Dream of Fields

Not long after completing A Welcome Suburbia, I had the thought to go into my gigabytes of field recordings, pull out files that I particularly liked, and put together a compilation of them.  Since getting my H4N Pro in '17, I have spent a fair amount of time with it (in fact, I keep it in my bag/purse), recording a wide range of aural phenomena from creaking floors to bird calls, A/C units to wind in fences, nighttime choruses to midday cityscapes, hits to pads to soundscapes.  Nearly all of it, especially in my first year or so, was learning/experimenting.  Three years into it, I'm certainly no master, but I'm beginning to have some sense of what I can and can't do, as well as what I want out of the medium artistically.  Revisiting my collection has reified my values as regards how environmental sounds should be used and the result are these two "sister" albums:





I call them sister albums because they came out of the same project, but they developed into different things.  The first, Ambiences, is a collection of my longest, largely natural-world soundscape recordings, collected while traveling in environments I don't normally get to hear.  These are intended to be listened to in a leisurely way, entering into and fading from conscious awareness in the true sense of ambient music and sound.  The second, Brief Fields, is comprised of relatively short soundscapes that are local and infused with fore- or backgrounded human activity.  I selected them because, for various reasons, I liked their content or atmosphere, but they were either too short or too intense to be what I think of as ambient.

Putting them together was, as I said above, validating.  As I was editing, deciding what sounds should be kept and which should be cut, I felt increasingly that I should leave in as much of what the microphones captured as esthetics could allow.  Retaining the odd car driving past or the jet in the distance that pulls the ear away from whatever foreground there was grew to be more and more important -- more honest, more real.  In the end, the only exceptions to this approach were one or two instances where a sudden change in the soundscape was jarring or overpowering (and were thus edited out and crossfaded) and wind.

Wind noise is the bane of many a field recordist's dreams; it is not merely an unpleasant sound but an unnatural one, arising from artifacts in the structure of the microphone being used and thus not something one would experience without the act of recording.  The first approach to minimizing this is through mic placement and use of windscreens, but these solutions are spotty at best in their effectiveness and often limit what you can actually capture.  Nearly all mic/wind interaction noise occurs below about 85Hz or 90Hz, so it is easy enough to filter out in post-production, but some soundscapes have enough going on in the two-plus octave range from there to the low end of human hearing that doing so often feels -- and sounds -- like an amputation.

My solution in these albums was a combination of the above.  As best I could, I made my recordings in wind-sheltered locations and always used a deadcat.  Almost inevitably, however, wind noise leaks through at least a bit in recordings of all but the most becalmed places.  In these cases my first step is to select stretches of audio in which no wind occurred, thus sometimes wind noise -- or its lack -- effectively determined recording length.  If a particular recording had esthetic interest in the same frequency range as some low-level and infrequent wind noise -- say, trucks going by or surf -- I attempted to filter the noise out using a shelving filter, which could cut enough of the artifactual sound to be tolerable but still leave the otherwise interesting low frequencies perceptible.  In other samples, where the wind noise was more prevalent and the bulk of the soundscape's interest was above 80Hz or so, I used a more sharply inclined high-pass filter, excising entirely all sound below the threshold of wind.  I don't typically like this solution, as the missing bottom end can be noticeable, but in some tracks, it was workable.

Another insight that came out of compiling this was that I like long environmental recordings.  I'm especially proud of the two longest tracks on Ambiences, "New England Suburban Midnight" and "New England Rural Sunrise."  (At 1:53:53/600Mb, the former is at the limit of what Bandcamp allows artists to upload.)  These are ambiences that you can put on your stereo and they hold a space and they are long enough that the captured soundscape changes from beginning to end; the day is never static.  I've learned that my H4N Pro is limited to files of 2:14:45 in length at 44100 sample rates and 24-bit resolution; this is a bit above CD quality (which is 16-bit), so I might be able to get a bit more length, but I'm finding myself coveting longer file sizes.  Yes, of course, you can crossfade files together imperceptibly to make effectively limitless lengths, but somehow the esthetic of knowing the sound is uninterrupted carries weight for me.

Barring unexpected developments, this will be my last field recording project for a while:  I intend next to focus my efforts on an album of viola music, some covers, some original, mostly solo/unaccompanied, a few with computer or other instruments.  These two sister albums have been in keeping with my commitment to a Depth Year, taking what I already have and building on and/or completing it, and the viola project is also very much in the same vein:  I've had several works for viola percolating for months or years and it feels like it's time to put bow to string and get it done.

