UTS Music.Sound.Design Symposium 2008 abstracts

Philip Samartzis - The Space of Sound

The gallery space is becoming an increasingly popular site for the presentation of sound art. An ever-expanding assortment of technologies, procedures and concepts, has extended the possibilities for composition and presentation, of which the installation format appears to be the most appropriate. As a site of exhibition the gallery space possesses both distinct advantages and disadvantages for the sound artist. In particular, the qualities that define the contemporary art space and the critical relationship between context and content challenge the way sound art may be exhibited and experienced. In the context of Western culture's privileging of sight and visuality, sound art presents a challenge where the ear, rather than the eye, provides the central mode of perception and evaluation. For audiences unfamiliar with the medium, this may forge effective new modes of communication and aesthetic appreciation. This discussion presents a series of concepts, procedures and strategies concerning the theory and practice of surround-sound installation that contribute towards resolving the schism between seeing and listening.

John Bassett - Acoustics & Transduction - The Complex Components in Recorded and Live Sound Capture and Reproduction

A review of practitioners in audio reveals a tendency for the industry to focus on the electronic hardware that is an essential component in any recording or reproduction process. Examination of the recording or reproduction chain however, reveals that the electronic manipulation of the audio signal no longer holds many challenges. The two areas of greater complexity in the chain are the acoustic character of the instrument/performer and their interaction with the acoustic environment followed by the transduction process of converting acoustic energy to electrical energy through microphones and loudspeakers. This discussion will review aspects of these frequently overlooked parts of the audio chain.

Damian Castaldi - Making Connections

Making Connections is the title of this paper. Within sound art, sound design, music and audio production I will discuss my work as a musician and sound artist and current pedagogy at UTS. I will elaborate on areas of sound culture, radio/transmission art, acousmatic composition and gesture interface for sound installation and present/play short excerpts from a New media residency with the ABC, the Listening Room, recordings made from musical instruments of my own construction, an acousmatic piece commissioned by the ABC Earclip series and a musical track co produced with Solange Kershaw for an independent CD release. I will conclude with an online demonstration of an audio project I am currently working on in its developmental stages - A commercial project, which outlines the original concept for an interactive sound sculpture planned for installation in the Melbourne Telstra Concept Store in 2008.

Densil Cabrera - The Appeal of Acoustics

This presentation gives an overview of acoustics teaching based on the presenter's experience in the postgraduate audio and acoustics program at the University of Sydney. It addresses the questions of why students are interested in studying acoustics, possible content of acoustics courses, and the benefits acoustics education can bring. A notable aspect of the audio and acoustics program is that it attracts many students whose background is in audio production (as well as students working in professional audio and acoustics). Some study to make a career transition into professional acoustics or audio systems, and others are interested in using knowledge of acoustics to inform their work in audio production.

Kees Tazelaar - Electronic Tape Music Composition and Spatialization

When in the 1950's, one of the leading composers of the Cologne school of electronic music and later director of the Institute of Sonology Gottfried Michael Koenig was asked what a definition of electronic music could be, his answer was: "not instrumental music". The act of instrumental composition concentrates on a symbolic notation of known timbres coming from known musical instruments, but composing electronic music means composing the timbral flow itself. Timbres are not known on forehand but their flow is the result of composing its parameters, which expresses the musical form.

Although early electronic tape music still exhibited an instrumental character in the sense that timbres were produced first, then selected, and finally combined according to a pre-calculated score, Koenig would start a search for a compositional approach in which the compositional idea is integrated as much as possible in the production stage of the material itself. His composition "Terminus" from 1962 has been a point of departure for my own compositional work, because the classic compositional model of 'themes and variations' is replaced by 'sound material and sound transformations'. This compositional model has also proved to be a successful tool in the education of electronic music at Sonology.

Another topic to address in this lecture is electronic music spatialization. Just as in my view, timbres should not be distributed on a time line after they were produced, sound spatialization ideally should not be decided on at the very last moment of an electronic music production or worse, during its performance, but instead be taken in consideration during the production of the sound structures themselves. This however is usually much more difficult to achieve than the previous proposition for a number of reasons. A very ambitious project from the past will be presented as an example: the Philips pavilion of the Brussels World Fair of 1958. Furthermore, recent developments for sound spatialization such as Surround Sound Systems and Wave Field Synthesis will be discussed.

