This research looks at the methods and models behind aesthetic, intuitive and, possibly, technical decisions that led to the composition commotion (2019) as it is. In 2016, I was developing a performance for The Sound of Saute Ma Ville (Akerman 1968) in Q-02 Brussels (Pinheiro 2019). Parallel to the residency, we had a private listening session of Terry Jennings’ Piece for Cello and Saxophone (1989; see also Boutweel 2014). While listening to this long piece, I imagined something along the lines of a minimalist approach, but created with ‘found sounds’ (field recordings) rather than musical instruments. What kind of sounds could provide the same effect? I thought of creating the impression of an untouched artwork, something brought from the outside world and ‘free of residual associations’ (Demers 2009). A sound-work in which nothing changes while at the same time providing the feeling that each moment is not the same as it was a second ago. This is something that I had never tried with my ‘found sounds’ approach, which is in line with what Joanna Demers (2010; see also 2009) defines as ‘static music’, eventually re-conceptualizing it as ‘maximal music’, which in its turn seems to be related to Eliane Radigue’s Feedback Loops (1969–70) and other composers such as Maggi Payne.
At first, it seemed that the feelings of continuity and immersion were somewhat more naturally produced with string instruments than with field recordings. With this in mind, my awareness of the sounds around the residency became biased. I found the sounds because they were very present in my routine at the residency and very specific to my conditions at that time: some were ‘seasonal’ (they occurred as a result of some Christmas installations in the street), some were prominent sounds in the residency space itself and therefore they were always present in my environment while working at the residency. But most importantly, I chose them because they were very ‘loopable’ and I could try to extend them in the same way I felt the strings were extended.
At some point, it became clear that I had identified four sources to be recorded and perhaps this choice was influenced by the idea of four channels. However, this was just an idea. I would not execute it right away (because my residency had a different purpose). For now, I only collected these sounds, in the knowledge that I would get to it later.
This research looks at the methods and models behind aesthetic, intuitive and, possibly, technical decisions that led to the composition commotion (2019) as it is.
In this sense, the composition itself is a research process, as it explores the compositional approaches that fall into the minimalist music category. By aiming at an understanding of those strategies, commotion also provides the possibility of auto-analysing my own creative process by comparison or difference. In sharing it, it is my hope to promote an insider understanding of sonic tools and strategies in order to demystify them within academic and artistic research discourses. In this way, sound can be embraced, inclusive and included. As Salomé Voegelin proposes within her exploration of ‘the political possibility of sound’ (2018):
[S]ound is an alternative perspective, it is a slice of the actual world, sound is a portal to imagination and an access point not only to itself, opening experience towards a sonic materiality, but also to the experience of a radical realism, to the idea of the world not as an absolute real but as an indexical real – the way the world is or the way we perceive it to be is one way which doesn’t impede it from being different, something else. (2016)
She sees ‘sound as a possibility to pluralise the lines, to connect to the invisible, to the knowledge that speaks a different voice, that does not sound the line but off the line and across lines and blurring them’ and so does commotion (email to the author: 24/11/2021).
In order to assert as pragmatic a discourse as possible, this exposition will make a comparative study between the act of creation and the rationalization of it. On the one hand, the investigation follows the traditional strategy of a ‘case study’. On the other hand, there is a parallel ‘meta case study’; that is, the observation of the ‘case study,’ which is, itself, observed. This is possible in this digital environment, where two expositions can be observed and commented on in parallel. There are also two kinds of text: this one, typed, and the parallel one, ‘handwritten’. In this way, this exposition proposes a critical engagement with the process of composition—hoping to provide a case-study that, although specific to sound, maybe be transversal to any discipline. For that reason, it will also engage with a parallel reflection about ‘intentionality, interpretation and representation’ as an attempt to establish a relationship between the ‘case study’ and the ‘meta case study’.
