sonic sketchbooks

Around midnight of the 14th of December 2023 the Sun emitted an unusually strong solar flare - an unimaginably vast and powerful eruption of primary cosmic energy. The event was observed and monitored by terrestrial, atmospheric and space-wandering instruments of various government and scientific agencies of we, the humans. And with a welter of extraordinary imagery and catastrophic predictions, was reported widely in global media.

This significant space weather event occurred while I was developing this episode in response to a prompt by longtime listener Philip Toydog to ‘do something with UTC’ - Coordinated Universal TIme - and more specifically the sonic experience of UTC familiar to many who have dabbled in listening to Short Wave or High Frequency radio transmissions.

As a boy had a germanium crystal radio - a Japanese made SR-150 Science Egg Radio. The Egg in the title described its shape - a clear plastic egg containing a tangle of wires and a giant diode. It required no power - an alligator clip attached to anything metal (my bed frame) that would act as an aerial and a decidedly hospital-like mono earpiece was used to listen discreetly. Tuning was by winding a thin steel columnar screw up or down to locate AM signals. I did enjoy finding the ABC and listening to music programs, but I also enjoyed the spaces between, the ever varying static. A couple of decades later I bought a Sony World Radio with shortwave capability and explored the incredible ephemeral sounds of short wave transmissions coming from who-knew-where bouncing from the ionosphere.

One of these was Coordinated Universal Time - a hypnotic crackle-and-fade 60 beats per minute pulsation periodically defined by two American-accented voices - a woman and a man - announcing, once a minute, the Universal Time moment about to be traversed. You can read about UTC in the usual places.

Thinking back on my 80s and 90s interest in short wave radio, the enigmatic world of Number Stations came to mind, which in turn prompted a reminiscence of seeing Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film Orphee, at a tiny theatrette in a federal government building in Brisbane where cinemateque films borrowed from the National Library were screened maybe only once a month, on a Thursday night to an audience of maybe 20 subterranean cinephiles.

One aspect of that film that fascinated me is the use of a car radio as a site where the titular angry self-obsessed poet listens to and transcribes surrealistic sentences declaimed (in French of course) by a resonant deep male voice, plagiarising transmissions perhaps emanating from the underworld of the dead. Jean Cocteau confirmed that this oracular radio was inspired by BBC radio broadcasts he heard during the Nazi occupation of France – mysterious apparent nonsense of numerals, words and musical fragments carrying coded messages from the British military to French resistance fighters during WW2. Prototypical examples of what would come to be known as Numbers Stations - tools of trade of state-based secret service organisations.

There’s much more of course, but save to say this new composition crowds various of these inspirations together with my modular musings into a drifting enigmatic roll on the plasma sands of the ionospheric beach gazing into the stellar maw of our solar system as it coughs a chaotic bolus of x-rays and plasma our way.

Gary Warner, 2023

Host/Composer, Sonic Sketchbooks podcast

Over decades of field recording, I’ve grown to increasingly appreciate and utilise incidental sounds made between or around an intended sound capture. For example, walking across the dried-out forbs and grasses of a drought-effected wetland to follow a large flock of tiny red-browed finches moving on wing in clouds of synchronous sparkle between patches of seeding grasses on the edge of a forested hill on a warm morning in early summer.

[ Pushing against an impulse ingrained during analogue times when cassette tape capture time limits demanded economy, I often keep the recorder running while relocating or resetting.]

This episode presents a pair of new sonic sketches connected by that sound of walking. Each sketch incorporates a machine rhythm constant—one a drawing machine, the other an experimental instrument I built on a small modified turntable in which ping-pong balls roll in an octagonal box and bounce off symmetrically fixed aluminium barriers.

Surrounding these slow core flows, electronic and digital waveforms drone and drift, twist and twine, crackle and decay.

Music to my ears and perhaps to yours also…

I built this new composition ‘polytonal wander’ from five recent recordings using different methods and devices for each. 

F

irstly, a new modular element in my small Eurorack mix is an ERM Polygogo polygonal synthesis generator which allows very interesting signal creation using multiple control voltages applied to eight different parameters. For this recording I patched randomised CV in from a couple of BASTL Kastle instruments. 



