MUS Thesis Hawkins 2013 Redacted

1
The Smooth Space of Field Recording
Four Projects
Sonicinteractions, Doublerecordings, “Dense Boogie” and ‘For the Birds’
Ruth Hawkins
Goldsmiths, University of London
PhD MUSIC (Sonic Arts)
2013
2
The work presented in the thesis is my own, except where otherwise stated
3
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Dr John Levack Drever, who supervised this thesis, and to
the following individuals and organizations who gave me permission to record
their work; provided information, technical and other support; and gave me
opportunities to publish or screen parts of the work presented here.
Sebastian Lexer. Natasha Anderson; Sean Baxter; David Brown; Rob Lambert;
John Lely; Anthony Pateras; Eddie Prevost; Seymour Wright. Oliver Bown;
Lawrence Casserley; Li Chuan Chong; Thomas Gardner; Chris Halliwell;
Dominic Murcott; Aki Pasoulas; Lukas Pearce; Alejandro Viñao; Simon
Zagourski-Thomas. Anya Bickerstaff. Lucia H. Chung.
Dr Peter Batchelor; Marcus Boon; Mike Brown; Brian Duguid; Prof Elisabeth Le
Guin; Dr Luciana Parisi; Prof Keith Potter; Dr Dylan Robinson; Geoff Sample.
Rick Campion; Emmanuel Spinelli; Ian Stonehouse. David Nicholson; Francis
Nicholson. Dr Cathy Lane; Dr Angus Carlyle - CRiSAP; Prof Leigh Landy; Dr
Katharine Norman - Organised Sound; Helen Frosi - SoundFjord; EMS; Unit
for Sound Practice Research - Goldsmiths, University of London.
4
Abstract
This practice/theory PhD focuses on four projects that evolved from a wider
objects, each of the projects was concerned with the ways in which ‘straight’
recording and real-world environments. The dissertation and projects attempt

to reconcile, what has been depicted within the acoustic ecology movement
as, the detrimental effects of ‘millions’ of recording productions and playbacks
on individuals and global environments, by exploring alternative conceptions
of environmental recorded sound.
recordings that links these to haptic expressions of spatiality and perception,

from a range of sources. Amongst these, concepts of ‘acoustic’ (Marshall
Mcluhan) and ‘smooth’ spaces (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), are
in acoustic ecology (including R. Murray Schafer; Hildegard Westerkamp).

Haptic spaces are introduced through discourses that relate the playback of
public environmental musics. Multiple and repeated instances of recording are

then linked to resonant, liminal and simulacral depictions of recorded sound.
production.
These concerns are practically explored through environmental and mimetic

strategies of recording. The projects mainly focus on ambient background
The critical effect of these is largely produced during playback: using software
applications that change this in some way, or by diffusing multiple recordings
simultaneously in a sound installation. The projects attempt to realise ‘smooth’
non-sonorous forces together.

5
Contents
Introduction 9
Part I: Sonicinteractions (2005 & 2011)

1. Introduction 22
2. Sonic Interactions Conference 27
3. Environmental Recordings 32
4. Control 36
5. Playbacks 43
6. Haptic Reception 52
7. Conclusion 61
Part II: Doublerecordings (2005 - 2007)

1. Introduction 68
2. Recordings and Complexes 74
3. Echo, Reverb and Delay 80
85
91
6. Echo in Environmental Musics 98
7. Dub 107
8. Conclusion 113
Part III: “Dense Boogie” (2007 - 2011)

1. Introduction 117
2. The Installation 122
3. Background Recordings 128
4. ‘Evening cicadas, Italy’ 138
CONTENTS 6
5. Insects and technologies 143

6. Appropriation and Mimesis I 150
7. Appropriation and Mimesis II 161
8. Conclusion 168
Part IV: ‘For the Birds’ (2008 - 2011)

1. Introduction 172
2. Field recording practice 178
3. Birdsong recordings 186
4. Installation I 196
5. Installation II 205
6. Smooth space 212
7. Conclusion 217
Conclusion 222
Appendices
1. Soft Machine text (2005) 238
2. Proposal “Dense Boogie” (2011) 240
3. Proposal ‘For the Birds’ (2011) 241
Bibliography 242
Discography 257
Illustrations
Fig. 1 Untitled Max splash screen (2005) 8
Figs. 2-4 Sonicinteractions 259
Figs. 5-7 Doublerecordings 262
Figs. 8-17 “Dense Boogie” 265
Figs. 18-27 ‘For the Birds’ 271
CONTENTS 7
Audio
Notes 277
Field recordings 278
Sonicinteractions 281
Doublerecordings 283
“Dense Boogie” 287
‘For the Birds’ 290
CD
‘Blackbird II’ 2008
‘For the Birds’ 2011
DVD
DVD I audio
DVD II data
8
9
Introduction
‘ . . . to introduce space and air, chance and memory into an

otherwise claustrophobic world. ’ (Toop quoted in Connor 2006:10)
‘But the air, our air, is in the process of becoming denatured,

renatured. The air . . . is saturated, spasmodic, densely populous.
and copresence . . . it has become less and less a voluptuous

opulence of the empty, and more and more aggressively colonised .
(Connor 2006:10)
Background to research
The four thesis projects - Sonicinteractions, Doublerecordings, “Dense Boogie”,
had mainly involved the contingent production of recordings from wherever I

happened to be. This approach led to the random repetition and foregrounding
recording formats to organise and structure the works.
described below, before outlining the key methods the projects themselves
use. The thesis’ main focus on environmental depictions of recording is then
more widely. The further core theoretical concerns of the thesis are then set
out, before discussing the criteria for their selection.
INTRODUCTION 10
Earlier works (2000-2004)
Examples of previous works include: ‘Heads’ (2000), where randomly
recordings made using in-ear binaural microphones. Another series of

recordings, using omnidirectional microphones, were structured around
randomised start times and open recording locations; their duration determined
by the length of a CDR (‘Globes’ 2001-). Further recordings were made while
I was asleep.
Although many of these earlier works featured relatively quiet interiors and
background. For example, one of ‘31 random recordings’ (2002) is of loud
explored more explicitly in a series of recordings made from performances and

playbacks of existing works (2002-2003). A website from 2004 continued this
(Edgeless website).
Key methods
methodologies and critical concerns that had already been suggested or

partially developed as part of this wider practice. Rather than being completely
planned in advance, individual projects were gradually evolved over time from
realised in response to an invitation or other event.
involving programming and automation, key methods derived from this include:
the use of mimetic technologies that aim to produce realistic recordings (e.g.
individual examples; the development of customised software players. The
recording content, as described below.

.
INTRODUCTION 11
Environmental sound of recordings
There was a main focus on the environmental sound of recordings, over the
course of the thesis. The term has ambiguously implied incidental as well as
more deliberate productions of environmental sound (e.g. noise pollution;
ambient and background musics), and each are relevant here1.
I initially became aware of both environmental noise and musics through
places 2
similar, mundane content. The same pervasive natural and technological
sounds were repeatedly heard across both the recordings and real-world
3
).
This developed into a closer interest in the repetitive, unremarkable sounds

that might be heard across a range of interior and exterior environments;
rather than in the more exceptional ones. The practice also produced a critical
awareness of the ubiquity of recordings across such environments; whether
unsolicited or from playbacks of my own. In this way, environmental recordings
became implicated together with ambient background sounds in my work. Each
evidenced (at least potentially) commonly shared and repeating instances of
sounds; rather than being only uniquely or exclusively experienced.
environmental and technological noises (e.g. rural background ambiances;
underscoring their mundane and minimal effect. Beyond this, a focus on neutral
intended to be - at least partly - experienced as generic or banal. Many of the
either recorded or real-world sounds 4.

1 Cf. ‘. . . a label such as “environmental music” is obviously problematic in its
possible confusion with Muzak, background or New Age music, music performed in various
environments, eco-propaganda, and so on.’ (Truax 1996: 51).
2 Mainly in Suffolk and London, UK.
3
4 The term ‘real-world’ is used to distinguish sounds other than those electronically
INTRODUCTION 12
Field recording
practice ‘in its own right’ (Montgomery 2009-1:1).
In relation to the projects and individual recordings described here, untreated,
in a range of locations. Private and close-up noises of production (e.g.

conversations; microphone handling) were avoided in order to
produce more neutral, anonymous sounding recordings. There was no further
The different contexts and ways in which the recordings were then played back
were also critical aspects of each project. These were all intended, however
obliquely, to relate to everyday, environmental experiences of recording
playback. Whether through modelling this, in some way, by means of software
applications developed alongside the recordings; by situating these site-
5
.
musics (whether by documenting environmental noise, or as examples of
‘objects’; whether in terms of an individual production (Wollscheid 1999: 7), or

because they are unhearable as such: where they sound similar to real-world
sounds (Kittler 1999: 37), or are simply boring.
5 Although all of the projects involve some degree of programming, I have chosen not
to explore this aspect of my work in detail here. This omission partly evidences a lack of space
INTRODUCTION 13
Spatial paradigms of recording
The thesis also attempts to address the larger question that Steven Connor
puts in the epigraph, above. That is, whether recordings, as such, ‘colonise’ and
diminish real-world spaces; or whether, in fact, these are able, as David Toop
suggests, to do the opposite: be productive and ‘space-making’ themselves?
Their ‘resistant’ potential in response to existing monologues of environmental
recorded sound is also explored.
An environmental depiction of recording has often, like Connor’s above, been

negatively expressed in terms of a radical loss of open or individual space.
These issues are mainly represented here by the work of R. Murray Schafer
and other theorists associated with the acoustic ecology movement in Canada 6.
Aspects of this provide a focus for, and sometimes counterpoint to, the
recordings have not been depicted as a conspicuous part of the problem of

environmental recorded noise, they have sometimes been characterised as
an extension of representational ‘capture’ into every part of the real-world;
ranging from the micro- to the macrocosm (e.g. Cage 1952/1953).
recorded and real-world sounds and to accurately simulate these. In either

case, they might be conceived of as part of a larger programme of exploitation
in which every last part of nature is processed into some form of capital (Hardt
& Negri 2001: 272).
Appropriation
the way in which both recorded and real-world sonic spaces are ‘striated’ 7
6
Project’ in Vancouver, Canada by Schafer and others, including Hildegard Westerkamp
and Barry Truax, in the 1960’s. In 1993, the ‘World Forum of Acoustic Ecology’ was formed
to represent associated international organizations and individuals who shared similar
environmental concerns (WFAE Website 2013).
7 See pp. 213-214.
INTRODUCTION 14
recordings described here also produced a material awareness of recorded

sounds, both intrinsically and in relation to further recorded and real-world
sounds and events.
Despite the increasing availability of recording technologies, within a context of

pervasive environmental recorded sound, any independent production and, in
particular, any further appropriation of such recordings by individuals remains
problematic. Even where these are privately allowed to be produced and
or impossible to achieve, whether through informal restrictions or through

legislative control and prohibition.
For this reason, the thesis projects have, on the whole, avoided straightforward
‘plunderphonics’ 8. At the same time, they continue to allude to other productions
of recorded sound beyond my own; for example, by producing generic and
(e.g. “Dense Boogie” 9). Where other recordings are included, either permission
has been given for these to be recorded; or these are only reproduced here,
under the terms of ‘fair dealing’, as research documents 10 11.
Environmental musics
Despite sharing many of the concerns about the negative effects of environmental
musics themselves. This is evident not only in shared methodologies, but also
Environmental characterisations of recorded sound depict both background

and foreground recordings as happening alongside other real-world and
recorded sounds and everyday events. Instead of being exclusively listened
8 Chris Cutler summarises ‘plunderphonics’, after John Oswald, as ‘the appropriation
and no conventional performance or compositional skill is required.’ (Cutler 2010: 15).

9 After ‘Dense Boogie 1’ Maryanne Amacher (1999).
10 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (Legislation.gov.uk Website 2013).
11 These are not included in the electronic version of the thesis.
INTRODUCTION 15
to, recordings are heard partially, or even unconsciously in, what has been
described as, an increasingly prevailing, ambient mode of reception (Kassabian
2001: 7).
This has been partly explored through the foregrounding of both private and
public playbacks of various digital audio, CD and LP recordings in many of
the works described here. Whilst discourses surrounding some of these have
Personal environmental experiences of recording have also produced a more

informal, ‘subliminal’ background to the projects and, rather than linking these
popular music genres. At the same time, discourses developed around such
genres have provided crucial insights in respect of individual thesis projects.
recordings are broadly considered alongside these. Whilst often reproducing

ostensibly similar content, these represent a diverse range of theoretical
Certain discourses drawn from these also directly pose questions in respect
distinctive examples of these, each of the projects juxtaposed and related
post-genre accounts of recorded sound (see Fink 1998; Kassabian 2001).
‘Smooth Space’
developed previously 12. Part of the original aim of the projects was to realise
12 E.g. Edgeless website.

INTRODUCTION 16
mimetic similarity (Taussig 1993: 40) that the former sometimes achieved.
At the start of the thesis, therefore, a broad proposal was set out to produce,
what I understood to be at the time, a smooth, continuous and homogenous
space; in which neither category of real-world or recorded sound necessarily
predominated. This might be achieved, for example, by producing longer, more
recordings.
Whilst this was partly practically achieved, by the different methodologies
of real-world sounds, with existing discourses of environmental recorded

sounds - whether avant-garde, functional or mass - as themselves immersive
and total 13.
apart from tropes of capture and enclosure, towards alternative accounts of

environmental recorded sound and, what becomes described here, in partly
Deleuzoguattarian terms, as a haptic, nomadic or ‘smooth space’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 1988: 95-96) 14.
Theoretical models
The thesis introduces a wide range of theoretical constructs and sound works
beyond those I produced myself. Although I was already informally aware of
some of these, they were mainly researched alongside the practice, rather
than organised in advance. As described above, some of these directly
generated or contributed aspects of individual projects or introduced more
theoretical models and examples of composition were found in response to
13 E.g. where these are depicted in terms of ‘environment as music’ or ‘music as

environment’: Cage quoted in Kostelanetz 2003: 70; Eno 1982/1986; Schafer 1994;
Westerkamp 1988; Krause 1993.
14 Please note that Deleuze and Guattari is abbreviated to D&G throughout the thesis.
INTRODUCTION 17
and expand on these.
The projects typically focused, instead, on practices and individual examples

that were already reasonably well documented and that problematised my
own work in some way. This also encouraged a broader generic and cross-
as a whole.
use to enlarge on my own work. Much of the research came from papers on
Certain constructs of environmental musics also provided critical alternatives
others provided a background and wider context that linked different parts
musics available 15. Where they are most coherently addressed - for example,
within acoustic ecology or in individual papers on functional musics, of which
there are a reasonable number, many of these form only negative appraisals of
their social and environmental effects. It was much harder to locate alternative
critical positions that did not then address environmental musics, such as
ambient, in only aesthetic or subjective terms. This encouraged a broader
focus on spatial constructions of these.
15 Although ‘Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds’ (Toop
1995), for example, provides a useful overview.
INTRODUCTION 18
Certain discourses, as referenced in the thesis title, were drawn from well-
known philosophical and critical texts that trace a different approach to
music, mediated sound, composition, and reception that, although famously
playbacks of environmental musics in relation to these core texts; as well as

to emerging paradigms of space and sonic production (e.g. haptic; rhythmic;
molecular). Because this approach was only gradually developed over the
course of the thesis, in response to individual projects, the latter especially
Parts I-IV
Part I: Sonicinteractions (2005 & 2011)
In ‘Sonicinteractions’ (SI) the volume parameter of a software recorder

was automated to produce modulated recordings of further participants’
presentations at an academic conference. This made a tangibly environmental
experience of recorded sound, which alternated between the recorded and
real-world sounds of the playback space.
relating to Gilles Deleuze’s late essay on the ‘Societies of Control’ (1992);

including those by William S. Burroughs; Michel Foucault; William Bogard.
Modulation is then linked to both public and private environmental musics.
by Burroughs, James Tenney and Hildegard Westerkamp, featuring tape cut-

ups and parametric modulation, is also discussed.
The alternative ‘smooth space’ of the thesis title is introduced by Glenn Gould’s
accounts of tactile and haptic modes of perception, understood to have been

developed in response to mass media, produced by Walter Benjamin, Marshall
Mcluhan and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
INTRODUCTION 19
Part II: Doublerecordings (2005-2007)
In the ‘Doublerecordings’ project, a software recorder was developed that
recordings of varying content were made; producing a range of echoic

effects. These were further ‘doublerecorded’, ‘rerecorded’ and ‘recovered’
to produce different generations and versions of an original recording.
The range of effects these produce is discussed before introducing the

distinctive account of echo and resonance that Schafer makes, partly in
response to Mcluhan’s depiction of ‘acoustic space’ as resonant. This is
expanded in further discourses that relate echo and recording, as such, to the
environments.
Alternative paradigms of echo, schizophonia 16

through a range of critical texts. Similar concepts of echo are compared
across further discourses relating to popular musics that feature echo, reverb
The doublerecordings are then related to these.
Part III: “Dense Boogie” (2007 - 2011)
In the sound installation, ‘”Dense Boogie”’ (DB), a recording of crickets was
software installation player, alongside texts and artefacts. Many of these were
intended to be redundant or ‘unoriginal’ in some way.
Part III discusses works by Maryanne Amacher, Francisco López and Luc
Ferrari, in relation to both the crickets’ recording and the installation as a whole.
Discourses are drawn from reviews that focus on the similarities between the
sounds of recorded and real-world insects and technologies; that also has
implications in respect of recording genre.
16 See p. 85.
INTRODUCTION 20
The background recordings in DB are linked to strategies found in environmental

musics that also attempt to produce an indistinct effect (e.g. between recordings
and real-world sounds). The sound of insects is also more broadly related
to technologies; partly explored through Rosi Braidotti’s linkage of multiple,
liminal insect productions to a wider contemporary sonic milieu. These
different accounts clarify a resonant, liminal depiction of both appropriation
and environmental strategies in DB.
Part IV: ‘For the Birds’ (2007-2011)
Like DB, ‘For the Birds’ (FTB) played back a complex of foreground and
background recordings in a sound installation. The recordings were produced
its duration. A foreground recording of a blackbird provided the focus of FTB,

which the original real-world blackbird then strikingly sang together with.
production of the blackbird recording in relation to other such individual bird
recordists and theorists (including Bernie Krause, Francisco López, David

Dunn, and René van Peer). The use of repetition in the installation is explored.
The surpassing of isolated bird recordings is further related to broader

changes in the contemporary techno-acoustic environment. This is expressed
in terms of a transition towards, what D&G describe as, molecular and
‘smooth’ expressions of sound that exceed individual sonic productions.
Thesis, DVD I, DVD II, CDs
The dissertation is divided into four main parts, each chronologically arranged
around an individual project. These are followed by appendices corresponding
to individual projects, bibliography, discography, illustrations and audio listings.
A PDF version of the dissertation is provided on DVD II.
INTRODUCTION 21
only detailed in the audio listings at the end. DVD I provides the most direct
produced in the programming environment Max. The former are directly
application (Mac OS only), also included.
Two further 8cm CDs, ‘For the Birds’ and ‘Blackbird II’, are also enclosed.
22
PART I: Sonicinteractions (2005 & 2011)

1. Introduction
‘What we most lack is a belief in the world, we’ve quite lost the world,
it’s been taken from us. If you believe in the world you precipitate
events, however inconspicuous, that elude control, you engender
new space-times, however small their surface or volume . . . Our
ability to resist control, or our submission to it, has to be assessed
at the level of our every move.’ (Deleuze 1995: 176)
Overview
A pair of software applications - a recorder and a player - were developed in

the programming environment Max 1 to simply modulate the dynamic levels
of a recording against the real-world sounds of a playback environment. The
recording and playback levels were randomly dynamically changed, from near
silences to very loud sounds, over variable durations. Both gain and duration
parameters were randomised on the start of recording, or upon the introduction
The collective name of the project, Sonicinteractions (SI), and the content
of the initial recordings, were taken from the ‘Sonic Interactions’ conference
Interactions Website 2013). Using the SI recorder interfaced to a laptop

and stereo microphone pair, recordings were made, with permission, of the
conference talks and presentations from the front of a lecture theatre site.
Several of the presentations included playbacks of the participants’ own
1 Max is a proprietary software environment for audio, music and multimedia that
provides programming objects that visually connect these different aspects together (Cycling
’74 Website 2011).
PART I: SONICINTERACTIONS (2005 & 2011) 23
recordings, both as extracts and full-length works.
During my own presentation, on the second day of the conference, a text was
read which introduced the main ideas of SI, whilst simultaneously playing back
a recording of another participant’s work, that had been made through SI on
the previous day in the same space.
Whilst the SI recorder was only used once at the conference, the standalone
player was intended to be distributed independently on a CDR. A version of
the same SI player was also later reused in the sound installation “Dense
Boogie” in 2011 2. Although the following chapters focus mainly on the Sonic
Interactions conference, it is important to note that any recorded or playback
content is contingent on the situation where SI is used.
Introduction
SI automates the gain parameter of a recording, so that when it is recorded, or

played back, it sounds as if it is being adjusted by an invisible hand. Although,
because these adjustments can be extreme, in terms of speed or levels, it
might sometimes be experienced as a careless or monstrous one. As a volume
control, it connects to one of the core personal interactions with selected
recorded sound, beyond ‘on’ and ‘off’, that an individual can make, whether
because the SI levels are smoothly automated and regular, the changes in gain
can also sound like straightforward machine modulations of code: producing
continuous and smooth transitions.
The SI applications relate to a series of recording playbacks: those which
but the Recordings’ (Burroughs 1981), ‘For Ann (rising)’ (Tenney 1969), and
‘Kits Beach Soundwalk’ (Westerkamp 1989); the other participants conference
recordings (which were not known in advance); and the unknown playbacks
potentially produced through the standalone SI player. Apart from the Burroughs’
and SI player recordings, all of these were diffused in an academic context.
2
and modulation 3
these works evidence the degree of control that the composer has over their
own composition through the parametric modulation of audio. These individual
modulations are also related to further recorded sounds: whether by implicating
or including other recordings, or as a critical response to the environmental
proliferation of these.
Following R. Murray Schafer, individual recording playbacks have been
1973-2: 34-5). Such listeners, Schafer claims, are already damaged and
desensitised by environmental technological noise, and are therefore unaware
of or unconcerned about their own part in it. The effect of this has been depicted
within the acoustic ecology movement as an increasingly homogenous sonic
environment, in which individual voices are lost; whether because there are
too many productions or reproductions of sound, too much loud noise, or so
many different genres of music available (e.g. Truax 2008).
Soundscape compositions, such as ‘Kits Beach Soundwalk’, have been used

to reclaim and communicate an intensely individual, perspectival experience
of recording and listening in response to this; using the parameterisation of
audio as a way to ‘face the monster’ of a gross and indifferent monologue of
transcribed in
McCartney 1999: 221).
Yet an exponential number of individual playbacks have also coincided with

a broader cultural focal shift from production to reception (Dean 2009: 540).
This has allowed a reinvigorated conception of the listener, who is no longer
depicted as a passive recipient of music or recorded sound. James Tenney’s
works, for example, by using modulation and random procedures, foreground
the perception of the listener, rather than the composer’s own (Kahn 1999: 2).
Glenn Gould, in ‘The Prospects of Recording’ (1966), anticipating more complex

levels of consumer audio control than just volume, argues that the individual
3
to due measure and proportion; measured or rhythmical movement’. 2) ‘a.
Telecommunications: The process of modulating a wave . . .in order to impress a signal upon
it; the extent to which a modulated carrier wave is varied; also the wave-form or signal so
impressed. b.Transf[erred sense]: The action or result of varying the magnitude, degree etc. of
something’ (Oxford English Dictionary 1989).
threatens, and will ultimately usurp, the composer. Gould speculates that
transition in music: from a highly individual and categorical composition, through

home listener, to participatory, environmental modes of recording production
and reception.
A different approach to mass reception had already been suggested by Walter

Benjamin in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’
(1935-6) (‘artwork essay’ 4), where reproductive technologies are related to a
state of reception in ‘distraction’ (2008: 40). Benjamin understands distraction
as a tactile, rather than contemplative, form of perception, that approaches
modality of perception to an everyday, utilitarian response to architecture,

which is developed transiently through habituation: ‘on the ground’, piecemeal
and close-up.
recent theories, which make it possible to relate this mode of reception more
precisely to environmental mediated sound. Both the media theorist Marshall
Mcluhan and the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (D&G), in
‘A Thousand Plateaus’ (D&G 1988), associate this new epistemology with
haptic formulations of space - ‘acoustic’, ‘nomad’, ‘smooth’ - which, they argue,
emerge together at the same time.
These concepts of haptic space and perception are partly derived

from the work of the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter who, in a co-
publication with Mcluhan (Carpenter & Mcluhan 1955), relates close-up,
tactile forms of Inuit perception to the visually featureless landscapes
that they inhabit. Mcluhan then extrapolates from this the ways in which
individuals encounter the contemporary electronic mediascape, which he
calls ‘acoustic space’, opposing it to visual space 5. D&G, similarly, relate
haptic, smooth spaces to sonorous, rather than visual depictions of space:
4 The second of four versions of the artwork essay is mainly referenced here (see
Hansen 1999: 314).
5 That this is not only repeating, what Jonathan Sterne has criticized as, the ‘audiovisual
auditory to audile to audio-tactile to tactile’ (Cavell 2003: 63). See also pp. 57-58.
‘ . . . winds, undulations of snow or sand, the song of the sand or the

creaking of ice, the tactile qualities of both.’ (D&G 1988: 382)
Although each of these suggest drifting and unencumbered receptions, and
Deleuze, writing independently in a late essay, ‘Postscript on the Societies

of Control’ (1992), also relates haptic spaces and modes of engagement just
what he calls, the new societies of control. Understanding control as an
technologies, as a key expression of its operation and effects.
Deleuze takes the term ‘control’ society from William S. Burroughs who uses it
4). Burroughs makes ‘street recordings’, alongside tape cut-ups and other
treatments, which he then plays back on location, against both real-world sounds
and further recordings (Burroughs 2005). These turn, what he understands
to be, the techniques of ‘control systems’ against their own monologues and
monopolies: using modulation to ‘scramble the code’. Burroughs promotes
the method; anticpating a much wider participation through the proliferation of
recording technologies.
SI is focused around different paradigms of recording playback produced
with the ‘coming together’ of public and private, suggested in different accounts
of environmental recorded sound, which ultimately relate this to a globally
homogenous sonic environment. In SI these convergences are explored
from the fragmentation of recordings, and subjectivities, into controllable and

‘workable’ parts, to the production of a smooth ‘sonic continuum’.
27
2. Sonic Interactions Conference
Disciplinary society and structures
The Sonicinteractions (SI) applications were partly produced in response to the
which was held in the ‘Small Hall/Cinema’ lecture theatre (Small Hall) at the
Electronic Music Studios (EMS), Goldsmiths University of London, where they
The Small Hall conforms structurally and culturally to an extensive network of
society developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which have
since become widely standardized (Foucault 1995). This was predicated on a
prisons, but also in homes, work places, hospitals and educational and cultural
within the next (e.g. school or work) (Deleuze 1992: 3).
Disciplinary architectures are perspectivally arranged around a model of

surveillance, in which a mass of repeating individual viewing or listening
points are held and trained towards a central focus.
points (1995: 195-228). They are discretely structured and use distance and
partitioning to measure out and create stable and distinctive areas of production
and reception,
Such architectures also inform and structure ‘classical’ organizations of

and distinguished from further productions and from reception. These are
then protected and monopolized so that anything that happens elsewhere
has reduced or no meaning or value. Composers and listeners are visibly
differentiated: the former as uniquely specialised individuals, whereas the
audience is depicted - both publically and at home - as an anonymous and
divided mass (Gould 1988: 347; Rothenbuhler & Peters 1997: 244). Within
this a large number of individuals remain immobile and silent, with only limited
opportunities for participation.
Absolute music and recorded sound

In a disciplinary society, the production of music and recordings is also
similarly regulated and constrained. As John Corbett relates, whilst ‘absolute’
conceptions of music come out of a longer lineage of divisions and restrictions
these only fully emerge alongside architectures such as the concert hall (1990:
88). They were established on the concept of an isolated and hermetic sound
object detached from any extrinsic other sounds or external references (Oxford
Music Online Website 2013).
.
As material objects themselves, records were literally understood to capture
music or sound, (Levin 1990: 32) and then reproduce this to multiple, isolated
instances of ‘absolute’ reception 6. Audio formats, such as mono and stereo,
exclusive zones of sound, such as ‘stereo images’ or ‘sweet spots’, which
Within this paradigm, the technological production of recordings becomes

understated or invisible. A recording would be able to be listened to as if neither
the recordist nor the technologies were there, in a chain of transparency
that follows analogously through from the concert hall or lecture theatre into
the home (Corbett 1990: 90). The recordist, within this context, acts as an
anonymous ‘functionary’ who only realises the parameters of a fully coded
interaction already established within existing disciplinary structures and the
recording apparatus as such (Flusser 2000: 21-32).
6 Although, as Emily Thompson notes, writing on the early cultural history of recordings,
(Thompson 1995).
Description of the Small Hall and Sonic Interactions Conference
The site
The architecture of the Small Hall and the structuring of the Sonic Interactions
conference can both be understood as expressions of the disciplinary structures
outlined above. In the Small Hall, a raked hemisphere of identical seats is
arranged around a central podium area, which is further marked out by a
screen and loudspeaker pair for audio-visual presentations. Smaller speakers
above the audience reinforce the main stereo projection into the corners of
The
distractions 7.
The conference
The Sonic Interactions conference was timetabled around a series of
presentations that took place on the podium over two days. These were
followed by more formal concerts and performances in the ‘Great Hall’ nearby.
Apart from the conference presentations and performances, there was a
subdued sense of any other production or further active participation in the
event. In the Small Hall, especially, other sounds were silenced or neutralised,
and where present, seemed loud or interruptive (e.g. coughs or door bangs).
Within this structure, the participants’ voices and recorded sounds are allowed,
what seems like, complete latitude and freedom of expression.
The individual presentations and performances of the participants were
arranged hierarchically within the overarching structure of the conference.
There were two ‘keynote’ speakers and nine other participants on day 1.
The two main speakers each made hour-long contributions at a ‘prime time’
(on Saturday at 10-11am and then 14-15pm), whilst further participants had
approximately 20 minutes each. On day 2, a Sunday, there were four shorter
20 minute presentations, including my own at 10am. Each talk was introduced
by an organizer and divided distinctly from the other talks by intervals of similar
durations. During these the audience was mainly silent. In the breaks, a low
level of informal noise could be heard (e.g. the murmur of the audience which
became louder as members left the room).
7 Although the noise of an air-conditioning system is also noticeable.
The SI applications had been tested using relatively random playbacks of popular
music recordings in a quiet studio at home 8. These playbacks encouraged SI’s
focus on the Sonic Interactions conference as a series of discrete presentations,
rather than as an extensive whole. This was already suggested, and strikingly
facilitated, by the disciplinary structure of the architecture and events that took
place in the Small Hall (which for this reason was chosen over the Great Hall).
These included: t
productions from each other; and the silence of the audience. The content
of the SI recordings was also substantially organised by the structuring and
timetabling of the conference that had been published in advance (Sonic
Interactions Website 2013).
Field recording in the Small Hall

Apart from the modulations of the SI recorder, the granting of permission
to record Sonic Interactions before the start of the conference and the
disciplinary context. The recording equipment was situated amongst the other
audio technologies and playbacks of the conference room, out of sight of the
reinforced, the existing model of sound production arranged around a central,

‘keynote’ focus. Any recordings produced within this context might therefore be
expected to be documentations of a series of original performances (Auslander
2006: 1).
The SI recordings were made using a stereo microphone pair interfaced

to the SI recorder application running on a laptop. Two cardioid pattern
9
, pointing towards the podium. By using directional
or the audience - were minimised, making it possible to make highly

focused and nearly exclusive recordings of the conference presentations.
8 Because such recordings typically use dynamic compression and are of short
duration.
9 The microphones and set-up were not especially selected for the conference
Sonicnteractions recordings
The recordings made at Sonic Interactions focused on the contributions of

the other participants as discrete presentations and playbacks, rather than
on any intrinsic content that these might individually have had, or on the
further noises of the conference. All of the SI recordings simply followed the
of the presentations. Although these were not edited at all in post-production,

because of the background ambient silence of the disciplinary setting,
the recordings have the potential to sound like completely circumscribed
recordings that informed SI 10.
Although only one of the conference recordings was selected to be played

back on the following day, the fact that many different recordings had been
made was important to the project. This highlighted the operation of the SI
recorder in relation to the disciplinary structuring of both the Small Hall and
the conference as a whole, rather than focusing on any individual performance
(including my own). The playback of the selected recording during my own talk
the next day also related different presentations together, instead of channelling
these apart.
Whilst the SI recordings, as discrete productions, partly conform to a disciplinary

paradigm, the algorithm modulates the gain parameter, so that within each
recording the levels are continuously variable and sometimes drop out.
Together with the way in which the SI recording was then selected and played
back against a further presentation, or where, using the SI player, another
recording is played back elsewhere, this produces through modulation, what is
partly intended to be, an environmental experience of recorded sound.
10 I.e. the popular music recordings that were used during the development of the
playbacks of the Sonicinteractions player.

32
3. Environmental Recordings
Environmental depictions of mediated sound do not characterise recordings as

isolated and circumscribed objects which only reproduce real-world originals
and are then exclusively played back and listened to. Instead they describe
recorded sounds as becoming detached and independent from original
sources and producers; interpenetrating with real-world sounds (whether as
noise pollution or more productively); and as having the capacity to regulate
and territoralize spaces and to produce affective and social changes.
Many of these accounts have focused on the playback of recordings by

individuals that happen outside of enclosed spaces, such as the institution;
and the proliferation of these has further been directly related to commercial
and functional environmental and background musics.
Through the automation of the volume parameter, Sonicinteractions (SI)

relates an individual playback of recorded sounds together with a paradigm of
control that has been most tangibly deployed in functional musics, like Muzak.
The volume modulation in SI also produces its own environmental effects.
SI production or diffusion, and, at the conference, the appropriation of further

sound productions and their playback together.
Acoustic ecology
Multiple, private recording playbacks have been implicated in the production of
(Westerkamp 1988: 17; Schafer 1994: 43; Truax 2001: 23-24). This is depicted
as a densely overpopulated, predominantly urban, soundscape, with a low
signal-to-noise ratio, in which real-world sounds are masked by mediated and
other technological noises. This has produced an effect of homogeneity and

uniformity that, it is argued, has been exacerbated by the sheer amount and
variety of recorded material available (Schafer 1973-2: 34; Truax 2008: 103).
If mediated sounds are only produced by, or consumed in response to,

commercial and regulatory interests, such arguments continue, these only
represent a false surrogate of difference within a larger strategy of mass
market homogenization (Westerkamp 1988: 45). What is produced instead is
an equivalence and levelling of genres (Emmerson 2001:17; McCartney 2002:
22) from which recordings are played back repeatedly and indiscriminately,
only adding more redundancy and noise.
evidenced both in public environmental musics, and in private playbacks

(Schafer 1973-2: 30; Westerkamp 1988: 36). Within this, Schafer writes, the
and turn up the volume. This is understood as part of a dangerous feedback loop
in which, as mediated sounds multiply and are turned up, so listening becomes
physically degraded; not only producing inattentiveness and distraction, but
also causing actual hearing damage and loss.
Distraction, or competition, then feeds into a broader indifference in respect

of the environment which, as real-world acoustic sounds are blocked out or
covered up, becomes polluted, or even ceases to exist (Droumeva 2004: 1;
Truax 2008: 104; Hempton 2009).
sound, has further been understood to literally stop and isolate the individual
from any social or environmental participation. Barry Truax, following Schafer
fragments, blocks off and alienates any possibility of action; resulting in, what
Truax understands as, a radical reduction of individual space and subjectivity
(Truax 2001: 24).
The individual withdraws instead into a pervasive synthetic, surrogate

environment which itself has become normalised and seems ‘natural’
(Westerkamp 1988: 25; Lanza 1991: 51). Hildegard Westerkamp describes this
in terms of a total simulation:
‘ . . . it takes us away from who we are at present. It takes us into an
a space that speaks of another time.’ (1988: 52)
This loss of place and orientation, in turn, encourages the playback of mediated
sounds without consideration of genre, place or time (Westerkamp 1999). And
where there is a concern for their environmental effect, it is argued, individuals
only follow functional models of mediated sound; whether by using wall-to-
regaining their own identity and privacy through the sonic control of a territory
(Droumeva 2004:1). Either way, these are understood as a private articulation
and extension of commercial and functional musics’ purpose (Franklin 1994:
3).
Muzak
Early functional and environmental musics, like Muzak, were developed

simultaneously with, and often in response to, other technological innovations
and noises. As ‘piped in’ utilities they existed comfortably alongside the noises of
air-conditioning and electrical installations in newly soundproofed architectures;
either accommodating these or subtly covering them up (Sumrell & Varnelis
2007) 11. Part of their effect was made possible through the deployment of
extensive, hidden broadcast and distribution systems, which enhanced their
sense of sourceless, directionless impingement.
management and corporate strategies, to stimulate production in workplaces

and factories, and consumption in shops and malls (Atkinson 2007: 1911). The
music was drawn from an extensive range of compositions and genres, which
were then stripped down and carefully rearranged into unobtrusive melodies.
These were then segued and programmed into playlists that were constantly
shoppers (Lanza 1991: 44).
11 See pp. 132-133.

Disciplinary
Muzak’s early model of ‘stimulus progression’ has been linked, by Rowland

Atkinson, to military research which connected increased musical tempo to
enhanced levels of alertness and motivation (2007: 1911). Early background
musics were alternated with periods of silence, maintaining distinct zones of
attention, mobilization and rest, which Atkinson directly relates to a model of
surveillance (cf. Vanel 2008: 101-102). In this way, Atkinson connects functional
music, within Foucault’s terms, more broadly to disciplinary technologies
that shape and control behaviours, at the same time as inviting or excluding
participation.
of the Commons’ (1994). In the essay, Franklin argues that, like the dedicated
structures of the disciplinary, background musics use virtual ‘aural architectures’
to channel and partition other noises, which then become shaped, suppressed
or isolated. She describes the more complete implementation of environmental
musics in terms of an imposition of convention and monologue against the
potential of ‘unprogrammed, unplanned and unprogrammable happenings’
(1994: 2).
which formerly public, open spaces are privatised and monopolised by single
voices (e.g. Westerkamp 1988: 49; Radano 1989: 456; Sterne 1997: 46; Frith
2002: 41; Droumeva 2004:1). The public environment has been depicted as
increasingly threatened and spaceless as multiple individual playbacks become
integrated with public functional musics; directly through their shared content,
environmental recorded musics and convergence of public and private has

also been found in Gilles Deleuze’s account of a transition from the disciplinary
society to one of control.
36
4. Control
‘ “Control” is the name Burroughs proposes as a term for the new

monster . . . ’
‘Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a

modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change
from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will
transmute from point to point.’ (Deleuze 1992: 4)
Control societies
In the paper ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ (1992), Deleuze articulates
describes the way in which the new societies of control, in order to continue
to regulate and accumulate capital, have been encouraged to develop
different forms of organization. These have been produced in response to the
limitations of, and increasing resistance to, disciplinary methods; and to, what
he understands, following Foucault, as a more ‘generalized crisis in relation to
all the environments of enclosure’ (1992: 3-4).
The new technologies of control, Deleuze argues, have the potential - through
more intensive and pervasive hold on individuals (Deleuze 1992: 3; Parr 2005:
53-55). These have been implemented through computing and information
technologies which produce what Deleuze describes in terms of ‘the coils of a
invasive levels of control.

