On Rediscovering Music-Making

First, open this page and play the song. Then switch back to this page.

Last spring my 2004 G5 “desktop” (more like a “floortop” given its heft and profile) finally gave up the ghost. At the time I just switched to a laptop and kept writing. But its death had some beneficial effects on my creative life (outside of scholarship, which I do find creatively rewarding).

To begin with, I could hear–and occasionally see–the impending machine death coming. This mattered because the G5 housed the software and mixes for the then-still-unfinished second lo-boy record, recorded in my Pittsburgh basement in the summer of 2004 right before I moved to Montreal. I emailed Mike, who now lives in Madison, to tell him that once the book was out I was either going to have to finish the record myself or he’d have to finally come up and join me. The urgency came from the fact that if my machine died (and Carrie’s matching G5 wasn’t too far behind), the work we’d done on those songs would be lost and we’d have to start over from scratch. That would probably kill the project altogether.

Music software isn’t quite like the stuff that academics normally use. A single song might use products of 10 or more different companies. There are endless compatibility issues to resolve, and once you get a working setup, you stick with it. So I would update my OS for work stuff, but the music setup more or less remained frozen in 2004. Needless to say, some programs or companies die off, and so when you update, you lose capabilities, settings and presets as well as gain new capabilities.

When my computer died, I didn’t have time to deal with it, but summer came, Carrie got her new laptop, and so I took parts from my dead computer and combined them with her living (but wheezing) computer to create a working FrankenMac. Mike came up at the end of August and we spent two days finishing the lo-boy record. Once we’ve made some final tweaks, we will get it mastered sometime this fall and then release it.

But after the book went out in July, I also spent about a week setting up my not-entirely-new laptop to be my main music computer for new stuff. That week sucked. I’d just turned in this book manuscript that I loved writing and to celebrate, I basically spent a week installing stuff, configuring it, calling tech support, and then buying other stuff so that I could better use the stuff I’d just set up. Carrie and I also spent a couple unpleasant days hanging acoustic panels in the office (they’d been sitting on the floor for two year, waiting to be hung). None of that was very fun and kind of a crappy to spend the little bit of time that I take off. But it turned out to be worth it.

In the world of music software, a lot of amazing things have happened in the last five years. I can now use my computer more or less like a live effects processor for my bass if I want, and the software synthesizers that you can get are astoundingly good-sounding. Software effects were already really good in 2004, but you can do even more now and there are some wonderfully designed things available that weren’t when I last looked. For instance, there are now actual good distortion plugins. Even the audio software with which I am most familiar has made leaps and bounds, and other software that I had tried and put aside, like Ableton Live, now seems much more robust and just fun to use.

So in addition to finishing the old project, I started some new ones. At first, I just did some “exercises” to try and figure out how to program drums or use software synthesis tools that were new to me. But I’ve also begun a new collaboration with a friend and am making music regularly–at least once a week, sometimes more–for the first time since I moved to Montreal.

It has been a head-slapping experience. I am as busy as I have ever been but I have just decided to carve out time and do it, which I could have done before. There is no pleasure in my life like playing or making music–it is totally immersive and totally pleasing. In a way it’s a perfect antidote to the stresses of being a bureaucrat as well as a scholar (and will be for the next 8.5 months). So I feel kind of stupid for neglecting this aspect of my life for the last 5 years (with a couple minor exceptions, like the Fetus Training recording I did with Carrie). But better late than never.

The new project has no name and no completed songs, but it’s definitely a new direction. The music is purely studio music, more electronica-y and somehow a little less serious in tone. We will see where it goes.

As a side effect of the studio being set up, I also completed my first work of real, bona-fide sound art–a sort of Alvin Lucier cover that is meant to go with my mp3 book. But that is for another post.

Questions About Sound

Some questions arrived in the mail this morning from Ekpektatwa, an interdisciplinary arts project in Poland. I decided to warm up by answering them. I think they really wanted an essay, but I went with point form. Sometimes it’s more fun just to answer the questions.

1). What is silence for You? Is it a relief or anxiety?

There is no silence. Ever since I was a child, I always heard some dim ringing in my ears even in the quietest moments. I would go further, though: there is no such thing as silence for the hearing. There are always noises, motions, reverberations. Even for the person who sits perfectly still in an anechoic chamber there are sounds.

2). Do you remember the moment when you were conscious of the sound in a creative sense? Did you find any differences between the sound and the music if any?

Hard to say, since my parents got me involved in music at an age that I no longer remember. They do teach kids to explore instruments by sound. In terms of more explicitly thinking about sound as a creative element, it would have to be when I discovered that records on the radio did not sound the same as they did on my turntable.

