MB: I was wondering if you could just give. Short introduction for yourself, just in case someone reads this and wants to learn more. NW: I am Nathan Wolek. I'm a professor of digital arts at Stetson university. I have been teaching here for 15 years now. My specialties are audio signal processing but lately doing a lot of stuff with a field recording as well. So they're working in audio for quite a long time. Yeah. Okay. MB: Awesome. I'll thank you. I figured they're probably going to be some people who don't know exactly who you are, so I just want to sure in there. Yeah, so I've basically, I just have three or four little general questions. Whenever I do an interview, I just like to you ask them and then whatever happens conversationally, happens. Sure. Nice and casual. So my first one was just wanting to ask you if you could just kind of describe some of the kinds of processes and techniques you use and some of your work. You mentioned the field recording versus the audio processing. What's the you kind of common workflow and things that you do in a normal day with that. NW: Yeah. Well the last three years, three or four, field recording has come become a major part of my work more so than it used to be. Early on in my academic career. I was doing a lot of stuff with laptop performance and field recording was part of that process, but it wasn't at the center of that process. So we would go and do things where we would show up in a city. This is the mobile performance group that was here at Stetson, that was a laptop ensemble that we had for a number of years. We'd go to a city, and go around out into that city and gather materials. So field recording was a part of that process and that we would go and try to find things that sounded like, a snare hit, things that sounded like a bass drum, or that had tones to them that could be used as drones and things like that. So it really was looking for sounds out in the world that could map onto things that we'd be part of electric of electronic music production. And the challenge we would set for ourselves is to go out and record as much as possible in a day, edit that down and then start using that material the next day in, in improvising electronic music pieces. This was just at the beginning of digital audio recorders. That really sped up the cycle because we're as it used to, we used to have to record the tape and then you'd have to play the tape into your computer to get it digitized and that just slows you down. And we were using some of the very first for, at first they were compact flash and then they were SD card recorders which made it very easy to go out and record and then just pop it into your computer and now you're editing the same file that you just recorded. It just sped up a spot cycle and allowed for these kinds of really fast turnaround times of capturing sound too. Improvising with a material to performing in the span of like two or three days. So since then I've been really interested in doing more work with binaural microphones. Or I guess I'd say that because I binaural microphones, the microphone I've been using a lot is the, the crown S S it's a, it's a microphone that has the, the, the hair about the distance that it would be between your ears and it has a baffle in the middle, so you get good stereo, sweat separation between the channels. And what I'd like to do is use that as a means of exploring a space, exploring a location. So I've done one project here on our campus where we have a in the Palm court where we have a hundred and 109 trees.
So I went out and actually recorded three minutes of audio and every single one of the trees over a number of weeks and then edit that material together. I, I, I kind of go back and forth between long drones and really hyper kinetic edits in my work. So and that will, and I was doing a lot of editing between different takes, different recordings that were made around the Palm court. Since then, well, she's been two years ago about, I started a project up at one of the state parks where I was doing similar process with the binaural microphone, but instead of doing different locations, I was doing the same locations over and over again. So over the course of a year I was visiting the same four or five locations in the park and recording and exactly the same position for approximately 10 minutes. . And so then editing those together in the same kind of hyper cut style too, but instead of the cuts be representing a jump across the space there. Now the cuts represented jump across time. So all of the recordings that were recorded in a single position over the course of months, I've been edited together into these these compositions that I'm working on that would be part of a, the installation project. So that's another thing that's been a kind of shift in my, so shifting from live performance to shifting more towards museum and gallery installation work has been something in the last five years that I've really enjoyed exploring. Okay. So awesome. MB: Okay because you mentioned a little while back with the recording on the tape and then putting that into the computer. How exactly would that works? I'm actually for this class also working on a paper just about the physicality of tape manipulation techniques. Yeah. How exactly