After the End, Sound Scene at the Hirschhorn Museum

https://www.goethe.de/ins/us/de/ver.cfm?event_id=24771676

Sound Scene 2023: After The End

For Sound Scene 2023 at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC, I invited Susan Jahoda to join me in installing a series of site-based, tactile, semi-autonomous sound objects outdoors. Big thank you to the Goethe Insitut for funding this work.

Additionally, we offered a workshop, Speaking and Listening with Sound Objects.  The project and workshop centered around these questions. How do we live besides sentient and non-sentient others? What are the implications of being in a non-hierarchical relationship with each other, of living beside? Do technological, human, or natural systems need to be “fully known” (dissected, reduced, assimilated, etc.) for nourishing exchanges to happen?

The project aimed to create an environment where participants could question assumptions about hierarchies and interdependence with nonhuman others, practice deep listening, and engage in horizontal collaboration. Those encountering Speaking and Listening with Sound Objects were invited to a collaborative, improvisational jam session with our anti-instruments.

Bread Symphony: A cross-species collaboration for material and spiritual nourishment

In 2021 I invited collaborators Max Horwich, Ashley Jane Lewis, and Emily Saltz to create Bread Symphony with me as a practice work at SloMoCo (Slow Movement Computing Residency), a community of artists and researchers who convene to share insights, findings, and provocations at the intersection of movement and computing. It was later shown at Berkeley's Refamiliarization exhibit in Berkley's Platform Space, New York City's Electroacoustic Improvisational Summit 2022 (which was later screened at the Images Festival in 2023), Images Film Festival in Toronto, and the International Conference for Movement Computing 2022 in Chicago.

Live jar of bread starter with sensors feeding data into MaxMSP, where it feeds an algorithm, determining sonic output such as pitch, note, and sound sample. CO2, humidity, and proximity sensors are registering the off-gassing and rising of the starter).

Bread Symphony is an ongoing generative sound installation experiment that uses the collaborative efforts of nonhuman organisms to produce sonic compositions. We make audible the symbiosis of living organisms in the literal and figurative fermentation vat and use these explorations to re-frame notions of human centrality, acknowledge nonhuman collaborators, and encourage inner species collaboration.

Bread Symphony is an generative installation: bread fermentation is measured and sonified, made into a symphony that authors itself and plays live. It's part of a four part experiment in which we capture the movement of the bread during its fermentation (off-gassing, rising) and the movement of our hands and bodies during the preparation (kneading, shaping - part II) and consumption phases.

We abstract the movement of our bodies and the activity of nonhuman actors we collaborate with and framed this relation of collectivity by making it audible in one sonic composition. In this way the symphony becomes an artifact of a cross-species collaboration. We are drawn to bread-making as it is a form of engaging other species dialogically. It requires observing and responding to yeast activity. Tending to and “listening” to the yeast is necessary in order for a nourishing (materially , sonically, socially, spiritually) results to happen for all parties. The partial absence of our own agency/authorship replaced by input from nonhuman elements guides conversations and creates opportunities for others to re-imagine relationalities.

While the composition is a two week symphony (takes about two weeks for a starter to mature and be used to bake bread), we created a sample (first video - Vimeo link above) to illustrate the overall aesthetic. The sounds range from generated piano notes and sound samples such as vocalizations (by Emily Saltz), claps, gurgles, and clicks, whose pitch is bent and shaped by incoming information from the yeast activity in the form of serial data.

Bread Symphony at Re-familiarization at New Media Berkely 2021

Workshop

The accompanying performance/workshop, entitled Breaking Bread, served as a thematic continuation of the earlier processes presented in Bread Symphony, allowing participants to collectively listen, respond, and produce sound that formed a new part of this emergent more-than-human symphony.

In addition to the live sound-emitting installation that reads CO2 levels live, the group incorporates somatic deep listening workshops to research what it feels like to become acutely aware of interdependence with one another and other species. Collective bread-making is a practice that requires cooperating with human and nonhuman systems, to look outside of one’s singular capabilities and embrace collective thinking, research, and action. With such a work we also hope to challenge conventional ways of knowing - knowing process, creation, consumption, seen and unseen collaborators, while centering some of our earliest forms of storytelling and communication, sound and nourishment.

