Overview
The origin in the choice of Forum Stadtpark for the exhibition that was eventually titled “Turbulence” lay in another research project, “Klangräume” by Georgios Marentakis and David Pirrò. That project investigates the potentials and limitations of applying evaluation strategies normally found in design contexts to the production of sound art works. I am using this blog as a means to answer a number of questions posed by “Klangräume”, documenting the process through which “Turbulence” came into being.
Intention
A good number of paragraphs that may elucidate questions surrounding “intention” and “inspiration” may be found in the essay I wrote for the brochure that we produced to accompany the exhibition: “Particularities and Generalities”.
I will first start with some thoughts about my sound works in general, before then defining the particularities of this installation. To save myself work, I will put a few quotes from my PhD thesis:
[…] we find ourselves in a permanent struggle with the technology. We may have a certain idea of what we are trying to achieve when using it, but it will always introduce a shift in what is being produced which is inherent in the machine and not under control—neither the control of the composer nor the control of the designer of the machine. It is often assumed that the machine embodies a “service”, with ideas on two ends of a spectrum. On one end, an engineered algorithm perfectly adhering to a design specification versus, on the other end, the idea of a perfect model of the human cognitive capabilities that can be implanted into a machine which thereby becomes transparent “support”. These ideas need not be dismissed, but they ignore the possibility that an experimental system arises from the friction between human composer and machine. […]
Naturally, a setting is given; for example, when I plan to make a sound installation in a particular space, the space and the situation are given, and you have to write a proposal or outline of what you are going to do, which materials and resources you will need to allocate, etc. But they remain hypotheses for the sake of getting started. If there is a form plan, it is just a frame inside which the experimentation happens. […]
As audience, I very much prefer to visit a sound installation than to attend a concert. I explain this by the possibility of non-theatrality which allows me to define my own unrolling of a piece or situation in time. There must always be an element of non-narrativity. [pp. 3–4]
So while it is correct to say that there were a number of starting points—the SysSon project, sonification, the climate data sets…—they are not necessarily my “movitation”, that what animates my work. For example, the exhibition space was a huge motivation in the first place; the prospect of being pervaded by a spatial sound structure suspended within this beautiful space with its glass façade, a sound structure that reveals something about the clash between ideas brought from the outside and the technology that I have been developing for quite some time (the computer music system, the sonification platform).
There are also “aims” that can be better understood as guidelines. For instance, the thematic of the installation—to make perceivable something as complex as climate phenomena which by their definition do not occur within a scale amounting to our individual sensation of our immediate environment. Understood as a guideline, that means that if—by whatever means—in the eventual exhibition there are elements that evoke a sensation that someone connects to their abstract conception of “climate”, then we achieved something we aimed for. On the other hand, we have no guarantee of such evocation, because I do not believe that my own experience necessarily reflects that of any other visitor of the show, nor would this evocation be something that we could really have designed.
When I create an installation, I always want to create a space that permits someone to spend their time inside, offering certain ways to perceive sounds, rhythms, shapes, trajectories. If someone enjoys spending their time there, letting their thoughts wander around and make tiny connections, then I think the work has succeeded.
Apart from these considerations, there is also a very manifest technological motivation in this work. I have built SoundProcesses, the software on top of which the SysSon platform operates, for many years now, and only recently it became mature enough to run a sound installation. In my works “Voice Trap” and “Dots” (2012) it was used for the first time, but it was far from complete, and there were many things that I could not do at that time, and many other things which have changed since then. With SoundProcesses I want to build an environment that blurs the boundaries between electroacoustic composition, sound installation and live improvisation. For me, SoundProcesses has become a body of questions relating to the representation of musical material, the flow of time, the process of composition, the nature of algorithms and so forth. It is my epistemic apparatus so to speak. So advancing that apparatus, experimenting with a specific sub-set of these questions is a strong motivation in this project.
Experience
Curiously, the questionaire only talks about the experience that I wish “an ideal visitor” would have. It is thus more a question about expectation that about experience. I will nevertheless use “experience” as the headline and complete the expectation part with my own actual experience.
Expectation
I do not hide the fact that my ideal visitor shares a significant amount of traits with myself; after all, I want to create a work that I am convinced of myself, that pleases my own aesthetical sense. Humans may have extremely different experiences and backgrounds, but still we know that we share values with other individuals—the individuals we value. We all know the famous quote by Saint-Exupéry: “Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” So I imagine that a person that values the work at least occasionally looks into the same, or approximately same direction as myself.
But then experience is the process-form in natura. Experiences are becomings, and we want people to make experiences. So I think there are two components to this question. The first concerns the preconditions I consider relevant, the other the possibilities of change. As a precondition, I think you ought to be a sensitive person, and my experience is that this is a general condition independent of the type of sense (i.e. you need not be necessarily someone that is very good with their hearing sense in particular).
