Beck Stewart

Sound Project Sounds are just actors

"The thing we call 'music', is someone talking about their feelings. However when I hear sounds, no one is talking. I have a feeling, the sounds are acting" John Cage

Sound is non tangible, its immersive and its the communication between time and space. It can be used to create discordance, as film maker Murch once described. Whereby the image and the sound are juxtaposed to one another. For this project we have been asked to collect a libaray of 100 original sound effects, and to create an original compesisiton of experimental sounds. The sounds can be altered in pitch

"I don't think....." then you shouldn't talk, said the Hatter- Lewis Carrol, Alice in Wonderland.

So where was I going to find these sounds? I had to go back to the sound of Silence.

John Cage describes what sounds are & what his favourite sound is... SILENCE. In this short video he describes how to listen to sound, and that when he describes sound, it isnt music but the noise. People often look at sounds as redundant "noise" that could not be useful to anyone. It is often taken for granted and therefore people no longer listen, to their environments.

John Cage- About Silence Video.

John Cage- The Sound of Silence

To me there is a clear difference between sounds and noise. Noise is something, that is; a mix of sounds, that have become so distorted that they make no pleasurable experience for the audience. Such as feedback from a microphone to close to speaker.

Where as sounds can be recorded and manipulated multiple ways to create something new. That could be an experience, submersive and pleasurable. If manipulated in the right way.

Musique Concrete.- this is the experimentation of taking everyday objects, creating sounds from them and the further distorting, to create discordance.

It was in the late 1920's, that André Cœuroy wrote in his book Panorama of Contemporary Music- "Perhaps the time is not far off when a composer will be able to represent through recording, music specifically composed for the gramophone"

'musique concrète,

Musique Concrete is a form of electroacoustic and can also be described as a sound without an original cause. E.g- Glass smashing. It includes sounds that are created through the use of voice, musical instruments and synthesisers.

""When I proposed the term 'musique concrète,' I intended … to point out an opposition with the way musical work usually goes. Instead of notating musical ideas on paper with the symbols of solfege and entrusting their realization to well-known instruments, the question was to collect concrete sounds, wherever they came from, and to abstract the musical values they were potentially containing" P.Schaeffer

The Theremin Advertisement

The Theremin produces an ethereal and pure sound thorough the use electronic magnets. The Russian physicist Lev Sergeyevich Termen, also known in the west as Leon Theremin.

The theremin is one instrument that is played without any physical contact. There are two antennas, one that controls pitch and another that controls volume. There are two oscillators that determine the frequency. One is operating on a fixed frequency and the other is controlled by the distance of the performers to the antenna that controls the frequency.

Leon had interesting links with KGB. Was Therimin more of a scientist than a spy, or more of spy than a scientist? He produced listening devices during his time with Sharashka Camp during the Cold War, which was given to the US Ambassador, which hung in his office between 1945-1952.

The Original Theremin-Leon Theremin Video

Acoustmatic in the Arts

The theatre production of "Stomp" in the 90's, saw a new wave of theatre performance. It combined rhythm and aucoustimatic sounds, into a performance piece, that utilized the idea of space.. Supporting what John Cage suggests about time, space and sound. Stomp brought together not only the performance of dance, but composition of sound, out of regular items. Even though this project is not looking at creating a musical score, it is important to acknowledge the different uses of sound, within the arts and creative industries.

"Stomp" was one of those magical stage performances, that mesmerised its audience in not only in the use of space but mostly sound. It was submersive in its acoustic sound narrative.

Stomp- Sound, Rhythm & performance

Acoustmatic in Cinema

The Forbidden Planet- Louis & Bebe Barron

In 1956 Louis & Bebe Barron created an electronic tonetalities score. Louis based his own sound methods on mathematician & electrical engineer Norbert Wiener. The Book "Cybenetics", which led to many of the sounds being created on a circuit called the "ring modulator".

The Forbidden Planet Sound Track Clip

100 Sounds Experiential Composition.

The task has been to create a library of 100 sounds, and to create an experiential composition from these sounds. This I feel is going to be the most challenging out of all the projects, due to this really going out of the norm of how I may have considered sound in past. Like John Cage states in the clip, when he discusses sounds not as a musical sounds but just sounds of our world, people just disregard them... The question is what can we do with them.

Created By

Beck Stewart

Appreciate

Credits:

Created with images by Unsplash - "speaker sound music" • Paul Loubet - "Silence action" • Graf Spee - "NOISE®" • tjmwatson - "Sound Waves: Loud Volume" • Attila Hajdu - "Sound Laboratory 1" • Taras Kalapun - "beginning of a Music" • mathias shoots analogue - "detektivbyrån" • dereckesanches - "STOMP - CREDICARD HALL"