From the Re0familiaeization exhibiton at At UC Berkeley:

Max Horwich, Ashley Lewis, Katya Rozanova, & Emily Saltz [ Bread Symphony ] Bread Symphony is an active cross-species collaboration meant for material and spiritual nourishment. Seeing bread-making as a form of engaging dialogically with other species, the collective behind this work aims to document and make audible the lifecycle of the organisms that ferment the bread as we accompany these oft-unperceived organisms in sonic unison.

The accompanying deep listening, somatic performance/workshop, entitled Breaking Bread, served as a thematic continuation of the earlier processes presented in Bread Symphony, allowing participants to collectively listen, respond, and produce sound that formed a new part of this emergent more-than-human symphony.

Left to right: Max Horwich, Ashley Jane Lewis, myself (on the phone! I had to zoom into the workshop), and Emily Saltz. UC Berkeley’s Refamiliarization Exhibit. 2020.

Workshop we lead at UC Berkeley’s Refamiliarization Exhibit. 2020.

Bread Symphony’s perfoirmance at NYC Electroacoustic Improvisational Summit 2022 screened at Images Festival later that year.

HOLE // at Un/sounding the Relational City Conference

“The rhythmanalyst will have some points in common with the psychoanalyst, though he differentiates himself from the latter; ... He will listen to the world, and above all to what are disdainfully called noises, which are said without meaning, and to murmurs [rumeurs], full of meaning – and finally he will listen to silences.”

Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis

Camilla Paditt-Coles, Nire Cooney, and I exhibited Hole at NYU’s Department Of Music’s conference called Un/sounding the Relational City.

Hole is an interactive sound installation, organic-machinic ecosystem, that acts as a self-reflexive instrument for the city to play. We combined in this project sound recordings and production systems we have built. One such system records snippets of auditory and sub auditory (vibration-based) environmental sounds, cuts them up, and stitches them together to emit an ongoing, abstracted, real-time sonic portrait of New York City. Another system records the pitches of the sounds in the environment and translates them in real-time into a musical composition. A third system recorded sounds that are out of auditory perception and scale them up or down for the installation. In this way, we created living sonic portraits of specific sites, including living and nonliving sounds from past and present, ranging from Greenwood Cemetery to Brooklyn’s construction sites to the sounds of tree networks and underground insect activities of public parks. Interlocking systems morphing into a cyborg organism. The soundscape is a mix of past recorded sound intermixed with speculative sounds and reflective sounds and finally the manipulated bits of real-time sound that listeners emit while conversing or simply breathing next to the object.

In this way, the participants are made aware of their presence inside of the sonic composition and identified as complicit in this ecosystem.Acknowledging our presence’s effects on the surroundings, we hope to facilitate a more active engagement with all the seen and unseen, heard and unheard, living and machinic actors of this city. 

These pods served as sites of sound production, listening, and audience participation. 

We hope that in future iterations these sound-emitting and sound-recording pods would remain installed in the environments where they absorbed past sounds, which would provide an opportunity for these sites to continue to imprint onto the composition, evolving over time along with the space.

Sketches

Sound Playground

Critical Sound Objects for Collaboration

Update: An iteration of this project was shown at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (SoundScene) in Washington DC. Sound Scene Schedule.

Sound playground is a meditative public installation where people, alone or collectively, can focus on tactile sensations and create sounds with an opaque, autonomous ecosystem by observing and discovering its properties.

The work allows for play, humor, discussion, and co-producing sounds with other humans as well as with a group of semi-autonomous anti-instruments – feral technologies - that can be collaborated with but not fully known.

Some objects in the troupe only appear to work from 5 to 8 pm, others only in November. Sonic behavior evolves over time and objects decide how they respond to human input (touch, sound, proximity).

