Lateral Addition aspires to enrich dialogues among contemporary practices in sound — improvisation, computer music, “sound art,” etc. — and other areas of current media and visual art. In order to nurture the growth of these connections, it serves to further elucidate the often esoteric methodologies and thoughts of artists working with sound through original audio material.
Established in 2013, Lateral Addition releases sets of 4 audio and text contributions from an international roster of artists and writers on a bi-yearly schedule.
Lateral Addition on Library Stack
Remote Viewing (2019 - 2021)
Edited by Eric Laska / email
The lockdown in New York began the day after Gryphon Rue and I held what would be our last concert for over a year, though neither of us knew it at the time. We'd been on the verge of canceling the event, as events throughout the city were getting postponed amid concerns over the rapidly spreading new virus, but we ended up performing for an audience of four. Afterward, on our way home through the eerily empty streets of Manhattan, we glimpsed the first signs of the ghost city New York would soon become. The city that never sleeps was finally taking a break.
Over the next two months, I experienced a strange dissonance: everything I was hearing and reading described the world outside my apartment as a breathable death threat, but the view from my window was of life in full bloom. Spring had arrived, the trees on our block were bursting with blossoms, and – unless an ambulance's siren was cutting through the silence, which was often – the uncharacteristically hushed soundscape of Brooklyn had filled with a greater diversity of bird calls than I'd heard in all my previous 13 years as a borough resident.
In my local community of musicians, the onset of Spring was especially dissonant with the fact that we couldn't do one of the things we loved most: sounding together. Online jam sessions felt unsatisfying, so Gryphon and I started scheming ways we could meet in person for socially-distanced musicking. We masked up and brought our musical saws to various Brooklyn parks, brandishing our blades at each other from opposite sides of a bench. During our initial sessions, it was often challenging to hear each other over the wind and other ambient noise, so we began scouting for outdoor areas with good acoustics. Prospect Park, with its network of hilly paths, supplied a series of tunnels which turned out to be perfect rehearsal rooms. Our favorite, Cleft Ridge archway, soon became a popular spot for local musicians who were also looking for ways to sound together.
This audio clip contains fragments of recordings I made in that tunnel, with sounds of my voice and my partner Michael playing tenor saxophone. I had decided to compose a piece that would be staged across a series of locations in Prospect Park, to celebrate the haven the park had become for musicians during those times of sonic isolation. These sounds were my initial sketches. I based the piece on field recordings of local bird calls, as an homage to the birds whose voices comforted me during lockdown by connecting me to the living world outside. After selecting my favorite birdcalls from the recordings, I transposed them to be performed on two euphoniums by Christopher McIntyre and Weston Olencki. Christopher and Weston would follow two predetermined paths through Prospect Park, crossing at different junctures before ultimately converging at Cleft Ridge archway for the final act. The audio here, recorded in the archway, includes some first attempts at imitating the recorded birdcalls, as well as other exercises I asked Michael to perform on saxophone to test the tunnel's resonant frequency. The piece, “Mo(u)rning”, was performed in Prospect Park on the second Saturday in May, 2020, World Migratory Bird Day.
*I recommend listening to this piece with headphones, as I recorded it with binaural microphones.
- MB
“Each person was to become a fleshless envelope, the best possible conductor of social communication, the locus of an infinite feedback loop which is made to have no nodes”
- “The Cybernetic Hypothesis” Tiqqun
Torvald clutched the jagged edge. With one final desperate attempt he pulled himself up onto the rim of the escarpment. His head spun. His vision faded in and out with the labor of his breathing. He lay on his back and groaned, finally breathing deeply, heart rate slowing.
His monitor implant let out a shrill beep. Hastened by the missive he struggled again to stand. His legs trembled. His iter-suit hung in tatters, patches of his exposed skin seared by the var-beams of the algo-blats.
The blats! He spun around peering over the edge, his gaze sweeping frantically across the twisted labyrinth that lay below him. Here and there swarms of the hideous media-blats swooped in and out of the mangled and mind-bending patterns of corridors, arches, stairs, and chamber-ways. He trembled again, remembering what other horrors waited, concealed there in the maze.
His cranial implant buzzed lightly. A trace of his stack-path blinked into overlay on his view; a thin, glowing line marking his crooked trail through the circuit-skein.
His monitor toned it’s shrill signal again. His muscles tensed. He felt a synth-gland release a flood of chemicals into his system. Coursing through his blood, the stimulants washed the pain away. His vision cleared and tightened. A cold gust blew in from behind him. He looked up and around, aware now of the arch above his head. The metal gleamed dully, no seams visible in its unforgiving surface.
Facing away now from the valley behind him he glanced down. His mind reeled, his jaw clenched. The same perplexing plane of skein-circuit stretched out before him. Another buzz in his head, the same trace, rotated now 360 degrees blinked onto his view. He gave a sharp inhale and squinted into the distance and there, at the limit of his sight a ledge rose up above the plain. And likewise an archway peeped through the wall. Was it possible? Was there a figure poised there in the center? A ragged, tense shadow; an echo of himself, gazing out through it’s own arch onto another identical skein-circuit.
The monitor skreeched again in rapid succession. “Initiate skein-circuit cycle engagement.”
Stairs leapt up ahead of him, spiraling down into the valley.
“Stack-trace compulsory completion timing 3.3973 parcels.”