Haptic technologies & spaces

Deleuze’s argument is later developed by William Bogard (2007), who relates
control societies to the contemporary tactile technologies and haptic spaces
anticipated in the ‘Postscript’ essay. Although Bogard describes the increasing
presence of upcoming haptic technologies, such as touch screens and data
gloves, he argues that the ways in which these function is also literally relevant
Haptic technologies communicate through simulating the effect of direct

physical contact with immediate force feedback; engaging directly with the
body’s capacity for movement and affect. These are sometimes directly related
to fully manipulate and orchestrate a particular response within an already
discipline, they regulate and modulate through continuously variable pressure:
of the body’s optical environment the regulation of its tactile milieu.’

(Bogard 2007)
Yet, as Bogard notes, haptic affects are not restricted to touch, as optical effects
might be to the eye, but are distributed throughout the body across the senses
and skin; producing immersive embodied experiences. Haptics can, therefore,
also imply a more subtly extensive, elusive contact, which goes well beyond
any single sensory modality. This contact is ‘all over the place’, ‘everywhere
precisely encoded changes above might imply.
Individual subjectivities
Deleuze understands the ways in which control is implemented produces
a different paradigm of individual subjectivity from that established within
organised as discrete, signatured and surveillable entities, and then massed

together into large groups like audiences, in societies of control this is no
fragmented instead into, what Deleuze has called, ‘dividuals’ (Deleuze 1992:
5; Parr 2005: 54).
Within this paradigm, individuals become susceptible to control through

close-up, affective technologies; rather than by being passively, optically held
under observation. Through code and data, they become dismantled into sub-
individual parts, which are then continuously, smoothly modulated across both
public and private environments. There is a constant, coercive demand for
response and ‘communication’, which, as John Marks understands it, leaves
little room for any other form of creative production or resistance (Parr 2005: 54).
Bogard uses the analogy - which, he notes, hardly is an analogy since they
are both driven by code - of workable sound samples and audio parameters to
describe the effect:
‘Dividuation … is the internal division of entities into measurable

and adjustable parameters, in the way, for instance, a digital sound
sample is divided into separate parameters of tone, pitch, or velocity
. . . For audio engineers, these parameters, or “modules,” can be
setting is too high or low, the sound breaks up or becomes inaudible,

etc.). Each sound, in turn, can be divided into smaller samples that
are also subject to parametric control, and so on. Think of your body
composed of samples of vibrational information like these sounds,
whose parameters can be measured and used to generate tactile
feedback’. (Bogard 2007)
Working and ‘being worked’
Whereas the different structures of the disciplinary are analogous to one another
to be, a relation of modulation or variation. Within this, everything becomes a
writes that ‘ the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network’

(1992: 6). Within this paradigm, the individual both continuously works and
is continually worked, and the private and public realms become densely
intertwined. As Bogard notes, this has already become more evident in the
years since the ‘Postscript’ essay (Bogard 2007).
Whilst Deleuze sets out many of the ways in which control is used to shape
and coerce individuals, he also suggests - both directly and indirectly, by citing
Burroughs - that the techniques of control can also be used against control
(Deleuze 1992: 3).
William S. Burroughs tape cut-ups
Whilst I was not aware of Deleuze’s essay at that time, Burroughs’ use of
the conference, against which the other participant’s recording was diffused 12.
As the SI applications were being made, the playback of a Burrough’s LP was
also recollected (as an event rather than for any intrinsic recorded content).
The album, ‘Nothing Here Now but the Recordings’ (1981), I later discovered, is
made up of Burroughs’ early tape recording experiments mainly from the early
1960’s. These include cut-ups from conversations, news and TV and radio
broadcasts, and other treatments of recorded sounds, such as ‘re-recordings’
and echo effects 13.
Burroughs uses random procedures across the LP tracks; both in tape cut-ups
and in juxtapositions of different genres and techniques. Genesis P-Orridge,
form of these (P-Orridge 1981). Originally devised by Brion Gysin in 1959 in

relation to a variety of media, Burroughs, together with Gysin and Ian Somerville,
experimented with different tape recording and playback techniques alongside
electronic effects and cut-ups. These included ‘street recordings’ which used
both single and multiple recorders to produce playbacks across many different
contexts.
Street playbacks
In ‘Feedback from Watergate to the Garden of Eden’ (1970), part two of the
12 See Appendix 1, pp. 238-239.

13
tape experimentalist, Konstantin Raudive (P-Orridge 1981).
book ‘The Electronic Revolution’ (Burroughs 2005: 4), Burroughs describes the
relating recording playbacks to weapons of war and the problem of ‘control’. In

a contemporary interview with Dan Georgakas, Burroughs’ concludes:
‘What could be done with tape recorders is unlimited. You could

cause a riot easily. All you have to do is take the tape recorders with
goes on. It’s very simple, this staging of events with tape recorders.
The CIA and other agencies have been doing it for years. The CIA
was in Paris recording in the streets ten years ago. It’s as simple as
this: a recorded whistle will bring cops, a recorded gunshot when
they have their guns out...Well, it’s as simple as that.’ (Burroughs
n.d in Lotringer 2001: 152)
Recording experiments in this way turn the technologies of control back on

themselves (cf. Kittler 1999: 110-111). As Genesis P-Orridge writes, tape
recording can both operate control (e.g. by reproducing monologues and
‘linear, rigid structures’ of power) and - through an experimental ‘non-linear’,
radical decontextualization) (P-Orridge 1981). Burroughs formally exploits this

ambivalence; maintaining parts of the control structure (for example, using
effectively disrupt it (Burroughs 2005:18).
At the same time, Burroughs acknowledges the limitation of such works,

writing that ‘the control machine . . . never hesitates to engage in playback’
tape cut-ups, Burroughs still understands their democratic potential and power
to undermine systems of representation and individual habits of association:
‘any number can play anyone with a tape recorder controlling the
also Burroughs 2005:13)
‘Street recordings’ produced by ‘millions’ have the potential to drown out the
voices of the mass culture industry (Burroughs 2005: 13,18):
‘The basic operation of . . . playback can be carried out by anyone

with a recorder . . . Any number can play. Millions of people could
nullify the control system . . . Like all control systems it depends on
maintaining a monopoly position.’ (2005: 12)
Muzak and Control

Environmental recordings go from being described as a contiguous
‘soundtracking’ - with different recordings played back discretely in different
places (Frith 2002: 36) - to a seamless, continuous and immersive surrogate
environment. Steve Goodman directly relates Muzak’s corporate change from
‘stimulus progression’ to ‘quantum modulation’ to a ‘sonic microcosm of what
Deleuze has described as the shift from discipline to control’ (2010: 144).
‘Quantum modulation’ references the way in which the songs in Muzak’s

database are analyzed and used. These are divided into 45 individual categories;
including tempo, instrumentation, voice, mood, genre and era (Kushner
1998). This breakdown into parameters allows Muzak to be programmed to
produce and maintain an even affective intensity which, by smoothly moving
through successive song changes, gives the impression of changing whilst
remaining the same. In this way ‘quantum modulation’ works indirectly through
atmospheres and mood control, rather than by focusing on individual actions
(Goodman 2010: 144-145).
Public/ private
their movement out of enclosures, like workplaces and shops, into everyday
environments (Sumrell & Varnelis 2007). Muzak has become increasingly loud
and ‘foreground’; losing any obvious distinctiveness from individual or other
playbacks. In this way, background functional musics now form, what Jonathan
Sterne understands as, part of a densely fabricated public environment that
dovetails into private experiences of listening at home. Sterne describes the
way in which the public and the private become affectively implicated together:
‘In mass mediated societies, this process is part of an endless chain

in which the outside social world of recorded songs, mass mediated
images, and programmed spaces and schedules is folded into

that which is most inside and private: the substance of affect and
experience.’ (1997: 46).
In this way, a pop song, for example, becomes implicated with environmental
and personal contingencies to become ‘our song’ (Westerkamp 1988: 45). This
prolonged interweaving of the public and private allows the entire soundscape
to be understood in functional terms - like the ‘programmed spaces’ of Muzak
- and as part of an extensive, controllable ‘technological milieu’ (Franklin 1994:
1; Groom 1996: 8; Droumeva 2004: 2).
musics creates an unfocused and timeless ‘melting pot’ of sounds which,

however originally oppositional or loud, are able to be incorporated and
accommodated into any new environment (Westerkamp 1988: 45). Beyond
this, Muzak has also recently been relaunched as ‘audio architecture’14;
corporate production into other disciplinary areas (Lanza 2004: 2).
Westerkamp on ‘Muzak’
Recalling Deleuze’s serpentine account of control, above, or a tighter,
more regulated version of Benjamin’s ‘waves’ 15, Westerkamp also uses the
metaphor of a rhythmic motion of squeezing and release more explicitly in
relation to background environmental musics. She describes ‘Muzak’ as a
repeating undulating movement, which, as it produces a genre-less uniformity,
also conditions and regulates affect (1988: 40). Westerkamp writes that
and out of silence’, and ‘in and out of the ambiance’ as it works to produce
a mesmerizing, mirroring of mood which is experienced, docilely and at a
remove, as ‘undulations of emotions’ (1988: 44-45).
14 See p. 132, n. 41.

15 See p. 57.
43
5. Playbacks
Most of the work involved in Sonicinteractions (SI) concerned the production

of the recorder and player applications, whereas the actual recordings
which were made through these at the conference were largely contingent
on whatever else was happening. Although the recordings were structured
SI recorder. On the second day of the conference, one of the SI recordings

was selected and played back (using a generic audio player) against my own
spoken presentation. The recording was modulated against the ‘Soft Machine’
text, which discussed some of the concepts of the piece 16.
The SI recorder application was only used once at the Sonic Interactions
recordings made with it. The SI player, however, was more intensively developed
as a standalone application and later re-used in the installation “Dense Boogie”
(2011) 17. At the time of the conference, the player was intended to implicate
The content of the SI recordings, and any future playbacks, was contingent
initially on the conference presentations, and then later on these possible private
playbacks. Although the recordings produced at Sonic Interactions might seem
other recording playbacks made elsewhere; and were mainly structured around
their circumscribed, ‘absolute’ forms. These included recordings produced for
testing purposes during the SI’s development; the further diffusions of the other
participants own recordings during the conference; and the future playbacks of
16 See Appendix 1, pp. 238-239.

17 See p. 117.
the standalone player.
These are mainly relevant to the dynamic changes and the wave-like form
of the core algorithm, but also relate to SI’s focus on recording playback as
such, rather than on any intrinsic recorded content. Both of the recorded works
discussed below - ‘For Ann (rising)’ (Tenney 1969) and ‘Kits Beach Soundwalk’
around the time of SI’s production.
They each make use parametric modulation and by doing so, either directly or
indirectly, implicate or sometimes appropriate other real-world and mediated
sounds.
Sonicinteractions recordings
Background
had continued to make of electroacoustic and other recorded works and

performances using generic software recorders. These recordings were often
context in which they were made (cf. Burroughs’ street recordings). Like the
SI recordings, they were also often recorded from within an audience, with the
permission of the performers, (unlike bootlegs, for example) 18.
Sonicinteractions Recordings
At the Sonic Interactions conference, recordings were made using the SI
recorder of Alejandro Viñao, Aki Pasoulas, Chris Halliwell, Simon Zagourski-
Thomas, Li Chuan Chong, Lawrence Casserley, Lukas Pearce, Dominic
Murcott, Oliver Bown, (Thomas Gardner 19), and Sebastian Lexer 20. Each
participant’s presentation was recorded separately, following the structure
18 E.g. ‘Improvised recordings’ at ‘Interlace’ performance 02.10.04 Great Hall, Goldsmiths,

University of London (Sean Baxter, David Brown, Anthony Pateras, Natasha Anderson, Ross
Lambert, John Lely, Sebastian Lexer, Eddie Prevost, Seymour Wright). See DVD I: Tracks 1-4;
DVD II: Sonicinteractions/Audio_other/Interlace.
19 This recording failed.
20 See DVD II : Sonicinteractions/Audio_conference.
of the conference, and was straightforward to individually attribute using the

schedule (Sonic Interactions Website 2013).
The SI recording of the composer Lawrence Casserley’s presentation 21 was

chosen to be played back on the following day during my own presentation;
mainly because it included recording playbacks itself. This was diffused against
my own text on day 2 from the original playback position and site. Because
some of the audience attended the conference on both days, the playback also
had the potential be recognised as an appropriation 22.
As a recording playback, the SI Casserley recording might be experienced

as a redundant one: because it merely repeats a previous presentation and
recording, both in terms of its content and location. On the other hand, because
of the modulation the SI recordings are not properly archival audio documents
(Auslander 2006: 1). At the conference, as the recorded sound dropped off, the
sound of my talk and the absolute silence of the Small Hall was heard. As the
volume picked up, the recording became increasingly monologue, drowning
out further sounds. In this way, random parts of sentences and noises, like cut-
ups, were heard together with the sound of automation and modulation.
Other Playbacks
‘For Ann (rising)’ and ‘Kits Beach Soundwalk’ were both played back in a
institutional space 23 close to where the Sonic Interactions conference took
place, and around the same time as the SI applications were being developed.
Although both works clearly foreground - either completely or in brief - the
modulation of a narrow audio parameter, each produces a quite different
development of the SI applications and performance. The use of modulation in

both works brought attention to the low environmental sounds of the listening
space and silent audience together with an intense, even mesmerising,
experience of a recording playback.
21 DVD I: Track 5 (extract). Also DVD II: Sonicinteractions/Audio_conference/
Lawrence_Casserley_Presentation (full).
22
as ‘the copy of a copy’, without totally conforming to this (by being reproduced in the same
playback context).
23 DVD I: Track 6.
‘For Ann (rising)’ (James Tenney 1969)
‘For Ann (rising)’ is arranged around a classic auditory illusion, known as a

‘Shepard tone’, named after a colleague of Tenney’s 24. The piece produces
a smooth succession of constantly rising glissandi played back a tritone
apart. The individual glissandi are faded in and out imperceptibly, so that ‘For
Ann (rising)’ has been described as an auditory equivalent of M.C. Escher’s
the production of a Shepard tone - is established completely at the start, and

then continues throughout the piece. As Tenney relates, there is no clear, or
non-arbitrary, start to ‘For Ann (rising)’ which could also potentially continue
homogenous’ (Tenney 1983: 14), whilst the oscillation, or algorithm, passes
hand, in ‘For Ann (rising)’ there is nothing to listen to - because the process,
which continues unchanged throughout the piece, is made clear from the start
- on the other, there is a freeing of perception and attention which Tenney
understands as a main focus of his work. Describing his music as ‘sound for
the sake of perceptual insight - some kind of perceptual revelation’ (Tenney
1978), Tenney links such ergodic forms to the development of a change in
listening, which:
ironic that it is an attitude which most people are able to adopt quite
easily in situations outside the usual realm of “art” (e.g. the sounds
of a forest).’ (1983:14)
‘Kits Beach Soundwalk’ (Hildegard Westerkamp 1989)

‘Kits Beach Soundwalk’ is more overtly related to issues of environmental
recorded sound than Tenney’s piece above. The work is part of a genre of
concerns of acoustic ecology (Westerkamp 2002: 51). One of the main aims
awareness’ in relation to an ‘overloaded sound world’ (2002: 52). This aim is
24 Roger Shepard.
out, actual levels of urban noise.
In the work, Westerkamp situates the volume parameter amongst a smoothly
a recording of ‘Concret PH’ (Iannis Xenakis 1958), which unfold over nearly
10 minutes. Her own voice is often foregrounded as she narrates the piece,
talking the listener through each of the sounds. As she does so, she details and
suggests different forms of reception: from real-world and recorded sounds, to
those drawn from imagination and dreams.
After an introduction of relatively untreated ambient sound, Westerkamp talks

the listener through a series of shifts in sound levels which, to some extent,
prepares them for the composer’s more intensive parameteric interventions
later in the piece:
is this loud. (INCREASE LEVELS) But it is more like this. (LOWER

LEVELS AGAIN) The view is beautiful in fact, it is spectacular. So the
sound level seems more like this. (LOWER LEVELS FURTHER) It
doesn’t seem that loud. But I’m trying to listen to those tiny sounds in
more detail now. Suddenly the background sound of the city seems
louder again.” (INCREASE LEVELS)’ (transcribed in McCartney
1999: 290)
Setting the intimate and ‘tiny’ sounds of the water and barnacles against the
loud and interfering noises of the city, Westerkamp describes the city noises
acoustic space’; preventing her from properly or comfortably listening to the

quieter sounds. Against the effort required to do this, Westerkamp proposes
of the piece.
Modulation and the mass mediascape
Westerkamp
Westerkamp also situates soundscape compositions, like ‘Kits Beach

Soundwalk’, as a forceful counter-strategy against functional and commercial
recorded sound. She describes the way in which these can be used as ‘talk
backs’ (McCartney 1999: 417), which, despite their schizophonic 25 status,
are capable of reorienting the listener towards their own environment. In ‘Kits
Beach Soundwalk’, Westerkamp relates the use of audio parameters, as ways
even to ‘face the monster’ of corporate
and regulatory environmental noise (Kolber 2002: 42).
Yet, unlike Burroughs, for example, Westerkamp understands the task of the
composer is to interpret, clarify and re-establish essential and meaningful
relationships between individual and location in order to recover a sense of
and a carefully selected further recording (of Xenakis), as a series of personal
and mass media. In this way, soundscape composition is able to reinvigorate

a keen awareness of the sonic environment, and precisely oppose and
‘speak back’ to the strategic, corporate use of background recordings which
deliberately promote disorientation and distraction for solely commercial
purposes (Westerkamp 2002: 52).
Burroughs
Burroughs’ tape recording experiments are relevant here as well, because, to

an extent like Westerkamp, Burroughs also modulates recordings against both
the ‘monster’ of control (Deleuze 1992: 4) and real-world noises. However,
real-world sounds but to undermine these: whether as linear monologues

or as guarantors of any single reality. Paul Hegarty writes that Burroughs
tape recordings are produced, instead, in a critical, responsive relation to
environmental other sounds:
‘ . . . tape recordings, or more accurately, tape and tape recorders,

25 See p. 85.
can react to new settings and events. Burroughs recommends

directing public events through near-subliminal juxtaposition of, say,
political speeches and the sounds of animals or riots. The key to this
is not just to multiply sound sources and confuse a gathering, but to
cut different recordings in order that new meanings and imperatives
can be heard.’ (2007: 5)
Like ‘Kits Beach Soundwalk’, above, Burroughs’ recordings also sometimes

appropriate further mediated sounds. However, Burroughs does not then
relate these to an individual expression or, as Hegarty writes above, use them
to produce an only formal proliferation and confusion. Instead, random and
These different sonic instances then become juxtaposed in what Davis

Schneiderman has called a ‘double resonance’ that ultimately exceeds any
individual intention or association (2004: 146).
Part of what Burroughs achieves is through a repetition that no longer repeats an

existing recorded or real-world sound, as such, but by means of that repetition
changes it. This is produced through a recontextualization which is also listened
to alongside any recording, which therefore becomes differentiated from the
original 26. Burroughs, in this way, further demonstrates the potential of using
the strategies of control against control 27. Even, or especially, where originally
oppositional recordings (e.g. rock music and tape cut-ups) have become
absorbed and co-opted by the system, he argues, the uniformity and repetition
of mass media allows small, mundane differences of context and reception to
28
.
Tenney
Although ‘For Ann (rising)’ perhaps sounds the most autonomous, and least
environmental, of the recordings described here, Tenney’s use of modulation
26 Cf. Julian Henriques on repetition (Henriques 2010: 77-78).

27 Cf. ‘There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.’ (Deleuze
1992: 4).
28 E.g. ‘You will notice that this process is continually subject to random juxtaposition.
Just what sign did you see in the Green Park station as you glanced up from the PEOPLE?
Just who called as you were reading your letter in the TIMES? What were you reading when
your wife broke a dish in the kitchen?’ (Burroughs 2005:14).
thesis as bridges 29, or transductions 30, between different categories of sound

31
. Larry Polansky, writing on Tenney’s works, notes that the modulation of
parametric changes, as such, had been regarded as a widely compelling form
in music:
‘Composers (and listeners) have been fascinated by such works,

and have experimented both with the concepts of apparent change
parametric axis.’ (2003: 11)

Polansky adds that the Shepherd tone itself was already closely associated
with the work of the composer Jean-Claude Risset.
works and composers can be partly traced to the way in which, as Tenney
himself writes, the act of modulation itself seems to insinuate, or appropriate,
other sonic forms.
Many of Tenney’s works, like ‘For Ann (rising)’, repeatedly make use of
algorithms which explore limited parameters of sound in quasi-natural, wave-
like forms (Polansky 1983: 126). Relating them more broadly to contemporary
technologies, such as tape splicing and digital code, Tenney understands
such forms as able to perform transitions and connections, across extremes
of cultures and sonic categories, to produce a smooth ‘continuum’ of sound
(Kahn 1999: 8).
Such works also clearly perform, and make perceptible, the operation of
modulation: producing both constant variation (difference) and connectivity.
These sonic continuums are not then fully enclosed or resolved but remain
‘palpably’ open and accessible to a listener. Tenney describes ‘For Ann
(rising)’ like an intensely machined version of ambient 32. The work produces
a mesmerising effect in which the listener is able to both wander about and to
apply intermittent, individual, close-up attention:
29 Cf. ‘It is a temperamental thing of mine. I like to make those bridges, those connections.’
(Tenney quoted in Kahn 1999 :1).
30 Adrian Mackenzie describes transduction, following Gilbert Simondon, as a ‘resonance
and coupling between diverse realities’ (Mackenzie 2002: 13).
31
32 ‘Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention
without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.’ (Eno 1978).
‘A wonderful thing happens in For Ann (rising). So little seems to be

happening, yet there is continual change, partly because it appears
to be in some way completely predictable, right? The mind starts
moving around in the sound in an extremely interesting way, and
everyone is taking a different path through it. You can just sit there
you can actually focus your hearing and cause yourself to change
your focus within the texture.’ (Tenney in Kahn 1999: 7)
connects both to familiar experiences of private listening and to well-known

experimental works such as John Cage’s ‘Imaginary Landscape No. 4’ (1953),
conference, the SI applications might also be conceived of themselves as

appropriations of existing works, like Tenney’s and Cage’s above. At the same
time, through the action of modulation, SI does not then only repeat these, but
moves on to implicate and appropriate further recorded and environmental
sounds.
52
6. Haptic Reception
‘It is said that composers do not hear: they have close-range hearing,
whereas listeners hear from a distance’. (D&G 1988: 493)
Description of Sonicinteractions Player v2 (2011)

Sonicinteractions v2 33 is the 2011 version of the standalone player that was
substantially developed at the time of the Sonic Interactions conference in
2005. Both versions of the player were compiled in Max 34. The 2011 update
altered the graphics of the player to include a Sonic Interactions logo 35 that was
part of the original conference typography. Since they are nearly functionally
identical, the more recent version is described here.
Sonicinteractions v2 is made up of two main windows (‘Shell’ and ‘Operator’)

which open on the program start up and remain on top. Three user selectable
windows (‘About Sonicinteractions; ‘ReadMe; ‘ScreenShot’) provide further
the audio button in the ‘Operator’ window is on, played back by clicking on and
36
.
The Sonicinteractions (SI) applications produce, what is intended to be,

an automated version of an individual listener’s ‘dial twiddling’ (Gould
33
34 In Max/Msp 4.5 and Max 5 for the Macintosh PowerPC; compatible with Mac OS X to
version 10.6 (‘Snow Leopard’).
35 © Goldsmiths, University of London.
36 The user is warned that this potentially produces an extreme range of volumes: from
silent to very loud. It is also important to note that any silence at the start of a playback is not
a malfunction.
1988: 347) at home 37. The gain levels of any recording made or played
through them are constantly variably adjusted by the algorithm. This
produces a restless and fragmentary experience of recorded sound, which
is clearly heard together with any playback context. Whilst this might
already be the case in a less formal playback situation, such a reception
is more unusual within the absolute, disciplinary context of a conference.
SI sometimes reproduces, across the extremes of the algorithm, the effect

of either an individual ‘taking control’ of, or of themselves being controlled by
recorded sound (e.g. where this is a loud monologue). Whilst this also situates
SI in relation to the ‘monster’ of control, discussed previously, I am more
interested in the tactile involvement of a listener, in relation to a background of
recorded sound, as producing something less delineated and purposeful.
playback, in the essay ‘The Prospects of Recording’ (1966), and expanded

by further discourses which connect haptic epistemologies and accounts of
reception more broadly to mass media and to technological modernity. These
are drawn from Walter Benjamin, Marshall Mcluhan, and Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari (D&G), all of whom describe ‘distracted’ and tactile modes of
reception emerging in relation to haptic spaces (‘acoustic’; ‘nomad’; ‘smooth’).
imply rather than on the spaces themselves, which are discussed more fully in
Glenn Gould: participation

Gould’s essay describes the contemporary emergence of a listener who is
a participant and ‘associate’ in the production of music; rather than only a
passive recipient. He depicts a listener at home who effectively co-produces
the recorded work by physically engaging with the knobs and dials of the
playback equipment. Although Gould describes the on/off buttons, and
volume controls, as ‘primitive’ and ‘regulatory’, providing only weak and limited
interactions, Gould, nevertheless, anticipates and connects these to extended
possibilities of participation 38
37 Although it is clear that this is no longer necessarily a dial.
38 Cf. Nicolas Bourriard’s contemporary linking of the consumer’s remote control to
achievement of the recording industry’; understanding that it would ultimately

efface any differences between composer and listener (Gould 1988: 347).
The evolution of this is traced, paradoxically, to the disciplinary scene - which

Gould relates to all mediated sound - of ‘an audience of unprecedented
numbers’ in fact being ‘a limitless number of private auditions’ 39. These private
interactions with recorded sound then produce, what Gould understands to be,
a heightened expression of subjectivity in which, through modulation, personal
tastes and preferences, however marginally, then alter the experience of a
recording. Gould adds that as the listener adjusts the equipment: ‘he transforms
that work, and his relation to it, from an artistic to an environmental experience’
(1988: 347).
Gould describes a listener who, through tape splicing and collage, is able to
to, what Gould understands, as the ‘complicated gestation’ already implicit

in all recorded music, and which renders any one ‘horizontal’ (historical or
biographical, for example) approach to recording pointless and inappropriate
(Gould 1988: 343). Such a linear, or straightforwardly genealogical, depiction
through the juxtapositions and simultaneous playbacks of mediated sounds of

Mcluhan’s ‘“global village”’(1988: 349).
The development of the ‘listener-consumer-participant’ is then connected to

background recorded musics, as such (1988: 350). Gould writes that Muzak
makes extensive use of melodies from the entire repertoire of music, which, as
background musics, are then indiscriminately cross-referenced and blended
together, in a more conscious and deliberate manifestation of the ‘global
village’ above. This proliferates and naturalizes a succession of voices and
genres to produce a situation which, Gould argues, erases earlier modes of
reception (1988: 340). These become ‘absorbed’ through an omnipresent,
environmental ‘Muzak’, rather than more directly understood (1988: 350-1) 40.
Gould further argues that - because environmental musics minimize and make
considerations of genre, chronology or individual artistic production irrelevant -
(Bourriard 2005: 39).

39 Cf. panopticon (Foucault 1995).
40 Cf. Benjamin pp. 55-57.
the listener is able to treat each playback as part of an extensive environment

of recorded sound, in which they themselves have now become implicated:
‘ . . . all the music that has ever been can now become a background
against which the impulse to make listener-supplied connections is
the new foreground’. (1988: 350)
The neutrality and unobtrusiveness of background musics provides, what

Gould then understands to be, a ‘becoming-environmental’ of music in which
music becomes an indistinguishable part of everyday life, available to all.
Through tactile reception, and modulation, the audience starts to appropriate
and interact with recorded sounds, and therefore actively participate in and
respond to their wider environment. This produces, what Gould optimistically
art and life - so that ultimately:
‘The audience would be the artist and their life would be art’ (1988:
353)
Walter Benjamin: distraction and close-up
(Benjamin 2008). In the essay, Benjamin relates new forms of audio-visual
art works in general, which at the same time, Benjamin argues, has altered the
quality and ‘mode’ of that participation (2008: 39). Benjamin cites contemporary
criticisms of mass participation 41 - in terms of their ‘distraction’ and opposition
to classic forms of contemplative reception - in the essay, before developing a
Relating such new modes of reception to existing, mundane experiences of

architecture, Benjamin argues that architecture provides a prototype for the
former; because it is an art work which is experienced daily and collectively,
in a ‘state of distraction’ (2008: 40). He describes the way in which everyday
architectures - against those encountered as a spectacle by a tourist - are
41 Cf. acoustic ecology pp. 32-34.

appropriated indirectly and through tactile means; rather than visually at a

distance or through focused concentration:
‘On the tactile side there is no counterpart to what contemplation is

on the optical side. Tactile reception comes about not so much by
way of attention as by way of habit. The latter largely determines
even the optical reception of architecture, which spontaneously
takes the form of casual rather than attentive observation.’ (2008:
40)
described, and again in Mcluhan and D&G below, as operating across a range
of senses that include the optical, rather than being restricted to actual touch.
At the same time, Benjamin adds, there is no tactile version of contemplation,
placing it in ‘polar’ opposition to distraction:
‘Distraction and concentration form an antithesis which may be

stated as follows. A person who concentrates before a work of art is
absorbed by it; he enters into the work … By contrast, the distracted
masses absorb the work of art into themselves. ‘ (2008: 40)
Benjamin understands this changing epistemology to have been produced in

response to the serial ‘shock effects’ of technological modernity that would
otherwise be impossible to absorb. Rather than being directly confronted or
contemplated, he argues, such changes are instead gradually and obliquely
‘mastered’ and absorbed through repetition and habit (2008: 40, 53).
This is also partly suggested, in the Artwork essay, by Benjamin’s description
phonography and radio, he relates this effect to both to their status as copies
and reproductions - which are therefore able to be returned to and repeated
- and to their portability; enabling them to be experienced by the individual as
part of the everyday, at home (2008: 37).
details, which would otherwise be unnoticeable, become isolated and

accessible to analysis (2008: 37). Benjamin understands that the medium in
this way, through splice, close-up and repeatability, simultaneously encourages
immediate, critical assessments together with a relaxed, wandering inattention.
In each of these ways Benjamin understands distraction, as a gradual,

enabling them to absorb art works into themselves, rather than entering into
them and being absorbed. The audience instead obliquely appropriates and
assimilates the work through incidental close encounter and repeated exposure
(like waves):
‘Their waves lap around it; they encompass it with their tide’ (2008:
40)
Marshall Mcluhan: ‘Acoustic Space’

The concept of ‘acoustic space’ is developed across a number of Mcluhan’s
writings 42, where he relates it to electronic mass media and the changes in
perception that he argues these have produced. Mcluhan places acoustic
space dialectically opposite to visual space, describing their differences in a
series of oppositions. Visual space is Euclidean and reliant on vision alone; it
is experienced as enclosed, stable, continuous, regular and measurable. In
contrast, acoustic space is ‘boundless, directionless, horizonless’ (Mcluhan
1970: 13); it is produced by an ‘audile-tactile’ interplay of all the senses
(Mcluhan 2011: 62), and experienced in terms of simultaneity and discontinuity,
resonance or rhythmic interval.
Mcluhan’s interest in spatial theories was developed alongside a number
independent of visual space, produced through distinct modes of perception

(see Cavell 2003: 20-23). Edmund Carpenter’s work on Inuit perception
providing a way for Mcluhan to relate new forms of electronic media directly
to acoustic rather than visual space, and to changing modes of perception.
In ‘Space Concepts of the Aivilik Eskimos’ (1955), for example, Carpenter

evidenced that perceptions of space were socially and culturally constructed,
rather than universal or essential features. He wrote that in the arctic:
‘There is no middle distance, no perspective, no outline, nothing

the eye can cling to except thousands of smoky plumes of snow
running along the ground before the wind - a land without bottom or
42 Examples include Mcluhan 1969; 1970; 1988; 2011. Mcluhan & Powers 1989;
Mcluhan & Fiore 1996; Mcluhan in Mcluhan & Zigrone 1995: 38.
edge ... when travelling by boat along the coastline in a heavy fog, a
navigator relies on the sound of waves arid the direction of the wind.
Without seeing light or land, and without any stars, he is still able to
the surf.’ (Carpenter 1955)
The analogies between experiences of an arctic landscape and the mass

mediascape, which Mcluhan then makes, are developed in the paper ‘Acoustic
Space’, co-written with Carpenter (Carpenter & Mcluhan 1970: 65-70). After
relating preliterate and ‘Eskimo’ perception to the transition in perception
produced by mass media, they describe acoustic, or auditory, space in detail:
‘Auditory space has no point of favored focus. It’s a sphere without
the thing. It is not pictorial space, boxed in, but dynamic, always in
pinpoints, abstracts, locating each object in physical space, against

a background; the ear, however, favours sound from any direction’.
(1970: 67)
Mcluhan describes the tactile, or audile-tactile, qualities, which are produced

in relation to such environments, as multi-sensory; distributed amongst the
senses like other haptic accounts of reception (Mcluhan 1969: 5). Tactile
awareness is produced instantly and simultaneously with events: ‘not . . . by
and breakings of contacts’ (Ivins in Cavell 2003: 57). Acoustic space brushes
up against the subject ‘close up’ and produces a constant sense of surprise
or ‘shock’; producing a sensitive and responsive alertness to the variations
and intervals between things (2003: 214). The discontinuities, Mcluhan adds,
produce a participatory effect; unlike visual spaces which, by ‘having everything
covered’, exclude this potential (2003: 122). The viewer or listener is, therefore,
able to become actively involved with production.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: haptic, ‘nomad’ or ‘smooth’ space

In ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ (1988), D&G also develop a concept of haptic space,
which they otherwise call ‘smooth space’ or ‘nomad space’ (1988: 474), and
similarly link to close-range perception. Like Mcluhan, they oppose ‘close
vision - haptic space’, which operates across all of the senses, to optical,
‘striated’ space (1988: 492). D&G also associate haptic expressions of space
and perception with nomadic locations and forms of engagement; using the
terms ‘nomad’ and ‘nomadic’ across the book and relating them, both literally
and metaphorically, to nomadic geographies, lifestyles and practices, warfare,
politics, philosophy, art and music etc.
It is worth quoting a passage from Chapter 14 ‘1440: The Smooth and the
Striated’ in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ at length here, where D&G explain the
differences between haptic and optic modes of perception:
‘ . . . it is said that composers do not hear: they have close-range
of the haptic, smooth space of close vision is that its orientations,

landmarks and linkages are in continuous variation; it operates
step by step. Examples are the desert, steppe, ice, and sea, local
spaces of pure connection. Contrary to what is sometimes said,
one never sees at a distance in a space of this kind, nor does one
see it from a distance; one is never “in front of,” any more than
one is “in” (one is “on”...). Orientations are not constant but change
according to temporary vegetation, occupations and precipitation.
There is no visual model for points of reference that would make
them interchangeable and unite them in an inertial class assignable
to an immobile outside observer. On the contrary, they are tied
but are instead nomads entertaining tactile relations among

themselves. The interlinkages do not imply an ambient space in
which the multiplicity would be immersed and which would make
distances invariant; rather they are constituted according to ordered
differences that give rise to intrinsic variations in the division of a
single distance.’ (1988: 493)
D&G expand ‘smooth’ spaces to include places like the desert and sea, describing
acoustic space above, by Carpenter’s depictions of Inuit perception (1988: 494,

574 n.28) 43. Following Carpenter, they stress the nomads’ indifference to visual
information, such as astronomy, developing instead, what D&G understand to
be, ‘a whole minor science of qualitative variables and traces’ (1988: 557 n.56).
In haptic space everything is experienced, outside any proper perspective in
43 D&G also cite: ‘There is no middle distance . . . ’. See pp. 57-58.

a mode of constant and close-up variation 44. Details, and small or temporary,
differences become important and are tested and sifted through on the ground.
Orientation is gradual and conditioned on marginal, close-up differences rather
479).
Because a smooth terrain itself is in a state of drift, any tracks made through it
are transiently produced on the surface as the subject moves across it, quickly
becoming covered again (1988: 381-2). For this reason, the subject responds
to smooth space with constantly changing assessments and evaluations of its
qualities and symptoms. In this way, any nomadic subjectivity is made (and
erased) simultaneously with any immediate environmental moves that the
subject makes; rather than being essential, prior or externally caused.
The distinction that D&G make between the listener and composer can also
be related to the other accounts above. D&G place the listener’s reception
at a distance against a composer’s haptic, close-up engagement, which they
argue is no longer hearing as such. Gould similarly predicates the transition
from listener to composer on a tactile contact with a haptic, smooth space of
tactile appropriation of Benjamin’s ‘reception in distraction’ together with his

depiction of the audience as an ‘absent minded’ examiner, in the face of mass
media (Benjamin 1977: 243 45) is also like the nomads’ drifting evaluation.
44 Cf. modulation.
45
61
7. Conclusion
‘ . . . took over bars cafes and jukeboxes of the world cities and
installed radio transmitters and microphones in each bar so that the
music and talk of any bar could be heard in all his bars and he had
tape recorders in each bar that played and recorded at arbitrary
intervals . . . so he set waves and eddies and tornadoes of sound
down all your streets.’ (Burroughs 2010-2: 240)
to modulation itself, so that everything is taken up within this

modulation of modulation.’ (Murphie in Massumi 2005: 191)
Volume
The dynamic changes in SI are experienced in terms of a continuous variation,
rather than as stable effects. Various states rapidly follow on from each other
and pass through different intensities and thresholds to produce, what Tenney
has called, ‘sonic continuums’ of both volume and sound. The algorithm moves
from nearly silent, through average to loud levels, and between different
categories of recorded and background ambient sounds.
The repeating operation of modulation produces a further lack of differentiation

between different instances of recording that also makes the beginning
and end of a recording less clear. Because any silence that SI produces is
‘environment’. During playback, the point at which a recorded sound starts or

46
.
One of the effects of volume modulation is to implicate the sounds of the

playback site alongside any recorded sound. In this way SI formally reveals
46 Cf. ‘the skin of the recording’ (Appendix 1, p. 238).
an environmental depiction of recording, in which recorded sounds are not

only exclusively listened to. If the volume levels are low, or drop out, in the
played back in, become a tangible part of the experience of a recording.

