MATA Interval

Resonant Sound

It is often overlooked that music is embedded in the physical world. Sound is a thoroughly physical phenomenon, the oscillation of pressure through matter—the vibration of air, water and wood. The sounds that our ears are capable of hearing oscillate between 20 and 20,000 cycles per second, with wavelengths on the human scale—from 56 feet to just fractions of an inch. In a very physical sense, our music inhabits the same spaces we do.

When sounds combine, some parts of the sound are reinforced while others are attenuated. In air, sound waves are the variation in the density of air molecules above and below the average atmospheric pressures. When these waves pass through one another, the crests and troughs of density interfere, reinforcing one another when positive densities combine with positive densities, and attenuating one another when positive densities combine with negative densities.

The walls and objects in a room reflect sound about the room. As sounds are reflected off of the objects and surfaces of a room, they recombine with their sources in constructive and destructive interference. Surfaces can also change the character of a sound. Different materials reflect sounds in different ways. Some materials reflect certain frequencies more strongly and absorb other frequencies. Others affect the orientation of waves, causing them to interact destructively with their sources.

Certain frequencies fit in certain rooms. These frequencies have wavelengths that correspond to the dimensions of the room. When these frequencies are reflected about the room, they line up with themselves, causing constructive interference that reinforces the sound. Frequencies that do not fit in a room reflect onto themselves out of phase, causing destructive interference that weakens and alters the sound.

When we experience sound in a room, we are also hearing the numerous reflections of the sound off of walls, objects and other surfaces. These reflections interact with one another, with the original sound and with other sounds in constructive and destructive interference. The shape, dimensions, angles, surfaces, objects and material of the room affect how waves travel about the room, determining its acoustic character.

These are the conditions that the artists will be working with in residency throughout early January:

Architectures of Sound, the site:

a rectangular prism, 56 feet long, 17.5 feet wide and 17.5 feet high

constructed of wood, stone and metal

built between 1865 and 1901

set in the Old American Can Factory, a six-building industrial complex

Old American Can Factory

ISSUE Project Room

ISSUE’s future home

Posted in general | No Comments »

Michael Winter

Michael Winter is a composer, curator, music theorist, and software designer. He co-founded and co-directs (with fellow composer Eric km Clark) the wulf., a non-profit arts organization that presents experimental music free to the public in Los Angeles. Michael is a firm believer in music making as an experimental process and free information; e.g. open source code, free music, etc. In keeping with this, all his scores, software, writings, recordings, and related work are typically easy to obtain from his website.

Posted in general | No Comments »

Jacob Sudol

Jacob Sudol writes intimate compositions that explore enigmatic phenomena and the inner nature of how we perceive sound. He currently resides in La Jolla, California and is working towards a Ph.D. in composition at the University of California San Diego with Chinary Ung. He has written music for domestic and international performances by prestigious ensembles and performers including the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, the Contemporary Keyboard Society, Canadian pianist Xenia Pestova, Taiwanese pianist and composer Chen-Hui Jen, Brazilian percussionist Fernando Rocha, and the McGill Contemporary Music Ensemble in collaboration with the McGill Digital Composition Studio. He also frequently performs his own works for instruments and electronics. Sudol also has an interest in religious phenomenology, literature, acoustics, and visual art.

Posted in general | No Comments »

Charles Stankievech

Charles Stankievech is an interdisciplinary artist who’s work has been included in the context of the Biennale of Architecture (Venice), Banff Centre for the Arts (Canada), Eyebeam (New York), Planetary Collegium (UK), and Atlantic Center for the Arts (Florida), among other venues. His writings have been included in academic journals, such as Leonardo Music Journal (MIT Press), artist’s catalogues and translated into French, Italian and German.  Stankievech holds an MFA in Open Media and BA (hon.) in Philosophy + Literature.  A co-founder of the KIAC School of Visual Arts in Dawson City, Yukon Territory, Stankievech splits his time between the Arctic and other landscapes.

Posted in general | No Comments »

Anthony Jay Ptak

Anthony Jay Ptak is an artist and a composer born in Brooklyn, NY 1970. An inviolable autodidacticist, he has studied with Tony Conrad, Paul Sharits, Lydia Kavina, Peter Campus, and Herbert Brün. He performed at the First International Theremin Festival. He was a guest artist at the historic Experimental Music Studios at the University of Illinois. He has presented at Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Institute for Advanced Study Princeton, Roulette, the Kitchen, the Stone, Media Lab Madrid, and at the first Points in a Circle series at Issue Project Room. He is a founding member of the New York Theremin Society. His graphic scores have appeared in the Notations 21 and in Between Thought and Sound: Graphic Notation in Contemporary Music.