A full parcel faster than the last cycle! In a surge of recognition it dawned on him then. He would complete the feedback loop, faster and faster again; compelled by the algo-blats and node-beasts, fueled and guided by his implants.
A thick mist emitted from the arch, swirling around him. A fresh iter-suit congealed on his form. He lept off down the stairs into the labyrinth, his mind a fleshless envelope.
- LS
Overactive sound
Events weave and unravel
Frayed pulsar threads snap
Pulsar Threads is the latest of a series of works that aim to inject the sound and morphology of pulsar synthesis into my practice while maintaining active continuity with prior work. This music is about 17 minutes long. This music is also about 17 years long, the length of my practice so far of working with different kinds and orders of improvising with an established but still evolving performance ecosystem (1) in ways that are influenced by both early tape works and modern turntablism.
Specifically, Pulsar Threads explores, often simultaneously, buffer scratching, corpus scrubbing, waveform scuffing, live sampling and a range of time-based, spectral and neural transformations of material sourced from the New Pulsar Generator (nuPg) (2). To borrow a phrase from Bolt's work on practice-led research, if there is any magic to be found here, "the magic is in the handling" (3) and concerned with material thinking. This music is characterised by fast moving detail, development and interactions between sound objects and embodied technique to make connections in material through superimposition, stratification, juxtaposition and interpolation.
I love the sound of pulsar synthesis, it can be pushed to so many different kinds of sonic places, but I just can't play nuPg fast enough, or really, I can't play it fast enough with the required precision and agility for creating responsive real-time onset, continuation and closure of sound events at multiple time-scales that cluster and collide then fragment and dissipate, with varied and morphing envelopes, arcs and sharp changes in direction. Maybe I just need to practice more!
Keep's concept of "instrumentalising" is the discovery of the inherent character and opportunities for manipulation of sound in sounding objects (4), and since 2007 I've been working towards instrumentalising high resolution multidimensional surfaces in combination with MaxMSP software and digital sound files in order to achieve rapid gestural and textural transformations of pre-recorded sound files of varied character and differing durations, from milliseconds to minutes. Beginning with a graphics tablet and what has been described as 'mixed sensing' I've explored a range of typical tablet gestures (5) which, together with scrubbing and scratching, include dipping and bowing across different kinds of sampling and synthesis methods and material. Additional interfaces augmenting the system include a USB turntable, pressure and location sensitive pads, and a compact midi controller.
With time the graphics tablet has given way to a multitouch device offering greater opportunity to explore simultaneous contrasts and traversal of timbre and temporalities in material. Different approaches to creating and manipulating sound include sample segment triggering and microlooping, spectral resynthesis, granulation and more. The system uses a range of mapping strategies and design in the interaction of the different DSP layers such as non-linear controller values, and (un)control and unpredictability in the live sampling processes as my attention and intention shifts between simultaneously sounding layers of points, lines and planes in motion. A point might be a moment of pause or a moment of action. A sequence of points forms a line. Massed points create textures of varying density. Lines have a descriptive function as the material trace path of a moving point. Massed lines create shifting planes and curving arcs of lines under tension.
As the system has developed for different use cases or works, it's generally followed Cook's principle of "Instant music, subtlety later" (6). There's an immediacy to triggering sounds, but also a complexity to shaping them, even before we begin to process them. The more I practice the more my 'bandwidth' increases, both cognitively and physically. The performance system here meets a number of Croft's conditions for instrumentality (7). The scale of physical gestures on the multitouch surface affects the scale of audio output in a fine-grained way, the responses of the software outputs are tightly synchronous with my gestures and generally my dsp processes follow or match the energy motion trajectories of the input audio. The relationship between my actions and the computer is (mostly) stable, and for people watching a performance, there's a visible relationship between action, effort and sound.
I've designed in "explorability and learnability" (8), and occasionally 'bug' becomes 'feature'. One example of this is polyphonic voice stealing. Reflecting on some glitching that was the result of too many simultaneous multitouch points and too few available voices I thought, "Oh, OK, increase the voice count", then, after a reflective pause, "Oh, no, leave it, because it gives me another place (distortion, saturation, and stuttering overload) to go". This is playful, what my Raw Green Rust bandmate Owen Green might describe as a decision to not use tools 'properly' (9), but also results in opportunities to create emotionally and expressively charged "highly aestheticised digital bits" (10).
This work also explores processing of sound in ways that my previous work with nuPg material has not. In part, this is a result of working more deeply and regularly with nuPg itself, spending more and better time with it. Having moved from initial exploratory sessions to arrive at informed improvisations with shaped sound output, there's more causal understanding and detailed control of nuPg, leading to a more varied palette of pre-recorded material for further typological and transformational discourse and development of sonic morphology (11).
There's also more extensive experience of improvising with the already improvised outputs from nuPg, in mapping them to surfaces and software processes, in understanding the possibilities for threads of connection and combination in and of material. These performed sounds are then sent to multiple auxiliary destinations for further temporal and spectral processes of stuttering, scanning, freezing and looping, of which, these processes can also send to each other in an extended feedback network. These are all things I've been doing for a long time, just not with this material, and it's that material thinking that is at the centre of this, the tacit 'knowing' that comes through handling materials (and tools) in extended and sustained practice.