did that work? So that was a bit before I got into doing all of this. Yeah. And I let me think. NW: I never had to do tape splicing. I'm just, I'm right at the cusp of like young enough to have, not had to be taught like tape splicing and that sort of stuff. But I still remember having to record two things like dad, things like a debt. There were digital formats, but because they were taped and because you weren't recording directly to a hard drive to an SD card, to the media computer use, it would take you as much time to digitize it and get it into the computer as it did to record it. If you go out and make an eight minute recording, well then you have to then take that back into the studio and it's going to take you eight minutes to get it into the computer. If you go out and record 80 minutes, then you've got to go back to the studio. It's going to take you 80 minutes to get back into the computer. So that just multiplies the production process, multiplies the amount of time you have to do that it takes for you to get from capturing to actually working with the material inside the computer. And I mean it's, it's, it's one more step in the process, therefore it slows down in the creative flow. Right. So, yeah, I think the benefit of being able to record directly to the medium and directly into the file format that you're able to work within something like a door or something like even a, even a two track audio editor is a huge time saver. That just speeds up the creative flow. And that's really, I think what one of the key things in addition to using laptops as an instrument, that's one of the key things we were exploring with it within PG was being able to speed up that flow of capture to performance. Okay. MB: Interesting. Yeah. Awesome. So in terms of just like just these kind of processes and things that you use, what's kind of the [inaudible] like what will be the most important one is the workflow that you have that, does that make sense? Oh, say it again. So you're doing all of these kind of, you know, the recording and the different things. Like if there was one of them that you think is the most, , I guess kind
of the most fundamental to what it is you're doing, what, what would that [inaudible] me and a tool that I'm using or tool or a technique or some. NW: Okay. Hmm. I think it's, I mean I do, I am really captured by this idea of the binaural recording. I am, I'm not as enamored with multi-speaker setups and making sound fly around the audience. I really liked this idea of the audience of one and I put, I create pieces for an audience that puts on a headphone and they're listening to it, you know that I think, I think that is a key part of my aesthetic right now in terms of working on these, these pieces that are using the binaural recording. So it's not just that the way the binaural like, capture sound, but it, it's, it's tied in with delivery overhead songs, you know that I'm creating these pieces that are meant to be listened to over headphones, not over. They sound great over loud speakers too. But I think you kept, you get sense of that sense of being enveloped in the sound through the vinyl recording over headphones. Okay. MB: All right. just for clarification, you said you used a binaural microphone. Is that like having two microphone capsules in there, only they're about ear distance from each other NW: Yeah. So I keep turning around because I'm looking at it on the shelf. Hold on a second. Oh, this is the microphone here. Okay. Ah, so you got to hold her there. But these little capsules here are the microphones. You see how it's got a baffle about the distance between my ears, right? So it's designed to give you that separation. You get a little bit of reflection from the hard surface here. You get some, you get less reflection from a softer surface here. And then on the back, it just has, Just your two XLR inputs. And these are for nine-volt batteries. If you're not using Phantom power, you don't have to use the nine-volt batteries. This is actually near-binaural, because true binaural microphone is going to have, a dummy head shape, and it have the microphone capsules in where the eardrum would be with some rubber ears. So, this is not a true binaural microphone, but it gives you really good stereo separation and creates really good headphone recordings. Crown doesn't make this anymore. I guard this because I've got I've got so many hours of recordings on this and I'd like to keep making hours of recordings on this thing. I want to make sure it stays in good shape. MB: Ok, I was curious. I had never actually seen one, so thanks for sharing that. I was imagining a little dual stereo microphone but slightly farther apart. NW: It’s different than the, you know, like a spaced pair or cross pair. it's actually inserting the baffle in between that helps you get some more separation between the channels. And there are a few: Neumann makes one that's very expensive and it looks like a mannequin head basically. The idea there is that you actually, you get reflections off of what would be the torso, right? So you get sound reflections that are coming up hitting your torso and going up. So it's supposed to create even more real image. I'm pretty captured with the according to that this thing makes, so I keep using it.