Going Down

Around the European winter holidays, a forum I participate in, lines.co, typically has threads about goals -- what you accomplished this year, what your plans are for next year, usually focused on music, but also incorporating life in general.  This year, one member posted about his plan for a Depth Year and his post resonated with a lot of folks, including me.  The idea is to "go deep rather than wide" or, stated more practically, focus on engaging with what you already have, rather than adding new stuff.  This is based in part on the principle that you don't need new stuff to be happy -- or that relying on new stuff to make you happy can make you unhappy -- which, like many of us in this consumer culture, I get and endorse, but maybe sometimes occasionally have a hard time following.

This year, though, a Depth Year seems not only a fit, but a natural outgrowth of last year.  In 2019, in the wake of my father's death, my mom, my wife, and I decided that we should all live together and buy a house.  This entailed helping my octogenarian mother sell and move out of her house, transport her and her stuff 1800 miles over to our neck of the woods, find and purchase a house all three of us like and which has room for one of our adult children, too, pack up our household, move, and unpack a total of three households into that one house.  This while my wife started grad school full time and I maintained a full-time private practice in psychology.  The previous several years were not dramatically different in terms of novel experiences:  major career changes, family deaths and tragedies, kids in college, etc.  So, yeah, we've had our share of new stuff.

Music-wise, too, a Depth Year feels right.  Since re-acquainting with my musical self back in late '10, I've done a lot of experimenting and exploring which, naturally, means trying new stuff.  I'm pleased with and proud of most of that work, even as I've chosen not to follow many paths I was introduced to.  On the contrary:  that exploration has wrapped me back around to where I am now, focusing on my viola, ambient music, and field recording.  Those areas feel the richest to me, with the greatest potential for satisfaction, and those are domains I intend to go deeper into.

Thus, my Depth Year will be focused, musically, on testing out how far I might be able to go technically and compositionally with my viola, exploring harmony and timbre in ambient music, and expanding field recording into longer forms (more on that in the next post).  I might also spend some time rebuilding my (piano) keyboard skills, which were never particularly great, but would be good to have, and to expand my use of and facility with my Push2, which I've had for more than three years now.  Max/MSP and Ableton Live remain my go-to software; I intend to spend more time exploring the plug-ins that are bundled with Live, especially those built with M4L, and using the knowledge I have from building my own stuff to understand them better rather than reinventing the wheel.

Personally, my mom, my wife, and I have things we want to do with our new home.  We also want to care for and support our kids as they transition to adulthood and to enjoy our time together.  I plan to spend (and have been spending) time with cherished friends, building on established relationships.  I'm also expanding my self-care, going to the gym, working with my medical providers and my psychotherapist, and using my mentor more. 

Already, I see how rich my life is and how much there is to dig into; new stuff is not really necessary.

Making Noise

I'm not really into noise music.  I get it and I've heard some work that I was fairly impressed by, but it's not my cup of tea, if only because it really exacerbates my tinnitus and messes with my otherwise impaired hearing.  So, I was surprised when I found myself really digging the noise that came out of an experiment I did with Audacity's image-to-audio conversion function.

It started with following a link an online friend pointed me to called pixelsynth, in which one can create or import an image and the browser-based synth will convert the brightness values per-pixel into pitches.  Although I thought the app was cool and potentially useful, the synth output clipped badly and I couldn't find how to adjust it and so ended up abandoning it.  But I really liked the concept of image-to-audio, which I had been aware of for some time, and my search for help with pixelsynth led me to an Audacity-based solution.  In the end, I found myself with 16 hours of audio created from one of my favorite images of the Pleiades.  As I said, it felt unexpectedly musical and, after much finagling and negotiations with the sound and with myself, I produced the following piece:



The first few minutes of the piece are unaltered from the original sound file.  Although the sound is never the same -- it maintains this wonderful balance between pattern and variation -- it didn't really have a perceivable sense of direction, an aspect I consider critical to what makes something musical.  To remedy that, I slowly added some basic effects:  panning, delay with feedback, LPF sweeps, and some reverb.  Notably, the reverb-like sound you hear at the beginning is not an added effect, but native to the converted image audio.  There was some light equalizing to balance out the spectrum, but that's it.  I'm pleased with the results -- although not enough to pursue the genre per se!