As Francis Dhomont observed, ‘the perceived object has priority over the conceived object’ (1989). In other words, commotion fails to be a minimalist composition within the parameters of Jennings or Radigue, or at least it fails to evoke their work as I meant it to. I think the piece would need to be much longer for that feeling, allowing the movements and transitions to be much smoother and slower. Time spent listening allows for an engagement that changes with length and commotion lacks that quality of extended time. However, throughout the process of understanding the common parameters of minimalist music—sustained tones, modular repetition, radical reduction, modal pitch, dream ‘chord’, chromatic aggregate, damping, etc. (see Boutwell 2014)—I understood which of these parameters resonate in found sounds and, more importantly, I understood more deeply the steps I go through during my creative and technical process. Instead of ‘just doing it’, I did it under the awareness of doing so and therefore this process was more informed in itself. commotion only fails as a minimalist composition if it is reduced to that possibility. From the poietic perspective, the research led to commotion as it is. From the esthesic perspective, commotion carries no intentions nor representations. As Augoyard and Torgue posited, ‘imitation implies a sense of intention […] and requires the listener’s knowledge of the reference’ (2006: 59). This would condemn the work to its interpretation and the interpretation itself would be condemned, in turn, to the sense of intention. When one listens to commotion, one listens to the sounds in it and the ideas they raise within. That will always be something else, someone else’s.
While Demers (2010) makes a point refuting absolutism, there is a certain need for a pragmatic attitude towards the artwork if one wants to formalize the process and shorten the distance between the artistic practice and the scientific thought. I would argue that there are a few parameters that can be firmly defined. In fact, although scientific research leads to conclusive outcomes in their specific fields, these are only temporary conclusions. The nature of research is to keep on testing, exploring and questioning. This is something that the pandemic has shown us: understanding a virus is as mutative as the virus itself. In that way, both artistic and scientific research are relative. In truth, these dilemmas, dichotomies, and challenges are transversal to any other creative field. The separation between fields happens mostly because the discourse is either too technical (and therefore not accessible) or too subjective (and therefore vague and… ‘relative’). Therefore, the artwork is as objective as anything else.
In this specific case, the listening experience of commotion should not be dependent on the listener’s inside knowledge of minimalist music, although this knowledge was necessary for the execution of the idea and the method behind making it. Besides, the problem with relativism is the dependency on the self—the artist or the listener. Aesthetic judgement is a subjective experience (a well-known discussion in Kant, Heraclito or Schiller), but there are also the objective elements in a subjective experience. Sound-wise, these objective elements imply addressing the process in a technical way without closing it into inaccessible terminology because these terms can be linked to empirical experiences—we are all listeners after all.
And for sound especially, it should be possible to improve the way it is communicated, also promoting it in predominantly visually oriented contexts and addressing it as a transdiscipline. There is a common ground we can depart from: for example, the acoustic behavior of a given space is as relative as it is objective: we can test how sound behaves in a specific space, how it propagates and resonates, which frequencies are the most prominent (early reflections), how the envelope of the sound behaves (attack, sustain, and decay), and so on. That, per se, would be an incredible departing point for any sound installation in a gallery space and could result in a proper sound-check and consequent positioning of loudspeakers or equalization of the sound, for example. Very often, these spaces are acoustically challenging and the artists have very few options: either trying to reduce their character by creating points of absorption, or just by reducing the experience to headphones. And that’s truly a reduction, as it erases any relationship with the space itself and monopolizes the body of the listener in a limitative way.