MB: I want to talk just a little bit about like teaching and how that kind of plays in for someone who is wanting to get into this field. What kind of skills would you say they should kind of develop? It might potentially be, have been overlooked maybe. Have you at least found that students need to build up foundation in something specific in order to be successful, or something that may have been overlooked before they came in with you? NW: I'd say get used to the tools changing and get used to things breaking and being unsupported in quick fashion. Also, I think that it is a lot better to learn things from a conceptual level than it is from a level of a specific tool. And you, there's several ways to go about that. I mean just learning multiple tools. If you know how to do something and Max learn how to do it in Supercollider or something like that and, and, and you know how to do something in Pro Pools, learn how to do it in Logic. Because you never know when one of these companies is going to get bought out, get changed, you know, that sort of stuff. I think I've been fortunate enough that Max has been pretty stable over the years. But even that, there were times that when we were concerned about it because it was owned by one company and then another, and there was a kind of transition, it could've gone another way. I mean I can point to several times where it could have gone away because the intellectual property changed hands between companies and a company could have easily said, “We're not going to do all that anymore. We were interested in something else,� and wash their hands of it. Because I've seen that happen with tools that are out there. But, I've been fortunate to have that as kind of a stable tool. So it's good to have one, at least one stable tool in your arsenal that you know is going to be around that has a good long track record. But then learning to do stuff in multiple platforms so that you understand them from a conceptual level. That's part of how I've tried to formulate the electronic music and sound design class that I teach here and fight by teaching. Not just any one tool, but I now teach students, because I'm trying to remember when you took it, was it all Max or did we have Ableton yet? MB: I'm trying to remember. I just took a basic if one, because I was there for a minor. I think we had the opportunity to choose to do stuff in Max and we had just got Ableton. NW: That's right. You, I think you were in the semester where I was trying to teach like one, like Mondays was Ableton day and Wednesday was max day and then Friday was Eurorack day at. I've since then done like units so that the first unit is Ableton, the second unit is Eurorack and hardware synthesis. And then the third unit is max. I'm very intentional in doing it that way and not just having 15 weeks be all about one tool. Because I think it helps. It helps the students learn it more from a conceptual level. So you see frequency modulation three times, but you see it in three different environments. And so you understand it more at a conceptual level so that if a new tool comes along and you need to do something with frequency modulation, hopefully the conceptual basis that you've had sticks and you can carry that over to a new set of tools.
So I'm a big believer in understanding things from a conceptual level, not just how do I do it with this one tool and get really good with a single set of tool. That being said, it is good to have something that you go deep on, that you're fluent in, so to speak, you know? MB: Right, right. My last little question I have is where would you kind of see either this would be like specific to you or just in general, but just the electronic music going in the future. NW: Ooh. Okay. I don't know. I think we're going to see more, I mean, I, web audio is one thing that I've not really had the time to get into. But I do think it's very powerful to be able to build musical experiences in an online environment. And so that's one thing. It seems to be beginning to grow. It seems to be growing every year and I wish I had more time to dig in and explore it. Another thing I think we're just starting to see commercial tools that are AI based, that are using yeah, algorithms to sort out different parts in the mix. So you can take, you can take a mix that has, you know, like drums, bass, guitar, vocals, and the AI can sort out which one's coming from where. I think we're, we're just starting to see commercial tools that allow you to do that sort of stuff. And that's, I think going to be a very powerful way to not just take a recording as is, but what we will be able to do is decompose the recording into its constituent parts. I do think we still need to work out this whole sampling thing. I think we've just kind of ignored the problem and people are going with the flow in some ways. But I do think it hampers creativity when, when we don't have a sampling framework that works for everybody to be able to freely and organically worked with all of these sound materials that are out there in the world. I'm not against people getting paid, but I think that there needs to be something like analogous to like what happens with covers songs: if you write up song, I can cover that song as long as I pay you a predetermined rate. If it were that easy to sample things, I think it would be a lot better in electronic music because it would open up a lot of creative possibilities. I don't like seeing laws get in the way of creativity; that doesn't sit well with me. Is that answering your question as far as like where things are going or where I see things that I see on the horizon? MB: I think so it's definitely got some there's some topics that are things that could potentially come into the foreground. I personally agree with you on this topic of sampling is some process should be worked out because I do want people to get credited for their own stuff, but not let that get in the way of creativity. So, there's some weird middle ground that hasn't been kind of worked out yet. NW: I think. Yeah. I think just sometimes in these situations people get so entrenched and it's hard for them to see new possibilities MB: I will say the web audio thing is fairly big with a lot of people at LSU. So I'm finding out more about that. We have some people go to the conference there every year.
