Alvin Lucier made the physical qualities of sound in space come alive through his compositions and installations, Pauline Oliveros took the idea of deep listening to finely attune the musicians consciousness to sound, David Dunn takes the composer outdoors into interaction with animal and insect sonic ecologies. Music today is ready to open up these territories, to explore connected consciousness and emergent behaviours through networks, to use sound to explore connections with other non-human ecologies, to instigate an environmental role for technology in electronic music, to consider the mind and body as central to the character of music making, to use sonification of humanly inaudible technological systems to open up areas of sound that increase our understanding of the sonic environment.

Primarily, this work aims to situate the composer as a sonic practitioner, researcher and visionary who uses tools and technologies as ways to extend the human interaction with the larger natural environment. For example the composer might look into the military use of sonar in the context of the marine biologist monitoring cetacean communication through sound. The composer might listen to recordings of natural environments not as sounds in themselves but as complex emergent systems of communication through sound. Researching new technologies in this way, the composer might explore potentials of absorbing them into a techno-intuition.

In seeking this position the composer must build on the already re-thought roles and established musical concepts. Over the last forty years, different kinds of relationships have been forged between composer, instrumentalist and listener. The musical score has been re-conceptualised as a changeable communication medium for a project. Issues of time and space are no longer separate considerations but are conflated in the process of composition and experience of music and installation. The visual relates to the audible, not in a static form of notation through a score, or audio-visual electronics, but through perception and understanding of intermedia not as additive but as complementary inextricable aspects of a whole. Instrumental sound, electronic sound, environmental sound, and language form the acoustic palette and their combination raises questions of aesthetic choice and communication. Instruments may need to be custom built as part of the composer’s process to open imaginations and start discussions on our place within the soundscape. Most importantly the environment composer uses sound and music as an articulator of relationship and as a catalyst for understanding.

Yolande Harris, 14/12/2008 Amsterdam

I’ve selected these comments on the following topics from the interview:

• technology and feeling – emotions in music
• functionality and musical choice
• distilling ideas, like pure alcohol
• two-dimensional notation, three-dimensional sound in space
• technology as a landscape
• physicality of fly-fishing and sound
• in and out of balance, with and without purpose

I think we should start talking again about emotions in music. 

Now what I do instead is to make pieces about natural acoustical phenomenon. The way sounds act; the way sounds are. People who don’t like what I do say that I’m doing experiments that any physicist can do, all right? Scientific experiments. 

[Talks about the brain wave piece using EEG scans, and taking out of the hospital practical context to make it interesting as a feeling] Technology is one tool after another, and its no better or no worse than any other tool. I took that feeling in the EEG out of the context where they’re not interested in feeling. They’re interested in the physical facts of what brain waves are, and I really didn’t care what the brain waves were.

I’d been thinking recently about making people have déja-vu as a musical experience…You’re always describing it [your work] in very very mundane theatrical terms and I don’t think that what I hear sounds like that.

[on Outlines of Persons and Things, sound waves bouncing off objects in space, works best when tuned at a high frequency, but] I didn’t like it, so I brought them down to the pitches that they are now because it reminded me of those insects in August … So in a sense I made a choice against the best operation of the piece, because it gave me that kind of feeling.

I think of my pieces as the clearest most intense examples of feelings… I try to distill these ideas and present them in their purest form…. It’s like distilling, making pure those things that happen anyway, but that you don’t perceive because they’re too complicated. … its putting people in a beautiful relationship to these phenomena.

.. before language and before writing … I think they were interested in reverberation and the sense of time that sound in space would have.

Well, Webern, Schoenberg, and post-serialism are so connected with print, so connected with writing notes. And if you don’t write in notes you get off the page… and if you’re not thinking on a page, you might not think in two dimensions.

When you write it’s in two dimensions, and sound is not two-dimensional … but most of the music we know is conceived on the page, two dimensionally. Okay? Now if I’m not thinking about that and if I’m not composing on the page and I really love sound, I begin to hear it as it is, which is a three-dimensional action.

See, I don’t think of technology as technology. I think of it as a landscape. … And it’s touching: a composer in the nineteenth or in another century is talking about the landscape that he’s in; the trees and the poetry – and I’m doing just that.

Could we talk a little bit about the idea of making things that make people feel good?

See what I’m doing here is rather like my art, isn’t it?