Posted in general | No Comments »

G. Douglas Barrett

G. Douglas Barrett makes experimental music, performance, installation, and text pieces.  His work has been presented in festivals, galleries, concert halls, academic conferences, and street performance events throughout North America and Europe.  Performers of his music and performance works have included The S.E.M. Ensemble, Francesco Gagliardi, Adam Overton, Philip Thomas, and Mark So.  He has participated in festivals such as the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (UK), Ostrava Days (Czech Republic), Wandelweiser Festspiel (Düsseldorf), Visiones Sonoras (Mexico City), June in Buffalo, and the CEAIT Festival (Los Angeles); he has appeared at venues such as the Ontological-Hysteric Theater (New York), the Wulf (Los Angeles), the Sonic Arts Research Centre (Belfast, UK), Theater Perdu (Amsterdam), and Miss Micks (Berlin).

Posted in general | No Comments »

Casey Thomas Anderson

Casey Thomas Anderson is an artist working with sound in a number of media, including composition, improvisation, electronic music, saxophone, and installations. Anderson has composed works for the California E.A.R. Unit (Los Angeles), the CalArts New Century Players (Los Angeles), and TRANSIT (New York). He has performed with Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith, Michael Pisaro, Ulrich Krieger, Mark Trayle, Fomoudou Don Moye, the CalArts New Century Players, and as part of Michael Pisaro’s Dogstar Orchestra. Recent residencies include STEIM, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and at the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival. Anderson holds a Bachelors degree, in Music Composition and Philosophy, from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and a Master of Fine Arts, in Music Composition, from the California Institute of the Arts. Anderson has studied with Mark Trayle, Ulrich Krieger, Michael Pisaro, Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith, Art Jarvinen, and Vinny Golia. he currently lives in Los Angeles, California.

Posted in Interval 3.1 | No Comments »

Curatorial Statement: Toward an Architecture of Sound

“I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now.”

1.

One day in 1969 — let us say, wishfully, that it is also early evening in the middle of January — Alvin Lucier steps into the Slosberg Music Center at Brandeis University, a chunk of glass‐and‐brick modernism designed by the same architects responsible for Avery Fischer Hall and its famously imperfect acoustics.

In the chambers of the Center’s Electro‐Acoustic Music Studio, Lucier recites and records a monologue of barely one hundred words, the text of which is now well known to us. He speaks deliberately, although his stutter is apparent on several words – “resonant,” “rhythm,” “reinforce,” “activity” and “smooth” – and upon reaching the final syllable of his monologue – “have” – Lucier stops the tape, rewinds it, and plays it back into the room. He makes a new recording, and repeats the process, “again and again.”

As the work plays out, Lucier’s voice declines, becomes ever more frail. The room’s resonant frequencies (what one initially recognizes as a “whistling” sound) are increasingly evident with the enunciation of each syllable. The frequencies build upon replay, thickening into a series of near‐palpable sonic forms, and the semblance of speech is lost – transformed beyond recognition by the room.

2.

It is mere and negligible accident that we present Architectures of Sound on the belated quad‐decennial of that first recording of “I Am Sitting In a Room.” No matter its date, this program could not avoid mention of Lucier’s work, which anticipates so many of the concerns that we hope to address.

Music today, “contemporary music” – the music of a new millennium! – is, of course, separated from “I am sitting in a room” by forty years, as well as by a cascade of paradigm shifts, both technical and theoretical. However, among the few vestiges of the pre‐digital, pre‐virtual past is that we are still sitting in rooms, writing and rehearsing and recording and performing music amidst architectural space. The implications of “I am sitting in a room” should haunt musicians and sonicians until the unimaginable juncture at which sound is utterly divorced from physical space.

3.

The site of performance is always performing. Every room bears a sonic signature – characteristic resonant frequencies that result from its design, from its shape and size, from its physical matter and mode of construction. These frequencies emphasize and de‐emphasize aspects of any sound produced within.

When Lucier states that he is “sitting in a room distinct from the one you are in now,” he is acknowledging the radical specificity of his and any site. Addressing an anonymous audience, he does not merely distinguish between his room and yours, so much as between his room and all other rooms.

The near‐limitless variation of architectural space mocks belief in the pure agency of a musical performer. However the performer acts, whatever the performer’s own design, received sound is always at the mercy of architecture. Lucier’s speech is eventually “destroyed” by the very form of the Electric‐Acoustic Music Studio; and while this is the result of so many repetitions, the process of destruction is initiated as Lucier’s first syllables slip into an unpredictable material world.

But let us not be pessimistic about the invariable ruination of our ideal sounds, about the violation of our constant rehearsals and best intentions. It appears, at least, that Lucier was not. “I regard this activity,” he ends, “as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.” As the recording reaches its latter half, Lucier’s stutter is indeed smoothed: the jerky stammers of “resonant,” “rhythm,” and “reinforce” deteriorate into shapes more fluid and viscous.

Lucier has enlisted architecture as his ally. An agreement of sorts is reached between the tendencies of architectural space and Lucier’s own desires to be himself remade, and by the close of “I am sitting in a room” we hear the dissolution of each into the other. Is this hybrid not more interesting than our prevailing model: the romantic artist who battles a profane and material world in order to realize platonic forms?

We thus ask: How can composers and performers reconsider their relationship to our ineluctably architectural lives? Can music avail itself of the diversity of the material world?

