Over the past 6 months, we’ve been working in collaboration with Head4Arts on our latest software project, Elemental. The project focuses upon a UNESCO site in South Wales, which contains some of the key sites of Wales’ industrial mining and ironworking.

Its pretty involved, but centres on the creation of a industrial gamelan orchestra, constructed from salvaged metal taken from the area surrounding the mines. We’re working with them to integrate digital elements into the process, developing multi-touch music software to allow participants to remix and perform found sounds in real-time.

As part of the preparation, we’ve been working with schoolchildren in the area to collect soundscapes and recordings we can use throughout the rest of the project. Best of all, we visited to Big Pit mine with 10 or students, descending into the darkness to record the sounds of underground tunnels, dripping water, rattling chains. Here’s one of the results – a four minute composition created from recordings of the Pit and the industrial gamelan:

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As those of you familiar with our Folk Songs Project and Echo Archive work will know, this project is part of our ongoing enquiry into new tools for electronic music. Since its been a while since those projects, its probably worth a quick update on our current thinking.

For us, music remains the most powerful of human experiences, and one that derives much of its power from the social and physical elements of the experience. I’ve been spending some time with evolutionary musicology recently, and its been an enlightening experience. I’m particularly interested in an essay by Bruce Reichman, who argues that “in the beginning”, speech and music making were one and the same – rhythmic systems of repetition used to established a sense of collective identity (“On rhythm, repetition & meaning”, found in MIT’s excellent Origins of Music). And it seems to me that if you want to think our way out of the copyright- and ego-addled deadend of the capitalmusicworldscene, this seems a good place to start.

At its heart, first forms of music seem to be about two things. Firstly, low barriers to entry – anyone can shout. And secondly, contexts that situate noise-making within social, communicative structures. A quick glance is enough to see that traditional music technology stymies both of these processes. Dominant software / hardware paradigms continue to be built on mouse clicks and analytical timelines, operated by geeked-out specialists spending long weeks in small rooms, automating envelopes, fine-tuning autofilters and generally missing out on human contact, sunshine and dinner.

Music Education seems a particular victim. Music technology remains relatively under-used in most schools, and where used, it is primarily seen as a shiny way to communicate traditional notation. In doing so, we’re bypassing the potential for electronic music tools to reinvigorate music education, to dust off the left-brain solitude of western music and map out new forms of social exploration and play.

So that’s what we’re about. Creating a piece of software that makes experimental music tech a natural part of a teacher’s toolbox. Something that encourages students to reconsider found sound, whilst establishing a platform for intuitive music making, a digital analogue to Cornelius Cardew’s scratch orchestras, opening up the doors to a range of soundworlds and performance possibilities for people of all ages and interests. Right now we’re figuring out what this looks like in practice, and hope to post some sketches and prototypes soon.

This weekend, we’re exhibiting at Net Audio Festival, alongside performances by Nurse with Wound, Mika Vainio and more. Our work is part of the Sonic Maze, an “immersive series of sound art installations set in the Roundhouse Studios.”

This will be the debut of our Open Cities / Vox installation, which is part of our ongoing Open Cities series exploring new relationships between site and performance. We began this with series of live concerts, but are now moving into a range of platform & process-bases works, of which this is the first example.

With Open Cities / Vox, a microphone is left in the middle of an empty room, and the installation is created entirely from the sounds of visitors, resampling their voices, shouts and (maybe) screams into polyphonic vox-boxing.

As much as anything, we’re interested in getting away from the burgeoning world of GallerySoundArt PLC and hope to offer visitors a chance not just to be quiet observers of yetanotherdronewithsoundsofrunningwater, but encourage a more playful and performative relationship to sound.

Sonic Maze runs this at the Roundhouse this Saturday 14th and Sunday 15th May from 12-6. The rest of the Festival look great too, and its worth giving special mention to the procedural music lectures – great to see a festival highlighting what seems to us to be one of the key (and under-represented) developments in contemporary music.

This week, the always-active Soundfjord started a new exhibition, based on the old “exquisite corpse” game where someone creates a work as part of a chain, based upon only seeing on the last section / fragment of it (commonly used by children to create grotesque figures where one draws the head, one the body  etc).