Moreover, this is not a concern only for sound installations, as most installations deal in some way with sound, even if they do not mean to do so. It does not need to be an audiovisual installation, for even in an installation that intends to be purely visual, as far as it is placed in a site, there will be sound. And therefore, the acoustics of that space will be, even if involuntarily, part of the experience of the artwork: the way sound resonates in space, or the way the absence of sound gives room to other sounds to surround the work. There is an ontological discrimination of sound in the artistic field because of its permanent abstraction: sound can be simultaneously objective and abstract. It lies in between an intrinsic perception and a ubiquitous process.4
And in the end, the work will subsist. Perhaps no one will notice how the acoustics of the space influenced the experience or in the case of commotion, no one will perceive the association with minimalist music, despite enjoying the experience, or not. This not cultural relativism (which has been discussed in the specific case of electroacoustic music in Andean 2012), because that would presume that the work succeeds (or does not) as a minimal composition and because music should not be legitimized by meaning (paraphrasing Demers 2010), nor intentions. This ‘aesthetic aporia’ (Weiss 2008: 11) displaces the possibility to focus more on ‘performativity’ than on the performance itself (Bal 2002). That is: the thing that it does, what it does, and how it does it. Not why (intentionality), but how (listening).
4 Perhaps a little off topic, but Douglas Self (1988) provides an interesting (rather technical) account of ‘subjectivism’ in sound within the technological developments of hi-fi systems.
Nearly three years later, I had the opportunity to attend the Summer Academy of Electroacoustic Composition at the Musiques & Recherches Institute in Ohain (coincidentally also in Belgium). The Summer Academy presupposed the making of a composition, while attending lectures and having individual discussions with the tutors. I decided it was a good chance to work with the sounds that I had recorded at the Q0-2 residency. I also thought of it as an opportunity for a very specific insight on the artistic process itself, because my participation in the summer academy was narrowed down to this intention, and because this study focused on the principles and strategies behind minimalist music (or this Jennings’ piece in particular).
In Ohain I selected two of these recordings and with this choice, a first impression emerged: these two samples could be used as opposite forces—one of them negative, darker and noisier, and the other positive, brighter and calmer—which would slowly take over and establish itself in the space. I started imagining the movements these sounds could create and as such triggered a certain ‘actualization of senses’ that felt necessary. For this, I thought of processing one of the sounds to create the darker content (lowering the pitch). I also thought it should start from the rear loudspeakers and evolve as a pushing force into the front loudspeakers. This ‘force’ would persist for a while until the second sample would put it at ease, making it brighter. For this new purpose, I realized I had a better sound from those recordings, which I prefered to the ones I had selected. These somehow belonged to the same space, but the microphone pointed at a different part of the source and therefore the pitch and texture were different: instead of like this it sounded like this (from now on, called the ‘darker element’). Also, the second part would contrast better with this sound (from now on, called the ‘brighter element’).
The initial process was quite chaotic. The Musique & Recherches Summer School gave it a context and a timeframe, but also brought in certain constraints. I had to work mostly with headphones and follow a very traditional take on electroacoustic music, particularly acousmatic composition (Vande Gorne, 2018). Accordingly, first one should follow an archaic structure of electroacoustic music composition concerning the development of the elements over time (introduction, development, conclusion). Such comprised a specific timbral treatment, including gestures and moving sources, dynamic contrast, and so on—what Natasha Barrett calls ‘distraction tactics’ (1999: 14). Second, there is a tendency to generate lots of new material from processing the original source in order to explore its possibilities. With this process, one would figure out how to use the sound and how to place its multiple parts together.
For these reasons, I started processing my darker sample within my usual set of possibilities: time/speed changes (consequently changing the pitch), massive filtering in or out of notched frequencies, and most importantly, layering all these processes to create movement and dimension. Usually, movement can be simply created by moving the sources in between the channels, or in a more subtle way with comb filtering, that is, having two or more identical audio sources mixed together with a slight delay between them, creating a ‘Haas Effect’, or precedence effect (Wallach, Newman, and Rosenzweig 1949; Pinheiro and others 2019).
