Sound art - ideas and tools

SOUND ART TO TRY ON YOUR HAIR

IDEAS & TOOLS

PROJECT

This booklet documents a youth sound art project delivered by Holborn Community Association in partnership with Two Temple Place. The project took place between MayJuly 2021 and was open to young people aged 13 – 24.

Over the course of 12 weeks, participants worked with artist Hannah Kemp-Welch to learn tools and techniques of sound arts practice. This included critical listening, sound walks, field recording, experimental composition and audio editing.

The project took place at Two Temple Place, a lavishly decorated building commissioned by (at the time) the richest man in the world.

Responding to the decorative detail commissioned by it’s bookish founder William Waldorf Astor, participants activated the house through sound works made during the project, culminating in a final exhibition.

This text shares resources and photographs from the project as a souvenir for participants, to help keep hold of learning from the project.

Produced by Hannah Kemp-Welch sound-art-hannah.com holborncommunity.co.uk twotempleplace.org

SOUND

The first exercise we tried as a group was an exploration of chance composition. We looked at everyday objects as potential instruments and producers of distinct and interesting sounds. Through this lens, tearing paper, opening an umbrella, rolling a can, became sounds we could compose with. We watched a video of ‘Water Walk’ (1960) in which artist John Cage gives a musical performance using just sounds connected with water - think kettles, bathtubs and rubber ducks. Cage was interested in the I Ching - an ancient Chinese divination text. We tried the coin toss method in order to determine first our fortunes, then the structure of our composition. You can try the coin toss method using this worksheet. https://tinyurl.com/ichingworkshop

GRAPHIC SCORES

One of our workshops looked at musical and sonic notation, and different ways that traditional scores have been expanded and reimagined by artists. We tried some group performances of graphic scores - imagining how drawings could represent changes in volume and pitch. We also looked at sound poetry; we listened to poems by Dada artist Hugo Ball and combined our voices to perform ‘Ursonate’ by Kurt Schwitters. Whilst listening to minimalist music, we tried the surrealist technique of automatic writing - letting thoughts flow freely from mind to paper to try and access our unconscious and encourage creative flow.

A Love Letter to collective listening In this essay, Mark Fisher talks about collective listening. The story starts when Gasworks Gallery asks him to play his 90 minute long 'audio essay' to an audience at the gallery...

Initially, the experience produced discomfort, even irritation. Being required to concentrate on something for such a sustained length of time poses a challenge. It is not only that we are now accustomed to pay attention only for very small time periods, it is that, typically, our attention itself is fragmented, divided across multiple platforms and interfaces. Increasingly, we

pay attention on the implicit proviso that we can click away from any particular stimulus at any time. As I write this, for instance, I find myself a victim of a kind of digital twitch; almost without my being aware of it, and in a pattern that will surely be familiar to most readers of this text, I switch out of word processor and onto the internet, checking my email and Twitter feed.

Far from being ‘empowering’, in fact, the digital matrix is a hard taskmaster: it wants my attention from the first moment I awake in the morning, and is nagging me constantly until I go to sleep.

All my waking life – and, surely, my dreaming life, too –

LISTE NING

is haunted by the possibility of missed digital communication. Being ‘always on’ – being connected to cybernetic communicative circuits at all times. I am multi-tasking practically all the time. The problem is not technology as such – but the drive to communicate. What matters is not the content of communication, but the sheer fact that it is happening at all.

Television is compatible with social networking, for the simple reason that, for many now, TV works only as background. A recent Ofcom report showed that 36% of people are online while watching television. Television also has the obvious advantage of involving the visual. The visual has a hypnotic power over the human nervous/ perceptual system which no other sensory input can rival. Which is no doubt a large part of the reason that we are happy to sit and watch a film for ninety minutes, but uncomfortable when we are asked to listen to a sound piece that lasts only half that time.

After the initial period of discomfort and irritation at Gasworks, though, it turned out that it was liberating to have something imposed on us. There’s an enjoyment to be had when one is momentarily exiled from the cybernetic communicational matrix, when the ability to click onto another option is taken away. And this feels quite different from the experience of listening to live music. Live music still gives us something visual to lock onto, and the cultural focus on live music – which, after all, is the main way in which corporations hope to keep music commodified in the future – has been complicit with a kind of sonic conservatism that privileges the supposedly authentic over the studio science of production. Why are we watching ageing performers re-create ‘classic albums’, instead of gathering together to listen to those albums over cinema sound systems?

The experience of listening with others to pre-recorded music in a shared public space feels novel. There was a tradition of ‘listening parties’ in the early to mid-twentieth century, which were organised as part of working class self-education initiatives. I hope that it will be possible to reinvent those kind of listening practices in the twenty-first century. Can we rediscover and develop modes of listening that are intimate yet public, collective but anti-social?

www.dummymag.com/new-music/a-love-letter-to-collective-listening/

MICROPHONES Reporter microphone This microphone is designed for handheld interviews - it is omnidirectional and specially tailored for voices so you can hear clearly in most conditions.

Contact microphone This microphone that senses audio vibrations through contact with solid objects, so you can hear objects vibrate as you interact with them.

Hydrophone This device converts underwater sound waves into electrical signals, allowing you to hear underwater.

RE CORD ING

When recording, be aware of the sounds around you - electrical hums, traffic or noises from next door. If you're recording voices, watch out for rooms with high ceilings and hard surfaces like tiles in the bathroom - this will produce an echoey sound to your recording that you may not want.

Hold your microphone a handspan away from your lips. Position it slightly to the side: your mouth emits gusts of air, so position the mic slightly below or above the line the air will hit. Try not to move your hand around the microphone or you risk ‘mic handling sound’.

Put headphones on one ear so you can hear your recording as it happens, and make sure you’re watching the audio levels meter on your device to check it's not distorting. The meter should indicate the middle of the band - and never reach the end!

SOUND SCAPES &FX When composing, you can use pre-recorded sounds that have a ‘creative commons license’ (free to use in your artistic projects) to create a sonic world. The word ‘soundscape’ was first used by composer R. Murray Schafer to identify sounds that ‘describe a place, a sonic identity, a sonic memory, but always a sound that is pertinent to a place’.

Aporee is a map of thousands of soundscapes recorded all over the world - you can search for any sound in any country. aporee.org/maps BBC Sound Effects is a huge, searchable sound bank. sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search Foley is the reproduction of everyday sound fx that are added to films after they are shot. These reproduced sounds can be anything from the swishing of clothing and footsteps to squeaky doors and breaking glass.

Watch a video about Foley artists in action: tinyurl.com/foleyinaction Learn to make your own Foley sound fx at home: blog.storyblocks.com/inspiration/foley-sfxeveryday-household-objects/

DIGITAL AUDIO WORKSTATION

Reaper is a good beginners programme for audio editing, and can be initially used free of charge with an option to make a donation for a license.

These tutorials and guides ‘Reaper for Radio’ will help you to make audio edits such as chopping pieces of sound out, layering sounds together and fading to and from silence.

Download Reaper: reaper.fm/download.php Reaper for Radio manual: tinyurl.com/reapermanual Reaper YouTube tutorials: tinyurl.com/reaperyoutube

INSPIR ATION

Kate Donovan – Listening beyond radio, listening beyond history soundcloud.com/seismograf/kate-donovan-listeningbeyond-radio-listening-beyond-history Delia Derbyshire – Inventions for Radio tinyurl.com/DeliaDerbyshireInventions Francois Bonnet – Skyquakes soundcloud.com/kassel-jaeger/francois-j-bonnetskyquakes Glenn Gould – The Solitude Trilogy: The Idea of North tinyurl.com/GlennGouldNorth