Recorded and real-world sounds are both integrated together - into a ‘smooth
space’ - and fragmented into parts. At the same time, SI exhausts absolute
accounts of recorded sound by making such modes of listening impossible.
Modulation
Sonicinteractions (SI) attempts to foreground the operation of modulation as
the individual instances and content of modulation are contingent and random,
the effect of modulation itself is clearly heard. None of the recordings that
of a complete or repeatable new work. Nor is SI interested in the absolute
sounds happening there 47.
Discipline/control
SI produces an experience of environmental recorded sound within a disciplinary

setting, whilst also evidencing this disciplinary structure. Because the recorded
content of SI is drawn entirely from the Sonic Interactions conference, the
recordings also confront the conditions of their own production there (cf.
‘talkbacks’). The SI algorithm disrupts the sonic organization of the conference
by fragmenting any concentrated or total experience of recorded sound in it.
This happens both by appropriating a further participant’s recording and by
background can now also be heard.
In this way different disciplinary structures also become parameterized and

modulated through SI; producing a continuum between disciplinary and control
of the disciplinary. At the same time, the modulation produces a haptic and
47 Cf. ‘ . . . to consider music (and by extension, artistic process) not as a produced
LaBelle, Sato & Wollscheid 2002: 3).

environmental experience of, what might otherwise be realised as, a series of

discrete and autonomous forms (recording; room noise; audience; speaker etc.).
The disciplinary situation also provides a concentrated context in which

recorded sound, as such, can also be listened to, not only in terms of discipline,
but also as modulation or control. The individual’s core private parameter of
volume is singled out and played back against the convention of an audience’s
silent, absolute reception of sound. In this way the silence of the audience
can be tangibly heard as a participation and production itself in relation to the
dynamic levels of the recording. At the same time, as the algorithm passes
through a range of volumes it reveals a range of auditory modes: from close-
up, haptic to distant and perspectival.
Whilst SI is modelled on the individual listener’s paradigmatic control, it also

reveals a careless, supple automation. This evidently has the capacity to
territoralize, deterritoralize and reterritoralize sounds, and as it does so, to
produce different subjectivities and behaviours 48. The algorithm simulates
both an individual tactile, restless, explorative reception and - as it relentlessly,
automatically changes tack and covers ground - a more sinister, alien probing.
Private/public
A main concern of SI has been to implicate, through modulation, the private

and public, home and work, working and ‘being worked’, and production and
reception, together. The convergence between the private and the public
has been found to be one of control’s most troubling effects; expressed in
terms of a radical constriction and curtailment of free or open space. This
has been evidenced here in the different accounts produced by Deleuze and
Bogard, Burroughs, and most tangibly expressed in criticisms of functional and
environmental musics by theorists such as Westerkamp.
Gould, as an emergence of the individual home listener as composer precisely

in relation to a mass of environmental recorded sounds; and upon ‘whose fuller
participation’, repeating Gould’s argument, ‘the future of the art of music waits’
48
an observer, is, precisely, that he make less noise than the noise transmitted by the object
observed. If he gives off more noise, it obliterates the object, covers it or hides it.’ (Serres
1995: 61).
(1988: 347). In this way, the ‘primitive’ modulation of volume becomes related
to haptic receptions (distracted; tactile; audile-tactile; nomadic) and spaces
(acoustic; nomad; smooth).
The different public and private, recorder and player aspects of the SI
application and contexts; the automation of the gain parameter connecting
absolute to distracted modes of listening; the appropriation of other peoples’
private; working together towards, what is understood here as, a ‘smooth’

space.
Environmental music
Environmental music - not so much a genre, as a proliferation of recording

playbacks and a mode of reception which involves all recorded sound - has
become conceived of as an everyday, everywhere ambient, which unavoidably
permeates across environments and individuals. Instead of thinking of this as
every part of life - Deleuze’s ‘coils of the serpent’- absorbing every particular
and individual as it despoils the environment, alternative characterisations
of environmental musics consider their creative, resistant potential to move
across and disorder hierarchies and boundaries, which have themselves been
Kassabian 2001: 4).
Today, a more extensive situation of ‘reception in distraction’ has been made

possible, through code and the miniaturisation of technologies, which has
also allowed more tangibly interactive points of access and participation.
Unauthorised, alternative expressions of environmental music have provided,
what has been described as, ‘a necessary critique of control in its purest
form to date’ (Bailey 2011), which points to control’s ambiguous operation.
However, instead of arguing here for a ‘power user’ who adopts and replicates
strategies of control 49, or for a listener-composer who only exchanges one
clearly circumscribed subjectivity for another, SI focuses on the way in which
such subjectivities are only transiently produced alongside haptic, smooth and
acoustic spaces.
49 Cf. Stevenson 2007: 16.
The ‘white noise’ mediascape of environmental recorded sound and the

wandering inattention that acoustic ecologists, amongst many others, want to
The
‘downtown’
(1994: 43) can be alternatively constructed as the close-up, haptic reception
of D&G’s composer above; now democratized. In close-up, new linkages and
connections are made amongst themselves, apart from any directive or stable
orientation from elsewhere. This is also expressed by Gould in the listener-
composer transition, and ultimately in the ‘becoming environmental’ of music;
‘ . . . articulate something Natural . . .’ 50
At the same time as SI repeats the sweeping, exploratory surveillance of

control, and the ‘program of haptics’ . . . to ‘ simulate the body’s feelings of
manipulating objects in the real world’ (Bogard 2007), it also cuts up and
contingently relates together recorded and environmental sounds. Charles A.
Baldwin, writing on John Cage’s ‘Imaginary Landscape No. 4’ (1951), relates
the continuousness and apparent autonomy of functional mediated sound
itself - ‘radio is always on, though no one’s listening’ - to the potential of tuning
as the ‘cut-up of programming’ (Baldwin 1996).
Whilst random modulation cuts-up monologues and regularised categories

of sound, it also produces new connections transiently out of these. The
contingent relations that the modulation of mediated sounds make, in this way,
become a critical part of their effect. Much of this potential - like in Burroughs’
cut-ups - emerges outside of any individual authorial intention (Hegarty 2007).
Aleatory music has also been more directly related to a haptic sensibility,
in something close to modulation, which is no longer focused on individual
skills, associations or tastes. Tenney, for example, relates the ‘palpable’
perceptibility of ergodic works such as ‘For Ann (rising)’ to the degree of
ranges’ (Polansky 2003). Cage, borrowing from Mcluhan, understands the

‘no work’ of aleatory composition in terms of a sensitive, tactile connectivity
produced through the random mutual conditioning of ‘information brushing
50 Hans Haacke Untitled Statement (1965) (Selz 1966:37). See Appendix 1, p. 239, n.3.
against information’ (Cage in Kostelantz 2003: 232).
As environmental mediated sounds become increasingly pervasive, reception

can also start to be understood in terms of modulation: a variable tuning
into and out of a continuously available sound; rather than only in terms of
enclosure or immersion (cf. D&G 1988: 493). Recordings are then experienced,
like real-world environmental sounds, mundanely and habitually rather than
only exclusively. In haptic accounts of reception, the habits of individuals and
contingencies of environments become implicated in any sonic production.
The necessary relaxation and freedom of movement and affect that haptic
reception implies also suggest that it impossible for control to be applied in any
direct or straightforwardly productive way 51.
Bogard explains this in relation to technologies of control, which he initially

describes as acting as enclosures which impoverish and ‘block the number of
connections a body can make and decrease its capacity to be affected’ (Bogard
2007). At the same time, Bogard argues, these technologies only simulate and
modulate tactility and haptic space. They are not able to control tactility and
affect, no digitalized thresholds of tactility’. Instead, following Deleuze, Bogard

understands these produce a ‘becoming different’ in which:
controlled modulation.’ (Bogard 2007)
Waves
The wave-like sound of modulation can be absorbing to listen to. This might be
interpreted, following Jacques Attali (1985: 6), as the fascination of listening to
power. In this case, the mesmerising impingement of control as it relentlessly
Adorno in Frith 2002: 38).
Yet this fascination, I would argue, is produced by the rhythmic way in which
modulation repeatedly territoralizes and deterritoralizes different categories of
sounds, and produces transient sonic continuums, rather than by any sonic
content as such. The pattern of compulsory contraction and release that
Deleuze locates at the heart of control also potentially produces something in
51 Cf. ‘Muzak claimed to make workers more useful, shoppers less penurious, chickens
lay more eggs and mango trees produce more mangoes’. (Lanza 1991: 44).
excess of this which is resonant and participatory. Mcluhan’s original statement

concludes:
‘ When information is brushed against information...the results are
takes many forms.’ (Mcluhan & Fiore 1996: 76-78)

68
PART II: Doublerecordings (2005 - 2007)

1. Introduction
Overview
As in Sonicinteractions (SI), a software application was developed in

Doublerecordings (DR) arranged around a single audio parameter, with a
recorder and player version 1. These recorded the left and right channels of an
an existing stereo recording, with a randomized or selectable delay between

them.
Whereas SI remained focused on the applications, in DR the ‘doublerecordings’

that were produced provided the main focus of the project; together with
other recordings which were made around them. The latter were developed
through a series of further methodologies, which either repeated the delay
using the same algorithm (‘doublererecordings’), made recordings of existing
doublerecordings using generic audio recorders (‘rerecordings’), or reversed
the original delay (‘recovered’ recordings). These built on the automated
productivity of the DR applications to produce complex aggregates of recorded
sounds.
The initial doublerecordings were randomly generated from a feature of Max 2

where audio is played back simultaneously from any open patcher windows 3.
This occurs unintentionally if the same window is opened more than once and
1
Doubleplayerdelay 1.0 and . . . /Applications/Doublerecorder 2.0.
2 See p. 22, n. 1.
3 Although Max objects are arranged in independent patcher windows, certain objects,
such as audio output are global.
PART II: DOUBLERECORDINGS (2005 - 2007) 69
played back together; producing a slight effect of reverberation. This effect
The delays produced echoic effects ranging from a subtle brightening of sound,
through phasing and reverberation to echo.
were produced in anticipation of an installation player which was also being

developed at the same time 4. However, this was not eventually used in respect
of DR. Instead, DR repeatedly and randomly produced a large number of
recordings of short duration. These were intended to be tested against, and
related to, further instances of sound; rather than be experienced, as sustained
or complete recordings, only intrinsically. In the version of DR described
here, complexes of doublerecordings and other recordings, which had been
developed together, were selected and placed onto CDRs 5.
Introduction
‘I think the echo on Elvis’s “Heartbreak Hotel” is better than the song
itself, by far. Nobody could tell me what that was, in my family. They
didn’t know what to make of that sound. It turns the studio into a
cave.‘ (Eno in Tamm 1995: 17)
The DR applications add a random millisecond delay between the channels of
applied to technologically mediated sounds. In this respect, they only increase

an existing delay which already occurs between the channels of any stereo
recording.
angle and distance apart from each other 6. These pick up distinct audio
signals, which are then recorded onto separate channels and later reproduced
on a pair of loudspeakers, also placed apart. This chain of technologies has
4
5
6; DVD I: Tracks 13-17) ; DVD II: Doublerecordings/CDR.
6 Examples of stereo microphone patterns include A-B, Ortf, X/Y.
been understood to produce a realist effect in which recorded sounds are

experienced as convincing reproductions of original real-world sounds.
By producing a further delay between the channels at the point of recording or

playback, however, the DR applications disrupt the spatial realism of the stereo
format. In this way, the delay is the crucial feature of any DR recording or
playback; rather than only subsequently being applied in post-production. The
further recording strategies in DR then extend or reverse this original effect.
At the same time as disrupting the stereo realism, however, the applications
continue to produce two channel recordings and playbacks. The different
DR recording methodologies also sometimes make convincing simulations;
whether of echoic effects, or of the ‘secondary’, virtual space of a recovered
Real-world and mediated echoes and reverbs are also sometimes directly
evident in the original recorded content. In this respect, a strategy of ‘doubling’
through appropriations of further recordings, to the doublerecordings and

different rerecordings.
One of the main focuses of DR was to produce recordings which related to

other instances of both real-world and mediated echo. Although echoes are
only exceptionally produced in natural locations (e.g. in caves), and more
world environments and interiors.
reverberation by making it hearable, as such. At the same time, the presence

7
has been found problematic in many
processes of recording and rerecording. The practice of close-miking has
become widespread in response to this, with echoic effects then reinserted in
post-production.
7 Resonance is the result of the introduction of a frequency into a system (e.g. a room)
that matches an existing frequency. This produces a sympathetic vibration that results in an
As well as enhancing the realism of mediated sounds, fabricated echoes

and reverbs have been used to relate different instances and categories of
sounds together 8; and to produce enlarged or, in some way disturbed, virtual
spatialities (Doyle 2004: 31). Each of these effects are also relevant to the DR
echoic effects in popular music 9.
Certain music genres have also been characterised by their use of echo and
DR, genres like dub reggae (dub) and ambient music (ambient) have been
musics (Prendergast 2000: 4; Veal 2007: 220-257). This made these more
broadly relevant to the project, which was also concerned to relate to wider
depictions of environmental mediated sound.
Recent theories of both dub and ambient, have also been critically useful in
developing a discursive context for DR. Although echo and reverb have been
characterised within both genres as producing disorientating temporalities -
evoking archaic, even oceanic, prehistories alongside virtual space-age futures
- they each develop distinctive depictions of echo and delay.
Michael Veal’s book, ‘Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican

Reggae’ (2007), relates dub’s use of delay to it’s larger structure of ‘versioning’
and appropriation. Veal describes both the production and reception of dub in
transgressive and participatory terms, which support an alternative depiction
of recorded echo, than that developed in early ambient or within the acoustic
ecology movement, for example.
Although other characterisations of ambient music are less explicit, the

composer Brian Eno, who formulated ambient partly in response to existing
environmental musics, describes autonomous-seeming, extensive and
protracted soundscapes, which partly insulate the subject from other concerns.
8 E.g. where a number of recordings are treated with the same reverberation in post-
production to imply that these have been made in the same location; or where reverb is used
9 See p.95, n.59.

acoustic ecology, which are further related to environmental recorded sounds.
In an essay, written in response to Marshall Mcluhan’s paradigm of ‘acoustic

space’, R. Murray Schafer links recordings, as such, to the earliest deliberate
production of echoes in caves. Within this schizophonic model, sounds are ‘split
off’ and multiplied from their original sources; producing instead, what acoustic
ecology understands to be, controlled spaces of simulation and ultimately the
10
.
global environment has also been characterised, after Mcluhan, as producing

resonant and participatory effects (Cavell 2003: 214). The DR project, to
an extent, by making many echoic recordings, attempted to both minimally
perform this environmental proliferation, at the same time as banally evidencing
Mcluhan’s idea.
proposed an alternative account of schizophonia, in which the multiple
of any recording’s production (Feld 1996). Feld’s positive reassessment of

recording playbacks invites more inclusive, and less controlled, accounts of
mediated sound production; already implied by the spread of consumer audio
technologies.
production - rather than a genre - of recorded sound that has been related to
a more democratic aesthetics and politics of recording (Grajeda 2002: 357).
also evidently shares procedural aspects with DR, as well as with ambient and
dub. The DR recordings potentially also sound similar to these.
of the material production of recorded sounds, which works against the realism
in Rebecca Leyden’s account that relates echo and reverb in mid-twentieth
10 See pp. 32-34.

century popular musics to ‘inferior’, domestic productions of sound (Leyden

2001). Within this context, the different parts of DR - most tangibly the
doublerecordings and the recovered recordings - also situate recorded sounds
produced mainly at ‘home’, against their potential stereo realism.
By repeating a recorded sound with a random delay, as well as by sounding

echoic, the doublerecordings also minimally recreate the real-world production
which is only then transiently brought together during playback 11.
Whilst this, together with the randomness and number of DR productions,

suggests both Schaferian and alternative paradigms of schizophonia and lo-
drawn from individual, more or less Deleuzoguattarian, accounts of real-world

and recorded echo from Christof Migone, Brian Massumi and Peter Doyle.
Like Veal’s depiction of delay, above, they are also more broadly relevant to
recorded sounds and issues of copying and appropriation.
11
74
2. Recordings and Complexes
‘ . . . the source was “a tape of a tape of a tape of a dub of a tape.”’

(Robbie Robertson in Schwartz 1995:13 n.8)
Applications; equipment set-up
Although the doublerecordings and recovered recordings were mainly

produced using standalone applications developed in Max, it is not my
intention to discuss the applications in depth here. To a certain extent similar
effects could have been made using a generic multichannel sound editor.
The ‘Doublerecorder’ 12
and ‘Doubleplayer’ 13
both used the same algorithms
or pre-selected recording durations and delay latencies between the stereo

channels of recordings. In this respect, the automated proliferation of short
recordings, in close succession to one another, was the Doublerecorder’s main
effect. The delays themselves, in both applications, could also be understood
as a part of this automated production of successive recordings, rather than as
only an echo effect.
the internal microphone of a laptop 14, many of the subsequent recordings and
rerecordings used the same recording equipment and set-ups as the other
15
.
12
13 See DVD II: Doublerecordings/Applications/Max/Doubleplayer 1.0; Doubleplayerdelay
1.0.
14
15 DVD I: Track 18.
Complexes 16: doublerecordings; rerecordings; doublererecordings;

recovered doublerecordings; variable doublerecordings; clones
The DR applications evolved together with the doublerecordings and a further

series of methodologies and recordings that were developed simultaneously.
or ‘recovering’ doublerecordings; and by rerecording them either using generic

technologies or again through the Doublerecorder (‘doublererecording’).
In the same way that the DR application produced two marginally different
rerecorded and ‘recovered’ versions of these.
Together these built up complexes of related recorded sounds accretionally,

which themselves remained open to most of the same ‘double’ procedures
17
. The complexes of recordings that were produced were neither intended
potential of further and future recordings.
This focus on the multiplicity of recordings and echoic effects, rather than the
and evaluative approach to the resultant recordings. Many of the DR recordings
further highlighting the range of effects that the different latencies produced.
Doublerecordings
After the initial development of the DR applications, the doublerecordings 18
project. The automation of the DR application, the randomised, brief recording
16 This describes a group of individual recordings that are considered associated

together, rather than only in isolation (e.g. through an original place or time of production; or
by a subsequent procedure such as rerecording).
17 Apart from the rerecordings from loudspeaker playbacks.
18 E.g. DVD I: Tracks 19-22;
edited, made it possible to make many doublerecordings in quick succession.

The duration of the doublerecordings (and therefore the other DR recordings),
typically ranged from a few seconds to under three minutes.
Rerecordings 19
rerecordings, these were developed more decisively in the subsequent projects.

This was partly because the effects of the rerecording process were more
evident in the smaller and more regular shaped spaces the later rerecordings
were produced in. However, there was no attempt to reduce these effects in
DR.
process, in DR it provided a further strategy of ‘double’ recording, which added
of rerecording, in this way, became audibly implicated with virtual echo effects.
Rerecordings, by producing echoes and reverbs, also foregrounded and
‘naturalized’ these effects, as an inevitable part of the recording process, and,
by doing so, exposed the work and illusion of stereo realism.
Recovered doublerecordings 20
listed the random durations and delays of the doublerecordings made during
its run-time. This made it possible to accurately reverse the effect of the
recordings.
Clones 21
19 DVD I: Tracks 8-12 (CD051115_01).

20 DVD I: Tracks 13-17 (CD051115_02). E.g. compare DVD I: Tracks 23 (original
doublerecording) and 24 (‘recovered’ doublerecording (rerecording from loudspeaker
playback)).
21
reproduced. Although digital copying has no effect on the sonic quality of an
production of a digital copy of a recording, on a hard drive or CDR 22.
CDRs were numbered each time a further CDR copy was made (e.g. ‘_c4’).
In this way the physical materiality of each recorded copy became related to
the ‘versioning’ of the doublerecordings themselves. Each further instance of a
this to the repetition or reproduction of a singular or original point 23.
Variable doublerecordings
An adaptation of the DR algorithm, which could be applied to either application,

also variably altered any delay set during recording or playback; using a line
input to produce a continuously variable delay over the duration of a recording.
This moved from an echoic to a non-echoic effect, making it possible to slowly
‘recover’ a doublerecording to a classic stereo recording 24.
Although the variable delay was not used extensively in DR, it suggested a
together with both further genres of recorded sound and real-world acoustics;
echo and reverb. This production of a ‘smooth continuum’ between different
The variable delay also relates the DR recordings more explicitly to the use
of gain modulation in Sonicinteractions, through the persistent exploration of
a single, linear axis of recorded sound. In the case of DR, the stereo format
itself might be considered as a parameter of recorded sound, which works
against its typical habituation through realism. The DR recordings, within this
paradigm, can be understood as adjustments to and from stereo realism;
classic stereo recording, or of a virtual echo.
22 This strategy quickly became unworkable.

23 Cf. Simulacra.
24 DVD I: Track 25.
CDR format
recordings, also encouraged an enquiry into whether it would be possible to

play these back in a more coherent and sustained way, without then losing
their transitory and contingent qualities. The question of format was ultimately
left unresolved in DR, and a series of CDRs were made from selected
doublerecording complexes 25.
Whereas the doublerecording playbacks through the DR application preserved
original doublerecordings 26
be realised in the live production and simultaneous diffusion of a DR complex
within a sound installation.
Because the DR recordings were produced randomly, in large numbers, it is

not possible to individually detail all of these. Instead, the recordings that make
up the DR complexes written onto CDRs are mainly presented here. 5 CDRs
were ultimately produced which were each arranged around an individual
doublerecording complex. The complexes were either related together by their
content, the millisecond length of a delay, or methodology.
Field recording content
informed each of the projects in this thesis 27

recordings were made randomly and repeatedly from my own daily life, and
the recorded content was nearly always contingent on where I happened to be;
rather than deliberately sought out. Local production noises, such as equipment
25 DVD I: Tracks 7-12 (CD051115_01);13-17 (CD051115_02); DVD II: Doublerecordings/

CDR.
26
27 See pp. 178-185.
mundane, everyday sounds of a rural UK environment. These included natural

sounds (e.g. wind; leaves; birds) and indoor and outdoor technological noises
(e.g. washing machines; computers; TV; DIY noises; garden and agricultural
Some of the original DR content directly related to the real-world environmental

presence of echo and reverb (e.g. in room ambiances or night-time exteriors).
A number of doublerecordings also intentionally included real-world echoic
28
. These further connected to
independently featured echo and reverberation 29.
ubiquitous presence of recorded and mediated sounds in the environment.

A number of the doublerecordings also included brief extracts from two DVD
30
. Although these were only indirectly appropriated, the recordings in DR
were also intended to more broadly suggest and relate to further recording
instances through their use of delay.
28 DVD I: Tracks 15-17, 26.

29 DVD I: Tracks 27, 28.
30 (Herzog 1971; Dick & Kofman 2002).
80
3. Echo, Reverb and Delay
Popular musics and media have been associated with an extensive use of echo
these as core effects. Many of these effects have become widespread (Doyle
2005: 5; Reynolds 2012: 171); and the doublerecordings sometimes approach
banal and ‘lite’ evocations of these; as well as relating to more subtle uses of
fabricated echo in mediated sound.
Mediated echoes and reverbs have been used to simulate a range of virtual
through depictions of generic echoic spaces, such as cathedrals and tunnels,
haunting or mysterious. Elsewhere, similar effects have been used to reproduce
recording, as such.
In this way, echoes and reverbs are experienced both as acousmatic
and, conversely, in murky relation to further sounds, muddying and distorting

them. The DR recordings also reveal this double potential: of a virtual, ‘other’
space, together with a palpable sense of mediated materiality.
Real-world echoes and reverberations are produced from mixtures of direct

and indirect sounds that result from the interactions of the sound waves of
are typically associated with fully, or partially, enclosed spaces; whereas
obstructions, such as rock faces, in relatively open sites.

Whilst in both cases the original sounds become multiplied and fragmented,
sound and its repeat occurs after approximately 50 milliseconds, and a clearly
repeating initial sound is heard one or more times. In reverberation the sound
indistinguishable from one another in a mixture of direct and indirect sounds

(Truax 1999; Lacasse 2000: 116-7).
Whereas reverberation is almost always present in any natural acoustic,
commonly experienced as mechanical and digital productions, in the form of

delays, rather than as natural events (Doyle 2004: 32).
sounds in both natural and manmade structures. These have included

bathrooms, churches, tunnels and caves, echo chambers and analogue and
digital versions of these (Leyden 2001: 100; Doyle 2005: 27-28; Senior 2008-
2).
Although echoes and reverbs can be understood as producing a disordering

effect in relation to an original sound, the effect is also potentially, at least
partly, repeatable. This could be achieved through reproducing a sound within
the same real-world structure or place, or by repeating a preset digital echo
(Senior 2008-1), for example.
Echoic effects in doublerecordings
The random delays of the Doublerecorder application were not modelled on
conceived of as having the potential to sometimes reference each of these.

Although, unlike real-world echoes, which become quieter and eventually
subside, the Doublerecorder produces a single delay only, which is as loud as
the original sound 31.
The doublerecordings ranged from producing subtle latencies and reverbs to
31
discrete echoes; depending on the length of the delay. The original content of
the recording also affected the quality of any delay. For example, those with
sharp transient attacks sound more clearly echoic 32.
Delay
In the DR application, the delayed recording was automatically produced
straightforward timed repeat, or replay, of an audio signal, the doublerecordings

followed a model of delay. Except in the case of DR, it will be recalled, that
made through left and right microphone channels, so that any echo effect
might be reversed.
Although, as discussed above, the structure of the delay was not based on a
the effect was close to, what is known as, a doubling echo; and where longer
(60-100 ms), it started to sound more like slapback echo (Izhaki 2012: 386).
Shorter delays created reverberant or phasing effects which produced dense
blends of sounds (Truax 1999).
Doublerecordings vs rerecordings
The different strategies of doublerecording and rerecording in DR produced

distinctive patterns of echoic sound. Whereas many of the doublerecordings
sounded mechanical and repetitive, the process of rerecording often made a
more naturalistic effect.
Several of the recordings, made using the DR application, sounded muddy

and electronic rather than truly reverberant; especially where these were
recordings of ambient background sounds, like wind 33. Even when the delay
latency was narrow, and the effect was closer to reverb, doublerecordings still
sounded subtly regular and machine-like; rather than organic 34. Because they
are were procedurally similar to these, the doublerecordings also recalled tape
32 E.g. Compare DVD I: Tracks 22, 29.
33 DVD I: Track 22.
34 DVD I: Track 19.
delay effects 35.
The rerecordings, made from loudspeaker diffusions, were immediately more

dense and incoherent sounding 36. This is perhaps because resonant effects
, so that they are experienced as integral, irreversible parts of rerecordings.

37
Unlike the doublerecordings, which, through sounding repeated, remain open

and ‘workable’.
Echoic effects: spatialities; temporalities; subjectivities
produce distortions of spatiality and scale, which alter any usual parameters
or experiences of real-world spaces. Eric Tamm, for example, writing on Brian
Eno’s use of echo in ambient music, describes the use of delay lengths, depths
and numbers of repetitions (especially where used in conjunction with sounds
which already have protracted attack and decay envelopes) to produce ‘vast
Although Tamm describes the virtual enhancement of spaces produced by

delays, such effects can simulate a range of spaces. These vary from seeming
terms of both their scope and materiality (e.g. underground dungeons; metallic
tunnels; ‘canned’).
that echoic effects are able to suggest. These might manifest as a slowing down
or dragging of time; a sense of timelessness or of a ‘yawning’ future (Reynolds
timescales (Doyle 2005: 6; Veal 2007: 198).
These alternative, virtual spaces also produce, what has sometimes been
characterised as, the perception of an isolated, even incarcerated, individual
subject (Reynolds 1995; Thaemlitz 2003: 98; Roquet 2009: 372-3). Whereas
35 See Brian Eno’s description of tape delay (Eno 1975).
36 DVD I: Tracks 7-12.
37 Cf. ‘I’m Sitting in a Room’ (Alvin Lucier 1969).
in the more extensive virtual spaces, this interiority might be experienced as an

unrestricted, wandering sense of movement - of the explorer or ‘space-cadet’
(McLeod 2003: 342), for example - otherwise a sense of alienation, suspension,
grand and remote, virtual vistas, transitions into something only immediately
tactile and obscure in dark subterranean tunnels and caves; and into self-
absorbed, hallucinatory states (Reynolds 1995: 1-2; Doyle 2004: 36, 231).
Following other fantastic, simulacral accounts of musics, like ambient and
dub, Thomas Bey William Bailey also moves beyond, more or less, ‘optic’
accounts of subjectivity, as he elaborates the effects of post-industrial ambient
music; describing the spatial disordering which this produces as permeating
the subject to create an uncanny, ‘neither here nor there’ state of liminality or
threshold (Bailey 2011).
85
‘The challenge of the schizophonic situation for the listener is to

make sense of the juxtaposition of two different contexts.’ (Truax,
2001: 134)
Together, the various recording methodologies in Doublerecordings (DR)

propose a different paradigm of, what Schafer has called, ‘schizophonia’
(1994: 273). Schafer uses the term to describe the dissonant playback of
the immediate source, context, and time of their production. According to
environment, previously described in Sonicinteractions (SI) 38. Its effect has

been further understood to have been made more critical through simulation
(Westerkamp 1988: 25).
The DR recordings relate to the concept of schizophonia as recorded sounds, as

such, but also because of the way in which they minimally play out a realisation
of what has been understood, following Schafer, as some of its effects. By
making and playing back two recordings closely together, for example, the
doublerecordings sometimes sound muddy and indistinct, and at other times
produce convincing virtual effects.
The doublerecordings, when played back through the Doublerecorder

application, are also intended to reproduce a minimum paradigm of a real-
world echoic effect. The left and right channels are separately articulated as
two independent productions and ‘surfaces’ of sound. Any echo or reverb then
happens as these are brought together anamorphically during playback.
38 See pp. 32-34.

In ‘The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World’ (the
and mediated sounds, to the production of real-world echoic effects (1994: 90);
before developing a closer analysis of echo in an essay written in response
to Edmund Carpenter and Mcluhan’s depiction of ‘acoustic space’ (Schafer
and echo are introduced below, before turning to alternative characterisations

of these in the next chapter.
Schizophonia and simulacra
Schafer coined the term ‘schizophonia’ to express the discordance and

bizarreness of the disjunction between recordings and their actual productions;
especially where recordings are abstractly constructed or take place apart
from any real-world context or appropriate attention (Schafer 1994: 91). In the
‘Tuning of the World’, Schafer argues that recording technologies uproot and
dislocate sounds from ‘their proper places’ to chaotically and unpredictably
repeat and replay elsewhere:
‘Originally all sounds were originals. They occurred at one time

and in one place only. Sounds were then indissolubly tied to the
mechanisms which produced them . . . Since the invention of
electroacoustical equipment for the transmission and storage of
sound, any sound, no matter how tiny, can be blown up and shot
around the world, or packaged on tape or record for the generations
of the future. We have split the sound from the maker of the sound.
Sounds have been torn from their natural sockets and given an
depiction of reproduction; also notably expressed in Jean Baudrillard’s‘Simulacra

and Simulation’ (1994), for example 39. Simulacra, the images which simulation
39 Baudrillard relates simulacra to the contemporary electronic mediascape; describing
to any reality whatsoever’ (1994: 6). He argues that where copies are produced which are
vanishes. This then produces, what Baudrillard understands as, the possibility of a total
simulation, in which signs are completely substituted for real things and every reference to the
real is lost (1994).
as‘copies of copies’ or as ‘false copies’ (Parr 2005: 250). Within this hierarchical
copy’ or representation exists as an impoverished and secondary version of it.

Unlike models or ‘true copies’, simulacra have no relationship, in any way, to
an original.
schizophonia, which is similarly concerned with the differences between

originals and copies, and the effect that recorded sounds have in relation
to real-world environments; in particular where these are experienced as
simulations 40. Schafer, above, depicts recordings which are like the ‘false
copies’ of simulacra: ‘split’ and torn apart from their original producers, sources
and locations and then multiplied and played back elsewhere, without any
proper reference to these.
Schafer on acoustic space
Although accounts of schizophonia, like Schafer’s, describe recorded sounds

as independent, and fragmented, from real-world sources, as simulations
they also imply the production of extensive territories of privatised, ‘walled off’
to echo effects and to an earlier pre-technological imaginary and desire to

dislocate and separate sounds, both spatially and temporally:
‘The introduction of . . . echo effects, the splitting of resources . . .

were all attempts to create virtual spaces . . . just as the breaking
represents a desire to transcend the present tense.’ (Schafer 1994:

90-91)
This argument is developed in the essay ‘Acoustic Space’ (Schafer 1993: 29-
44), where Schafer again relates echo effects to the virtual spaces produced
depiction of acoustic space as boundless and participatory. Although Schafer

acknowledges Mcluhan’s description of acoustic space as a mosaic of
40 Schafer and Baudrillard also independently produce strikingly similar accounts of

quadrophonics, an early surround sound format, in terms of total simulation (Schafer 1973-2:
34; Baudrillard in Gunkel 2007: 4).
simultaneous and disconnected productions (1993: 43), he challenges its
itself, not space containing the thing.’ (1993: 33)
Schafer outlines, instead, a territorial and proprietorial depiction of

(anthropogenic) sound production in relation to space. Within this, acoustic
governmental or regulatory interests, and imposed as a monologue on

individuals (1993: 33). Giving an example of the church bell covering a parish,
Schafer relates such sounds to a concept of ‘Sacred Noise’ in which loud and
encompassing noises - otherwise subject to censure - are able to be produced
repeatedly and freely by selected groups (1993: 35) 41.
These noises are traced back, by Schafer, to the earliest sound productions
within enclosed interiors, such as caves, which, he argues, were then
intentionally developed into crypts, churches and cathedrals and, in modernity,
‘The only space where sound can be naturally bounded is the interior
space, in the cave, which was extended by deliberate design to the
crypt, the vault, the temple and the cathedral. The magical sensation
indoors and begins deliberately to shape his buildings to achieve

that sensation. Then resonant frequencies are used as natural
materials are sought to extend reverberation time, giving sound a
air . . . One sounding event is made to follow another in resonant

sequence and without interruption. All contradictory sounds can
understood as deliberately extensive, persistent and repeatable productions,

which either take place within interiors or - through audio technologies -
produce and extend such enclosures into the wider soundscape; as evidenced
41 DVD I: Track 30.

environment is understood as a consequence of schizophonia 42.
monotonous environments produced by widespread technological noise and

exacerbated by mass media 43
associated with the World Forum of Acoustic Ecology 44 have continued to use
both terms.
frequencies, and a lack of masking from loud or persistent noises. This provides
a wide perspective of both background and foreground sounds which, Schafer
writes, are predominantly experienced as ‘discrete and interrupted’, rather
than continuous (1994: 78). Schafer relates the clarity of distant sounds made
available in such environments to experiences of far-range vision; noting the
45
.
to acoustic ecology, Kendall Wrightson relates echoes and reverberations to

the amount of sonic information made available:
‘The lack of masking facilitates the propagation of “acoustic

colouration” caused by echoes and reverberations that occur
environment, and due to the effects of weather related factors such

as temperature, wind, and humidity. The resulting colouration offers
42 However, Schafer also recognizes a contemporary ‘momentum for blending’
This is also explored in the ‘Patria’ cycle (Schafer 1966-) which Schafer writes is ‘. . . colourful,
simultaneous and haptic . . . it demands participation.’ (Schafer in Robinson 2008: 35).
43 See pp. 32-34.
44 WFAE Website 2013.
45 Cf. accounts of close-range haptic perception pp. 56, 58-60.
the physical nature of the environment and expressing its size in

relation to the listener.’ (Wrightson 2000: 11)
In such information-rich environments, Wrightson argues, following other

acoustic ecologists, a diversity of discretely hearable and knowable sounds
listeners, who are thereby able to guide and subtly orientate themselves in
space.
This account is effectively illustrated elsewhere, by an example that Hildegard

Westerkamp gives of the echolocation that a blind person uses through
tapping (Westerkamp 1988: 11). Westerkamp depicts this, following Barry
Truax (Truax 2001: 21), as an acoustic searching, ‘testing out’ and participation
in the environment. Echoic productions, in this way, combine what acoustic
ecologists understand to be, a vital balance of sound-making and listening,
its behaviour over time, reveals vital surface and spatial information. She
describes tapping as an interaction with a surface that produces an anticipatory
sense and knowledge of further spaces. Although Idhe writes that ‘auditory
space is opened up’, Westerkamp concludes that any differences between the
surface and a further interior or distance (between near and far) it reveals are
resolved in the temporality of sound: ‘The space of sound is “in” its timefulness’
(1988: 11).
91
‘The term “bootleg” carries an image of some schlub with a tape

recorder sitting in the cheap seats and recording mostly echoes and
feedback.’ (Anderson 2011)
Theorists such as Westerkamp and Truax, following Schafer, depict

schizophonia as a break from the real-world and a ‘closing off’ of participation;
However, in DR it is proposed that recordings might be listened to as simulacra

which, following Mcluhan’s depictions of acoustic space, are also able to
produce a resonant and participatory effect.
This was both literally realised in the DR recordings, which sometimes sounded
banally echoic, and implied through their tangibly fragmented, random and ‘lo-
or recording event, the DR recordings attempted to reveal the multiplicity and

discontinuity of productions and diffusions of recorded sounds.
Steven Feld’s response to Schafer’s depiction of schizophonia developed

across two essays: ‘From Schizophonia to Schismogenesis: On the Discourses
and Practices of World Music and World Beat’ (1995) and ‘Pygmy POP: A
Genealogy of Schizophonic Mimesis’ (1996). Both texts elucidate alternative
accounts of recording playbacks in relation to an original source or production.
which both sometimes sounded like these and shared certain procedures.
These are mainly drawn from Tony Grajeda’s essay ‘The Sound of Disaffection’
opposed to mainstream and corporate stereo realism. Rebecca Leyden

develops a similar argument in respect of reverb in popular musics. Together
Steven Feld on Schizophonia
Writing on recordings of world music, Feld calls for a positive re-articulation of

schizophonia, after tracing Schafer’s concern with original versus copies back
to Walter Benjamin’s Artwork essay (1995: 98). Feld invites a reappraisal of the
term, calling for the multiple instances and transience of recording playbacks
to be taken into account.
Relating schizophonia to diverse academic and commercial interpretations
recordings are in circulation, as commodities, they are no longer controlled by

their original producers:
diverse agendas, many of which were unanticipated and may now

be unwelcome or distasteful to recordists or those recorded . . .
Unwittingly or not, they - we - have been central players in creating a
global schizophonic condition whose consequences are now vastly
more complex and open to contestation than any of its participants
could have anticipated.’ (1996:11)
and sources of sound, to the ways in which these are then distributed, circulated
and consumed 46
schizophonia in the ‘Tuning of the World’, makes a similar point; arguing from
made possible through digital technologies. Within this, he writes, it is clear

that any sound, from anywhere, can be recorded, sampled, processed and
played back any number of times (1995: 98).
46 Cf. Gould p. 54.