In the meantime, João Oliveira (one of the tutors) brought to my attention the importance of starting with a clear and defined gesture. In practice, I changed almost nothing, but introduced a little bit more impact in the first movement (precisely by duplicating the sound and delaying one of the sources slightly). The content remained the same, only more defined. ‘attention catcher’—instead of a loose feeling of something that has already been started. While the idea of ‘gesture’ in music is a whole field in itself, it relates specifically to the nature of the acousmatic experience: in other musical contexts, there is a physical and a visible mediation of the experience. The instrument itself and the performer are agents. In acousmatic music, the agency is invisible and eventually mediated by the intentionality and efforts of the composer (see Smalley 1997b; Cadoz 1988).
The idea of intentionality itself is twofold: it comprises of the maker’s intentions which, in their turn, should translate into the receiver’s interpretation.1 It is the same to speak of poiesis vs. esthesis. The former refers to the creative processes that generate a work and can include authorial intentions, while the latter, esthesis, refers to the processes that receivers undertake when interpreting a work (see Kane 2014).
To challenge interpretation and meaning is to liberate the work from citationality, which is included in the ‘dogma of intentionalism’ (Bal 2002: 180). Interpretations are assumptions and assumptions are speculative. The ‘thing’ becomes about the assigned meaning, not the experience thereof. According to Susan Sontag, ‘interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there’ (2001: 13). Additionally, Mieke Bal (1997) proposes ‘interpretation is never anything more than a proposal’ (11), which can be a ‘form of censorship’ (17) and a projection of the self, as in L. Dusman’s ‘Individual identity’ (1994: 131). It is a projection of the ‘interpreter’ into the ‘interpreted’, mirroring the projection of the ‘maker’ into the ‘made’. Both intentionality and interpretation imply cultural assumptions, ‘all mapped by metaphoric implication onto the original binary: Self/Other’ (Dusman 1994: 134); and neither intentionality nor interpretation should constrain the possibilities of sounds to be something other than the listener’s guess.
Although Jean-Luc Nancy remarks, ‘to listen is to always be in the edge of meaning’ (2007: 7), this identification is limitative, closed in on itself, limited to the possibilities of the perceiver. This would doom sounds to representation, for ‘signification creates just another piece of oppositional epistemological discourse: “this” implying “not-this”, “that” implying “not-that”’ (Dusman 1994: 137). The meaning of a sound, or the whole sonic experience, is a thought sustained by the listener’s intuition (see Sheerin 2009). If the work is justified by means of intentionality, the work is reduced to representing that intention. However, that purpose or intention should either surpass the work and become the experience, or it is simply not present as a result. To state that the sound ‘means something’ is an effective identification with a possible source, idea or sensation.
The work represents its own idea and not itself. It becomes what it represents, instead of presenting itself. But instead the meaning of a sound, or the whole sonic experience, is sustained by the listener’s intuition (See Sheerin, 2009), not the composer’s intentions. If the work would be justified by means of intentionality, the work would be reduced to representing that intention.
During this process, the composition was becoming stereo because I was working with headphones. The initially intended front vs. rear bouncing movement was gradually lost in this process, as I decided to work the ‘front’ channels first and then the ‘rear’ channels. For the same reason, the incorporation of the ‘bright’ element was not happening very fluently and, most importantly, without the impact I wished for. Additionally, I could hear more texture and changes on the headphones than on the loudspeakers available. I worked mostly based on this modified sample, and the first few rounds sounded like this and this.
All things considered, trying to imitate Jennings’ piece implied an interesting technical challenge, but it also limited the process. The intentions were outside the sounds and undermined the perception of the materials. As long as the priority was to fulfil these intentions, the possibilities were narrowed down to those expectations. At this point, for the Summer School’s ‘Influx concert’ at the Espace Segnor in Brussels (August, 2019), I decided to keep only the first half of the composition (the darker element). I still presented it in 4 channels because this helped fill in the space given that the overall mix was a little dull. At that time, every variation of the brighter sample felt artificial, forced and out of the context. Its tempo didn’t work with the pace of the dark segment and while it seemed useless to generate variations, it also seemed the sound was not enough by itself. Naturally, the original sample was in the lower spectrum and low frequencies have a slower and longer nature. I couldn’t blend it into a higher-end (and therefore faster and shorter) sound because, although interesting, the combination was too dull. It did not fit my concept and I was not satisfied with it as it was. This was the version presented at the residency’s final concert.