Nigel Helyer - The Nomadic Ear

"The Nomadic Ear" is concerned with concepts of spatiality, of location and the interactions of sounding bodies that articulate and activate the soundscape; how we as auditors experience the sonic domain and how we as authors compose and construct compelling, immersive audioscapes.

We will consider strategies and methodologies for the design and composition of sonic narratives in non-linear environments; for example the design of immersive soundscapes, within installations that employ multiple parallel soundtexts; and in particular new compositional methods for building terrain-based mobile location sensitive audio experiences.

This presentation will examine the construction of sound narratives, together with the mechanisms for engaging with and experiencing, spatially distributed audioworks. I shall use my own creative and research projects that exhibit various forms of Immersion to tease out these issues, using four basic approaches that are categorised as follows:

1. Three-dimensional speaker arrays with dynamic spatial audio.
2. Environmental and public soundart projects.
3. Interactive multi-channel projects.
4. Location sensitive terrain-based spatial audio research.

These four categories of soundart projects each deal with issues of immersion and with the construction of narrative and modes of interaction in a variety of ways. Each work category describing different strategies for composition and content development for immersive environments and identifies varying auditor experiences, highlighting concepts of Linearity and Non-linearity and changing perceptions of locale and locatedness.

The works also allude to the changes in concepts of sonic immersion particularly in reference to Public Space by indicating how the technologies of audio transmission and reproduction have increasingly enabled and encouraged forms of privatized and selective hearing affecting a withdrawal from the Sonic Commons.

Sherre Delys - Pool

Pool is a media-sharing web project being developed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's, Radio National in partnership with University of Technology Sydney.

Project Lead Sherre DeLys will discuss Pool as a test-bed fostering open source interactions between ABC and creative content communities, and a research project investigating the public broadcaster's changing role as a vital player in Australia's Information Commons.

Kirsten Reese - Hallenfelder

As one example of my recent work which is situated between installation, performance and electronic composition, I will discuss Hallenfelder. Hallenfelder (hall-fields) is an audio-video installation incorporating a wave field synthesis array with 20 loudspeakers, presented at the festival Donaueschinger Musiktage 2006. It uses recordings from nine community halls where concerts and installations take place during the annual festival, the oldest and one of the biggest contemporary music festivals in Europe. Both the sounds of the empty halls and sounds from communal activities not related to the festival that take place in these halls during the rest of the year (like cow auctions, blood donations, carnival parties, various sports events etc.) are featured in this site-specific work. The atmosphere of the empty spaces, their animated silence is captured and transformed. Moreover, the 'aura' of empty rooms appears to come from what has already taken place in the space and what might take place in the future. Moments of acoustic and visual recordings taken from various events in the halls are interspersed across the work. Audio and video are often not syncronized so that sound and image flit either across the projection screen or through the loudspeakers in a quasi-ghostlike manner. The focus of the work lies in the play between representation and visual and musical abstraction with, concrete' sound material.

Jim Denley - Budawangs

From the 18th of May till the 1st of June 2006 I spent 15 days walking and playing saxophone in the Budawang Mountains, a wilderness area in the Morton National Park, South West of Nowra on the east coast of Australia.

These mountains are full of dramatic and rugged rock formations - caves, crevices and a hidden valley - it is a wonderland of natural acoustics. Presumably people have been making playing and singing in these spaces for thousands of years, but it's probable that this is the first time they have heard a saxophone.

Much of the playing was recorded, often on two separate tape recorders which were later synched on computer. Out of these raw recordings has come a CD and two radio programs.

These recordings are part musical performances and part field recordings. I will discuss the implications of this work, in relation to music making in Australia and concepts of nature.

Andrew Johnston - Partial Reflections

In this presentation, I present a series of simple virtual musical instruments that use mass-spring physical models to mediate between the sound produced by an acoustic instrumentalist and computer-generated sound and video. The instruments, and the associated composition Partial Reflections, were the result of artistic collaboration with composer/trombonist Ben Marks.