The idea was replicate this process via sound compositions. The works were also grouped into themes, ours being “sight”. On hearing the previous piece, we decided to take a decisively literal approach to this theme. Our process was follows:

1. A volunteer is placed alone in a room in darkness
2. They are played the previous composition in the Exquisite Corpse chain
3. They are asked to describe what they see and their description is recorded
4. They are also asked to draw what they see on paper
5. These drawings are then converted to audio via spectral analysis
6. The voices and spectral fragments are used to generate the piece

Although the volume levels of voices are altered during the piece, their relative positions in time are not – so each moment of the track documents the seven participants’ simultaneous response to that moment of the previous composition. It was a quick process, but the results are kinda fun:

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Turned out to be quite an interesting adventure, and a process we’re thinking of using more broadly in some future work. And great to see / hear how others responded to the call (and indeed to our submission). The exhibition runs until 30th April, so if you happen to be in the area ….

I seem to be hearing a lot more about “action research” over the past year or so, and thats definitely a good thing – its exactly the kind of collaborative, praxis-oriented work that we try to pursue at Incidental. So we were pretty happy to be invited into Sound & Music’s Ways of Hearing Programme, designed to generate “a wider understanding of the act of listening within urban environments”.  Great stuff, and pleasingly diverse – with acoustic ecologists, Arnolfini Gallery, The Architecture Centre, Blueprint Magazine, Arup Associates and several others involved.

During the session, i found myself reflecting on the growing attention paid to sound at the moment. On one level, its nice to see this oft-ignored area getting some more attention and support. And to see smart  programmes like Ways of Hearing. But all this zoundart … i can’t escape the feeling that much of it is just a detour and distraction. And more importantly, that the gallery / press hype surrounding it is both disingenuous and destructive.

Because as with participatory arts, the co-opting of SoundArt into galleries takes the external form but loses much of the underlying power of the medium. For me, one of the most interesting things about sound is its sheer physicality  - sound is an embodied experience, a vibrational experience … Sound is something for clifftops and motorway underpasses, bass-driven clubs and rattling souzophones.

But sound be-knighted via rows of speakers in white gallery presentations? Except in the most exceptional of examples, these are experiences shorn of their meaning. People once again asked to be little more than absorption-consumption machines. Water sold back to you in plastic bottles. (its worth saying that there is a longer, more subtle version of this argument, but this isn’t quite the time …)

Even the soundwalk, that classic technique … on one hand it offers everything. Casting familiar surroundings in an arresting new light, promoting a new sensitivity and attentiveness. But just as it does this, it takes it all away. Offering you this new perspective only so long as you withdraw yourself … don’t-talk-just-listen, transform yourself into a passive spectator of your own presence.

So … i was thinking about this, whilst trying to decide what to research for the SAM programme. And so i figured – why not try and tackle some of this head on? Get away from all this galleried, listen-don’t-speak soundworlds? Try to conceive of ways to address sound in the urban environment in ways that are more performative, more transformative. Don’t try to get raise sound up ”to attain level of art” or some such Gombrich, but drag all those things called art back down in the realm of creative immediacy. Play those underpasses, resonate your tableware. Bounce voices against voices and bring yourself back …

So that’s it. And from next week, we’re instituting “The Magical Hearing Society”, a small London-based group to conduct this research.

(n.b. – our definition of magic is connected to the various trails of thought left by people like Jorge Luis Borges, Genesis P. Orridge, Burroughs, Hakim Bey etc … no Merlins here except false ones)

Over the coming months, we’ll be working to argue & research the potential of performative approaches to urban sound – psychedelic psycho-acoustics, twilight vocal rituals, meditaudio wierdness. Not entirely sure what will happen, but if you want to get involved, this one is completely open-to-all, so please get in touch. More soon …

Krom Monster CD reviewed in April’s Wire Magazine.

We’re in the process of updating our site and bringing our blog over from Tumblr. Though with all the crankshafts and electrical piping, its taking a bit longer than we thought.

In the meantime, all older posts are still available on our tumblr page.