Bringing Ancient Sounds Back to Life, by Alex Marshall

LONDON — Peter Holmes, a 76-year-old former aircraft engineer, was standing in his tidy living room in North London recently holding a Scandinavian war horn more than four feet long. When asked how the instrument, known as a lur, is played, he said: “I’ve no idea. No one’s played it for 3,000 years.”

With that, Mr. Holmes put the lur to his lips and blew. Rather than an angry bellow that might transport a listener to a lonely fjord among Viking warriors, it sounded more like a bugle played by someone with a lisp.

Mr. Holmes, an expert on ancient music, built the lur and other long-forgotten instruments at the University of Middlesex’s engineering department, where he is designer in residence, and in his cluttered garden shed.

He is also a central figure in the European Music Archaeology Project, or EMAP, a 4-million euro (about $4.6 million) effort started in 2013 to recreate the sounds of the ancient world. The project unveils the results of its work this year. It started with a concert in Glasgow on Saturday, to be followed by a touring exhibition that opens on June 6 in Ystad, Sweden.

 The classical record label Delphian is also releasing a series of albums as a tie-in with the project, beginning with works of ancient Scottish music in May.

John Kenny, a trombonist from Birmingham, England, who also plays the carnyx, an Iiron Age horn, said that ancient instruments were important because they offered a different perspective on the past. “I’ve witnessed the most extraordinary skills used to reconstruct buildings, clothes and language, but those don’t put you into the imaginative world people used to live in,” he said. “Only music does that.”

“If you reconstruct a sword,” he added, “no one apart from a homicidal maniac could use it for the purpose intended. But reconstruct an instrument, and anyone can experience it.”

The project, half funded by the European Union, with the rest coming from an assortment of institutions and state agencies, covers the Paleolithic era to around A.D. 1,000 and the Dark Ages. Calling on the skills of archaeologists, philologists, acousticians, metal workers and others, it has brought back to life instruments ranging from ancient bagpipes to 30,000-year-old vulture- bone flutes (although some say those are merely vulture bones that some poor animal chewed holes in).

Read more here

Horror and the Art of Noise, by Philip Hausmann

Fifty years ago, on September 20, 1963, director Alfred Hitchcock shocked movie-goers with his thriller that showcased killer birds. Perhaps even more than the images of assaults by seagull and crows, it was the birds' chilling screeches that worked themselves into cinema fans' collective consciousness.
It's a jarring story with a number of surprising elements: after a brief encounter in a pet shop, Melanie Daniels follows attorney Mitch Brenner to the California coast, where Brenner wants to spend the weekend in Bodega Bay. There, Daniels is attacked and injured by a seagull. More attacks occur, and increase in intensity, until some people are killed. Huge swarms of birds begin terrorizing the town. Many residents flee; others barricade themselves in their homes.

In his film, Hitchcock manages to transform seemingly harmless and familiar creatures into deadly beasts. But for the soundtrack, his audio crew was originally only able to come up with the quaint tweets of backyard birds. "I hear sounds like that all day long. I need something that is really coming to shake people up!" the film king told them. Hitchcock saw the soundtrack as integral to his 1963 movie.

 The trautonium

When Hitchcock met Remi Gassmann, a former student of German composer Paul Hindemith, for the first time, Gassmann said he knew the right person for the job: his former fellow student from Berlin, music pioneer Oskar Sala. Hitchcock didn't hesitate for long.

And Sala placed his bets on an unusual instrument: the trautonium. Named after its inventor, Friedrich Trautwein, this electronic instrument resembling a little organ is considered a predecessor to the analog synthesizer.

Hitchcock had heard sounds from the instrument once before: on Berlin Radio at the end of the 1920s. But for the film, Oskar Sala used the instrument to create all sorts of noises: the cries of the birds, the slamming of windows and doors, even the hammering by the people wanting to barricade their homes to protect themselves from the flying fiends. All of the sounds were created in Sala's little studio in the Berlin district of Charlottenburg in 1961.

read more here

Event: The EVP Sessions

The EVP Sessions
Saturday 14th November

Start time: 8pm
Tickets: £11
Book online

Shoreditch Town Hall
380 Old Street
London EC1V 9LT
Website: shoreditchtownhall.com

Electronic Voice Phenomena returns with a series of electrifying live sessions featuring the very best in hauntology, spoken word, glitch noise and performance. The EVP Sessions takes its inspiration from Konstantin Raudive’s notorious Breakthrough experiments of the 1970s, in which he divined voices-from-beyond in electronic noise. Enter the labyrinthine basement of Shoreditch Town Hall and experience a “mind-boggling”, “perplexingly good” avant-garde cabaret of human, ghostly and machine voices.