Beyond the auxiliary processing, there's a final couple of developments explored here that aren't present in my earlier solo work in any form. The first is the use of the Fluid Corpus Manipulation (FluCoMa) toolkit (12) for corpus based similarity analysis, dimension reduction and clustering of fragments of sound across a series of newly developed multitouch controlled software instruments, creating an interpolation space for highly expressive sounding action.
The same kinds of corpus analysis can be used for live input audio matching, where sound input triggers further sound output that is related to the original material across different descriptors. In addition, this work employs neural style transfer, where sound is resynthesised using the timbral characteristics of a trained model. In this case the model has been trained on an improvisation by saxophonist Franziska Schroeder (13), and I've given myself control of four out of sixteen latent vectors so that I can direct the output character in real-time while keeping sound output roughly proportionate to the energetic characteristics of the input audio
Overall, there's a rich set of possibilities for monophony and polyphony, precision and instability, simplicity and complexity, but all these often conspire to create what Waters would call a "rate of information" (14) problem in my work. I've tried hard here to address this and relax a bit, but one element in particular was gifted to me. Owen has previously suggested that agility might be found in performing with or through uncooperative and failing tools and processes, and in this case nuPg was more or less frozen. All I could do was make a spectral intervention by changing the harmonic structure of a high register metallic drone accompanying regular rhythmic pulses, so I did that, for a long time, and for this release, improvised with and around that recorded improvisation for a long time too.
- JR
(1) Waters, S. (2007) Performance Ecosystems: Ecological approaches to musical interaction. EMS : Electroacoustic Music Studies Network – De Montfort/Leicester 2007 (available online at http://www.ems-network.org/IMG/pdf_WatersEMS07.pdf)
(2) https://www.marcinpietruszewsk
(3) Bolt, B. (2007). The Magic is in Handling. in Barrett, E (Ed.). Bolt, B (Ed.). Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, (1), pp.27-34
(4) Keep, A. (2008) Responsive performance strategies with electronic feedback: Shaping intrinsic behaviours. PhD Thesis, p.29 (available online at https://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/1470/)
(5) Zbyszynski, M. et al (2007) Ten Years of Tablet Musical Interfaces at CNMAT. Proceedings of the 2007 Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME07). (available online at https://www.nime.org/proceedings/2007/nime2007_100.pdf)
(6) Cook, P. (2001) Principles for Designing Computer Music Controllers. Proceedings of the CHI'01 Workshop on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME01). (available online at https://www.nime.org/proceedings/2001/nime2001_003.pdf)
(7) Croft, J. (2007) Theses on liveness. Organised Sound 12(1): 59–66 2007 (available online at http://john-croft.uk/Theses_on_liveness.pdf)
(8) Orio, N., Schnell, N. and Wanderley, M. (2001) Proceedings of the CHI'01 Workshop on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME-01) (available online at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.01571)
(9) Green, O (2011) Agility and Playfulness: Technology and skill in the performance ecosystem. Organised Sound 16(2): 134–144 (available online at https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1017/S1355771811000082)
(10) Rodgers, T. (2003) On the process and aesthetics of sampling in electronic music production. Organised Sound 8(3): 313–320 (available online at https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1017/S1355771803000293)
(11) Smalley, S. (1994) Defining timbre — Refining timbre. Contemporary Music Review, 10:2, 35-48. (available online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07494469400640281)
(12) https://www.flucoma.org/
(13) https://huggingface.co/Intelligent-Instruments-Lab...
(14) Waters, S. (2000). The musical process in the age of digital intervention. ARiADA Texts, 1(1). (available online at https://pureadmin.qub.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/17255926/2000musical_process_libre.pdf)
I’m drawn to the intimate and erotic relationship between the human body and technology in live performances. Starting in 2022, I began exploring the possibility of playing with microphone-speaker feedback and placing contact microphones within bodily orifices to amplify the sound of muscle movement, footsteps, and bone-conducted sounds. After a series of experiments, I started to sonically augment the body - by placing a customized speaker in my mouth to create feedback with a headset microphone and place a geophone sensor within my anus to amplify my body movements, and using a pair of Chinese bass drum sticks to play my body as a drum.
The in-mouth speaker plays back audio samples of gun sounds and is automated to create feedback at specific points in the performance. My mouth filters and mutes the playback samples and creates multiphonics and beatings when singing with the speaker's feedback tone.
The geophone sensor transforms my body into an instrument, incorporating the room into my acoustic body. My position in the performance space, the speaker’s volume, the muscle movements, and the room's layout all contribute to the sound-producing process and change the tone of the physical feedback system, which happens occasionally. The sound is conducted from the subwoofer on the ground through my body to the microphone. Because of these variables, the resulting sounds become intertwined with my relationship to the room through my choreography, which is improvised live. Thus, the audience in the room becomes physically connected with me through the haptic low frequencies.
The resulting solo performance consists of choreographed, ritualistic improvisations that build on ancient Chinese drumming traditions and explore body dysmorphia, self-harm, sexuality, spirituality, and mortality, linking sound, movement, and violence in divine ceremony.
The audio is an excerpt from my solo performance at E-Flux Bar Laika in NYC on January 31, 2024.