To help explore the nature of these somewhat unusual 'virtual instruments', a number of expert musicians agreed to play them and provide detailed feedback on their experiences. These feedback sessions provided a number of insights into both the design of these specific instruments and the interaction strategies employed by the musicians. In particular, it was noticeable that musicians approached the virtual instruments in three ways: as instruments (as we expected), as effects or transformers of their acoustic sound, and as partners in a musical conversation.

In this presentation I will give a brief overview and demonstration of the virtual instruments themselves, along with video and transcripts from the feedback sessions illustrating the different approaches taken by the musicians.

Stephen Barrass - The Sonic Communications Research Group

This talk is an overview of the activities of the Sonic Communications Research Group (SCRG) a the University of Canberra, presented through past highlights, a preview of fresh research hot off the press, and a pointer to exciting new directions arising from an international collaboration on Sonic Interaction Design and the merger into a Faculty of Design and Creative Practice within the University of Canberra.

SCRG is an interdisciplinary group of researchers, educators, post-graduate and undergraduate students working on data sonification, product sound design, interactive art and music, and perceptual, cognitive, and emotional studies of sonic communications.

SCRG is a member of the Australian Research Council - Research Network on Human Communication Sciences, and the European Collaboration on Science and Technology initiative on Sonic Interaction Design.

Danielle Wilde - Body-centric Interactive Sonic Interfaces - A Personal Perspective

Wilde's presentation will include a range of interactive, wearable works designed specifically for the actuation and control of sound. From body extensions realised a decade ago, through to recent explorations into how one might successfully mesh gestural/physical and sonic composition to arrive at gesture sound synchresis, these works characterise an evolution in the author's relationship to body-centric design, wearable interactive interfaces and performance.

While the author's work is not focussed on instrument building or sonic output, per se, interactive sonic interfaces feature prominently in her catalogue of works. The reasons for this - the possible value of augmenting the body with instrumental capabilities as well as the implications, challenges and advantages of working with sound when one's training and specialisation is interaction design and the performative body - will be discussed. Throughout the presentation, Wilde will also reflect upon the limitations and affordances of her body instruments; the role of interface, extension and tangibility; performance and performativity; and the changing role and importance of collaboration in her work.

Donna Hewitt - The eMic - Extended Mic-Stand Interface Controller

This presentation discusses the ongoing development of a gestural control interface for contemporary vocal performance and electronic processing called the eMic (Extended Mic-stand Interface Controller). This instrument is a modified microphone stand, custom fitted with an array of sensors and gesture capturing devices aimed at capturing commonly-used gestures and movements of vocalist who use microphones and microphone stands in performance. These common gestures were discussed in an earlier paper prepared for the New Interfaces for Musical Expression Conference 2003 (Hewitt and Stevenson) and it was seen that the gestures form the basis of a well-practiced language and social code for communication between performers and audiences. The microphone has become a standard performance tool for the contemporary vocalist, allowing for the extension of the voice as an instrument. The eMic aims to further facilitate the performer by giving them more flexibility and control over the processing and sound of their voice in a live context, by providing an gestural data to a software processing system.

Ernest Edmonds - On Audiovisual Discourse

When we watch a film we accept film sound as a natural part of the work. More generally, the sound track is recognised as a crucial element in the quality of the film. However, at times music is thought of as an accompaniment to the visual element, whereas it might alternatively be thought of as having equal importance. Much the most interesting integration, however, is where the sound and the visual elements are equal so that, for example, one can see a visual display as one instrument in piece in which other instruments, such as violins, happen to produce sound. A significant history exists of composition in this area using colour organs and the notion of synesthesia. The construction of such work can begin either with the music or the visual or swap between them. Alternatively, it can begin from some more abstract description or notation that can be mapped into either sound or image or both. This approach yields greater unity and is the basis for the work described and illustrated in this presentation.