Feld also takes into account the impermanence and unpredictability of

schizophonia:
‘Against this earlier and somewhat monolithic anxiety about the

jeopardy to primal originality, I urged that schizophonia needs now to
be imagined as more varied and uneven, as practices located in the
how recordings move in and out of short- and long-term commodity

states.’ (1996: 14)
This alternative depiction of schizophonia moves away from any original, stable
version of a recorded sound to the multiple, short-lived instances of recording
production; evidenced both in individual playbacks and in the, now extensive,
appropriation and sampling of recorded sounds. Elsewhere, schizophonic
of recording, which are also relevant to DR.
and in audiophile literature more generally (Keightley 1996:153), the term has
also implied other potentials of recorded sound, beyond that of straightforward
still related to individual, ‘compromised’ productions of recorded sound, these

have also been, at least partly, understood as an expression of democratic
produced and diffused, and by whom (Grajeda 2002: 364).
cheap or defunct technologies; ‘authentic’, non-professional, recording places

(e.g. bedrooms; bathrooms; corridors); and unorthodox and unauthorised
techniques (e.g. incorporating handling noise; random accidents; ‘bootlegged’
recordings).
materiality of production, which, Tony Grajeda argues, performs a critique of

both stereo realism and any system that controls its production and distribution
(2002: 360-2). Its sounds happen outside, and in excess of, the systems of
situated in, and operates amongst, the quotidian and everyday.
Field recordings are often produced using expert technologies, with an

emphasis on either documentary realism (Schrimshaw 2012: 1) or on a
precisely determined individual perspective (e.g. López 1997; DeLaurenti
of apparently ‘second rate’ and ‘inferior’ individual decisions and productions -

from the context of recording, through the equipment, to the diffusion - encode,
Distortions or departures from stereo realism can also be experienced as a

foregrounding of the texture and materiality of a recorded sound, in terms
recording contexts, handling noises, playback sounds and technological

glitches, which, as Grajeda describes, become nostalgically reinscribed as
naturalized and organic (2002: 360). In this way, they both inclusively invite
the potential of participation and involvement, at the same time as producing
apparently authentic, ‘human’ - sounding documentations of real-world events
(2002: 359).
and control, and related to predominantly feminine modes of reception and

production. Within these, ‘scattered’, ‘sloppy’, fragmented, and incomplete
experiences of recorded sound - like so many echo effects - are produced by
passive and distracted forms of reception in domestic spaces (Grajeda 2002:
364-366).
discourses of pop music, with a ‘form of (degraded) mass culture . . . a form of

(banal) consumption’, that he argues is exacerbated by its production at home
(2002: 365). He adds that this is both a return to previous forms of cultural
production (e.g. singing around a family piano) and an expression of the post-
47
.
Similar accounts of production have also been more directly related to echo
effects. Rebecca Leyden, writing on reverb in mid-twentieth century popular
musics (Leyden 2001), has argued that characterisations of reverb in recorded
music have historically followed a gendered and high-low trajectory. These
have trivialised and positioned echoic effects against the absolute orientation
Whilst stereo recordings have been understood, by audiophiles and others,
traces contemporary cultural depictions of echoic effects in terms of technical

inadequacy, distortion, ambiguity and excess (2001: 99, 101). She writes, for
example, that, unlike stereo,
Reverb, then, acts as a kind of surplus – something in excess of

what we determine to be the sonic essence.’ (2001: 99)
Leyden relates this ‘magical’ surplus to a maximal production of sound in

relation to a minimal effort expended in achieving it (2001: 104). She gives
examples of shouting in empty spaces, and singing in the bathroom, which
suggest playful, unauthorised, individual experiences of sound-making and
relate to private sound productions, as well as to ubiquitous personal, domestic

experiences of listening to recorded sound. These take place casually and
indirectly, rather than only exclusively; even sometimes from the same places
in which the reverbs themselves might be initially produced: in bathrooms and
through doors, for example (2001: 104).
47 See. pp. 41-42.

The millisecond delay in the doublerecordings is still able to cause an
information or otherwise a simulation, however inadequate, of the real-world

effect of echo and reverb. In this way, the DR recordings formally reproduce a
effect of DR happens during diffusion rather than in relation to an original

or singular recording point. The DR recordings no longer emphasize the
48
. In the
doublerecordings, this is already partly achieved through randomizing the
duration of the recordings and, to an extent, any recording content, together
with the length of the delay.
The other DR recordings continued a strategy of situating recorded sounds

predominantly in relation to further recordings, rather than to original production
points. These either directly produced, invited, or undermined further productions
of recordings. By relating to other recordings as much as to real-world sounds,
they invite simulacral and post-genre accounts of recording (Davis 1996: 11;
Fink 1998; Reynolds 2007). The DR recordings also approach the effects of
schizophonia in other ways: by being made randomly in large numbers, using
recording content.
Aside from their content and the way in which they were produced, the
recordings, as individual mono or ‘recovered’ stereo recordings. In this way
characterisations of schizophonia in DR; rather than categorising or bracketing

these in some way apart 49.
48 Cf. ‘The magical experience of producing an echo is an experience of effortless

excess’ (Leyden 2001: 104).
49 Cf. ‘To record sounds is to put a frame around them. Just as a photograph frames a
visual environment, which may be inspected at leisure and in detail, so a recording isolates an
The doublerecordings and other DR recordings were intended to connect to
are characterised by their transparent use of recording technologies, and

in doublerecordings this effect was made remotely available, through the
authorised categories of production.
Because the doublerecordings were produced in mundane, everyday situations,
produced in specialist spaces, recordings were made in domestic interiors and

outdoors; where random and unsolicited background noises and interruptions,
room resonances and wind noises were also sometimes present.
Although many of the doublerecordings were made using professional, rather

than consumer, recording technologies, several of these were also recorded
using the internal sound system of a laptop. This was partly an expedient as
the DR applications were developed at the same time as the recordings on the
also highlighted the equipment and processing sounds; notably of the laptop’s
internal hard drive 50.
). The DR recordings that appropriated

51
further recorded sounds, and many of the rerecordings, similarly reproduced
recordings, the frequencies of an original recording become distorted through

the resonant characteristics of a room. In this way rerecordings reproduce both
part of the rerecording process).
acoustic environment and makes it a repeatable event for study purposes.’ (Schafer 1973-1).
50
51 The mixer levels were not correctly calibrated in advance to accommodate both the
98
6. Echo and Environmental Musics
Doublerecordings (DR) was informed by random, natural, ‘trivial’, banal, and

fantastic forms of sonic production. Examples can be drawn from both the
that were made alongside the projects, as well as from further experiences
of mediated sound. These included recordings of pheasants calling across
; cockerels in the mountains at night 53; a child
52
clapping in a church 54; a karaoke song 55 56

; and the
57
.
contingently and sometimes intentionally, included the pervasive and repeating

58
. This encouraged
a broader approach to - mainly popular 59 - music and media recordings which
sounds.
Field recordings of these also informed a direct awareness of the artefacts of

rerecording. Echoic effects are also already subtly evident in the content of
52 DVD I: Track 26.

53 DVD I: Track 27.
54 DVD I: Track 31.
55
56
57
58
59 Because this is what I mostly heard. Cf. Corbett’s analysis of popular music ‘as a
formal genre’; including ‘All music is now popular’ (Corbett 1990, 82-3).
chamber or specialist studio, every real-world environment is inevitably

reverberant; however unmarked or curtailed this reverberance might be.
more distinctive; especially through direct comparisons with real-world sounds.
sounds, observed by Corbett and others (e.g. Evens 2002: 186 n.17), for
of recordings.
Echo in popular musics
This chapter introduces a number of discourses which focus on fabricated echo
new age and ambient, which use echo as a core effect. Arguments that relate
to these are also pertinent to contemporary mediated sounds more generally
such genres (Reynolds 1995; Veal 2007: 220-256; Roquet 2009: 364).
Echoes and reverbs have also been more directly implicated in the production
of an omnipresent, banalized mediascape. Certain accounts, like Schafer’s
previously, understand recorded echoic effects as directly intensifying
schizophonia through further fetishizing the sourceless production of generic
and immersive virtual spaces. Whilst, in part because of their length, many of
the DR recordings do not achieve some of the more extreme renditions of echo
and reference them.
Echoic effects can prolong, amplify and repeat sounds to produce an expanded,
unfocused or unlocatable sensation of time and space, which, at the same
time, diminishes any sense of individual production. This has suggested
schizophonic and autonomous accounts of recordings: which become
characterised as automated or self-generated (e.g. Eno 1975; Labelle 2010:
14-15); disconnected from original real-world sounds; or only able to reference
further recordings.
John Corbett on echo
been described as eliding differences, both intrinsically within recordings, and

between different instances of these; as well as suppressing those between
recorded sounds and real-world environments.
where he relates echo and reverb, amongst other studio techniques, to

the fetishization of recorded sound as an independent production (Corbett
1990). Corbett argues that echo effects erase and smooth away any trace of
a performer from a recording; intensifying an ‘audiophile’ sense of recorded
sound’s autonomy:
‘Echo, by doubling the sound upon itself . . . by doing away with
of absolutely independent music.’ (1990: 92)
Although echo’s ostensible function in popular music is to amplify and

underscore presence, Corbett argues, echo instead reduces and eliminates
any particularity ‘to make the individual body interchangeable and the sound
of its contours more manageable’ (1990: 92). Echoic effects are used, both
during recording and in post-production, to alter and efface any prior relation
of a recording to an original performance.
Through echo and reverb, Corbett continues, this effect is carried through
into further instances of recording, and the recording becomes detached and
autonomous, relating instead only to further simulations (1990: 92). Because
repeated, the lack of any individual or local differentiation also extends across
many different musics, becoming a generic and banal effect.
Whilst Corbett writes about examples of music which foreground their use of
dominate and constitute what most popular music sounds like (1990: 92). This
has also been a more recent concern within acoustic ecology in relation to the
practice of close-miking (Truax 2004: 47-8; Droumeva 2005: 3), which has
Close-miking
Close-miking describes a technique of recording in which the microphone
colouration, and to isolate it from other sources of sound (Senior 2008-2). This
unrealistic 60, but to which echo effects can then be freely added to reintroduce
a virtual liveness and spatiality in post-production.
The non-reverberant sound of close-miking enables, what Milena Droumeva
of background recorded sounds, which are then able to produce pervasive

surrogate environments (Droumeva 2005: 3). As in Corbett’s example of echo,
above, the same effects are widely reproduced, and so become limited to a
few archetypes (2005: 4).
These accounts relate fabricated echoes to the production of regulated and

repeatable virtual realities, which are autonomous and exclusive, as well as
banal. Instead of being used to orientate or clarify where or how a recording
is produced, echo and reverb, as parameterized, interchangeable effects, only
supplement an otherwise ‘dead’, or inert, acoustic in mediated sound. These
then evoke and simulate virtual spaces and atmospheres, whilst enabling a
producer to maintain maximum control over any representation.
Discourses of echo in ambient
ambient, like the new age music described by Corbett above, also highlight its
core use of echo and reverb to spatialize sounds and make recorded content
atmospheric and diffuse (LeGuin 1994: 5; Reynolds 1995: 1; Bailey 2011).
60 ‘If all real-world sounds were to be somehow stripped of their cloaking of reverberation,
it would be a wholly disorienting, dead, almost spaceless and depthless world.’ (Doyle 2005:
38).
The series of ambient works produced by the composer Brian Eno from 1975
to 1982, as well as sharing certain methodologies with the recordings in DR,
also clarify different conceptions of echo which are relevant to the project 61.
Like other examples of environmental music, ambient has a similarly subdued
sense of overt production and development, and is characterised by a lack of
distinctive breaks within it (e.g. from voice or beat) 62. This produces, what has
been described as, nearly static extents of glacially emerging, often lush, non-
consequential sound (Toop 1995: 193; Reynolds 1995: 1; Ultrared 1997-1: 2;
Roquet 2009: 371; Hibbett 2010: 291, 303).
Delay in ‘Discreet Music’
In a 1996 interview, Brian Eno situates echo and reverb effects as integral
parts of an ambient composition (Korner 1996). In ‘Discreet Music’ (1975), for
using tape recorders, based around a long delay with feedback. Relating
the work to minimalist and process music, Eno describes the planning and
programming of the piece to be almost his only compositional role (Eno 1975).
The direct use of echoic effects in the album also underscores its sense of
autonomous production (Bailey 2011).
Although the effects in ‘Discreet Music’ were initially discovered by accident (cf.
DR), Eno’s later works, such as ‘On Land’ (1982) intentionally use echo and
the composer’s memories of childhood (Eno 1982/1986). Echo effects are able
to produce, what Eno understands to be, an illusion of place and placement,
which can be manipulated and morphed to ‘evoke a whole geography’ (Eno in
Tamm 1995: 72).
Whilst these can simulate a range of real-world spaces, Eno directly relates
these to landscapes, rather than to interiors as such:
‘I was . . . moving into a kind of landscape sensibility of music, the

idea being that one is listening to a body of sound presented as a
61 These discourses move from something like an acousmatic characterization of echo
(Eno 1975); through a landscape/soundscape sensibility (Korner 1996) to more or less virtual
depictions of echo (Eno 1982/1986).
62 Or, where used, only function to underscore the reverberant effect (LeGuin 1994: 6).
happening in a particular type of space, a location of some sort.

One of the characteristics of recorded music is that the composer is
in a position to design not only new instruments but new locations
for them. One does this by using reverberation, echo, and other
such treatments as a part of the composition and not as a cosmetic.’
(Korner 1996)
Although echo and reverb have been used to add realism to recordings and to
reference existing spaces, Eno is more interested the virtual, or psychoacoustic,
locations that such effects produce. Writing in the liner notes of ‘On Land’ (Eno
1986), Eno describes the way in echo effects are used, not only to invent
diverse sounds together:
‘I never felt any sense of obligation about realism. In this category I

included not only recordings of rooks, frogs and insects, but also the
complete body of my own earlier work. As a result, some earlier pieces
I worked on became digested by later ones, which in turn became
digested again. The technique is like composting: converting what
would otherwise have been waste into nourishment.’ (1982/1986) 63
Eno uses echoic effects partly to absorb differences: drawing in and mingling
diverse content and works from other periods and places, in a depiction of
echo not dissimilar to Corbett’s above, in which everything ‘becomes music’ 64.
continuous, immersive ‘visual space’ in which echoes and reverbs are used to
relate sounds extensively and coherently together. In the ‘dark’ ambient of ‘On
Land’, he relates this to changing conceptions of landscape:
‘ . . . the landscape has ceased to be a backdrop for something

else to happen in front of; instead, everything that happens is a part
of the landscape. There is no longer a sharp distinction between
foreground and background.’ (Eno 1982/1986)
At the same time, as different virtual spaces are produced, any clarity between
foreground and background is collapsed, so that effortless movement in all
directions becomes possible 65. This is then experienced, both intrinsically
63 Cf. Dub recycling p. 110.
64 Cf. Cage quoted in Kostelanetz 2003: 70.
65 Cf. ergodic p. 46.
within a recorded work, and extrinsically as a sense of immersion, or suspension,

in a pervasive and orchestrated atmosphere 66.
to suggest a more intensive, productive and immanent depiction of echo and

appropriation. Peter Suchin, for example, quotes from an interview in which
Eno describes the work in terms of ‘a number of actions carried out near
microphones’; rather than as a completely worked out or coherent piece (Suchin
way in which, in ‘On Land’, Eno both directly incorporates other temporalities
by using previous works of his own; and further understands such works as the
unrealised, pasts, presents and futures (Eno 1982/1986).
in ‘On Land’, to the theorist Roland Barthes depiction of an emerging post-

modern form of art: as a ‘disconnected’, ‘heterogenous’ and textured plurality
quoting Barthes - describing such works as:
‘“ . . . woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural

languages . . . antecedent or contemporary, which cut across it
through and through in a vast stereophony . . . the citations . . . are
anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read: they are quotations
without inverted commas.”’ (Barthes in Suchin 2005)
Beyond Eno’s incorporation of his own previous works in ‘On Land’, the echo
‘On Land’, can be understood as part of the vast web of anonymous citations
traced above.
The familiar, non-confrontational, even bland appropriations within ambient

music, have been understood, in this way, as points of stability within evolving
and challenging new sonic environments. These produce, what Paul Roquet
describes as, a resonant Mcluhanesque interface between the subject and the
66 E.g.‘ The choice of sonic elements in these places arose . . . from listening to the
world in a musical way . . . The effect of this simple technological system was to cluster all the
disparate sounds into one aural frame; they became music.’ (Eno 1986).
work, which allows:
‘ . . . the body to latch onto the aural-tactile environment around it,

both consciously and unconsciously. In this way, music acts as an
interface between subject and landscape, establishing resonances
between them in particular ways.’ (Roquet 2009: 366)
Whilst Corbett mainly discusses the application of echoic effects to voice in
voice, or only evidence this randomly or vaguely. In this way the DR recordings,
like the new age and ambient music described above, might be understood to
exacerbate echoic effects, through a considered reduction of any foreground
presence.
The recordings in DR can sound both autonomous and non-produced, through

the combined use of automation, randomness and contingency in their
production. By using the same or similar delays, the effect can seem banally
repetitive, or extensive, across the different recordings.
The banal potential of echo is critical to DR because it highlights the repetition

of recorded sound, without then making this only secondary to a prior
representation. That is, by using delay, DR does not, through reference or
reproduction, only guarantee or assert an original sound or recording, but - by
repeating a sound – also produces a tangibly new and different version of it. At
recognizable as a version, as such, in relation to other instances of recorded

and real-world sound 67.
The echo effects in DR, like those in Eno’s ‘On Land’, are similarly realised
68
. This edge between
67 Cf. ‘Repetition is a form of change’ (Eno in Akin 1985).
68 ‘When I was in Ghana . . . I took with me a stereo microphone and a cassette recorder,
ostensibly to record indigenous music and speech patterns. What I sometimes found myself
doing instead was sitting out on the patio in the evenings with the microphone placed to pick
up the widest possible catchment of ambient sounds from all directions, and listening to the
result on my headphones.’ (Eno 1982/1986).
banality and the mundane appropriation of everyday sounds produces, what

is intended to be, a subtle sense of involvement and participation; rather than
only submersion or stasis. The DR recordings also similarly incorporate earlier
versions of recordings, by producing rerecordings for example, but these are
to reworking 69.
In the ambient described above, the intrinsic use of echo within a recording
emphasizes a slowed down and visceral sense of production. This acts like
a denser version of the longer temporalities between original instances of
recordings and their appropriation. The DR recordings, however, because of
their short durations and multiple co-production, produce a more shattered and
fragmentary experience of recorded sound.
In DR, a sense of protracted, tangible production instead plays out liminally

across virtual and real-world spaces: in the displacements of technologies;
in the repetition of effects; and then distributed amongst the different DR
recordings and complexes; and to other instances of mediated sound. (More
like dub).
69 Cf. ‘The interlinkages do not imply an ambient space in which the multiplicity would
be immersed and which would make distances invariant; rather they are constituted according
to ordered differences that give rise to intrinsic variations in the division of a single distance’
(D&G 1988: 493).
107
7. Dub
‘ . . . when McLuhan announced that the Global Media Village as

‘a proper place for the birth of metamorphosis’, his sentiments had
met their match in King Tubby’s echo chamber.’ (Martin 1995)
of ambient music (Toop 1995). Its connection to ambient had already been
use of echo and appropriation (Eno 1979). Like ambient, dub is characterised
by the use of echo and reverb as a core effect (Reynolds 2012: 171). Although
discussed (see Veal 2007: 79) 70.
Dub’s immersive electronic spaces have also been linked to avant-garde

works such as John Cage’s ‘Imaginary Landscape’ series (1939-52), as well
as to ambient (Hopkins 1993; Reynolds 1995: 2; Veal 2007: 39). Each of these
effects applied to existing recorded and mediated sounds. In addition, dub,

like ambient and other environmental musics, has been understood to have
contributing to the increasing hybridisation and/or erosion of categorical

differences between these, as Toop suggests above 71.
Although, unlike many environmental musics and the DR recordings themselves,

the music described below often makes predominant use of rhythm and voice,
70 See pp. 93-95.

71 Also Davis 1996: 11; Reynolds 2007.
a number of contemporary discourses surrounding dub reggae also make

it relevant to DR. The articulation of dub’s use of delay and appropriation
within these make it possible to elucidate some of the strategies also used
in DR; and to connect these to a more positive depiction of simulacra, than
introduced earlier 72. Dub also evokes a more fragmentary, ‘shredded’, and
less solipsistic account of recorded sound production and reception than the
more orchestrated, self-contained ambient described above, which make it
both pertinent to the wider thesis and closer to what the DR recordings try to
achieve.
Dub
Jamaican dub artists in the 1970’s, notably Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and King Tubby,
appropriated and stripped out tracks from the popular music which was locally
available to them at the time. Having removed the vocal and foreground parts,
through editing or dropping these out (Clarke 2007: 55), the artists then further
manipulated the tracks; using eight-track recorders and later, echo and reverb
units (Clarke quoted in Korn 1992: 329 n.29; Davis 1996: 7; McLeod 2003:
342) 73.
These processes built up ‘huge’ amounts of reverberation and ‘spaced

out’ tracks; resulting in what Erik Davis describes in terms of an ecstatic,
hallucinatory, nearly cyborgian, version of Eno’s ‘studio as compositional tool’
(Eno 1979):
‘Dubmasters like King Tubby would saturate and mutate individual

instruments with reverb, phase, echo and delay; abruptly drop
voices, beats, and guitars in and out of the mix; strip the music
down to the bare bones of drums and bass and then build it up
again through layers of distortion, percussive noise, and electronic
ectoplasm. Good dub sounds like the recording studio itself has
begun to hallucinate.’ (Davis 1996: 7)
The sense of immersive enclosure, that the distended, ‘heavy’ use of echo
in dub creates has been depicted, like ambient music, in terms of a oceanic,
72 See pp. 86-87.

73 E.g. Upsetters 1976; Pablo & King Tubby 1976.
amniotic interiority (Davis 1996: 8; Toop 1995) Otherwise dub spaces, again
of deep and outer space (McLeod 2003: 342-3; Veal 2007: 198).
Yet dub also produces, what have been described as, more eccentric and
disconcerting effects. Davis, for example, relates dub’s unsettling, resonant,
strangeness to a sonic realisation of contemporary deterritoralized, smooth
spaces, like Marshall Mcluhan’s acoustic space, when he writes of dub as:
‘ . . . a spacious electronic orientation of affect and quality rather than

information and quantity, a space of simultaneity, superimposition,
nonlinearity, odd repetitions, and odder resonances.’ (Davis 1997:
6)
Simulacral depictions of dub
used to distort and mutate familiar everyday experiences and examples of

music and sound (Veal 2007: 198). Recorded sounds are heavily reworked,
with echo and rerecording, to produce a ‘versioning’ in which any original
becomes submerged and obscured (Hemment 1998: 84). This pushes dub’s
echoic effects beyond, what Corbett understands above as, their generic and
standardized uses, to more transgressive productions of echo and reverb
(Corbett 1990: 98). Echo is not used to shape or ‘pump up’ existing pre-recorded
material arranged around an individual artistic production; or to subtly blend
it into existing patterns of sound, but to overwrite and disrupt these. Through
echo effects and rerecording, recording is turned against recording in order,
as Drew Hemment puts it, ‘to tear that material out of its earth-bound context’
(1998: 83).
genres by producing recorded sounds which abandoned any ‘dialectic of

original and copy’; making the production of simulacra its fundamental concern
(1998: 84). Erik Davis describes this in evasive and haunting terms:
‘Dub arose from doubling—the common Jamaican practice of
songs. At a time when “roots” reggae was proclaiming a literally

religious mythos of folk-cultural authenticity, dub subtly called it all

into question by dematerializing and eroding the integrity of singers
and song. There is no original, no motherland outside the virtual,
Yet by improvising and mutating its own repetitions of prerecorded

material, dub added something distinctly uncanny into the mix.’
(Davis 1996: 7)
Versioning
produce multiple versions out of original recordings. Sylvan Morris is quoted

by Michael E. Veal summarizing dub as ‘” just a version of the original which
is done in many forms “’ (Veal 2007: 54). Veal partly relates ‘versioning’ to an
expedient and economic imperative in which it was important to exploit and
maximize limited resources (of artists and production) to extend an original
recording’s commercial life (2007: 89).
Previous versions of dub in this way, Veal understands, act like advertisements
for new ones; whilst new versions subvert and problematise originals. As the
original songs are mined and recycled, memories of these are tapped into
and manipulated; producing a sense of ‘yearning’ which, at the same time,
represents what Veal, quoting Paul Gilroy, understands as ‘“ a calculated
its original version. “‘ (2007: 89).
Despite an economic imperative, Veal also argues that, through appropriation
different hegemonic practices of the music industry. As well as directly

subverting copyright, the aesthetic of reuse and recycling in dub implies
conceptions of recordings as open and participatory forms, which exceed any
belies and problematises any concept of an ‘original’ as such. (Veal 2007: 89-
90).
Delay as a condensed version of appropriation
Veal further connects the reverb and echo effects of dub, which dominate in
the recordings, to its larger structure of appropriation (2007: 198). This is also
condensed, resonant example of the time differences between an original

song and a version (Hebdige 2003: 2). Veal’s characterization of delay as a
primarily rhythmic effect (2007: 72) - rather than as a repetition of the same, or
the repeat of an original - can also be more broadly related to recordings and
appropriations as such.
Doublerecordings, ambient and dub
aspects of ambient, and many of the recordings sound similarly intrinsically

unfocused and non-consequential. Where these use the same content,
delay latencies or processes, different DR recordings also start to become
related together 74. Their short durations, number and different recording
methodologies, however, also fragments them; making any recordings only
transiently immersive, and preventing them from being experienced exclusively
75
.
This produces a more textured and tactile, searching effect than ambient,
where something completely planned elsewhere and ‘elsewhen’ surrounds the
listener-viewer. Different accounts of echo from ambient and dub, in this respect,
also partly express the haptic/optic divide discussed in Sonicinteractions 76 77,
which the echoic effects played out in DR themselves banally allude to.
Both ambient and dub explicitly appropriate further music and recordings. Eno
predominantly relates these to his own past compositions and experiences,
which are then reprocessed into later works (Eno 1982/1986). Previous
recordings were also intensively rerecorded in DR, but these were neither
individually memorable nor nostalgically reintroduced. Instead they were
intended to provide a subliminal sense of ‘slowing down’ or arrest 78. The use
75 See p. 33.
76 See pp. 57-60.
77 Cf.. Doyle 2004: 36-37.
78 Cf. Elisabeth LeGuin’s understanding of environmental musics as producing a
memorable effect rather than actual ‘arrest ‘(LeGuin 1994: 6).
of appropriation in DR, to an extent, also suggests this.
The appropriation of other peoples’ works is limited in DR, which only incidentally
uses these, and mainly ‘feeds off’ itself. Yet a similar concern remains to relate
different instances of recording together, with each instance, at the same time,
potentially remaining distinct or hearable. This might be audible, as such, or
achieved by underscoring the fact that these have been brought together:
79
.
The former is made most evident in the doublerecordings, which through their
repetition are opened up and maximised to reveal and proliferate distinctive

processes; whilst also evidently involving other peoples’ works, without then only
and relatively autonomous, acting as more transitory, less comfortable ‘points

of stability’ than those found in relation to ambient above 80.
These further recordings provide arbitrary and banal counterpoints, like the
environmental clichés in Mcluhan’s quotation below 81, that ‘arrest’ and stultify
at the same time as they invite participation and produce ‘metamorphosis’ and
change (Mcluhan in Gordon 2010: 124). The listener is released from any
singular or encompassed event, point or place of production, towards past and
future works and other voices; and given permission to ‘touch’ or ‘play’; in a
process that Hebdige describes as ‘dialogical, open ended, democratic’ (2003:
2); or, as Toop describes, ‘as if music was modelling clay rather than copyright
property’ (1995: 118).
79
80 Cf. ‘I realized while I was living this nomadic life, the one thing that was really keeping
me in place, or giving me a sense of place, was music . . . We can use recordings to insert a
sense of place in the various locations that we end up in. They repeat identically each time --
they’re reliable portable experiences.’ (Eno in Korner 1996). Cf. D&G’s nomadic ‘moving whilst
staying still’ (see pp. 62-64;157). Also Leguin 1994:6.
81 See p.113.
113
8. Conclusion
‘Cliché appears in many modes. All media whatever are

environmental clichés. The effects of such surrounds is narcosis
or numbing. This is a kind of arrest which, mysteriously, results in
metamorphosis.’ (Mcluhan in Gordon 2010: 124)
The recordings in Doublerecordings (DR) relate to both their further versions in

the complexes, and to other mediated and real-world sounds. The automation
and further methodologies in DR, in this way, trigger and proliferate sonic
productions which occur liminally between different instances of sound, rather
The fabricated echoes and rerecordings in DR are also intended to relate to

the reverberance evident in nearly any recording. In this respect, recorded
echoes can be understood to foreground the conditions of their own production
by making the virtual ‘secondary’ space of the recording more clearly audible.
between the sounds and the enclosing surfaces. The more foregrounded these
are, as when a recording is made in a reverberant space or with echo effects,
like in the doublerecordings and rerecordings, the more this virtual spatiality is
circumscribed and made palpably evident (Lansky 2004: 8; Doyle 2005: 15).
In this way, at the same time as implying an autonomous, virtual space, in

which any original production seems remote or irrelevant, recorded echo and
reverb can also emphasize the material production of a recording, as such.
process and the sounds of the original recording site, which are then experienced
together in a more intense materiality. Real-world and fabricated echoes and
reverberations tangibly prolong, and play with, and therefore highlight and
explore, the complex event of sonic production; apart from any original source
or instrument.
As Rick Altman argues, any recording could be conceived of as presenting a

double space (the sites of recording and playback) (Altman 1992: 27); and this
might also be understood in more complex, ‘echoic’ terms. Christof Migone
links Altman’s double site of recording to an oscillation of spatial movement, in
which any materiality is neither located in the recorded sound nor at the site of
playback but, paradoxically, ‘in the nowhere of the inbetween’ (Migone 2003)
82
notions of utopia and heterotopia to the heretofore singular space

. . . As Robert Altman points out . . . in a recording we hear double,
both the sound of the site it was recorded and the site where
the recording is being played . . . In this double hearing we are
presented with an elsewhere dissonant with other stimuli . . . Marin
place, the nowhere does not mean the unreal or the imaginary, but
the indetermination of place, the neutral space of difference and the
force of differentiation. Place which is neither here nor there, utopia
presents an absence in the here and now of space.’ (2003)
This differentiation of recording, through doubling, proposes a neutral, liminal,

‘no-place’, that challenges the ‘landscape sensibility’ that Eno, for example,
the playback environment into an immersive whole, in Migone’s account the

recording and playback sites remain separate and articulated as a multiplicity
and a difference.
Within acoustic ecology, like in the ambient above 83, echo (and recorded
sound) has been understood in terms of an extensive production that segues
82 Cf. ‘double resonance’ p. 49.

83 Also: ‘ “New Age composers barely distinguish inner space from outer” ‘(Susan Grove
Hall in Hibbett 2010:292).
interior and exterior spaces together 84 85. Both accounts of echo resolve
the ‘to and fro’ indeterminacy of sounds into an oscillation that is set within
the parameters or ‘walls’ of a recording, and only predicated on an original
production (whether this is then experienced as autonomous or not).
These alternate characterisations of real-world and recorded echoes - as the

extension and ‘playing out’ of an original sound and source or as immanent
in Popular Music Recording 1900-1960’ (2005). In the book, Doyle makes an

analogy between recorded echoes and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s
(D&G) model of territoralization and deterritoralization, in their discussion of
the refrain in music, in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ (1988) (Doyle 2005: 16-17) 86.
Doyle relates D&G’s terms to recorded echoes, which, he understands,

underscore and play out different expressions of spatiality and territorality.
These are both able to evidence the actual production of, and control over,
sonic processes and territories, by delineating and overstating these, and to
produce distinct virtual spaces. Doyle continues that:
‘Synthetic echo and reverb might also be seen as the paradigmatic

instance of the (de)territoralizing refrain. A sound emitted here is
repeated there, the space in between is thus delineated, mapped,
known, possessed. Or perhaps the opposite occurs: the echo is
diminishing repeating irretrievably other. The echo and the space
between here and there is alienated, lost, unknowable.’ (2005: 17-
18)
Within these terms, the recordings in DR make encounters between different

sound productions explicit; rather than focusing on any one of these individually,
84 Cf. public and private pp. 35, 41, 55.
85
I hear just as much displacement as placement, just as much placelessness as place . .

. difference and displacement form a backside to soundscape compositions’ emphasis on
immersion and origin.’ LaBelle 2006: 211).
86 In brief, D&G depict music in territorial terms, as a continuous making (‘territoralization’),
unmaking (‘deterrritoralization’) and remaking (‘reterritoralization’) of spatial territories out of
repetition and refrain. They further divide the refrain into three distinct, but related, organizations
of space. These alternately produce calmness and stability within a larger chaos; create and
mark home territories; or open up and connect such territories to the outside cosmos (D&G
1988: 311-312).
or stably resolving them together, by capturing or ‘possessing’ these. Recording

is used against recording to produce further sounds, which are in some way in
excess of, or independent from prescribed format, technological production or
sound, in which its predominant effect happens after any original point of
production: the ghostly sound of ‘information brushing against information’
(Cage in Kostelantz 2003: 232).
Minimum disturbances in DR - making and unmaking tiny latencies, repeating

recording processes, using minimal, contingent content - expose the material
production of recorded sounds, produce spatial and temporal disorderings,
and make virtual spaces. A minimal delay, in this way, acts as a paradigm of
the larger breaks and repeats which happen in relation to any recording. The
shifting proximity of any DR recording to a previous or potential further version
Together these produce a different characterisation of repetition in recorded

sound, and consequently of appropriation, in terms of intensive production
87
and irresolvable ‘echoic’ effects. This is relevant to DR, as well as to the
thesis as a whole, which attempts to develop a simulacral account of recorded
sound away from tropes of representation and capture. DR uses delay and
source, production or genre, and to relate these instead to multiple further

recorded sounds, which they both reference and realise through their own
production and diffusion.
87 ‘An echo . . . cannot occur without a distance between surfaces for the sounds to
the emptiness with its complex patterning. That patterning is not at a distance from itself. It is
immediately its own event. Although it is complex, it is not composed of parts. It is composed
of the event that it is, which is unitary. It is a complex dynamic unity. The interference pattern
arises where the sound wave intersects with itself. The bouncing back and forth multiplies
the sound’s movement without cutting it. The movement remains continuous. It remains in
continuity with itself across its multiplication. This complex self-continuity is a putting into
relation of the movement to itself: self-relation. The self-relation is immediate – in and of itself,
only its own event – even though it requires distance to occur. The best word, once again,
for a complicating immediacy of self-relation is “intensity” . . . Resonation can be seen as
converting distance, or extension, into intensity. It is a qualitative transformation of distance
into an immediacy of self-relation.’ (Massumi 2002:14).
117
PART III: “Dense Boogie” (2007 - 2011)

1. Introduction
‘I recall meeting a young . . . composer who told me that he had

given up writing music after becoming infatuated with the beauties
of cricket song. But when asked how, when and why crickets sang,
he couldn’t say; he just liked taping them and playing them back to
large audiences.’ (Schafer 1994: 206)
‘Crickets may be the lazy hedonists lying in the sun, but they have
amazing destructive powers.’ (Braidotti 2002: 148)
Overview
The sound installation “Dense Boogie” (DB) brought together a complex of
played back simultaneously with environmental background recordings,
The crickets recording playback was triggered from a touchscreen by a user;
duration of the installation. These were coordinated and played back using a
software installation player built in Max alongside the previous project.
Although parts of DB were produced using multichannel technologies, the

version described here was diffused in stereo at a conference held in the
NAB building at Goldsmiths, University of London in July 2011 (Phonography
Colloquium Website 2013).
PART III: “DENSE BOOGIE” (2007 - 2011) 118
stereo loudspeakers on a table in front of and from four pairs of headphones

hanging behind a freestanding wall in the NAB concourse. A series of wall
texts listed and referenced the sonic and other parts of the installation, which
included a pile of blindfolds placed nearby 1.
“Dense Boogie” and other projects
The DB installation partly repeated some of the strategies already

described in relation to the previous two projects, Sonicinteractions (SI)
version of the SI Player application; and revisited an academic location.
The same generic installation player and many of the strategies described in
Birds’ (FTB) 2
were shown in the same year (2011). Where aspects of DB and FTB closely
reoccur, these are discussed in detail in relation to an individual project only
repetition.
Introduction
DB focused on a series of mimetic and appropriative strategies that aimed
world sounds of a phonography conference. Sonic strategies ranged from
of ambisonic rerecording techniques. The appropriation of local typography
blindfolds, referenced or borrowed from other productions of recorded sound.
1 The other installation audio equipment – Mac Mini, RME Fireface 400, microphones
and stand - was also visible.
2 See pp. 172-221.
the sounds of audio technologies, such as equipment hiss. These are called
‘horspielstreifen’ to distinguish them from the ambient background recordings
produced at the same time 3. Although ambient and horspielstreifen recordings
they are related, both sonically and strategically, to examples of background

environmental musics.
Despite the fact that they were, more or less, unhearable, the background
recordings in DB provided a way to smoothly relate the different mediated
and real-world sounds of the installation together. At the same time, although
mediated sounds were diffused across the installation, the foregrounding of
the crickets recording made it possible for the installation to be experienced as
recording without ‘glazing over’.
and then subsequently to any stable or sustained listening - approaches some

of the ways, previously discussed, in which environmental recordings have
4
. Like many contemporary depictions of
environmental musics, the real-world sounds of insects, such as crickets and
cicadas, have been persistently related to problems of rationality and affect in
respect of audition; and depicted as ultimately distracting, disorientating and
mesmerizing (G.R.F. Ferrari 1990).
Both real-world and recorded versions of insects like cicadas have also been
conversely described, by the composer Francisco López, in terms of an
‘environmental acousmatics’ (López 1998-2). This implies that they are able
3 After the theorist Theodor W. Adorno, who used the term ‘horspielstreifen’ (‘hear strip’)
to describe the noise of equipment hiss that starts before and persists throughout the playback
of any recording (Kahn 1994).
4 See pp. 32 -34; pp. 41-42.
(e.g. visual; biological; cultural etc.). Within López’s account, there is a further
potential of such insects to sound technological.
R. Murray Schafer makes a similar point, in the ‘Tuning of the World’, where he
amongst natural noises. Schafer links their characteristics to the mechanical

and electric drones of industry and technology in the environment (1994: 78).
In the book ‘Metamorphoses’ (2002), Rosi Braidotti draws further implications in

respect of the insect/technology coupling, above. Following Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari (D&G), Braidotti argues that, through their sound productions,
insects both evidence and create a liminality – between nature and technology,
animal and human, for example - which is also relevant to a wider techno-
acoustic sensibility.
Similar ambiguities, between real-world and recorded insects and technologies,

are also evidenced in reviews of certain audio recordings. The, often unresolved,
categorisation of these recordings, in terms of their genre, sometimes hinges
electronic effects. This uncertainty has been frequently explored in many sonic
development of DB.
A rerecording I made in 2007 of Maryanne Amacher’s ‘Dense Boogie 1’

(Amacher 1999), as well as obliquely connecting to this debate, was also
appeared similarly unchanged. Although the ‘Dense Boogie 1’ rerecording
remained.
The background sounds and extra-sonic parts of DB repeated similar

ambiguities around the more obvious natural/technological trope of the crickets’

recordings. The horspielstriefen recordings, for example, were diffused
and recorded sounds.
At the same time as the different parts of the installation were clearly attributed
insects, loudspeakers, individual works and recordings) were assembled and

diffused in such a way as to disperse attention from any one of these, towards
their multiple, complex expression.
122
2. The Installation
“Dense Boogie” and ‘For the Birds’
The installation structure of both “Dense Boogie” (DB) and ‘For the Birds’
(FTB) developed from the same proposal to situate the foreground playback of
a recording together with a complex of further ambient background recordings,
rerecordings and real-world sounds. Although structured around the same
paradigm, each of the installations was quite distinct. Their shared features
are described below, before discussing the DB installation itself.
The foreground recording, within this general proposal, was intended to be

the ostensible sonic focus of the installation. This focus might be produced by
the recording’s content, dynamics or positioning; and supported by a cultural
habituation to monologues of mediated sound. Its content would either be
(as in FTB).
Further installation recordings and mediated sounds were intended to be

much less sonically obvious. Rerecordings, for example, proposed to closely
levels; unremarkable, ‘neutral’ content; or are indistinguishable from the real-

world sounds of the playback context).
‘Installation Player v2’ 5
‘Installation Player v2’ was developed, in response to this proposal, as a

generic application which routes, sequences and triggers multiple audio
events and functions within a sound installation. Play, record, live and levels
and fades were independently written into text scores 6, which could then be
easily loaded, edited or exchanged.
set-ups; including B-format decodes and ambisonic playbacks 7. The latter

were used to produce rerecordings for both installations, and for diffusing
Although some of the same functionality might have been achieved using a mix
8
- which includes
the direct implementation of interactivity using timers and sensors - made it a
more appropriate choice. The graphic customization of the Installation Player,
that Max makes possible, was also of interest; although this remained only
partly explored 9 10.
5
6 See DVD II: Dense_Boogie/ Installation_Player_v2.2.37/qlists.
7
formats from stereo to periphonic surround sound. (Elen 2001).

