ZenGlop

Look! A Blue One Floats By... (for solo piano)

 

 

Look A Blue One Floats By by Andrew Kaiser

I remember a dream.  I am underwater, in a domed city populated by small, enigmatic creatures ambivalent towards me.  The dome collapses, and I find myself compressed, swirling, exploding for lack of breath deep beneath the surface.

Then a whale - huge, enormous, blue - approaches me.  He swims next to me, I recall vivdly the eye scanning me.  A warm, dark brown eye.  With the mass of his body, the Whale protected me from the furies of the ocean, and guided me to the surface where I could breath again.

I started to write a piece, which ended in a drawer for three years.  I restarted the piece, believed it finished and moved on.  Two years later, I have finished it.  This time period corresponds quite clearly with my engagement with psychotherapy.  I may not yet be done with this piece.

Urlicht (Mahler) for Piano

A piano transcription of the 4th movement (Urlicht) from Mahler's 2nd symphony.   (PDF score available at http://zenglop.typepad.com/zenglop/download.html)

Music that is Impossibly Loud and Unbearably Silent: notes and video

(video part two is also available on YouTube)

early images (a vision?) ...
Music that is Impossibly Loud and Unbearably Silent came out of an earlier inspiration where Lowry, Jonathan and I were at an event on the NASA Ames research facility, waiting for the performance of ‘I See the Earth’.  We were sitting in a hangar large enough to have housed the space shuttle, looking out at the mountains framed by an art deco entrance way.  The buildings at Ames feel like egyptian temples and giant cabaret dance halls:  there’s also a Zeppelin storage area - now empty - that has the impact of a breaching whale.

The mountains mixed with a roar of jet engines, the real stuff loud and fast and agile.  Sexy.  The place cried out for large scale images, music of immense proportion, gigantic scale, enormous gestures.  One idea, a 20 mile mylar pipe balanced on a fulcrum between the doorway and the mountain view for which the place has it’s name.  A second:  seven jet engines arranged at intervals around the landing fields, each pilot generating controlled revolutions (or whatever measurement makes sense in a jet engine) such that an overlapping sequence of harmonics would be created.  

It would be a magnificent piece, perhaps with powerful lasers shot into the sky, creating unfolding petals in the night with  this unimaginable annunciation of sound exploding  on the ground.  

Our piece came and went, as did we, followed soon by the inspiration.  What we had been referring to as ‘That Jet Engine Piece’ languished, not forgotten but identified as one of those concepts  better to talk about after a few drinks on an easy Saturday afternoon. Besides, I can only imagine how resistant NASA would be to the misuse of their finely tuned engines and the pilots who run them.  (Turns out, they would be right to worry given the eventual destruction of my Subaru...

something happens...
 The years passed.  One afternoon I was waiting at a bus stop in Pittsburgh.  (Grant and 5th, for a route to Oakland and the CMU campus). I was using my iPhone to listen to Spiegel im Spiegel, for cello and piano written by Arvo Part.  I was obsessed with the purity of the piece, and was listening to nothing else.  It was an early summer afternoon, following a short Spring and an extraordinary extension of brutal winter.  The sky opened with heavy rain, and I stood beneath the mostly  adequate protection of my umbrella.

When the wrong bus pulled up, I strained outside to follow the music on my headsets.  All I could hear was the Port Authority diesel - a lesson in Zen Ears:  what could I hear, what was I hearing, not what I expected or desired to hear.  The effort of following this un-hearable music was a lush, gorgeous experience.  It  pulled my heart apart, it dragged me to reminiscence and nostalgia.  The erasure of the structure that I knew was there created a void, a negative space that felt rich and ripe.

I don’t think it was an accident that this experience happened while listening to Part.  His music creates a highly formal space, open to elaborate ideas and processes, but constructed from the lightest use of musical materials.  In  a 1997 interview with Bjork and Part (part of a BBC series on Minimalist composers), Bjork asks “...question and answer the different voices inside your music almost like Pinocchio and the little cricket:  one is human and always doing mistakes and the little cricket is like comfort”.  Part responds “ I’m very happy...it is really so.  This style consists of two ways, two sides so that one line is my sins and another line is forgiveness for these sins.”

I thought back to the original idea at Ames.  I thought two things.  First:  I could not wait until I had access to seven jet engines.  I would take this vision and realize within whatever constraints existed.  Second:  I realized that there needs to be a sonic event on the inside of ‘That Jet Engine Piece” which is known to be un-hearable. That sonic event should be of extreme beauty.  Thus the title of the piece took shape:  an impossibly loud structure around a piece of beauty whose ‘un-hearability’ was unbearable.  

to be written...
 I resolved to write a piece of exquisite form, and to call upon the resources I had at hand.  I could not allow the unavailability of military weapons to prevent me from realizing this  structure.    I rejected the  idea of a proposal to Port Authority to borrow seven of their buses for an afternoon - I couldn’t wait, and besides, there seemed to be an important lesson emerging, something along the lines of demonstrating commitment to a vision, to the subconscious forces.  Those forces didn’t seem to care about the details of realization, nor did they exhibit concern about the difficulties of manifestation.  Not for them the excuse of a bottom drawer filled with un-submitted manuscripts.  This was an event that had to happen.  

(This is not the only way in which the piece is different from anything else I have written to date.)

I was surprised by the  response I received from a simple status post  on Facebook  - and also by how easily I could explain the project.  I would  gather Drivers together.  They would learn a few simple hand gestures that I would use to direct the sounds of their engines.  My wife Kathryn would be in the center, singing a song that nobody should  hear.  Drivers included Nick Williams (in the family minivan), Diane Bronowicz (in what I think was a PT Cruiser), Lowry Burgess (in his wife’s beautiful new car), Maria Stoy (driving my Subaru), and Sam Stoy, in his rusty Pathfinder.  Jonathan Minard put together a crew of videographers and sound technicians.

