sonic sketchbooks

release date: 30 august 2022

R

ecently I made a small kinetic instrument from a ball carved out of a champagne cork rolling around inside a rotating biscuit tin. Watching the roughly shaped ball bounce and hobble about inside the cylinder I got to thinking about the word tumble and how I’ve often expressed a sense of tumbling through life, rather than purposefully shaping a trajectory of progressive improvement. 

T

umble of course conjures a scene and a sense of suddenly falling, with or without control or intention. The unlucky, the inattentive and the trained acrobat alike can take a tumble. It’s a word used frequently in reference to things economic, such as the advice ‘sell into rallies, buy when markets tumble’.



A phonaestheme is a phonic sequence that suggests a particular meaning and there does seem to be some semantic thread stitching together the many umble words of the English language. A run through the alphabet yields bumble, crumble, fumble, grumble, humble, jumble, mumble, rumble, scumble, stumble, tumble and umbles - edible animal intestines. Maybe even dumbbell at a stretch. 



There’s meaning overlap amongst them all, of incoherent noise, mild disparagement, lack of success or control, momentary disorder or incoherence. And one might expect the umble words to have some common etymological ancestor but apparently not. Instead, they derive variously from different sources in old english, proto-germanic, old norse, middle dutch, middle french and so on.



In 1980, Talking Heads released the album Remain in Light, featuring the energetic cryptolyrical opening track "Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)” with David Byrne’s emphatic announcement ‘I’m a tumbler’. Forty years on the song maintains its hypnotic allure.

Four hundred years prior, Shakespeare dropped tumbles into many a players exposition, and René Descartes became anxious about his meditations on what can truly be known about our existence. 

Tumblers are a performative breed of pigeon that chaotically twist and turn in flight.

Botanically speaking, Tumbleweed is a descriptor for wind-dispersed diaspores of many various xerophytic plants. Culturally, the Tumbleweed as signifier has morphed from a trope of Western cinema to a meme for a moment of empty awkwardness or awkward emptiness.



And then there’s Tumblr.com the American web platform founded in 2007 on the gamble that users might enjoy tumbling through cascades of brief texts and images micro-curated by fellow users. A rewarding prescient insight that was…

This episode is a composition titled ‘I couldn’t find any trees…’

As is often the case, I sat down at my iMac to build it from recordings I’ve made since release of the previous episode. Yesterday, I walked to a relatively remote ocean beach south of Sydney with my partner, one of my sisters, her husband and their two adult daughters, celebrating one of their birthdays.

As people have always done on shell grit beaches, we chatted and combed through the crunchy underfoot fragments in search of tiny treasures of form, texture, pattern and colour.

One of my nieces focused on collecting from the millions of tide-tumbled shards a handful of sea urchin spines, all a deep maroon-violet-blue. As her gather developed, she commented on the beautiful micro-acoustic glass-like sounds the tiny rods made as they knocked against each other in her palm.

So, I recorded that tiny sound and use it here as the field for the following sonic sketch - it’s the tumbling tinkling tones randomly rolling under the first ten minutes.

Other sounds encountered in this meander from forest to street via beach, classrooms and non-existent virtual spaces are:

water dripping in a sandstone cave in a recently flooded forest,

a student drawing with contact mic attached to a pen and the signal diverted through a delay pedal,

a small rubber ball being rolled around inside an old square biscuit tin,

the rhythm of an ad hoc drawing machine in one of my experimental drawing classes,

some noodlings with miniature keyboardless synthesisers,

and, from the weekday streets of Redfern on Gadigal country, labourers taking down scaffolding 15-storeys up one of the many residential tower blocks being built like so many artificial cliffs and mountains on this age old hill top.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about uncertainty its many variants and causes - indecision, vagueness, ambiguity, fuzziness, aporia, doubt, bewilderment, terror, indeterminability, incoherence, obfuscation, chaos, deep fakery, etcetera…

Uncertainty is fundamental to creative practices and a foundational principle of quantum sciences - Heisenberg’s proposition that it is impossible to know - that is to measure - with precision both the spatial position and the energetic momentum of a particle at a given time interval. That’s presuming time can be meaningfully discretised…

All forms of measurement are, in some way however minute, uncertain - which is often quantified in the user manuals or specifications of professional metrological devices such as scales, oscilloscopes, force gages, rulers, thermometers and suchlike.