Secondly, I used my MakeNoise Morphagene to generate manipulations of various field recordings and thirdly collected new EMF recordings with my trusty SOMA Ether roaming over a collection of electronics comms and security boxes that have gradually accumulated on a mundane wall in a staff kitchenette at the school where I teach experimental drawing. 



A fourth sequence was generated with very low frequency waveforms output from a Mordax Data unit that allows fine grain control of shapes, hertz and overlay modulation of pairs of waveforms. 



Finally, fifthly, for a deep analogue element I tied a pair of small kalimbas together, one facing up one facing down, so I could play them simultaneously held in both hands. Each has five steel tines but one, made in Germany, is very sweetly chromatically tuned and the other, made in north Africa is, let’s say, intuitively tuned and has buzzing rings of tin fitted onto each tine which is a traditional and sonically important element of many African instruments. I used one of my Tascam recorders to capture an impromptu performance in the bathroom with this ad hoc assembly.



As ever, this composition, constructed over a couple of days from the five original tracks, is offered as an experimental divertissement, a strange, hopefully intriguing gift of sculpted sound, something to accompany your creative making or as a transport into unknown imaginaries.

John Cage - composer, artist, writer, provocateur, citizen mycologist and much more - was born 111 years ago on the 5th of September 1912. I’m publishing this 2023 episode on his birthdate, and the composition is made in homage to him and the inspiration I’ve found in his work and ideas since the late 1970s. There is much to discover about his life and works on the vast repositories of the internet, so you can perhaps bounce around there for a bit while listening…

If you’re up for a little old-fashioned book-reading, an excellent biography titled Where the Heart Beats was written by Kay Larson and first published by The Penguin Press in 2012.

Later this week I’m opening a solo show of drawing works at DRAW Space, a new gallery here in Gadigal/Sydney. One of the works is titled ‘Sound drawing for DRAW Space and John Cage’. It’s constructed from reworked post-consumer packaging, primarily plastic, cardboard and aluminium, formed into channels, tunnels, chutes and drops arranged in site-specific marble-run slaloms on the gallery walls.

A visitor climbs a platform ladder to drop quandong* nuts into the tops of the slaloms. These natural wooden marbles sequentially sonify the various materials as they roll, zig-zag, drop and bounce along their gravity-assisted journey to terminal receptacles on the gallery floor.

Both visual score and sounding instrument, each slalom is an analogue sound sequencer creating a replicable noise-melody and while repetitive of the same sequence, each tumbling quandong ‘run’ varies depending on initial conditions and the momentary physics of material encounters along the way.

While not alone in exploring the creative potentials of chance operations and actively addressing questions about how to think about sound and what music might be, John Cage was uncannily prolific, and his influence across art forms wide-ranging. This episode is a new composition built from preliminary recordings of tests for the work I’ll be installing later in the week, entwined with various other sonic explorations of the past few months and years.

With thanks to Barbara Campbell for performing the piano chords derived from the music of Erik Satie.

This composition is built from various new recordings of encounters with insects and birds, and wind-song heard through a gap in the wall of a remote rural building, wound together with outputs from various synthesisers - modular and otherwise -, a temporary sonic-kinetic sculpture made from tins and containers, and recordings of analogue, generated sounds I find interesting such as a quartz pebble bounced around on the steel tray of an old dustpan, and tapping a collection of antique porcelain plates displayed on a weatherboard farmhouse wall.

With many of the small digital audio generators I’ve bought over the past few years, it’s close to impossible to replicate sounds because once the device is switched off, many or all of the internal settings of the session are negated, lost, wiped. On power-up, the electronics are refreshed and each new combination of dial settings, cables, inputs to outputs and so on creates a new sonic field unique to the moment of its generation. I quite like this - probably unintentional - surrender of control - it ensures a degree of non-attachment and might be interpreted as a respect for the moment of making, for the valuing of process over product.