- QLL
[ the music of history ]
Tonkin was one of the 5 protectorates of the 'Union Indochinoise', to the northeast and with Hà Nội as its capital. On January 1st of 1882 the colonial governor opened the 'Manufacture d’Opium de Saigon' in order to control the entire opium production in the 'Union Indochinoise' and its sales, financing the colonial regime to a considerable extent. The french exploitation of coal in Tonkin began in 1884. Soon after, 1894 onwards, the private 'Société française des charbonnages du Tonkin' intensified the exploitation in the extended open-pit deposits of Hongay. On June 27th of 1908 Vietnamese nationalists attempt to assassinate French military of the Hà Nội garrison by poisoning their meals, the start of a general uprising in Tonkin to drive out the colonial regime. The strata of image and text in the postcards follow in their economy the economy of power, their 'truth' is a commodity. The postcard with the beheading scene seems to have as its source photographs signed with "Exécution capitale à Quan Yen Tonkin le 7 Mars 1905. (Coll. J. Chinh)" from which the postcard publisher produced postcards with a variety of legends, testing the sales market.
"For the historical index of the images not only says that they belong to a particular time; it says, above all, that they attain legibility only at a particular time. And, indeed, this acceding „to legibility“ constitutes a specific critical point in the movement at their interior. Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each „now“ is the now of a particular recognizability. In it, truth is charged to the bursting point with time. (This point of explosion, and nothing else, is the death of the intentio, which thus coincides with the birth of authentic historical time, the time of truth.) It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation."
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project [N3,1]
- MW ( 2019 - )
These 12 minutes of sound are a combination of a recording of waves and wind at the rocky breakwater beach at Belle Côte in Cape Breton, Canada and a recording of me piling up wood on the porch on the following day in December 2023.
Sometimes we think that to live in the present with no memory is an escape, has a freeing quality.
To be so caught up in the sensuous now that we live completely, completely live.
Sound as sense beyond sense that keeps reminding us of its ongoingness. In and out as quickly as we hear it.
But what’s the way that sounds also maintain or hold us, suddenly point to themselves and to other things?
Everything is piling up.
Memory sifts time’s accumulations.
Sound piles are what must be left out so that we can make sense.
But our little bodies and lives are also records of these forgotten (and never even known) heaps.
Sounds accumulate around us, through us, in us. Neither pure narrative nor pure sensuousness.
There are the sounds we don’t and can’t parse but that still exist in us: a mass, a weight, an unwritable history. The frequency splatter of everydayness.
All around us, there’s this music of amassing, different densities of sound piling up, a relentless sound that is always there, will be there, has been there.
In Derrida, Egyptian Peter Sloterdyk suggests the pyramid is a monument always already built to be a ruin.
"It stands in its place, unshakeable for all time, because its form is nothing other than the undeconstructible remainder of a construction that, following the plan of its architect, is built to look as it would after its own collapse."
A pile of monumental ruins built to be “as it would after its own collapse.” It’s the made unmade just at the edge of composition, improvisation, constructing a life, dying, forgetting.
To record piles of sound is to record nothing much and not do much but hear the sound of the falling monument, simultaneously forgotten and forever.
As I record the sound of moving wood from one pile to another pile, I want to listen to stored energy relayed from one place to another. Armload from the yard pile to the porch pile, from the porch pile to the fireside pile, to the fire, to the atmosphere…
As I listen to wind and breaking waves I want to listen to the meeting-point between air, water, and land, to where solidity falls apart in foam and scribble. Water, rock, sand gets moved. Waves like pyramids. Falling in the very act of their emergence.
I tried to escape composition with these piles—but can’t. I can only begin, and then begin again. No gesture but the poverty of means, of attention, of capability, of memory as a starting ground. Aimless gathering.
And in that?
- JM
As animals with smell, so are humans with voices1
– Anne Karpf
In the summer of 2012 I conducted an exercise called OWN VOICE, consisting of interviews on the perception of one's own voice. After gathering basic information, participants were asked three key questions:
1. Do you like your voice?
2. What do you like (or dislike) about it?
3. Can you describe your voice?
Most interviewees found it challenging to articulate why they liked or disliked their voice. The phrase "I don't know" was a common response. The following are excerpts from six interviews:
- Nataly (19, Spanish): "Yes. I don't know what to say about my voice. I think it's more high-pitched than low, I don't know what to say."
- Jean Carlos (17, Dominican Republic): "Yes, I like it. I don't know, I see it as normal. It's sensual... beautiful."
- Rejep (20, Turkey): "I like my voice. Because I like to sing... and... I don't know what else to say. Not so strong, normal, baritone, male voice... I don't know what to say."
- Paolo (54, Brazil): "Honestly, no. It seems a bit metallic. I don't know, it seems not very modulated, sometimes a bit monotonous."
- Gabriela (17, Spanish): "No (laughs). I don't know! I hear it is very weird. It's very serious (laughs). I don't know! It's very strong (laughs)."
- Alameda (16, Spanish): "Yes. I don't know how it sounds and all. I don't know, sometimes it sounds high-pitched."
After this exercise, questions arise: Why is it so complicated to talk about one's voice? What happens when we speak about our own voice? Why do we lack linguistic resources to describe the voice?
Thomas Trummer's2 statement provides a clue: "Our own voice is our own most trusted familiar, more trusted than our own appearance, for which we at least need a mirror. Although it appears to be so close to us, the voice is in a strange place surrounded by many other voices, and sometimes it gets lost there." And Haytam El-Wardany3 wrote in How to disappear (2013) "Your inner voice is the sound of the external world resonating within you."
