TASCAM_0187
15:29 min
TASCAM_0188
11:09 min
TASCAM_0195
21:55 min
TASCAM_0196
12:03 min
cicada.slow – thank you for listening to cicada.slow. You might be ready for alles, was irgend geschieht, which can be found here.
a story
an apple
This* is an apple from Kent, United Kingdom, back from when this Kingdom was a member of the European Union or back when there was reason to believe that it would soon not be the before mentioned. I brought it from Kent, the so called garden of England, in memory of an apple I had eaten in Cornwall. I had eaten a lot of apples there, some from an old lady who picked them so they would not go to waste through the storm that was said to arrive (a situation much alike one I was a part of on a when I visited my sister in Nicaragua, where we got stranded in the much unfriendly town of San Juan de Nicaragua. We were left with no money in a town that understandably saw tourists as walking money stuffed bags glowing from whiteness, finally, money in this god forsaken town. The government had been advertising them for years. But what the locals got to see was their private airplanes swooshing over and low above their town, heading straight for the beautiful lagoons and beaches of the Caribbean sea, that, other than from afar, too many of the inhabitants of this San Juan had never seen themselves. Neither would I on our stay, which, I felt, was fair. So the day after our arrival we walked the concrete walkways that were not sideways since there was no in between road for vehicles since there were no vehicles but the private boat of the one wealthy family in town that we went looking for and as we asked people for the directions to their house they must have believed that we were insane or insanely dumb and only one boy agreed to show us the way, going ahead on his bike but staying behind for the last corner that he pointed us to turn by ourselves. We greeted the family that I wished we had not met and asked when their boat would depart, up north the Caribbean coast, but we did and and found out it would depart when it would depart and and it would depart without us as we did not have the money to pay the trip nor for a dinner since we would have to spend another night in this San Juan. In the end we left the way we came, went back West on the river that divides and joins Nicaragua and Costa Rica in economic hatred and family relations.
After having met the family and after another night and having packed for the river ferry to the West we were on our way back from this very ferry that had just left without us when an old lady came walking hastily towards us, waving her arms. She was coming from the house of her friend who had the tv and she said that her friend said that the forecast said the tsunami would arrive today, we should hurry home. We hurried home and the tsunami did arrive that day, not on the Caribbean but on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua where it flooded and destroyed many houses and thus lives.) and the storm did arrive in Cornwall, it was beautiful and cleansing.
Also other apples I ate, from the Eden orchard (that made me imagine the Cider House Rules anew and remember that i never fully understood what an orchard might look like and why I read it and mourn), where most of the apples were being grown for making cider and all of them for presenting them to tourists, also the local ones and school children. Yet another apple I picked and ate (and this is the one mentioned as the apple in memory of which) from the tree that greeted us when we first entered the grounds of Vounder Barn that we stayed in at Eden. It was a beautiful little tree, bent to the ground as if from the load of apples it carried, but probably more from the wind and weather (and one particular thunder storm as we should learn). The very first day I picked an apple. It was deliciously juicy, sweet and sour. I handed it to Till. We spent the day getting to know Eden, its grounds and staff. And when we arrived back home, the tree was cut down. Maybe because I was raised in a Christian country, I felt very guilty.