Featuring

EX-EASTER ISLAND HEAD
LAURA BURNS, TIM MURRAY-BROWNE & JAN LEE
ROWAN EVANS & MAISIE NEWMAN / DUNCAN GATES
LUKE JORDAN / GARETH DAMIAN MARTIN / NICK MURRAY
NATHAN PENLINGTON / JOANNE SCOTT
ANTOSH WOJCIK / NICOLA WOODHAM

with special guest
S J Fowler

Full programme of works: http://www.electronicvoicephenomena.net/index.php/shoreditch-town-hall-london/

https://www.facebook.com/events/1639973726274802/

Event: Chronic Illness of Mysterious Origin

Chronic Illness of Mysterious Origin

Saturday 10th October, 
 
The Dungeons of Polymorphous Pan, Holloway Road, London

19:30-22:00 

https://www.facebook.com/events/907740049263314/

Join us for an evening of experimental ritual performances, noise, ceremonial electronicks and esoteric post-industrial techno-primitivism which will take place within an exploratory environment, forming in the depths of The Dungeons of Polymorphous Pan in Holloway.

Please RSVP and we'll send the address.

Acts

Neofung and Cao
"Trans-Trance Vol. II. Intra-telluric Transplant"

Following from wasteland embodiment act “Trans-trance”, a performance that proposed savage physiological strategies to incorporate nature into the city environment, re-appropriating base-materiality through the transformation of the performer into an urban-feral agent, “Intratelluric Transplant” seeks to reframe the act within the space of an underground realm, evoking the symbolism of the telluric interior of the earth. Here, the act executed by the urban-feral character will serve as a rite for the opening of a new abstract space: the entrails of the wasteland, the intimacy of the wasteland. A transplant onto a different symbolic realm would take place as the performers oscillate between the opening of new possibilities of rooting and uprooting, and the mute encounter with groundlessness.

http://neofung.tumblr.com/

http://www.cao-music.net/
http://www.soundcloud.com/cao-6

Luke Jordan
"Unclean Spirits: A Transformative Lecture"

An absurdist action installation of ritual uncleanness, invoking the visual and sonic informe.

Within, cacophony, biotic painting and sculptures of detritus and rot, occur in an affective flux.

Functioning between the urge to communicate and its failure; feedback, spoken words and unintelligible vocalisations are channeled and distorted through sculptural objects within the environment, further obscuring any rational meaning therein. The objects animated and possessed by the disembodied voice, and materials interacting with and manipulated by the body become transformed in an assemblage of the human and non-human, each taking on aspects of the other.

http://lukerichardjordan.blogspot.co.uk/

Richard Crow (Institution of Rot)
“Live De-composition with desiring assemblages for Les Hommes n’en sauront Rien (Of This Men shall know Nothing), 1923, oil on canvas, 31 5/8 x 25 1/8 (80.5 x 64 cm) by Max Ernst (1891-1976)”

The back of the picture is inscribed with a mysterious and enigmatic prose poem (Ernst only confirmed in 1970 that the poem was written by himself), which can be translated as follows:

OF THIS MEN SHALL KNOW NOTHING

The Crescent (yellow and like a parachute) prevents the little whistle falling to the ground. The whistle, because people are taking notice of it, thinks it is climbing to the Sun. | The Sun is divided into two so that it can spin better. | The model is stretched out in a dreaming pose. The right leg is bent (a pleasant exact movement). | The hand hides the earth. Through this movement the earth takes on the importance of a sexual organ. | The Moon runs through its phases and eclipses with the utmost speed. | The picture is curious because of its symmetry. The two sexes balance each another.

Ernst’s occult symbolism (depicting the sun, the moon, rays and human organs) can be related directly back to Daniel Paul Schreber’s Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken (Memoirs of my Nervous illness) 1911. Crow has been obsessively working with this text from as early as 1992, the year he opened up the Institution of Rot.

THE INSTITUTION OF ROT (A SHORT HISTORY OF DECAY)

In history as in nature, the rotten is the laboratory of life. Karl Marx

The wonderful Schreber...ought to have been made a professor of psychiatry and director of a mental hospital. Sigmund Freud

There are many aberrant 'histories/herstories/heresies' of the IOR, therefore you may not recognise/identify yourself with what is written below.

Speak (and listen) according to the madness that seduces you.