The last of the interviews conducted for OWN VOICE was with Valentina, a woman who studied journalism, worked in Chilean radio, is an academic, and an artist. Even she had a bewildered reaction when suggested to describe her voice, and later reflected on it:
Valentina (38 years old, Chile)
1. Yes.
2. I don't dislike it. But the truth is, I've never really thought about what I like about my voice.
3. It's a soft voice, I would say. Mhmmm, yes, I can't think of more adjectives. It's difficult because one doesn't generally hear oneself speaking. I could describe other people's voices, but my own voice is different. The thing is, one doesn't really hear oneself when speaking, I believe.
Talking about one's own voice is a rhetorical peculiarity: it is both the medium and the material of analysis. Qualifying one's own voice is also listening to it cautiously, and in this process, there is something similar to what a signal delay in a phone produces, where the delay increases, and we hear ourselves a little after saying a phrase. Trummer introduces the Voice&Void exhibition catalog with the reflection: “The human voice can say something about itself, and therefore it is a vehicle for speech and, at the same time, its own-reflective commentary, because talking about the voice always takes place in and with the voice."
In Western culture, the process of socialization is mainly carried out verbally. We use the voice as a means of exchange; it is the instrument with which we shape our identity in relation to others, expressing our feelings through it. Guy Cornut4 explains that there are two links that connect the voice with someone's personality: 'the voice as an instrument of self-expression' and 'the voice as an instrument of self-assertion.' The first responds to the need to manifest emotions through crying, shouting, laughing, while the second is explained as follows: 'Every person who speaks tries, to a greater or lesser extent, to have an effect on their interlocutor. The more one seeks to obtain the listener's agreement, for example, to make them obey, convince them, or seduce them, the more a high level of energy is needed, which will translate into a modification of the various characteristics of vocal emission: intensity, tone, timbre, articulation, speed or slowness, associated gestures, etc.'
For Cornut, voice intonations are acts of self-affirmation. The act of 'having an effect on one's interlocutor' is a way of confirming one's presence in a specific place and with a specific person. By expressing through the voice, we reaffirm ourselves in the present, leaving evidence of our connections with others and the environment. This opens the door to considering that the occurrence of human communication (through the voice) circulates in deeply intimate implications, activities that go far beyond the transmission of concepts. Anne Karf writes about the human voice:
'The voice isn’t just a conduit for language, information, and mood: it’s our personal and social glue, helping to create bonds between individuals and groups.'5
That the voice has the power to create bonds between the individual and their community has been exploited in various political and mass communication applications.
However, we also utilize it in personal and ordinary use: every small detail of the voice functions as a link in the everyday seduction between two people.
In 2006 I did an experiment which essentially involved staying silent. I set this goal on a Monday, wanting to see how many days I could go without uttering a single word. At that time, I was studying at the University of Buenos Aires, and this location facilitated the experiment: a foreign city where nobody knew me. The plan was as follows: always carry the exact change to board the bus, arrive a bit late to class, leave as soon as it ended to avoid exchanging words with classmates or the teacher. Bring a snack and eat in the park. Coffee: from a machine, as ordering it would require speaking at the cafeteria. Return home with exact change. Don't answer the phone, only respond to text messages. If I had to leave the house for another reason, do so with headphones on. On the first day, I felt relieved, immersed in an egocentric sensation, yet still content and satisfied. The second day brought difficulties: I began to experience the desire to communicate, to say at least a "good morning," so I started writing: everything I wanted to say went into a notebook. I realized that, although I was not contradicting my initial plan, I was engaging in a dialogue. While writing, I heard my own voice dictating what remained on paper. I also started singing internally and formulating speeches in the way I speak... I mean that, while thinking, I was listening to myself speak, as I usually don't compose my ideas the same way I construct speech; instead, I do it through images, isolated words, some phrases, abstract elements, clusters of sensations. The third day was truly challenging; I started to lose the enjoyment, feeling like an excluded woman. I continued writing in the notebook, and the writing style became more introspective and boring. On the fourth day, Thursday, I broke the rule. I remember how it happened: I was on the bus back home, and a lady sat next to me; winter was just giving way, and that day the sun was setting on Rivadavia Avenue. She said, "Look, what a beautiful day!" Although that statement wasn't a question, and there wasn't much to respond to, I couldn't stay silent. I remember feeling great relief when I heard that lady's voice because, even though her words weren't directly addressed to me, she assumed that I was her listener, her interlocutor; it was a way of including me in her world, in a snippet of her life. That final realization was the most valuable takeaway from the experiment, contrary to what I initially thought I would achieve: a Vipassana meditation-style introspection, where I could enhance inner tranquility. Instead, the result I ended up with was truly different; those three days of remaining silent made me think that speech is an almost necessary human action for perceiving oneself in the social world, evidence of synchrony and nowness.
- APS
—
OWN VOICE was carried out in the summer of 2012 in Barcelona at the Center for Studies and Documentation MACBA. And re-edited in January 2024 for Lateral Addition.
Acknowledgments: Anna Ramos, Lina Bautista, Laura Llaneli, Renato Souza, Valentina, Rejep, Paolo, Jean Carlos, Alameda, Luiga, Rosa Ángela, Joao.
The text is an excerpt from The Softest Voice: an approach to the human voice from the radio voice. Thesis of the Master in Sound Art from the University of Barcelona, directed by Dr. Carmen Pardo, published in 2013 by the author.