It is difficult to write about the expectation at a point when the exhibition is already running for 2 1/2 weeks, because I will retroactively shape what we have done into something that can be experienced. So I have to force myself to be artificially vague here. I think I would have wanted the visitor to be able to engage with some form of technological interactivity that is subtle in the sense that it requires softness. In the programme notes I used the formulation of “modulating the space” and I think that if someone would have an experience of modulating the space (whatever one understands by the term of modulation), this would be what I wish for.
I wish for visitors to explore the space, to walk around and understand that the sound they hear is equally produced by my composition and their movement in the space (not only in terms of activating sensors, but also purely in acoustical terms, and even further in terms of their focus of attention, the cross-modulation by the light and space). I wish for people to connect to thoughts and fragments in their memory that they had forgotten about, to bring some to the surface and allow them to be transformed by the installation.
Furthermore, I have long imagined that there must be some way in which a spatially extended sound environment could provide for a particular form of co-presence, i.e. for the possibility to perceptually or mentally decompose a complex object and be able to understand its components as present with each other, but individually distinguishable, reproducing some form of spatial extension or texture in the mind. I imagined that the sonification of a multi-channel data set would be an appropriate material to develop such a texture.
Actuality
While the structure of the piece was developed mainly in October, listening “offline” via a headphones simulation, most sound layers were developed, at least in their raw shape, a week before the set-up in the TU workshop space “Halle”, placing the speakers on chairs with distances scaled by a factor of about 2:3. Nevertheless, this proved to be still a sort of dry practice and did not produce any actual experience of the work. The experience began to shape during the set-up in the exhibition space. I was worried about the decision to place all speakers on the ceiling—the decision was made to simplify the structure for the composition as well as the physical installation, questions about audience movement etc. It turned out to be not problematic at all. I had used all-ceiling speakers in “Voice Trap”, but in a smaller space and only with piezo disks. The speakers we used in “Turbulence” have a quite clear image, and having them obscured by the paper installation helped a lot to lessen the impression of sound coming from a punctiform source.
The combination of paper and sound produces an interesting synaesthetic experience. Since the two came only together in this very moment, the effect was difficult to anticipate. For example, in the idle soundscape layer, “finding” a particular sound becomes intriguing, as you have to walk through the paper and your pathway is structured by the paper. In other words, the mode in which one encounters one of these sounds is strongly influenced by the visual installation, and as a consequence bleeds into and transforms the experience of “just listening” to a particular sound. Without the visual installation, the sound locations would be much more neutral, and two sounds would just be next to each other, whereas with the paper network, the places of the speakers would be much more individualised, and the perceived spacing between neighbouring speakers became higher.
In our artist talk with < Rotor >, I tried to understand this synaesthesia as an entanglement, based on the following formulation by Karin Barad (“Meeting the Universe Halfway,” 2007):
To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence.
What I find interesting about this entanglement, is that we get to think about authorship, collaboration, identification, causation and complexity, to name a few. The experience you have within the work cannot be traced back to the sum of individual contributions (the sound, the paper, the sensors), but really emerges as something new. It is not the first time I understand the mechanism by which the “end-product” escapes a thorough pre-planning, as in fact this is the case with any installation, not only a collaborative one. I think what one can learn from this is that one is well advised to not be afraid to leave some decisions and constellations open till the moment of montage, to deliberately give up the idea that one should totally control the composition, that such total control is not possible and attempts at it might even be counter productive.
Of course, one imagines how this coming together will play out. One of the layers uses recordings of falling leaves, a timbre I wanted to use as a reflection of the paper installation. The sounds are modulated in their density and using a formant, and due to technical limitations in treating each sound grain separate from the others, I was not fully convinced of this layer during the “Halle” period. But in the exhibition space that layer suddenly made much more sense, and I did not mind the artificiality of the applied filtering any longer, it simply did not matter.
Even now that I am listening to sound recordings made in the exhibition, I cannot but reproduce the whole installation in my imaginations, i.e. the sounds are still entangled with the paper in my mind.
Another thing that worried me was the subtle but constant pressure to “represent” in this project an “outcome” of our research on sonification and climate science. While I understand this constraint, I think it acted rather negatively on the development of the sound composition. On the other hand, it meant that I relocated by “freedom” within the meta-structure (the way sounds emerge, how they can appear next to each other, how they are selected). That this somehow worked became clear to me during the audio documentation of the project. Although I did an extensive recording session at the beginning of the exhibition, whenever I came back I felt I had not properly documented the work, as I always found myself exposed to sound constellations that did not occur during that recording session and that I thought “better represented” the work.
It also became clear that the ideal exposure is when you are alone in the installation. Probably unconsciously, I have always imagined that the visitor will have the entire space for himself/herself. The work easily becomes unclear when several people are involved, particularly as they make sounds themselves, talk, etc. This requirement for quiescence is reflected by the notes of Laura Nefeli Chromecek who was part of the group of the visual artists. With respect to the exhibition’s opening, she writes that
… the number of people in the space increases the noise in the exhibition space, abasing the sound of the installation to a secondary element.