Andean, James. 2012. An Embodied Approach to Acousmatic Music (Jyväskylä University Digital Archive)
Augoyard, Jean François and Henry Torgue (eds.). 2006. Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press)
Bal, Mieke. 1997. Narratology, Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 2nd edn. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Bal, Mieke. 2002. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (Toronto: University of Toronto Press)
Chion, Michel. 1994. Audio-vision. Sound on Screen. Columbia University Press.
Demers, Joanna. 2009. ‘Field Recording, Sound Art and Objecthood’, Organised Sound, 14(1): 39–45 <https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355771809000065>
Barrett, Natasha. 1999. ‘Little Animals: Compositional Structuring Processes’, Computer Music Journal, 23(2): 11–18 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3680732>
Boutwell, Brett. 2014. ‘Terry Jennings, the Lost Minimalist’, American Music, 32(1): 82–107 <https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.32.1.0082>
Cadoz, C. 1988. ‘Instrumental Gesture and Musical Composition’, conference paper given at ICMC 1988—International Computer Music Conference, Cologne, Germany, 1–12 <https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00491738/document>
Demers, Joanna. 2010. Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Dhomont, Francis. 1989. ‘Mais est-ce de la musique?’, in >convergence< GUIDE, (Montréal: CEC), translated by Laurie Radford and Claude Schryer. Also available as ‘Acousmatic, What is It?’ at <https://electrocd.com/en/album/2396/Francis_Dhomont/Cycle_de_l_errance>
Dusman, Linda. 1994. ‘Unheard-of: Music as Performance and the Reception of the New’, Perspectives of New Music, 32(2): 130–46 <https://doi.org/10.2307/833601 >
Haraway, Donna. 1988. ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies, 14(3): 575–99 <https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066>
Holub, Robert C. 2003. Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction (London: Taylor & Francis)
Kane, Brian. 2014. Sound Unseen (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Kant, Immanuel. 1991. Critique of Pure Reason (London: Everyman)
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007. Listening (New York: Fordham University Press)
At the same time, leaving the listening experience to interpretation is to rely completely on subjective meaning. Drawing from Frege, Paul Ricoeur clarifies that sense is a predicative relation and reference is the pretension to say something about reality (Ricoeur 1976; Frege 1970). Since it involves a subject, identification is predicative. As Ricoeur formulated, ‘the question here is whether the surplus of meaning […] is part of [the work’s] signification or if it must be understood as an external factor, which is non cognitive and simply emotional’ (1976: 45). Thus, the meaning of a sound should not be repressive, but rather an act of spontaneity, as in Kant’s ‘synthesis of imagination’ (1991). Otherwise, as Szendy asked, ‘what space for play does a work reserve, in itself, for those who play it or hear it, for those who interpret it, with or without instruments?’ (2008: 7).
In fact, a listener is not devoid of a past, since the listening experience is itself a cultural activity. Sounds evoke reality, as something being-in-the-world: ‘sound is sensual and meaningful, a structured articulation of body and world’ (Weiss 2008: 12).2 Listening itself is a permanent process of assessing the sounds and perceiving them—an act of consciousness. It is organic, in a permanent state of change and rearrangement. In the same way, memory and culture establish how sound refers to the senses; that is, previous individual experiences or ‘situated knowledge’ (Haraway 1988). It is through these references that the listener relates themself to the experience. As Allen S. Weiss asserts ‘to listen is already to think […] and all natural sounds […] evoke a world’ (2008: 9).3
Thus, the process of perception should be the goal in itself (Jauss cited in Holub 2003: 50). The work should consider the perceiver as it considers the emitter: by questioning its position in the frame of the work, the relation between both interveners is what determines its evolution (see Holub 2003: 55; 57). As Bal remarks, ‘the artist is involved only part of the way. S/he disappears, gives his work over to a public s/he will not know. What happens after the work has been made is not determinable by artistic will’ (2002: 255). Because, while interpretation is a form of ‘active appropriation’ (Szendy 2008), the perception of the artwork based on subjective relativism is dependent on too many variables. It turns the work into an aleatory experience. And while the artwork and the audience are an ‘encounter of two independent causal chains’ (Darwin via Cadoz 1988), there are a number of premises that shape the experience.