Deep Listening

The way Pauline Oliveros told the story, she and two of her colleagues and friends took an opportunity, more or less on a whim, to experiment with improvising in an immense underground cistern in northwest Washington state.  When the group listened back to the recording of it, made also essentially on a whim, they realized they had an album.  They settled on "Deep Listening" as a title for it because they liked the pun; their 1985 performance is now legendary.

That was the origin of the name Deep Listening, but the work it has come to be associated with represents the entire oeuvre of Maestra Oliveros.  From her teen years, PO, as she is known among her friends and followers, was committed to "listening to everything all the time" and this imperative led her to a richly holistic approach to life and art, one that was eventually developed into a series of trainings in her approach.  I was privileged this fall to participate in one of those trainings and it had a profound effect on me.  I want to talk here about some of the insights I had, not only by way of sharing but also as an enthusiastic endorsement of the work and invitation to readers to explore it.

Deep Listening as a practice encompasses three broad domains or modalities:  listening, in the sense of both an auditory and attentional function, movement, in the sense of somatic and kinesthetic awareness, and dreaming, as a receptive experience, a lucid engagement, and a domain for practice.  Each of these modalities leads naturally into the next; indeed, in retrospect, the path seems obvious, as such trails do once they are clearly blazed.

PO's approach to listening appears to have a great deal of overlap with meditation; indeed, she often discusses it in such terms.  Distinguishing it as a perceptual process, as opposed to the sensory process of hearing, she breaks it into several subprocesses:  inclusive, exclusive, external-distal, external-proximal, internal-somatic, and internal-intrapsychic (some of these are my terms, as I've heard different labels used for these various concepts).  Inclusive and exclusive map closely to attentional processes in mindful and concentrative meditation, respectively.  External and internal listening are straightforward, essentially the public vs private soundscapes, while the subcomponents of those break down thusly:  proximal external sounds might be the soft sounds of your breath through your nose or the tapping of fingers on a keyboard, while distal external sounds are those from the room you're in, other people, the world outside, etc.; somatic internal sounds might be the creaking of joints or saliva bubbles moving about in one's mouth, while intrapsychic sounds are entirely auralized -- music, self-talk, memory, etc.  In Deep Listening, then, listening is global perception across several dimensions, demanding and producing a level of mindful awareness richer than what had ever occurred to me in a life of exploring mindfulness.

By listening at this level, one's awareness of self as an embodied being naturally expands and intensifies, leading one to the next modality, movement.  Again, the theme of open perception pervades this aspect of the work and the training focuses on embodiment as an experience.  Practices take the above subprocesses of listening and bring them to bear on attending to inner experiences of movement, e.g., through solitary practice of T'ai Chi, yogic, and Taoist exercises, and to experiencing moving with others, e.g., group practices of improvisatory dance, vocalization, or other collective performative activities.  Participants observe their own reactions and others' and practice bringing acceptance to the creative kinesthetic process. 

The imperative to listen to everything all the time led PO to consider one form of consciousness not usually considered when listening:  dreaming.  What are the sounds of dreams?  What are our embodied and other experiences while dreaming?  What if we could practice listening intentionally in our dreams?  Deep Listening explores our dreams from contexts that were new to me, taking a dream at face value, an experience valid in its own right, rather than as a section of consciousness that only has meaning in relationship to waking.  I've spent my entire adult life exploring dreams, their interpretation, their neurological substrate, and practicing active and lucid dreaming, and never before had I thought to just be in my dreams, the way I might just be on a mountain or in my studio.  In Deep Listening, dreams are explored as valid realities, both receptively, i.e., practicing being open to the experience and to creative ideas, and proactively, i.e., lucidly, but lucidity not to produce virtual reality- or videogame-like experiences, but rather to make use of the dream space to practice mindfulness, yoga, or other consciousness-raising activities. 

Two themes run through all of the Deep Listening training, and, indeed, through PO's work:  community and acceptance.  Although almost all of my fellow trainees were professional artists in one domain or another, the practices are designed for lay persons; there is no expectation or requirement of special skill or background.  This is not to say that building skill is not encouraged -- far from it -- but the skills most encouraged are those associated with this kind of global listening and unconditional acceptance.  PO's commitment to community as a core of her work has its roots in the social upheavals she lived through and synergizes with the practice of acceptance to create art activities that are the-thing-in-itself, performances that are experiences that are art. 

