things to hear
(music)
things to see
(video/artwork)
things to read
(writing)
things to do
(software)
things to learn
(teaching)
places to go
(performances)
people to meet
(collaborators)
my info
(bio/cv/contact)
(music)
things to see
(video/artwork)
things to read
(writing)
things to do
(software)
things to learn
(teaching)
places to go
(performances)
people to meet
(collaborators)
my info
(bio/cv/contact)
On Time
by R. Luke DuBois
Technology has given to listeners the ability to regulate the musical continua they hear. - Jonathan D. Kramer
Here's an exercise for you the next time you go to a concert, listen to a record, take a walk listening to music on your headphones, or engage in any 'active' listening experience: as soon as the music stops, fixate on the last echoes of the sound ringing in your ears, the last dying impression of an acoustic impulse. What does it sound like? Is it literally the last sound your heard, or is it something a bit deeper than that? How long can the impression last for? Seconds? Minutes? How easily is it dispensed with? Does it flutter away as soon as you talk to someone or hear something else?
I've been trying for a while to capture that sound. I'm not sure how well I've succeeded, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's a pandora's box of inquiry, stemming not only from the etic parameters of how we perceive the sounds around us and parameterize musical information according to our acoustic culture, but also from the poesis of the musically creative act itself.
My older brother is a photographer, and when I was a kid I used to follow him around with a cheap camera and take pictures when he did. I remember once watching him change the film in his camera and, mimicing his motions, I opened my camera as well, unaware that while his roll had finished, mine was only halfway through and I was exposing my film, ruining whatever pictures I had taken.
Photographs, like our vision, can saturate fairly easily. Let too much light onto a photographic substrate and the sensitivity specks will all become exposed, leaving the latent image completely exposed. Sound has a similar saturation threshold, with a microphone (simulating the tympanic membrane of our ears) capable of sustaining only so much acoustic pressure before distorting its output signal. Inside the computer, however, it's a different story.
In the world before phonography, sound was intrinsically tied to the body that created the sound. This emancipation of sound from its physical source, as many would call it, ushered in whole new modes of creating and listening to acoustic experiences. In other words, we no longer have to exist in the natural 'habitat' of sonic phenomena in order to partake in its sonic productions. We can hear a rainfall from the comfort of our living rooms, listen to the Beatles thirty-five years and counting after they broke up, and recognize the voice of Franklin Delano Roosevelt despite the fact the we were never alive to hear his voice.
This is great, but it also makes us incredibly fickle. Raise your hand if you surf the dial on your radio far more than you actually fix it on a station. How about if you've ever skipped to the next song on an album because you don't like the one playing. Even if you do like the song, do you always listen to the end?
Like so much else these days, our listening experiences our becoming increasingly under siege by the funny feeling in the back of our minds that we don't have time to waste listening to things we don't necessarily want to hear. So we switch stations, skip to the next track, and cut off the song after the second chorus because, to paraphrase Gordon Gano, the third verse is usually the same as the first, more or less.
And yet, paradoxically, many of us will listen to the same song over and over again until we're sick of it. We crave repetition, and will gladly re-experience something we know works at the expense of trying something new.
Let's posit for a moment that the aesthetic pleasure derived from our listening experience can be divided into two categories: the act of listening (in whatever mode, active or passive, diegetic or mimetic) and the act of remembering what was heard at a later time. The former is a contact high, experienced through the same channels of perception which we use when we partake of anything else in our lives. The latter is an act of memory, drawing from an acoustic impression to regenerate a transcendent impression lost to use the moment the sound stopped.
If we think of sound as something that propagates through time, and time is precisely what we're always running out of, maybe we can come up with a way to encode a listening experience that invokes the same emotional associates in a shorter listening period. This sounds like a nice fantasy, doesn't it? Pop on your headphones, and in five minutes you can hear the complete works of Beethoven, or every song that was played at your high schoool prom, or everything your parents ever told you (well, not quite everything).
Imagine for a moment we have this piece of magic. What would you most like to hear?
You can't just speed up a sound and expect this to work. A time-domain acoustic wave will rise in pitch when played at a higher rate (think Alvin and the Chipmunks or, if you're hipper than that, The Smiths' 'Bigmouth Strikes Again'). By turning the sound into frames of frequency domain information, we can speed up sound using a procedure called phase vocoding to change the timebase of an audio signal without altering its pitch. This works up to a point, but a lot of detail becomes lost as phrases become compressed to the level of events, events to the level of transients, and transients disappear entirely.
Musical memory is cumulative, that is to say, our hearing in any given moment is informed by what we've heard before. This statistical process is an important aspect of our perceptual apparatus and is one of the pillars of the gestalt account of how we perceive our world. Musical parameters such as harmony and timbre all rely on this process. So how do we preserve them?
If we focus entirely on the experiental overview of acoustic memory, we could imagine that our system only focuses on the complete, the overall, the gestalt. By computing the spectral average of a sound over time we could give a sense of all the frequencies present in the work, weighted according to their frequency in the original piece. This is similar to a long-exposure photograph, which fuses time into a single image.
But we also listen hierarchically, which means that we comprehend not only sonic progress but are capable of also decoding sonic formalisms. How do we preserve these?
By combining the averaging with a system that moves the average, we can get both a sense of temporal momentum and an impression of these fused overall impressions. I've been calling this technique time-lapse phonography.
