1 Jun 2011

Room Tone

(download)

As I understand it, when you are collaborating on producing sound for moving images, it is important to record what is called ‘presence’ or ‘room tone’. Once the actors have delivered their lines, the set is cleared of its human inhabitants and the microphone is set to work recording the ‘silent’ atmosphere of the studio or the external location. The room tone recording can then be used in the soundtrack as a plausible underlay for any dialogue that needs to be re-recorded in the soft padded confines of a sound-proofed booth. Without this underlay, the voices – and more specifically, the gaps between them – would take on a strange interiority, as if they were heard inside the head rather than spoken in any real world environment with all its acoustic foibles.

I visited the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery on a day it was closed to the public armed with various microphones. I wanted to record the room tone in the galleries I had identified as potential places to direct the headphone listener of “Noli Me Tangere”. I had in mind the idea that if I relayed the recorded sound of the empty rooms back to the listener who was walking through them, I could give them the reassurance of a certain presence. This would allow me the freedom to leave gaps between sounds without these being perceived as awkward and to play with juxtapositions that contrasted what was heard and what was seen.

As a way of connecting the two spaces – the real, live museum through which the visitor was navigating and the virtual space assembled in software and then delivered through the headphones – I’m thinking about allowing the listener just half a headphone (one speaker for only one of the two ears) or limiting the playback volume or the insulation in the earpiece. Using such strategies might ensure that external events bled through into the composed soundtrack and everything becomes nicely porous. Not removing the listener from the Museum but drawing them closer.

The reality of the room tone recording experiment was very different from my expectations. In one sense, it was a disaster. The Museum refused to offer up its quietness to me. Rather than the anticipated pin-drop tranquillity, no amount of changing microphones or recorders, or scrolling through the various audio settings, could give me what I had been after. Even when all was still, light bulbs buzzed and air conditioning units made their presence felt. But stillness was a rarity, even in a Museum that was ostensibly shut. People moved – quite rightly – from place to place, creaking the floorboards or clicking the tiles with their heels and soles. They talked and whistled, rattled keys and polished, washed and vacuumed. But however far this was from what I had originally wanted, it was the Museum that I was listening to and recording and I think I can do interesting things with what filled up my little storage cards.

In a different sense, the morning spent recording was a great success. For one thing, I was able to spend an extended and undisrupted time close to the exhibits. For another thing, I got to talk at length with two of the curators and learned a great deal from them. Speaking to the curators was particularly inspiring in the sense that this little project took on an undeniable reality: having to explain what I was up to allowed me to understand what I was up to; realising how little time remained before I had to get everything together pushed me to move from thinking to doing. Finding a particular door closed only intensifies the struggle to find and then wrench open another.

3 Jun 2011

Object of Shame

Blurry_mic

In its earliest version – the version I pitched to the Soundwaves Festival and the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery – “Noli Me Tangere” was to focus on specific objects in particular locations amongst the glass cabinets, display cases and plinths. I wanted to choose identified artefacts and work outwards from these. Initial candidates included the shiny surfaces of a Michael Graves designed Alessi whistling kettle; an enamel creamware mug (with the wabi-sabi of a brown crack visible on its lip); an oat and orange Emanuel Ungaro dress and jacket cut from the same Space Age 1960s cloth that Pierre Cardin, André Courrèges and Paco Rabanne enjoyed; and a glass vase that looked like a distended cat’s eye marble.

Finding the right objects would be fun and, once found, they could provide an appropriate frame for the kinds of soundworlds I wanted to evoke. With a defined piece in mind, things would become more manageable. The kinds of sound I was thinking of presenting to the listeners’ ears included: sounds of the craft or industrial processes involved in the production of the object; sounds of the object in use and the places where the object might have been used; the kinds of sounds that could be heard were the object to be struck, scraped, brushed and stroked. I would record material for all these sources and use that material as the raw ingredients from which to cook up a ‘musical’ composition that could be heard while wandering the galleries.

This object-orientated approach would, in part, be a sly reference to the notion of the ‘sound object’, an idea that is talked about a lot within discussions in sound art and music. The ‘objet sonore’ was proposed by Pierre Schaeffer, a composer who used the Studio d’Essai in France’s national radio station as a laboratory of experimental practice. Working initially with phonograph recordings and then magnetic tape, Schaeffer used real-world recordings as the basis for a compositional strategy that had the potential (at least) for taking its listeners far outside the parameters established by the conventional orchestra.