The Institution of Rot (IOR) was founded by artist Richard Crow and writer Nick Couldry in 1992 as part of London’s Secret Spaces. Situated in a Victorian House in Finsbury Park, North London, Richard Crow's working and living space, the IOR has been (from 1992 - 1996) an active artist-run space dedicated to performance, audio works and site-specific installations. Rooted in a mindset of do-it-yourself production and collaboration, the IOR significantly contributed to the extraordinary dynamism of London’s artist-run spaces phenomenon of the 90's.

IOR’s specific concerns (and obsessions) were the privacy of the human body and its public transformations (ingestion, expulsion, cleansing, confessions, rituals and taboos).

From 2002 (until July 2009) the space of the IOR remained 'open' as a point of contact for international collaborations and occasional (unofficial) artists’ residencies in partnership with the curator in residence Lucia Farinati.

At present the ‘remains’ of the IOR constitute a ‘living archive’ – a kind of uneasy hauntology of recordings, objects, texts and images, people and places.


RICHARD CROW/INSTITUTION OF ROT

http://www.soundthreshold.org/season2_session3.htm
https://soundcloud.com/richard-crow

Ghostly Voices From Thomas Edison’s Dolls Can Now Be Heard, by Ron Cowen

Though Robin and Joan Rolfs owned two rare talking dolls manufactured by Thomas Edison’s phonograph company in 1890, they did not dare play the wax cylinder records tucked inside each one.

The Rolfses, longtime collectors of Edison phonographs, knew that if they turned the cranks on the dolls’ backs, the steel phonograph needle might damage or destroy the grooves of the hollow, ring-shaped cylinder. And so for years, the dolls sat side by side inside a display cabinet, bearers of a message from the dawn of sound recording that nobody could hear.

In 1890, Edison’s dolls were a flop; production lasted only six weeks. Children found them difficult to operate and more scary than cuddly. The recordings inside, which featured snippets of nursery rhymes, wore out quickly.

Yet sound historians say the cylinders were the first entertainment records ever made, and the young girls hired to recite the rhymes were the world’s first recording artists.

Year after year, the Rolfses asked experts if there might be a safe way to play the recordings. Then a government laboratory developed a method to play fragile records without touching them.

The technique relies on a microscope to create images of the grooves in exquisite detail. A computer approximates — with great accuracy — the sounds that would have been created by a needle moving through those grooves.

In 2014, the technology was made available for the first time outside the laboratory. “The fear all along is that we don’t want to damage these records. We don’t want to put a stylus on them,” said Jerry Fabris, the curator of the Thomas Edison Historical Park in West Orange, N.J. “Now we have the technology to play them safely.”

 More here

Linguistic Comprehension of Electronic Voice Phenomena: An Experiment In Auditory Perception Accuracy, by Michael J. Baker

Abstract. Since the mid-20th century EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) has been the focus of countless debates. Among them is the interpretation of what is truly being spoken within each recording. Since most EVP recordings are low in quality, phonetic analysis is often difficult and therefore most researchers rely on their hearing and audible interpretations to determine the words contained in each file. The purpose of this experiment is to establish the accuracy percentage at which human hearing can identify spoken words in random statements contained in low quality recordings. To perform this experiment we have created twenty simulated EVP recordings, each with similar background noise and vocal styles (normal speech, whispers, mumbles etc.) as those found in purported anomalous recordings. The recordings were created in various environments by three N.E.C.A.P.S. staff members (C. Wong, B. Hantzis, M. Baker) and presented within in two separate online surveys, displaying each recording independently. The volunteers then listened to the recordings and reported the words (if any) they felt were contained in each file. The results (123 for survey 1A and 108 for survey 1B) were downloaded and analysed for grading accuracy and to establish perception patterns. Our findings have shown that none of the volunteers scored above 80% accuracy for survey 1A and 50% for survey 1B. The average accuracy percentage for survey 1A was 49% and survey 1B was 28%. The results of this experiment indicate that human perception is not an accurate methodology for determining non contextual spoken words contained in an EVP recording. Inaccurate interpretations appear to be due to various neurological and psychological obstacles such as various biases, anticipation and pareidolia. These obstacles greatly affect the comprehension and or objectivity of the listener’s perspective.

