Rhythmanalysis has provided me with much of my reference-able information, but I feel that one book isn’t a wide enough sample size of references. I’ve been doing some digging for extra source material to give my work a bit of extra context.
The hunt to find other audio-self portraits has turned up nothing that seemed sizeable or popular, only other small student works that seemed as ill informed as my own.
The ‘joy in everyday sounds’ aspect of my work turned up quite a bit of sources.
Meklit Hadero’s TED talk
Above is linked a TED talk by Meklit Hadero, in which she talks about rhythm to be found everywhere. It seems to be an introductory talk, talking to people unfamiliar with sound arts and its existing canon – she mentions Bernie Krause and John Cage, both names are familiar to anyone who has dipped even the merest tip of their metaphorical toe into the ocean of sound arts. However, her musings on listening to rhythms everywhere and finding art and music in the natural soundscapes of daily life seem very relevant to my work. She talks about how, in this context, we are both audience and performer, contributing to the soundscapes around us and existing to enjoy them. The old question “If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” comes to mind here. Perhaps we are simultaneously the tree, the woods and the being who is there to hear it?
I’m writing this list to help myself identify some of the life-rhythms that can be found, to aid with my decision-making in which to include and omit from my sound piece. Which rhythms would I like to highlight and focus on?
Organic
Year/seasons, represented by food? And light? And temperature?
Life, growing up and changing
Hunger, food.
A day
Heartbeat
biological negative feedback loops – homeostatic control
Altering my sound piece to focus more on my own life-rhythms and be less centered around the pleasant sounds around me has led to the realisation that I can no longer rely simply on concrete sounds to bring my sound piece to its logical conclusion.
It has also just occurred to me that I am in need of a title.
I digress.
Recording has begun of other, more textural sounds. I have arbitrarily decided to illustrate waking up in the morning with synthesisers. Falling asleep at the end of the day should also be synthesisers. I would like to illustrate moments in which the rhythms are broken (scrolling through my phone, losing focus on the task at hand, procrastination) with raucous harsh noises, probably heavily processed recordings of the tube (as that would illustrate another rhythm, that of travel. Perhaps I should be illustrating several distinct rhythms instead of an ever growing number? Waking, daily coffee, travel? No, keeping the scope wide enables a good range of sounds, although might obscure the repetition aspect inherent to rhythm? Maybe I should make small sequences of sounds, wake, coffee, travel, cigarettes, food, coffee, travel, cigarette, reading; and then repeat these motifs to illustrate that they are rhythmic in nature? All things to ponder…..)
Nonetheless, I have realised that concrete sounds alone do not suit my purpose, and that is what this blog post is here to say. That will be all.
This self portrait/documentation of my own daily rhythms has involved a lot of very quiet sound sources: unscrewing a Moka pot, the ticking of a mechanical stopwatch, playing a quiet guitar very softly, gentle breathing, clothes brushing together. I started off using an AKG p40 – a large diaphragm condenser mic, and I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the clarity in the top end or the ability to pickup supremely quiet nuances in the sound (I’m not too sure if there’s a name for this characteristic of mics? For example, dynamic mics have a low ability to do this, but the larger diaphragm condensers often are very good at it, and the more modern AKG C414’s that I have access to on campus can sometimes even pick up super low freq rumble from road noise outside the building, completely inaudible to my own ears). I was looking for something more akin to the ASMR tropes of very present top end and a strong, weighty proximity effect. I borrowed a friend’s Sontronics Orpheus microphone for the mid channel of my M/S recording, and that was exactly what I was after – it was delicate and precise, significantly more clear with more ‘resolution’ (I know that it isn’t actually providing more resolution in the technical sense of the word) in the top end, with a less mid-focused sound than the P420. It improved my recordings greatly.
Preamps
I have two types of preamps available to me – those that are built into my desk (a 90s-ish Soundcraft live console) and those built into my interface (a Behringer 10/in 10/out interface). I had noticed that the Behringer pre’s were less noisy and more clear than the Soundcraft ones, but due to the routing of my studio I am running mics through the console into the interface into Protools. Unsure of whether the console would add undesirable noise in certain circumstances, I did some experiments with different amounts of amplification from both preamps and bypassing one or the other to see if there was a balance between the two that suits these types of quiet sources the best, and found that running the console at unity and then doing all of my amplification within the interface worked the best. I found it quite interesting that the console performed well with mic level signals running through its buses, not adding very much noise at all – I would have expected the console to run optimally with amplified signals, but it seems that the worst of the noise comes from pushing the preamps to their limits, and is not inherent to the circuitry.