I've used this technique in a few pieces on my website, as well as a couple of commercially released recordings.
Maybe it will work for you. Maybe it will sound like the ringing in your ears the moment the music stops.
Let me know, either way, will you?
- rld, september, 2006.
by R. Luke DuBois
Technology has given to listeners the ability to regulate the musical continua they hear. - Jonathan D. Kramer
Here's an exercise for you the next time you go to a concert, listen to a record, take a walk listening to music on your headphones, or engage in any 'active' listening experience: as soon as the music stops, fixate on the last echoes of the sound ringing in your ears, the last dying impression of an acoustic impulse. What does it sound like? Is it literally the last sound your heard, or is it something a bit deeper than that? How long can the impression last for? Seconds? Minutes? How easily is it dispensed with? Does it flutter away as soon as you talk to someone or hear something else?
I've been trying for a while to capture that sound. I'm not sure how well I've succeeded, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's a pandora's box of inquiry, stemming not only from the etic parameters of how we perceive the sounds around us and parameterize musical information according to our acoustic culture, but also from the poesis of the musically creative act itself.
My older brother is a photographer, and when I was a kid I used to follow him around with a cheap camera and take pictures when he did. I remember once watching him change the film in his camera and, mimicing his motions, I opened my camera as well, unaware that while his roll had finished, mine was only halfway through and I was exposing my film, ruining whatever pictures I had taken.
Photographs, like our vision, can saturate fairly easily. Let too much light onto a photographic substrate and the sensitivity specks will all become exposed, leaving the latent image completely exposed. Sound has a similar saturation threshold, with a microphone (simulating the tympanic membrane of our ears) capable of sustaining only so much acoustic pressure before distorting its output signal. Inside the computer, however, it's a different story.
In the world before phonography, sound was intrinsically tied to the body that created the sound. This emancipation of sound from its physical source, as many would call it, ushered in whole new modes of creating and listening to acoustic experiences. In other words, we no longer have to exist in the natural 'habitat' of sonic phenomena in order to partake in its sonic productions. We can hear a rainfall from the comfort of our living rooms, listen to the Beatles thirty-five years and counting after they broke up, and recognize the voice of Franklin Delano Roosevelt despite the fact the we were never alive to hear his voice.
This is great, but it also makes us incredibly fickle. Raise your hand if you surf the dial on your radio far more than you actually fix it on a station. How about if you've ever skipped to the next song on an album because you don't like the one playing. Even if you do like the song, do you always listen to the end?
Like so much else these days, our listening experiences our becoming increasingly under siege by the funny feeling in the back of our minds that we don't have time to waste listening to things we don't necessarily want to hear. So we switch stations, skip to the next track, and cut off the song after the second chorus because, to paraphrase Gordon Gano, the third verse is usually the same as the first, more or less.
And yet, paradoxically, many of us will listen to the same song over and over again until we're sick of it. We crave repetition, and will gladly re-experience something we know works at the expense of trying something new.
Let's posit for a moment that the aesthetic pleasure derived from our listening experience can be divided into two categories: the act of listening (in whatever mode, active or passive, diegetic or mimetic) and the act of remembering what was heard at a later time. The former is a contact high, experienced through the same channels of perception which we use when we partake of anything else in our lives. The latter is an act of memory, drawing from an acoustic impression to regenerate a transcendent impression lost to use the moment the sound stopped.
If we think of sound as something that propagates through time, and time is precisely what we're always running out of, maybe we can come up with a way to encode a listening experience that invokes the same emotional associates in a shorter listening period. This sounds like a nice fantasy, doesn't it? Pop on your headphones, and in five minutes you can hear the complete works of Beethoven, or every song that was played at your high schoool prom, or everything your parents ever told you (well, not quite everything).
Imagine for a moment we have this piece of magic. What would you most like to hear?
You can't just speed up a sound and expect this to work. A time-domain acoustic wave will rise in pitch when played at a higher rate (think Alvin and the Chipmunks or, if you're hipper than that, The Smiths' 'Bigmouth Strikes Again'). By turning the sound into frames of frequency domain information, we can speed up sound using a procedure called phase vocoding to change the timebase of an audio signal without altering its pitch. This works up to a point, but a lot of detail becomes lost as phrases become compressed to the level of events, events to the level of transients, and transients disappear entirely.
Musical memory is cumulative, that is to say, our hearing in any given moment is informed by what we've heard before. This statistical process is an important aspect of our perceptual apparatus and is one of the pillars of the gestalt account of how we perceive our world. Musical parameters such as harmony and timbre all rely on this process. So how do we preserve them?
If we focus entirely on the experiental overview of acoustic memory, we could imagine that our system only focuses on the complete, the overall, the gestalt. By computing the spectral average of a sound over time we could give a sense of all the frequencies present in the work, weighted according to their frequency in the original piece. This is similar to a long-exposure photograph, which fuses time into a single image.
But we also listen hierarchically, which means that we comprehend not only sonic progress but are capable of also decoding sonic formalisms. How do we preserve these?
By combining the averaging with a system that moves the average, we can get both a sense of temporal momentum and an impression of these fused overall impressions. I've been calling this technique time-lapse phonography.
I've used this technique in a few pieces on my website, as well as a couple of commercially released recordings.
Maybe it will work for you. Maybe it will sound like the ringing in your ears the moment the music stops.
Let me know, either way, will you?
- rld, september, 2006.