Everything was in place, except the location.  I considered a spot down by the river, on the Monongahela by an abandoned glass works.  Suitably poetic mix of water, land and industry, but difficult to access by vehicle.  I was also unclear on the legal status of the land, and couldn’t stomach the prospect of law enforcement ( or worse, Pinkerton’s) showing up and questioning my activity.  

on the day...
We ended up beneath the 16th street bridge, on the north side of the Allegheny.  I had noticed the parking lot, empty during the week and likely to be ignored on a Sunday afternoon.  A trucking business made up one side, an empty church along another, and the riverside trail on the third.  Access was easy from the bridge, which itself is a striking backdrop to the cityscape.   Time, place and actors were set and established.

 
 

Now:  the reader may doubt that the event ever took place, just as they may doubt whether Kathryn is really singing anything at all, let alone a piece of heart-rending delicacy.  You aren’t supposed to hear the song - does it matter if a video exists to prove that this happened?

The event needed to happen.  But this written summary is enough to capture the experience.  I tell you that a piece was un-hearable, what does  that mean?  Is it different if you had been there to not hear it?  

At the same time, it all looked very cool, and I did hope that the Loud Structure of the engines would be an engaging experience in it’s own right.  If there was a taste of the visionary about the piece (sprinkled with a dash of Arvo Part for seasning) , then there was also a mug of frothy Futurism on the table.    From the Futurist Manifesto:

”We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds."

I didn’t have all that, but I did have a bridge and some combustion engines.  The logistics on the ground threatened to devolve into a jumbled parking lot.  I drew a diagram for the Drivers, reproduced here:

 
 

program notes...
 The idea was that I would walk around the circle of cars three times.  On the first walk, I would point to each Driver, and they would turn on their engine, leaving the engine to rumble out of gear.  I would then walk a second time, providing hand gestures to more more precisely direct the RPMs of each car.  The sound structure would then be in place, and Kathryn would sing.  At the end of the song, every Driver would take their foot off the gas, and I would walk a third time directing Drivers to switch off the engine.

By the time the second car had revved up,  I couldn’t tell anything about individual RPM, and drivers would just have to rev up and hold.  I talked to Diane afterwards, and she said that regardless of what I had done with my waving arms, she’d just floored it.  

The score calls for something like an English horn to accompany the voice.  In the spirit of using what was at hand, we decided to have voice and mandolin.  I wish I could tell you what the song is.   I’ve never heard it sung myself, although I’ve been told that our daughter did once overhear a practice session.  The video of Kathryn singing is great:  there’s a snippet where it looks like she’s either tuning the mandolin, or perhaps just seeing if it’s making any sound at all...the  cars really did fill the space with a sonic gesture that was solid to the touch.

Towards the end of the song, you will see Kathryn look with alarm over her shoulder, and then shake her head.  This is to tell Maria *not* to try  and restart the Subaru, which had come clattering to a stop.  Further inspection by trained mechanics resulted in a new engine - I will not accept that art required such a sacrifice.

 
 

next...
 The idea of musical erasure, un-hearable sound, the empty noise of silence, is one that I wrestle with in other pieces.  How do you erase sound?  Until this, I had looked for electronic solutions.  My next piece in this set is for Hurdy Gurdy and Freight Train.  I will sit as close to the track as possible, play a drone and melody on my Hurdy Gurdy while a freight train emerges from the distance, blocks all sound, and then recedes to leave a shattered and empty sound space.

I may look to realize the same Impossibly Loud structure using different types of engines - maybe the Port Authority would be interested in a piece of public art?  Perhaps NASA will come around?  Maybe with the decommissioning of the shuttle program, I could arrange several unused launch engines over a 10 miles span.   Controlled thermonuclear explosions across the southwest desert?

I also see that one solution has suggested many new questions.  Something magical happens when sound is presented in counterpoint to a specific location.  Perhaps this will evolve into a ‘musical’ idiom where the shapes previously generated  as waves in air will instead be passed as energy through another medium?  Water, earth, air, electromagnetism all strung on a single Lyre.

 

Quiddity: a distancing perspective, an elemental definition, an object of Psychogeographic meaning

Human activity etches meaning onto the landscape, which is then later excavated through Psychogeographic activity.  ‘Landscape’ has meaning, and ‘The Landscape’ has meaning.   The word itself  has a meaning, and the expanse of space described is also redolent with meaningfulness.   I derive the concept of a Quidd as a unit of Psychogeographic meaning.

 

Vladimir Nabokov used the word Quiddity in a description of Lewis Carroll:  thus, from Strong Opinions (p.183) 

“ Alice in Wonderland is a specific book by a definite author with its own quaintness, its own quirks, its own quiddity.  If read very carefully, it will be seen to imply, by humorous juxtaposition, the presence of a quite solid, and rather sentimental world, behind the semi-detached dream.”  

Nabokov is using  Quiddity to describe a special ambience, the ‘real’ as a lure for the exotic spaces of the brain.   He also describes in Pale Fire “ “my vision reeked with truth.  It had the tone //  The quiddity and quaintness of its own //  Reality.”

In scholastic philosophy ,  Quiddity  identifies the ‘whatness’ of an object, vs Haeccity, or the ‘thisness’ of an object.  Quiddity is the Class, while Haeccity is the Instance, to steal some jargon from my Object Oriented Programming friend(s).  A cup of tea described by George Orwell, against this specific cup of tea upon which my morning depends.    

These concepts are adumbrated (by the luminosity of the modality, no doubt) when James Joyce writes ( chapter 14 of Ulysses p. 394) 

“And as no man knows the ubicity of his tumulus nor to what processes we shall thereby be ushered nor whether to Tophet or to Edenville in the like way is all hidden when we would backward see from what region of remoteness thewhatness of our whoness hath fetched his whenceness”  (My italics)

I had to look up most of this sentence.  Ubicity is ‘whereness’, perhaps the Ontology of place - I’ll have to check with my Heidegger-reading friends (are they the same as the Object Oriented Programmer acquaintances?).  A tumulus is an ancient burial mound.   Tophet is a location of old testament child sacrifice:  Edenville appears to have associations beyond the biblical garden.    Nobody knows the where (or when) they will find their grave, or the manner (whatness)  of life that will precede it following the accident of birth.