Read more here

All the ghostly sounds that are lost when you compress to mp3, by Jack Rusher

Right now, you’re probably listening to music on your computer. The source of that music — whether you’re listening to an mp3 file or streaming — is a compressed version of a file that was much more detailed, but way larger. It’s worth interrupting your music for a moment and asking: What sounds are you missing?
To get a sense, watch the video above, created by Ryan Maguire, a Ph.D. student in Composition and Computer Technologies at the University of Virginia Center for Computer Music, for a project called The Ghost In The Mp3. It’s a song made with only the sounds that were left out when compressing Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner” to mp3.
As his site explains,

“‘moDernisT‘ was created by salvaging the sounds lost to mp3 compression from the song “Tom’s Diner”, famously used as one of the main controls in the listening tests to develop the MP3 encoding algorithm. Here we find the form of the song intact, but the details are just remnants of the original. Similarly, the video contains only material which was left behind during mp4 video compression.”

 Read more here

Arthur Machen: The Sounds From Beyond The Veil, from The London Sound Survey

ADVENTURES MADE EARLY in life can go on to define intellectual careers and reputations. Darwin was 22 when he set off on The Beagle. T. E. Lawrence built a personal mythos from his experiences as a young officer during the Arab Revolt of 1916–18. The anthropologist Margaret Mead was 27 when her book Coming of Age in Samoa was published, while Napoleon Chagnon spent his twenties studying the Yanonamo people, sometimes introducing himself to a new village by leaping into its central clearing with his face daubed in war paint, waving a shotgun.

The Welsh-born mystic and writer Arthur Machen moved to London in 1881 when he was in his late teens, a good age for the kind of long exploratory walks which can bring on a trance-like state of fatigue. He lodged briefly in south London before moving to Turnham Green, then Notting Hill Gate. With De Quincey’s opium-powered London wanderings sometimes in mind, Machen began first to explore the north and west of the city. His autobiographical works, such as Far Off Things (1922), suggest he gathered enough thoughts on London and its hinterlands during these expeditions to inform the rest of his literary career.

Machen’s descriptions of sounds often occur in the absence of seeing what’s making them. In The Terror (1917), a part of the Welsh countryside is haunted by an eerie, distant moaning, which is later revealed as people crying for help up the chimney flue of a barricaded cottage. A Fragment of Life (1899) features a nature spirit less benign than Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, which whistles unseen at a couple walking in the fields near Totteridge. The confrontation is a foretaste of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now:

Still, she felt it was no good bothering her head over what couldn’t be made out or explained anyway, and she was just settling down, when one Sunday evening it began all over again, and worse things happened. The whistling followed them just as it did before, and poor aunt set her teeth and said nothing to uncle, as she knew he would only tell her stories, and they were walking on, not saying a word, when something made her look back, and there was a horrible boy with red hair, peeping through the hedge just behind, and grinning. She said it was a dreadful face, with something unnatural about it, as if it had been a dwarf, and before she had time to have a good look, it popped back like lightning, and aunt all but fainted away.

Part of H.P. Lovecraft’s acknowledged debt to Machen also lies in hearing without seeing. Well before Lovecraft’s half-human ululations emanated from somewhere below ground, Machen’s The Three Impostors (1895) has Francis Leicester ingest a restorative white powder from a chemist, only to undergo a horrible physical degeneration. The process takes time, however, as his sister finds out:

“Francis, Francis,” I cried, “for heaven’s sake answer me. What is the horrible thing in your room? Cast it out, Francis, cast it from you!” I heard a noise as of feet shuffling slowly and awkwardly, and a choking, gurgling sound, as if some one was struggling to find utterance, and then the noise of a voice, broken and stifled, and words that I could scarcely understand.

Read more here

Brendan Chilcutt: The Museum Of Endangered Sounds

"I launched the site in January of 2012 as a way to preserve the sounds made famous by my favorite old technologies and electronics equipment. For instance, the textured rattle and hum of a VHS tape being sucked into the womb of a 1983 JVC HR-7100 VCR. As you probably know, it's a wonderfully complex sound, subtle yet unfiltered. But, as streaming playback becomes more common in the US, and as people in developing nations like Canada and the UK get brought up to DVD players, it's likely that the world will have seen and heard the last of older machines like the HR-7100. And as new products come to market, we stand to lose much more than VCRs.

Imagine a world where we never again hear the symphonic startup of a Windows 95 machine. Imagine generations of children unacquainted with the chattering of angels lodged deep within the recesses of an old cathode ray tube TV. And when the entire world has adopted devices with sleek, silent touch interfaces, where will we turn for the sound of fingers striking QWERTY keypads? Tell me that. And tell me: Who will play my GameBoy when I'm gone?

These questions and more led me to the undertaking that is The Museum Of Endangered Sounds."