We spent one month in Eden, passing by the trunk of the apple tree twice a day at least, a minimum of 60 times minus the two when it had still been a trunk attached to an apple tree and a lot of apples: walking onto the site and off the site of Eden again and again and again. From day to day we discovered more about Eden, its layers and particles, horizontal and vertical structures and wormholes, inherent connections as well as random dots and knots and since we met Kevin also acre after acre of land. It was delightful to meet him, it was usually delightful to meet the horticulturists as they were a group of people that felt in good balance with themselves and the world around them, maybe because they were in touch with it so much or because they saw as much sunlight as there was to see ? or so I wondered – but Kevin especially was a pleasure to meet, he grew up around here and knew every inch of this place by heart and so we asked him lots of questions and chatted along, not understanding half of what he answered, not at the time, only some things we could grasp later, when we discovered them ourselves and, in a second rush of enlightenment discovered that this was what Kevin had been talking about. Though what we did understand as we spoke was the story of the apple tree. Maybe because it was short. He had cut it down. In a thunder storm it broke and since then a fungus nested inside its trunk. It was infected, unable to heal itself and had to go before the fungus would spread to the life around it. Interestingly this habit of killing within ones own environment, to safe the whole by cutting out a part, is also common to some fungi. Adam taught us that the mycelium that work as a communicational network and executive organ of the societal structure of woods and other areas that are not being plowed, connects trees and other plants and, from time to time, expells those from the joint informations and power supplies, that are sick and could infect not the fungi that kills it but others of its own species, thus threatening the equilibrium of the shared inhabitat. Here the fungi work in their own as well as other species respect and very differently from another type of fungi that we learned about from him, one that inhabits specific ants, enslaves their nervous system and makes them crawl up on trees where the heads of the insects explode, thus spreading the spores of the fungi as far as possible. This pictoresq example should not cover the fact that fungi can do the exact same thing to humans (not the head exploding, not as far as i know). When the candida that we all house in our systems overtook in my body, it made me crave and eat exactly what was bad for me but good for the fungus, I was a zombie in fungi name and found myself waking up in the kitchen with the wrappers of chocolate in my hands, not remembering when I had made the decision to eat them nor how I had eaten them. We are as animal as any animal. And we are structured material that can be inhabited by other living beings, that can couple with other structures so to say, be they our size or molecular, be they a logical structure or a magnetic one. We are on a molecular level structures and we are material, we will fall into pieces, our structures will decompose and as everything we will end up in entropy. And this makes the material structure that we are the most basic and thus maybe the most important one of our being even if, then again, there cannot be a hierarchy between our intertwined layers since as we all know words do hurt (I don't love you anymore.) and can kill (shoot!), to point out some obvious extremes. We are plant, too, we grow and extend into the world, we carry scars and are thus what we have lived through and our actions – something that we like to point out to children or as a metaphor in films on the rings of a cut down tree where we can see the fire that the tree survived and the years it worked its way into the world. And this – what we do and did and experienced, perceived with our senses, heard, read, said – makes up what we are and is all the same true for our nervous system (a part of which is the brain) through which we make sense of the world, we make the sense of the world that we can through the structures that we are. We are the sense that we make of the world, our structures are this world, it does not exist anywhere outside of them.
a gift, a failed mission, I Ulysses
We had plans and badges for anyone brave enough to dare sign up for our mission. In the end we were the ones lacking the courage. How to invite you? How to formulate an invitation that would meet your needs to recognise it as an invitation? Or that would kindly refer from inviting you if that is what your needs imply?
We brought gifts, we had been working on them the night before and the day before. They were gifts we liked so maybe they were for us more than for you? Like the vinyl sent into space, a gift mankind gave to itself, persuading itself it was more than space waste to others. Would anyone want to hear this nonsense because it makes no sense when outside the system that it stems from, it receives its sense from this system since sense is the description of its position within this system. Would anyone be able to hear?
I went to the foot of the mountain again to record the cicadas I had heard the other day but then was too tired and rushed to record them, messing up most with heavy breathing and chasing of mosquitoes. The first half hour of todays recording is then again peppered with people passing me by and greeting or asking about the recorder in my hand, starting their bikes and riding away. I feel like the cicadas do react to people being there or not, but even more to wind and sun coming and going. Is it possible? This is the first recording. Following up are several shorter recordings of more or less concrete cicada songs, concrete being defined by my ears and what I would consider a song I walked up more, collecting songs and waste clips. Then it happened.