Later entries in the  Oxford English dictionary define Quiddity as a  legal mater of hairsplitting distinction.  And from there, it seems an easy step to crotchety, eccentric and possibly just a little bit mad. 

But in between, William Blake uses “Quid” as a character in An Island in the Moon - this Quid is a regular sort, a common chap, a fella about whom Blake says he was “ chewing his Quid of Bitterness”:  quid refers to the bloke as type and as name, as well as to the chump of chaw he was chewing on.   

Martin Amis refers to Quiddity in Time’s Arrow.  The retro-traversing heroic conscience describes his bodies' experience (p.49) in a crowd as 

“with rapture and relief he elides with the larger unit, the glowing mass.  He sheds the thing he often can’t seem to bear:  his identity, his quiddity, lost in the crowd’s promiscuity.”   

Quiddity in these later writings has evolved  to something  equal to the innermost essence of a character.  That  essence is arrived at through the distillation created by distance:  the ‘humorous juxtaposition’ that Nabokov refers to.   In  the Amis piece, that distance is  rendered through the explicit fact of the man’s ‘identity’ watching the previous events of  his  life unfold backwards, contained within his body but unable to do other than watch.   The patterns of life that we take for granted (eating, emptying our bowels, making love, the shape of a relationship, birth, death)  are imbued with magic - the novelistic perspective allows us to perceive Quiddity.

This perspective is essential for the poetic apprehension of Quiddity - which after all, is the Psychogeographic stance.   ‘Distanced’ - whether by time, nostalgia or raw liquor - is the Psychogeographic perspective.   Auden writes, in The Crux left of the watershed 

Who stands, the crux left of the watershed, 

On the wet road between the chafing grass

Below him sees dismantled washing-floors, 

Snatches of tramline running to a wood, 

An industry already comatose, 

Yet sparsely living. ...... 


The poetic placement gives the watcher (the stander) a perspective on the lines where land meets lane     It is the perspective that allows the watcher to see the patterns of the land, etched in by natural forces and by the technological manipulation.  In the earlier  quotation from Ulysses, Joyce had the whatness/whereness  available only when we can “...backward see from what region of remoteness...”

The view in Auden’s poem  is of  a landscape that has been given rough treatment in sketch and tone.  The land itself is ‘cut off, will not communicate’.  What remains are the memories of human life, physical corpses and the debris of our industrial activity.  These totems litter the land, and now shape the actual landscape as powerful as ley lines or geologic formations.  Perhaps inseparable fro them, part of the ancient access paths to archetypal connection.

The same Quidds also reflect our own preoccupation and inner psyche.  These preoccupations are the  poetic gestures of quiddity.  And clearly Quiddity is an accumulation of awareness, literary, historical, idiosyncratic.   That process is an odd one, a poetic process, a process of Poesis.   Quiddity is a creative mechanism, an outpouring of imagination:  a romantic  overlay of internal psyche and external landmarks. 

A Quidd is the psycho-geographical insight into  a man-made artifact that resonates/casts a shadow of meaning on the landscape around.  A quidd is an object around which the human psyche has deposited meaning - a measurement of Psychogeographic value functioning like carbon decay in reverse. 

In London Orbital, Iain Sinclair writes about the bridges of the M25... his walk around the M25 is many things, but it is also an act designed to extract the Quiddity from the landscape.  He writes of exorcism, Thatcherite ghouls and Blairite meanies:  as if his walk pulls the ancient strength of the land, the alternate reality, the Quiddity of the place.  The M25 forms a loop around London, and as such must  cross the Thames twice.  The language Sinclair puts in place is a good example of a poet extracting quids: (p.252/253)

“ On the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, road dominates.  The tidal Thames is unwalkable, unswimmable, impossible.  Literally suspending disbelief, to drive over the broad span of water, as it opens (storage tanks and container ships) to the World Ocean, marks you.  You die into what you see.  You purchase vision at the expense of mortality.  You relish the play of cables as they flick against riverlight.  You feel younger, stronger, elevated by a section of motorway that isn’t motorway:  the only point in the circuit where imagination overrides the M25’s compulsive reductionism”

Sinclair also brings in (p.164) the writing of J.G.Ballard, especially his seminal work  Crash.

“ J.G. Ballard came to Watford to make a television documentary called Crash! which preceded his notorious auto(mobile)erotic novel by two years.  “There are an enormous number of multi-story car parks in Watford...it’s the Mecca of the multi-story carpark.  And they’re quite ornate, some of them...they were iconic structures.  I was interested in the gauge of the Psychoarchitectonics”.

That phrase, “Gauge of Psychoarchitectonics”,  means I think something very similar to my Quiddity:  Quidd as a unit of Psychgeographic measurement, Quiddity being  the correct measurement of insight.  Psychogeography is the uncovering patterns, a kinaesthetic connection to body, land and cosmos.  The valence of this activity is the Quidd.

notes on keynote address at UNESCO forum "Music as a Catalyst for Dialogue and Communication"

Sound as Cultural Dialogue

by Andrew Kaiser

written for “Music as a Catalyst for Dialogue and Communication” 
an International Forum in celebration of the UNESCO International Year for Cultural Raprochement,
28 June 2010 

Organized by Melody for Dialogue Among Civilizations Association in collaboration with UNESCO, and the Arts Arena, American University in Paris.

Why is sound such a pervasive and effective mechanism for expressing human meaning.  Can we identify a generic morphology of sound structures used cross- culturally?  Will  the articulation  of these ideas lead to a pathway for a new paradigm in  cultural activity that is based on truly global gestures?  Following a brief discourse on the nature of sound, this paper will present theory for a new paradigm, and will describe significant creative works  and research projects influenced by these ideas.