Upon hearing about my interest in finding rhythms in daily life, Milo referred me towards Henri Lefebvre’s book Rhythmanalysis. I initially thought that it would be primarily about audio rhythms but instead I am finding that its a book grounded in the larger rhythms of life, looking into the nature of repetition and how we live our lives by weaving in amongst rhythms both inherent to existence and constructed by ourselves. This has lent a new perspective to my piece of work, and has inspired me to re-structure the sequencing of audio – perhaps to represent a day in my life, chronologically ordering the recordings to reflect the repetitious aspects of things. The piece seems to be re-shaping from a self portrait derived simply from pleasurable sounds into a work about daily rhythms (both audio and life-based), and I now plan to include a series of harsher, less pleasant sounds as a representation of the unwelcome life-rhythms that I experience.
This talk of life-rhythms has resonated with me greatly, and it feels as though I’m a step or two closer to figuring out what my own happiness is centered around. Taking time to observe the rhythms in play feels like a tremendous reason to be alive. The slow changing of seasons, the way we start our days in our own unique manners, the more complex evolving rhythms of growing older and behaving differently, and the polyrhythms of interaction that occur when coexisting with others. Certainly, it seems to be an easier raison d’etre to explain than the overall peculiarity of existence that I feel is fundamental to my understanding of life (referenced in the blog post titled THE ABSTRACT [or rather, an abstract for the abstract]).
I stumbled across a potential title for this audio paper that is giving me so much trouble:
The Unspoken Agreement, or rather; this is how we’re doing life now.
This is in reference to a subject that I feel is integral to my life but is such a frustratingly difficult thing to explain that it makes me wonder if it’s just blindingly simple and the fact that I can’t explain it very well means that there really isn’t much to it. Focusing too hard on it sort of makes it slip away, like trying to pop a tapioca pearl on a flat surface using only your index finger, whilst both the finger and the pearl are covered in a generous quantity of extra virgin olive oil.
The root of the matter is how peculiar everything is. But examples of this seem to fall short of the mark; I feel that these things are wondrously gleeful and ironic, but I sometimes think that this attributes say more about my own outlook on life rather than intrinsic features of the examples. An example I’ve been providing recently in conversation with people is call centers for tech support; people are employed to work in these places, often at low wages and with bad hours, working in cramped, busy, noisy environments. It is safe to assume that the workers do not want to be there. The customer calling the support line equally despises having to make the call, and would (in most cases) much rather have a comprehensive and well written guide on how to solve their (often tech related) issues. In fact, the call centre worker is often just reading from a handbook and relaying the information back to the customer in real time. Instead of having a simple solution to these issues, we now have a situation where two humans are begrudgingly talking to each other, which I see as a symptom of the unfathomably complex bureaucratic spaghetti that we are drowning in on a daily basis.
***THIS SECTION ADDED LATER***
This blog post has been sitting in the ‘drafts’ part of the site for a couple of weeks now, and I considered deleting it as it seems as though it doesn’t relate to my current feelings about my audio paper – I am still yet to stumble across a simple solution or even a thread of ideas to pull at with regards to the above concept. It also feels supremely dismissive of human thoughts and opinions, casting human emotions as just another pawn on a field of mildly amusing misfortunes about modern living – this, I definitely don’t like. And thus the concept is relegated to a strange limbo, still dwelling in my mind but having no logical conclusion, no satisfying journey of exploration. However, I decided to post it (despite it being an unfinished set of ideas and written in a slightly clunky and quite unsympathetic manner) because it serves as an illustration of my thought processes, and records one of the ideas I considered before landing on the final one.
Skimming over my blog post titled ‘An audio self portrait’ I realised that I hadn’t written much about my motivations for creating a self portrait, so this post will elaborate on that.
This piece of work is intended to bridge a slowly widening gap between me and my work; I’ve been struggling to feel a personal connection to my ‘sound arts’ work, and yet I think that there are a few things that I would like to express within that context (as opposed to a music context, which is a side of my art that I’m now digging my teeth into again). For example, one of these things is the overall peculiarity of life and the sense of quiet amusement that I find almost everywhere in the absurdity of all of the little systems, situations and processes that make up modern living. Another, touched upon during first year, is an interest in liminalism, liminal spaces and what we do with spaces once we no longer have a use for them, leading into some psychogeography research. Figuring out how to express some of these ideas within a sonic context (especially because some of them are not initially grounded in audio, but rather in vague undefined feelings) has proved tough, so the decision to strip things back and create something more personal is one that I hope will fit into my own catalogue of work as a turning point, enabling me to better identify methods of expressing ideas that initially seem scatterbrained.