More here

No Ghost Appears: Luciano Chessa’s Reconstructions of the Futurist Intonarumori, by Benjamin Lord

I. A Photograph Comes to Life

In every history of sound-art lurks a photograph of the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo (1885-1947) and his assistant in Russolo’s painting studio with the intonarumori. Literally noise-intoners, these were musical instruments with delicious names: gorgoliatore (the gurgler), ululatore (the howler), stroppicciatore (the rubber), and so on. Played with levers and cranks, and housed in simple plywood boxes, the intonarumori channeled their gurgles and howls through large, speaker-like cones. Much in the photograph is obscure: the bulky boxes hide the internal mechanisms from view, and both the photographer and the precise date of exposure are unknown.

In spite of or perhaps partly because of its obscurity, the image has become famous, entrancing generations of artists and experimental musicians. Part of its allure is formal: the patterned spread of hexagonal tile on the floor creates a strong, almost diagrammatic perspective in the foreground, which then terminates in a jumble of boxes against the back wall. The effect is deeply classical, not unlike some paintings by the 15th century master of perspective Paolo Uccello. In the photograph, the two men appear dwarfed by the giant instruments. Together, they seem composed but slightly ill at ease, late-19th century men adrift in a 20th century world of inflationary geometries. The whole scene is suffused with the decline of the Belle Epoque.

Luciano Chessa, a musician and musicologist, has studied this photograph intensively for several years. He is probably the world expert on this picture and on its close cousin, an alternate exposure of the same scene with a slightly different arrangement. Ever since he began looking at the photos while writing his dissertation on Russolo (published in 2004), he hasn’t been able to leave them alone, mining them for their every minute detail as a documentary record of the instruments. When RoseLee Goldberg, impresario of the Performa festival in New York, invited him to recreate the instruments for concert performance in 2009, he began an extended project of reconstruction. At once scholarly and creative, Chessa’s project recreates a technique of the historic avant-garde, bringing it into the present in a necessarily altered form. Given its massive scope, it also raises historically complex aesthetic, political, and musicological concerns that have so far escaped serious critical review. This essay attempts to situate and evaluate Chessa’s remobilization of the intonarumori within each of these realms.

Read more here

Book Download: An Individual Note, by Daphne Oram

Download from ubuweb here

Graham Wrench: The Story Of Daphne Oram’s Optical Synthesizer, by Steve Marshall

In the early '60s, pioneering British composer Daphne Oram set out to create a synthesizer unlike any other. The engineer who turned her ideas into reality was Graham Wrench.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in April 2008, I wrote about its history for Sound On Sound (you can read the article on‑line at /sos/apr08/articles/radiophonic.htm). I've always felt that Daphne Oram's importance has been underestimated, both as a co‑founder of the Workshop and as an electronic composer, so I tried to redress this by including as much as I could about her graphically controlled Oramic synthesiser. This was not easy, as Daphne died in 2003 and I was unable to find anyone who'd even seen the Oramic System, let alone knew how it worked. I did my best, but shortly after the magazine went on sale, an email was forwarded to me by Sound On Sound. 

"I enjoyed the article very much,” said the writer. "With reference to the bizarre design concept of the original Oramics machine, you might be interested in some background as to why and how it took shape! I was the engineer who originally turned Daphne's concept into a reality, with an extremely tight budget and a lot of inverted, lateral thinking.” It was signed: "Yours respectfully, Graham Wrench.”

I had to meet this man! So off I went to rural Suffolk, where Graham lives in a little house crammed with engineering wonders. There are musical instruments, home‑made telescopes, model railways, vintage photographic gear… There's even a steam railway museum just down the road! Despite these temptations, I managed to spend a whole afternoon listening to Graham's account of how Oramics really worked, and how he came to design and build the prototype.

Read more here

The ANS Synthesizer: Composing on a Photoelectronic Instrument, by Stanislav Kreichi

THE ANS SYNTHESIZER

For the past 30 years, I have been working with the ANS synthesizer. This photoelectronic instrument takes its name from the initials of Russian composer Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, whose creative work and ideas about synthesizing the different arts inspired the young inventor Eugeny Murzin [2,3].

In 1938 Murzin invented a design for composers based on synthesizing complex musical sounds from a limited number of pure tones; this proposed system was to perform music without musicians or musical instruments. The technological basis of his invention was the method of photo-optic sound recording used in cinematography, which made it possible to obtain a visible image of a sound wave, as well as to realize the opposite goal - synthesizing a sound from an artificially drawn sound wave.