There is not a culture on the globe (within space) or across history (within time) that has not privileged the experience of music.   Plato thought sound so important that his Republic would carefully control access to the skills of music production.  In the  Australian aboriginal creation myth, the sound of the didgeridoo calls forth Dreamtime, the scared condition of evolution.  In the contemporary - increasingly globalized -  world, we are familiar with music as entertainment, both trivial and profound.  Even cultures that do not specifically have a concept of ‘music’ do refer to prayer and chant.

Discourse on the nature of sound

Sonicism is a series of concepts developed to place a systematic some framework around the discussion of human use of sound.  Sonicism is a poetic structure, based on observation and inclination, with important ramifications.  Sonicism can be defined with the following statements, which this paper will discuss in detail:

• A Waveform in one medium holds meaning in second
• Sound represents the interstice of physiology and cosmology 
• Experience is a standing wave, a habit of creation and it’s creature
• Corollary:  a Morphology of Human Sound Use
• Directive:  towards a newly Global aesthetic (Exospherics)

Sonicism: A Waveform in one medium holds meaning in a second

Music is sound, and sound is a wave formed in air, received by the carefully evolved physiology of our bodies, passed through the nervous system to the brain and then  interpreted by  the brain and psyche to produce meaning.

Because the sonic object is a wave, it can be represented as a mathematical pattern.  Fourier analysis is a technique for representing complex waveforms:  Fourier’s mathematical insight was that a complex waveform could be shown as the combination of many simple waveforms (sine waves) at particular frequencies.  The analysis would assume that the waveform is unchanged over time:  since that is not the case with most waveforms, either in music or in other fields of study, we refer to a secondary analysis known as Short-Time Fourier Transform.  STFT establishes ‘windows’ of time and ‘buckets’ of frequency.  In any given instant/window, a particular collection of sinusoids can de defined.   The  next window represents a new collection,  and so over time the picture of a piece emerges.   The output of this analysis can be graphed, with changes in Frequency  and time graphed on the y and x axis.  Amplitude is captured on the z-axis with different shades of colors reflecting the ‘loudness’ of each wave.  

As an example, the following graph represents a 4 minute sample of Tibetan monks singing in their distinctive bass overtone style:


 Additional information can be reviewed by taking a closer look at a 10 second sample:


 It is very important to be able extract the experience of the sound from out of the superficial elements that define the cultural apparatus of composition.   The following two charts show a 10 minute song from a Humpback Whale, and the 4th movement of Gustav Mahler’s 2nd Symphony.  It is less important that we know which one is which than it is that we are able to work towards understanding the sonic gesture outside of the producing culture.

  
 
 

Sonicism:  sound represents the interstice of physiology and cosmology.

The body is extremely sensitive and receptive to sound waves, and so acts as an intersection between the landscape, and the sky.  Our understanding of waveforms as represented in sound provide an understanding of  other environmental structures that are also defined as wave structures.  This is a horizontal alignment.  The medium of sound provides an interface between our consciousness, and the landscape around us...events such as Seismic activity, the movement of the oceans, and atmospheric phenomenon.

The use of sound within human culture also represents a human understanding of larger, electromagnetic structures in the cosmos.  The body enlivened by sound is drawn towards the sky.   The vertical alignment with the sky provides an archetypal connectivity with consciousness.  There is a structuralist model where  the sonic object represents our physical nature in relationship to the Gaian landscape and to the cosmic depths. 

Sonicism:  experience is a standing wave, a habit of creation and it’s creatures.

The sound object also discloses our relationship to temporality.  A piece of music emerges from silence, moves through a series of changes, and then eventually ceases, returning to silence.  Our own mortality follows this shape:  if we are able to extract the sonic gesture from time, we can see a reflection of the relative gestures that comprise our own reality.  We can hear generic shapes that match the beating heart, the pulse, breath, perhaps even the microsound of neurons and synapses.   Through the spectral analytcal output, we can envision the wave form of a piece of music as an object to be held..or indeed to ‘Behold’.

Maybe this is an understanding of why music is such a profound and generic human activity. We are all restricted in understanding of multiple dimensional objects. In Flatland, the Victorian teacher Edwin Abbot creates a thought model from the perspective of creatures living in a two dimensional world.  A rotating 3 dimensional object appears as a 2 dimensional object that moves, changes, disappears and reappears. But that movement is illusion.   We perceive a piece of music that begins, ends and noodles around in between those points - that is, until we step outside the moment (after the piece is done) and hold the shape as a kinaesthetic experience.  Likewise, we see ourselves existing as the result of conditions manifest in this particular moment alone - when instead we are at least a four dimensional object in a singular totality of time that we perceive as a piece birthing, dying, and living in between those points.

We have become adept at developing technology that allows us to interrogate the sonic phenomenon.  A medieval cathedral extends the duration of a human voice, extracting the sound beyond the framework of the human producer.   Modern digital sampling can dissect sound into millisecond events, exposing a level of sonic structure that is not apparent to our normal state of listening.  All cultures from Neolithic caves through Greek oracles and on demonstrate a spatial relationship to sound that extracts the sound from the original temporal framework.   This supports the model provided by spectral analysis, which provides a single object outside of the time domain. 

Corollary:  Towards a Morphology of Sound. 

Beneath the surface areas of a piece of music, or a sonic event, are generic shapes that could be represented as a Morphology of Sound.  (I would also include in this the ability to consider sounds of nature and of other species).  This is an exceptionally important piece of research, with ramifications in diverse fields such as aesthetics, SETI and a trans-disciplinary approach to culture.

Directive:  towards a newly Global music

This ‘Generic’ material will inspire a new form of cultural activity from  artists, musicians and thinkers in  every community.  Imagine a piece where the ‘score’ is the understanding of gestures  based on shared modules of meaningful gesture, incorporating sounds from any instruments, from the natural world, and from the electromagnetic spectrum of the cosmos.

Influential  Precedents

The spectral analysis of music has been developed  by Robert Cogan, first in his book New Images of Musical Sound (1984).  Several composers, especially affiliated with IRCAM, use STFT data to construct their music.  Karlheinz Stockhausen  proposed a ‘morphology of musical time’, which is very influential in setting the problem domain for a general Sonic Morphology.