As ever, this new composition is offered for listening with full, wavering or minimal attention - intended as a contribution - strange and unusual - to the ambient sensory environment of your studio, home, travel or workspace and as food, fuel or grit in the oyster of your creative inner life.

I’ve long been collecting individual sounds of everyday objects like saucepan lids, wine glasses, tools and implements, vessels and containers. I strike the object once with something, perhaps a chopstick with a rubber band wound around one end, a wooden spoon or something else to hand, and record the sound it makes. Of course, any object can be coaxed to generate a variety of sounds depending on what it is struck with, where and with what intensity.

I call this my Pleximetry series, named for the medical diagnostic method of tapping the chest and other body areas. Forms of this art of listening-touch were practiced in Egyptian antiquity and probably across pre-colonial societies, but an early written description of the technique was made, in Latin, in 1761 by a doctor who developed his method from memories of his father tapping wine kegs. In 1826 a doctor of the Napoleonic wars, Adolph Piorry inspired by the recent invention of the stethoscope to listen to and learn from the bodies internal sonic mysteries, invented the pleximeter to instrumentalise diagnostic percussion with analogue amplification. He also coined other still-used neologisms such as toxin and septiceamia.

I’ve now gathered a library of hundreds of Pleximetries and have used them in different ways in gallery installations, performances and previous episodes; and I recently made an addition of 160 new sounds gathered from objects at a friends rural farmhouse and working sheds.

This episode is a 20 minute ambient meditative composition made with a small subset of this new collection which I fed into a modular synthesis array. The audio files were first sent to a MakeNoise Morphagene granular synthesis module. The Control Voltage output of that input signal I cabled to a Mutable Instruments Branches module - a coin-toss simulator that randomly assigns signal to a pair of heads/tails outputs that were then sent to TipTop Audio’s MISO module - an acronym for Mix, Invert, Scale and Offset - for dial manipulation of the aleatory CV signals which are then fed back into the Morphagene to control various of its parameters such as sample selection, playback position within the sample, grain size and varispeed. The patched array is a feedback loop that continuously evolves without further intervention.

I like to think of this as a kind of prepared synthesiser, in the trailing wake of John Cage’s prepared piano and all the other prepared instruments and players that have followed from his 1940 experiments to make something new, strange and complex through inventive, exploratory combination of knowns, unknowns and the vagaries of chance.

I then further manipulated the Morphagene output recordings through my usual compositional methods of layering, time-shifting, effecting and signal-processing in the digital video editing software Final Cut Pro.

release date: 24 january 2023

This new composition drifts across and through various sonic topologies of layered and abstracted recordings including :

water boiling in an old-fashioned whistle kettle,

passenger and freight jets descending over inner-city suburbs,

multi-story scaffolding being removed from a newly completed residential tower nearby,

the usually inaudible signals and patterns of elecromagnetic frequencies constantly emitting from devices all around us,

morphagenic distortions of my spatial pleximetry recordings where I capture the singular sound of objects being struck once,

and the rhythmic pulse of the bulbous bright green cicada Cystosoma saundersii, commonly called the bladder cicada that I encountered in the suburbs of Brisbane Queensland during a 2022 summer family visit. These cicadas, unusually, are nocturnally active and begin their calling in the crepuscular half-light near dusk and call long into night’s darkness.

Like the songs of crickets, songs of cicadas - different for every one of the over 3000 scientifically identified species - form an important part of locally specific soundscapes around the world. Cicadas have a high incidence of species endemism - wherein a species is habitat dependent, and a particular habitat may not have a wide or contiguous distribution - so there are all over the temperate and tropical world, local cicada songs that contribute to a sonic identity of place.

I treasure my field recordings of summer in Japan for the highly evocative sounds of cicada species very different to those I know from the various parts of Australia where I’ve lived and worked over the decades. I had known those Japanese cicadas long before hearing them actually call from their tree podiums, through the cinema of Ozu, Kurosawa, where the musical pulse of cicadas underscores the langour of the archipelago’s hot, humid summers.

As ever, I imagine my compositions as a kind of transport for the listener to journey into unusual but hopefully evocative sonic territories of mind, memory and feeling.