1 Karpf, Anne (2006) The Human Voice: The Story of a Remarkable Talent. Londres: Bloomsbury Press. p.11
2 Trummer, Thomas (2007). Voice and Void. At Trummer, Thomas (Ed.) Voice & Void (1a ed., pp. 6-27). USA: The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. p.11.
3 El-Wardany, Haytam, Cómo desaparecer (2013) ñ Press, Mexico City.
4 Cornut, Guy (1983) La Voz. Spain: Fondo de Cultura Económica. P. 70 5 Karpf, Anne. Op. Cit. p.2
5 Karpf, Anne. Op. Cit. p.2
The kernel of ?M Fra* is a set of files that were generated by Marco Pasini’s musika software from a dataset of audio files by Ian M Fraser and myself. Like teratomas — rare tumors that can sprout fully formed teeth, hair, bone, or other somatic structures — the output of this system featured familiar musical figures jutting haphazardly out of a more primitive, inchoate sonic mass. They register less as hybridizations of Ian’s work and mine than as para-musical found objects: stylistic markers from the corpus of royalty-free techno music used to train musika are audible, distended and compressed by the opaque compositional logic of the generative adversarial network, while the timbral dimension was characterized by a fuzzy indefiniteness that gave the impression of distance, that the sound was partially inaccessible due to the interposition of some occluding medium, never fully present but merely overheard in its state of virtual elsewhereness. These files were subjected to various source separation tools, each of which imposed its own spectral gestalt. Although the term source separation implies a genealogical protocol, a retrograde movement toward earlier, antecedent elements, the encounter between the musika products — a sonic object generated holistically rather than by summing discrete instrumental tracks — and the source separation algorithms yields novel entities, false histories ontologically posterior to that of which they are the putative “source.” By recombining stems from different source separation methods, the pattern recognition function of the various machine listening paradigms is subverted: new patterns emerge as a result of the juxtaposition of non-complementary stems, while reciprocal regions are riddled with gaps and spectral remainders.
- RMF
musika by Marco Pasini
demucs by Alexandre Défossez
RAVE by Antoine Caillon
Mastered by A.F. Jones
No Please Stop Don’t
No please stop don’t
please stop no please
stop no don’t stop
please no stop please
no stop don’t no
please stop no stop
don’t please no
stop please no don’t
stop please stop no
please no stop
don’t stop no please
stop please stop
stop no stop don’t
no don’t no stop
don’t please don’t
no stop don’t no
please no stop no
don’t please no stop
stop please don’t
no please no
stop no don’t no
please stop no
please no don’t no
don’t no stop please
no don’t please no
stop please stop
don’t no please no
don’t stop please no
stop no please don’t
stop don’t please no
please stop don’t
please don’t no stop
stop don’t please
no stop please no
don’t please no
stop please don’t no
no don’t no stop
please don’t stop
no please don’t
no please stop
stop don’t please
stop no don’t
please don’t no
no stop don’t
no please don’t
please stop
don’t stop please
don’t no please
please no
don’t no stop please
stop no don’t stop
don’t please stop no.
Need Some Bright Turn
Need some bright turn
turn need some bright
turn need some
some bright need
need turn bright
turn bright some need
some bright some turn
need turn some
some need some bright
some turn need turn
bright need turn bright
bright turn need some
need bright
turn some bright
need bright turn some
turn some need
some turn some need
some need some
turn some turn
bright turn
need turn need
some bright turn
need some bright need
some need some
need turn bright some turn
need bright need
need turn bright
some bright some
need some turn
bright need some
some need
bright need
bright some need turn
turn need bright
turn need
turn bright some need
bright need turn some
bright some bright turn
turn need some turn
some bright
need turn
some bright need turn
some turn
need turn
need bright need turn
need some need turn
turn some
turn
bright some bright
bright turn need
need some need
some need turn bright.
Upon Looking At It
Upon looking at it
it at upon looking
at looking it upon
it looking at
it at looking
upon at looking it
it at
it upon it
looking at it
looking at
upon at it looking
at looking upon
upon it
upon it at looking
upon at looking
it looking at upon
upon looking
at it looking
at it upon
at upon at
at it
it looking
upon it upon
at upon looking
looking upon
upon it at upon it
looking it at upon at
it upon looking at
at it at upon
it looking at upon at
at upon it at
looking upon it at upon
upon looking at
it looking upon at it looking
looking upon at upon it
at looking
it looking it
it looking
it upon
looking at it upon
at it upon looking at
looking it looking
at looking it at
upon it looking
upon looking upon it
at upon it looking it
looking at upon at looking
looking upon at upon
at it upon it
upon it looking it
at it looking upon
at looking.
Yes You Have To
Yes you have to
have you to yes
to yes have you
you yes to
have yes to have
you yes to you
have you yes
have yes to
you yes have to
yes to you have
have yes you to
you yes to have
you to have yes
yes to you have
to you to yes
yes have yes
to you have you
yes you to you
have to you
to have to you
yes you yes to
have you yes
you have to yes
have you have yes
have yes to
you yes to have
you have yes
to you to
have you to have
have yes you
to have to yes
yes you to
have yes
to have yes
to you to
yes you have you
yes have
you yes to you
have yes have
yes you to you
have to yes you
have you have
yes have yes you
yes to you have you
yes have to you
to have yes
to have you
have to yes
you to you have
yes have to yes to
you have
have yes you to.