R Murry Schafer is a composer who has written on the idea of the Soundscape.  In his book The Tuning of the World, (1977), he identifies the physical connection of the human body, and the natural sounds of the environment:

“ Day after day one walks along the strand, listening to the indolent splashing of the wavelets, gauging the gradual crescendo to the heavier treading and on to the organized warfare of the breakers.  The mind must be slowed to catch the million transformations of the water, on sand, on shale, against driftwood, against the seawall.  Each drop tinkles at a different pitch;  each wave sets a different filtering on an inexhaustible supply of white noise.  Some sounds are discrete, others continuous.  In the sea, the two fuse in primordial unity.  The rhythms of the sea are many;  infrabiological - for the water changes pitch and timbre faster than the ear’s resolving power to catch it’s changes;  biological - the waves rhyme with the patterns of heart and lung and the tides with night and day;  and suprabiolgical - the eternal inextinguishable presence of water”

Sonicism represents an intersection of art and science, and resonates with the poetic and scientific milieu of the Romantic period - a time when poets such as Keats and Shelley used scientific metaphors, and where scientists such as Herschel and Davies saw poetry as the preliminary stage of scientific investigation.  In his book The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes quotes from Mary Somerville, a pioneer of both the scientific method, and for women in that field.  She writes on the ability to abstract meaningful information across different expressions of waves:

“Light, Heat, Sound and the waves of fluid are all subject to the same laws of reflection and indeed their undulatory theories are perfectly similar”

Somerville also notes the importance of human physiology in our perception of wave phenomenon.  In this quote, she also comments on the role of consciousness: 

“A consciousness of the fallacy of our senses is one of the most important consequences of the study of nature.  This study teaches us that no object is seen by us in it’s true place, owing to aberration;  that the colours of substances are solely the effects of the action of matter upon light; and that light itself, as well as heat and sound, are not real beings, but modes of action communicated to our perceptions by the nerves.  The human frame may therefore be regarded as an elastic system, the different parts of which are capable of vibrating in unison with any number of superposed undulations, all of which have their perfect and independent effect.  Here our knowledge ends;  the mysterious influence of matter on mind will in all possibility be for ever hid from man”

While Heidegger provides a framework for discussing an unfolding sense of being as expressed through sound, the ideas of a global, shared structure for sonic development is highly influenced by Teilhard de Chardin.  The Omega point - the teleologic direction of the cosmos -  resonates with the underlying assumptions expressed in the discourse on sound.  Furthermore, Chardin  has written on the essential nature of the human experience.  This has been  especially significant in the development of specific art works discussed later in the paper :

“  Humanly speaking the internal passivities of diminishment form the darkest element of the most despairingly useless years of our lives.  Some were waiting to pounce on us as we first awoke:  natural failings, physical defects, intellectual or moral weaknesses, as a result of which the field of our activities, of our enjoyment of our vision, has been piteously limited since birth.  Others were lying in wait for us later on and appeared as suddenly and brutally as an accident or as stealthily as an illness.

All of us one day or another will come to realize, if we have not already done so, that one or other of these sources of disintegration has lodged itself in the very heart of our lives.”

Theoretical models: Deep Signaling and Exospherics

The Deep Space Signaling Group  is a group of musicians, visual artists, scientists and philosophers dedicated to exploring the ‘meaningfulness‘  of the cosmos.  The group was founded by Lowry Burgess and Andrew Kaiser in 2007 under the sponsorship  of the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University.  The group supports individual projects, as well as a focus on developing partnerships between group members and other institutions, individuals and government agencies.  

The Deep Space Signaling Group approaches the mythic logic of the Sky to develop new metaphors for engagement and collaboration.  The impulse for these projects is aesthetic and creative, global, human and futuristic:   a new paradigm for cultural frameworks in art, language, morals, ethics,science, technology, economics and policy which the group has named Exospherics.  Exospherics can be articulated as 5 Principles:

Ecstatic Philosophy

• How can artists, humanists and scientists engage the global meaning of outer space for all humanity, including non-space engaged cultures and regions
• The concept and meaning of the heavens is an archetype across all cultures, contemporary and historic.

Archive for the Future

• What are the curatorial imperatives for work that can be as ephemeral as a sub-atomic spark, monumental as Arecibo, ‘Long Now’ as a message to the stars millions of light years away, megalithic as our ancestral earth-calendars?  Can we inspire a dedication to documentation and stewardship?

Policy

• Can the group produce/extoll/generate open and confident engagement with space-oriented organizations, government agencies, institutions and corporations, leading to a wise and sustainable global body of experience, common practice and policy?

Visionary Technology

• Can human ecstasy direct technology?  Can the fulfillment of basic human instincts towards the sublime provide impetus for ongoing exploration of space? 

Network of Engagement

• Can the experience of a group formed across traditional institutional, geo-political and generational divides generate a body of ‘Best Practices’ for Transdisciplinary work that will result in life-long relationships and dedication?

Chronology of important pieces from the Deep Space Signaling Group

June 2010:  Andrew Kaiser presents keynote address at  the International Forum on Music as a Catalyst for Cultural Dialogue and Communication, sponsored by Melody for Dialogue among Civilizations, the American University in Paris, and UNESCO.

April 2010  Launch of The Moon Arts Group at Carnegie Mellon University.  Carnegie Mellon University  will take a series of interactive art projects to the Moon in December 2011.

February 2009:  Lowry Burgess is invited to present at the Astrobiology Conference hosted by The SETI Institute and sponsored by NASA in Mountain View, Ca. Discussion included the broader meaning of the search for life beyond earth, and included leading astrobiologists, theologians, physicists and artists.

Spring 2009:  Lowry Burgess leads the second Space Arts Seminar with trans-disciplinary students from the CMU campus. Andrew Kaiser assists.