1 Not to be confused with ‘interpretation’ as in instrumental music, in which an interpreter performs the instrument, in particular because in instrumental music, the interpretation of the performer has a concrete effect on the sonic sensory experience (e.g., making it slower).
2 Heidegger’s idea of being-in-the-world is drawn from Husserl’s relationship between consciousness and objecthood. For an understanding of this within the context of acousmatic music/sound, see Kane (2014), where the concept of Dasein is also explored.
3 Eventually, Weiss’ affirmation challenges the idea of ‘reduced listening’, a widely-spread concept popularized by Pierre Schaffer that advocates for a listening mode that focuses ‘on the sound traits of sound itself, independent of its cause and its meaning’ (Chion 1994: 29).
Pinheiro, Sara, and others. 2019. ‘Reflections on Sonic Digital Unreality’, Digital Creativity, 30(3): 196–205 <https://doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2019.1653929>
Pinheiro, Sara. 2019. ‘The Sound of Saute ma ville’, Iluminace, 31(4): 47–60 <https://www.iluminace.cz/en/artkey/ilu-201904-0003_the-sound-of-saute-ma-ville.php>
Pinheiro, Sara & Rouš, Jiří. 2022. 'Reflections on sound associations and sonic digital environments', Resonance, 3(3), 255–267 <https://doi.org/10.1525/res.2022.3.3.255>
Ricoeur, Paul. 1976. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian University Press)
Self, Douglas. 1988. ‘Science and Subjectivism in Audio’. Originally published in Wireless World, July 1988. Revised and republished at <http://douglas-self.com/ampins/pseudo/subjectv.htm >
Sheerin, Declan. 2009. Deleuze and Ricoeur: Disavowed Affinities and the Narrative Self (London: A&C Black)
Smalley, Denis. 1997. ‘Spectromorphology: Explaining sound-shapes’, Organised Sound, 2(2): 107–26 <https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355771897009059>
Smalley, Denis. 1997. ‘Spectromorphology and Structuring Processes’, in The Language of Electroacoustic Music, ed. by Simon Emmerson (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press), pp. 61–93
Sontag, Susan. 2001. Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Picador)
Szendy, Peter. 2008. Listen: A history of our ears. (New York: Fordham Univ Press)
Vande Gorne, Arnette. 2018. Treatise on Writing Acousmatic Music on Fixed Media (Ohain, Belgium: Musiques & Recherches), volume IX
Voegelin, Salomé. 2016. 'The Political Possibility of Sound', Paper presentation at FASE (Festival Arte Sonore Espanol) 6, Hybrid Lab, Berlin, Germany, 04 Nov 2016
Voegelin, Salomé. 2018. The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening (New York: Bloomsbury Academic)
Wallach, Hans, E.B. Newman and M. R. Rosenzweig. 1949. ‘The Precedence Effect in Sound Localization.’ The American Journal of Psychology, 62(3): 315–36 <https://doi.org/10.1121/1.1917119 >
Weiss, Allen S. 2008. Varieties of Audio Mimesis: Musical Evocations of Landscape (Berlin: Errant Bodies Press)
A few weeks later, I found the missing element while traveling in Trieste (Italy). I had been looking to record this kind of sound for quite some time and, by chance, I randomly found it there. The moment I heard it, I immediately thought it would combine well with the rhythmical, bright element from Brussels and perhaps both, together, would fit in better in the dark, noisy segment. While recording it, I decided I should start the process all over again. I wanted to recover the initial multichannel intentions and the bouncing movement. With this new sound, I felt I could try again to make the piece I had imagined.