Ian Andrews - The Expanded Contracted Field of Recent Audio-visual Art

A certain form of live audio-visual performance (AV) has emerged in the first years of the 21st Century. While related to VJ culture, AV seems to be closer to post-digital music and its related genres. Recent AV performance works share a history with the avant-garde, abstract cinema of the 1920s, optical-audio kinetic art, lightshows, expanded cinema, structural film, and video experiments of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, but what is it that differentiates AV from these earlier movements? Obvious answers would point to its live performance aspect, its integral relation to sound/music, and new advances in technology. Yet none of these aspects come close to universally demarcating the genre from its predecessors. In privileging sensate experience, AV represents a return to formal concerns of kinetic imagery and the modernist trajectory towards human self-perfection through the expansion of the senses, or the exploration of altered modes of consciousness (psychedelia). In other respects it constitutes a contracted self-reflexive examination of its own materials, albeit a reflection whose central concern is not the problematisation of representation. This paper will examine the implications of these issues for a pedagogy of music and sound design, and the relation that AV has to my own work. I argue that the most interesting aspect of AV work is not (syn)aesthetic experience, nor the self-reflexive foregrounding of the material substrate, but rather the imposition of (sometimes severe) compositional limits for real-time presentation.

Darrin Verhagen - Audiovision, Psy-Ops and the Perfect Crime

Given the limitations of conscious attention, schemas assist us in prioritising components within an incoming flow of information. In a search for meaning and significance, we draw upon previously established templates to assist us in making these choices, ultimately assisting us in minimising cognitive load. Sound designers and composers, whether consciously or unconsciously, exploit our fundamental desire to register as "known" particular types of audiovisual logic, thus rendering "invisible" the manipulative tools of their trade. Drawing on the extremes of Verhagen's works - vicious screen-based assaults of sight and sound (composed for the industrial underground), large scale robot soundtracks for contemporary dance, role playing scores for computer games, through to station ident jingles for corporate cable, the relationships between sound and vision, and the templates of the different platforms (whether used to disarm, pander, manipulate or decoy) will be explored.

Tom Ellard - Music Outside Of Sound

Music doesn't equal audio; as a discipline and aesthetic it has a place across all the arts - once named the 'muses' and now called 'media'. Harmony, counterpoint et al. are useful factors in all composition. Likewise elements in architecture, writing and visual design have potency in what is currently called 'music'. Some current stagnation in 'music' stems from a needless isolation of ideas and practice, especially disappointing at a time where technology is checked more by a lack of ideas than computational power.

This isn't another call for 'hybrid arts' or 'multimedia', which implies joining multiple practices after their conception - rather it's a call for a more fundamental Music that is expressed by all and every means appropriate. Art is diluted when schooled as 'audio', 'video' and so on. A little rebellion is needed here - at least in refusing terminology and in using tools against their implicit rules.

In this session I'll present some of my misuses of technology. While simple they lead to Music with a broad appeal.

Andrew Plain - The Filmic Voice and Digital Dolby Sound

The paper examines some of the issues that are explored in-depth in a longer essay co-authored with Helen Macallan in the forthcoming anthology, 'The Grain of the Voice in Digital Media and Media Art' (eds., Norie Neumark, Ross Gibson, Theo van Leewen: MIT). It considers the repercussions of the shift from Dolby Stereo (introduced in 1975) to Dolby Digital (1991) and similar digital surround formats (DTS and SDDS, 1993) on the production and reception of the voice in cinema. It will look, for example, at the way digital technology opens up new possibilities for the production of the filmic voice, including a re-conceptualization of the voice-body relationship. The epistemological, aesthetic and narrative-related issues that arise from a more inclusive concept of the voice will also be examined. Exemplars will be given from Jonathon Glazier's 2000 movie, Sexy Beast and the presenter's own work in film sound design.

Peter Blamey - Sine Waves, Acoustics and Aesthetics

This discussion aims to consider the relationship between acoustics and music through the figure of the sine wave. Within both acoustics and music, the sine wave (whether considered as a sound in the form of a sine tone, or as an image in the form of the sine curve) has played an important role in definitions and understandings of the nature of musical sound since the late nineteenth century. It represents a sound with one frequency component, and is considered the simplest form of harmonic motion. Yet a critical investigation of both the history of their theoretical formulation and their practical use in acoustic experimentation and musical composition reveals more than a simple 'reductionist' reading of sine waves allows. Philosopher Michel Serres has frequently questioned the problematic manner in which pure and simple forms limit and conceal multiple interpretations, in so far as they present as complete, theoretical knowns - singular and without residue. Following Serres, this discussion will attempt to unpack the singular interpretation of the sine wave. Through identifying and exploring some of those conceptual, empirical and epistemological 'residues' that have been excluded or sidelined in accounts of sine waves, this discussion will investigate the intermediate role sine waves play in interactions between science and art.