Architectures of Sound presents six investigations into the uncanny convergence of sound and space. In January 2010, artists Casey Anderson, Douglas Barrett, Anthony Ptak, Charles Stankievich, Jacob Sudol, and Michael Winter will develop site‐specific works for Brooklyn’s ISSUE Project Room – among them computer algorithms tuned to architectural characteristics, human transcriptions of the built environment, and a rethinking of Lucier’s iterative process. It assembles performances that collapse the distinction between a performance and its site – performances that forgo “music” as such to make architecture audible.

4.

Architecture and music have long been addressed as the most distant of artistic relatives. Tradition holds that architecture is thoroughly material, and music fully disembodied, that the former is merely functional and the latter metaphysical – “never the twain shall meet.” This is an intuitive distinction; it is also arbitrary and false.

We occupy a world of monsters – of so many strange pairings of human and nonhuman actors – whose ubiquity renders that purification farcical. The performer is among them: a musician cannot but join in unwitting concert with the architectural environment.

Architectures of Sound explores how musicians and composers might do so wittingly – how they might consciously engage their site of production.

No sound without space! No music without materiality!

Cameron Hu and David Kant, curators

Posted in Interval 3.1, general | No Comments »

MATA Interval Vol.3!

MATA INTERVAL Vol.3
Wednesday, January 13, 2010Interval 3.1: Architectures of Sound David Kant & Cameron Hu, curators
Every musical event is accompanied by an often unacknowledged and yet not-so-silent partner. The built environment reflects, refracts, and remakes sound, and performer and audience act and listen under the influence of its formal language. Architectures of Sound assembles an evening of unusual performances that attend to this convergence of sound and built space. Artists Casey Thomas Anderson, G. Douglas Barrett, Anthony Ptak, Charles Stankievech, Jacob Sudol and [The User] will present new work that interacts with the singularities of the performance space – its materiality, its geometric form, its historical specters and its vanishing present.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010Interval 3.2: poweRed Line Baljinder Sekhon, II, curator
poweRed Line will feature the Red Line Saxophone Quartet as they premiere five new works for Saxophone Quartet and a variety of electronics. The collaboration between Red Line and five composers will result in a presentation that will immerse the listeners in electronic and acoustic sounds from every direction. poweRed Line will demonstrate an imaginative use of state-of-the-art technology, such as interactive multimedia software with live video and audio processing, while spotlighting the award-winning talent of the Red Line Saxophone Quartet. The use of electronics varies from piece to piece and serve functions such as allowing the saxophone ensemble to play in microtonal temperaments, generating hundreds of incredibly-quiet synthesized tones at different frequencies which are slowly navigating a three-dimensional space, tracking pitches of the acoustic saxophone in order to control processsors and spatialization with sound, and to play back manipulated saxophone samples while the performers interact with the computer in conversation. New pieces by composers Andy Akiho, Matthew Barber, Andrew Colella, Robert Pierzak and Baljinder Sekhon will result in a diverse program that explores a wide spectrum of compositional techniques, implementation of electronics, and dynamic range of emotions.

Posted in Interval vol. 3 [09-10], general | No Comments »

THE TOY PIANO deMYSTIFIED

An excerpt from Margaret Leng Tan’s article, TOY PIANOS No Longer Toys!, which appeared in Experimental Musical Instruments, September 1998. Used with permission from the author.

THE TOY PIANO deMYSTIFIED

The mechanism for the original Schoenhut toy piano consisted of a series of flat, gradated steel sounding-plates held together by twine. These were struck by wooden mallets, actually round pegs which were attached to and activated by adult-width wooden keys. This produced a chime-like timbre. The modern Schoenhut toy piano has plastic keys and plastic diamond-shaped hammers. The five-eighth-inch wide sounding plates have been superseded by circular rods one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter, made from cold-rolled, high-carbon steel. These strong but flexible rods are reamed to encourage maximum vibration and optimum resonance before insertion into a rectangular base beam.

Paralleling the modern piano’s relationship to the fortepiano, the sound of the modern toy piano is more percussive than that of the early models or that of a celeste (which can aptly be described as a toy piano on valium). If anything, its penetrating voice is most akin to that of the gamelan family which accounts for its Asian sensibility to some ears.

Like real pianos, toy pianos vary greatly in personality determined less by the casing materials than by the quality of the rods. Some instruments are mellow, others more light and silvery; some are full-bodied while others are tinny or brittle-sounding. In fact, I find more timbral variation between two Schoenhuts than between two Steinways!

A lingering haze of overtones is a defining feature of the toy piano sound; the actual notes die off almost immediately after they are struck. Every toy piano is unique because each individual set of rods has its own inimitable potpourri of overtones. The overtones of a toy piano are omnipresent and capriciously complex. While the fundamental pitches should ideally be in tune, it is the melding of these mysterious overtones that gives the toy piano its off-key poignancy and ineffable magic…..a magic which my novelist friend John David Morley calls, “Sound combed from the keys of a ’starway’ ascending faintly into sleep”.

Margaret Leng Tan

Posted in general | No Comments »