Silviphonics: Sound in timber
(2018)
author(s): Vincent Wozniak O'Connor
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
The unique mechanical and conductive properties of wood have made it the material of choice for making musical instruments from antiquity to the present. Ancient lyres, rattles and slit drums all rely on the acoustic properties of timber to convert human actions into sound. While wooden instruments are used to produce sound, trees themselves make sound without human intervention. This essay focuses on the material connection between timber and sound. It examines sound outputs derived directly from timber, considering multiple methods for deriving sound from timber. By examining the connection between instruments and timber, the role trees play in physically shaping instruments is highlighted as having direct influence in coloring the sounds they produce.
Artists engaged with the relationship between sound and timber include instrument builders and sound and installation artists, who have chosen timber as the basis for making sound as a transmission medium or in field recording interventions involving live trees. Artists Laurie Anderson and Doug Aitken use the physical properties of timber, such as acoustic velocity, as a basis for their sound sculptures and installations. Research into the qualities of timber reveals shared histories between bioacoustics, instrument building and the sonic arts. The Xylophonic phonograph experiments of the 1960s, including John Cage’s Cartridge Music (1960), connects early plant bioacoustics with a shared history in hardware hacking and experimental sound. Recording directly from plants and living trees, Patrick Farmer and Robert Birch contribute to a framework of Silviphonic instrument building focusing on the vibrational quality of living trees. Developing from Farmer and Cage’s piezoelectric experiments, my own recording projects are considered here as they highlight the readymade acoustic qualities of forestry grown pines, relating silviculture to sound. The musical aspects of trees in the wind will also be examined, as they possess similarities to Aeolian instruments. The basis of these sonic practices relies on the qualities inherent to wood that enable it to radiate and transmit sound. This essay explores these practices as they expand the variety of sound outputs produced by timber.
“Step by Step” Reading and Re-writing Urban Space Through the Footstep
(2018)
author(s): Elena Biserna
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This paper explores the materiality of sound by focusing on the interaction between the walker and urban space established by the most “basic” form of soundmaking on the move – the sound of our footsteps. It considers the presence of footprints and empreintes in the contemporary arts and surveys a series of projects by artists and composers – Peter Ablinger, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, katrinem, Dennis Oppenheim, and Jessica Thompson – highlighting the interplay between body and site established through the footsteps. By drawing on an interdisciplinary body of literature on city walking and on sound studies, I consider the step as the fundamental bodily contact with the environment while walking as well as a sound signal that generates a sense of presence, activates the surroundings, and locates us in space. Therefore, I interpret the footstep as a primary auditory event, allowing us to “read and rewrite” (Augoyard 2007) urban soundscapes, to explore and perceive – but also to reshape and participate in – acoustic spaces, establishing a material, embodied, situated, and mutual relationship with our context.
Traumatic Ruins and The Archeology of Sound: William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops
(2018)
author(s): Lindsay Balfour
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This paper traces the relationship between art and atrocity, materiality and decay, and the aural possibilities of hospitality in a time of terror. There is one site in particular that seems to speak so poignantly to the complex workings of trauma, ruin, and memory, and it is the use of sound in this place that I wish to draw attention to here. The September 11 Memorial and Museum may not appear, at first, to signal the ways in which sound might usher in a new way of thinking about the philosophically complex concept of hospitality nor the promises of decay. Yet, one installation in particular manages to do just that. Located in the Museum’s Historical Exhibition, and evocative of death, mourning, and haunting, William Basinski’s sound and video installation, The Disintegration Loops, offers a fitting yet unique elegy to the loss of the towers and nearly 3,000 innocent people. Additionally, this work also carries within itself far more: layers of meaning and spectral traces that are often missed during singular visits by museum guests and that recall aspects of memory and materiality crucial to the question of what it means to live alongside others. I want to suggest that, while existing as a differentiated work in its own right, it is through its in-situ role – a ruin in a place of ruins – that The Disintegration Loops recalls one of the most complex and contradictory paradigms for thinking about loss and for mourning alongside strangers. It initiates, I argue, a philosophy of hospitality that is, defined in this context, uniquely preoccupied with ideas of strangers, belonging, home, and homelessness and an ethics concerned with “das Unheimliche” or something odd that is not quite at home yet nonetheless present in that space. In this paper I will discuss the significance of Basinski’s work to aural and material memory and explore the concepts of ruins and dust to arrive at one of hospitality’s most startling and uncanny figures, a figure of autoimmunity that is powerfully raised in Basinski’s work, making it one of the most compelling pieces of art in the Museum.
Fugue States
(2018)
author(s): Tyler Shoemaker
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This paper situates the work of installation artist Bartholomäus Traubeck at the crossroads of sonic materialism (Cox 2011) and recent debates among new media theorists concerned with the nature of mediation (Kember and Zylinska 2012; Grusin 2015). Picking up on what Richard Grusin has called “radical mediation," I examine how expanded theories of mediation jeopardize medium specificity, and I do so within an exhibition of Traubeck's works. The latter carefully constructs assemblages out of easily identifiable objects. But once turned on, these installations produce ambient soundscapes that quickly blur the borders between their constituent elements. Their processes slip by auditory perception, generating slippages between media devices along the way. However, these instances of ambience do not elide the necessity for returning to the devices undergirding them, a move Traubeck's pieces constantly encourage. Insisting on the importance this return, and in a corrective to radical mediation, I look simultaneously to neurophysical accounts of auditory perception and Félix Guattari's Chaosmosis (1995) to place sonic media alongside the latter's axiological appraisals.
Recapturing the sounds and sonic experiences of the hunter-gatherers at Ajvide, Gotland, Sweden (3200‒2300 cal BC)
(2017)
author(s): Riita Rainio
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
The rich and well-preserved osteological material from the archaeological complex of Ajvide, Gotland (3200‒2300 cal BC), provides favorable conditions for studying prehistoric sounds and soundscapes. Archaeological excavations at the site have uncovered tubular bone artifacts and concentrations of animal tooth pendants that resemble whistles and rattles, the earliest types of sound instruments. The remains of hunted animals, such as seals, boars, dogs and birds, provide a lively picture of the species that were present in the environment. This article aims to evoke the sonic experiences of the people utilizing the site of Ajvide and explore how these hunter-gatherers constructed and responded to their sonic environment. The results of the osteological, organological and soundscape analyses are presented in the form of a scholarly text, samples of studio and field recordings, and a soundtrack that fuses the results together into a nine-minute piece of sound art.