What Is Misuse?
Misuse is of course an obtuse term. It is slightly sensationalist in a way that is both problematic and undeniably appealing to me.
As seen above, in the Merriam-Webster dictionary verb definition, the definition includes misapplication, both in the sense of applying a tool to the wrong purpose but also in the sense of handling the tool improperly. We can also see that notions of abuse and mistreatment are baked into the definition, where your usage of a tool causes damage or suffering to either the tool itself or whatever/whoever is affected by your use.
But if I can generate sounds using a certain method and walk away with my ears, equipment and software intact, am I not simply using?
Based on these definitions, I have decided on three concepts that I find both valid and fruitful for my ambitions with this project.
The first is, of course, to simply break your equipment. As I will give historical examples of in later sections, achievements in misuse have been made through the permanent alter(c)ation of(with) equipment.
The second is simply to go against the norm of intended use for a software as it is established by the interface design, educational content and general culture established by the product and its users. This could of course also be labeled something such as ”creative use”, and I believe that the labeling of it as misuse is therefore contextual. In conventional music production education these sorts of techniques will often appear as ”unusual tips”. This, in my mind, represents the most experimental aspects of said education, but it also represents the delegation and containment of misuse as a simple curiosity without wider implications for the field of music production. Along those lines, I believe a practice becomes misuse whenever it gains the potential to destabilize the identity of whatever category of creative you consider yourself to be.
To draw a parallel, my experiences working with classical student musicians have involved many moments where the musicians began to withdraw from participation whenever I asked them to perform in a way that risked destabilizing their identity as ”classical musicians”.
This identity category, and a musicians level of accomplishment within it, I believe to be defined by the musicians elimination of ”fault” in western classical playing technique, a skill which is continually built over many years of practice. In light of this, asking the musician to perhaps use their instrument in a different manner, or maybe asking them to exaggerate and explore ”fault” is to ask them to either destabilize and potentially re-constitute their identities or to make parody of themselves towards themselves.
This can easily be seen in the music producer as well, who through the reading of books, the viewing of tutorials and through potentially just as many hours of practice as the classical musician attempt to eliminate their own faults, learn the proper usage of several types of physical and virtual equipment, and finally in the end achieve things such as ”the clean mix” or ”the perfect kick”. To base your practice on strange usages of this production equipment, creating sounds with unconventional and hard to define frequency spectrums (those who cannot simply be defined as ”bass”, ”pad” etc), can then destabilize the identity of the producer and lead to either a re-constitution of that identity or a potential comfort in limbo.
With my third definition I take heavy inspiration from the book Between Air and Electricity: Microphones and Loudspeakers as Musical Instruments by Cathy Van Eck. She identifies a lot of music amplification technology as being designed to be transparent. Transparency here is defined as only supporting the sound, amplifying while coloring the sound as little as possible. The practice of misuse in this context is in making audible what was designed to be silent, drawing out the character and the sound of the equipment itself. Here she draws parallels to instrumental music, where the sounds of the material that actually makes up the instrument are considered undesirable (the mechanics of the piano, the buzzing of guitar strings against the fretboard etc.) and where experimental music has often sought to draw these sounds out.4
I believe this definition can easily be translated into the context of working in digital audio workstations as well. Here we can draw out and exaggerate the sounds of plugins, use what was supposed to be a light coloration as a sound source in and of itself, and by doing so reveal different kinds of sound artifacts.
From Creator to Curator
In her book, Cathy Van Eck also describes the early theorizing preceding sound synthesis technology as well as the desires that drove its development. A common desire, exemplified by 20th century German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen above anyone else, was the desire for total control and freedom in the hands of the composer. For him, sound synthesis represented a move away from the limited material of the western orchestra and analogue instruments in general, as well as liberation from the abilities and interpretations of the musician tainting the composers vision. Since all sounds are in essence made up of the combination of several sine and cosine waves, he imagined that composers, with the use of combinations of sine-wave oscillators, would be able to create any sound imaginable and arrange them as they saw fit.5
Reality, in my experience, is slightly more limiting. While the likes of Stockhausen were often deeply knowledgeable in both music theory and the physical theory of sound, the reality remains that predicting the sound that a certain combination of sines and cosines will produce is largely impossible from the perspective of a practicing composer. In the development of the synthesizer certain norms therefore quickly established themselves, and certain rather simplistic waveforms became the basis of synthetic compositional practice. These waveforms (primarily the sine wave, triangle wave, sawtooth wave and square wave) differentiate themselves only by whether they include odd, even or all overtones (or none in the case of the sine wave) and whether the volume of the overtones taper off the higher they go.
The introduction of the Moog Synthesizer6 to the broader music community created further consensus in how a synthesizer is meant to be used. The Moog Synthesizer uses subtractive synthesis, a method which involves filtering away frequencies from waveforms with rich harmonic content, such as the square or sawtooth wave. The sound of these different filtered waveforms quickly became iconic in their own right, and along with the introduction of the keyboard as part of the synthesizer (something which had previously been seen as antithetical to the philosophy of electronic music), were in my opinion instrumental in establishing what electronic music sounded like in the popular consciousness. To this day subtractive synthesis is considered the norm while other methods (such as, for example additive synthesis, FM synthesis or wavetable synthesis) are considered more experimental techniques and, most importantly from the perspective of control, not considered to be techniques where one can predict the results one will get as reliably.
This unpredictability is to me a large part of the appeal of the practice of misuse. Within the scope of this project I will be using Ableton Live to generate sounds that I will be recording. This puts me in the role of a sound curator7, acquiring lots of unexpected content that I then have to sift through and find the parts that appeal to me. In the sense that I have control, it is only the control of how I will choose to explore the unknown vistas of my software. I can control my own actions and can often somewhat predict what is more likely to occur, however just about any sound could potentially result.
Another way of viewing this process is that I become both actor and reactor, and am therefore put in a much more equal relationship to the tool I use, no longer necessarily the master of the technology at my disposal. In this practice my lack of complete control becomes even more apparent as I have to actively take precautions to prevent the risk of sudden extreme volumes or frequencies.
Why Misuse?
There remains the question of not only why I wish to use these techniques, but also why I wish to frame the techniques through this slightly vague term of ”misuse”.
In the examples referred to earlier from Between Air and Electricity, it was mentioned how both traditional instruments as well as amplification equipment often are designed to be transparent, i.e to not draw attention to the material reality of the equipment, literally the materials from which it is built. I strongly believe, on the other hand, that there is value for the composer in drawing attention towards the material reality of the sounds being produced. I believe that it situates us in the knowledge of what our canon and culture values, who designs that value system, how we are directed and encouraged to act and what the limits of our possibilities are.
In that sense it also acts as guidance. One is directed towards an inherently under-explored world of sound. From a macro-perspective, it guides composers and producers in a progressive direction, challenging the limits of their working tools. On a personal level it keeps you moving, providing clear direction in your practice.
This, as I will further describe in later sections, is what fuels my experience that the sounds I generate using this practice appear to me imbued with meaning. The potency of these materials makes me approach them not as things to fit into a larger vision of a composition but rather as objects meant to be respectfully and carefully examined, allowing the composition to grow organically from the whatever I find within.