It is an opportunity to be with technology that requires respect of its opaque behavior and that respects our opacity in return. Neither party is expected to be fully knowable in order for playful collaboration - creation of sounds - to happen. Can lingering with reflexive nonhuman collaborators be an exercise for decentralizing the human and expanding the social imagination?

Conflating objecthood and personhood, the project aims to create an environment where people can practice collaborating with a heightened awareness of the agency and opacity of human and nonhuman others, reflecting on our horizontal interdependence with one another.

“The Anthropocene... calls for novel approaches to social dynamics. When nature and culture can no longer be studied as exclusively human, nonhuman or machine, how might we approach this puzzle?”

— Elaine Gan, Bettina Stoetzer, Anna Tsing, *Feral technologies* (2016-7)

“The point here is not merely to use non/humans as tools to think with, but in thinking with them to face our ethical obligations to them, for they are not merely tools for our use but real living beings (and I include in this category ‘inanimate’ as well as ‘animate’ beings).”

— Karen Barad in Nature’s Queer Performativity

Sound Playground performed by groups at The Waiting Room exhibit. The picnic-style blanket invited participants to engage alone and collectively in sound making with the semi-autonomous anti-instruments, sound playground characters. In this way the humans entered into an ecosystem they could not fully control but could collaborate with by listening and responding. Photo credit Gilad Dor.

Some objects have the Arduino Bluefruit with Bluetooth communication and some are wired. Both setups send serial to MaxMSP.

In Short:

Sound Playground is a tactile, semi-autonomous ecosystem of objects that emit sound to communicate with one another when they want to but that you can also collaborate with by triggering some of their sonic behaviors.

Sound Playground is a collection of networked tactile critical sound objects meant to serve as reflective instruments for groups to think with and examine our relationship to the sociotechnical systems that move us and in which we are complicit. One such object for example only works from 5-8 pm and another only in November. Critical but light, I nod towards models of alternative rules and hope to create opportunities for dialogue around our social agreements.

The picnic-style blanket invites participants to engage alone and collectively in sound making with the semi-autonomous anti-instruments, sound playground characters. In this way the humans enter into an ecosystem they could not fully control but can collaborate with by listening and responding. All the while, the sound objects remain independent actors of the experience.

Research question:

This experiment aims to examine the effects of such encounters.  What happens when we consciously interact with ecosystems that are partially opaque to us? Can we be comfortable with unknowability both human and nonhuman? The project invites people to practice lingering with and collaborating with nonhumans whom they cannot fully understand and control, challenging the notion that the world is a rational, fully knowable place that can be controlled by humans

Can a workshop for human-nonhuman cooperation be an exercise for expanding or invigorating the social imagination?

 Inspired by Ultra-Red’s sound objects for cultural analysis and action, improvisational practices of sound artists and musicians, Caroline Woolard’s tactile objects for the Center for Group Work and projects in the solidarity economy for artists, Pauline Oliveros’ collective vocal Deep Listening exercises, Éduard Glissant’s concept of the “right to opacity”, Jane Bennet’s human-nonhuman assemblages, Moten and Harney’s “undercommoning” as refusal, Bread Symphony: A Cross-Species Collaboration for Material and Spiritual Nourishment, Félix Guattari’s ideas on transversality, the Touch Tour for people with low vision, this motley and evolving work sits somewhere between a reflexive group jam session and a workshop that facilitates conversations about collaboration in various forms (with an emphasis on collectivism and the political economy of the art world) and the technologies used for such practices. It also poses questions about how we relate to nonhuman systems we “collaborate with”, about how much control we are used to enacting on such systems and how much those systems “see”/help/control us.

More about Sonic Playground:

The sound playground’s sonic behavior changes over time and cannot be predicted with certainty.

Due to the ever-shifting behaviors of this troupe of anti-instruments the human participants are gently decentralized.

The sound playground encourages deep listening, meditation, play, exploration, and the relinquishing of complete control on the part of the human.

Due to the ever-shifting behaviors of this troupe of anti-instruments the human participants cannot learn them but may be able to notice patterns as they get to know the personality of each sound object and as they observe the socialites that these objects form with one another. They can impress some of their sounds and interactions onto the playground’s memory, shaping some of its current and future behaviors. It is a sort of human-nohuman collaboration.