3). We have 5 holes in our head, and a lot of research try to discredit the leading eyesight sense, yet the hearing sense is a minor case. Of course we don’t mean the superiority of the senses but not seeing the potential which lies in other of them. How can we use human hearing sense?

We can design for the ear. This is a core point in older sound studies work, from Rudolf Arnheim to Murray Schafer and Barry Truax, but also in newer writings like Emily Thompson’s. We dwell mostly in synthetic environments, and yet so little attention is given to sound in comparison with the look or smell of things; this is true even in much soundscape scholarship, which has largely upheld Schafer’s faux-naturalistic aesthetic (to its own detriment, in my estimation). This is especially true in architecture and interior design. In contrast, there is now an empire of sound design in the media arts: it is a crucial aspect of television, cinema, and video games, and many popular music genres spend a great deal of effort creating acoustic spaces for our ears to dwell (the trippier, more downtempo dubstep is my favorite recent example).

4). What sounds do you find most irritating? Which ones are soothing?

As someone born in the land-locked Midwest United States, I love standing on a coastal beach and hearing the sound of the ocean. I love the moan of really deep bass. The incredibly complex timbres of a distorted guitar or bass, or a synthesized pad resonating through an elaborate artificial reverb also move me. The sounds that most irritate me are those of other people’s lawn care (scissors and push mowers are fine; mowers, trimmers and blowers are not). I now live in a neighbourhood that still has a few gardens but is more or less without lawns.

5). We know that sound is a good way to possess the space. The amalgam of the city sounds which make noise is ambiguous. On the one hand it doesn’t represent nothing but a technological function, eliminating the silence ( or the sounds in-situ), on the other hand it is abstract, so it can transform into musical pulp which enables the space control. Do artists and scientists still perceive the ecology of sound as socially and politically communicative, transgressive or enabling critical activity.

No sound is essentially communicative, transgressive or enabling of critical ability. Those terms are all relational terms, and involve a configuration of people, meanings and institutions. No artist controls the meaning of his or her work, and no work has an inherent effect. To believe that is possible is one of the great follies of our time (and probably an unfortunate side-effect of the grant-writing process). As countless scholars have shown, attempts to intervene in the sounds of the city are actually occasions where the social and political relations of the urban fabric are being worked out.

6). Gugliemo Marconi believed once that we can hear even the oldest sound adapting the right apparatus. Do you think that sound can resist the trace of time?

No. Sound is only a stratification of vibration by the human ear. Otherwise, it’s just pressure changes in the atmosphere. Nothing human lasts forever.

Tap. . . Tap. . . Is This Thing On?

Greetings, loyal rss aggregators, assorted robots and extremely dedicated readers. After a summer hiatus, this blog awakens refreshed. Sure, blogging is so passé that it’s cast as a quaint, dated practice in Julie and Julia but that won’t stop me.

During the summer’s silence, time pushed me past a few milestones.  I’m not normally given to observing blog anniversaries, but I will indulge this once.

  • This blog is now over 5 years old.
  • I have now lived in Montreal longer than I lived in Pittsburgh.
  • I have completed a full decade of professing.  This September marks the beginning of year 11.
  • As my mom points out, I’m now in my 40th year of life (since one only turns 40 at the end of the 40th year)

All of this would suggest that it’s time for some reflective self-assessment.  And I’m certainly raring to go on that front.  I am nearing completion of a whole bunch of things that will open up the next stage of my life: finishing old writing projects and conceiving of new ones; finishing old music projects and starting some new projects in art and music; carrying out my last year as chair and looking forward to a sabbatical in 2010-11 after which I will return to the ranks of the faculty; and experiencing changes in my body and outlook that appear to coincide with getting a little older.  Oh, and the blog and sterneworks designs are starting to feel a little long in the tooth.

But the next 9 months or so are going to fly by, and the reality that any sustained self-reflection will occur on vacation or sometime next summer.  So in lieu of any deep confessional thinking-out-loud for the moment, I’ve simply changed the subtitle to this blog.  Even though I’m still very American (and in a way, the more I travel the more American I feel), I am also becoming more and more Canadian, and will be applying for citizenship on the day that I am eligible (sometime in early November depending on the actual length of a trip in October).  Though right now it’s an 18-month wait, which means I may get date sometime during my sabbatic year, when I’m not in Canada.

In the meantime, I return to semi-regular writing in this space, and will try to supplement the usual reflections with some discussion of what I did on my summer vacation.  At least the interesting parts.

All Quiet

It’s summer.  Between socializing, tending to a few domestic matters, computer issues, a little bit of admin and making a big push on the book (I have set myself a deadline in July for sending it out for review, though I’m a little flexible on the exact day), I’m neglecting the blog.  So I guess I’ve been on some kind of hiatus. I’ll be back. Some pictures may appear in the interlude at some point.