The idea of today’s class revolved around the idea of our changing perceptions of the way sound works. We focused on how re-contextualizing sounds can completely change the meaning they are able to communicate to us. On a very basic level, this could be for example how when we hear something not distinctly musical placed on loop; we tend to musicalize it – imagining a beat or trying to recognize the basic musicality embedded in whatever the loop is.
Robbie brought up William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, which I suggested to him after Tuesday’s class as the first example of this type of observing sound differently to create new context. Around the early 2000’s, Basinski found recordings he had made on tape in the 1980s and tried to transfer them onto a digital format. However because the tape had deteriorated over the years, the loops when being played onto digital formats would deteriorate even further – the music as a result would more grainy and there would be more gaps and cracks in the music. The story goes that Basinski finished the project on the day of 9/11 in New York, where he was living at the time, and set the music to imagery of the tower smoke he had filmed with his video camera, creating a poetic meditation on life and death. This to me fit right in with what were learning about, and was completely coincidental seeing as I had only discovered this collection of music recently.
Steve Reich’s 1965 piece “It’s Gonna Rain” was then screened in class, and was an even earlier version of a similar sentiment. Reich was a pioneer in this sense: with limited resources he was able to create movement from sameness through little variations from time to time, which would accumulate and change the perception for the listener. This is the sort of outside the box thinking I think Robbie was demanding of us going forward.
Robbie then sent us a recording he had made of a bell sounding noise, which we all put into audacity and created a small rhythmic loop. This was fascinating as almost everyone came up with different rhythms or ideas in their loops. While everyone was doing this I was trying to make drones out of the bell using the Paulstretch effect in the program. This, even still, was interesting to me, as after a while the same effect of the rhythmic loop began to happen with this drone, as I was able to notice the higher frequencies much more through their resonance.
bell drone
After this, Robbie instructed us to find some similar sort of sound in our surroundings, giving us 15 minutes and then come back and construct a similar sort of loop. I found a ding noise by flicking a metal object on the roof of our building’s second floor within about 5 minutes and came back to construct mine. I based my loop a little bit off Radiohead’s “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushed Tin Box“, as the cacophony of bells that were ringing when we first constructed our loops reminded me a little of that.
“Packt Like Sardines in a Crushed Tin Box”
My loop created in class
We then as a class paraded around the building at Robbie’s request, leaving a lot of the people in the highly embarrassed as we walked around with our industrial percussion band like preschoolers having their first music class playing the triangle. Underneath the bewildering amusement it caused all of us, at points I was able to recognize some musicality within all of our loops. My loop would often intersect with the various end and start points of other people’s, creating some really interesting textures and rhythms while walking in different spaces. It was also interesting to note that in certain spaces our sounds were more distinguishable than other spaces where there was a lot of reverb, effectively compressing all our sounds into noise.
I think what I gained from today was that I don’t necessarily need a tape machine to think differently about specific sonics – it can be as simple as tapping something and reworking it into something completely different from how I had found it in the first place.