October 2008: Andrew Kaiser consults with Squonk Opera for their work, Astrorama, a multimedia production that addresses the human urge to reach into space. Presented as part of the recent Pittsburgh 250 celebration.

April 2008:  International Space Station Live Interactive Arts, Humanities and Culture in Space Collaboration, Yuri's Night Bay Area 2008 celebration created by DSSG in partnership with NASA Ames Research Center, the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, College of Fine Arts Carnegie Mellon University, and the Zero Gravity Arts Consortium.

March 2008:  Andrew Kaiser, Lowry Burgess and Vashti Germaine collaborate to present music inspired by The Quiet Axis. The event was presented as part of an exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

2005:  Andrew Kaiser and Doug Vakoch present online exhibit on Extra-Terrestrial Message composition at the San Francisco Exploratorium

May 2005:  Andrew Kaiser presents “Voices of the Noosphere”, a concept for electromagnetic art in space at 7th Workshop on Space and the Arts; co-organized by European Space Agency, the O.U.R.S Foundation, and Leonardo/OLATS.

March 2002:  Andrew Kaiser presents on music as a source for message composition at the SETI Workshop on Art and Science of Extra-Terretrial Message Composition.

March 1989:  “The Boundless Cubic Lunar Aperture”, created by Lowry Burgess, is taken into outer space on the space shuttle Discovery. This is the first Non-Scientific payload in NASA history.

Current Projects:

The Deep Space Signaling Group is an umbrella for significant activity in many fields.  Two active projects that reflect the commitment to Exospherics and trans-cultural/trans-disciplinary work are Voices of the Noosphere and “The Moon Arts Group”, at Carnegie Mellon University.

Voices of the Noosphere

Voices of the Noosphere  was first presented by Andrew Kaiser at the 7th Annual Space Art conference, sponsored by Leonardo Journal and the European Space Agency  The piece is a sonic sculpture intended both for appreciation by human audition, and for interstellar transmission across electromagnetic frequencies. The source material for Voices from the Noosphere is derived from the radio signals of cosmic phenomena such as pulsars or solar flare activity, combined with the representation of humanity as found in cultural expressions in sound.   Voices of the Noosphere explores the idea that research into sound use can derive some generic information about what it is to be fundamentally human. The sound of a didgeridoo is a source sample, because the partials and drones of that instrument seem to map intuitively to the rhythms of the body. Breath, pulse, eye-blinks, synaptic twitches, eat and sleep, birth and death.

This musical, sonic material is combined with data received from radio telescopes directed towards cosmic objects.  The corresponding output can either be performed for a human audience, or transmitted outbound into space as a counterpoint to the original astronomical event.

‘Voices of the Noosphere’ installation details

1.  Using a live Radio source, the  signal becomes the first of two audio inputs.  The sample shown here is a sonic representation of a pulsar.

 

2.  The didgeridoo sound will act as a controller, modifying the underlying envelope of the pulsar sound.   Note the complex overtones, above the geometric presentation of fundamental drones.   The frequency spectrum clearly shows the multi-layered patterns and resonances within this most ancient of instruments.  
 

3.  Both audio signals will input to a Macintosh computer running SuperCollider and cSound - open source software applications used for powerful sonic manipulation.  The output of the code process can be  be amplified and played into a performance space:  or may be re-broadcast into ‘outer’ space.  The installation will present a counterpoint of some cosmic phenomenon and the voice of human consciousness, represented in this case by the didgeridoo.

 

The Moon Arts Group, at Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University  will take a series of interactive art projects to the Moon in December 2011. The artworks will be on board Carnegie Mellon’s lunar rover enterprise in pursuit of the $20 million Google Lunar X Prize.  The Moon Arts Group is a project of Carnegie Mellon’s Studio for Creative Inquiry. 

There are many pieces under development by The Moon Arts Group.  Specifically influenced by the work of the Deep Space Signaling Group is  “Moon Bell”, which will use radio waves, telescopes and emerging computer software to create a sound from the earth to the Moon. The rover will initiate a broadcast-burst that will be received by a radio antenna then reflected back and forth between the earth and the Moon, like the metal ball inside a bell ringing each side of its metal cover. Moon Bell will create an ever-expanding reflected ping that can be heard and shared globally through the Internet. 

Composed around  the ‘Moon Bell’ will be a series of pieces that are envisioned for  dance, orchestra and cross-cultural instrumentation with  the theme of “Moon Choreography”  - an eclectic ballet that follows the movements of the sun, earth and Moon.” 

Other projects will direct the movement of the lander to ‘draw’ anamorphic images on the surface of the moon; to create a ‘Moon Ark’ that will include water in carbon nano-tubes; a ‘Reliquary’ designed as part of the landing platform of the robot; a distillation of fragrance produced by master perfumers around the world; and a time capsule from Earth that could remain undisturbed for many millions of years.  

Future collaboration.

Exospherics  is a paradigm for creative thought that is derived from an understanding of the shared use of sound in human culture, calling for a new approach to shared artistic activity.  This approach recognizes the interconnection of Human experience on the surface of the Earth, and is oriented towards the Sky as a common mythological archetype.  Insights drawn from this work have implications far beyond cultural aesthetics to suggest new  policy, ethics, economics,  and technology across institutional and geopolitical boundaries.

Artificial Intelligence and composition

There's an interesting article at Slate.com, on the use of computers in composition.  David Copely talks about Emily Howell, the nom de plume for his computer composition software.  

I use computers in my composition, sometimes.  I use electronic synthesis to create sounds that couldn't readily be extracted from human players.  I also use tools like Open Music (from IRCAM), which is a development environment to create objects that process musical information.  It could be used to generate 'algorithmic' music, which would be to define some limits over a determined group of parameters (pitch, volume, whatever) and then let it rip.  There's a good bit of jargon around, with nuanced distinction between Computer Generated, Computer Assisted, Artificial Intelligence, but  that's my basic understanding of AI composition.  Emily Howell has a pretty sophisticated set of inputs, which seems to allow 'her' to write music that is interesting, dare I say creative - and certainly effective for a listener.  there's several good samples in the slate article.

