Exploration Through the Transformation of Noise

Exploration Through the Transformation of Noise


My current thesis investigation (Alex Braidwood.) involves the exploration of developed systems that, by design, take some form of input material, pass it through a procedure defined to include some level of noise (as in interruption or interference) and produces some form of output as a result.

 The goal is explore how various types of input, manipulation and interpretation techniques can create less-expected results.

 The most recent addition to my working definition is that noise “violates expectation.” This can occur at a variety of levels from small derivations to large redirections.

 For example, you can walk from your home to the market in a straight line.

 However, sometimes you have to change your route slightly because the sidewalk is under construction. Your neighborhood looks a little different from the other side of the street.

 Then imagine that the entire street is closed down and you have to take an entirely different route that leads you into places you have not seen before. Having your path disrupted creates new potential.

 Interruption, manipulation and fragile procedures within a process are areas of noise that I am now interested in within my thesis.

 New potential is created in the development of systems that violate not only the expectations set for or by the viewer but also the inherent expectations of the system itself.

 As a very simple example of what is meant by this second statement, suppose a process is developed to expect an image as input for interpretation and you send it text or it is expecting one word and instead, a short story is smashed through it.


One area that I am interested in is the intersection of sound and technology.

 More specifically in various ways in which experimentation has lead to the development of instruments for the creation of sound and in some cases, even music.

 For example, the documentary “Theremin - An Electronic Odyssey”1 discusses how Leon Theremin invented a new musical instrument as a result of his scientific explorations of radio fields.

 What interests me the most about this is that Theremin, in it’s original time or now, is not what many would consider to be a popular musical instrument.

 It has been used by the likes of the Beach Boys2 as well as way to make eerie sound effects for various films3 but the type of sound that it creates is quite different from that of a traditional instrument (even my today’s standards).


Markus Popp, who creates and performs music under than name Oval, is known for making sound pieces through the use of custom software that he developed in order to produce not only recorded tracks for distribution but the software also allows for live performance.4 If the software is considered as a system, what becomes the most interesting is the ways in which the system is used, what the system does versus the user / performer and how material is created for the system.

 For example, a great deal of the audio source that Popp uses as material is collected from the glitches and pops recorded from his acts of destroying and then playing back compact discs in order to capture the errors that occur when a scratch is encountered and the data is disrupted as a result.

 This is what Kim Cascone refers to as The Aesthetics of Failure5 as he discusses ideas of using or causing mistakes in a system in order to explore the potential of that system and generate new material as an initially unintended result.


While Leon Theremin was not primarily a musician yet developed a musical instrument, and Markus Popp was a musician who developed his own working environment, the sound artist Robert Henke could be considered to meet them somewhere in between.

 Not only is he one of the main developers of Ableton Live, a now standard piece of software for audio production and performance, but he has also developed his own hardware device for performance and production of his own works.

 As he states on his website, “the artistic result that is evident in his works and the creation of the instruments and tools to achieve these results are two sides of the same artistic process”6 This statement is important in that it reasserts the value of making the things that one uses in order to make other things.

 It is the fly fisherman who ties his own flies. The chef who grows her own vegetables. It is one piece of a much larger process but by having a hand in the process from a variety of vantage points, new levels of tweakery and refinement are not only possible, they are inherent within the learning process.

 When on finds themselves stumbling around in unfamiliar territory, the happy accidents need to be appreciated and preserved for further evaluation.


Edison’s early recording techniques are also interesting in their approach to the documentation of sound.

 His earliest recordings where made on tin-foil which not only made them of an incredibly noisy quality but they were only to be played back two or three times before the recordings where completely destroyed. Sound in itself is inherently fleeting so the pursuit of recorded sound has been one of not only accurate reproduction but also one of archiving.

 As we sit in a time of permanently temporary media leaving a wake of dead formats, there’s something engaging within the idea that a form contains a certain level of growing noise that specifically elicits and later becomes its own demise.

 The system caries in its DNA the symptoms and recipe for its own destruction and makes any user or viewer aware of this as it proceeds. Even earlier than Edison’s recordings, the Phonautogram was never intended to be replayed even though it was a recording of a sound. In fact, it wasn’t until 2008 that a computer engineer was able to develop a system that could playback that which was recorded one hundred and fifty-one years earlier7.

 This example begins to ask the question, does the encoder and decoder need to be developed at the same time? What type of results could a system arrive at if the two ends of the process, so to speak, were not developed together but instead where considered as unique elements in a process.

 Also of interest is the idea of the long echo that this raises.


I am interested in sound as an outcome but not music in the traditional sense.

 The way in which Cage discusses music, all sound is music if you listen to it as such. He did a great deal of composing8 and writing9 in order to raise issues of listening.

 When it comes to the work of John Cage, I’m more interested in his writings about explorations of process and procedure.

 When he talks about chance operations, he is discussing systems that involve some type of input, a mechanism that is a decision making process and there is generally some form of interpretation required on the part of the user or, in his case specifically, the performer.10

 This approach definitely has the potential to create a variety of outcomes but in many cases, the potential results are too varied for what I consider to be a useful result for analysis.

 What I am interested in is exploring these ideas in a way that allows the boundaries to become the design problem and the ways in which those constraints are exploited, pushed, bent, and leaned on become the results with fluctuating levels of variation.


Brian Eno talks about this idea of developing systems to generate output as designing seeds11.

 This is the idea that the system is what takes designing and then output comes as a result of the system that has been developed.