8 See p.22, n.1.
9 During the DB installation, the Installation Player was hidden behind the touchscreen
interface; although it was still remotely accessible through screen sharing. Whereas in this
version of DB, the player was only referenced in the title wall text (‘programming’), it had the
potential to become a more visible part of a future installation. This possibility impacted on the
way it was developed. Whilst in projects like Sonicinteractions (SI) the software applications
were intended to be distributed instead of, or alongside, the recorded sounds, in DB in
particular, the Installation Player, although not visible, was still, in this way, partly implicated as
a part of the wider work.
10 As well as reiterating a previous performance, in terms of its academic location, the
new version of SI also reproduced some of the typography of the original Sonic Interactions
potentially to be made available during DB. The Installation Player, in this way, also evidences
DB’s wider mimetic approach. See DVD II: Sonicinteractions/Sonicinteractions_v2; DVD II:
Dense_Boogie/Installation_Player_v2.2.37.
‘Installation Player v2’ (“Dense Boogie”)
version of the Installation Player 11. Pre-prepared scores were loaded into
the player before the installation 12
playback and recording start times and durations.
The Installation Player was interfaced with a version of the earlier SI application
13
, which was initiated at the start of DB and operated throughout its duration.
This featured an adaptation of SI’s core fade algorithm that now interacted with
the player in DB and modulated the foreground and background recordings
against their respective rerecordings.
The fades in the new version were set to operate within a narrower parametric
much less obvious, dynamic variation than in the original, where the modulation
was heard as an effect in itself 14.
Background to “Dense Boogie” and ‘For the Birds’
This concept for an installation evolved from a practice of making rerecordings
ambiences and uneventful rural exteriors. The rerecordings themselves also

sometimes included such ambient recordings as part of them. A rerecording
might be made, for example, of a foreground recording fading imperceptibly
through an ambient background recording into real-world acoustic sounds.
This might then be played back in the same place it was recorded in 15.
11 See DVD II: Dense_Boogie/Installation_Player_v2.2.37.

12 See DVD II: Dense_Boogie/ Installation_Player_v2.2.37/qlists.
13
(‘sonicinteractions’ window).
14 See p. 62.
15 I discuss this in more detail on pp.152-153.
Recording Complexes 09.06.06 to 02.02.09 16
Both DB and FTB were also anticipated by a series of CDR ‘Recording
development of the Doublerecording (DR) complexes discussed in Part 2 17,
The ‘Recording Complexes’, again, included a series of rerecordings; now

alongside low level ambient recordings, and recordings of equipment noise -
horspielstreifen -
and real-world sounds to be related within the complexes.
Complexes in “Dense Boogie” and ‘For the Birds’
, the18
complexes of recordings in DB and FTB were developed relatively randomly

and intermittently by repeatedly producing recordings and rerecordings.
These strategies emphasized the productive, mutable and transient effect of
recording, rather than the production of any one stable and repeatable work.
This might also be expressed, following DR, in terms of a more subtle, mimetic
are played back undecideably. Whilst this might be read as only a practical
convenience, by sharing methodologies and recording locations, the DB and
FTB installations could also be understood as versions of one another.
differences between recordings and real-world sounds or rerecordings; the

minimal eventfulness and virtual silence of the background recordings; and in
the use of generic recordings.
16 DVD I: Tracks 37-45; DVD II: Dense_Boogie/Recording_complex_090202; For_The_

Birds/Recording_complex_080502-080812.
17 See p.75.
18 See Appendix 2, p. 240; Appendix 3, p.241.
“Dense Boogie” Complexes
versions of the installation recordings 19. As they were diffused through the
loudspeaker pair, the DB recordings were simultaneously reproduced through
the headphones, alongside the other sounds of the NAB concourse. These
as people dining, assembling, and moving about the building, and outdoor
sounds through the open windows 20.
only experienced distinctly. This happened intrinsically, between the different
and genres of real-world and recorded sound. Differences between individual
by using similar locations and techniques, and by regulating and normalising

playbacks.
recordings in the installation, these were considered as part of a larger
been made over an extensive period of time, as part of the wider recording
practice, which had often used the same equipment and locations, and shared
content and methodologies 21.
The background recordings in DB were also directly connected to FTB 22

,
same technologies and rural location in Suffolk, UK. The same or closely
19 DVD I: Track 120.

20 DVD I: Track 46.
21 See pp. 178-185.
22 See pp. 172-221.
similar, ambient recordings and rerecordings were produced, which had the
potential to become the background parts of either, or both, sound installations.
All of the DB installation recordings were, therefore, made away from the
installation site in London (Perugia, Italy and Suffolk, UK). The original crickets’
usual example of my mundane, everyday experience and nor was it randomly

selected, but rather produced in response to the compelling sound of crickets.
128
3. Background Recordings
around a concept of background and foreground sounds. Apart from the

foreground recording, ‘Evening Cicadas, Italy’ 23, the other sonic parts of the
installation were intended to be experienced as background sounds. These
also used methodologies which are similar to those found in environmental
background musics; ranging from the selection of individual audio content, to
the parameters of playback, and the context of sound diffusion.
The ‘ambient’ recording in DB was nearly silent, whilst the rerecording of this
the installation recordings as background sounds themselves. The description

of the ambient and horspielstreifen recordings below (apart from the live
‘Ambient’ and ‘Rerecording (ambient)’ 24 25
The ambient recording and rerecording were diffused and modulated together,
using the installation player with the SI adaptation, from the start of the
installation and continued throughout its duration. Both of the background
recordings were looped continuously until a user triggered ‘Evening Cicadas,
Italy’. They were then crossfaded out, fading back in again as the foreground
23 DVD I: Track 47.

24 DVD I: Track 48.
25 DVD I: Track 49.
Production of background recordings
phonography conference. These were recorded during the evening, away

from the main installation site, in a domestic, rural interior. The intention had
to make a rerecording of it under similar conditions. The least eventful tracks
The rerecording and rerecording were then cut together to produce the same
duration 26.
Ambisonics
Although the original ambient recording and rerecording were made using
ambisonic recording techniques, these were then decoded to stereo for the
DB installation in the NAB building. The selection of stereo playback emerged
from the practicalities of available on-site equipment together with an interest in
stereo as a ubiquitous and normalised form. The stereo format also connected
to a wider preoccupation in the installation over loudspeakers as visually
problematic objects 27.
Description of background recordings
The ambient recording 28

to hear within the context of the NAB concourse 29. It lacked any exceptional or
substantial content, and where heard at all, might be experienced as a diffuse
and neutral drone of low level ambient sound.
Although ‘Rerecording (ambient)’ 30

more obviously included the sound of
26 This was just under 10 minutes. Although the original intention had been to produce
much longer durations this was not possible; for technical and other reasons which became
27 See p. 157.
28 DVD I: Track 48.
29
30 DVD I: Track 49.
had a similar potential. Through its shared ambient environmental content

(because they were recorded in the same place) and low dynamics, it either
sounded very similar to the rerecording, or fell beneath the threshold of
perception to bring attention to the live noises of playback equipment in the
NAB 31 32.
‘Rerecording (ambient)’ 33
The ambient rerecording, which it was modulated against, was similarly

featureless and drone-like. As a rerecording as such, ‘Rerecording (ambient)’
subtly related to the live noise of installation equipment and supplemented,
or reinforced, the local sounds of diffusion. It was possible that, close to the
loudspeaker cabinets, the sound of loudspeaker hiss might be louder than the
recordings themselves.
In this way, the live loudspeaker and equipment noises potentially became
34
.
At the same time, real-world equipment sounds become undecidably diffused
together with, and critically indistinguishable from, the background recordings.
Background recordings within the context of the NAB building
in a similarly quiet environment, or using headphones, and even make out the
subtle distinctions between them, this was practically impossible within the
NAB building.
However, further attention to the ambient recording and rerecording was also
drawn in DB through the texts and blindfolds and from the wider context of the
the wall text above the touchscreen, which stated their titles and total time:
31 In this respect, the onsite calibration of levels was a critical aspect of the installation.
32 Unlike in FTB, the installation loudspeakers in DB (Tannoy) were of a different model
to those used to produce the rerecordings (Genelec 1029a).
33 DVD I: Track 49.
34
a quiet playback location. E.g. DVD I: Track 50.
‘Ambient’, ‘Rerecording (Ambient)’ ‘9’52’ 35. The positioning of the text and
loudspeakers also indirectly invited any participant to stand in an optimum
‘sweet spot’ position. The blindfolds similarly implied, or provided, a more
intensely concentrated, acousmatic audition 36.
Low level, minimal sounds can encourage closer, strained attention, as well as
recordings also inferred other possible categories of recorded sound. For

example, these also might suggest ‘lowercase’ genres of recording 37, and it is
possible they could be listened to as such.
Whilst the background recordings in DB were potentially unhearable during the

installation, it was important that this was not experienced as a complete ‘drop
out’ of recorded sound; because this might itself become a noticeable feature
(e.g. where heard as a malfunction). Instead, the background recordings
were intended to provide an unremarkable, subliminal ‘bridge’ between the
The microphones 38
would only obliquely pick up the foreground recordings of crickets as
background sounds themselves. They were focused instead across the wider
NAB concourse. The live sounds were transmitted to a series of headphones
hanging on a row of seats that faced away from the main concourse on the
reverse of the installation wall.
This also produced an alternative, more acousmatic, model of the installation in

which nearly all of the sources of sound production, apart from the headphones,
were out of sight.
35
36 See p. 164, n.129.
37
use of silence and very quiet sounds (Roden 2011). E.g.s Günter 1993; Chartier 2002.
38
NAB Concourse 39.
The siting of the DB installation in the lower area of the NAB concourse
conformed to other architectures typically associated with background
environmental musics (Lanza 2004: 2). The basement of the NAB building was
open to the roof and a central atrium linked informal meeting spaces, and a
café, to enclosed lecture theatres and screening rooms across the levels of the
building. Different events and activities in this way are able to simultaneously
take place.
The DB installation was situated outside the main lecture theatre in an open
thoroughfare with seats and tables casually arranged across it. The front
part of the installation was set up against a narrow partition wall opposite the
main staircase in the middle of the concourse 40. The table and chairs used
in DB were borrowed from the immediate setting. Despite it being situated in
the basement, the installation site was visually well connected, through the
extensive use of glass across the atrium, to the different levels, as well as to
outdoors. Sounds could be heard, and were picked up by the microphones,
from throughout the open parts of the building, including from outside.
Background and environmental musics
Some of the ambient and background music theories that are relevant to DB
can be traced back to early experimental and utilitarian environmental musics,
such as Erik Satie’s ‘Musique d’ameublement’ (Furniture music) (1920) and the
mid-twentieth century productions of the Muzak Corporation 41. Within these,
technological sounds - either recordings or equipment noises - were intended
to become perceived as indifferent, indistinct or continuous with each other
and different real-world environments.
Although, within the context of this thesis, ambient background recordings
39 NAB Website 2013.

40
41 ‘Muzak’ was rebranded in August 1998 as ‘audio architecture’ (Kushner 1998; Nunns
2002: 129) - and again, in February 2013, as‘ Mood’ (Sisario 2013; Muzak Website 2013) .
certain functional strategies.
Background and environmental musics
The use of quiet dynamics, and uneventful, or neutral content, was commonplace
in - particularly early - forms of functional background and environmental
musics. Within these, continuous low level amplitudes of recorded sound
were mixed with real-world noises; without either obscuring them or drawing
attention to themselves (Minard 1996: 18).
Diffuse, steady-state and unremarkable atmospheres were designed to be

experienced indifferently, together with an existing environmental context, and
to be registered affectively beneath conscious attention (Vanel 2008: 94). In
this way further activities alongside could continue undisturbed or be subtly
supported and shaped.
Early functional musics were developed alongside other industrial and domestic
utilities and public architectures (Kushner 1998). Sounds were designed to
mask, smooth over, or supplement the hums and drones of the new systems.
The new technological noises were also understood to at once encourage
an uncanny absence of natural, human ‘social’ sounds and conversely, by
bringing this to attention, highlight unavoidable and disturbing examples of
these (Lanza 1991: 43).
A too low level of functional noise was itself, therefore, seen as problematic
and, to address this, further sounds were added to insulate a space against
‘drop-out’ (Kaprow in Vanel 2008: 104) 42. Environmental recorded music
coupled with air-conditioning, for example, aimed to produce an indifferent and
unremarkable ‘pseudo-silence’ (Westerkamp 1988: 65 n.8) that was similarly
intended to be ignored.
42 Cf. horspielstreifen below.

Horspielstreifen
Other minimal recorded sounds were used to introduce and mitigate the
abrupt effect of loud recording playbacks on mass audiences in cinemas. The
philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, in an unpublished paper on radio (Adorno
1938), relates such recordings, which he calls ‘horspielstreifen’, to the sound
at the start of a 78 rpm record before the music began; and that continued
throughout the recording as a background noise (Adorno & Leppert 2002: 218-
19). In the paper, he argues that this background sound, which is described
as ‘slight, continuous and constant’ (2002: 219), allows the foreground of
music reproduced together with it to be experienced, albeit registered only
unconsciously, as a projected or surface image 43.
Trailers of horspielstreifen
start; both preparing and settling the audience, as well as reassuring them that
a mediation was under way 44. This functional and subliminal use of recorded
sound recalls the regulatory and utilitarian purposes of Muzak. Yet Adorno also
understands horspielstreifen as decisively effecting modes of music reception;
arguing that such sounds, because of their prevalence across all mediated
sound, and apparent lack of substantial content, also have the potential to
(Mowitt 2003: 270). In this respect, a lack of recorded content, itself, connects
background recordings to further instances of recording; linking these together,
at the same time as subliminally alerting listeners to the material conditions of
their production (Mowitt 2003: 270).
Horspielstreifen in “Dense Boogie” and ‘For the Birds’
The concept of horspielstreifen is relevant to the practice of rerecording which
noise 45. They were called ‘horspielstreifen’ in order to distinguish them from
43 Cf. Rancière pp. 219-220.

44 Cf. ‘On hold’ telephone music (Rigby 1998).
45 DVD I: Tracks 40 - 42; DVD II: Dense_Boogie/Recording_complex_090202/ 090202_
T04; 090202_T04_xfadein; 090202_T08; 090202_T10; 090202_T11; DVD II: For_The_Birds/
Recording_complex_080502-080812/080804_T05; 080804_T08.
the straight ambient recordings and other rerecordings within the complexes.
Horspielstreifen, within this context, were either recordings of the sounds of
technologies simply turned on, without any further signal, or rerecordings of
very low level ambient playbacks. Although, within these terms, it would have
been more accurate to describe ‘Rerecording (ambient)’ 46 as a horspielstreifen
recording it was instead called a rerecording in DB. This was so that the
background recording and rerecording might be observed (in the installation
text 47) to rhythmically mirror the structure of the foreground recording and
rerecording.
The horspielstreifen recordings focus on the sounds of playback technologies;

especially the equipment hiss of loudspeakers. Many of the rerecordings were
made of original ambient recordings diffused ambisonically across multiple
loudspeakers 48
usual stereo playback) in the horspielstreifen recordings, such as ‘Rerecording
(ambient)’ 49 50
insects in DB.
The horspielstreifen recordings were invariably made from the same position
as the rerecordings; using identical technologies, set-ups and levels. They were
often produced immediately before or after a rerecording and, like Adorno’s
horspielstreifen above, were intended to be diffused together with them. This
minimized any audible differences in production noise, between a rerecording
and a horspielstreifen, or a horspielstreifen and an ambient recording, and
enabled them to be effectively crossfaded or spliced together 51.
The two background recordings in DB, ‘ambient’ 52 and ‘Rerecording (ambient)’

53
, for example, fade in and out of one another unnoticeably. In this way
horspielstreifen recordings, as well as connecting to real-world noises, also
46 DVD I: Track 49.
47
48 See p. 153.
49 DVD I: Track 49.
50 E.g. compare stereo loudspeakers on; quad loudspeakers on; stereo and quad
loudspeakers on DVD II: Dense_Boogie/Recording_complex_090202/090202_T04; 090202_
T11; 090202_T10.
51 DVD I: Track 42.
52 DVD I: Track 48.
53 DVD I: Track 49.
intrinsically provide sonic ‘bridges’ between different rerecordings, and between

rerecordings and straight ambient recordings, to produce something like the
consistent subliminal tone of production that Adorno describes above.
same spaces they have been made in, they are also able to connect smoothly
from foreground recordings to happening real-world sounds. Although this was
not so relevant to the version of DB produced in the NAB concourse, this
aspect is developed fully in FTB 54. In DB the unmarked re-siting of the ambient
recordings - from a rural to an urban interior - produces a radically subdued
version of the more transparent displacement the foreground recordings
achieve.
Dynamic levels and fades in “Dense Boogie”
between the different sonic parts of the installation, the dynamic levels and
and between these and real-world sounds, were crucial aspects of DB (and
FTB).
‘Ambient’ 55 and ‘Rerecording (ambient)’ 56 were intended to be dynamically

consistent, as far as possible, at the point of recording. This was mainly achieved
by reproducing each of the background recordings using the same recording
equipment, position and levels at similar times. Because of environmental
contingencies (e.g. meteorological changes, aircraft etc.), several attempts
were made to achieve these.
Part of DB’s intention, in respect of the background recordings, was to produce
. None of the DB recordings were, therefore,

57
intended to have dynamic levels or fades written into them. Instead these were
54 See pp. 199-201.

55 DVD I: Track 48.
56 DVD I: Track 49.
57 See pp. 183-184.
mainly applied, using both the installation player 58 and SI applications 59, during
the installation playback 60.
The background recordings, in this way, emerge and then disappear

imperceptibly either from, or into, the real-world noises of the NAB, or in and
out of the foreground recordings. Whilst the foreground recordings conform to
many such recordings by discernably fading in and out over 4 seconds over
the low levels of the background recordings.
58 The Installation Player included a fade function that allowed global and local fade
settings to be read from scores. These could be programmed for individual installations and
to calibrate different recording levels, for example. See DVD II: Dense_Boogie/Installation_
Player_v2.2.37/qlists/_audio_stereo_2; _live.
59 See DVD II: Dense_Boogie/Installation_Player_v2.2.37. Open v2.2.37 application
then click on ‘sonicinteractions’ window to open ‘scaling’ window.
60 In DB, the background recordings are automatically faded in at the start of the
installation. They loop on continuously; until the foreground crickets’ recording is triggered by
a user via the touchscreen. The foreground recording is crossfaded with the current playing
point of the background recording, which then fades out. The latter fades seamlessly back in
at the end of the crickets’ recording and loops on until the next interaction, or to the end of the
installation.
138
4. ‘Evening Cicadas, Italy’
The foreground recording of crickets, ‘Evening Cicadas Italy’ 61, in “Dense

Boogie” (DB) is an extract from a stereo recording that was made in August
2007. It records the summer evening sounds on the edge of a small village on
the border of Perugia and Tuscany, Italy.
as an expedient rather than as a necessary requirement of DB 62. My (limited)

familiarity with such sounds had been informed as much ‘second hand’ and
indirectly, from different media and genres, as by occasional experiences of
these as a tourist. The recording was made with the informal, and erroneous,
idea that the ‘singing’ insects were cicadas, rather than crickets. The mistake
of the cited works.
part of DB, something of the compelling circumstances of its production, and

the way in which the original evocative and mesmerising sound seemed to be
sustained and reproduced in the recording was important to the work. At the
same time the initial focus and attraction, towards both the real-world sound
and recording, quickly deteriorated during reception into a glazed and hypnotic
repeatedly drifted off. The recording itself seemed pointless and insubstantial.
It was relatively straightforward to make ‘Evening Cicadas, Italy’, which was
61 DVD I: Track 47.

62
recording.
63
. The extended recording was
had been made in the same wider location previously. A pair of microphones 64
were positioned on a convenient low wall, facing the wooded and grassy area
where the insects were mainly singing from. It was a warm and still August
evening and therefore minimal wind protection was required 65. A DAT recorder
and mixer were set up, and the levels were calibrated and then left to run,
without any further change or monitoring. The insects did not appear to be
for example, a bird might be, and continued to call.
Description
a dense and steady foreground of

66
insects sings against a background of mostly anthropogenic (human-made)

noise. A persistent low background of television, often with piano music, plays
continuously alongside the insects. This fades in and out of the foreground,
67,68
. Low voices sound
occasionally close by, whilst different dogs bark intermittently and repeatedly in
the middle distance 69. Car sounds are sometimes loudly obtrusive and nearby,
70
. Towards the end of the tape there is less background activity and the insects
71
can sound almost alone 72.
63 DVD II: Dense_Boogie/Audio_other/070813.aif.

64
65 Foam windshields.
66 DVD II: Dense_Boogie/Audio_other/070813.
67
68
69
70
71 Cf. blackbird in FTB; ‘Presque Rien No. 1’.
72
The insects produce a persistent pulsating rhythm that has subtle variations
in amplitude and frequency over time. There seems to be at least two distinct
varieties of sound production that are rhythmically and persistently modulated
against one another, which perhaps implies more than one group or species
of insect 73. A more shrill, musical noise can be heard together with a lower
chirping or churring. The different sounds sometimes coincide, in terms of their
broader rhythm and dynamic levels, whereas at other times they drift apart.
They then overlap, or sound antiphonal, or less balanced where the higher
sound becomes louder and starts to predominate.
‘Evening cicadas, Italy’ 74
For the purposes of DB, the 5’ extract which was selected from the extended
75
) was from the least eventful part of
the tape; in terms of both the character and consistency of insect noise and the
anthropogenic background noises. The crickets produce a repetitive rhythm
and continuous level of shrill chorusing throughout the duration of the extract.
Although there is still a partly antiphonal effect, the different parts no longer
background there are the low, smooth sounds of cars fading in and out of the
middle-distance, with occasional fragments of low level television music and
remote dog barks. The start of the track is cut to the zero crossing of the wave
76
.
‘Rerecording (‘Evening cicadas, Italy’)’ 77
The foreground rerecording in DB, ‘Rerecording (Evening cicadas, Italy)’,

was recorded in the same location, using the same technologies as the DB
73
of bioacoustics signal recognition (Chesmore & Ohya 2004). See also Schafer 1994: 36.
74 DVD I: Track 47.
75 DVD II: Dense_Boogie/Audio_other/070813.
76 Fades are applied from the Installation Player. See p. 137, n.58.
77 DVD I: Track 51.
background recordings, although at a different time. This made it possible to

make a foreground rerecording which would subtly connect to the background
recordings in DB and reduce any sense of dissonance between them; however
unhearable this mutual sound might be, as such. At the same time a sense
of rerecording, in this way, becomes subliminally available in the foreground
rerecording, which would otherwise sound hardly different from the original
crickets recording.
‘Non-work’
foreground sound in DB was the way in which it was possible to make

perceptually accurate rerecordings of such sounds. These were able to be
rerecorded in domestic spaces without obvious room colouration.
recording, ‘Crickets, Perugia, Italy’ 78. The crickets performed regularly and
was only possible to approximate their location - both because individual insects
are unseen and because they are spread out in an unknown multiple - different
recording equipment positions also seemed uncritical and interchangeable in
respect of these 79.
Perspective
seemed to come from ‘everywhere and nowhere’ (Schafer 1994: 29; López
- was hard or impossible to distinguish, hold on to, or to later recall (Schafer

1994: 36).
cicadas and crickets, like ‘Evening Cicadas, Italy’, which can sound similarly
78 DVD II: Dense_Boogie/Audio_other/070813.aif.

79 Cf. Dauby p. 184.
unplaced and non-perspectival. The location of the recorded insect sound in

respect of stereo loudspeaker diffusions, can continue to seem non-directional
be experienced as the same as, or very similar to, an original.
Background/ foreground
‘Evening Cicadas, Italy’ 80 and ‘Rerecording ‘Evening Cicadas, Italy’’ 81 ostensibly

form the foreground sounds in the DB installation. However, as suggested
above, the ambiguous quality of the real-world sound insects is maintained in
recordings of these.
the noise of the television that can itself sometimes be heard as a background
also positioned so that this would obliquely pick up the ‘Evening Cicadas, Italy’
recordings as background sounds themselves. ‘Evening Cicadas, Italy’, as a
highly repetitive recording, also produces a slight psychoacoustic after-effect
82
.
Installation playback
Whilst the foreground recordings reproduce crickets as the almost only and
predominant sound throughout their duration, in the installation they were
not intended to sound dynamically overwhelming. The playback volume was
adjusted to match a putative ‘natural’ sound level. The recording and rerecording
of ‘Evening Cicadas, Italy’ were triggered by users and then played back
intermittently for 5 minutes; rather than constantly looped, as the background
recordings were. Furthermore, within the context of the NAB and a phonography
conference, the recording itself had the potential to be experienced as a banal
and commonplace introduction (Martin 1994; Toop 1995: 240; Dunn 1999: 27;
McCartney); and therefore not requiring close attention.
80 DVD I: Track 47.

81 DVD I: Track 51.
82 See ‘Remanence’ (Augoyard & Torgue 2005: 87).
143
5. Insects and Technologies
R. Murray Schafer and Rosi Braidotti on insect sounds and technologies
crickets and cicadas, have been widely related to mechanical and technological
noises. In the ‘Tuning of the World’, for example, R. Murray Schafer describes
their ‘continuous stridulation’ as an exception to noises which have otherwise
been exclusively produced by the mechanical and electronic drones of industry
and technology. Schafer writes:
may be an illusion, for many insect sounds are pulse modulated

or varied in other subtle ways, but despite the “grainy” effect such
modulations create, the impression with many insects is of a
continuous, unvarying monotony. Like the straight line in space, the
again until the Industrial Revolution introduces the modern engine.’

(1994: 36)
waveforms produce. Although he notes that mechanical and technological

noises might take variable forms, Schafer describes their predominate
feature as an unchanging and prolonged continuousness along a horizontal
line; producing, what he understands to be, a state of ‘low information high
redundancy’ (1994: 78).
Whilst Schafer consistently opposes natural and technological noises, he does

not ignore the similarities between insect noises and technologies but leaves
open the question of what this might imply. His depiction of insects in
relation to the contemporary global technological environment, although only
technological modernity.
The sonic relationships between insects and sound technologies, which
building on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (D&G) in ‘A Thousand
Plateaus’ (1988), critically relates insect sound production to the contemporary
mediascape.
In the book ‘Metamorphoses’ (2002: 117-171), Braidotti relates insects,

through their forms of sound production, to the emergence of the ‘post human’;
arguing that insects are capable of producing sounds which are closer to the
technological than the animal. Braidotti describes the post human in terms of
non-living, animal and machine (2002: 152) 83.
As ‘multiple singularities’, insects produce a mobile liminality and interstitial

status; remaining in a state in which, Braidotti citing Steven Shaviro writes,
they ‘neither assimilate or expel’ (2002: 149). As such, productions of insects,
or operational use, under any single monolithic scheme (2002: 126).
As Braidotti notes the associations between insects and technologies in the

social imaginary, following D&G (2002: 153-4), she argues that insects, like
technologies, are able to ‘fantastically’ outperform and surpass human music.
This characterisation moves beyond depictions of insects as scaled-up super-
organizations (e.g. choirs, or orchestras 84 of tiny instrumentalists sawing
away). As Steven Connor describes elsewhere:
‘It is not an orchestra, but the shimmering body of a multitude; it

has the kind of mobile, diffuse intactness possessed by a swarm, or
shoal, or horde or cloud.’ (Connor 2001)
83
abject, the menacing and uncanny (2002: 142, 149, 170). Cf. the ‘downright frightening’ the
84 Cf. Krause1987: 1; Schafer 1997:31, 37.

Crickets and cicadas, through stridulation - which is the rubbing of different

parts of the body together - are able to produce sounds that are temporally and
rhythmically much faster and more complex than any human production. This
problematizes the way in which music is predicated and authenticated in terms
of a central, virtuoso performance of a sole human producer or voice. Braidotti
writes, quoting from D&G (D&G 1988: 308):
‘. . . insects constitute a real challenge for humanity; they deprive

the human of his or her alleged monopoly over music-making:
‘Birds are just as important, yet the reign of birds seems to have
been replaced by the age of insects, with its much more molecular
vibrations, chirring, rustling, buzzing, clicking, scratching and
scraping.’ (2002: 154)
Like D&G, Braidotti understands that such techno-acoustic sounds are able
spaces, polyphonic hybridization, multiple sonic interferences’ (2002: 157).

She also connects collective experiences of pervasive mass media to D&G’s
account of nomadic reception as ‘moving whilst staying still’:
‘Most dwellers of the post-industrial urban space have developed a

paradoxical relationship to their own acoustic space . . . technology
has endowed us with the capacity to create and carry around in our
own embodied self our own musical habitat. This may or may not
coincide with the mass-produced saturation of commercial sounds
. . . Of all the technologies we inhabit, the musical, acoustic or
sound ones are the most pervasive but are also the most collective.
They thus summarize the paradoxes of nomadic subjectivity as
simultaneously external and singular.’ (2002: 154-5)
In this way, Braidotti concludes that generic, much repeated and shared
reproductions are also paradoxically able to defamiliarise and affectively
these into private instances and subjectivities (2002: 170-1).

Insect recordings
The lack of distinction between insect and technological noises is audibly

demonstrated in recordings of insects and/or certain synthesized electronic
sounds, where any sonic difference between the two has sometimes been
found critically undecideable. This has encouraged speculation in respect
elsewhere.
practices and commented on by many music reviewers 85. A review of ‘Cicadas

And Crickets’ (‘Cigales Et Grillons’, 1999), a global audio survey of both genus’
by Jean C. Roche and Jean Thevenet, is suggestive:
‘ . . . the buzzing chirping sounds still sound familiar, comfortingly

so. Yet alien too, when you think about it . . . this could just as easily
be the work of an experimental electronic musician! Ryoji Ikeda,
Noto, or Nerve Net Noise perhaps...and the examples of “buzzers”
on the Conet Project also come to mind . . . Also, these bugs’ high
pitched whines and massed chattering vary in intensity levels from
the soothing to the downright frightening . . .’ (Aquarius Records
Website 2013)
In another example, Frans de Waard, writing on the title piece from the sound
and processed noises to cricket sounds and ambient music. Because Julius’
recordings and bespoke electronic devices, the listener is left uncertain as

to what it is they are hearing. The review describes de Waard’s meandering,
genres and sources; settling on an ambient, ‘intelligent sound’ which sounds

like ‘loud singing crickets’ (de Waard n.d.).
85 E.g. Henderson 1998; Ffytch 2001; Montgomery 2009-2: 155; Pinnell 2011.
Evening Cicadas, Italy sounding technological
Following the arguments above, it is clear that the cricket recordings in DB,
like other such insect recordings, have the potential to sound technological. A
further aim of DB was to produce a foreground recording that was ungraspable
sound would be heard to start, continue, stop and repeat; rather than to be
intrinsically eventful.
Whilst ‘Evening Cicadas Italy’ 86

cut from the most consistent and least eventful part of the original recording
in terms of other background noises. The total duration of 5’00 was also partly
determined by this.
duration. That is, one which could both be feasibly listened to completely and
repeatedly, and, at the same time, because of the monotony of its content, be
long enough to be found predictable or boring; without being so long that this
becomes a feature in itself 87.
The intrinsic volume of the crickets was also consistent throughout and,
through normalisation, across both recording and rerecording. The recordings
were then diffused together during the installation at a median master level
which was neither loudly foreground nor subtly background.
The pulsing repetitions of insect sounds in the recording were also reiterated in
the modulation of the rerecording and in the larger repetitions of the recordings.
The incessant regularity produced by the intrinsic cricket to cricket sounds
algorithm throughout the playback of the foreground recordings.
Insect recordings in different genres
86 DVD I: Track 47.

87 Cf. durations of Cage’s ‘Silent Prayer’ (1948);‘4’33’ (1952) (Vanel 2008: 101).
insect recordings and technologies, also extends to their stable placement

within any single genre. Whilst the foreground crickets recording is unusual in
respect of the recording practice described here, such recordings have been
commonplace across a range of genres.
are found across electroacoustic and experimental musics. Environmental

musics, such as ambient and new age, have also made extended use of ‘bush
muzak’ to produce relaxation and meditation tracks 88.
expert interest in insects. Yet through multiple experiences of such sounds in

the mass media - sometimes mainly, or only, gathered through recordings -
real-world experiences of insect sounds might recall recorded versions; even
after the Amacher’s ‘Dense Boogie 1’ rerecording 89 90

.
Despite the fact that it was not my intention to produce a specialist entomological
or bioacoustic recording, ‘Evening Cicadas, Italy’ 91 still had the potential
to be listened to in this way. During the DB installation several participants
approached the main diffusion area and (correctly) identifed the insects as
touchscreen ‘Evening Cicadas, Italy’, along with its distinctive sound, it was
further suggested that the subject of the recording might be the nocturnal
Italian Tree cricket (Oecanthus pellucens) 92.
88 Selected examples include: Ferrari 1967-70; López 1998; Mizutani 2005/2006; Dauby
2007. Wild tracks: Malle 1974; Weerasethakul 2010 (see Morgan. n.d.); Hamilton 2005.
89
90 Cf. simulacra pp. 86-87.
91 DVD I: Track 47.
92 Thanks to Geoff Sample for suggesting this.
‘Evening Cicadas, Italy’ in “Dense Boogie”
‘Evening Cicadas, Italy’ (from the original ‘sr070813_35-40mins’) in DB,

in order to both informally relate it to other such recordings and to produce
placelessness evident throughout the installation, because cicadas only sing

during the day.
‘Evening Cicadas, Italy’ was not only used to repeat the insect/technological
trope above, or to contribute to an already substantial sub-genre and subject
replicated many existing similar recordings. By sounding generic, and banal

even, the listener was also invited to hear the recording as something familiar
and repeated 93. In this respect it was intended to provide an ambivalent focus.
The crickets recording was selected mainly for the way in which it effortlessly
related to further instances of both mediated and real-world sounds, rather
than for its intrinsic content. This was realised within the installation through
its sonic and extra-sonic siting in relation to further instances of recording
Maryanne Amacher’s ‘Dense Boogie 1’ (1999).
Beyond the installation, the original recording produced a convincing

representation of crickets that was, arguably, close to their real-world effect;
The real-world acousmatic production of cicadas and crickets also lends itself
94
undermined by these different mimetic effects: of sounding technological; or

like other recordings (rerecordings; further cricket recordings), or real-world
insects. In this way repeating the wider mimetic strategy of the installation.
93 ‘Evening Cicadas, Italy’ was also played back repeatedly during the installation.
94
produce.
150
6. Appropriation and Mimesis I
There is quite an extensive appropriative aspect to “Dense Boogie” (DB),

although this is mainly extra-sonic. The title, “Dense Boogie”, was borrowed from
a recording by the composer Maryanne Amacher; and her work is referenced
again, in the installation, with an Amacher quotation from elsewhere. The
blindfolds were copied from the composer Francisco López. In addition the
typography and layout of the wall and touchscreen texts within the installation
The background and foreground rerecordings, alongside the re-use of the

Sonicinteractions algorithm, also evidence a plunderphonic approach to
95
. The original ‘Dense Boogie
1’ recording (1999), as well as being a subject of the rerecording practice
‘Evening Cicadas, Italy’ 96, as previously discussed, whilst an original of my
Lucia H. Chung 97.
Mimetic strategies in “Dense Boogie”
The use of appropriation in the installation was conceived of as part of a wider

focus on mimetic strategies and affects, which extended across the project
95 The term ‘plunderphonics’ was coined by the composer John Oswald to describe
recorded works which exclusively use other recordings as their own ‘raw material’ (Cutler
2000: 92). (See Cutler 2000; 2010).
96 DVD I: Track 47.
97 ‘Measurement No. 1.’ Lucia H. Chung 2011. DVD I: Track 119.
98 99
. Beyond the use of the audio technologies themselves, these included:
selection of background and foreground content which was similar to, or

indistinguishable from, further instances of recording and real-world sounds.
The extra-sonic appropriations, above, can also be understood within this
mimetic context.
Although the use of mimesis in sound installations has sometimes been

related to an extended and persistent effect of immersion and susceptibility
(Bishop 2005: 82-101), it was not the intention to produce such a total effect in
DB. Instead mimesis was used as a productive methodology which developed
further versions of recordings from individual instances of sound, that were then
distributed and referenced across the installation. In this respect, the mediated
sounds in DB, not least the original crickets recording, might be understood
to produce, what Claire Bishop has described as, a ‘yielding’ to the ‘trompe
98 Rather than repeating a Platonic paradigm of mimesis (see pp. 83-84; also Potolsky
2006), my understanding of the concept follows from alternative depictions of mimesis drawn
from contemporary theories developed mainly around Walter Benjamin (Benjamin 1999: 333-
336). These understand mass media reproduction as a recovery of earlier mimetic forms of
participation and engagement (e.g. Taussig 1993; Hansen 2000). Although these discourses
in respect of DB below. Following Benjamin, contemporary modes of subjectivity have been

related to mimesis both produced in response to technologies, and through their use. In
‘Mimesis and Alterity’, Michael Taussig describes mimesis as an innate tendency and faculty
- most clearly stated in human childhood, for example, but also found in nature - which has
been recovered through reproductive technologies (1993: 35, 77, 211). Mimesis implies both a
copy and a substantial connection, or material transfer, that produces a tangible, even mutual,
contact between subject and object (Taussig 1993: 144-5). The subject becomes merged
together with the object of its perception through sensuous contact; rather than producing a
separation between the two. This mimetic resurgence has been interpreted as a widespread
and necessary reaction to the increasingly industrial and technological milieu of modernity
and post-modernity. Human subjectivity is understood to have shifted, out of necessity, from a
semiotic and instrumental relation to nature to mimetic modes of engagement. This is in order
to grasp, what has been described as, a radically and continuously changing relationship to
a ‘second’ nature (Hansen 2000: 234). Quoting Susan Buck-Morss, Mark Hansen expresses
this as a transition from a position of ‘mastery’ to one which is open and receptive to matter:
‘the “mastery” of our irreduciblely technological relation to nature demands “being receptive
to the expressive power of matter, a mimetic, not an instrumental skill”.’ (Hansen 2000: 247).
Whilst this mimetic approach might be related more easily to modes of reception, it also
implies a passive and ‘anti-heroic’ characterisation of production, more generally; as well as
a less hierarchical characterisation of recordings and real-world sounds. These depictions of
99 The DB installation further evidences, what might be characterized as, a ‘Cailloisian’

mimetic strategy: by aiming to produce recordings that were ‘just similar’, without having any
other goal (Caillois, 1984: 30).
l’oreille’ 100 that is tactile and local, rather than absolute or hierarchical (2005:
100) (e.g. between the horspielstreifen recordings and loudspeaker hiss).
Rerecording
the projects in this thesis, its appropriative and mimetic aspect is explored
most closely in DB. In the previous two projects, Sonicinteractions (SI) and
‘Doublerecordings ‘(DR), no attempt was made to minimize any artefacts
of the rerecording process; such as room reverberance. In the former, the
focus of the work and the structure and scale of the lecture theatre made
this unnecessary; whereas in DR rerecording artefacts were included as an
important part of its wider strategy.
noted in relation to DR 101. This became a critical concern of the later two projects
which aimed to produce convincing reproductions of original recordings in
smaller, private spaces 102.
Background
Rerecording had already been, both a random and sometimes intentional,
Complexes’ 103 horspielstreifen were

produced before or after the rerecordings in the same playback locations; using
100 Trompe l’oreille
of trompe l’oeil in painting. Following Katharine Norman (Norman 1996), Peter
Batchelor emphasizes a more limited and transient account of trompe l’oreille in sound
installation than Bishop’s, for example. This involves what Batchelor describes as:
in spatial and sonic behaviour from reality as to allow the listener to believe s/he is truly
‘hearing the thing’, if only (and in many cases explicitly) for a limited period. In the same way as
its visual equivalent, the trompe l’oeil, it seeks to present a plausible landscape, often through
the apparent extension of an existing one, from which it may be indistinguishable (Batchelor
2007: 1).
101 See p. 76.
102 See p. 207.
103 E.g. DVD I: Tracks 37, 38, 40.
identical technical set-ups.
Other recordings, which merged rerecordings together with background

recordings 104, evolved out of the necessity of turning on and off an original
recording without then making this production noise a part of the rerecording.
Although these were initially produced by stealth, they were later sometimes
triggered automatically, and were therefore able to include extended durations
of ambient before and after the rerecording.
Techniques
After a series of experiments, one of the solutions which was arrived at, and
later adopted, in relation to both later installations, was to make ambisonic
rerecordings in a close equilateral triangle with a stereo speaker pair. A stereo
recording was diffused through the stereo speakers and rerecorded in B-format
105
.
Although many of these experiments were focused on producing convincing

mimetic reproductions, rather than on any intrinsic recorded content, this
remained an important qualitative aspect of any rerecording. For example, it
was also possible to make a convincing rerecording of low level, uneventful
ambient noise from the centre of a speaker cube. This also informed the
foreground recording selection in DB.
Appropriations
‘Evening Cicadas, Italy’ has already been depicted here in terms of an evasive,
also considered for the foreground DB installation recordings: ‘Presque Rien

ou le lever du jour au bord de la mer’ (Luc Ferrari 1967-1970) (‘Presque Rien
No. 1’); and the track ‘Dense Boogie 1’ on Maryanne Amacher’s CD ‘Sound
104 E.g. DVD I: Track 39.