The sound playground is a self-reflexive instrument.

Some of the characters generate new sonic compositions by using bits of environmental sound, mixing it up with past recorded sounds, and playing the mashup back.

“Legibility becomes a condition of manipulation.”

James C. Scott

“Fugitivity is not only escape, “exit” as Paolo Virno might put it, or “exodus” in the terms of-fered by Hardt and Negri, fugitivity is being separate from settling. It is a being in motion that has learned that …there are spaces and modalities that exist separate from the logical, logistical, the housed and the positioned. “

Judith Halberstam in the introduction to The Undercommons by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney.

Early prototypes and current iterations.

This is a video of me moving one of the sound objects (without it's’ paper pulp shell). The accelerometer/gyroscope sensor is picking up the tilt, sending the data through serial to MaxMSP, where various sonic behaviors are set off. Some variation happens due to the object being programmed to have options as to how to respond and with which sounds, but for the most part the semi-autonomous object can be collaborated with.

I am moving away from a geometry for now and more towards organic earthy aesthetics but this was an early prototype of mapping movement to sound using an accelerometer and JavaScript (P5 js in the P5 js browser on a smart phone). Here you can see it without the shell : https://vimeo.com/527104416

One of my first prototypes for playtesting. I used a granular synthesis composition I made to create an experience where the sound plays and becomes louder or fainter depending on the proximity of the objects to one another. A light sensor would be used for this. This particular instrument is complex to make (trying out various light proximity sensors) so it is still in progress.

Themes explored

Sound Playground explores several themes. Opacity, object agency, refusal, tactility and sound, therapeutic play, abstracted anthropomorphism, and awkwardness of form.

Opaqueness and the negation of transparency

Can we sit with opaque ecosystems and be comfortable with unknowability both human and nonhuman? Can we entertain a more complex view of the world than the dominant narrative that puts forth the idea that the world is a rational, fully knowable place that can be reduced to numbers and controlled? What actions - or inactions - would constitute a politics of refusal to slow down increasingly troubling socioeconomic, political, and environmental conditions?

The playground invites people to linger with and examine how they relate to human and non-human ecosystems that they will never be able to fully learn.

Refusal

Sound Playground, through its generative autonomous nature (agency to record and play sound when they want, unpredictability or “uselessness” to the human) and specific relationship to time (some of these objects only work from 5- 8 pm, others only in the month of November) critiques existing forms of labor and offers some bold alternatives

Object agency and anthropomorphism

Object agency and anthropomorphism serves to decentralize the human in these playful interactions. In Nature’s Queer Performativity, Karen Barad encourages thinking with nonhumans and paying close attention to them - even objects - as a way to tread carefully on a shared planet.

“...The point here is not merely to use non/humans as tools to think with, but in thinking with them to face our ethical obligations to them, for they are not merely tools for our use but real living beings (and I include in this category “inanimate”as well as “animate” beings). A related point is to avoid the pitfall of positioning everything in relation to the human and to embrace a commitment to being attentive to the activity of each critter in its ongoing intra-active engagement with and as part of the world it participates in materializing.”

Temporality, Unpredictability, and Play

In addition to play, I am examining the human interactions with things that they cannot control or learn as well as change over time. The objects absorb bits of the surrounding noise and insert these bits into the existing algorithmic composition, somewhat like new snippets of DNA. An object's program also changes in response to how it was moved. The experiences of an object is incorporated into its future behavior, but it changes alongside us using its own logic. The interactions invite users to examine what it means to them to be in control, especially in control of creation. Can we accept this degree of independence from our interlocutors and be at ease with it?
.

Awkwardness of Form

The shapes of the objects often lean or appear to be in mid-fall. The intention is perhaps to convey some energy and vulnerability, which, I think help to anthropomorphize some of these objects.

Preparing for Unfolding Realities exhibition in Brooklyn. May 2019.

Fabrication and materials

Fabrication included creating enclosures out of home-made paper clay from shredded documents and egg crates. The object that actually looks more like an egg crate (below) was modeled in Vectorwoks and 3-d printed.