Despite the apparent simplicity of his idea of reconstructing a sound from its visible image, the technical realization of the ANS as a musical instrument did not occur until 20 years later. Murzin was an engineer who worked in areas unrelated to music, and the development of the ANS synthesizer was a hobby and he had many problems realizing on a practical level. It was not until 1958 that Murzin was able to establish a laboratory and gather a group of engineers and musicians in order to design the ANS. I joined his laboratory in 1961 as asound engineer and composer.

One of the main features of the ANS is its photo-optic generator, which Murzin designed in the form of a rotating glass disk with 144 optic phonograms of pure tones, or sound tracks. The narrow tracks that proceed from the wide track at the edge to the center of the disk correspond to the 144 pure tones. The track nearest to the center has the lowest frequency; the track nearest to the edge has the highest. A unit of five similar disks with different rotating speeds produces 720 pure tones, covering the whole range of audible frequencies. To select the needed tones, a coding field (the "score") was designed in the form of a glass plate covered with an opaque, nondrying black mastic. The score moves past a reading device made up of a narrow aperture with a number of photoelectric cells and amplifiers.

Scraping off a part of the mastic at a specific point on the plate makes it possible for the light from the corresponding optic phonogram to penetrate into the reading device and be transformed into a sound. The narrow aperture reads the length of the scraped-off part of the mastic during its run and transforms it into a sound duration. The nondrying mastic allows for immediate correction of the resulting sounds: portions of the plate that generate superfluous sounds can be smeared over, and missing sounds can be added. The speed of the score can also be smoothly regulated, all the way to a full stop. All this makes it possible for the composer to work direcdy and materially with the production of sound.

Read more here

The Sound of Soviet Science Fiction, by Robert Barry

Eduard Artemiev first met Andrei Tarkovsky at a house party thrown by the painter, Mikhail Romadin, in the spring of 1970. The conversation somehow turned to the subject of electronic music and, to Artemiev's surprise, the director soon invited himself to the electronic music studio in Moscow where the composer worked, keen to see the working methods behind the ANS synthesizer that was housed there.

Artemiev had been one of the first composers to work with the ANS, after its inventor, Yevgeny Murzin, posted a note up at the Moscow Conservatoire where Artemiev was a student, looking for composers interested in electronic music. This machine, the first Russian synthesizer, operated using a unique system of drawn sound synthesis. The composer would paint on a sheet of glass which was scanned by the synthesizer, becoming a kind of graphic score, allowing the composer to work like a painter, tinting and shading, forming textures and tone colours directly. Due to the similarities such a method conjured up with the colouristic music of Murzin's idol, the Russian composer Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, the device was named after his initials.

Tarkovsky was evidently impressed with what he saw at Artemiev's studio for he soon asked him to compose all the music for a new science fiction film he was working on with Romadin, Solaris, having recently fallen out with regular musical collaborator, Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov. Tarkovsky gave Artemiev a completely free hand on Solaris, insisting on just one stipulation: that the film must include JS Bach's Choral Prelude in F-minor, ‘Ich ruf zu Dir, Herr Jesus Christ’.

Though the soundtrack to Solaris uses both orchestral and electronic textures (from the ANS), Artemiev has said in interviews that in terms of its treatment, the orchestra "functioned like one giant synthesizer." From the composer's notes written before he started work on the film, we can see that he delineated five general areas: landscapes; personal sound perceptions; various transformations and distortions of the Bach theme; recollections of the Earth; and the sounds of the living ocean, Solaris, itself. Of this final category, Artemiev remarked, "It is, obviously, composed of the sounds of terrestrial life as if processed by the Ocean. . . The characters of the film hear (or are trying to hear) sounds either similar to terrestrial ones, or sounds which are kind of little cells or islands remaining from the Earth which they manage to identity out of the mass of strange and yet incomprehensible noises."

Read more here

The X-Ray Audio Project

We are telling a story of forbidden music, cold war culture and bootleg technology  with a documentary, book, live events and travelling exhibition.

Many older people in Russia remember seeing and hearing strange vinyl type discs when they were young. The discs had partial images of skeletons on them and were called 'Bones' or 'Ribs'.

In an era when the recording industry was ruthlessly controlled by the State, an alternative source of raw materials was found to make illegal recordings - used X Ray plates obtained from local hospitals.

"The Age of the Bones" was a period lasting about fifteen years during which the sound of forbidden Russian and Western music was associated with images of the human skeleton. It was a period of what might be called "roentgenizdat" - the audio equivalent of  "samidzat" private publication of banned written works.  

In the Soviet states during the cold-war era, most modern Western bands and music was banned for all sorts of reasons including 'neo-fascism', 'mysticism' and even 'obscurantism'. Much Russian music was also forbidden for a variety of other reasons. Even certain rhythms were regarded unfavourably. But a vibrant, secret and risky trade grew up in what became known as 'Bones' or 'Ribs'.