105 See p.123, n.7.
Characters (Making the Third Ear); (1999) (‘Sound Characters’).
The cricket recordings in DB were intended to sound canonical to the extent
in ‘masterpieces’ such as ‘Presque Rien No. 1’ (Caux in Drott 2009: 163).

Although neither Amacher nor Ferrari’s recordings were eventually used, both
remain (directly and obliquely) referenced in the installation.
‘Presque Rien No. 1’ and “Dense Boogie”
‘Presque Rien No. 1’ is a widely circulated and well-known work in the canon of
Musique Concréte 106. The work relates to DB in a number of different ways. A
rerecording of ‘Presque Rien No. 1’ was made several years before the thesis
projects; in what might be understood as an early plunderphonic response to
a recording that I had liked at the time 107.
the foreground content of the DB installation. In part, because of the way in

which the insects provide a repeating and striking presence, which, as well as
sounding intrinsically compelling, perhaps makes the composition more easily
At the same time as ‘Presque Rien No. 1’ has been recognised as a canonical
work, its focus on mundane, everyday sounds has encouraged an extensive
debate in relation to the circumstances of its production. This has often
focused on the cicada sounds and whether these are, or how they relate to,
untreated, manipulated or synthesized sounds, which also returns us to the
insect/technology discussion, above.
in terms of genre. Andra McCartney, for example, situates ‘Presque Rien

No. 1’ within the tradition of soundscape composition, against a prevailing
106 See p.155, n.108. Also McCartney 1999: 104-106.

107 Cf. John Oswald (Duguid 1994).
electroacoustic trend (McCartney 1999: 104). Elsewhere, Howard Slater relates
recording practice described here (Slater 2001) 108.
‘Presque Rien No. 1’ has further resonances with DB because of Ferrari’s
1’, as in my own practice to a degree, recorded sounds are drawn from the
repeated random and unexceptional sounds that are produced by the everyday
sought out (Warburton 1998).
became ‘Evening Cicadas Italy’, was produced on holiday. Ferrari locates
connecting it to both amateur and mass cultural productions (Drott 2009: 159-
160). Although these have elsewhere implied a banal repetition of unoriginal
imagery, and been related to impoverished experiences of reality (2009: 160),
108 Slater understands ‘Presque Rien No.1’ as a precursor of sampling which acts as a
‘subtly framed de-specialization of music’ (2001: 5) that is able able to bypass and challenge
the existing canon. Slater argues that the canon imposes an ideological mode of listening in
which categorical and dualistic distinctions are authorised and established between different
‘men’, the insects’ are in this way each separated out and underscored in order to submit the
the categorization of ‘Presque Rien No.1’ as a work within any one genre of sound production.
Slater understands that its unplaceableness is achieved through Ferrari’s informal and
transversive approach to creativity. This uses citation, as it moves ‘between different forms
and interests’; and extends to perceptions other than the composer’s own. Slater continues:
‘This unaware-ness, a kind of informal creativity that is not conscious of itself, almost features
as a challenge to the overly conscious metier that the canon bids us to imbibe. The very
informality of the sounds that are captured and edited by Ferrari makes music-making an
ever-present environmental possibility and so, in the sound-world of Presque Rien, being
able to hear makes the listener into a meta-musician’. Slater further understands that within
‘Presque Rien No. 1’ reality is also used in the manner of a citation, rather than as a way to
assert a pre-existing natural order. The act of making a citation or sampling, he continues,
is foregrounded as an open and participatory social act which inevitably ‘brings other voices
along with it’ (2001:6). In this way other productions of sound - a lorry revving, folksong, the
cicadas’ song, along with Ferrari and the microphone - become complex collaborations which
live improvisation: it is the outcome of a sensitivity to a place whose people are collaborants,
subjects in their own right, meta-musicians, rather than objects to be usuriously plundered for
their exoticism.’ (2001: 6).
Ferrari understands such minimal works, instead, as an incitement to further

popular productions of sound (2009: 159).
‘Presque Rien No. 1’ s ambivalent status as both a memorable, canonical

work and as an unplaceable cultural artefact makes it relevant to DB. This
undecideability itself has become foregrounded, in relation to both the work’s
construction and genre, and sometimes focused on the cicada sounds
themselves (McCartney 1999: 105-8; Slater 2001: 5-6).
Whereas McCartney tries to recover categorical stability through relating the

recordings (of insects) to the perception and real-world experiences and work
of the composer, Slater disperses the action from the composer to the many
other human and non-human participants in ‘Presque Rien No. 1’; including the
in terms of individual expression, Slater depicts the work as a co-production

which, because it brings along with it a multiplicity of mundane and everyday
sonic productions, resists being resolved on any one of these (2001: 6) 109.
‘Dense Boogie 1’ and “Dense Boogie”
Maryanne Amacher’s recording ‘Dense Boogie 1’ sounds like an extreme,

almost painful, electronic-only version of cicada or cricket sounds. In this way,
although it is unambiguously electronic sounding, it also evidences the insect/
technological trope discussed above. Throughout the recording, the same high
frequencies and dynamic levels repeat in a fast tempo; producing a relentless
foregrounding and dense patterning of electronic sound (Kirk 2010: 317). It is
way.
‘Dense Boogie 1’ is one of a number of Amacher’s recordings on the CD ‘Sound
109 The volume manipulation of the cicadas, and the sudden stopping of these at the
end of the piece, make audible, what Slater understands to be, the sound of the recording
process itself. This, Slater argues, enables the playback of ‘Presque Rien No. 1’ itself to also
be experienced as a production; alongside the other sound productions it more obviously
includes. (Slater 2001: 5).
part of her work has explored 110. These are the complementary physical sounds
that the inner ear produces when confronted with particular frequencies of
sound. According to Amacher, although otoacoustic emissions are widely
available, they are usually only subliminally heard. Amacher’s aim is to
resensitize and activate these sounds (Oteri 2004). This is partly made possible
through the use of intense repetition and redundancy in works such as ‘Dense
Boogie 1’ (Kirk 2010: 317). Amacher describes the effect as follows:
‘When played at the right sound level, which is quite high and exciting,
the tones in this music will cause your ears to act as neurophonic
instruments that emit sounds that will seem to be issuing directly
from your head. In concert my audiences discover music streaming
out from their head, popping out of their ears, growing inside of
them and growing outside of them, meeting and converging with
the tones in the room. They discover they are producing a tonal
dimension of the music which interacts melodically, rhythmically,
and spatially with the tones in the room.’ (Amacher 1999)
Maryanne Amacher’s sound installations
Amacher uses the term ‘aural architecture’ 111 to describe the way in which
her installations are architecturally arranged and encourage movement in the
audience. In an interview with Frank J. Oteri, which forms the larger part of
the quotation used in DB, she describes the evolution of the concept of ‘aural
architecture’ in her work:
because I hated loudspeakers. I was working in electronic media,

so it was quite a contradictory thing. I was always interested in
the spatial aspects of sound. I discovered that maybe if I put the
from another room became much more rewarding. I could make a
In Amacher’s sound installations, electronic sounds, otoacoustic emmissions
110 E.g. ‘Head Rhythm 1’; Chorale 1’ (Amacher 1999).

111 Cf. Muzak as ‘audio architecture’ p.42.
from the ears, and the other body movements of listeners, precisely resonate
and interact with different structural parts of buildings and rooms. In this way,
Amacher understands such installations, both as compelling virtual spaces
and as works that are able to produce actual physical responses in the
audience. These responses not only contribute to the work but also actively
and reciprocally produce it (Shintani 2006:10).
Amacher’s installations are often arranged either across a series of rooms

or distributed at different times; in order to avoid traditional paradigms of
performance or sound installation (Licht 1999). This produces, what Amacher
accessed individually as aural architectures or developed episodically over

time, rather than as continuous works. This distributive effect is realised
again by reproducing otoacoustic works like ‘Dense Boogie 1’, on the ‘Sound
Characters’ CD (Ouzounian 2006: 74).
CD ‘Sound Characters (Making the Third Ear)’ (1999).
The recordings on ‘Sound Characters’ are remastered, ‘dual channel’ extracts
produced in the 1990’s (Ouzounian 2006: 74). CD recordings like ‘Dense Boogie
documents of the individual ‘sound characters’ that Amacher developed in her

studio; and, depending on the playback volume, autonomous electroacoustic
recordings also capable of generating otoacoustic emissions (Amacher 1999).
Rerecordings of CD ‘Sound Characters’
in DB, the title “Dense Boogie” and a quotation, were the only parts of the
DB installation that were ultimately appropriated from Amacher’s work. Whilst
textual references were all that remained from a broader interest in Amacher’s
work and a series of ambisonic rerecordings produced in May 2007.
A rerecording of ‘Dense Boogie 1’ 112 was made alongside other recordings

from the ‘Sound Characters’ CD. An ambient recording of the playback space
was also produced using the same equipment, positioning and location
immediately afterwards 113. One of the main motivations for rerecording ‘Dense
generational loss. This was an important aspect of the DB project more generally
and, in this respect, the Amacher rerecordings are part of the wider mimetic
experiment which attempted to produce both recordings and rerecordings that
sounded indistinguishable from original real-world and mediated sounds.
rerecording of this, which was also played back in the installation, also sounded
very similar to the original 114
‘Evening Cicadas, Italy’, by sounding, to a certain extent, like a natural version
of ‘Dense Boogie 1’, also approaches and reiterates the same mimetic goal.
Like other examples of appropriation 115, the rerecording of “Dense Boogie 1’

was motivated by a personal interest in and enjoyment of Amacher’s recordings.
However, ‘Dense Boogie 1’ is not a ‘middle of the road’, or widely known
recording (Oswald 2001: 21). For this reason the references to Amacher in the
installation were likely to be relatively obscure (see Licht 1999).
Although ‘Dense Boogie 1’ was considered for the DB installation, it was
respect, ‘Evening Cicadas, Italy’ more closely approximates Luc Ferrari’s

approach in Presque Rien No. 1’ and John Oswald’s and Tenney’s strategies,
below, for example.
Stereo loudspeakers
112
114 Cf. DVD I: Tracks 47, 51.
115 E.g. Oswald’s recordings of Elvis Presley, Stravinsky, Count Basie and Dolly Parton
(Oswald 1988; Duguid 1994); James Tenney’s ‘Collage # 1 (“Blue Suede”)’ 1961 (Polansky
2003).
sonic production with local loudspeakers only. These are intended to be elided,
as the Amacher quotation in DB suggests, as sounds are heard indirectly from
other locations, or emitting from the structures of buildings and moving bodies
not impossible, to achieve with only two speakers; although the otoacoustic
recordings contradict this (Oteri 2004).
conventional stereo loudspeakers together with the further sonic and visual
achieve this. Beyond the Amacher quotation used in the installation, this is
most tangibly realised by the foreground crickets recordings which, although
stereo, still sound ambiguous and unplaceable 116.
The background recordings similarly produce an uncertain effect in relation

to the loudspeakers; whether this is produced by an apparent absence of
recorded sound or through horspielstreifen
also reiterates other parts of the DB installation, so that these are heard from
another place.
116 See p.141-142.

161
7. Appropriation and Mimesis II
Wall texts and touchscreen in “Dense Boogie”
The wall texts and touchscreen in DB were formally linked to each other
through their graphics and layout which was repeated across the installation.
The typography itself was appropriated from the NAB building.
Two of the wall texts (the title 117 and the background recordings 118) were scaled
to match the small touchscreen 119 120 and mounted on museum board. The
fonts and layout of each of these were borrowed from examples of screens
and signage taken from the concourse. Apart from the title text - which was
printed on orange card selected to match the wall colour - all of the fonts and
backgrounds were in shades of black and white.
The Amacher quotation 121

, although it used the same typeface, reproduced it
sellotape, following other local examples of this.
The touchscreen and wall texts made reference to different composers,
Cicadas, Italy’, ‘rerecording’, ‘recording’), and referenced the appropriative

structure of the installation (‘after Maryanne Amacher 2004’, ‘after Francisco
López 2008’).
117
118
119
120 To access touchscreen: DVD II: Dense_Boogie/Installation_Player_v2/v2.2.37. Open
‘startupandcontrols’ window; select ‘Touch Screen from ‘Interaction’ drop down menu.
121
Title “Dense Boogie”
The Maryanne Amacher citations (“Dense Boogie” and ‘’so you wouldn’t get
on two wall texts in DB. The installation title directly referenced the ‘Dense
Boogie 1’ recording, and a footnote made the attribution of this to Amacher
clear. By using an existing title, “Dense Boogie” also appropriated another title,
as such.
At the same time, the use of double quotations was also intended to imply
that the title either acted as a ‘placeholder’, or that it did not, in some way,
completely represent the installation. The punctuation also inferred that the
different recordings (‘Dense Boogie 1’ and ‘Evening Cicadas, Italy’) were in
some way similar, or exchangeable. Otherwise ‘Evening Cicadas, Italy’ might
be read as a stand in for the original ‘Dense Boogie 1’, which itself was unable
to be played 122.
The double quotations of “Dense Boogie” also obliquely introduced the wider
use of appropriation within the installation 123. The title itself, by sounding like
an obscure and out of place dance reference, also tried to suggest that this
was not “Dense Boogie”, which is another work 124. It also repeated the evasive
placelessness evidenced throughout DB, and the tension between what was
seen and heard.
However, the foreground recording of crickets, the complex of mediated sounds,

the multiple texts and references, and the distribution of the installation layout
also suggested something rhythmic, dense and unlocateable, which perhaps
approached Amacher’s original composition. In the last part of the interview
with Oteri, Amacher describes her work in terms of an elusive density out of
which some sort of excess is produced; whether from her own brain, the minds
122 E.g. for copyright reasons.

123 ‘Musical language has an extensive repertoire of punctuation devices but nothing
hand in the air, as lecturers sometimes do, when cross-referencing during their extemporization,
system, well-intended correspondences cannot be distinguished from plagiarism and fraud.’

(Oswald 1985).
124
of listeners or out of the loudspeaker boxes 125 (Oteri 2004).
Maryanne Amacher quotation
The Amacher quotation is an extract from the same interview with Oteri, above.
Whilst, as an electroacoustic composer, they are clearly essential to her work,
Amacher stresses her dislike of loudspeakers as objects and sets out some of
the ways in which to reduce their visual impact 126.
Unlike in Amacher’s installations, the loudspeakers in DB were placed

prominently on a table in the main part of the installation as a stereo pair.
In this way, they reproduced a relatively commonplace audio set up which
itself, through habituation, might be invisible to some extent (Corbett 1990:
90). The Amacher quotation, however, was placed centrally on the wall above
the loudspeakers 127. At the same time as the text reinforced their presence as
to ignore them; suggested a focus on some other part of the installation; or

vaguely explained something about DB’s wider intention.
Blindfolds (after Francisco López)
A small pile of blindfolds was placed on the table close to the loudspeakers and
touchscreen 128. They were listed, in the DB title wall text, as part of the work
125 ‘ . . . my music is so dense and has so many parts that to me it sounds like all these
harsh . . . It’s a mystery, so what am I doing? It’s so dense because it has a lot of parts. Maybe
my brain just can’t deal with it and I’m imagining the sound that I get when it’s in one of these
architectures. I think that’s also what people do that enjoy some of this dense music on CD
because they’re imagining, which in itself is very interesting because I would like to dream that
I could make music that triggered another music in the listener’s mind.’ (Oteri 2004).
126 See pp.157-158.
127
128
of the installation, and accredited to Francisco López in a footnote. Although

copied from a blindfold included in the CD ‘Live in San Francisco’ (López 2005),
they were intended to reference López’s work more generally.
Francisco López is an entomologist and acousmatic 129

recordings and found sound drawn from a wide number of different sources,
ranging from environmental to technological sounds, to produce compositions
within a tradition of ‘Musique Concréte’ 130. López describes these as coming
from a ‘non-bucolic broad-band world’ in which natural sounds inevitably
coexist alongside anthropegenic sounds.
range of recorded material and complex manipulations they use, at the same
time the composer often emphatically refuses to reveal details of either their
source materials or their technical and compositional production (López 1998-
1).
In performances, López uses blindfolds, curtains and darkened spaces,

together with surround sound, to produce total and immersive experiences of
listening. In this way every visible part of the production - the loudspeakers, the
instrumentation, the room, the composer and the audience - becomes hidden.
López distributes the blindfolds to audiences before withdrawing behind
a curtain in a blacked out space (Van Peer 2002: 12). In the ‘Live in San
Francisco’ CD (2005), López underscores the acousmatic effect of recorded
sound by producing a version of blindfolds for listeners at home.
129
an only auditory experience of sounds, apart from any visual knowledge or appreciation of
their source (Chion 2009: 11-13). The word derives from the ancient Pythagorean projection
of lectures from behind veils or curtains to a separated, silent audience of akousmatikoi; which
produced a concentrated focus on the words and voice of the speaker alone (Kane 2008).
Today this effect has been widely normalised in mediated sounds, and Schaefferians such as
López claim that these produce the potential for an acousmatic, ‘reduced’ listening, in which
‘sound matter’ can be listened to exclusively apart from any visual or other distractions (López
1998-2).
130 Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry developed Musique Concréte in Paris, France, in
the late 1940’s (Chion 2009: 37-39). Within this, recordings from electronic, instrumental and
microphone sources are edited and manipulated to produce abstract ‘object sonores’ (sound
objects) (Chion 2009:3 2) which are then assembled in compositions (e.g. Schaeffer & Henri
1950).
‘Environmental acousmatics’
Many of López’s recordings seem to directly invite, what has sometimes been
depicted as, an ‘implosion’ of a range of natural and technological noises that
is already partly predicated on an existing real-world sonic ambiguity. Within
these, as in DB, the distinction between insect and technology is sometimes
foregrounded. In ‘Live in San Francisco’, for example, one reviewer describes
a ‘drone’:
The minutes drift by, the din’s volume and frequency builds and
builds until the insects and machinery shriek together, as if crushed
the Earth’s gravitation pull’. (Dusted Magazine 2005)
2001: 4), which is set out more starkly in López’s CD ‘La Selva’ (1998)131.
same jungle reserve in Costa Rica, South America.
The recordings in ‘La Selva’ represent, what López has described, over a
trilogy of albums 132, as an ‘environmental acousmatics’. In each of these,
sound recordings are produced from invisible environmental sources: hidden
animal and plant sounds, wind, and technological sounds in buildings. In the
essay, ‘Environmental Sound Matter’ (1998-2), López relates the tropical rain
López describes La Selva as a ‘strong paradigm’ of acousmatics, because many

sounds in the dark jungle are naturally heard without any visual reference. This
131 Although López does not include blindfolds in ‘La Selva’, he uses other strategies to
encourage an acousmatic experience of listening at home. Part of this relates to the way in
acknowledgements etc. are all located in a sealed part of the CD, which López, in an unbound
part of the same liner notes, challenges the listener not to access: ‘I did not want to omit these
referential levels, because they inevitably exist and I have indeed dealt with them, but I also
wanted to emphatically give you the opportunity to skip them, to have them in your hands and
to decide purposely not to access them. ... This is not a game or a trick; it is a confrontation
with the relational frameworks that blur our experience of the essential.’ (López 1998-1).
132
produces a rupture between the ‘sounds themselves’ and their sources which,
listening’ (López 1998-2).
The hidden sounds of cicadas within La Selva, amongst other animal and
plant sounds, are then given as an exemplary instance of environmental
acousmatics:
‘There are many sounds in the forest but one rarely has the chance
to see the sources of most of them. In addition to the fact that a
multitude of animals are hidden in the foliage, the foliage also hides
itself, keeping away from our sight a myriad of plant sound sources
. . . Many animals in La Selva live in this acousmatic world, in which
one of the most characteristic and widespread sounds in La Selva:

the strikingly loud and harsh song of the cicadas. During the day,
this is probably the most typical sound that naturally stands in the
intensity and proximity; many times you hear the cicada in front of
your face. Yet, like a persistent paradox, you never see it.’ (1998-2)
Within this paradigm, the sounds of insects, such as cicadas, already

demonstrate the potential of acousmatic listening to detach sounds from any
reference to their real-world sources 133
both in the real-world and in relation to mediated sounds. A lack of categorical
understand as, an intense focus on the sonic qualities of natural and

technological noises in themselves.
Through this, an extensive and continuous range of sounds becomes freely

available to the composer, which are no longer predicated on, or correlated
with, any ‘objective’ real-world sources 134. The multiplicity of sources, as well
133 The dense repetitions that such insects perform also conform to Schaeffer’s
understanding of repetition, as such, as encouraging acousmatic listening:
‘By repeated listening to the same recorded sound fragment, the emphasis is placed on
recorded signal can perhaps ‘exhaust’ this curiosity and little by little impose ‘the sound object
as a perception being worthy of being listened to as an object in itself’ (Chion 2009: 12).
134
sound material (López 1998-2: 5).
as testifying to the sonic complexity of the jungle La Selva, only highlights,

what López understands as, the composer’s own activity and selective criteria
in relation to these (Montgomery 2009-1).
Environmental acousmatics and “Dense Boogie”
Like ‘Presque Rien No. 1’, ‘La Selva’ provides another relatively well-known,
within it are highlighted in the extra-sonic discourses which relate to these. In

both compositions, the real-world sound of cicadas are pivotal in determining
how the works as a whole might be listened to; as well as establishing these
in terms of their genre.
The playback of ‘Evening Cicadas, Italy’ 135, partly by obliquely referencing

existing works, also points to their repeated, non-unique production. These
implied by the mimetic realism of such insect recordings, which can both sound
like real-world crickets and technological productions.
According to López, the environmental acousmatics of the cicadas demonstrates

and legitimizes the release of sounds from existing sources and categorisations
so that these can then be more fully exploited as an expression of the individual
composer. In DB, however, this quality of insect sounds is related instead to
their independence from any such solo, original expression. The persistent
compelling sound disarms any more considered production or reception.

168
8. Conclusion
‘Evening Cicadas, Italy’ 136 was intended to produce a paradoxical intensity of

focus which at the same time, through sustained repetition - both intrinsically
and extrinsically through other similar examples of recording - quickly exhausted
the interest and attention of the listener. After initially inviting its playback
through the touchscreen interface, the crickets recording did not produce the
intense, stable focus of acousmatic listening but, through its banal sameness
and predictability, released and encouraged the listener to move across to the
other parts of the installation and beyond.
The rerecordings and background recordings also performed mimetic strategies

without then making these total or immersive experiences. The rerecordings
produced uncertain transitions between one recording and another; so that
together with the acoustic context of the NAB; both through their shared remote
rerecording location and by producing horspielstreifen which then blended with
At the same time, an array of different sources of sound was made, at least
visually, evident in the installation (through titles; references; the loudspeakers;
sounds). Some of these, like the blindfolds and the Amacher loudspeaker
quote, invited an erasure of such visible sources themselves, in order to
produce a more intense audition. Through its environmental acousmatics,
‘Evening Cicadas, Italy’ also independently suggested this. The way these
were related together in the installation, however, undermined their absolute,

‘blind’ reception.
One of the initial reasons for using the crickets recording as the foreground
recording in DB was the way in which it almost immediately produced a
tangible lack of focus, or ‘glazing over’, and a tiring of effort during reception
as a constant ‘sliding off’ and waning of both visual and auditory attention 137.
The dissipatory effect of the visual is what acousmatic composers, like Francisco
López, attempt to minimize by using blacked out spaces and blindfolds; which
most obviously partition the senses of sight and hearing. But whilst the blindfolds
in DB point to this potential, the installation uses the foreground recordings of
crickets, together with the other parts of the installation, in a deliberately more
ambiguous way.
The more complete partitioning of senses and on-off focus is realised

interstitially, instead, across the different visual and sonic parts of the sound
installation 138
the liminality of the original real-world crickets, produced through multiple sonic
productions and the ‘in between’ states that these make without ever resolving
onto any one of these.
evident in “Dense Boogie” and, beyond the installation, through appropriating

and referencing particular genres and instances of recorded sound. These
recording and further neutralized and made the crickets recording redundant.
They also clarifed the way in which the work was situated amongst other
137 Simon Emmerson relates this effect to a dialectic of seeing

and hearing in which the different senses drop in and out of focus:
‘if the music at a dance performance demands my attention, my eyes glaze over and I become
aware some time later that I have missed a section of the stage action. If, however, I concentrate
on the action, the music ‘disappears’’ (Emmerson 1999: 135).
138 Jean-Godefroy Bidima, writing on Deleuze and music, also makes clear the relevance
of this to conceptions of the DB installation as a haptic, smooth space. Bidima writes that
Deleuze opposes sensory partitioning to a haptic aesthetic sensibility. In this respect, for
Deleuze, rather than being limited to a self-referential aesthetic autonomy, art is precisely
productions of sound.
The crickets recording was both ultimately placeable as a ‘canonical’ subject
This effect was produced in different ways (e.g. through its virtual realism;
lack of perspective; by sounding abstract or technological). Its straightforward
stereo playback was also exceeded: both because it was modulated with the
and reception. The background recordings, as environmental recordings, were

also elusive through their lack of distinction and neutrality.
Insect sounds have been depicted here as liminal forms which connect to
both contemporary expressions of music and to the sounds of technologies.
These also move away from more individual, human-centred accounts of sonic
production and from absolute categorisations of genres and sounds.
The crickets’ recordings not only intrinsically reproduce multiple sound

productions but also, as commonplace recordings of insects, point to many
more. The way in which they are located in the installation in relation to further
sounds, and their ungraspableness during reception, also defuses these in
terms of any one instance of production or capture.
Both insects and mass media, according to Rosi Braidotti, evidence a

remarkable liminality that remains outside of any ulterior organizing principle.
This provides an alternative to existing accounts of environmental musics.
For example, where these have been negatively characterised in terms of an
‘absorbance’ of difference; or related to a mesmerized, debilitated subjectivity
139
.
Environmental musics might also be understood as strategies which relate

mediated and real-world sounds together; without reiterating these as stable
categories or hierarchies of sound or within a unique, autonomous or total
139 See pp. 33-34.

order of production (e.g. an individual composer; a genre; technological or

natural etc.). Their pervasive and sourceless, nearly mechanical, repetition
140
placelessness.
140 Cf. Roland Barthes’ description of the neutral: ‘a hyperconsciousness of the affective
minimum, of the microscopic fragment of emotion . . . which implies an extreme changeability
2010: 10).
172
PART IV: ‘For the Birds’ (2008 - 2011)

1. Introduction
‘I didn’t really record nature sounds because I thought that nature

sounds are boring,” he sniffs. “There are many environmental
records that sound like that, with water and birds.’ (Inoue in Ultrared
1997-1: 4)
Overview
‘For the Birds’ (FTB) is the title of a sound installation that was developed
in the UK over a period of weeks in Spring 2011. Its gradual evolution, alongside
the installation player developed in Max 1
and eventual manifestation. Together with a text proposal 2, two archival CD
recordings, from 2008 and 2011, were made to mark the installation 3.
FTB is the project which most obviously and closely developed out of
informed the background to each of the works described in this thesis. The
recording methodologies which it brings together; and its siting within a familiar
recording location.
FTB also has many formal crossovers with the project “Dense Boogie” (DB)
in particular, which was developed as an installation simultaneously together
1
2 See Appendix 3, p. 241.
3 CDs ‘Blackbird II 05.06.08’ ;‘For the Birds 25.06.11’.
PART IV: ‘FOR THE BIRDS’ (2008 - 2011) 173
same installation player; the structuring of the FTB installation around the
intermittent playback of a foreground recording; the simultaneous diffusion of
other background ambient and horspielstreifen recordings; the way in which
the mediated and real-world sounds were distributed across the installation;
The main distinctions between FTB and DB - apart from the obviously different
FTB installation and recordings; the ambisonic diffusion of the background

recordings; and, most strikingly, the interaction between a bird and a recording
that inspired the development of FTB.
In the Spring and early Summer of 2008, a male Common Blackbird (Turdus
Merula) (‘blackbird’) persistently and loudly interrupted the playback and
studio window. At the same time, the blackbird song became an increasingly
recurrent and predominant recorded part of the rerecordings that I was also
attempting to make.
classic, ‘purist’ 4 bird recordings: in which an isolated, close-up, individual bird

sings against a distant and subdued background (e.g. ‘Blackbird II’ 5).
The installation FTB proposed to reproduce this event, without trying to

guarantee the presence of a blackbird (e.g. by deliberately producing a lure).
In the 2011 version of FTB described here, a blackbird quickly established itself
it possible to produce reasonably focused, solitary bird recordings during the

installation, which, when played back, the real-world blackbird then sometimes
sang together with (‘Blackbird IV’ 6).
4 See p.181 n.23.

5 CD ‘Blackbird II 05.06.08’ or DVD I: Track 108.
6 DVD I: Track 54.
Introduction
Field recordists on birdsong recordings
diverse as David Dunn, Bernie Krause and Francisco López; as well as being
depicted itself as part of a wider contemporary cultural turn.
The different perspectives of Dunn, Krause and López, amongst others,

typically move from negative appraisals of isolated studies of individual birds;
through more inclusive recordings of birds and other environmental sounds; to
recordings which are conversely either completely abstract (López), or which,
in some way, evidence or produce an interaction with a further sonic milieux
(Dunn).
The FTB blackbird recordings, whilst they partly attempt to return to, and
reproduce, earlier ‘canonical’ forms of bird recording 7, are also considered
here in relation to these different accounts. Although it is Dunn’s approach
to recorded sound that has more obvious parallels with FTB, the attempted
practice. López’s depiction of ‘sound matter’, which was previously introduced

in relation to DB, also invites comparison to accounts of ‘sonic molecularisation’
and ‘smooth space’ - drawn from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
From ‘the reign of birds’ to ‘the age of insects’
The cultural transition from isolated birdsong has also been more widely
expressed, following D&G, as a movement from the ‘reign of birds’ to the ‘age
to DB 8. There, Rosi Braidotti links non-human, particularly insect, productions
7 The term ‘canonical’ is used here to describe an attempt to conform to existing

practices and forms of bird recording rather than to imply that a canon of recorded birdsong,
as such, exists. (Thanks to John Drever for clarifying this), See also Slater on canonical forms
p.155, n. 108; Toop 2004: 49).
8 See p.145.
of sound to a contemporary techno-acoustics drawn from a passage in ‘A

Thousand Plateaus’. Within this, after relating birdsong to music, D&G describe
a movement away from ‘the songbird’ towards molecular productions of sound,
which is worth repeating here:
‘ . . . birds are still just as important, yet the reign of birds seems
to have been replaced by the age of insects, with its much more
molecular vibrations, chirring, rustling, buzzing, clicking, scratching,
and scraping. Birds are vocal, but insects are instrumental . . .
The insect is closer, better able to make audible the truth that all
becomings are molecular (cf. Martenot’s waves, electronic music).’
(1988: 308)
In ‘Metamorphosis of the Muses’ (2002), the philosopher Jacques Rancière,

makes it possible to further relate D&G’s and Braidotti’s argument to
contemporary sound and video installations. In the essay, Rancière links insect
productions to the repetition and proliferation of samples and recorded sounds
in themselves; rather than to any particular content or quality of sound.
Coincidentally anticipating the foreground and background horspielstreifen
loudspeaker ‘crackles’, as a part of the eclecticism, re-use and exchangeability
contemporary cultural milieu (of sound and video installation).
After describing the Deleuzoguattarian shift in music from ‘birds’ to ‘insects’

(from notes and organised sounds to noise; from voice to instrument), Rancière
writes:
‘Let us add that the insect is an eclectic animal. It can be serial or

spectral, concrete or virtual. It can be in harmony with a tortured
violin as much as with a misused electrical device, a synthesizer-
produced sound, an electronic beep, the crackling of the loudspeaker
or a recorded birdsong. It is the true interchangeability of these
modes of production of ‘sound particles’. (2002: 127)
Rancière relates sonic molecularisation to the multiplication and ‘equalisation’

(2002: 128) of images, as distinct from copies, that has been made possible
through new reproductive technologies. Although appropriation, as such, was

more obviously highlighted in DB, the FTB installation was also structured
around the repetition and recycling of different sound productions.
Throughout the duration of FTB, repeated attempts were made to produce

close-up recordings of individual birdsong, alongside ambient background
recordings, without then treating these - and by implication any much repeated
or ‘ready-made’ recording - as only redundant or closed forms. Instead, FTB
paid a different attention to the environmental production of real-world and
recorded sounds which was intended to approach the simulacral, molecular
above.
This is evidenced across the FTB installation: in the mundane, repetition
originally drawn from; through the repeated use of recording and rerecording;
at the level of the recorded content (another bird recording, another recording
of loudspeaker ‘crackles’ or low level background ambient; and another sound
installation featuring these); and, again, both diurnally and seasonally and at
the ‘culmination’ of the installation, as the blackbird sang together with its own
recorded song.
‘Smooth Space’
Accounts of simulacral proliferation and sonic molecularisation have also
interpenetrations of real-world and recorded sounds, for example. Although

both the FTB and DB installations were focused on, what was originally
conceived as, the production of a homogenous and continuous space, over
or smooth space.
The haptic and nomadic forms of engagement that such spaces imply have
already been discussed in Part 1 9. I have also written at some length, in ‘For
9 See pp. 52-60.

the Birds: a sound installation’ (Hawkins 2012), about the alternative, ‘non-
expert’ modes of listening (e.g. ambient; ‘ubiquitous’ (Kassabian 2001); the
therefore focuses, instead, on FTB as the production of a smooth space.