I’m So Very Mad
I’m so very mad
so mad I’m
mad so I’m very
very I’m so very so
mad I’m mad
I’m very so mad
very mad so I’m
mad very so
so mad I’m very I’m
mad I’m so very
very so
I’m so I’m
so I’m very I’m
mad so
so very mad
mad I’m so
so I’m mad very
I’m mad so I’m so
so very I’m very so
so I’m so very so
mad I’m mad so
I’m very
mad I’m so I’m
so mad I’m mad
very mad so
I’m very so
very so I’m
so mad very
very I’m so I’m
so mad so
so very mad
so very so I’m mad
I’m so mad so very
I’m very mad so mad
I’m mad
so I’m mad
I’m very so I’m
mad so
mad very
I’m very
so mad I’m very
so very I’m so very
mad I’m very so
so I’m
I’m
very so mad am very
very mad I’m very so
so very mad very I’m
mad I’m mad I’m very
mad I’m so mad so
very so very
mad so very I’m so.
Have Been Going Again
Have been going again
going again been have
been have going again
have been have going
been going have going
again going have been
been have going been
going been going have
have going have been
going have been have
going been again have
have again been going
been have going have
have been have been
been going been have
been going been going
going have going have
have going been
been have going again have
going have been going
been have
going again have been have
again have going again
been again going
again going again been
again having been going again
have been going
going again have again
have going again going
again been have again
been again have
going been again
have been
have going again been
again going have going been
been again have going
going again
have again going been have
going been going been
been
going have
going been
again going been have
have
have again been
have again going been again
again have been
again going have again
going again have going
been again going have
again going have going
have been again.
What happens when the ear is presented with ten independent melodic lines? Or twenty? Or a hundred? In a series of sonic-perceptual experiments over the past few years, I’ve found that beyond about eight independent melodic lines, we lose the capacity for perceptual discrimination and begin to hear nothing but mush. But if we go further still (between about 20 to 50 lines) one of two things happens: either we hear more mush (I.e., noise), or something clicks and the ear begins to gestalt things into groups. Et voilà: melodic-like shapes begin to emerge from the morass.
Our auditory systems are constantly doing this kind of analytical work. They do it every time we hear a phoneme or a note, for example, by fusing the many spectra into a cognizable thing. We also do it when we listen to music, separating out the various layers (drums, bass, guitar, and voice in rock music, for example).
Even so, I am surprised every time it happens: when going beyond about 20 lines yields something new, something with a kind of cognizable shape. Usually in a way that’s quasi-improvised (and using some kind of pitch set or simple harmonic motion), the shift from ten incoherent lines to the uncanny popping Gestalts of 40 lines takes my breath away. When it happens. It often does not, and I end up with something ragged and ugly that I erase immediately. Part of what I’m working on now is understanding what works and what doesn’t. The little audio piece in this Lateral Addition issue was my first ever attempt with this compositional process. (I recorded it in my lockdown living room on the 2nd of April, 2020.) Since then, I’ve done many other pieces, and I have advanced the process quite a bit, but there’s something about the freshness of this first attempt that I still find perceptually thrilling.
In the version here, I’ve attempted to make something out of the little fragment of 20+ independent melodic lines. My friend and collaborator Jim Sykes plays wonderfully chaotic drums over the thing.
I see this attempt as part of an approach to music composition (and to music generally) that I call perceptualism. The claim of perceptualism (and I will elaborate on this soon in various places) is that Western music has historically been divorced from questions of perception. This is so both in terms of making music (composition, performance, etc.) and theorizing music. But what do I mean when I say that music is divorced from questions of perception? Surely musicians care about nothing other than how the sound they produced is perceived? And surely academic types do nothing but try to explain how music is perceived and how it affects listeners? To some extent, yes, these assumptions are true. But we also know that historically Western music has had a deeply idealist or even mathematical thrust. Pythagoras’ hammers were merely abstractions rather than sounding bodies. The birth of “modern” instrumental music ca. 1800 also traded primarily in abstractions: of pure and organic form. The listener is often less than an afterthought.
I propose a perceptualist music: an approach to music making that engages questions of auditory perception directly.
I said that Western music has historically been divorced from questions of perception. What I have in mind can be expressed if we split that history into several trajectories.
If we take these three trajectories as broadly paradigmatic of the main poles of Western music history, we see that perception is not an issue.
There was a moment in the 1960s and 70s when Western music took a near perceptualist turn. Buoyed by ethnographic analyses of non-Western music (especially East African and Indonesian music), the composer Steve Reich, the music ethnographer Gerhard Kubik, and the psychologist Albert Bregman simultaneously and independently developed Gestalt (or Gestalt-like) theories of perceptual grouping in music. Similar ideas, perhaps less ethnographically-oriented, are evident in work by Maryanne Amacher and James Tenney.
My compositional work takes stock of this moment in music history, trying to recuperate it and radicalize it. All I really want to do, at least at this stage, is to make music that sounds genuinely interesting. No theorization can produce interesting-sounding music, but at the same time I feel that we have tried too long to make interesting-sounding music without sufficient theorization. Beginning on a perceptualist footing is, I believe, a step in one possibly fruitful direction. We have many possible places to look in the past to help us, should we wish to. If not, we can continue making music that either offers itself nakedly, or is totally indifferent, to the listener. (The third option, which I believe is possibly the one taken by many interesting composers today, is to intuitively find some middle-ground. But intuition may have run its course.)