Ludwig Wittgenstein insisted that the most we can ever justifiably claim about anything is that ‘I think I know’ - rather than the emphatic ‘I know’.

The ‘surprisal’ is a unit of measure of uncertainty used in information sciences to quantify How surprised one would be by a single unusual symbol appearing in a stream of otherwise predictable or expected symbols.

Uncertainty is at the heart of the popularity of murder mysteries and the compulsion to gamble and is carefully designed into gameplay, gaming engines and narrative plotting. Uncertainty is the carbohydrate of skepticism and is mathematically contorted in the gymnasium of statistics to formulate risk potentials that inform the cost of insurance for just about anything imaginable. Risk being the inherent state of uncertainty about the potential continuity or radical transformation of agreed value.

William Butler Yeats told us ‘the center cannot hold; things fall apart’ - Keats proposed poetic creativity as ‘negative capability’, a willingness to sit with uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason. Shakespeare ventriloquised the grieving Prince of Denmark to utter the epistemic bedrock expression of uncertainty ‘To be or not to be, that is the question?’

Our everyday conversations are subconsciously peppered with placeholder and filler words that signal contextual or continuity uncertainties - like, like, you know, I mean, right? umpteen, widget, thingamijig, umm, err, whats-her-name, jane doe… In the at once famous and infamous United States of America court case Roe V Wade, Roe, for Jane Roe a variation on Jane Doe used to denote a second party in a legal action, refers to the then unidentified plaintiff. Anonymity as an agentic form of uncertainty.

And I’m not sure how many other avenues of uncertainty there might be to wander. To infinity and beyond presumably… To paraphrase physicist Neils Bohr - we live and breath paradox and contradiction but are as oblivious to their beauty as a fish is to the beauty of water…

So, to this episode - it’s a blurry peripatetic exploration of vocal expressions of uncertainty, an incomplete catalogue of utterances pegged against a restless drift of chance encounters between manipulated recordings of tiny fragments of aluminium dropped onto a marble tabletop, a tall stack of metal stools I slowly dragged around an empty room and quasi-random signals emanating from of a couple of small synthesiser oscillators.

release date: 19 july 2022

It’s been a while since I offered an episode built from field recordings and I had an idea about building a composition from overheard speech, from recordings made in many different contexts over the past twenty years that included or centered on speech - artist talks, interviews, conversations, accidental encounters, people together in different social contexts. In addition to the wonderful diversity of human voices, languages and acculturated forms of expression, there is a wide variety of inherent musicalities in the rhythms, cadences and interplays of voice as speakers navigate different situations. The stage, the street, the lounge room are all different places that provoke, allow or demand different vocal presentation of speakers.

Then there’s the well-known phenomena of the surprising human ability to differentiate and comprehend the speech of a voice of particular interest, against a surrounding background of competing sounds including other voices - the cocktail party effect, also known as selective hearing, though I prefer selective listening.

I’ll say that its unlikely this ability is limited to humans - anyone who’s watched urban birds calling to each other across distances filled with buildings and machine sounds will appreciate that they can discern and respond to the vocalisations of their species within the auditory chaos of cities. And, of course, natural ecologies like rainforests can be very noisy places, especially at dawn and dusk, so this is not a recent adaptation forced by human impact…

Reading around the cocktail party effect reveals that the phenomena began to be scientifically investigated in earnest in the 1950s, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, with intentions around understanding aspects of how the brain functions and processes sensory input. The suggestive phrase ‘speech shadowing’ was one method of experimental investigation - developed in Leningrad- where participant subjects are required to repeat phrases heard through headphones, sometimes with different speech being played to each ear simultaneously. These experiments yielded many interesting observations including that we have the ability to selectively comprehend one stream of speech and at the same time recognise words or phrases of importance in a second stream, especially the mention of our own names.

