Air and silence

 

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will upon unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.

- Frank Zappa

 

The Joy of Loss uses two simple materials: air and silence. 

One is universal and ever-present; the other does not exist.

It took a long time for me to appreciate the point Frank Zappa was making in the quote that begins this blog entry. My music composition education, whilst comprehensive and detailed and thorough, concentrated almost exclusively on the handling of materials defined by parametric development (pitch, rhythm, harmony, texture, timbre and so on). That is fine enough but I became increasingly dissatisfied and frustrated by the approach, likening it to seeking the secrets of a splendid butterfly by killing it and dissecting it to examine its constituent parts.

This frustration was mainly because I was writing music that was technically proficient and rigorous in its developmental narratives, but – to be honest – I just didn’t like the sound of it…admittedly that probably says more about my own limitations rather than that of the techniques I was employing, but I became determined to find the methodology that satisfied my ear (by transcending it) and my intellect (through conceptualising it).

It was at that point I became fixated on gesture: an aurally identifiable building block that is described and identified in its totality and through its behaviours (personality).  I also became keenly aware that sound was not about the instruments making it or the machines generating it, but the air carrying it.  Not exactly a great revelation to everyone around me, but something that provided something of the missing piece of the musical puzzle for me. It was the spark that led to many sonic investigations and a move into complementary visualisation.

In thinking about air rather than sound, I started to investigate music and sound outside of the audible range. That isn’t to say it is imperceptible, but that it is experienced differently.  Not via the aural sense, but by the sense of touch as the physicality of the wave through air impacts the physiology of the body.  I particularly like the infrasonic range: that range below 20Hz, considered the lowest point of the range of human hearing. I doubly like manipulating beats in this range through the use of contiguous or proximate sine waves to ‘force my will on unsuspecting air molecules’.

In The Joy of Loss, the infrasonic range features in Gesture 1: the fire installation (as a solitary candle flame flickers and moves in sympathy with the movement of the air being pushed by infrasonic beating); Gesture 2: the air and infrasonic installation (constantly shifting infrasonic beats at high pressure through two subwoofers); and Gesture 3: the eight channel surround sound installation. Testing the inaudible physicality of the activated air in The Block is something I am looking forward to in the tech week.

Additionally, air is also audibly present throughout the space through recorded and sampled breathing (in Gesture 2 and 3), and in the instrumentation used in the live music performance (Gesture 6). My fellow musician Grant Johansen will be using wind/brass instruments, with something of an instruction to use ‘coloured air’ in the performance…

Recently, I spent some time in the anechoic chamber at the University of Salford, thanks to my friend and colleague Professor Paul Haywood. The university has a number of anechoic chambers. I spent time in one that is unofficially the quietest in the world with a measurement of −12.4 dBA. It was amazing and revelatory.  A reflectionless, simulated quiet open-space of infinite dimension…

The visit was an acute reminder of the visit to the anechoic chamber at Harvard University by John Cage in 1951 – the place that led Cage to the realisation of the impossibility of silence.  As Cage describes it:

I heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation.

The realm of impossible silence is reflected in The Joy of Loss in a few ways. The aforementioned infrasonic register composition in several of the gestures references sound outside of the nominal audible range…aurally silent yet physically present.

Gesture 7 uses ‘silent interviews’, where individuals are interviewed but then have their words stripped away, leaving only the emotional imprint of the interview on the face.

There may be no sound emanating from the interview, but the message is loud and precise. No sound, but intently communicative…