I use OpenMusic more to create a framework for the music that I otherwise couldn't conceptualize - or would have to know too much maths, or would have to work a bit too hard to produce.  For example, I want to use data generated by my iPhone GPS unit when Io go on a long walk.  That data is stored in a specific file format, which can be interpreted as a changing sequence of information.  I like to apply that to various aspects of the music...start with pitch, but that's a bit obvious aesthetically.  So maybe manipulate the data before it's applied to a musical  parameter, and maybe that parameter is something like a filter on the upper partials only, creating a kind of spoken phoneme within the sound, based on the path my footsteps take.  Or maybe Apply some of that information delta to the rhythmic structure of the piece, either duration of section, particular patterns.  All kinds of things.

So where am I going with this?  Well, the Slate piece isn't so bad as some, but invariably these articles on AI and music end up asking whether composers will be replaced.  Having dabbled in composition myself, and knowing many who actually make a living from it, this is a fraught discussion.  I'm prepared to accept my irrelevance to the audience.  The Slate article figures that computers will never write better music than the best human composers...I'm not so sure (although I'd challenge any computer to come up with Stockhausen's Helicopter Quartet).  

The questions about whether an audience can be equally moved by a piece written by a computer is not a question about whether composers can be replaced. It's a question about information processing, whether the artificial provenance of a piece is noise enough in the signal to disturb the receptor/audience.  It probably isn't (i've spent hours listening to Bloom on my iPhone, and for all I care there are tiny gnomes infiltrating the circuitry).

Composers will never be replaced by computers, because some people will always want to write music.  Or paint canvas.  Or walk the dog.  Artificial Intelligence won't replace  the human desire to do something, even if it ends up being written for the desk drawer, ignored by an audience who only want to hear their macbooks speak.  (That would be kind of cool).

Choreography in the score for Poulenc's 'Sonate' for 2 Pianos (1953)

Francis Poulenc wrote a Sonata for two pianos, published in 1953 - the two piano sonata is an enormous and magnificent piece, which  should not be mistaken for an earlier Sonata for 4 hands (on one piano).  There’s a beautiful repertoire of early 20th century French music for two pianos.  Ravel wrote Mother Goose.  Debussy has some Antique stuff.  Faure (a little earlier) wrote Dolly.  I played a lot of it as a younger person, and I remember the experience with great fondness.  

It's easy to pass over Poulenc in a discussion of structure and theory - anything so lush, so melodic with such a coquettish promise must surely have been pulled from a cognac-fuelled improvisation.   This  would be doing a disservice to the composer, and to the listener who is transported by the music.  The Oboe sonata is as meticulously ordered around pitch class as anything written by the contemporary Stravinsky, and  the two piano sonata offers many opportunities for reflection - some prurient, some intellectual, others in a place that questions the line between the two.  

A puzzle is presented with the very beginning of the piece: a dramatic clanging sound  that opens and closes the sonata:

Click to hear Poulenc sample

Here’s the score, to follow along:

 
 
 The same kind of writing ends the piece, but it is ‘scored’ differently. ( ‘Scored’ refers to which notes are played by which hand, taken from the act of writing a musical score).  It's curious to me why Poulenc would have done that.  In the first movement, there are huge leaps by each hand of each pianist.  In the final movement, one pianist plays notes in a central part of the keyboard, while the other plays a series of chords across the keyboard.  Sounds the same, written quite differently.

Perhaps what Poulenc has done is to score the composition so that the musicians have to move in a particular way?  Perhaps in addition to the actual notes on the page, Poulenc is interested in the relationship of the pianists hands to each other, to the other pianist across the stage, and to the audience. Perhaps he is:  I certainly am. 

Consider the layout of the pianos on the stage.  These pictures  is taken from a film recording of Poulenc playing his concerto for two pianos...unfortunately, there’s no full stage shot available, neither could I find a film of the actual sonata.  But this gets across the visual layout of the pianos on stage.  This is a standard arrangement, with the curves of two grand pianos pressed together - like the Newfoundland coast and western Europe in geological text books on tectonic shift.

  
 
 
 The first relationship  to expose  is between the players and their pianos.  If  each note is assigned  a number, with the lowest key on the piano being zero, and the highest being 87, then I can create a chart that shows the relative position of each hand in each beat of the music.    The x-axis is time, represented as each quarter note beat in the piece.  The y axis shows the number of each pitch.   This is the perspective of someone suspended from the ceiling above each pianist - it is a mirror image, where the lowest note on Piano 1 is directly across from the highest note  on Piano 2.  

 

An opening line downwards is followed by lots of jumping around.  These two gestures - split at Rehearsal letter A in the score -  define the overall  structure of the section.   I want to highlight the relationship between mirror hands, the hands that are directly across from each other.  Here’s a chart that shows the right hand of one pianist with the left hand of the other:  

 

When one hand moves up, the other moves down on each respective keyboard.

Consider what the positioning of the pianos on stage does to the pianist’s hands in relation to the audience. From the perspective of the audience, the hands closest to us are moving in parallel...as one jumps away, the other follows.  My thought is that this visual relationship is as important to the interpretation of the piece as the actual notes being played.

One way to make this relationship clearer is  if I revisit the chart of lines representing note values, but do some quick math so that instead of a fixed value on the keyboard, each note is assigned a value in relation to the audience.  For  the pianist on the left, I subtract the key position from 88, to get a value of distance to and from the audience.  Zero on piano 1 is the highest note:  zero for Piano 2 is the lowest note.  This  chart shows only  the hands closest to the audience.  

 

  From the pianist  perspective, in relation to the keys, even in relation to what we hear, the two musicians  are playing opposites.  But to the visual perception, the pianists are moving as if joined by a bar connecting their chests across the pianos.  As one leans right, two leans left to follow.  The pianists are moving together towards and away from the audience. Two marionettes whose bodies lean and shiver in tandem over the two opposing keyboards.   

This is a pretty piece of choreography. 