178
2. Field Recording Practice
In ‘For the Birds’ (FTB) something of the isolated, purist bird, exclusive of
an environment, found in early bird recordings, emerges, instead, on (what
is an attempt to articulate) a smooth space: the molecular plane of ‘sound
particles’, where recorded sounds interpenetrate with different sonorous and
non-sonorous productions. Within this account, the use of surround sound
technologies and mimetic strategies in the installation are also understood as
capable of realising smooth spaces; rather than as only more effective and
total reproductions.
Rural UK environment
The FTB installation was sited in a private space on the edge of an East
Anglian village, in the same rural area of the UK that many of the individual
density of houses mainly arranged around a single street and is surrounded
village pubs, a shop, church and school.
practice introduced at the start of the thesis. As previously described, this

often focused on the mundane and everyday background noises of the area;
rather than on exceptional or individual ones. Outdoors, these predominantly
included the sounds of wind, birdsong and calls, together with the pervasive and
and agricultural machinery) 10. Interior noises included those from utilities (e.g.
10 DVD I:Tracks 55-58.
plumbing; electrical systems) 11; media and communications (computers; audio
sometimes heard outdoors 12.
Although many of the outdoor background sounds occurred repeatedly

and predictably, these were often intermittent and low level; and happened
gradually, diurnally and seasonally, rather than being more constantly present.
Their frequency and dynamic levels changed marginally and imperceptibly
over long periods of time. Sometimes - at night, or on a Sunday - it was very
13 14
.
Background to FTB
In Spring and early Summer, when the FTB installation took place, both
public and private, indoor and outdoor, sounds start to be heard in different
intensities. These are conditioned by a range of parameters - meteorological,
biological, social, cultural - relating to the seasonal, environmental changes.
There is an increase of plants and animal organisms (leaves; crops; migratory
and breeding birds; livestock); less wind or extreme weather conditions; more
open windows and outdoor activities (agricultural spraying and harvesting;
light aircraft; DIY; garden; walking; celebrations) 15.
as background and middle distance sounds. The same garden and farmland
birds were randomly and repeatedly recorded; from similar local places, at
different circadian and seasonal times 16. Within this rural UK location, many
of these are experienced as periodically predictable, sometimes mundane,
background sounds; whilst other bird sounds are increasingly rarely heard,
or have disappeared altogether 17. The blackbird in FTB, within this context,
11 DVD I:Track 59.
12
13 Cf. Ruth Happel in Robair 2003: 6.
15 DVD I: Tracks 55, 56, 57, 58, 62, 63-67, 68-73, 74-78, 79-85, 86-92, 93, 94, 95,
96-100.
16 DVD I: Tracks 63, 69, 75, 83, 101.
17 E.g. nightingales; cuckoos.
remains a common UK garden bird, which is also heard across urban

environments (RSPB Website 2013).
appeared to be triggered, changed, stopped by, or in some way involved with,

human events. Beyond the 2008 blackbird recordings which inspired FTB,
disturbed and started off by my arrival with audio equipment 18; children
mimicking the sounds of an owl, who then appeared to be copied by howling
dog 19 20.
environment intermittently nearly enables, what R. Murray Schafer has called, a

21
, is predominantly
associated with rural environments. Within this, very low level, environmental
and animal behaviour sounds, for example, can sometimes be listened to with
clarity, in close-up, and across large distances 22.
At the same time, the quiet rural context also highlights the different noises
of technologies and mass media that happen both domestically, privately and
these would often be experienced as part of a dense mass of noise rather than
more distinctly heard.
periodically reproduce a classic, absolute situation of reception, in which

recorded sounds can be listened to nearly exclusively. Field recordings, made

20 Cf. p.149 n.98.
21 See pp.86-87.
22
there is perspective — foreground and background.’ (Schafer 1994: 43).

in this environment, have an intermittent potential to reproduce uneventful, very

low level sounds or to focus on individual, discrete noises. This also makes it
transiently possible to produce purist 23
of a bucolic environment or a non-human ‘wilderness’. Rerecordings can
similarly sometimes be made with minimal interference from further noises
and, therefore, sound like an original recording.
produced alongside the main thesis projects were made from the same, or
similar, interior and exterior locations. Their content was not intensely sought
out, or required to conform to any a priori
environments and seasons over many months, content was shared across
many of the recordings. They were often also monitored, either in, or close to,
the same places that they were recorded, in post-production as well as during
recording, so that the same contingent background sounds (e.g. wind, birds,
airplanes etc.) were often heard across both real-world and recordings 24. This
made it sometimes critically hard to distinguish the noises of the recorded
in relation to real-world sounds when these were later played back.
23
recording in order to reproduce a realistic sonic event (Cummings n.d.). Within these terms,
recordings in FTB also attempt to achieve durations of ‘unadulterated’ sound (see pp.214-
215) that are then played back together in the installation (rather than reconstructed on a CD,
as Krause’s are, for example). Elsewhere, Andy Hamilton describes such constructions as
evidencing a more sophisticated version of purism in which the aim, rather than to maintain
the ‘diachronic and synchronic integrity’ of the original, is to produce a ‘realistic auditory image’
(Hamilton 2003: 345, 351).
24 DVD I: Tracks 55, 63-67; 68-73; 56, 57, 74-78; 79-85; 86-92; 58, 93; 62,94,95; 96-
100.
focus of both recording and rerecording. Despite the fact that many of the
rural population in relation to an urban one (Pateman 2010/11: 43), might itself
be experienced as exceptional - the mundane, everydayness and neutrality of
the recordings was locally unremarkable and focused on unexceptional sounds

that might also be found across a range of further environments.
Whilst the recordings were produced from out of the contingencies of my own
life, directly personal sounds were either avoided or later edited out. For this
to an original real-world event), and relatively unmemorable and indistinctive

as individual recordings; both because much of the recorded content is similar,
or repeated, and the same real-world sounds are still available on site 25.
Although this might not be the case over an extended period, or where the
‘Negative capability’ 26 27
, for 28
example, others have been developed less purposefully or systematically.

These further recordings are conceived of here in terms of a kind of technological
‘negative capability’ 29.
in relation to their own receptive inertia or boredom, as capable of producing
25 Both during the FTB installation and afterwards.

26 After John Keats, 1817 (Keats in Strachan 2003 :14).
27 It is interesting to note that Keatsian ‘negative capability’ has also been related to
Walter Benjamin’s depiction of mimesis (Hansen 2000: 247).
28 DVD I: Tracks 101, 104.
29 DVD I: Tracks 105-107.
quasi-subjects in indirect or unexpected ways 30 31. For example, David Dunn

describing the development of the CD track ‘Chaos and the Emergent Life of
the Pond’ (1991) writes:
‘I started making these underwater insect recordings by accident.

On a recording expedition, while waiting to be picked up by my
associates, I had nothing to record after the dawn chorus had
ended. To alleviate the boredom I threw my hydrophones into a
small pond.’ (Dunn 1999)
and the boredom of, individual species recording (Krause 1993: 5). Such
descriptions suggest encounters with other (natural) rhythms and events that
interest, effort or will. Dunn, for example, goes on to discover the micro-sounds
of underwater insects in the pond.
Although such feeds of sound imply long, and sometimes nearly continuous,
similar effects through repetition and multiplication, rather than through being
same, or similar, to one another. In this respect different recorded content has
32
comparison between these different instances, often over a number of years.
Field recordings as feeds
phonography. Within these phonographers and composers have understood

their own gestural, instrumental performance, together with the selection and
placement of the technologies, as a critical part of the work.
30 See also Hawkins 2012: 211.

31 Cf. the environmental feed that informs Maryanne Amacher’s work (Amacher 1989).
32 Cf. Walter Benjamin p. 60.
Yannick Dauby, for example, writes that in phonography the ‘arbitrary choices
of the transducer, the medium’ are part of a practice, alongside the ‘gestures’
of the sound recordist (2007:3). Dauby then summarizes phonography as ‘a
recording is nothing more than the result of a meeting between a terrain . . .

and a technical device ‘ (2007: 4) 33 34.
the FTB installation, however, try to minimize the perspectival presence of
is partly achieved through the removal of production noises together with

the randomizing and selection of recorded content. Although certain purist
and technological sounds of production from a recording, such recordings

are usually then only characterised in documentary terms, as ‘transparent’
representations of reality 35.
‘Negative capability’ in ‘For the Birds’
of recorded sound, or a proliferation of many similar sounding recordings, is

a critical backdrop to FTB. The uneventful sameness, both intrinsically within
produced a drift of attention during monitoring and playback, like Dunn’s and
Krause’s above; together with an intermittent alertness to small differences
33
devoid of intervention by the sound recordist as opposed to phonography, in which the sound
recordist will meticulously re-listen, sort, and select an extract from his material (the “rushes”).
up for listening.’ (Dauby 2007: 4).

34 Cf. ‘ . . . we’re celebrating the . . . capacity of someone to use a tape recorder well’
35 Cf. ‘The longstanding ideal is to record invisibly, standing still or moving very slowly
activity (airplanes,coughing during a song, dropping the microphone), ultimately editing

everything into a smooth, seamless “reality.” I challenge those prevailing practices in several
2:150). Also Demers 2010: 168).

and detail.
to conceive of these either in terms of individual productions or objects, or

as a single, coherent mass. Instead the similarities between the recordings
produce, what is more like, local build-ups of intensity and affect; in which
certain features or content sometimes emerge and become predominant 36.
Together with the playbacks, which acted as lures, and rerecordings, which
the context out of which the foreground blackbird recording became possible,
Dauby’s above, which neither emphasizes the agency and subjectivity of the
recordist nor, by ignoring or eliding their presence, is only found meaningless
37
.
36
together seem similar or the same, on close inspection minute variations become evident. In
this way they are not homogenous.
37
186
3. Birdsong Recordings
Although foreground birdsong and calls have remained popular subjects of
proposed different conceptions of recording to address the limitations they

have found in these.
Purist forms of nature recording, whether of isolated birds or of pristine natural

environments, have been criticized for decontextualizing their subjects. It is
also argued that these manipulate or mislead listeners from both the immediate
sounds of their production and the global social and environmental reality of
noise pollution (Michael 2011: 207).
These different arguments are relevant to ‘For the Birds’ (FTB), because whilst
an isolated bird recording, it also proposes that these are able to relate to
further recorded and real-world sounds. Field recordings are neither depicted
here as impoverished or false representations of real-world sounds, nor as
surrogate virtual realities.
A brief introduction to some of the earliest forms of bird recording in the

UK 38, characterised by studies of solitary subjects, will also relate some of
pertinent to the production of the blackbird recordings in FTB. The way in which
bird recordings have been developed in relation to longstanding individual
awareness’ of noise pollution, are considered here; alongside a number of
38
birdsong recordings by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New
York, USA (Bruynincx 2012: 138-140).
later critical perspectives.
Although each of these later criticisms stresses the way in which the recorded
(bird; animal) content has been detrimentally isolated from a wider ecological
and environmental context, these move from being focused on the inadequacies
of representation; through conceptions of recording as abstract or hyperreal;
to a more complex view of simulation in which recordings are understood to
produce revealing interactions with real-world sounds and events.
‘Classic’ recordings of isolated birdsong
The early mono, and later stereo, bird recordings were characterised by
individual studies of solitary birdsongs and calls against low level, uneventful
backgrounds (British Library Website 2013). The recordings featured short
sections of close-up bird vocalisation, such as a single birdsong or a few
minimised in the recordings in order to prevent distraction to the listener; and,

where present, these were only considered secondary to, and supportive of,
the foreground ‘solo’ (Lewis 1966: 2) 39.
Bird recordings were marketed to have a broad appeal to popular audiences

and ‘bird lovers’, as well as to amateur and professional ornithologists
(e.g. Nicholson & Koch 1936; Lewis 1966; Simms 1970). Many of the early
recordings had explicitly educational aims, with audiences taught to recognize
and remember individual, often garden, birds. Listeners were sometimes
given detailed instructions on how to listen. For example by being invited to
repeatedly play recordings, or to make comparisons of these to wild birds
outside (Nicholson & Koch 1936: 188).
Individual bird and animal recordings have remained a widely experienced and
39 Although Koch used close-miking in order to capture birdsong, he chose to work in
environment (Bruynincx 2012: 137). In this respect, Koch’s recordings provide, what Joeri
Bruynincx understands to be, a naturalistic contrast to the ‘detached’, perspectiveless and
‘sterile’ bird recordings produced by the Cornell laboratory, for example. (Bruynincx 2012:
140).
(Van Peer 1995-1; Rothenberg & Ulvaeus 2001: 4; Toop 2004: 49). Such
recordings are what the original ‘Blackbird II’, to an extent, reproduces, and
the FTB installation attempted to repeat. Within this context, the foreground
blackbird recordings in FTB were intended to sound familiar to a broad range
garden bird.
From the start, many of the discourses surrounding bird recording report and
on location (e.g. Nicholson & Koch 1936: xxii-xxv). Beyond the individual
equipment failure; adverse weather conditions (wind; rain); bird behaviours;
Increasing complaints of noise pollution are made palpable in recording
C. Lewis, for example, after citing a 1942 account of a ‘noise-ridden’ world,

emphasises the years of work involved in producing the ‘Bird Recognition’
series in 1966:
‘ . . . all the reproductions included in this set of recordings were

obtained within the last seven to eight years: all were made in this
country, and many thousands of hours have been spent in the
process. Due to the advent of the jet aircraft and the present-day
multiplicity of man-made noise generally, good quality natural history
sound recordings are fast becoming virtually impossible.’ (1966: 3).
tradition (bioacoustics; acoustic ecology; soundscape) and producing

recordings worldwide, makes similar observations. In 1987, and again in 2007,
he emphasizes the exponentially increasing amount of ‘gross’ work involved
the excess of discarded recorded ‘waste’ against the fragments of sound

‘To obtain these recordings we would typically spend 500 hours

on site to get 15 minutes of usable material...a ratio of 2,000:1.
The long wait is due primarily to the introduction of human-
induced mechanical noise(s) like chain saws (from 20 miles away),
aircraft, motorized riverboats, etc. To date, our library consists of
approximately 3,500 hours of material...20% of it from now-extinct
habitats. (Krause 1987: 5)
‘When I started in 1968, it used to take me 14 or 15 hours of recording

to get an hour of usable material. Now it takes me a year to get that
same amount of material.’ (Krause in Robair 2007: 2)
vividly illustrate what has been depicted in terms of an exponential and

devastating loss of ‘open’ or extensive space. Beyond the diminishing returns
reduction or species’ extinction; a critical loss of silence; psychological states

of anxiety and claustrophobia (Van Peer 1995b: 4; Wrightson 2000: 10; Ingram
recordists like Krause and groups, like the original Vancouver Soundscape
Project (Schafer et al. 1973-1), have made, also map out a disturbing model
of simulation in which, they understand, ‘vital natural soundscapes no longer
exist- except on tape’ (Krause 2002: 63).
René Van Peer: birdsong recordings
Over a series of essays on birdsong and nature recordings (1994; 1995-1;

1995-2), the writer René van Peer argues that studies of individual, isolated
and calls. Whilst such recordings often focus on the recognition of a unique
bird sound, what is elided, he argues, is a far more complex environmental
interplay of sounds (1994). This extended, often territorial, context frequently
includes further birds, alongside many other ambient noises, which might also
inform any vocalizations.
Such recordings further, Van Peer adds, ‘standardize’ such songs and calls by
happen diurnally; in developments of their song across a season; or in an

adaptive response to local habitat and weather conditions (Van Peer 1994: 3).
The elimination of ambient background noise, found at its extreme in bird

recordings, extends to purist soundscapes which, Van Peer argues, evacuate
and ‘unpeople’ audio recordings; both by subduing the immediate sounds of
production and by erasing a larger technological and social context (1994: 3,
2).
uninformative and unmoored content, which he contrasts to those that include

a more extensive ambient environment. The latter, he argues, produce a
greater sense of vitality and realism through reproducing a larger spatiality
and thus provide a sense of perspective and depth (1994: 4).
Francisco López: CD ‘La Selva’
Francisco López picks up on a number of these points directly in the essay,

‘Environmental sound matter’ (1998-2), included with the CD ‘La Selva’;
previously introduced in relation to “Dense Boogie” 40. The essay further
contrasts the ‘total’ environmental sound that ‘La Selva’ reproduces with the
focused analyses of individual species that inform contemporary bioacoustics
(López 1998-2: 1-2).
Although individual species are listed in the CD liner notes, López argues,
habitat:
40 See pp. 165-167.

‘The birdsong we hear in the forest is as much a consequence of the
topography, the degree of humidity of the air or the type of materials
animals that inhabit a certain space.’ (1998-2: 2)
However, even where such studies expand bioacoustics from a single species
to ‘assemblages of sound-producing animal species’ and ecosystems (e.g.
Krause’s ‘niche hypothesis’ (Krause 1993)), López argues that these are
still arranged around analytical approaches. Within these, backgrounds and
from categorical distinctions between differentiated, individual vocalizations of

species (López 1998-2: 2).
‘Plane of consistency’
The animal sounds included on ‘La Selva’, as previously described, are not
pre-selected from already organised and rationalized categories; and nor
are such recordings depicted in terms of hyperreal simulations or pragmatic
demonstrations of ‘reality’ (López 1998-2: 3, 6). López insists, instead, on
a sonic ‘plane of consistency’ 41 where all sounds are equivalent. He further
predicates the multiplicity of sound matter, within this, on a diversity of natural
and technological environments, neither of which are necessarily distinctive
or have essential priority, rather than on a return to the bucolic (López 1997:
1; Cox 2001: 4). López writes, for example, that ‘under some circumstances,
nature can also be considered as an intrusion in environments dominated by
man-made sounds.’ (López 1998-2: 6) 42.
David Dunn: CDs and ‘Mimus Polyglottus’ (1976)
rather than reproducing a real-world environment, only ‘confuse the map for
the territory’ (Dunn & Van Peer 1999: 67). Instead of preserving such
environments or promoting environmental activism, Dunn argues that such
41 Cf. smooth space (Bonta and Protevi 2004:144).

42 Cf. ‘Blackbird II’, pp. 196-197.
This is not only achieved through discourses which ‘falsely’ emphasize their
status as real-world documents, as truthful representations of a prior reality,
but, for Dunn, also by removing the immediate techniques and sounds of their
production together with any other anthropogenic environmental noise:
‘Most of the time, what you hear in these recordings is someone who
sat long enough between periods of airplanes and cars passing that
they could get something that appears to be a pristine recording. To
put that forth as the reality is a lie.’ (1999: 67)
recordings for the CD ‘The Lion in which the Spirits of the Royal Ancestors
Make Their Home’ (1995). These were commissioned as ‘classic’ soundscape
as such. Dunn, however, in the liner notes and through further commentaries,
problematizes each of the recordings on the CD; relating these apparently
‘wild’ soundscapes themselves, instead, to a zoo (1999:67).
In a paper on Dunn’s soundscape recordings, David Ingram acknowledges
recordings and CDs (Ingram 2006: 125). Ingram, however, also compares
Dunn’s selection of content and use of editing in certain audio recordings,
itself, to the concerns outlined in the texts accompanying these. The former,
despite Dunn’s stated antipathy to ‘fakery’ and idealized projections of nature,
example (2006: 131-135).
Yet Dunn describes his own approach to such recordings as ‘compositional’

(Dunn 2001: 8); and, even where such works might still sound like straight
a mutual and participatory encounter with a subject. Within this context,
understood as an expression of what such recordings are able to elucidate

and achieve.
Throughout his work, Dunn has proposed a series of alternative strategies in

which recorded sounds are no longer framed within a ‘romantic’ discourse,
posed against an objective world. Within such a new paradigm, any ‘reality’
emerges through active participation; rather than being established beforehand
43
(Dunn 2001: 8-9).
Dunn relates this effect to a broader ‘emergent’ property, in which complex

patternings and interactions between different instances, collectives and
processes exceed any one (human or non-human) individual agency (Ingram
2006: 128-9). In this respect, environmental complexes of technologies,
animals and subjectivities are no longer resolvable into only constituent parts
Dunn differentiates his works from those that, he understands, decontextualize
birdcalls’ (Dunn & Van Peer 1999: 64); regarding these as part of a wider
aesthetic tradition derived from John Cage. His own interest lies, instead, in
the wider ecological context and complexities of such recordings, which his
own presence is a manifestly evident and inevitable part of (1999: 65).
Similar concerns are set out more prominently in a number of works that were
conceived around a single or multiple species interaction 44. ‘Mimus Polyglottos’
(in collaboration with Ric Cupples) (1976) produces a real-time interaction
between mockingbirds and electronic sound stimuli in which the birds’ capacity
for mimicry is explored and challenged; in this way, directly relating to FTB.
‘Mimus Polyglottos’ was developed initially experimentally, by using birdsong

recordings, and then pure electronic sounds, to attract and produce interactions
with local mockingbirds (Sound Art archive Website 2013). Individual tapes
of sounds were prepared with a range of different effects - ‘pure Mockingbird;
distorted Mockingbird; and pure electronic sounds’ - and played back to the
birds. The interactions themselves were then recorded. Whilst the distorted
version silenced the mockingbirds, the two others triggered, what Dunn
43 Cf. nomadic perception pp. 59-60.
44 See also ‘Simulation 1:Sonic Mirror’ (Dunn 1986) ; ‘Nexus 1’ (1973) and
‘Entrainments 1’ (1984) (Dunn 1996).
Rather than using such works to manipulate, or produce, new sources

of sound material, Dunn understands ‘Mimus Polyglottus’ as an attempt to
‘generate a linguistic interaction’ (Dunn 1996: 3), which evidences an inclusive
and collaborative structure in which other forces and living systems participate
(Dunn and Lampert 1989: 104). This moves beyond concepts of expanded
musicality, or new sonic materials, to a conception of music as precisely
that which remains close to other forms of species communication and has
65) 45.
How this relates to FTB
These different accounts of birdsong and nature recording provide a discursive

context within which to situate the recordings that were produced in FTB. Whilst
the arguments they make most evidently relate to the blackbird recordings,
they are also relevant to the background recordings and to the installation as
a whole.
By attempting to reproduce isolated blackbird recordings, amongst further

recordings and real-world sounds, FTB proposed to relate existing, ‘canonical’
recordings in FTB both restate existing purist nature tropes and, like the
mockingbird recordings that Dunn produces, above, produce revealing
interactions that move well beyond them.
The installation, in this way, tries to connect popular and clichéd instances
of birdsong recording (and birdsong itself) to less ‘striated’, comfortable
formulations of nature and technologies 46. Unlike Warren Burt, for example,
45 Cf. D&G pp.220-221.

46 At the same time, further examples of sound works that both directly and indirectly
feature bird interaction can be found. E.g. Walter Marchetti in ‘La Caccia (Quartetto n. 2) (1965)
‘open air version’ records the sound of birds attracted by hunting lures; Christina Kubisch
notes that birds sometimes imitated the electronic buzzers in outdoor installations (Kubisch
2002: 20).
who opposes Dunn’s works as a ‘radical, rigorous’ response to ecological

concerns from new-age ‘nature Muzak’ that only reproduces existing,
conservative paradigms (Dunn 1996: 4) 47. The background recordings also
evidence a similar liminality.
without only limiting these to the activity and expression of the composer in
relation to an expanded palette of sounds. By repeatedly attempting to produce
individual responses to the site. Because the installation also followed, what
the foreground and background recordings also had the potential to become
47 See pp. 234-235.

196
4. Installation I
‘Blackbird II’ (2008)
Studio location
Both the original blackbird recording, ‘Blackbird II’ 48, which inspired the
development of the installation, and the 2011 ‘For the Birds’ (FTB) recordings
were produced in a similar, although not identical, edge of village location.
‘Blackbird II’ was recorded with a microphone pointing east towards the open
countryside. The blackbird sang from a tree directly beneath an upstairs studio
facing perpendicular to the window. The blackbird song was initially perceived
as an intrusion within a reasonably quiet studio context.
Appearance of blackbird
The original blackbird recordings and the concept for the installation FTB
rerecordings during the Spring of 2008 49. At that time, the increasingly
persistent and loud sound of a blackbird at the window (both open and closed)
was experienced as an annoying and problematic interference.
The blackbird sang regularly and repeatedly from the same position and
disrupted both the monitoring and production of the rerecordings which were
with the playbacks which the bird was perhaps attracted by 50. The birdsong
started to appear on parts of the rerecordings that then had to be discarded.
48 CD ‘Blackbird II 05.06.08’ or DVD I: Track 108. See also Tracks 89, 109.
49 These were discarded at the time.
50 See discussion of lures and ‘playback’ in Constantine and The Sound Approach (TSA)
2006: 165-170..
The blackbird became noisier and more persistent as the season progressed;
Production of ‘Blackbird II’
with the microphones now pointed towards the window. The recordings were
made with an increasing awareness of their potential to sound like classic,
isolated subjects of bird recording. The aim, now, was to produce a recording
51
.
The production of an isolated birdsong recording was much less straightforward

than the bird’s previously predictable and reliable performance had implied. The
blackbird, perhaps in response to my own change in behaviour in the studio,
was initially quickly scared off in response to any sighting or movement of either
the equipment or myself. In response to this, I started to anticipate its arrival
and prepare the audio equipment in advance; hiding myself during recording.
The bird again became habituated to the situation, and the microphone was
sometimes able to be positioned outside the window, near the blackbird’s song
post 52.
the microphone diaphragms, when these were outside the window, and when
these were positioned inside, the microphones were not close enough to
the birdsong to produce an exclusive recording. Further environmental and
domestic noises were similarly frequently disruptive. These included noises
from other birds, garden machinery, telephone calls, door slams, kitchen
equipment, a central heating vent etc.
51 The song of the male Common Blackbird (Turdus Merula) has been described as
a complex, individualised repertoire in which the full song is subdivided into single songs
separated by intervals of silence. Whilst complete songs are only occasionally repeated,
certain elements and sequences of ‘motifs’ within these frequently reoccur in the same order
(Hesler, Mundry & Dabelsteen 2011: 592).
52 ‘Song post’ describes a tree or other structure that an individual bird habitually sings
from and frequently returns to.
CD ‘Blackbird II’ 53
The CD ‘Blackbird II’ was the culmination of the series of recordings, above, that
had attempted to produce a generic bird recording. ‘Blackbird II’ was produced
on a warm, still day and nearly achieves a reasonably isolated foreground
birdsong recording. However, towards the end of the recording, the blackbird’s
song rises in frequency 54
The recording in this way fails to meet the most rigorous standards of purist
species of bird.
Installation ‘For the Birds’ (2011)
Beyond the attempt to reproduce the ‘Blackbird II’ event, above, the complex of
recordings in FTB also partly repeated the contingent and repetitive approach
and methodologies of recording. The proposal 55 was detailed in full before

the start of the 2011 version of FTB and it was intended to be experienced as
reproduced independently elsewhere.
and any articulation of background and foreground recordings, for example,

emerged over the duration of the installation from the contingencies of the
recordings - the foreground blackbird recordings or the background ambient

and horspielstreifen - existed at the start of the installation.
53 CD ‘Blackbird II 05.06.08’ .
54 See ‘Lombard effect’ (Brumm and Naguib 2009: 10).
55 See Appendix 3, p. 241.
Methodologies
above, with a number of already established recording methodologies that had
ambient and horspielstreifen background recordings - have already been

introduced, in relation to the previous projects; and they were used coherently
which inspired FTB, as discussed above, were also developed as a distinct

methodology before the 2011 installation 56.
practice’s focus on minimal or redundant content 57. At the same time, each
of these methodologies was intended to produce intrinsically distinct and
exclusive content. In respect of FTB, this included close-up, solitary birdsong
recording; neutral and ignorable ambient background recordings; and durations
of unchanging equipment hiss (horspielstreifen).
Following purist practices, any obvious production noises were minimized;
blackbird recordings, because of their deterrent effect on any bird (Cummings

2001: 2). Within this context, the minimization of noise was not only understood
It is obvious that any visitors to FTB would also have a potential to scare
off a bird; as well as introducing, in purist terms, unwelcome noises into any
recordings that were made as part of the installation. At the same time, by
attempting to limit local anthropogenic noise within the installation, this also
highlights the user’s part in any sound production. The failure of any blackbird to
arrive, or ‘perform’, at FTB, to an extent, depends on these human behaviours.
However, for the reasons set out below, these issues were not critical to the
version of FTB described here.
56 DVD I: Tracks 63, 69, 75, 83, 89.

57 See pp. 128-129,134-136,181-182.
Although it had already been established in the wider practice that it was
achieve these from either interior or exterior environments. Inside, intermittent

loud interruptions, such as telephone calls, made it necessary to repeatedly
make recordings. There were also a number of unforeseen technical issues.
For example, the low buzz of interference 58 from an audio cable, too close to a
computer, affected several background recordings which it was reproduced on.
Outside, although there was very little rainfall, the site was often windy and this
affected the quality of the birdsong recordings in particular that were recorded
from the balcony. There was also more anthropogenic noise on the warm, still
59
.
Installation site
‘Blackbird IV’ 60, was recorded closer to the village than the original blackbird
recordings were. The earlier recordings had informed the selection of the site,
which was again reasonably close to a tree. The stereo loudspeakers in the
main room of the FTB installation now directly faced the village and the main
street to the south.
The 2011 version of FTB was developed in a private, domestic space, without
public access 61. The space was intended to reproduce a generic sound
installation site which could then be potentially moved to further locations 62.
The site was chosen partly practically, because it was constantly available
over an extended period, and close to the probable presence of a blackbird
at critical diurnal and seasonal times. This made it possible to produce a
sound installation that was gradually developed over a season in relation to an
individual bird’s behaviour.
At the same time, the domestic setting of the installation also formalised the
everyday playback of a foreground recording at home which FTB, like DB,
58 Known as a ‘ground loop’.

59 DVD I: 96-100.
60 DVD I: Track 54.
61
62 See p. 229-230.
partly focuses on. The siting of the installation also attempts to despecialize
this way, is undermined, in terms of a unique and exceptional location or event,
the remarkable singularity of an individual blackbird song.
Recording and playback locations
equipment placements across the site 63. These positions were functionally
determined at the outset, and continued largely unchanged throughout the
duration of FTB. Recording and playback locations were distributed across
a main room with a balcony, and a corridor. These were divided into four
recording locations and three diffusion areas. The window in the main room
A total of eight loudspeakers were arranged into three groups; all positioned
at head height. In the main room, a foreground stereo loudspeaker pair was
placed against the opposite far wall from, and pointing towards, the open
window. A background quad of loudspeakers 64 stood in the centre of the room
in a square. In the corridor: a further loudspeaker pair was placed against a wall
on the same plane, and facing in the same direction, as the main foreground
speakers 65.
Stability
The selection of recording locations and equipment positions was prepared
tunings’ of each sort of recording. For example, the position of the cardioid
song post which the bird consistently used. At the same time, the regular and
repeated placement and use of these, was also designed as a practical method
63
64 For a horizontal or planar ambisonic recording (Elen 2001:2).
65
the site.
As well as producing a formal and visual stability throughout and during the
installation, the stable positioning of audio equipment supported a conception
of this as a static ‘placeholder’ for feeds of sound; rather than as more individual
expressions, or improvised responses, to the contingent developments of the
site. In this way the focus of production moved away from the physical, gestural
further recorded and real-world productions of sound across and beyond the
site.
Lure
Whilst it was unintentional, the way in which the original blackbird sounds had
emerged in relation to the recorded sounds played back in the studio might
be retrospectively understood in terms of a lure. In the same way, the FTB
installation did not use an existing recording as a lure at the start, but rather
relied on the contingent presence of a blackbird.
TSA: 2006: 165-166) used recording playbacks to attract animals and birds
- literally as mechanisms of ‘capture’ or control - FTB attempts to connect to
this potential of recording in a different, less bleakly functional, way. Instead
of ‘demanding’ a performance from the blackbird by persistently playing back
foreground recordings, these were only played back intermittently around the
time of the day when the bird visited the closest song post (mainly in the early
evening).
‘No show’
from the non-appearance of the blackbird to the production of a classic bird

recording, as described above. Although the blackbird singing close to its own
recorded song was incredible to listen to and rewarded the somewhat
painstaking and laborious development of the FTB installation, it was important
that a ‘no show’ was also a realistic possible outcome.
In the event of this, the distribution of the installation across interior and exterior
spaces, and any background and foreground recordings that were able to be
made, were intended to provide the main content. The foreground recordings,
in this case, would be of more or less background ambient sounds which would
still connect across the installation to the exterior; and the installation title ‘For
the Birds’ would remain.
The distribution of FTB across a main room, a corridor, and through the window
of Amacher’s work; already discussed in relation to DB 66. This described her

alternative approach to both sound installation, and the individual playback
of CD recordings, in which electronic sounds are physically and episodically
distributed across different architectural spaces and times.
as sounds are interactively and reciprocally produced by listeners bodies;

moving at both macro- and micro-levels in response to these. This intensive
effect is most obviously drawn, within the context of FTB, by the triggering of
the foreground birdsong recording which the real blackbird then sometimes
interacted with and responded to.
Like in Amacher’s otoacoustic CD tracks, also, the effect is implicitly carried

through into further locations and playbacks. ‘Blackbird II’ 67
two installation archive CD’s, for example, invites future interactions with other
birds; whilst at the same time, through sounding generic, suggesting these are
more widely available.
66 See pp.157-158.
67 CD ‘Blackbird II 05.06.08’ .
Installation set up: touchscreen and automation
FTB used a similar touchscreen interface to DB 68 which would allow the

foreground recording to be triggered periodically by a user through the
installation player application. The screen only had the foreground title and
duration (‘Blackbird IV 06.06.2011 2’49’) visible on it, printed in the same ‘Times
New Roman’ italic font as the main part of the application hidden behind the
screen 69. The greyed out text turned black when selected; reverting to grey at
so that any user would be aware of its duration.
The touchscreen interface was intended to highlight the active participation of

any user in the FTB installation, as well as to subtly relate and conform to other
experiences of individual recording playback elsewhere. It also reiterated the
foreground status of ‘Blackbird IV’. The interface was designed to be triggered
only intermittently in order to avoid the continuous playback of loud or obtrusive
recordings that might both disturb the other residents of the building 70 and
unnecessarily provoke any bird.
as a proposal in a private site, the foreground playbacks were in fact triggered

remotely 71 using a timer. In this respect, the 2011 version of FTB represents an
impossible, hyperreal environment which, through the use of automation, itself
plays out purist tropes. As well as implying a pristine, untouched environment,
conditions for encouraging a bird.
68
69
70 Cf. Barrett 2005: 199.
71 Using Mac OS X ‘Screen Sharing’ feature that enables a computer’s screen to be
displayed on another computer in the same network. From Mac OS X v10.5 and later this also
allows the programs on another computer to be accessed and operated (Apple Website 2013).
205
5. Installation II
Background and foreground
Although ‘For the Birds’ (FTB) was formally structured, like “Dense Boogie”
(DB), around a background and foreground paradigm, this was not made so
obvious in the later installation. In DB the foreground and background parts were
stated on the touchscreen and wall texts, whereas in FTB only the foreground
audio was referenced on the screen 72. The low-level ambient recordings and
horspielstreifen, and corridor rerecordings, which played intermittently or
continuously in the background, were unmarked.
The largely functional structuring of FTB around background and foreground

recordings was also, as in DB, enabled by the Max installation player 73. The
player provided both a technical and discursive clarity for the development
and playback of an aggregate of sounds that might otherwise have been
recordings sounded similar).
At the same time, the different parts of FTB were intended to be developed
distinctly: an isolated foreground bird recording, alongside background ambient
and horspielstreifen. The blackbird recording, like the crickets recording in
DB, was also meant to have a potential to be experienced, like many such
recordings, as an individual, circumscribed playback. Although it was by no
means intended that the recordings were perceived only in this way. Instead,
FTB tried to reconcile the foreground and background recorded parts into
the smooth space of the installation, which included real-world ambient and
blackbird sounds.
72
73
‘Blackbird IV’ 74
The foreground blackbird recordings were produced from the window in the
main installation room with a cardioid microphone pair 75 pointed towards, what
was quickly established as, a blackbird song post close to the site. Depending
on the weather, recordings were made from the balcony, or from just inside
the window. The blackbird recordings were then diffused from the main stereo
speaker pair 76.
blackbird quickly arrived on the nearby tree 77. Over the season, and the duration
of the 2011 FTB installation, the blackbird repeated similar vocalisations (e.g.
singing the same melody; responding in the same way to a delivery van); and
and evening.
It has been observed that direct repetitions of complete songs occur only rarely
in natural blackbird song, whereas certain motifs and sequences within these
592, 594). In this respect the ‘Blackbird IV’ recordings, like the ‘Blackbird II’
recordings made previously, represent what I understand to be parts of, rather
than, complete songs. In both cases, this was in order to achieve the most
isolated bird recordings possible in such an environment.
Blackbirds produce variations in their song which also sometimes evidently

mimic further individuals of the same and other species, as well as environmental
and anthropogenic noises (Hall-Craggs 1984). This was most obviously (and
ambiguously) demonstrated in FTB by the blackbird appearing to duet with
the recording of itself 78
to neighbouring and more distant blackbirds 79; in what René van Peer has
described as adaptive ‘weaving patterns’ of imitation, ‘call and response’
(1994: 3).
74 DVD I: Track 54.
75
76
77
78 DVD I: Tracks 110, 121-124.
Leaving aside the further environmental contingencies, which were not

inconsiderable, in terms of the blackbird’s own behaviour, it was relatively
straightforward to produce recordings of birdsong. It was possible to predict
the timing and almost precise location - to a number of branches 80 - of the
became less easily scared off, as the bird became accustomed to seeing and
loudspeaker playbacks).
‘For the Birds’ CD
Alongside ‘Blackbird II’, a further CD, ‘For the Birds’ 81, was produced as an
archival document of FTB. Both CDs were also intended to problematise the
82
; both by evidencing other and
implying future productions of sound.
Although both ‘Blackbird II’ and ‘Blackbird IV’, to an extent, realise purist modes
in the same way 83. Whilst these were also partly rerecordings (of the blackbird
singing to its own recorded song) they distinctly failed to achieve the quality of
reproduction evidenced in the rerecordings of ‘Blackbird II’ 84, for example. ‘For
Background recordings
During the installation, an ambient surround sound recording 85 was

simultaneously diffused with a blackbird recording (ultimately ‘Blackbird IV’ 86
80
81 CD ‘For the Birds 25.06.11’ or DVD I: Track 110.
82 Cf. Amacher ‘s otoacoustic CDs pp.157-158, 160.
83 Partly because the aim to produce a dynamic balance between the real-world and
recorded bird took precedence. I would hope to resolve this in a future version of the installation.
84 DVD I: Tracks 111, 112.
86 DVD I: Track 54.
87
) in the main room, together with a rerecording 88 of both in the corridor. The
‘foreground’ ambient recording was made using an ambisonic microphone
positioned in the centre of the loudspeaker quad in the main room, with the
windows open.
As the foreground blackbird and ambient recordings and rerecording ended,

they were replaced with background recordings of stereo horspielstreifen 89
and a further ambisonic ambient recording in the main room 90 and, again, with
a rerecording of both in the corridor 91. These recordings were each made with
the installation window closed and therefore were more low level, uneventful
and neutral.
As in DB, the background recordings were crossfaded in and out between

the instances of foreground recording; and were otherwise produced and
played back continuously throughout the installation. Because ambient and
horspielstreifen recordings have been substantially introduced in relation to
DB 92
and playback.
The background recordings in FTB had a similar potential as those in DB to

be unheard or ignored. However, the much quieter rural location of the FTB
installation, together with the number of loudspeakers, also allowed low level
more clearly heard.
Although the background recording playback was not otherwise marked within
the installation, the loudspeaker quad and stereo loudspeakers in the corridor
were both more visually striking and closely accessible. Multiple loudspeakers
at head height also produced a more substantial level of background sound
(than a stereo pair). This noise might still, however, be interpreted ambiguously
as real-world or recorded equipment hiss (horspielstreifen).
87 Earlier versions: DVD I: Tracks 125-127.
88 DVD I: Tracks 114, 115.
92 See pp. 128-137.
The same noise was also present, to a degree, in the foreground corridor
rerecording 93 that was produced and diffused (although in stereo only) using
the same technologies. The effect was more even in FTB, than in DB, because
the same model of Genelec loudspeaker 94 was used in every part of the work.
The sounds of technological production were, therefore, consistent throughout
the installation; subliminally realising a persistent material sameness, a sense
of surface production, and an equivalence between different instances of
recording 95; at the same time as connecting to real-world equipment sounds.
as discrete sonic events 96. Instead, like environmental musics, these were
intended to blend in with further recorded and real-world sounds so that there
would be no distinctive differences between them.
Rerecordings of the main room ambient, horpielstreifen and birdsong recordings,

made from the adjacent corridor 97
the loudspeakers. Decoded background and foreground rerecordings were

then diffused in stereo in the corridor together with the recordings in the main
room. So that, for example, as ‘Blackbird IV’ 98 was diffused in the main room,
a synced rerecording of it played in the corridor 99.
Repetition
As previously discussed, the different sonic productions in FTB (background

ambient and horspielstreifen recordings; real-world and recorded birdsong)
emerged from a broader practice of intermittently and repeatedly making and
period of time.
94 Genelec 1029a.
95 Cf. Adorno on horspielstreifen p. 134.
96 See p. 212.
97 DVD I: Tracks 114, 115.
98 DVD I: Track 54.
repetitions and differences of sound that happen across environments; and

that organisms, like humans and birds, for example, both display. The periodic
habits of local, sometimes individual birds, including the original blackbird
behaviour that inspired FTB, was already well documented within these 100.
repeated actions, might further be understood to correspond to, what Julian

Henriques describes as, the sometimes obsessive development of rhythmic
routines and behaviours over circadian and monthly periods (Henriques
2010: 77). These repetitions produce reciprocal build ups and intensities of
attachment and affect, that, at the same time as making us ‘creatures of habit’,
create, what Henriques understands as, a vibrant awareness and connection
between different sonic events and milieus.
FTB was informed by combinations of both extrinsic and intrinsic, gradual,

intermittent, and more frequent repeats; from which individual recordings
were then incrementally developed. These repetitions included: the intensive
making, remaking, and updating of background and foreground recordings
throughout the duration of the installation; the repeated playback of recordings;
the repeating song of the real-world blackbird (both on its own and in relation to
‘Blackbird IV’); the production of CDs; the reproduction of the original blackbird
event (‘Blackbird II)’; the reuse of existing forms of bird and environmental
background recordings and examples of sound installation and bird interaction.
Mimetic strategies
The repetition of recording in FTB was used to both practice, and achieve,
the purist aims of the installation, whilst at the same time moving beyond the
events, which were able to be produced.
A similar effect was also achieved through the use of mimetic recording
strategies, already discussed in relation to DB. These also produced near
100 See p. 179, n. 16.
repeats, or close similarities, between different instances of sound (generic

forms of bird, ambient and horspielstreifen recordings; recordings and
Continuing attempts to chronologically track and, as far as possible, remain

mimetically close to, contingent real-world sounds, produced a tangible sense
had started off as discernably accurate reproductions drifted into becoming

largely inadequate ones 101.
forms of recording (eg. birdsong recordings; ‘lowercase’). In this respect,

the actual blackbird, by ‘duetting’ with a previously made recording of itself,
partially arrested or nearly resolved this transitory effect (between recordings
and real-world sounds) through repeatedly returning to the song post with the
same or a similar song.
Henriques’ account, above, makes it possible to reconcile the mimetic and

purist strategies of the installation, produced mainly through repetition, with the
intensive production of affect that, he writes, emerges from such repetitions
(2010: 77). Instead of ‘capturing’ and commodifying the blackbird song, along
with the ambient background recordings, the FTB installation and recordings
remained sensitive and alert to the minute changes and differences between
sonic instances 102. The multiplicity and transience of these also highlighted
world bird).
101 Cf. Keightley 1996:152.