These Bones were medical X-Ray fluorography sheets unofficially obtained from hospitals, cut into discs and embossed with the grooves of bootlegged gramophone records - a kind of medical version of a DJ dub plate. The quality was poor and the discs wore out quickly but the cost was low, just a couple of roubles compared with the fabulous cost of an actual Western LP.

To listen to Bones records go here.

There are many stories to be told about the people who made these recordings and how or why they did it. Some of them not only bootlegged the discs themselves but also copied the machines that made them in order that the process spread and persisted. They were often people who were fired up with a passion to share music, who risked and sometimes lost their liberty at a time when listening to certain songs was an offence and the private copying of music could result in a gaol sentence.

Despite the inevitable imprisonments and clamp downs, the culture of the Bones persisted right up to the early sixties when reel-to-reel tape recorders became common enough for this laborious real-time process involved to no longer be necessary.

More here

Controlling Sound: Musical Torture from the Shoah to Guantánamo, by Melissa Kagen

“Purely physical torture is losing importance,” observed the psychologist Gustav Keller in 1981. “Psychological and psychiatric findings and methods are taking its place, planned and sometimes administered by white-collar torturers.” This statement, though prescient, is debatable: plenty of purely physical torture has been reported by former prisoners of Guantánamo and Bagram. The implication, however, is one of progress: that torture has been civilized, professionalized, in some way stripped of its teeth.

After the news broke that American soldiers were torturing detainees in secret prisons like Guantánamo, the idea spread that so-called “no touch” torture is more humane than more conventional methods involving violence to the body. No-touch torture utilizes methods like sleep deprivation, temperature regulation, violation of cultural and religious taboos, the playing of loud music, and psychological manipulation while interrogating prisoners. These methods, though often brutal, frequently don’t leave physical marks, thus nebulizing the concept of torture and leaving the act more open to interpretation.

Music torture at Guantánamo is a prime example of this mindset. Endless news cycles discussed whether waterboarding, hooding, and playing loud music could even be considered torture. Musicians, when asked for comment about “music torture”, sometimes responded dismissively: Metallica’s James Hetfield replied to the news with the comment, “We’ve been punishing our parents, our wives, our loved ones with this music for ever. Why should the Iraqis be any different?” Bob Singleton, who composed the often-used Barney the Purple Dinosaur theme song, wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Would it annoy them? Perhaps … But could it ‘break’ the mental state of an adult? If so, that would say more about their mental state than about the music.”

The implication that these torture methods are somehow softer or easier to withstand than traditional methods is an interesting but dangerous fallacy. In no-touch torture, the torture weapon is the prisoner’s own body, which aches in stress positions, shivers, sweats, and demands sleep. The body itself becomes the enemy, psychologically destroying the prisoner from the inside out.

Read more here

Supernatural Sound: Science and Shamanism in the Arctic, by Tim Fulford

Toolemak’s voice

Scanning the horizon off the coast of Greenland in 1822, William Scoresby witnessed the impossible: floating in the sky was an upside down ship. “It was,” the whaling captain wrote, “so well defined, that I could distinguish by a telescope every sail, the general rig of the ship, and its particular character; insomuch that I confidently pronounced it to be my father’s ship, the Fame.” And this despite the fact that no ship was visible upon the water itself.

“I was so struck with the peculiarity of the circumstance,” Scoresby noted, “that I mentioned it to the officer of the watch, stating my full conviction that the Fame was then cruising in the neighbouring inlet.” Scoresby was correct: the airy phantoms not only resembled his father’s ship but, like the supernatural images seen by those with second sight, were premonitions of it. Scoresby senior’s ship subsequently appeared over the horizon, floating the right way up on the sea.

In the same year, the captain of a Northwest Passage expedition found his ears playing even stranger tricks than had Scoresby’s eyes. Meeting “a few male wizards,” among the Igloolik, George Lyon invited their “principal,” named Toolemak, to demonstrate his magical skills:

[He] began turning himself rapidly round, and in a loud powerful voice vociferated for Tornga with great impatience, at the same time blowing and snorting like a walrus. […] Suddenly the voice seemed smothered, and was so managed as to sound as if retreating beneath the deck, each moment becoming more distant, and ultimately giving the idea of being many feet below the cabin, when it ceased entirely. His wife now, in answer to my queries, informed me very seriously, that he had lived, and that he would send up Tornga. Accordingly, in about half a minute, a distant blowing was heard very slowly approaching, and a voice, which differed from that at first heard, was at times mingled with the blowing, until at length both sounds became distinct, and the old woman informed me that Tornga was come to answer my questions. I accordingly asked several questions of the sagacious spirit, to each of which inquiries I received an answer by two loud claps on the deck, which I was given to understand were favourable.

