Sound Arts Intro Course

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Close your eyes, if you safely can, and listen to one short phrase four times: on a piano, on strings, on a slow synth pad, on a mallet. Notice what stays the same and what changes, and pick the one you'd want to hear again. All four came from a single drawing of four notes, handed to four instruments. That drawing is MIDI. This is the audio lecture for the ninth module, where synthesizers get keyboards. MIDI separates the idea of a sound from the sound itself, and the idea is something you can see: rectangles on a grid. That makes this the most visual week of the course so far, so the practice underneath everything is keeping your ears in charge of a tool built for your eyes. The first half builds a voice, the way a synthesizer does: adding sine waves up, or carving a rich sound down with a filter, and choosing presets by ear, with the name read last. Then a sound's life in time, from Pierre Schaeffer's bell with its attack cut off to the envelope, and modulation crossing the twenty-hertz line, with John Chowning's FM and the bells of the DX7. The second half plays that voice with data. MIDI as a communication protocol that carries instructions and no sound at all; the score and the player piano as its ancestors; Wendy Carlos handing Bach to a Moog; and Edgard Varèse's "organized sound," with the sound taken out. Then the grid, quantizing, and one habit worth keeping for good: listen before you look. Then the piano roll as a canvas, from Conlon Nancarrow punching player-piano rolls by hand to Laurie Spiegel's programs at Bell Labs and Caterina Barbieri's sequenced patterns, with Pauline Oliveros's focal attention as the way in. Plus one question about who the composer is when a model writes the notes, with Holly Herndon's work alongside it. It ends with twenty seconds of listening to wherever you are. Required listening: Caterina Barbieri, Fantas (2019), all of it, ideally with nothing on a screen in front of you. Required reading: Jeffrey Hass, "Envelopes and Gates" and "MIDI Overview and History." Speakers or headphones, at a comfortable level. Pairs with the Module 9 pages and videos. Chapters 00:00 Four notes, drawn once 03:25 Building a voice, by ear 06:01 A sound has a life 10:11 Instructions, without the sound 13:32 The grid, and listening before you look 15:26 The piano roll as a canvas 19:31 Who writes the notes 21:00 One more listen

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

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

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

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