In order to start again, I tried to analyse the whole process and figure out the steps between generating the material and the Influx version. I tried to deconstruct the steps I took at the Summer School, this time at the acousmatic studios of The School of Music in Bangor, Wales. Among the different versions, I was only convinced by the very beginning of it, but the rest didn’t really resonate for me: I knew I had lost the initial roughness and although all these variations were different, they were, I felt, all the same. Most of all, my composition was missing detail. For that reason, I decided to keep the beginning but build everything else from scratch. Also, this version held onto the dark and noisy tone I wanted to create, but it had nothing to do with the minimal composition I meant to evoke, with slow and continuous transformations. I felt I should explore the sample again but return to the ‘static’ concept:
‘Static music—music that is maximal in terms of its duration and repetition—engenders a condition that is unmusical: the absence of development, of growth, of organicism’ (Demers 2010: 102). Furthermore, Demers writes: ‘Static music is not only music that avoids conventional harmonic or melodic goals but also music that takes specific steps to obscure any sense of the passage of time’, (93) ‘[b]ut static works confound our experience of aesthetic time, because they renounce any claims toward organicism or development. Instead, they highlight our experience of the empirical time of the artwork’ (100) ‘because there are no expectations regarding the ways in which materials will interact with one another’ (102).
For that purpose, I simply started with sequencing the sample across the four loudspeakers. This created a classic (and basic) rotating movement, but in this layering I found the frequencies that, once accumulating in the space, created an overtone. I was looking for those overtones because they were my strongest reference from Jennings’ piece. With the juxtaposition and the overtones, I found the minimalism I was looking for. By now, there were three blocks of content (the introduction, the minimalist development and the ‘bright’ segment). I thought of different alignments for these parts, but the order as described seemed to make most sense for the feeling I wanted to produce. From this moment on, the whole process was triggered and fluent. I simply tried to make it evolve slowly and with blurred transitions until it would feel right to bring the ‘bright’ segment. I listened more, and did less. After a while, these three blocks were aligned but I still did not feel united. Also, other sources started coming to mind slowly. First, I remembered one specific sound that I had recorded for a 3D installation in Stockholm a long time previously. This sound is different in nature (movement, pitch) but it holds the same feeling of rotation, repetition and continuity. It is barely audible in the composition, but it enriches the texture and it incorporates the ‘brighter’ segment smoothly; its use makes the transition less divided.
Once this segment was almost complete, I felt that the middle segment was not holding well as a transition between the first part and the second part. To work on that, I tried to extend the overtonal layer, making it more intense and immersive. That’s when the second ‘random memory’ appeared: a recording I had made in Prague, nearly six years earlier. I had never used this recording, and now it came to my mind exactly because it was noisy but spacious (unlike the dark main sample, which is quite dry). Additionally, it contained a spaced pulse, bearing a sense of time passing and a recurring event (recognition). Finally, it provided a sense of place, an existing, physical location which was missing in the journey I wanted to create. Such a location seems also common within the electroacoustic ‘sound space palette’ (Barrett 1999: 12). All these layers together made the composition more complex. The initial idea of having a ‘dark’ chaotic segment followed by something kind in nature, a quieter and more pleasant moment, became a sort of ‘rite of passage’ in itself. Along the way, other sounds came into play and the initial drive triggered other ideas. In the end, whether or not the final result resembled a minimalist composition appears to be besides the point. It is the process that mattered and what ‘survives’ in the piece or not, in spite of the intentions. In fact, after the incubation period (the idea) and the making process, the composition became something else, it became itself.