What you’re doing right at this moment?

Yes, the whole physical quality of this sport [fly-fishing] … The loops, the motion, the physical motion and the laws of wind resistance. … when I do this hour after hour it sharpens my senses. You know, the standing wave piece [Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas, 1973/74] is exactly this piece here [fly-fishing]. It’s exactly what you see when you’re on a stream, or on a pond. You know the first picture about the nature of sound in those acoustical books is a pebble in a pond. They show the photograph of how the surface of the pond radiates outward when you put in a pebble. And if you drop another one in and those waves interfere with each other, you have exactly this kind of thing. … The loops I make are never the same, but the action is. You try to make it the same but each loop is slightly different…. you can see the way the line falls is always slightly different and you can pay attention to that … The change of light, the change of the volume in the stream, the way sound diffracts around the rock.

… when I’ve come to a solution I feel there’s a kind of purification. It’s like alcohol; it’s very pure. It’s like the liquor that you drink – very distilled, transparent you know. It’s like a wonderful kind of gin. That’s funny to say for someone who doesn’t drink any more.

Have you ever noticed, at the moment when you can identify that you’re creating something, that previous to that , you were out of balance or you were sick?

.. It’s [composition] like an activity without a purpose – with and without a purpose.

Notes on “Problems in Cetacean and other Mammalian Communication” (first published 1966, written while working for John Lilly and his dolphin centre in the Virgin Islands. pp 364 – 378)

In the problem of understanding Cetacean communication, mammals such as Dolphins and their sound production, is the difficulty of us as humans approaching communication that may have completely different goals and importance. Bateson describes the predominance of communication of relationship (love, hate, dependency etc) in non-human / non-linguisitc mammals, where there is no need for a language of data (humans have hands and manipulate objects and language is built out of this ability and necessity). The communication of relationship in humans is less explicit in language but can be found in gesture – proto-linguisitc communication – common to all mammals.

Cetaceans, Bateson proposes, are almost solely communicating issues of relationship, but unlike land-based mammals they have very little in the way of visible gestures,  facial expression, body hair, limbs are all smoothed in underwater life. It is not only very difficult if not impossible for us to even guess at these proto-linguistic meanings, but dolphins themselves must have developed other alternative ways of communicating – most probably through their complex sounds. 

Bateson also distinguishes between what he calls analogue and digital in communication. Human language could be considered digital, the example being that 5 has no greater value than 1 in a digital system, it’s pointless to think someone’s telephone number is greater than another, they are merely ways of accessing a matrix. In the same way the word big is no bigger than the word small. But in proto-linguistic gesture or behavior there are matters of degree, a muscle can be more or less tensed, a smile more or less intense, an analogic system.

Perhaps dolphin communication through sound is another digital system, but perhaps it is more concerned with questions of relationship than human language? How can we then study and potentially understand this communication and what does it lead to understanding ourselves in relation to music?

There are four levels of understanding that can be applied to testing intelligence. After the ability to distinguish between x and y, the ability to learn that x or y are a cue to behavior, and the ability to chose always for the good or one that produces the desired result, comes the final fourth layer, whether the dolphin/human can decide or not to collaborate using free choice. Most experiments with humans considered ’sane and reasonable’ don’t need to deal with this fourth layer because it is agreed upon at the outset, only schizophrenics, naughty children and dolphins will challenge this fourth point. But this is also the sign of an intelligence, suppressed in for example the training of circus animals, abrogating the use of certain higher levels of intelligence. How successfully can dolphins be studied in captivity when they are essentially bored in confined space?

A jackdaw (bird) has flown onto my roof and is making a series of complex sounds that appear to articulate something I can only try to understand. Its inflections of tone and timbre that irresistibly seem like language have drawn my attention and I have begun recording the sound. In doing so the jackdaw’s voice has made me shift my focus and listen to the environmental sounds outside my room in Amsterdam. My internal space – my concentration on the thoughts – is located in my physical room that is remarkably quiet, the only sound being my computer keyboard whilst I type this. The voice of the Jackdaw comes from just outside my space, I can’t see it, only hear as it sits and sounds the in-between space, so close as to be almost in the room. The sounds of Amsterdam then become clearer and present, although distant. The sound of the jackdaw is articulating an in-between, the intermedial, a moving back and forth between the internal, inside, to outside.