 Within this type of system, unless you intend to have a specific one-to-one relationship between the input, the system and the output, the addition of noise allows for the variation to occur. Once ideas of input is introduced, it is also worth adding that it’s not just about designing the seed to go off and grow but also designing the seed in such a way that how it grows is determined by the resources available to it, meaning the input.

 The balance of how much noise is introduced will have dramatic affects on the output. Too much noise and the variation becomes so broad that nothing interesting emerges and all control is lost.

 Too little noise and the results become entirely expected.

 This process of determining not only where in the process to introduce the noise but how much noise to introduce is an exciting challenge.

 The act of design then becomes the balancing of control within the system versus relinquishing of control to the system.


David Byrne’s project Playing the Building12 takes on a specific role in the development of a system for the creation of sound in that the system of pneumatics and servos that he has created essentially work the same technically anywhere the piece would be installed but what changes is the specifics nature of the sound as a result of the place.

 For example, a larger space would be more reverberated in general. In the case of devices getting attached to pipes to bang on them, each pipe in each installation is going to have a unique characteristics based entirely on the specifics of the space.

 In his TED talk How Architecture Helped Music Evolve,13 he even asks do we make things with a venue, a context in mind?” and then goes on to give some great historical examples of many types of music that best fit into particular places.

 The most interesting aspect of this is not the sound that it makes, or the music it performs but the system that has been developed in order to take an adjustable material, in this case the specific space in which it is installed, and create a sonic portrait or story about that space.

 This has informed my interest in the development of experiments that look at using different methods of defintitionarily informed and aesthetically adjusted recording techniques.

 These techniques aim to capture a variety of interpretations of a particular place at a particular time. The systems, however, are not straight recollections.

 They are fuzzy memories.

They sample, combine and eliminate in order to make a new story about what was happening that is not entirely true nor is it entirely untrue.

 Instead, it should be considered to be based on a true story.


This is where another interest that is informing my research experiments becomes relevant and that is to look at ways in which people deal with the noise that they exposed to.

 The specific area of noise as sound that I am interested in currently is that which becomes a violation of expectation.

 Paul Hegarty discusses this idea in an interesting way in his book Noise / Music: A History when he presents the idea that when a jet flies overhead while one is walking in nature, nature is not interrupted by the sound of the jet. Instead, what is disrupted is the expectation of what a walk in nature should be, an expectation which has been created and set as a result of modern culture.14

 This is an important distinction to make because it redraws the frame around the implications of noise as a violation of expectation, freeing it from terms of displeasing sounds as determined by volume, pitch, tone, texture or any of the other characteristics that regularly are associated with the idea. Similarly to this discussion is the setting of expectations through the controlling of sound within an environment. George Prochnik discusses in his book In Pursuit of Silence the commodification of silence as a luxury item or luxurious feature.15 Handling noise in its various forms continues to be relevant as our environments continue to develop ever increasing aspects of noise.

 This has a direct impact on us in ways that range from changes in our evolutionary adaptation16 that has allowed us to understand the world around us to our ability to learn and speak language in the ways that previous generations have as a result of noise machines introduced to silence crying children.17

 These types of sociological observations illustrate the kind of material that the experiments are interested in investigating.

 They demonstrate possible contexts in which explorative deployments can be used in order to develop various forms of systematized representations.


My current thesis explorations set out to explore the overlapping spaces outlined in the previous writing.

 It is concerned with a variety of systems that document, interpret and represent a particular place, object or action.

 The systems developed will continue to include a variety of tactics for the insertion of noise into the system in order to produce varied results.

 The amount of noise inserted as well as the amount of variation with in the output along with what the system does and the material being investigated are all key questions unique to each experiment.

 By identifying the selected examples, a focus of three areas has emerged.

 The definition of the input, the designing of the system and its noise and then the explorations of control levels.

 All three of these become part of a larger tool that is not for the specific dictation of an outcome. They tally up to a body of explorations that will work to show the potential value of playing with violated expectations. It is not a pencil that draws a perfect line.

 It is a pencil that resists drawing a line at all in order to see what else can be done.


A collection of additional references and sources of inspirations can be viewed here.


Notes
Martin, Steven M. Theremin - An Electronic Odyssey. MGM (Video & DVD), 2001.
Used on the track Good Vibrations and discussed in the film Theremin - An Electronic Odyssey.
For example, the sound of the aliens mask in: Wise, Robert. The Day the Earth Stood Still. 20th Century Fox, 2003.
OvalProcess is the name of both the system that Markus Popp created as well as the name the name of an album created using the software that he developed. Oval. Ovalprocess. Thrill Jockey, 2000.
Cox, Christoph, and Daniel Warner. Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. Continuum, 2004.
http://www.monolake.de/interviews/bio.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/arts/27soun.html
Gann, Kyle. No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage's 4'33". Yale University Press, 2010.
Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings. 1st ed. Wesleyan, 1961. p. 109-127.
Ibid., p. 35-40.
Eno, Brian. “Generative Music” presented at the Imagination Conference, San Francisco, CA, June 8, 1996. http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/eno1.html.
http://www.davidbyrne.com/art/art_projects/playing_the_building/
Byrne, David. “How Architecture Helped Music Evolve” presented at the TED2010, Long Beach, California, February 2010. http://www.ted.com/talks/david_byrne_how_architecture_helped_music_evolve.html.
Hegarty, Paul. Noise/Music: A History. Continuum, 2007. p. 8.
Prochnik, George. In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise. 1st ed. Doubleday, 2010. p. 195.
Ibid., p. 67.
Ibid., p. 234.



© 2011 Alex Braidwood.