The objects to date are all prototypes though some are higher fidelity than others.

The skins/enclosures must be durable because they are often held and moved. They can be made of various materials and varied textures are encouraged - therapeutic tactile objects have been used to help with mindfulness training.

I used mainly paper pulp made of egg cartons and shredded recycled paper. In the past I have used wooden enclosures and 3d printed ones. My next iterations will likely be higher fidelity paper. However, I am also interested in ceramics for ease of cleaning and aesthetics, in certain metal for their antiseptic qualities, and in textiles for variations on tactile sensations. I am leaning towards organic-looking material in order to elicit the feeling of aliveness and mystery. Materials like wood and metal are associated with industrial or commodity goods. I plan on experimenting with growing enclosures out of mycelium though paper pulp seems to produce similar effects.

The objects moving forward will be covered with a protective wax or organic resin for ease of sanitation The pandemic has brought up limitations on materials. Gloves will be required to handle these objects while in a pandemic and possibly even after.

The innards: Arduinos, sensors, and contraptions to hold everything together inside the enclosure.

Brick and Bread Sound Objects

Speaking and Listening with Sound Objects was exhibited at @soundscenefest on June 3 and 4 at the the @hirshhorn in collaboration with Susan Jahoda @susan.jahoda with sound contributions from sound Camilla Padgitt-Coles @ivymeadows , Emily Salz @saltzshaker , and Hannah Tardie @hannahtardie .

Thank you DC Listening Lounge and @goetheinstitut In DC for funding this project.

Every time lights gets in, the objects choose to play something from a sound bank so the pairings are somewhat surprising combinations. People are invited to listen to the sound pairings between objects, in this case by moving apart (opening to light) both the bread and the brick halves.

Sound Objects at the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. June 4, 2023.

More:

In creating such object pairings I hoped to gesture towards the intersection of organic-flowing and organized activities, reflecting on the observations that systems and actions emerge from group interactions that can't be entirely known or predicted. A person can compose a song and use an instrument to play it but one can't prefiguratively compose how social and ecological systems interact, for example. The "feral piano" doesn't sound like it's being controlled by a human. 

The objects use a light sensor to turn on sounds. Randomly played (random play selection feature of the software MAX/Msp) the sounds range from abstracted sounds of collective animal and human groups vocalizing illegibly, bubbling of fermentation (bread), sounds of protest, of bricks falling, crashing of the window.

The first video shows objects that emit varying sounds. // These are two of the objects in a testing session recording from a group of sound objects for @soundscenefest in collaboration with Susan Jahoda. Invited by @goethe_dc .

Some of them are generated by sound artist Camilla Padgitt-Coles (drones of different tones that seem to be conversing, but the clip it's fairly short in this video) and Emily Saltz, and some of them are sound samples I found, like a brick falling and a hint of a protest or some unidentifiable group action. I also used sounds I made in Max/MSP - granular synthesis of the sounds of a piano piece and then a separate granular synthesis of a group of rhinoceroses. 

The granular synthesis was used to abstract the sounds, making the rhino vocalizations less identifiable as a specific species. What I want to get across, among other things, is an impression of groups of living organisms, both human and nonhuman and to highlight the similarities between those groups.

The granular synthesis of the piano was also a way to blur the specifics, making it less legible as a traditional human-made composition and rendering it more organic and erratic. I wanted to bring it closer to the generative aesthetic of the murmurs of groups of people and their counterparts in the animal (masked rhino vocalisations) world.

The second video captures the objects as they vocalized intermittently together on the lawn of the Hirshhorn.

Technical details:

Technical (sensors and max/MSP) help from Cem Çakmak.

Turns out you just have to put a light sensor in the objects and tell MAX/Msp to play from a sound library at random. This way you are always surprised!

Inside objects are small Bluetooth speakers.

A rift: Sound Object with Granular Synthesis of Rhinos, Cello, and Doves

Prototypes of sound objects. The sound is a granular synthesis I made of rhinos, cello, and dove coos.