I don’t think I ever really got what Schaeffer was up to. I remember talking to students about “Etudes aux Chemins de Fer” (= “Study on Trains”) as if what Schaeffer was after was the rich allusional resonance of the sound of railways in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.  Shamefully, I’ve not actually read Schaeffer’s original book where he elaborates on the idea of the ‘object sonore’ but as I understand things now, these allusions were precisely what Schaeffer was trying to escape. For him, the sound object is “any sound phenomenon or event perceived as a coherent whole (...) regardless its source or meaning”.

Whatever the exact nuances of Schaeffer’s position – and writing these words has guilted me into going to the library to read up what he actually said – focusing on specific objects in the museum would allow me a sidereal (and slightly satirical)  reference to this concept of the ‘sound object’.

There would also be, in adopting this method, an opportunity to find myself in the dim shadow of another of those giants of sound art who block out the sun: John Cage. Cage, after an encounter with the film-maker who was the lyricist of the non-objective image and a contributor to Disney’s “Fantasia” learned the following:  Oskar Fischinger made a remark to me which dropped me into the world of noise. He said: ‘Everything in the world has a spirit, and this spirit becomes audible by its being set into vibration’. He started me on a path of exploration of the world around me which has never stopped. Of hitting and scratching and scraping and rubbing everything, with anything I can get my hands on”.

But things, as they always do with me, gang awry. Because I didn’t want to use a voice-over and because I wanted those who experienced “Noli Me Tangere” to wander around, it was very difficult to resolve how I could direct people’s attention to particular locations in the Museum. Sure, I could use a photo of the object and stick that on a map but that seemed to concede too much to the visual.

So I have moved from individual objects to collections of objects, from the condensed qualities of the particular to the broader, diffuse characteristics that can be attributed to the group. The listener will now hear the atmospheres that they trigger by selecting the track that a map associates with a particular ‘hot spot’. This solution loses a lot of what had initially inspired me. But it will be simpler to deliver technically; it will allow people to choose their own route through the museum (rather than having to follow a proscribed itinerary); will allow them to move about a particular room or corridor rather than standing stock still and peering; it will also allow them to decide how long they want to listen to each track.

3 Jun 2011

Hotspots

Hotspot

After I had decided to shift scale from objects to atmospheres (see the “Object of Shame” post) and as the clock ticked down ever more insistently to the day to deliver the loaded mp3 players to the Museum and send the relevant files to Soundwaves (for those who want to listen on their own phone or player), I had very quickly to choose the locations for the ‘hotspots’ (the points where the different tracks should be activated). In terms of the personal appeal of objects (and the viability of accounting for their objecthood acoustically), the Fashion and Style gallery would definitely make the cut, so would World Art, two spots in the long and open C20th Art and Design space made a lot of sense and I couldn’t miss out Mr. Willett’s Popular Pottery.

I made some recordings up in the early morning wind at the Iron Age fort that marks the origins of the settlement of Brighton, thinking to use them for a track corresponding to one of the two Local History collections. Something wasn’t quite right about the recordings, even when assembled into a nice little blustery atmosphere, and I decided not to pursue that route. The two Ancient Egypt rooms were also promising but these – like one of the Local History rooms - had their own sounds from interactive and static displays and these existing sounds made them less receptive to the kind of intervention I’m contemplating.

This left five different hotspots.

In truth, part of the process of arbitration about which locations were included and which excluded related to the distribution of the spaces around the gallery. I wanted these to be as evenly spaced as possible even if I was going to leave to the visitor some choice about which order they would complete the hotspots in. I say ‘some’ choice because I’d like to direct the visitor to finish in the Fashion and Style collection on the Second Floor. Part of the reason I want the visitors to end up there is because (even with 14 days to go and no hotspot actually completed) I also have plans for a wildcard track, designed to be played to accompany the listener to “Noli Me Tangere” on their back out to the exit of the Museum.

Angus Carlyle's Space

This is a blog that charts the progress of the "Noli Me Tangere" commission for the Soundwaves Festival 2011 in Brighton. Posts are 'live' in the sense that they will only appear while I am working on this project (and in its immediate aftermath). Posts are 'raw' in the sense that I am using this Posterous blog more as a thinkspace - a scrapbook, a sketchpad - than as anything more polished or resolved. There will be typos and mistakes just as there will be changes of tack and contradictions.

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Angus  Carlyle