Another more recent observation arising from ‘speech shadowing’ experiments is that drivers are more able to focus on the attentive demands of driving if the sound of a phone call they’re part of is coming from speakers in front of rather than to the side of or behind the driver - something to do with not splitting directional attention.

Current developments arising from cocktail party effect research include incorporating artificial intelligence and noise cancelling softwares with hearing aids to provide a synthetic cocktail party effect that helps people with hearing loss be able to participate in noisy social situations.

I had already built this episode before beginning my reading research, and its a deep rabbit hole so I’ll stop here and let the composition unfold. I hope you find it an interesting listening experiment.

release date: 05 july 2022

Of late I’ve been reading about 1816, the Year Without A Summer, a global experience of sudden disruption to normative climate cycles.

In 1815 Mount Tambora, a volcano in present-day Indonesia, erupted - violently - blasting millions of tons of gases and tephra into the upper atmosphere.

These volcanic aerosols distributed up there, encircling the earth, reflecting light and heat from the sun to such an extent that in 1816 crops failed across entire continents, waterways used for trade remained frozen after winter and ‘unseasonal’ storms caused widespread flooding and havoc. These impacts resulted in epic famines, social upheaval, refugee diasporas and general disquiet.

Artist such as Kaspar David Friedrich in continental Europe and JMW Turner in the British Isles recorded the resulting, persistent phantasmagoric atmospheric effects of deep red skies and darkened days in their paintings, with great visual acuity.

But no-one then made a connection between the southern hemisphere eruption and its global consequences. This correlation didn’t happen until the early 20th century after the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa and other major volcanic events that effected global climate.

Famously, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and 19 years old Mary Shelley nee Godwin/Wollstonecraft decamped from England to Switzerland, where very cold, wet conditions persisted from winter into the European summer. Mary penned the story that would become Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus and Byron penned Darkness, an 82 line apocalyptic vision of the end of days in the cosmological extinguishment of all light.

Byron wrote Darkness when artificial lighting was produced directly by combustion of oils, wood, waxes or other fuels. In his poem humans burn everything in the world to produce light, to be able to see each other ‘once more’. The ubiquitous electric light we take for granted was yet to be invented. In 1780 husband and wife Luigi and Lucia Galvani discovered that static electricity could excite the nerves of dead frogs, Alessandro Volta invented the electric battery in 1799, and English inventor Francis Ronalds demonstrated the first electric telegraph for message transmission in 1816 - the Year Without A Summer. Our current deep reliance on electricity and its generation by combustion of fossil fuels and more recently nuclear fission, was well and truly seeded.

So I got to thinking about humanity and The Industrial as a kind of slow distributed volcano - another force of nature spewing millions of tons of gases and particulates into the atmosphere that sustains us, regardless of potential consequences. Today, many point to the narrative of 1816 as an object lesson in appreciating the great ecological systems of our planet and how the earths climate can be impacted by disturbing the fine balance of billions of years of entropic settling.

This episode arises from a re-reading of Byron’s poem Darkness, and looking at other poets’ interpretations of the dark, leap-frogging forward to poet Robert Lax in 1984 by way of Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Yosano Akiko, Sylvia Plath and Gary Snyder.

Welcome to episode 64 of the sonic sketchbooks podcast - this is your guest host, a synthesised text-to-voice software voice found on the internet.

This composition - grumbling flowers - is an offering for studio listening, built from sounds derived from a few aluminium beer tins emptied of their contents and deconstructed into component parts, teasing sounds forth at each stage of their breakdown.

Additional sounds were captured from some containers found in the kitchen larder and a few files from the hard drive library.

As ever in the sonic sketchbooks world, original sound recordings have been distorted, manipulated, mangled, enhanced, slowed and carefully layered to create an atmospheric abstract soundscape.

By ‘studio listening’ the sense is that you, the listener, might be at work in your studio or creative space, making something, whatever that might be, and these sounds, this podcast, drifts around between foreground and background, feeding your imagination with its unusual sonic nutrients.