Although I had been introduced to PO's work in the early 80s as part of my coursework in music school, she remained mostly in the background of my musical interests until the last several years, when I began to take a more healing, inward-facing orientation to music and music making.  It was two years ago that I discovered the first Deep Listening Band recording described in the first paragraph above and made my first foray into what Deep Listening might mean to me as a musician and composer.  In my initial reading of PO's book "Deep Listening:  A Composer's Sound Practice" I found it hard to get the gist of her, but something called me back to it and each time I read it, I gleaned something more and eventually realized that she was talking about music as a kind of mindfulness -- and this rung my heart like a temple bell.  PO had brought a quasi-Buddhist, present-focused awareness to music in a way that I had felt was possible but had failed to get my hands around on my own.  I had to pursue formal training in Deep Listening. 

Having completed the first round of training at the end of November, I have since been consolidating what I learned and building Deep Listening practices into my life.  I am endeavoring to make time daily to practice formally listening, moving, and dreaming.  Deep Listening clicked immediately into my efforts to take a more meditative approach to viola playing and renewed my interest in singing; too, it folds into my practice as a clinical psychologist in meaningful ways, helping me to be more thoughtful and grounded with patients.  My physical wellness has been a particular focus recently, as I approach my 60s, and bringing lessons from Deep Listening movement has supported several positive behavior changes as well as added to my general sense of groundedness.  The new perspective on dreaming has broadly rekindled my interest in and experience of dreaming, but, more importantly, shown me new possibilities I had not seen or had forgotten:  dreams -- along with hypnogogia and hypnopompia -- are incredibly creative spaces and practicing being open to that has already changed my creative process significantly.  It has also led me to make a critical connection with a concept I rely on clinically, the constructed nature of reality:  given the nature of our perception as entirely limited to physical sensory systems and the epiphenomena arising from their processing, waking and dreaming experiences have more in common with each other than they don't.  By purposefully blurring the boundaries between these realities, it is possible to bring the best of each to the other, awareness and agency to dreams and creativity and numinosity to waking. 

As a fundamentally communally-oriented person, PO did not create or develop her work alone.  Her wife and partner of decades, IONE, and Heloise Gold, both artists in their own rights, collaborated with her on the initial ideas underlaying Deep Listening and continue to teach in the wake of PO's death in late 2016.  Having taught Deep Listening workshops, retreats, certification programs, and even academic courses related to Deep Listening since the late 80s, PO and her collaborators have built an international community of artists and teachers dedicated to exploring, expanding, and sharing its insights and processes.  Participating in the first part of the certification training tapped me into a robust, active, and creative network of fellow travelers; I hope and intend to continue to engage with and learn from them. 

I am deeply grateful to have found this body of work and its community of practitioners.  My own work as a musician and a psychologist have been and will continue to be informed by Maestra Oliveros' insights and I feel great personal resonance with her ideas and goals.  I look forward to my ongoing exploration of the worlds she discovered, attempting to listen to everything, all the time. 

Text Score: Sonic Map

Find a large, resonant space.  It should be more open than not and allow for movement in at least two dimensions.

Recruit a number of musicians, somewhere around six to ten, depending on the size of the space.  Each musician should have a phrase or motif that they repeat; more complex ones should be relatively short and simpler ones can be longer.  Each phrase or motif should make musical sense with all the others, as they are part of a single piece.

Musicians are arranged about the space roughly evenly.  They should be close enough together to hear each other and far enough apart so that each performer experiences the others through the resonance of the space.  Musicians remain in place for the duration of the performance.

An additional person, referred to here as the recorder, is equipped with an audio recording device and stereo microphone(s), ideally binaural.  The recorder should choose footwear and be prepared to walk such that their footsteps are quiet, but not silent, part of the performance, but not foreground.  The recorder starts and ends their walk in the center of the space.

The performance begins when the recorder begins recording and the musicians begin performing.  The recorder then slowly walks through the space, passing close to each musician but not lingering.  They should choose a path that takes them through the entire space while minimizing crossing or retracing their steps.  The guiding intention of the walk is to produce a recording such that an imagined listener to the recording would be able to get a sense of the space, to map it and the locations of the musicians in their mind.  The performance ends when the recorder returns back to their starting position, the musicians stop, and the recording is ended.