Under the heading of “Big, Artificial, Quiet” she writes: “This quiet, empty space, can be filled with a single sound.” And under the heading of “Alone, Sound, You”:
The room is filled with paper and sound but still you are the only element to interrupt this weird balance between the abstract sound moving through the room and the floating particles. Even though the intrusion is minimalistic you are the only force able to change the space at will.
So that sentiment seems to be shared by others as well.
An interesting observation about the unfolding of time was made by one visitor. He described the potential of the sounds to generate two very different articulations of the space. In the artist talk I have labelled these two types as “all-over” and “localised”. The former, embodied for example by the layer that produces grains with different overtones from radiation data, illuminates the whole space at once, whereas the latter, embodied for example by the layer based on temperature anomalies, traces the space, produces pathways and what in German is called a Tiefenstaffelung (a gradation in depth). The striking result—and I share that experience with the visitor who made me aware of this—is that the perceived extent and in fact topography of the space changes very much with these two types of sounds. The “all-over” sounds make the space appear much smaller than the localised sounds that scan a variety of distances. The localised sounds seem to have a closer relationship with the paper installation.
Development
The development of the sound composition is closely interlinked with its technological foundation which is shared with the overall SysSon project. Personally, I am interested in the interrelation between the composition in the narrow sense and its facilitation, so for me it is often difficult to draw a clear boundary between where one ends and the other starts.
The SysSon Platform
When I joined the SysSon project in January 2013, the installation was not present or relevant in the first place. The SysSon software platform itself did not exist yet, and one of the initial assessments considered the pros and cons of using a specific technology, such as building entirely on SuperCollider versus one of the modules I had been building, ScalaCollider. Only gradually it became clear to me that the most reasonable choice would be to incorporate larger portions of my software, especially after I had advanced SoundProcesses and Mellite (its graphical front-end) in spring 2013 during a stay at ZKM.
In January 2013, SysSon was a single document application, where a document corresponded with a NetCDF file. In February, I started an effort to create a visual patcher SoundDesigner, the idea of which was that apart from standard UGens, there would be sonification specific abstractions, and it would be possible to eventually design “sonifications” using this tool and not requiring text programming. Only a rough prototype of the SoundDesigner was produced and it was abandoned as unrealistic given the time resources I had. Concurrently, a simple domain specific language was introduced to read and extract data from the NetCDF files. Simple patches could be written using a new matrix data type that would produce a sequence of data vectors over time, accessible through a regular UGen graph function. One could make selections within a “full” matrix (an entire data set), transpose the matrix to determine the temporal dimension, etc. Example sonifications were still developed by adding code snippets to the compiled project.
The next step in the platform, apart from the extension with utility functions such as generating
and caching data statistics, was the introduction of a Library component in September 2013.
The library would be some sort of data base that can be accessed from within a desktop application.
Questions regarding the user interface arose and about the storage of “state” edited by users.
A distinction was made between a sonification model, described as text and edited and compiled
separately and outside the desktop application, and its parametrisation provided through a graphical user
interface with the possibility to associate data sets, select variables and ranges within the
data matrices.
As a consequence from the requirement to persist documents and the library, more and more elements that also form the basis of SoundProcesses began to appear in SysSon. The reason why I was reluctant for a while to take the next step was that these components were still experimental, and also the usage of the dataflow system (LucreEvent) is much more difficult to understand than a DSL build on a plain old mutable class (no transactions, no type constructor parameters, etc.) But as SysSon became more and more operated as a desktop application, where the sound programming was still done using simple UGen graph functions, this became a more viable option. Or put the other way around, it became more and more “expensive” in my opinion to deny oneself the use a lot of existing modules the functionality of which was really needed.
In January 2014, the Workspace type was introduced, finally acknowledging the need to group
multiple data sources together and collect them in one data base along with the sonification
models. Now, step by step the SysSon platform became a sort of domain specific extension of
SoundProcesses, providing access to the type of data that we worked with, providing also specific
user interface elements and abstractions (the Sonification data type). For example, the
first instance which really relied on SoundProcesses, still used it in an “ephemeral” way:
The sonification models were transcribed ad-hoc into the abstractions provided by SoundProcesses,
while they were modelled independently and outside the SoundProcesses API.
In spring 2014, the platform begin to acknowledge its dependency on more and more user interface abstractions known from Mellite, for example in March it became possible to edit and compile the sound models directly from within the workspace and desktop application. And in June, finally the workspace model of Mellite was adapted—or more correctly, both systems converged as several improvements in Mellite in turn had been born in SysSon (e.g., undo-redo).
Sonification as a Question within Computer Music
(to-do)
Context
(to-do)
Technology
(to-do)
Evaluation
(to-do)
Materials
(to-do)