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You can find out more about the podcast series at the episode guide at sonicsktechbooks.net.

COVID has left me a nagging discomfort, an occasional slight distress of being breathless.

‘Breathless’ is the English-language title for Jean-Luc Godard’s breathtaking 1960 cinematic experiment ‘A Bout de Souffle’ with its charismatic stars Jean Sieberg, Jean-Paul Belmondo, mid-20th century Paris and Godard’s slap-in-the-face stylistics.

He called his many films postcards and insisted they had no greater meaning than the direct experience of seeing and hearing them and whatever that might provoke within each person and amongst and between them collectively, afterwards.

Not long ago I chanced upon, or an algorithm offered to me, a video interview with Godard made not long before he left this mortal coil in September 2022. His voice was breathless, evaporating before my ears - not surprising as he sat in a doorway joyfully smoking a cigar worthy of Castro. He was speaking his native language, French, in a feature-film length interview with the unseen interlocutor a strident confident young male voice born long after 'A Bout de Souffle' had receded into cinematic legend. I could understand none of what was being said but Godard’s defiant nonagenarian mannerisms and the cadence and carefree struggle of his speech mesmerised me.

A year ago I stood on the shore of an east coast national park embayment, slightly before dawn, holding one of my digital recorders to capture the rhythmic sounds of small waves breaking on sand, the stridulations of unseen crickets secreted among dew-speckled dune grasses and the songs of awakening avian life in the rainforest pocket behind me. The situation was cold, dark, and under headphones made transcendent.

There’s an iPad app I have, downloaded from the John Cage dot org website, that presents a randomiseable grid of samples of prepared piano that can be played by touching the cold glass surface of that chimerical device, a curious kind of puppetry.

We are fortunate to live in the remaining time of birds, the time just before many of their immaculate voices will be sequentially swallowed into the maelstrom of extinction stirred up by our billions of human desires and fears.

Listen to the birds, they have nothing intelligible to say…

Wherever, whenever and whoever you are, thank-you for listening. If you’d like to find out more about the sonic sketchbooks podcast series, you can go to the episode guide at sonicsketchbooks.net

release date: 20 december 2022

This new composition is a structuring of recent audio recordings made on national park field trips using hydrophones, contact mics and my trusty Tascam digital recorders mingled with home-studio noodlings with modular synthesisers, home-made instruments and iPad apps.

At play in this sonified space of cinematic suggestion, sounds of sub-aquatic arthropods segue with unpredictable meanderings of the SOMA Cosmos ‘drifting memory station’ as it floats samples of a music box transcription I made of melodic phrases from John Cage’s 1948 ‘In A Landscape’; a thunderstorm catches a Thai family off-guard in the street; a small rotating sculpture knocks persistently at the edges of the sound field while, on a moonless night, frogs and crickets sing the cool night air as the farm’s labourers slumber…

I hope you find this new sonic assemblage of imaginative interest.

You can find out more about the sonic sketchbooks podcast series at the episode guide at sonicsketchbooks.net. This is episode 71.

release date: 13 september 2022

A small mustard tin from India, a paulownia box for a teabowl from japan, a dried starfish, limpet shells, a whirlygig made from a beer can, vehicle flattened bottle caps collected from the streets, a steel street sweeper bristle aquiver on the edge of a wooden desk, tiny seashells in a ceramic bowl and that paulownia box, the spiky woody seedpod of the tree Flindersia australis, or Crow’s Ash, a soft-bristled shoe brush made and bought in Kyoto, offcuts of superthin aluminium dropped onto a marble benchtop, a field recording made on a warm afternoon in a forest on bidjigal country north-west of Sydney where I live on the pacific coast of Australia.

Collected recently with a few different mics and recorders, these are the sonic materials I used to shape this episode through processes of layering, filtering, time-smearing, teasing, distorting, fragmenting, listening close, re-arranging and listening again. and again.

The resulting composition ‘adrift, afloat, a wandering…’ I offer to the genie of your aural curiosity.

You can find out more about the podcast at the episode guide at sonicsketchbooks.net