Sound Arts Intro Course

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Every sound you have worked with so far came from somewhere: a place, a person, a microphone. This episode opens on a single quiet tone that came from nowhere. Nothing in the world vibrated to make it until it reached your speakers.

This is the audio lecture for the eighth module, where you make sound from nothing with an oscillator, send it through a delay that gives it back a little later, and then play both, live.

The first half is the oscillator: an instrument with one control for pitch, one for loudness and one for color, and a history of test equipment borrowed for music, from the theremin to Delia Derbyshire's Doctor Who theme. Then what happens when sine waves meet: cancellation, beating, and the ratios that sit inside every pitched sound as the harmonic series, with the four basic waveforms heard side by side.

The second half is delay: a canyon, a tape machine with two heads, and the two jobs a delay does, technical and creative, including the precedence effect your brain uses to find sounds in a room. Then feedback, the point where a delay becomes a system you set running and listen to. Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room, heard a third way, as a feedback loop with a room inside it; a frequency shifter that pulls the harmonic series out of line; Éliane Radigue's early feedback works; and my own Sonic Spaces Project.

It ends with Pauline Oliveros, who made I of IV in 1966 in one real-time take, with oscillators set mostly above the range of hearing and two tape machines threaded together, and with what it means to perform a system: start with less, change one thing, listen, and decide how it ends. Plus one question about text-to-audio tools, and what happens to the listening when a prompt skips the waiting.

Required listening: Pauline Oliveros, I of IV (1966), at least the first ten minutes. Required reading: Jeffrey Hass, "Waveforms."

Speakers or headphones, at a comfortable level.

Pairs with the Module 8 pages, the step-by-step screencast and the performance demo.

Chapters

00:00 A sound from nothing

02:00 An instrument with three controls

04:08 When sine waves meet

09:25 The sound, again, later

12:58 Letting it come back

17:28 Playing a system, live

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Four tones play together, and you hear a low pitch underneath them. Then a fifth tone is added at exactly that pitch, and for most listeners the pitch doesn't move at all; the sound just gets a little fuller. In the first version, nothing in the air was sounding at that frequency. Your brain supplied it.

This is the audio lecture for the seventh module, where the course stops to ask what sound actually is, and what your ears and brain do with it. There is what's in the air, and there is what you hear, and almost everything interesting in sound art lives in the gap between the two.

The physics comes first: sound as a push handed through a medium, and why a crowd's roar can arrive low first, as if a filter were opening. Then the ear's ruler, the decibel, with Simon Carlile on a range of hearing that spans about one to a trillion, and Jeffrey Hass on loudness as "the way in which we perceive amplitude," the equal-loudness curves, and why quiet mixes lose their bass. Then masking, the everyday condition of listening, and timbre, the part of sound we can only describe with words borrowed from light, temperature and touch.

Then the ear as an instrument in its own right: the faint sounds a healthy ear makes, Maryanne Amacher's "third ear" music, Jacob Kirkegaard's recordings of his own ears, Diana Deutsch's speech-to-song illusion, and the McGurk effect. It closes on what the physics is for, from noise as a question of health and of whose neighborhoods are loud, to Lawrence Abu Hamdan's forensic listening, and on the choices you have already made by ear: every normalize, fade, filter and pan.

Required listening and reading: Maryanne Amacher, "Head Rhythm 1" and "Plaything 2," from Sound Characters (Making the Third Ear), through speakers at a comfortable level; Diana Deutsch, Speech-to-Song Illusion demos; Jeffrey Hass, "What is Loudness?"; Simon Carlile, "Psychoacoustics," sections 3.3 and 3.4.

Speakers or headphones, at a comfortable level.

Pairs with the Module 7 pages.

Chapters

00:00 A pitch nothing is playing

02:22 Something has to move

05:15 A ruler for your ears

08:57 Sounds that hide, and the color of a sound

12:55 The ear plays, too

17:06 What the physics is for

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The same two sounds as the last two episodes, a bird and a jackhammer, playing at the same moment, at the same levels. No fader moves. One change inside the jackhammer, and it slips behind a wall while the bird steps out in front of it.

This is the audio lecture for the sixth module, on EQ: the first tool in the course that reaches inside a single sound and changes what it is made of. Almost every sound you hear is many sounds at once, a stack of frequencies from low to high, and an equalizer lets you turn parts of that stack up and parts of it down. The world does this to sound all the time, through walls, glass, distance and canyons. This week you get to do it on purpose.

Along the way: plug-ins as descendants of the tape studio's hardware boxes, and why their order matters; the three controls of an EQ band, taught as a hand reaching into the sound; a narrow boost swept through the jackhammer until it rings like a room, by way of Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room and Music on a Long Thin Wire; and EQ's two jobs, clarity and transformation, from cutting before you boost to the telephone voice and the filtering in Hildegard Westerkamp's Kits Beach Soundwalk.