I found a good spot, close to where I had left off yesterday with the thought to record: the invisible leftovers of a ruin of a temple to worship the former Lan Na kingdom as the sign stated, marked by a half circle of cloth decorated trees in the woods. Yesterday there had been a beautiful concert of cicadas and I had imagined myself today, sitting within this forest glade, well covered in mosquito spray, enjoying the show. But I stopped just before that spot today, just a few meters before. The cicadas had caught my attention with a nice tune and as I stayed and listened I realised how it was changing a lot. Suddenly several construction sites swelled up from the grounds in front of me. Invisible drills were punching holes in non-existing concrete walls and materials of different kinds were screeching in resistance in frequencies I could barely hear. Not knowing what was happening to me I was trying to perceive this attraction when suddenly a motor bike started inside my ear. I shrugged and the shrugging is well documented on the recording, my trying to duck away before it would run over my head. One cicada, an inch of life, the size of the forest. It stopped and I was breathing heavily, waiting for another round of her tune to run through my skull and later it did. I tried to stay, just a bit longer, but after the third, the fourth verse of her song I left. I fled into the circle of trees in the woods where it was quieter, the drills and motor bikes only away in the background. I am done. I cannot take any more, this is too much for one person alone. To take up so much sound, such dense sound it almost renders visible the waves moving air, liquids and solids alike. I was not my body anymore, not structures that added up to organs, that structured made up a human body that one of its organs referred to as me, but a mass of particles kneaded, put into place, de- re- and structured by the songs of the cicada. To stay would have meant to become, to dissolve in their songs, in the woods, in this world. And I couldn’t. I put wax in my ears, me or my feet did by steering me out of this overwhelming beauty.
As I left there was more but how to describe when I was not even there... as in the distance some motor bikes started on the road leading from the top of Doi Suthep down towards town, the cicadas broke into several motorways streaming motor bikes and trucks loaded with drilling drills down into the midst of the forest. I was almost running, it is also on the recording.
In contrast to whales or sirens, the cicadas sing mostly within my audible range. Yet I am not able to hear them. My hearing is unable to detect the subtle beauty of their songs, I would need a different scale of perception for the frequencies and how they address them, a different time-space relation. Space and time are twisted in different ways into each other for a cicada and for me. How I wish I could have heard their songs. Had I, I probably would still be listening.
Yesterday I listened to the first cicada in my life. I recorded it and was so excited that I edited the clip right away and sent it to a friend. Since my online storage was, as usual, completely full, I encoded it as an mp3, best possible quality, and sent.
A bit later I listened to it and I couldn’t believe my ears – sure, mp3 is a lossy format – but this sounded completely chopped up, like I had compressed it as 8bit.
The songs of the cicadas contain informations in regions that the mp3 codec considers unimportant: things happen in between the frequency bands into which the sound file is being divided and in between the fractions of time (that’s a problem also with my recordings, they are not fine grained enough for a lot of things and I wish I could have recorded at a higher sample rate). There are more issues with the codec and why it does not work well with cicadas, but maybe I first share with you my findings in the mp3 cicadas.
These are screenshots of the frequency spectrum / spectral density analysis of the original and the mp3 compressed cicada recording made in audition.
I wonder what would come out of this recording if it were processed like the Ghost in mp3 songs. Would that be the actual Song of Cicada? Surely not, this is a clear case of not either or (which is not neither nor either) . Still I felt like finding out what this compression would make of the cicada recordings if it were to be applied multiple times – or as more rough compression – or both – maybe this would not reveal anything about the Cicadas Song, nor about our hearing but about the Codec that is being applied as well as its preassumptions.
So this is all not very scientific, it could be approached that way but I didn’t. I took some pictures of the spectrum of the clips and how it changed over time. Most interesting for me was that there seemed to be a threshold where the compression changed the clip dramatically and after which there was not much of a change anymore, or if, it seemed to rise from the codec interpreting and intensifying itself.
Here is, visually, what happened to one of my favorite cicada recordings, TASCAM_0206.wav, I encoded it as mp3 with 44.1 kHz, b bit and 16 kBit/s, no dither.
Jonathan Sterne describes in his essay „The mp3 as a cultural artifact” the strategies through which the decisions are being made which information to ignore and which to keep, one being the change in energy in the different spectrums. This analysis is then used in order to decide, which are the important frequencies. Here is a picture to illustrate why for cicadas this might not be possible:
cicada.scd is a joint project of Till Bovermann and me.
For this SuperCollider live set we use my cicada recordings from Chiang Mai as material for our analysis and later as source material for playing.
In order to get a better grasp of the cicadas songs listen to and look at specific bands of frequencies. Different things (patterns, pitch shifts, noise vs pitch switches) happen in different regions and over different time scales.
In order to perceive these happenings more clearly we start by isolating frequency bands, shifting them up or down and spreading or compressing them. This becomes the first layer of our cicada playing game.
