I realised their performance was in fact improvised; how they managed to play out the live piece so in-tune with each other is what made me think that everything was planned and practiced. Throughout I wasn’t really sure what was going on and what was the point in it, but their aim was to show the amount of different sounds you can produce from something that has always been designed and perceived as producing a distinct sound and only that.

The second performance I witnessed was by Gruinard Ensemble which right now I am still unsure about some aspects of their piece (I have sent an email questioning these, so possible edit of post in future*). This was also a live improvisation yet this really did sound like a worked on soundscape. Their piece had a long build up but when it got into it there was many industrial sounds incorporated into it, such as cars driving by, what sounded like rain on the pavement and trains; this part intrigued me the most because it is how I wish to go about my piece. I want a build up where I’m using synths and possibly some manipulated recordings, then having untouched industrial recordings gradually being layered into it and then making a big impact. The areas of this piece I am still waiting to understand is when one of the guys was playing a brass instrument into a microphone so quietly it was almost impossible to hear it. I’m not sure if this was the intention or if it just somehow managed to get lost amongst everything else we were hearing.

Although I didn’t experience Emily Wilczek’s experiment at the time of the event I did the week after, and it was using a standard coat hanger with some string; two pieces of string attached on either side, twisted a few times around your finger and then you stick your fingers in your ear and you bang the coat hanger on a surface and it really does sound like a gong. Another example of sound being manipulated, to create a different sound from an instrument or object that is not expected. Giving it another/new meaning.

References:

Home

Over the last couple of weeks I have been trying to find other examples similar to my desired project. Although I haven’t found any, as of yet, that are completely identical to what I wish to do (as I now know mine is more unique than I originally thought) I have found some installations and festivals that fall around the same concept and end goal.

I first came across an exhibition that was held at The National Gallery in London, July to September 2015. The exhibition commissioned musicians from all types of sound art backgrounds, this list including: DJ, producer and Mercury-Prize winner Jamie XX from the successful The XX, Susan Philipsz OBE, a Turner-Prize winner who is known for her work on installations linking music and architecture, and Nico Muhly, a orchestral composer heavily involved in ballet and opera. For this they had to choose a painting and compose a piece of music in response to it. This is, in a way, almost opposite to how I am going about my piece, as I am creating the soundscape and then creating a painting in response to it/as I go along. This is something quite fascinating to me as my plan and desire is to create an art piece in reflection to the composition I myself will create, however these artists are composing to pieces of art that are hundreds of years old and not their own work. The point of the exhibition is to get viewers to “hear the painting, see the sound” so the musicians and sound artists had to work hard to create a connection not only between the composition and the piece of art, but also to the audience.

Another example I came across was the 2016 Electronic Literature Organisation International Conference and Media Art Festival. They invited theorists and practitioners to explore the point of the conference and festival, which is to consider sound as a form of literature. They asked them to explore this through a wide spread variety of different media, such as sound walks, sound collages, field recordings and, the one most important to me, soundscapes. It was to encourage them to think about storytelling through sound sources rather than the human voice. No screens, no talking, just sound sources and sound effects, or even silence to tell a narrative “designed for careful listening experiences”. Although this does not relate to my project in the sense of the art piece I will be creating along side it, it does relate in the narrative area; the attempt to create an emotional connection, to create a story that the listener becomes engaged and invested in.

Both of these examples relate to each other heavily on the narrative and connection aspect. For a piece to be successful, whether it be as part of an exhibition or an online forum, a connection, a feeling, has to be made between said piece and the listener/viewer.

References: 

https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/whats-on/soundscapes

http://elo2016.com/festival/sound-installations/