Sound From Nothing, and Letting It Come Back: Module 8

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