At length, the “voice gradually sank from our hearing,” Lyon related, only to be replaced by an “indistinct hissing” that reminded him of the tone produced by the wind on the bass chord of an Aeolian harp. This was soon changed to a rapid hiss like that of a rocket, and Toolemak with a yell announced his return. I had held my breath at the first distant hissing, and twice exhausted myself; yet our conjurer did not once respire, and even his returning and powerful yell was uttered without a previous stop or inspiration of air.

Read more here

Sound Mirrors Echo Obsolete Military Technology as Art Installation

Before the invention of radar, the British military experimented with acoustic mirrors as a means of detecting approaching enemy aircrafts. Rather than displaying blips on a screen, these strategically placed parabolic monoliths simply reflected ambient noise from their concave surfaces, making it easier to discern far-off sounds, like the drone of an airplane’s engine.

After learning about the existence of these curiously primitive and imposing pieces of outdated surveillance equipment, which are still standing along stretches of England’s coast, artist Tim Bruniges recreated these interactive objects in a gallery setting. Earlier this year, in an exhibition called MIRRORS at Brooklyn’s Signal gallery, Bruniges installed a pair of 9 by 9 foot sound mirrors that he constructed from wood and concrete with microphones embedded in their center. The sculptures faced each other to create an interactive sound experience for visitors to the cavernous gallery space.

More here

The Acoustics of War, by Daria Vaisman

By the early 1990s, the United States was reassessing its self-image. The major conflicts of the last century—the two World Wars and Vietnam—had, for the most part, already been consigned to history (for a younger generation, they were only more media kitsch). But a protracted Cold War had kept the United States in a defensive posture for decades; now that the USSR had dissolved, the US no longer worried about the threat of a nucle­ar attack. The military wanted weapons that reflected the US’s new international role. What to do? In 1991, the Pentagon issued a directive to test an emerging class of arms: Called "non-lethals," these weapons were meant to disable their targets "in such a way that death or severe permanent disability was unlikely."

Most international policy was, at that point, riot control. The US had become a peripatetic interventionist, dabbling in United Nations sanctions and adjudicating regional skirmishes as if they were protests at a college rally. For an optimistic military administration, non-lethals were the humanitarian antidote to atom bombs. By 1996, the US had invested nearly $37 million in research for non-lethal weapons.

The ideology behind "non-lethal" weapons was not new. Police had used chemical sprays and rubber bullets, to name just two, to quell domestic riots in the US throughout the 1960s. A second-wave of non-lethals were introduced in the Gulf War and then, later, in Somalia in 1994: sticky foams to adhere a person to an object or another person; caustics to dissolve tires and roadways; lasers to disorient and temporarily blind; acoustic weapons that used high-decibel noise to cause pain, or infrasound to cause unbearable nausea. The US had already discovered, while dropping bombs over Vietnam, that sudden, high-decibel noise would deafen people, though this was not what non-lethal researchers had intended. (The 1907 Hague Convention clearly prohibits the use of "arms, projectiles, or materials calculated to cause unnecessary suffering.") But it presented an interesting question: Was it possible to project sound at a precise decibel level that caused pain without permanent ear damage? Furthermore, there was anecdotal evidence suggesting that at the right frequency, infrasound would "liquefy [people's] bowels and reduce them to quivering diarrheic masses."

Read more here

Book: Luigi Russolo, Futurist: Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult, by Luciano Chessa

Luigi Russolo (1885-1947) - painter, composer, builder of musical instruments, and first-hour member of the Italian Futurist movement - was a crucial figure in the evolution of twentieth-century aesthetics. As creator of the first systematic poetics of noise and inventor of what has been considered the first mechanical sound synthesizer, Russolo looms large in the development of twentieth-century music. In the first English language study of Russolo, Luciano Chessa emphasizes the futurist's interest in the occult, showing it to be a leitmotif for his life and a foundation for his art of noises. Chessa shows that Russolo's aesthetics of noise, and the machines he called the intonarumori, were intended to boost practitioners into higher states of spiritual consciousness. His analysis reveals a multifaceted man in whom the drive to keep up with the latest scientific trends coexisted with an embrace of the irrational, and a critique of materialism and positivism.