I don’t think I have succeeded in any very substantial way with this study, and I recognize the mismatch between the grandiose claims of this text and the slightness of the music. That said, perceptualism is not one thing, and I see this LA posting as an invitation to further creative exploration in this area.
- GS
The following audio-work is my first attempt of a sound (or tuning in) meditation, without using verbal language. I have been looking for ways to reduce discursive elements as much as possible for such a practice, as I am in an environment where most of the people around me have a different mother tongue.
I also think a sound meditation is both an empirical and intimate experience, and I often struggle to find the right terminology conveying my own auditive experiences.
This piece is called « Tuning In » as it is meant to be an introduction to a solo violin program I am releasing as an album next year. Before the music starts I wanted to propose a moment for the listeners at home to « clean their ears »* from daily life’s rumble (I am speaking from a city-life perspective), so they can be receptive to music again.
At first, I wanted to use sea sounds entangled with violin fragments. But two « technical » issues occurred to me : I don’t live close to the sea, and I am not a skillful field recorder.
I then tried to recreate a seascape with tools I felt comfortable with: a violin, a bow and a laptop.
*I recommend listening to this track with headphones, taking the time to adjust the volume as necessary.
- CL
In 2019 I began composing a series of pieces based on permutations of musical pitches. Starting with eight numbered pitches, I created a few simple rules and began sketching out “riffs” or — if you want to be fancy about it — “tone rows”. There are two voices and the music is primarily in octaves, although at certain points the “algorithm” flips and new pitch relationships are established. Eight pitches allow for 40,320 possible sequences. An alternate version of this piece might be to play through every possible permutation. It would take some time to get through them all, so it might be better to just imagine it. The present recordings were made with electronic oscillators, but this music could theoretically be performed on any two instruments.
- NH
Schema I-IV individual tracks in playlist
Schema III
86754231
85746231
84736251
83724561
83726145
85674132
84567321
86571324
76123458
75468231
74326518
74682513
73518426
72315846
75314268
76843125
68531247
67421358
64587231
61254873
61345872
62513748
62143758
63251784
58671423
58764321
51328476
52341867
53847261
53476812
57648123
54637281
48625713
42156873
41325867
45683712
42613578
43517268
46781253
47658312
37654812
34587612
31247568
31247658
35126487
32465871
36154827
32187645
21436578
28674513
28374615
26847531
28467315
23584716
24315876
25786314
15237468
14687532
12583674
13264857
18726345
17853246
13246578
12345678
wood, water, stone, metal
some questions:
working with objects in states of transformation, something moving or being moved slowly toward becoming something else, how do we listen to industrial and elemental entanglements?
places understood as nature are often sites of intervention. when and where does an ethical aesthetics of intervention begin and end?
in a coastal forest after it burns, at an oxygenated lake being overgrown by algae,
outside a cement plant at the edge of a quarry, what sense of duration do we perceive?
what changes occur when we listen within and when we listen without?
a note:
a background in percussion and improvisation informs my approach to field recording and working with sounding objects. this work is both documentation and interaction.
kevin corcoran, 2022
In March 2021, after two silent years of pandemic, I began collecting chants from around the world for my new acousmatic work. Exhausted by the long period of isolation and lack of contact, my artistic goal with this project was to bring together the voices of people from different countries, cultures and religions and unite them in my musical composition. In the promotional video I posted on my social media channels, I asked for audio recordings with a smartphone and received 26 songs that I used as source material for the piece. The audio files ranged from intimate solo recordings made in a bedroom, to polyphonic folk songs and chants professionally recorded in a studio, to songs accompanied by various instruments. As I listened to the recordings, I realized that my task as a composer was to find ways to connect the voices that were recorded in different acoustic environments, with different keys, tempos, and languages, and to create a sound world in which they could all coexist. Considering the time in which the recordings were made and the work was composed, I consider this piece a collective prayer, hence the title ლოცვა (Lotsva).
The first version of the piece premiered in Oslo on September 9 and subsequently toured other Norwegian cities and international festivals. In the meantime, I kept receiving new recordings, so I added a new contribution from a different country at almost every performance. The final version of the piece was presented at Kulturkirken Jakob as an 8-channel sound installation as part of VoxLAB VårFEST.
- MG
Mastering: Balint Laczko
Format: 2D Ambisonics / Binaural
Duration: 16 minutes
Year of composition: 2021
Commissioned by Ny Musikks Komponistgruppe
Contributors:
Annie Björkman, Sweden
Aine Eva Nakamura, Japan
Heidi Skjerve, Norway
Line Souza, Brazil
Gyrid Nordal Kaldestad, Norway
Nigar Gahramanova, Azerbaijan
Åshild Hagen, Norway
Katy Pinke, Israel
Supriya Nagarajan, India
Zosha Warpeha, USA
Silva de Waard, Netherlands
Zoe Perret, France
Verena Merstallinger, Austria
Diego (surname anonymous), Argentina
Tamo Nasidze, Georgia
Falk Rößler, Germany
Ensemble IALONI, Nino Naneishvili, Georgia
Elvic Kongolo Birkebein, Congo
Małgorzata Olejniczak, Poland
David Zurabiani, Georgia
Sajidah Ahmed, Bangladesh
Andrea Silvia Giordano, Italy
Balint Laczko, Hungary
Marija Astromskaitė, Lithuania
Diana Serrao, Portugal
Christopher Manning, US