NW: And the learning synthesis and the learning music website that able to input together is, I think, huge. Ableton’s website is a great example of what's possible using web audio in that sort of stuff. So if you're not familiar with that website. You should definitely check those out. It gives you an idea of like what you could do just teaching these topics in the browser. MB: I've looked at that a little bit because the, the class I teach is like a‌ I describe it as a creative coding class that's using Java script to do some graphics, some audio and a little bit of hardware stuff with Arduino. So I've looked at that a little bit. Just as additional resources for the students to have. NW: Yeah. I think that's another thing too, is, I mean, coding is going to be like a 21st century literacy issue. the idea is that in previous centuries it would have been people who could read if people who couldn't read. Now it's going to, and if we're not already there, we're going to be heading towards people that can code and people who can't code. People that just simply use the computer and people that know how to program and directly computer to work for them. I think that's going to be a big dividing line going forward. You normally teach a dual enrollment class, right? MB: Yes. NW: I think it's going to take earlier interventions on that because my experience as an undergraduate professor is that by the time the students get to me at the undergraduate level, they've already decided whether they're good at coding, good at math. And there's a kind of a wall that I hit trying to work through those things with students. Whereas if you can convince them early on that and give them some positive experiences with these things at an earlier age so that by the time they get to college and they want to dig into it more not in a way that everybody has to major in computer science. I think coding is going to get divorced from computer science if it, again, if it's not already it's going to be just another thing that you know how to do. MB: Right. Yeah, it does. I mean, I, I'm not, I don't know that much about computer science, but I, from what I do understand, I would kind of agree with you a little bit on that. How there's at least starting to disperse. There are somethings I've heard from my younger brother who's a computer science major. NW: Oh yeah. MB: So, yeah. Awesome. Well I think that that answers all of my questions. I don't if there's anything else you wanted to talk about. This was just kind of a loose structure sort of thing.
NW: Well, let me ask this, because that was always one of my critiques of my graduate program 20 years ago now. The idea that we weren't learning history, you know as much as we could. Are you finding that history is being covered well in your grad program? Like the history of specifically of electronic music? Because you asked this question about tape and tape manipulation. MB: Yeah, I'm taking a course right now. It's actually what this is for, is this the history of electro acoustic music. So there's, there's a course specifically dedicated to that. And I mean it's been a little weird just with everything going on this semester, but generally speaking, I feel we were at least covering that very well when you take that class. I don't know about outside of that, since I don’t have to take the basic music history stuff. I think just have to take another just generic history course. This is the only required one is the, this electro-acoustic history. NW: Yeah. I think that's good because you need to know the history of your discipline, the people that are coming before you in terms of, of that, that area of expertise. I mean, so many times I see it not only in my undergraduate students, but I also see, I'm sitting on a lot of conferences now, reviewing papers and stuff like that. And the number of times I see something I like in some of those papers, even sometimes before professional conference where it's like, they seem completely unaware about parts of the history of the discipline. And I have to write my view, “ sorry guys. If you had only talked about this, this and this, I might be able to support your paper, but you need to go back to the, you need to go back and do another literature review because there's a whole segment that you're missing, you know that, that I think is what helps you put your work in context.” There's a tendency sometimes to think that you're, you're repeating and you're being on original, but I don't, see it as that. I think it's you're learning from the mistakes of people that have come before you. and that's ultimately is going to lead to new discoveries quicker than it would otherwise. If you just ignore the work that others have done before, or instead of ignoring your, you're ignorant of those things. And ignorance is not the same thing, you know, it’s a lack of knowledge and the only way to fix that is studying it. MB: You know, with this course, I like it because there's a lot of reading sources, doing a bunch of listening to all the different. We also go off on her own and research these little mini topics and then present our findings. We also have to do a paper, an interview with someone else in the field, that's not at LSU. We have to, by the end of the class, we've asked him to write a manifesto about how we think electronic music will, will progress in what we do, what needs to happen between now and then. So that'll be interesting. NW: That's all good. Sounds good to me.
MB: I think so. I'm excited for it. I'm, I'm, I'm glad I'm doing this early on so that way I don't have to you try and get through all this coursework and then do all the history stuff as I'm trying to figure out my dissertation proposal. NW: Yeah. And it'll give you ideas of things. And then so many of the, that's the other thing is like, we're at a time period where so many of the pioneers of our field or are passing. It seems like each year there's, there's a handful of people that are like pioneers, that people that you read about in these history books that are, I mean, early histories, right. That have passed on here in the last couple of years. So, getting a chance to, I think I've been fortunate to meet a lot of those folks. I didn't get to study with a lot of them but getting a chance to converse with some of them even just at conferences and stuff like that has been, I mean, really remarkable experience. Just recently we were able to have Bernie Krauss here at Stetson in November, and that was a really great to be able to hear from somebody who's spent six years of his life going out and doing field recording, you know, so really a pioneer in that area, and to get his perspective on my work, get his perspective on like where we're at with things, where his work is. Yeah, I think it's important to, to get to know those pioneers before they're gone. MB: Like I said, I, like I said, that answers all of my questions, so thank you very much for our time. NW: Yeah, no problem. Thank you again and stay safe. Bye.