Mitchell Whitelaw - After Inframedia: Presence and Transmateriality

In 2001 I proposed the notion of "inframedia" in response to the tape hiss, clicks, cuts and crashes of the experimental sound and music of the time. Here I want to reflect on and develop the implications of this concept, now that the thrill of the "glitch" has passed and electronic music has assimilated its vocabulary of media artefact. Literary theorist Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht proposes an aesthetics and culture of presence that exists in dynamic tension with meaning. Inframedia practices seem to exemplify Gumbrecht's "presence culture", with their focus on materialising the otherwise imperceptible structures of its media systems, and their indifference to conventions of meaning, narrative and content. Presence, or an aesthetics of manifestation, also suggests links between inframedia audio and some of the practices that have followed it - databending, fused audiovisuals and live coding. Finally, if the inframedia urge acts to ground or reveal media technologies, what comes after that moment of revelation? The assimilation of the glitch as a stylistic cue shows how it can be reintegrated as content; this presentation will outline another possibility, for a practice that exploits the functional immateriality of the digital without surrendering a sense of its constant and contingent re-embodiment - a practice of transmateriality.

Caleb Kelly - Cracked, Broken and New

From the mid 20th century into the 21st, artists and musicians manipulated, cracked and broke audio media technologies to produce novel, unique and indeterminate sounds and performances. Artists such as John Cage, Nam June Paik, Milian Knížák, Christian Marclay, Yasunao Tone, Oval and Otomo Yoshihide pulled apart the technologies of music playback, both the playback devices - phonographs and CD players - and the recorded media - vinyl records and Compact Discs.

The paper will discuss the old media practices of "cracked media" as a precursor to the now common place approaches to media production. These practitioners approached old media in a manner that mirrors the attributes of contemporary new media. Specifically the variability of data manipulation in relation to the deliberate crack and destruction of both the record and later the turntable itself. New media has at its core the ability to transform digital code into new objects which are not fixed and objects that can be developed and altered in an infinite number of ways. Old media, such as vinyl records, were created as final fixed products. Cracked media, then, takes these fixed objects and transforms then into new works. The paper will discuss the "Broken Music" of Milan Knížák examining how he took records and permanently edited them through his destructive techniques.

Robin Fox - Sound: Sight and Space - Recent Working Methodologies

Robin Fox will discuss the transition from working with audio and particularly lap-top based performance to working in the area of synaesthetic audio-visual correspondence. The discussion will raise issues about hardware mediated synaesthetic artworks and the technological hurdles faced in the realisation of this work. His current use of laser technologies as an extension of films made using the cathode ray oscilloscope has prompted a re-evaluation of his audio aesthetic moving away from live performance and toward immersive installation. As a pre-cursor to the Friday night performance he will also discuss his approach to sound diffusion alluding to the ways in which working with contingency and space can transform the composer's relationship to sonic materials and phenomena.

Yasunao Tone - Group Ongaku, Hi-Red Center and Team Random to Paramedia and Noise/Parasite

In the beginning I would like to talk about my formative years a little, that includes group activities of Group Ongaku, Hi-red center and Team Random. I retrospectively consider my work in this period had somehow singular and seminal elements of later work. I was also interested in theory as an art critic. Then I moved to the United States in 1972.

Emigration forces artists to reinvent him/herself and I am not the exception. Necessity of reinventing myself and reformulating my concepts on music made me finally resulted new piece and new concept, of which first I negotiating the Cagean idea of indeterminacy and new work, which started from Voice and Phenomena (1976) by chance, which brought about Critique of the metaphysic of the presence as well as critique of ethnocentrism through practicing the piece. Of course, I learned those ideas from Jacque Derrida, books like La Voix et le Phénomène in 1970 and De la Grammatologie.