Then three artists who use the same kind of tool with very different temperaments: Ryoji Ikeda at the edges of hearing, Éliane Radigue's patient drones, and Marja Ahti's barely-there shaping of field recordings. It closes on the question underneath every EQ move, what gets taken away and who decides, from noise-cancelling headphones to the processed voice to Tanya Tagaq, who carries Inuit throat singing into amplified, electronic and orchestral spaces around the world.

Required listening: Éliane Radigue, "Kyema," from Trilogie de la Mort (the first five minutes), and Ryoji Ikeda, dataplex (the opening track, "data.index," at a moderate level).

Headphones recommended.

Pairs with the Module 6 pages and the EQ screencast.

Sound credits

"Nightingale song 2" by inchadney, licensed CC BY 4.0. Excerpted and mixed for this episode. https://freesound.org/people/inchadney/sounds/54374/

"jackhammer.wav" by overmedium, released under CC0 (public domain). Excerpted, mixed, low-pass filtered and swept with a narrow EQ boost for this episode. https://freesound.org/people/overmedium/sounds/652837/

Chapters

00:00 A wall that isn't there

03:39 Many sounds at once

06:44 Reaching in, by hand

10:32 Two jobs, one tool

13:19 Same tool, three temperaments

15:16 Who decides what gets taken away

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A bird and a jackhammer, playing at the same moment. Then the same two sounds again, with nothing changed but two faders. Not one sample of either recording moved, and the whole scene turned around. That is mixing: you are not changing the sounds, you are changing their relationship, and that relationship is the mix.

This is the audio lecture for the fifth module, where a soundwalk recorded and edited over the past two modules becomes a finished piece. The episode's argument is that a mix decides where the listener stands: what is close, what is far, what they turn toward, and what they only half notice.

Level is taught through Pauline Oliveros's focal and global attention, as one person's act of listening handed to someone else. Panning is demonstrated, a slow drift against a nervous flicker, and then turned into the question every soundwalk mix has to answer: do you put a sound where it was, or where you want it? Automation comes in as a performance you can edit, from the days when a mix took several pairs of hands on a console, to Daphne Oram drawing sound onto film.

Then one question for the artists: where is the mixer? In the room, for Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room. In the artist's own narrating voice, for Hildegard Westerkamp's Kits Beach Soundwalk. In the listener's own ears, for Maryanne Amacher and Jacob Kirkegaard. And still in the studio that grew out of Pierre Schaeffer's work, with Kassel Jaeger. It ends on who gets to hold the fader, from Janet Cardiff's The Forty Part Motet to spatial audio in your earbuds to software that will happily balance a mix for you, and why a point of view is a little unbalanced on purpose.

Headphones recommended.

Pairs with the Module 5 pages and the mixing and automation screencasts.

Sound credits

"Nightingale song 2" by inchadney, licensed CC BY 4.0. Excerpted, mixed, panned and automated for this episode. https://freesound.org/people/inchadney/sounds/54374/

"jackhammer.wav" by overmedium, released under CC0 (public domain). Excerpted and mixed for this episode. https://freesound.org/people/overmedium/sounds/652837/

Chapters

00:00 Two sounds, two faders

02:58 Level, and the mixer you already own

06:13 Space, and where things actually were

09:25 Automation: a performance you can edit

13:55 Where is the mixer?

18:16 Who holds the fader

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Two sounds, played in one order, then the same two sounds in the other order. Nothing changed except the sequence, and the meaning moved completely. That is editing, and this episode will not tell you what those two sounds meant, because that part belongs to you.

This is the audio lecture for the fourth module. It starts with the confusion that trips everyone: the word "editing" doing two different jobs. Technical editing cleans up a plan that already exists. Creative editing is the plan. The tools are identical, and the only difference is intent.

From there, what creative editing actually feels like, which is improvisation with a pause button: make a move, listen, keep or discard, until the piece tells you what it is. Then the six words worth having, grouped as the four that shape a whole piece (form, tension and release, pacing, texture) and the two that live at a single seam (transition, juxtaposition), each with the mistake that usually comes with it. Why a release works backwards and borrows all its weight from the tension before it. Why subtraction is almost always the stronger move. Why a crossfade is an argument rather than a politeness.

Then the lineage, and the thread running through it: Pierre Schaeffer cutting a sound loose from the thing that made it, Brion Gysin and William Burroughs shattering a work and letting chance reassemble it, and Rasheedah Phillips of Black Quantum Futurism cutting time itself. Three generations who found that taking something apart is how you get past your own intentions.

