Live
Writing in the break… the binaural experience was different to those binaural experiences I’ve had previously encountered in Jon’s work - on every other occasion (that I’ve been a part of), Jon has had the room set up somewhat ‘neutrally’ (I use that word very loosely) where the audio has had special attention paid to it by the headphones being set up in a semi-circle around the CD player. On another occasion, he was at a market stall, displaying his ‘wares’ to passers by with differing levels of interest… but there he had a train station implanted inside your head while you were also in the market - you couldn’t differentiate between the spaces if you closed your eyes - kind of a space collage. Another occasion was not through headphones at all, but through a somewhat large multi-speaker system.
This experience was much different, however. We were experiencing a live performance through the ears of one person (disregarding the sound bleeding through the curtain). Being very much interested in liveness, this was a much more interesting and fruitful experience for me (Jon’s work is always interesting, but this was particularly interesting because of the application it had with my work, which is currently exploring darkness after a successful performance of a piece called ‘My Universe’). This ‘darkness’ issue was brought up by Daisy.
We have had a lovely time recording things at the music building. It was nice to hear that when you go in and out of different rooms, the overall ambience - the ‘hiss’ changed pitch due to the parameters of the space - the acoustics.
I would like to note a little bit about documentation and actions that one executes. I am interested to know what actions I executed will make it into others’ documentation. For example, when I dragged a cymbal around Caroline’s body, will that make it into her documentation? It was rather significant for me, as I felt it would have given an idea of the ’spatial abilities’ of the binaural microphones - what their parameters are. Also, I’ve been thinking about what actions of others might make it into documentation. Perhaps something significant will be left out from everyone’s documentation - what is significant?
A note from what Caroline said to me earlier - she was mentioning something about a vocal representation of what was going on because a digital recording of a particular sound would take much longer to produce (please correct this if it’s wrong, Caroline!) I think that it would be fruitful to plan time for ‘follow up’ activities to the planned ones. If this workshop is co-authored, and practice informs further practice then perhaps a regime of ‘what we’re going to get through’ is only one way to go about it. Time to experiment with results of our experimentation would be good!
After the documentation of the little trip to Chandler building, we were to perform on the instruments. As an aside: I feel that our group musical sensitivity is being enhanced the longer we spend on the instruments with each other. We are able to pre-empt certain things and work together to create textures.
Then we created mixes of another group’s performance. Below are a few samples that I took on Nick William’s lovely program on MaxMSP. The program was suited to looping things - I don’t usually work in loops, so it was a challenge for me to create loops. The binaural microphones are extremely useful for documenting things - especially things that are in the dark - most of my pieces (for my research at least) will be in the dark until I find another way to immerse people in something, and the binaural microphones will most probably be a reliable way of creating that spatial illusion at a pair of headphones. A CD of a performance could be produced with instructions to sit in a dark room with headphones on or something - I’ll have to have a think about that.
The first recording is of a rather ’straight’ mix.
This second one shows how far removed a documentation exercise can be from the actual event!
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April 4th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
Drawing from memory is similar to making up an onomatopoeia for a sound: I am bound by my body’s limitations, yet I can convey my human experience of my memory.
When I try to isolate a visual with a camera, or a sound with an audio recorder, it takes ages to find that human experience in the information I capture. A photo or a video never looks like the ephemeral moment, an mp3 never sounds like the ephemeral moment.
But I can draw what I think I saw, or make a sound a bit like what I think I heard. It’s easy to draw what I think I see.
Today I’ve done some drawings from observation, rather than from memory. You can find them on Live Archives Workshops Day3 and Daisy Abbott. People tell me they are better, but I prefer my memories - they’re brighter and more abstract.