Telluric Psychogeography (part 2)

Telluric Psychogeography part 2

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I awoke one morning to find that I was a hair on Blake’s Buttocks.  Peering through a dense miasma at the cold grimace of a Pittsburgh morning, I was startled to see William Blake himself.  At first, I thought that perhaps he had contorted his body in such a way as to place his rotten teeth in close proximity to my unusual position within his anus.  A moment’s thought showed me how unlikely that was:  this was clearly an astral projection of the author, and one to which I was accountable in some as yet undisclosed fashion. 

I have seen a self portrait of William Blake, a pencil sketch in which he is walking along the street, turning back to look at the artist.  He is wearing a hat - a hat the same style as one given to me by Kathryn as a gift in winter 2008.  I assume that this is somehow responsible for the situation - inserted in Blake’s rectum -  in which I now find myself.

Blake spoke to me from this obscure advantage:  “In  the body, as the city, to the land” , he says.

I know  that when I am walking, my stride begins with some hesitation.  I am counting malas, laboured with my early morning breathing, muscles still tight, alignment of the spine to skull base still unsure (each morning feels like I am reliving our purported ape ancestors' descent from the trees and ascent  onto 2 legs).   The snot I blow directly to the ground, the odd occasion when I am forced by necessity to urinate upon the street.   This is a metabolic understanding of my self, the gradual deepening and strengthening of breath as my legs loosen to the hip.  Lungs, heart, skeleton:  all organs holding a specific pattern reflective of immediate experience – the drink I had last night, the food I ate beforehand – and of my genetic history – complex and challenging. 

The city responds to this .  The lark rises in the morning chirping merrily for the flaxen milk maids.     Blake wrote about a 'vegetal'  intelligence.  Victorian ancients discuss leylines and green men in gothic carvings, stomp across the dales and vales.  This human activity  activates the cityscape - recall Wordsworth on Westminster bridge 

“The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
 Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
 Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
 All bright and glittering in the smokeless air."

 But No - a grimace crosses Blake’s face (and a surge of gas supports his displeasure).  I am obviously not answering.   Let me pull a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses  from my own behind, and quote: “ Through spaces smaller than red globules of man’s blood they creepycrawl after Blake’s buttocks into eternity of which this vegetable world is but a shadow.  Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past”.  I am ejected!  Oh what sweet release.   With a finger in the snow before blessed forgetfulness removes the thought, I draw this table with the stains of my tribulation:

BODY:   Metabolic, Neurologic, Akashic.
CITY:  Local, Remembered, Sacred
LAND:  Geology, Manipulated, Cosmic.

 A sequence to which no doubt I will refer in future walks and writings.  There is a space in which the human body, the developed City, and the evolving cosmos can all be viewed as a resonant structure - one that 'plunges to the past', extracting architecture from chronology.

Telluric Psychogeography (part 1)

Telluric Psychogeography Part 1 

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An errant Psychogeographer once wrote a limerick that ended with a rhyme along the lines of “The ineluctable modality of walking”.   As poetry, the piece lacked focus: the scansion was wrong, and it was not a lewd commentary on social impropriety. However, as insight to our various shared walks across Pittsburgh, it seemed to demand a response. I began to frame my own limerick, goes something a little like this: 

There once was a pilgrim in Pittsburgh
 With a face full of beer and deBord.
 With mind psychoge'graphical bent
 along rivers he went
 to seek out the scent of Blake's buttocks. 

 Although I liked the forced elision in line three - and frankly delighted in the reference to bums - this is not my best foray into the genre.  (I think fondly of a few lines written in the early hours of morning after an unexpected arrival at some one or another of the Paris train stations, and which included the lines “they drank beaujoulais..on the Champs Elysee” ).

That distinction is still held by an early effort, written in the bowels of an office job, and includes the couplet “He sat in his cubicle//a kafka-esque boobicle...” . (To include the full limerick would open myself up to legal charges of slander initiated by my still current employer.) 

 A limerick is the perfectly psychogeographical poem. It is strictly controlled in structure, but intentionally transgressive in content. Poetic form is architectural, it is perceived outside of the progression of sounds, words, images, memes. So is musical form, but it is perhaps easier to apprehend poetic structure because we see the entire work on a page in front of us.  

The extraction of form requires an act of Tickling Time, removing the events into a space equal to their 'perceived dimension' +1. The perceived dimension (p) would be something like the moment of sound for a piece of music, or the current physical experience for a life.   The extracted abstract dimension (eAB) is equal to p+1. eAB could be the reckoning of a piece of music within the memory of mind as opposed to the beating of instant rhythm.  eAB could also be the nostalgic view of a torn map, representing a year in the life of a person in a place.  eAB is the flash of recognition that life is mortal. 

 The same is true on each of three levels: the Human Body, the Sacred City, and the (freaking) Cosmos (dude). The human body is a three dimensional object drawn towards mortality in a fourth, identified as a totality in the fifth. It is a structure populated by memory and meaning. Likewise, this Sacred City (Kaiser's Pittsburgh, Wordsworth's London, Blake's Jerusalem) is a landscape populated by structures that have acquired meaning through interaction with human bodies. Further, an element of consciousness draws together the Cosmos, leading towards an omega point of eschatology. The task of reconciling this progression in eAB is daunting. But a good walk on a brisk morning will do the job, and that's what this series of posts intends to elaborate upon.

Nostalgic Number

Here's a screen capture from Episode 9 of  'Cosmos".  Carl Sagan is working out how many bits of stuff there are in the universe, and needs to explain how very large numbers can be written in shorthand.  I don't remember the last time I saw 'Googol' rather than 'Google'.  

This episode kicked off with the quote "If you want to bake the perfect apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe".  A few minutes later, Sagan is lecturing in the Cavendish laboratory: 

What looks like a Go board to the right side of the table ends up being a representation of the periodic chart of elements.  It would have been nice if he had sat down with a couple of ghostly physicists and played a game or two.  I suppose the periodic table makes more sense, in context.