I hope you find the wander of interest.

strangeness is

an excited state

of matter

strange particles

carry

the quantum number

of strangeness

different

to zero

the quantum number

can be hidden

in a strange/

anti-strange pair

for example

the mu meson

strange quarks

are found

in subatomic particles

called hadrons

hadrons

containing strange quarks

include

strange D mesons

sigma baryons

kaons

and other

strange

particles

the decay

of the positive kaon

violates

the conservation

of strangeness

strangeness is

an exciting state

of mind

In a vague tangential way, this composition began in consideration of the beautiful aural strategies of the great French experimental composer Eliane Radigue.

We begin in everyday life on temple grounds in Kyoto, 2014 -

distinctive sounds of Japanese birds and people chatting.

from somewhere

that is nowhere

drifting low liquid tones and

thin high threads

like notes of a glass harmonica

tease for attention

a passenger jet doppler shifts

crossing the sky

electromagnetic frequencies gathered

with a special microphone

that hears and transfers silent emanations…

here, from an art school printing machine

pulses of prepared piano

drop a name

full of ideas

into mind

insect-like voices of electronic synthesis

call from the digital undertow

broken bass rumbles fold in

a drooping rhythm

a distant machine turns

art students consider

their morning creations

while

algorithms wrestle recordings

slow-stretch, speed-press

stochastic stutter stitches time

built from a simple recording

of a simple kinetic sculpture

spinning

stochastic stutter stitches time

built from a simple recording

of drawing circles

one after another after another after another

in conclusion

settling

on the there and then

of a suburban banal

a day like many others

buildings being built

or being torn down

vehicles

urban birds

wind in the trees…

over time

out of time

falling into time

Vespertine wandering

out with my recorder in a nearby park,

autumn turning to winter

people riding bicycles

playing basketball and tennis

jogging

walking dogs

walking home

going out…

in with my recorder and contact mics

the apartment studio

capturing sounds

dropping fragments of cutup aluminium cans

tapping shards of a favourite big red ceramic bowl,

accidentally smashed

activating spring-steel street-sweeper bristles found lying on the street

building ad-hoc sound machines with a turntable, post-consumer containers, balls and objects

teasing electronic sounds from handheld bastl kastle, pocket operator and artiphon synthesisers

outside

little corella parrots calling

bells ringing at a nearby greek orthodox church

all immaterial materials gathered to digitally build

a new sonic experience

not music, not documentary, not film score

a kind of poetry, drawings with sound and time, evocations

this artists everyday work

Eugene Carchesio is an artist - self-taught, self-generating, self-contained, forever producing and presenting. We’ve been friends, collaborators, colleagues, fellow travellers for roundabout four decades.

Eugene lives in Brisbane, Queensland - always has - and has forged a humbly extraordinary path across, through, around, outside of and beyond contemporary art. He’s fearlessly lost, an enigmatic poet, a serious practitioner, a self-deprecating and droll-funny man with a penchant for mid-20th century jazz, geometry, watercolour and silence.

In late 2021 - December 27 - I met up with Eugene at his studio in an abandoned paint factory in the southern suburbs of Brisbane, to record a conversation about his relationships with sound. In the 80s he formed and played in various underground and art bands, made and published his solo works on cassette and vinyl, performed improvisationally, collaborated with non-musician artists on curious projects and was always making from nothing with found materials, paintings, small objects and drawings - which he still does. Today, you can find a dozen or more of his releases on bandcamp under the Room 40 label.

Eugene has been producing art music, sound works, and generally exploring the sonic possibilities of conventional instruments, outdated computer programs and everyday things for decades. His discography is long and with many surprising connections.

This, the 60th episode of sonic sketchbooks combines and collides fragments from that summer conversation with a very few selections from Eugene’s catalogue and concludes with a collaborative piece derived from a brief improvisation we enjoyed that afternoon using his paintbrushes to sonify a drumkit piled up in a heap in the corner of his studio. He spontaneously titled them Drum Drawings.