I see it as a first thread to pull, that will hopefully lead on to more experiments. Following some comments on process made by Milo during Studio Praxis lessons I’ve decided to experimentally readjust my process to be less precious about everything being a means to and end, and rather focusing on being proactive in a manner that will lead on to the next step, following through with these explorations and welcoming that I’ll likely end up somewhere that is distant from my initial ideas. There are many potential routes splaying outwards: there is a certain element of ASMR to some of these sounds that I’ve been recording, there are notes of sound therapy, how sound dictates my purchases and clothing, shoe choice, finding rhythm in everyday life, recording my personality through time, how the space in which I live influences the sound of my life (psychogeography again), and there are probably more elements that I’ve not even noticed yet.
Still definitely struggling to find an essay subject, I had an interesting conversation with a course-mate (Iñaki) about my internal strife. We talked about absurd things, trying to illustrate the absurdity of modern day living and about perhaps researching a phenomenon rather than a cultural scene. Footsteps came up in conversation, owing to my choice of shoes, and I reported that I enjoyed their sound. I was wearing a pair of oxfords, and they make a nice clack when walking on hard surfaces due to their thin, rigid sole. Iñaki mentioned that the sound of heels reminds him of getting ready to leave the house, as his mother would wear heels when going out for dinner etc. The idea suddenly arrived in my head to interview people on the move about their footwear choice, with an additional microphone dangling down to capture both of our footsteps as we walk and talk. This makes use of dialogue (which I identified as a strong contender for an audio paper subject matter) and incidental audio (which I had dismissed, but now seems to be of utmost importance). It also has ties with psycho-geography’s ‘flaneur’ as we would be walking purposelessly, letting the landscape guide us. In this way, it carries on from last years’ experiments and research. It’s also slightly absurd, treating footwear as this supremely important aspect of daily life, and suspending belief to read into how ones footwear infringes on their behavior or confidence. Although, perhaps it isn’t all that far from the truth.
But what questions do I ask? Here are a few off the top of the head:
How many shoes do you own?
Do you enjoy the sound of your shoes?
Do different shoes make you feel or act differently?
To what extent does the sound of a shoe impact your decision about whether to wear it or not?
Are you able to identify friends by the sound of their footsteps? What about family?
Attempting to zero-in on a topic for my impending audio paper has been an arduous task fraught with the echoes of future mid life crises – what am I even interested in? Is there anything that I stand for? What are my politics? Questions like these have chased themselves around my mind with a furious sense of hustle and bustle, but I did make some slight progress, detailed below.
I was musing on the nature of audio papers and in what scenarios an audio paper would suit better than a traditional (written) essay, and I felt that (, personally) dialogue was the most compelling argument for the usage of an audio paper. Consider the following; if you require sound effects or examples of archival audio, you could attach audio files to your written paper to be referred to at certain points within the text. The very nature of these audio ‘examples’ is to interrupt the text, to be focused on between moments of speech. However, conversation and the interactivity of the voice is something that cannot be faithfully simulated within a written body of text. Conversations constantly overlap, people cut off others’ sentences and interrupt, fight for their point to be heard and generally abuse the absurd notion that one line of text comes after the previous line; this is the flagrant lie that is sold to us by transcriptions of conversation.
Of course, I recognise that I’m overlooking many excellent and inspired techniques that could be utilised to brilliant effect in an audio paper context, but I am over-simplifying the matter so as to out-wit this option paralysis that I seem to be plagued with. I find that deceiving ones own mind in this manner proves to be a strong technique in combating mental freezes and erroneous blips in cognitive processing.
So; I have ascertained that conversational interaction will be dear to the heart of my audio paper. However it soon dawned on me that despite this sizeable revelation, I was still no closer to an actual definable topic, and even further away from some sort of conclusion.
(Fig 1.)Global commercial capture of herrings in million tonnes reported by the FAO 1950-2010
In my one-on-one tutorial with Ingrid, she shed some light on the predicament and lent me a nugget of wisdom in the form of (and I paraphrase) ‘you seem to be thinking very introspectively’. This hit home. I was too bogged down in the personal, artistic side of things that I had completely negated to think academically, critically, questioningly (well perhaps I was thinking questioningly enough…). She asked what I was interested in (which set me off again on a whole series of crises, see paragraph 1 for more details) and with some difficulty I brought it back to the basics: surreal absurdism in everyday life, conversational peculiarity, and perhaps a dash of post punk (I’m currently invested in the London post punk scene, closely following it with the excitement of a bloodhound who has just caught smell of a large pile of herring circa. 1982, see fig 1. for more details on herring capture rates in the past 60 years).
Tying these together has been a real tough nut to crack. More specifically, what is the question that I am chasing? What is the topic that I am inquiring into, or documenting? I will be doing some more heavy thinking with less of a focus on self contained brooding, and will hopefully have something to show for it (a 200 word abstract is what Ingrid is pushing for) by next week.