The second layer focuses more on rhythmical structures from micro to macro scale: The clips are bandpassed very narrowly and analysed for (changes in) amplitude. The data is used for sound syntheses. The clips can be played continuously or be locked in loops in order to discover these regions thoroughly with our tools.
For visual analysis we used the Sonic Visualizer, Reaper and the Izotope Ozone Plugins.
For analysis and sound syntheses we used SuperCollider.
You may ignore the glitches below 4kHz, these are birds.
There is a very dense frequency band being supplied by the cicadas around 4.8 kHz. A little below and up until 21 kHz the cicadas produce a fairly equally distributed noise. These are still not all the frequencies cicadas produce or are able to perceive. For a scientific introduction e.g. on the "Acoustic communication in the Palaearctic red cicad" which is not any kind of cicada I recorded I can recommend this essay by J. Sueur and T. Aubin.
At some times, the energy seems almost equally displayed over the whole spectrum – the cicadas produce „noise” – while in the next moment they switch to discrete bands of frequencies. There are noise patterns at patterns within the noise. There are moments, where a pattern (visually) seems to invert.
We equal noise with insignificance: the information, the actual, the shape lies somewhere beyond or is being covered by it. But what if the noise if the actual, the real thing. What then happens to a Cicadas Song if it is being shaped through the concepts of sound of humans (which is what compressing does to it) and what information (other that this being shaped) does it still contain?
We choose shape over noise, we want to get a hold of the world, and if we can't find any, we shape it ourselves and subsequently state: obviously this is its shape. We seek a statistic average, peak or low and rank it higher than any or each of the perspectives, we even out their variations over micro and macro time, ignore or explain away their inconsistencies. We fail to teach our children the math this way around: if you gamble, your chances start over again with every bet, there is no equilibrium in the world, not as we like to imagine, it is a highly unlikely, accidentally stable state. The more we reinforce a stability in such a system, further we get to the threshold.
Maybe we can listen to noise more. Maybe we can't and that's also fine.
You might think it doesn't look too bad, we cannot hear these high frequencies anyway, not anymore. But listen to these snippets of the recordings, you do hear many differences.
up: TASCAM_0198_R.wav 02:15-02:35
down: TASCAM_0198_R.,p3 02:15-02:35
////////////// fft bands
chain = FFT(buf, in);
chain = PV_BrickWall(chain, hpFactor);
chain = PV_BrickWall(chain, lpFactor);
flux = FFTFlux.kr(chain, 0.9);
chain = PV_BinShift(chain, stretch, shift);
snd = (IFFT(chain) * \postAmp.kr(1)).tanh;
Pan2.ar(snd, LFNoise1.kr(Rand(0.05 + flux.linlin(0, 1, -1, 1))));
////////////// fft bands
///////////// patterns
playFreqs = rootFreq * [1.5, 1, 1.7];
postAmp = postAmp * AmpComp.kr(playFreqs);
bands = analysisFreqs.collect{|freq|
BPF.ar(snd, freq, bandRq)
};
analysisAmps = Amplitude.ar(bands, 0.01, 0.01);
// analysisGates = analysisAmps >= thresh; // either 0 or 1
pitchVars = ZeroCrossing.ar(bands) * analysisFreqs.reciprocal;
fbs = analysisAmps.linlin(0, 1, 0.5, 2);
// pitchVars.poll;
// amplitude contrast: quite quiter, loud louder
analysisAmps = (analysisAmps * 7 * ampContrast).min(1) ** (ampContrast);
snd = Mix([
noiseAmp * BPF.ar(PinkNoise.ar(analysisAmps * postAmp * 100),
playFreqs * VarLag.ar(pitchVars, 0.01, start: 1)),
synthAmp * analysisAmps * postAmp * SinOscFB.ar(playFreqs *
pitchVars, (fbs.neg * fbScale).min(2)),
bandAmp * PitchShift.ar(bands, 0.12, pitchRatio: rate.reciprocal,
timeDispersion: 0.000) * postAmp
]);
///////////// patterns
cicada.slow – thank you for listening to cicada.slow. You might be ready for alles, was irgend geschieht, which can be found here.