Some considerations:  How to take advantage of layout, reflections, verticality, resonance, or other properties of the space so as to give the imagined listener sonic clues to its shape?  How to place musicians so as to optimize the relationship between the space and the quality of each instrument or voice (and what criteria define “optimize”)?  How might the strengths and weaknesses of the recording equipment, especially microphones, be employed by the recorder so as to maximize the imagined listener’s perception of the space?  How might the orientation of the microphone(s) within the space (e.g., standing in one place but rotating) at any given point affect the ability of the imagined listener to perceive the space and how might such effects be employed or accounted for?

Some options:  Keeping and sharing the recording vs destroying it.  Rehearsal vs no rehearsal.  Presence vs absence of a live audience.  Live streaming of the audio vs not.  Original vs established music.  Composed vs improvised music.  Predetermined vs impromptu walking path for the recorder.  Multiple performances vs a one-off.  Recorder monitors recording live (e.g., via headphones) vs no monitoring.

Keeping Score

A text score is a set of instructions for a performance, often of music, but not limited to that; I was first introduced to the idea of a text score when I was in music school.  The examples I recall from my time in college were ideas that could not actually be performed, such as "The performer comes to the edge of the stage and throws a live grenade into the audience."  (I'm uncertain of the composer of that, or even if I'm quoting it correctly, but it might be from Dick Higgins' Danger Music series.)  Text scores don't have to be impossible (or unethical) to perform; the format can be extremely flexible.  They can be pages-long instructions for execution of elaborate performances or brief, simple, single-sentence statements; there's even a Twitter account for them.

Use and composition of text scores has been part of my recent training in Deep Listening* and their role in Pauline Oliveros' work -- both DL and her broader oeuvre -- appears mainly designed to promote an experiential orientation to art, the communal production of art, and civic engagement.  Oliveros' scores also tend to give a fair bit of leeway to the performers in how they might execute them.  I also think that text scores also allow a composer to share an idea -- and, to my mind importantly, take credit for it -- when they may not want or be able to produce it themselves.

Recently, I had an idea for a work that I was excited by, but for which I do not currently have the resources or time to perform and it occurred to me that it would make a good text score, as it had a fair bit of built in uncertainty and would benefit from respecting that.  So, having written it up, I will be sharing it here.  I expect there may be others in the future, thus my introduction/explanation in this post.  In sharing them, it is my intent that others are free to perform them, provided that they credit the authorship appropriately.  I would be grateful for any notification of any performances.


*This is something I've been meaning to share about here; I plan on writing an in depth post on it once the course is complete at the end of this month.

War of the Worlds(?)

My first exposure to what might arguably be H. G. Wells' most famous novel came when I was probably 10 or 11 years old, in comic book form, an adaptation from Classics Illustrated.  I remember devouring it and others from that series, images filling my head and populating my daydreams, reverberating even now, nearly half a century later. 

In particular, I was fascinated by the Martians' heat ray.  As the son of an engineer who worked on military applications for lasers, I talked at length with my father about how closely it resembles modern lasers, invented more than sixty years after Wells' vision.  One dissatisfying aspect, however, of real lasers at the time was that they were visible and the heat ray was not -- red, blue, green, probably other colors, as far as I knew, but colors you can see (given a typical amount of particulate matter in the atmosphere, anyway). 

Several years after my first introduction to WotW, Viking 1 landed on Mars, the vanguard of an invading army of Earthly probes.  While we've sent no tripods (so far), a handful of the probes are mobile, including the most recent, Curiosity, arriving in 2012.  I have, along with all of the Martian landers since the Vikings, followed its wending way with wonder and excitement.  I've long known of a particular feature of its geological laboratories, but it was only today that I made the connection:  Curiosity is equipped with an infrared laser -- that is, an invisible heat ray. 

Wells' Martians arrived on Earth nakedly hostile, an invading army with the goal of extermination or enslavement of all Terran life forms and Areforming their newly possessed planet; humanity's intentions on Mars appear, in our own narrative, more noble (although that may only be enabled by the apparent absence of sentient culture on Mars).  Our probes are hexapedal rather than tripedal and we claim to be seeking knowledge of our own origins, along with some distant and possibly pie-in-the-sky aspirations for full-scale invasion and Terraforming. 

But we sent an actual heat-ray.