It ends on what the deciding is worth in a moment when software will happily edit for you, on what it means to become capable with tools that can make somebody appear to say what they never said, and on the fact that you will never fully know what your choices do to the person listening. You make them anyway.

This week there is nothing due for a grade. Spend the week moving things around and finding out what you think.

Pairs with the Module 4 pages and the editing screencast.

Sound credits

"Nightingale song 2" by inchadney, licensed CC BY 4.0. Trimmed for this episode.

https://freesound.org/people/inchadney/sounds/54374/

"jackhammer.wav" by overmedium, released under CC0 (public domain). Trimmed for this episode.

https://freesound.org/people/overmedium/sounds/652837/

CC BY 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

CC0 1.0: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

There is a recording going around of a well-known voice saying something outrageous, and it never happened. Not one word of it. A machine made it. So how would you know? What in the sound itself would tell you whether it was real?

This is the audio lecture for the third module, the week we finally name the thing this course has been circling: sound art. We start with a definition wide enough to hold a field recording, a soundwalk, or a gallery installation, and with Edgard Varèse's idea that music is simply "organised sound," which quietly puts you at the center of the art form.

Then the history, told honestly, as not one tidy origin but several at once: Luigi Russolo and his hand-cranked noise machines in 1913, Halim El-Dabh transforming a recorded zaar ceremony in 1944 Cairo, four years before Pierre Schaeffer and musique concrète in 1948, whose razor blade is the direct ancestor of every clip you split in a DAW. Along the way: R. Murray Schafer's soundscape, with its keynotes, signals, and soundmarks; the soundwalk, from Hildegard Westerkamp to Christina Kubisch's Electrical Walks; and the practice I honestly cannot stop doing, field recording, through Francisco López, Annea Lockwood, Bernie Krause, and KMRU, who built an international career starting exactly where you start this week: one person with a recorder, listening to their own place.

It ends where it began, with that fake voice, and why telling a true record of the real world from a convincing synthetic one is not a small skill.

Your work this week is simple: go outside, record your actual place, and keep a piece of it. What does where you live sound like?

Pairs with the Module 3 pages and screencasts.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

There is a recording of a marsquake sitting on NASA's website, free, waiting for somebody to do something with it. That is where you are this week: standing in front of more sound than you could use in ten lifetimes, about to reach in and make something.

This is the audio lecture for the second module. We start with the tool itself, the DAW: what it actually does, and where it came from. Reel-to-reel tape, razor blades, and a handful of artists in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s who looked at a machine built to reproduce sound and decided to abuse it instead. That lineage runs in a straight line from Halim El-Dabh in 1944 Cairo, through Pierre Schaeffer and the idea of musique concrète, all the way to the sound you will drag across your screen this week.

Along the way: where to find sounds you are actually allowed to use, one beautiful little idea about how continuous sound becomes numbers a computer can hold, and the assignment itself, Sonic Sketch 1, your first piece of sound art.

The heart of it is a single move. Two sounds land against each other and do something neither one was doing alone. That is the whole art form, and everything else this semester is a variation on it. This week the making matters more than the made thing, so make something honest instead of something safe.

Required listening: Halim El-Dabh, Wire Recorder Piece (1944), and Pierre Schaeffer, Étude aux chemins de fer (1948).

Pairs with the Module 2 pages, screencasts, and the Pro Tools install guide in the course.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Episode 1 — Welcome, and Why Listening

Welcome to Sound Arts Intro Course. This first episode is the doorway into everything else.

We start where I like to start most things, with a sound I love, and then we get to the question underneath the whole course: what does it actually mean to listen?

You'll hear the difference between hearing and listening. Hearing is what your ears do all day whether you want them to or not. You can't blink an ear. Listening is the work your mind does to make meaning out of all that sound, and it's something you can practice and get better at for the rest of your life.

Along the way:

• Why almost any sound in the world can be enjoyed, once you decide to enjoy it. The fluorescent buzz, the refrigerator hum, the traffic, all of it.
• Three different ways of listening, from the writer and film theorist Michel Chion.
• Pauline Oliveros, and the practice she called Deep Listening.
• Why we've become a mostly visual culture, and what we lose when we forget we're also listening creatures.
• How sound is more intimate than sight, and reaches parts of us that images never quite touch.
• A small taste of silence, and the story of John Cage walking into a room built to be perfectly quiet and hearing two sounds anyway.

Try this after you listen: somewhere this week, take ten honest minutes with one question. What does it mean, to listen? Don't look anything up. Just think, and listen, and write down whatever you find. Keep it somewhere safe. We come back to it at the very end.

Names to explore on your own: Michel Chion, Pauline Oliveros, John Cage.

You are already a listener. You have been your whole life. This is just the invitation to start doing it on purpose. Come listen.