102 Cf. ‘Double resonance’, p. 49.
212
6. Smooth Space
Surround sound in ‘For the Birds’
The background ambient and horspielstreifen recordings, in the main room,

and all of the rerecordings were produced, and also sometimes diffused,
from a longer term practice of rerecording, as well as from an interest in a
Surround sound technologies - especially those which attempt a virtual,

isotropic sound like ambisonics - have often been depicted as an extension
and teleological progression of earlier audio mono and stereo formats (Auner
2000). Within these discourses, recordings, as such, are formulated in terms of
realism and ‘capture’; and surround sound is understood as closely reproducing
environment (Malham 2001). This surrogate environment is then associated

with a relative, albeit limited, degree of haptic freedom within it.
In ambisonic recordings the effects of control and simulation continue into

post-production. Recordings produced in ambisonic B-format (e.g. using
decoding 103
. The direction and placement of the microphone can be virtually
using a software application 104; and a B-format recording can either be decoded
ambisonically (to a series of different loudspeaker arrays) or to another format,
103 Both versions of the Installation Player used the open source Max ambidec object
from the ambilib collection; developed by David Malham and ported to Max by Matt Paradis
(University of York Website 2013).
104 E.g. Ambisonic Studio B2X Plugin Suite for Max OSX (Courville 2007-2012) that was
used here.
such as stereo.
In FTB, instead of using surround sound to produce a sense of virtual
to produce a tangible lack of differentiation between different recordings and

between recorded and real-world sounds. In this way, the remarkable effects
of simulation produced by such recording technologies was acknowledged,
without then only depicting this in terms of a more thorough and advanced
form of representation and capture.
Ambisonics were not used to subordinate, or subsume, recordings and real-

world sounds into the installation as a whole, but rather to produce a mutuality
and reciprocity between different instances of sound; and, what has been
described in this thesis as, a smooth space.
This approach to ambisonics is elucidated in Andrew Murphie’s account of

virtual reality technologies (VR) in the essay ‘Putting the virtual back into VR’
(2002). Within this, Murphie argues that the effect of total reproduction in VR
technologies, however remarkable, is ‘absolutely secondary to considerations
of the smooth and striated in the formations of virtual space’ (Murphie 2002:
205). He connects the mimetic (molecular and molar 105) capacity of immersive
VR, instead, to smooth space; in a different formulation of virtual reality which
might also be applied to surround sound:
conceiving of virtual worlds not as enhanced representations in this

way but as “smooth spaces”’. In this model . . . it is the haptic,
the use of the whole body which becomes the more important, and
more nomadic, means of negotiating the space.’ (2002: 204)
‘Smooth’ and ‘striated’ space
The concept of ‘smooth space’, developed by Deleuze and Guattari (D&G) in
105 D&G use this dyad of terms, in respect of perception, to distinguish the affective
in macro processes (Parr 2005: 171, 173).

‘Sonicinteractions’ 106. It was linked there to Marshall Mcluhan’s concept of

acoustic space and the tactile and haptic modes of reception that emerge
together with both acoustic and smooth spaces.
The main features of acoustic space have already been outlined in SI, and I
want to return now to further accounts of smooth space. Although it is relevant
D&G situate ‘smooth space’ at the other end of a dialectical continuum, and
in a constantly changing mixture, with ‘striated space’ (1988: 474). Both
concepts are developed in Chapters 12 (‘1227: The treatise on nomadology -
the war machine’) and 14 (1440: The smooth and the striated’) of ‘A Thousand
Plateaus’. The distinctions between the two are introduced as follows:
‘ . . . the difference between a smooth (vectorial, projective or
“space is occupied without being counted” and in the second case

“space is counted in order to be occupied.” ’ (1988: 361-362)
Smooth spaces
Smooth spaces are related by D&G to amorphous ‘patchworks’ of discrete parts
then made between these are contrasted to those produced by striated space.
They are rhythmic, rather than metric; immediate, local, and tactile, rather than
detached and assessed from a unique direction or distance; and continuously
variable and heterogeneous, rather than static and homogeneous. D&G write:
‘Smooth space is precisely the space of the smallest deviation:
points, and the linking of proximities is effected independently of any

determined path. It is a space of contact, of small tactile or manual
actions of contact, rather than a visual space like Euclid’s striated
a heterogeneous smooth space, is wedded to a very particular type

of multiplicity: nonmetric, acentered, rhizomatic multiplicities that
106 See pp. 58-60.
occupy space without “counting” it and can “be explored only by

legwork.” They do not meet the visual condition of being observable
from a point in space external to them; an example of this is the
system of sounds, or even of colors, as opposed to Euclidean
space. ‘ (1988: 371)
D&G borrow the terms ‘smooth’ and ‘striated’ from the composer Pierre
Boulez’s compositional vocabulary, who also conceptualised the two together
in a reciprocal, interactive relation (1988: 477). Boulez used the terms to
distinguish between the standardized and notated durations and tempos within
music to those produced through improvisation, for example. Whereas striated
time creates partitions within, and constancy throughout, a stable and limited
structure, in smooth time unmeasurable, irregular, varying and uncontrollable
partitionings are continuously immanently produced and accessed (Campbell
2010: 234-235).
‘ . . . the smoothest of smooth spaces’
In the translator’s foreword to ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, Brian Massumi writes that
in many creative arts. Following D&G, Massumi notes that on a formal level,
music, together with mathematics, is able to create ‘the smoothest of smooth
spaces’ (1988: xiii).
The implications of this are later set out by D&G in Chapter 11: ‘1837: Of the
Refrain’ where, citing John Cage’s work, they caution against any excessive
or exclusive use of smooth space; arguing that a ‘plane of consistency’ can
also be overdone (1988: 344). Such a space sometimes produces, what D&G
understand to be, a chaotic, statistical scrambling which ends up either merely
reproducing ‘sound effects’, or reterritoralising sounds too completely on
existing sources of noise:
‘The claim that one is opening music to all events, all irruptions
but one ends up reproducing a scrambling that prevents any event
from happening. All one has left is a resonance chamber well on
the way to forming a black hole. A material that is too rich remains
too “territoralized: on noise sources, on the nature of the objects.’
(1988: 344)
This depicts smooth space in terms of a chaos of echoic reproductions which

only repeat, or are reduced back to, existing forms rather than being able to
produce genuinely new connections or events. D&G argue, instead, that the
material must be deterritoralized enough in order to achieve a state of sonic
the same time, this relies on, what they understand to be, a degree of restraint
and ‘sobriety’ in relation to a creatively limited selection of material. Otherwise
what is achieved, through including too much, is what D&G describe as a
‘vagueness beyond recognition’ (1988: 551 n.55).
‘For the Birds’ and ‘Smooth Space’
Although FTB played back a simultaneous complex of (partly random)
repeatedly recorded and updated during the installation in order to reproduce

107
.
FTB tried, in this respect, to avoid what D&G describe above by using mimetic
strategies to produce a proliferation of recordings and a smooth space which, at
the same time, ‘dissolved’ into and were ‘resolved’ upon (Marks 2002: 12) these
purist and categorical forms of recording. At the same time, an engagement
with sonorous material itself ‘de-frames’ such canons (Murphy & Smith 2001:
4), which now become related, instead, to outside ‘forces’ 108.
The installation, in this way, attempted to produce a smooth space without it

then becoming: either an aestheticised ‘chaos’ of sound productions; a work
which was reducible to a mere function of probability; or alternatively one which
performed only echoic repetitions of different sources of sound; whether these
were real-world sounds or existing recordings and genres of recording. The
title of the installation, ‘For the Birds’, after John Cage, also alluded to this 109.
107 Also ‘background’ and ‘foreground’ categories of sounds.

108 Timothy S. Murphy and Daniel W. Smith describe canons of music as organised in
terms of striated and spatial-temporal structures of architecture and enclosure that are ‘de-
framed’ through an engagement with sonorous material itself. (Murphy & Smith 2001: 4).
109 John Cage explains the title “For the Birds’ in the introduction to the same book : ‘I am
for the birds, not for the cages in which people sometimes place them ‘ (Cage 1981:11).
217
7. Conclusion
‘For the Birds’ attempted to remain open to environmental contingencies whilst

carefully stipulating the different parts of the installation at the outset. This
provided a structure which produced precise articulations of recording at the
Whilst reasonably purist instances of recording were produced in the installation

space, the noises that were excluded from these - wind, other technological
and anthropogenic noises, other birds and so on - could be simultaneously
heard. This was most strikingly evident in the blackbird singing against its own
recorded song.
Their placement and repetition enabled the FTB recordings to be conceived

of as transitory realisations drawn immanently from the site rather than more
installation as an (albeit elusive) potential, rather than only a falsehood.
Like in the further accounts of bird recording above, although the work of FTB
was quite considerable, this effort itself was not intended to be obvious, either
in the recordings themselves or within the installation. However, this work was
not then only proposed to be inversely registered in terms of an even more
masterful absence and ‘sleight of hand’ (Bolter & Grusin 1995: 25).
Instead, the ways in which the installation recordings related to further

extrinsic sonic events became their predominant and most compelling effect.
These also challenged normalized hierarchies of sound by inviting critical
comparisons of real-world and recorded sounds together (e.g. which were
then potentially indistinguishable or, in the case of the blackbird recordings,
produced interactions).
This extrinsic concern makes the FTB recordings seem distinct from Francisco
sounds in the installation, the installation could also be understood as

following through the proposal that López makes above in respect of natural
and technological sounds, by siting this lack of differentiation at the point of
diffusion as well. At the same time, this indistinction draws attention away from
irrelevant, towards more environmental, tactile experiences of these, ‘on the

ground’.
As in López’s account, pre-existing categorical delineations between different
recordings in FTB do not invite the absolute production or reception of sounds
these produce a drifting reception across recordings and real-world. Whereas
understands it, following Dunn and D&G, in terms of an opening up to, and
interaction with, other ‘cosmic’ events.
As well as highlighting non-human productions of sounds, FTB also revealed

effects of mediated sounds and technologies on these further organisms.
This was partly expressed through the blackbird’s direct response to a sound
recording which then brought attention to and implicated the environmental,
‘polluting’ effect of any mediated sound. The bird’s ability to sing along with and
conform to an earlier song, similarly, challenged human-centred conceptions
of music and technological reproduction.
The real-world blackbird, by adapting to and repeating the recording, also

uncannily disrupted a conception of recordings as stable representations, or
as only monologous, circumscribed forms 110. At the same time, the blackbird’s
recording as predicated on only specialised or ‘peopled’ decisions (Van Peer;
as hyperreal simulations or lures.
110 ‘The performance sounds like its own phonograph record’ (Hamilton 2003: 348).
Like other smooth spaces, FTB was constructed out of immediate symptoms
and events in relation to local goals and points that were themselves transitory
and variable. This also connects to Dunn’s account of composition, which he
describes in terms of a complex reciprocity that emerges immanently during
many environmental and other interferences.
FTB also avoided reinscribing any individual source of sound or agency
dominant, part of its production. The installation realised, instead, an ongoing

production of a multiplicity of sound productions. These sonic productions were
not predicated on any one activity or position of production or reception, but
but without then channelling these into permanent monologues of sound; or

choking these off, in, what Michael Taussig describes as, the ‘“banking” mode
of perception’ (1993: 99).
The background and foreground recordings in FTB were intended to be
more distinctively as repeated or ‘canonical’ forms. ‘Blackbird IV’, for example,

relates to further recordings of isolated birds. The background recordings
examples of sound installation and bird interaction).
Like the pervasive horspielstreifen recordings that Adorno relates to a subliminal

awareness of production, generic recordings like birdsong can also be subtly
consciously experienced as produced objects. Part of what an incessant
proliferation of such recordings does, according to Jacques Rancière, is to
situate and animate such recordings as ‘images’, rather than as copies. Within
media) are evidently available to be repeatedly recombined and reprocessed

(Rancière 2002: 128). At the same time, their ‘equalisation’ and repetition also
produces, what Rancière understands as, a lack of distinction that can be
expressed, following D&G, in molecular terms (2002: 128).
Molecular
D&G relate the ‘proper’ content of music to its capacity to exceed ‘molar’,
categorical or representational thresholds, writing that music tends to:
‘ . . . become progressively more molecular in a kind of cosmic

lapping through which the inaudible makes itself heard and the
imperceptible appears as such: no longer the songbird, but the
sound molecule’ (D&G 1988: 248)
This lapping is described by Marianne Kielian-Gilbert, writing on D&G’s account

of birdsong and the refrain, as a transformation from the limits of repetition and
recognition to affective, tactile encounters in which the real-world bird, through
its song:
‘ . . . activates a morphing border between stylized and literal/”real”.

The performative activation approaches the “real” or “literal” by
creating an excess or surpassing of the “stylized” as “constructed.”
(2010: 213)
FTB attempted to approach a similar effect, by situating recognizably ‘stylized’

birdsong (and background recordings), together with mimetic and environmental
for example, as the real-world blackbird picked out and reiterated its own
recorded song.
D&G claim that through their continuous production and variation, birdsong
111
), are able to realise
‘infra-conceptual’, liminal relations. In this way, they become a part of, and
111 Following the examples D&G give of electronic music (e.g. 1988: 308).
work on the level, of molecular interaction rather than only representation 112.
Such sonic productions then reveal a multiplicity of other sonorous and non-
sonorous forces and interactions – ‘animal, vegetable, mineral’– which, as Eric
sub-atomic level, everything is in touch with everything else.’ (2005: 10).
112 ‘When we are concerned with understanding bird-song on the molecular level, what
counts is not the bird or the song (i.e. the molar units which are thought of as indivisible)
but bird molecules and sound molecules, which can be shown to function in ways that are
independent from conceptual units like ‘bird’ or ‘song’. It is clear, for example, that the sound
molecules which make up bird song interact in accordance with laws that exist on numerous
and of natural selection, and the various neurological and physiological laws that govern the
production and reception of sound.’ (Prieto 2005: 11). See also Bogue 2004: 98-99.
222
CONCLUSION
practice and conceptions of recorded sound, while considering how the projects
their playback more widely. The effects of the projects’ development, siting
are discussed, before describing how these changed. After considering the
theoretical approach of the thesis, I discuss how the research on environmental
related to forms of new age music that also suggest future directions for works.
Field recording
Changing methods of production
introducing this only in terms of randomness and contingency, as I do at the

start. Instead, I continued to use random techniques developed previously
recording techniques.
As these became more fully developed, it seemed less necessary to continue
many random recordings, as well as to focus on individual projects. Technical

issues in respect of programming also absorbed a great deal of time. Despite
CONCLUSION 223
constrained their contingent production during the thesis, more than I would
have liked, and allowed less time to explore their broader context (e.g. in terms
of further practices).
Although elements of automation were kept, mainly during playback, the
in “Dense Boogie”, for example, in the selection of the foreground recording

In this way, rather than
core methodologies, randomness and automation gradually became part of a
range of techniques to produce and organise recordings and their playback.
Alternative constructions
A move away from automation also gave me the space to introduce a number
This became characterised, instead, in terms of mainly passive (idle or yielding),

rhythmic or intensive interactions that emerged immanently in relation to
own practice. The gradual development of different recording methodologies
recording that contrasted expert, perspectival accounts. In this respect, they
without then insisting on this being only monologous or representational and

only drawn from a predetermined single ‘reality’. They also addressed the
thesis’ concern with ‘feeds’ or masses of environmental sound that, rather than
producing total simulations or enclosure, are fragmented by different modes
of reception.
Other voices; multiple voices

CONCLUSION 224
relevant to a project, it became clear, over the course of the thesis, that it was
not always necessary to explicitly or personally perform this. Their random
production had initially been intended to avoid commodifying either real-world
or recorded sounds during production or playback; and to detach them from
any unique or sustained sonic perspective; as well as to model certain aspects
of environmental recorded noise.
A continuing preoccupation with sonic productions beyond my own also
recording, in relation to a range of further practices and voices, and marked

a more fundamental shift in interest from any one individual or autonomous
voice or site of production 1. At the same time, these also expressed the
emergence of my own work in relation to a persistent situation of anthropogenic
environmental noise.
Mimetic and appropriative, rather than random, methodologies also produced
on unique posture or place. These provided approaches towards shared and

multiple, rather than individual, practices to develop my own approach; that
was already implied by the globally shared content (and methodologies) of
2
.
recording that were, at the same time, very personally or locally realised.
However, rather than highlighting my individual production or any essential
of further simulacral, multiple and non-human environmental productions of
promoting a range of natural and technological sounds, rather than only

3
.
1 Cf. arguments against single species’ recording (pp.189-194).
2
positions of individual subjects or persons towards collective utterance or enunciation.’ (Parr

2005: 170).
3 See also Wollscheid 1999: 7.
CONCLUSION 225
(I tested this in attempts to produce purist and generic recordings). In this
of reality’ 4; that also implied equivalences between different productions of

mediated and real-world sounds, like the mimetic strategies described below.
then make objective documentations of ‘reality’, as purist practices claim. Instead,

I observed the variability and undecideability of such effects: my own and further
anthropogenic noises both encouraged and discouraged other non-human
the complex products of interactions or acousmatic ‘broad band’ approaches

to sound, that David Dunn and Francisco López describe, but that then always
continue to be produced in relation to real-world playback environments.
Playback
focus also moved more decisively towards its vitally changeable, variable
potential during playback. In this way, the thesis recordings performed, what I
haptic reception across both recording and real-world, that describes, at the
very least, the beginning of, ‘joining in’ and participation. Rather than the only
abstract, autonomous effect that Joanna Demers (2009:40), for example,
environmental sounds.
Projects
practices rather than to sound art, one of the main aims, outlined there,
In retrospect, this contradiction immediately set out the spatial problematics of
4 See pp.104; 155, n.108;

CONCLUSION 226
the thesis. As described at the start, I had imagined such a work in largely
played back. At the same time, through experiences of producing and listening
their ongoing productive potential by restricting these to any one immersive

form, theme or monologue of representation.
First projects
sound productions, receptions and sites discretely (whether this was related to
a project as a whole or to individual recordings).
Contrary to both disciplinary and control accounts of recorded sounds, these
categories, that, the research and practice together implied, remained
and performance related approach towards productivity in the later works; that
also contradicted more demanding, totalising accounts of control.
Although a range of different approaches has been important, in hindsight it
projects highlighted distinctive aspects of my work, to a certain extent similar

methodologies and issues might also have been addressed in relation to the
later projects. Apart from the fact that “Dense Boogie” and ‘For the Birds’ were
the most challenging projects to produce, their complex development brought
closer appraisal (e.g. the role of programming in my work). On the other hand,
a more critical and methodological, rather than informal, approach towards a
larger number of projects would have tested the relevance of their siting and
timing more widely.
CONCLUSION 227
Final installations
background and foreground recordings and real-world sounds smoothly

together. I anticipated a largely aesthetic effect: where distinct categories of
sound would remain hearable as such, but now experienced ‘over there’, non-
hierarchically mixed together.
discontinuous experiences of sounds. They also formed quite complex models

of environmental recorded sound that were then able to be compared to the
accounts of smooth spaces previously introduced.
As I worked on the projects, it became clear that what was produced was a
much less stable realisation of either recordings or location, than originally
Subjectivities
In this way, the projects practically tested the loss of subjectivity that
outwards orientated receptions (towards further mediated sounds and other

voices), rather than an only intrinsic focus or fatal withdrawal into simulation.
even detrimental to the production of mimetic recordings and appropriations.

Although I worked on achieving accurate rerecordings, for example, existing
solutions would have been welcome. Other people, and places, as the works
CONCLUSION 228
themselves continually suggest, would also be capable of producing similar

works. At the same time, my own ‘legwork’ and repeated close assessments
were crucial to their development.
Categorical distinctions
The projects also problematised categorical distinctions between sounds
and simulacral depictions of recording as independent from any one form

of representation. Non-hierarchical equivalences between natural and
technological productions of sound, that simulacral depictions of recordings
imply, were also directly tested and explored. Mimetic recording strategies
and further recorded sounds. At the same time, because there was no outside
describe, they also avoided being experienced in terms of total simulation 5.
Instead of only optimising an immersive totality, as certain environmental music

discourses claim, the relationship between the foreground and background
recordings in my work also facilitated an approach that focused, however
minimally or obliquely, on the productivity of sound. These both audibly
and referentially related many different sounds to further sonic productions
further environmental noises of production).
More than one format
recordings in a more relational, less autonomous way without either resorting
sound installations. However, rather than any one physical location, the extrinsic
parts of each installation (including recording methodologies, programming,
proposals, titles, citations, artefacts, further environmental sounds) provided
5 In this respect, the thesis proposes a Deleuzean rather than Baudrillardian model of
simulation: in which the world is made up of - rather than obscured or replaced by - simulacra;
that are independently productive, rather than representational. (See Parr 2005: 250-251).
CONCLUSION 229
subtle, sometimes transient frameworks for the audio. These loosely supported
It has subsequently seemed less important to rely on any one form of

presentation or physical context but instead to select or respond to these in
a more experimental and methodological way, as a further immanent and
productive aspect of any proposed work. To this end, I have become interested
in more vague and unconventional settings; episodic, timed and distributed
works (e.g. across different platforms).
Sites
Generic
It also became clear, over the course of the thesis, that I was more concerned
with playback locations as functional or generic playback sites, rather than in any
6
crucial to a project, this became in some way despecialised or promoted as

more widely available during development (e.g. in terms of further disciplinary
architectures; by repeating aspects of installations or sites; by linking these to
domestic experiences of listening and sound production).
The use of random, appropriative and mimetic recording methodologies and
were both locally particular and transferable to anywhere. In this way, they also
evidenced the paradoxes of stillness and movement, singularity and collectivity
described in haptic and nomadic approaches to reception across the thesis.
in relation to certain phonographic practices 8
6
experiences of recordings. E.g. Minard 1996: 13; Schaefer 2001: 71.
7 After Kwon 2004.
8 Including Francisco López’s.
CONCLUSION 230
but rather are able to realise these sites as mobile and transient themselves.
and generic sounds ceaselessly draw sounds liminally and schizophonically
spatialities 9
by background anthropogenic noise, partly as I also attempt to do 10, as precisely
providing a means with which to move away from any focus on discrete sonic
11
.
Placelessness
This also realises, what I understand to be, the vital placelessness and
respect of sound art, for example. Different theorists have also problematized
43) 12
representations of location or to abstract expressions of individuals (2009: 40;
2010: 168). Field recordings have been understood here, instead, as crucially
of an individual production (in respect of person or place); genre or category of

sound; or single disciplinary context 13.
9
work as a catalyst interferes with the context and can, eventually, de-compose the contextual
and the symbolic’ (Wollscheid in LaBelle & Roden 1999: 9).

10 See pp. 63-66.
11 ‘The shift from objects to matter distances practices of nature recording
based upon the audible representation of place, individual species or bodies from those aiming
to uncover the generative capacity and ambiguous creativity of generalised sonic events’.
(Schrimshaw 2012).
12 ‘transportable works can be sound art (particularly if we take self-description
as a useful marker), if they are headphone pieces that ‘guide’ you around a town aurally . .
you are in . . . even if only listening on headphones in the gallery. A CD of sound art that gets
ambiences, and recordings of installations. (Hegarty quoted in Demers 2009: 43).

13 See Cusack 2006.
CONCLUSION 231
Approach to theory
practical development of the projects: a wide range of discourses were

gradually associated together, that were either directly related to an individual
project or more generally relevant to the persistent concerns of the thesis.
The relevance of these was mainly implied through their critical proximity and
would have been useful, therefore, to have either explicitly stated this at the
start, or to have integrated the projects further.
This also meant that texts and further compositions were reproduced in the
dissertation in such a way that they remained largely undisturbed by my own
practice. To a certain extent, this evidenced a reluctance to misrepresent or
obscure these, while also positioning or problematising them together with my
appropriation across the projects. This perhaps produced an undue emphasis

on certain works and philosophical and critical texts that was disproportionate
to the thesis as a whole. On the other hand, these also traced a critical
background of alternative constructions of mass mediated sound and reception
focus this and situate it more widely, rather than to directly analyse parts of the
practical constructs for the projects that either directly suggested, encouraged
were also sometimes directly cited within projects - in “Dense Boogie”, most
obviously; pointing to a certain reciprocity. In this respect, theoretical research
both affected individual projects and the course of the thesis.
Deleuze and Guattari
The work of Deleuze and Guattari, especially, provided key constructs that
CONCLUSION 232
and local potential of haptic, smooth, sonic spaces - by whomever and
time, ignoring the disturbing prospect of coercive and total implementations of

these.
Descriptions of smooth spaces in terms of sounds, such as wind, birds and
practices, emphasised such sonic productions as common and shared

amongst humans, organisms and things. At the same time, an insistence on
the singularity and capacity of these to produce connections - outside of only
categorical representations - across recordings and real-world sounds and
events was inspiring.
Articulations of multiple, ‘minor’ productions of sound and alternative

formulations of composition and reception approached and informed my
mass recording playbacks and environmental musics, against dominant

paradigms of either. A siting of sonic production apart from either classical
forms of representation or probabilistic chaoses was also critical in negotiating
‘manoeuvring’ required to produce sound works that avoid being immediately

co-opted or absorbed into prevailing models; that each of thesis projects, in
different ways, attempts.
Research on environmental musics
The research on environmental musics generated useful methodologies that
Their focus on neutral content, appropriation and background and foreground

playback was decisive in developing my own approach; enabling me to realise
Discourses drawn from and around environmental musics produced a range
playback; at the same time as understanding such recordings as capable of

CONCLUSION 233
connecting to further individuals, organisms and environments. An emphasis

on particular constructions of space and subjectivity, particularly in negative
criticisms of environmental musics, also encouraged me to explore alternative
paradigms in order to counter these.
Within these, characterisations of mass recording playbacks as a continuation

of functional environmental musics provided a crucial perspective from which
to approach the former. Other constructions of global environmental musics
and noise, in terms of distinctive forms of reception and spatiality, were
environmental recording playbacks.
of space and subjectivity explored throughout the thesis. In Sonicinteractions,

any distinctions between audiences, composers and sites were already
compromised by environmental depictions of recording and haptic receptions.
Subsequent projects expanded on these, as well as introducing selected
composers’ works, and from environmental musics.
Rather than resolving or distilling these, the projects were developed and
intended to be (as discussed above, not necessarily entirely comfortably or
evidently) situated in relation and response to such further works, rather than
only autonomously. For example, the foreground audio in “Dense Boogie” was
related to a range of purist, acousmatic, mimetic, appropriative and generic
sound practices; that were then either highlighted or obliquely suggested in the
audio, or extrasonically.
Mass playbacks
recordings, both directly and indirectly, to shared experiences of other sonic

productions ‘at home’. Alternative conceptions of sound composition were
introduced that either linked this to everyday, haptic receptions, or understood
it in terms of random, passive or domestic approaches, that typically involved
the playback of recordings.
CONCLUSION 234
Discourses that related everyday recording playbacks to composition, rather

than reception, also produced more positive formulations of individual and
composition production that were themselves despecialised in some way,

as described above, provided a range of alternatives to representational
approaches.
Mimetic strategies also corroborated these; both procedurally and by

decategorising sounds more fundamentally. These expanded on the different
in the development of the projects themselves. Mimetic recordings produced

across the thesis encouraged distracted, haptic receptions that, at the same
time, made tangible contacts between different categories of things; that were
experiences of environmental sounds that, at the same time, realised vital,

viable alternatives to exclusive, visual models of reception.
New Age
Towards the end of the thesis, certain critical discourses on New Age musics
seemed to provide a more convincing model for my own interests and practice
than other accounts of environmental music; given their positive focus on
vague, neutral and generic content and particular tropes; as well as suggesting
new directions for my work.
Echoes and reverberations, the sound of crickets, a blackbird singing with a

recording: each invite comparisons to broadly ‘new age’ trends in environmental
musics 14. These often (tritely) reference ‘ancient’ spaces, such as caves for
example, and use nature recordings, frequently together with instrumental
sounds, to produce relaxation and meditation tracks (Zrzavy 1990; Hall 1994:
15; LeGuin 1994: 5; Hibbett 2010: 290). Although David Dunn, for example,
has understood new age nature recordings in terms of ‘uneasy’, ‘unsuccessful’
14 See Birosik 1989; Werkhoven 1998, for examples.

CONCLUSION 235
c.15:10) 15 16, I don’t want to make this distinction here.
also been characterised by their use of environmental sounds (Zrzavy 1990:

37; Hibbett 2010: 285, 291); and certain discourses around these suggest
17
.
Dennis Hall, for example, describes new age as typically:
‘ . . . marked by minute variations and an abundance of repeats.

This music is all middle; it starts and stops, it is turned on and off,
but one does not get a distinct sense of beginnings and endings.’
(1994: 14)
Hall focuses on new age’s marginal, ‘constantly shifting’, appropriative, liminal

effects and its ability to confuse distinctions and blur boundaries (1994: 14) 18
19
. As well as to produce particular spaces that are at once popular and resist
being further organised or ‘acquiring associations’; in terms of an individual
producer, for example (1994:15; also Zrzravy 1990: 35; Hibbett 2010: 288).
New age music soundscapes, Hall argues, function vitally; both as refuges
transformations from one condition to another’ (1994:19) – habituate listeners

to the postmodern situation 20.
The way in which generic, vague or neutral content can inform such effects
is elaborated by Elisabeth LeGuin in an essay on background and new age
environmental musics. LeGuin describes their lack of focus, blandness and
neutrality as the means by which distracted, ‘magpie’ listeners, at home,
‘unmarked’) personal spaces (LeGuin 1994: 6-7). Such undemanding musics

15 Also Dunn 1999-3: 27-28.
16 Also Montgomery 2009-2: 149, 157. Cf. Morton 2007: 112.
17 Also: ‘The sounds and sensations produced by classic ambient often inspire
an entire world view, a greater awareness of one’s surroundings (and the natural environment--
inherently part of ambient’s aesthetic), and a heightened curiosity about the minutiae of
everyday living.’ (Hyperreal 2001).
18 After the anthropologist Victor W. Turner.
19 Both in terms of its content and typical playback times e.g. in the evening and
weekends: times that imply transitions from urban to rural, public to private etc. (Hall 1994:
18-20).
20 Cf. Walter Benjamin p. 55-56.
CONCLUSION 236
provide what LeGuin understands to be, an affective release from ‘the necessity
of having to focus, make connections, and interact’ (LeGuin 1994: 6).
Such characterisations of environmental musics also resonate with an extended

assessment of ambient, by the group Ultrared, as retaining something of ‘avant-
garde’ resistant practices, whilst side-stepping resistance as such by ‘playing
dead’ within a ‘mass culture industry’ (Ultrared 1997-2: 5; cf. Suchin 2005).
This potential, they continue, is produced in part by ambient’s production of
what Ultrared describe in terms of, local, vital connections to the everyday 21.
These concluding images of environmental musics reiterate and expand what I
new spatialities out of shared and mundanely available sounds; that can then
promote attentiveness to, and participation in, the minute particularities and
possibilities of production; rather than closing these off. They also suggest how
neutral, repetitive or redundant works might, at the same time as obscurely
raising such potentials, release any necessary obligation towards conforming
to such works themselves.
The spatial constriction and environmental degradation related, at the

start, to mass environmental musics and playbacks, and the concern that
partly, gradually resolved in terms of multiple and mutual productions and

potentialities of technological and natural, human and non-human sounds that
remain receptive and susceptible to one another. In this respect, ‘For the Birds’
- that until recently have largely resisted being arranged around individual
voices or perspectives 22 - to only ‘mark off’ everyday noises or locations, by
signing these or treating them as a resource.
21 ‘You’ve been orbed if you’re sitting in a room and you get up to look out the
window and you suddenly realize that it was coming from the record’. (Alex Paterson of The
Orb, in Ultrared 1997-2: 5).
22 See Cusack 2006
CONCLUSION 237
Future Projects
areas that were only introduced or touched upon in them. For example, the
connections made between cave sounds and recordings, in the earlier part of
to archaic modes of reception that would be interesting to explore 23.
These further suggested a shared recorded and real-world ‘mineral’ materiality

that has also partly inspired my growing interest in technologies such as
contact microphones, hydrophones, ultrasound transducers and sensors. Field
recordings using such technologies are becoming more straightforward and
viable to produce; both in terms of equipment cost and shared knowledge of
recording processes. An increasing number of ultrasound recordings of plants
and organisms, for example, have recently been released 24. I would like to
respond to such works both practically, by producing recordings of my own, at
the same time as relating these more overtly to new age tropes and popular
modes of reception.
This would build on the thesis’ concerns with unhearable, ‘everywhere and
nowhere’ recorded and real-world sounds, and non-human productions of
and tangible smooth, molecular practices; as well as explicitly performing its

immanently productive and ‘space-making’ potential for anyone to hear. This
seems interesting.
23 David Dunn, for example, relates soundscape recordings and audio technologies to a
return to, and recovery of, archaic modes of real-world reception (e.g. Dunn & Lampert 1989;
Dunn 2001-2: 7; Blackburn & Dunn 2004). These further produce, what Dunn understands, in
relation to works such as ‘Mimus Polyglottus’, as strategies of conservation of, and adaptation
to, earlier and other modes of perception (1989: 104). For example by ‘elevating human
hearing to the sensitivity of other organisms’ (Blackburn & Dunn 2004: c. 19:40). In this respect,
technologies are understood as facilitating a necessary and meaningful, rather than only an
aesthetic or virtual, return to ‘environmental hearing’ that is based on urgent need (Dunn &
Blackburn 2004: c.11:10); and that is relevant to human environmental survival (Dunn 2001-2:
7).
24 Examples include works by David Dunn; Lee Patterson; Michael Prime.
APPENDIX 1: SOFTMACHINE TEXT (2005) 238
Soft Machine1 Notes on Max/msp
1. Introduction
The idea of producing a piece of work which frames any sound brought into relationship with it rather
soft machine1
once by a hybrid of programmer/composer/operator/listener2
experiences of a listener who distinguishes and frames sounds in her head or turns a recording on and
off and regulates it against any ambient sounds.
2. Max patches
really.
manipulated or disrupted at its most
3 Effects
which this thins out and obliterates other happening sounds.

APPENDIX 1: SOFTMACHINE TEXT (2005) 239
Music is continuous only listening is intermittent”) 4
and from a sound rather than, as in the recorded real, where the distance is inherent in the medium, a
sound is only further controlled by the listener.
Using thoughts and programming words to operate in turn on other thoughts and words by making
Ruth Hawkins 2005
Notes:
2 “the ultimate composer-performer-critic-consumer hybrid.”
3 Hans Haacke, Untitled Statement (1966)

... make something, which experiences, reacts to its environment, changes, is nonstable ...
... make something indeterminate, which always looks different, the shape of which cannot be predicted
precisely ...
... make something, which cannot “perform” without the assistance of its environment ...
... make something, which reacts to light and temperature changes, is subject to air currents and
depends, in its functioning, on the forces of gravity ...
... make something, which the “spectator” handles, with which he plays and thus animates it ...
... make something, which lives in time and make the “spectator” experience time ...
... articulate something natural ...
http://www.msu.edu/course/ha/452/haacke.html
5 “Calling partisans of all nation--Cut word lines--Shift linguals--Free doorways--Vibrate ‘tourists’--Word

falling--Photo falling--Breakthrough in Grey Room.”
APPENDIX 2: PROPOSAL “Dense Boogie” (2011) 240
INSTALLATION “Dense Boogie” 1 2011 (Stereo version).
1&2) Triggered by user. Playback ‘Evening Cicadas, Italy’ 2

on loudspeaker pair;
Rerecord and playback with original 3.
3&4) Playback ambient recording and rerecording on loudspeaker pair when (1&2)
above are not playing 3.
5) Rerecord installation from start.
6) Amplify and playback live sounds of installation on headphones outside main space.
AUDIO
Foreground recordings (1&2); background recordings (3&4); archival rerecording (5);
TEXT [in ‘local’ font]

“…so you wouldn’t get the sense of these [gestures to a nearby loudspeaker] boxes.” 5
OTHER
Blindfolds 6
EQUIPMENT
OSX; Installationplayer v2.2 4; Sonicinteractions v2 3; 4 channel soundcard; 2
loudspeakers; headphones; stereo microphones; touchscreen.
1,5
MARYANNE AMACHER 1999, 2004
2
‘Evening Cicadas, Italy’ 5’ SR070813_X RH07
3
Sonicinteractions v2 OSX Max 5.1.5 RH11
4
Installationplayer v2.2 OSX Max 5.1.5 RH11
6
After FRANCISCO LOPEZ
RUTH HAWKINS 2011

APPENDIX 3: PROPOSAL ‘For the Birds’ (2011) 241
INSTALLATION ‘For the Birds’ 1 2008-2011
1) Record a blackbird in Spring or early Summer from a window.
2) Triggered by user. Playback on loudspeaker pair from same interior. Rerecord.
3&4) Produce ambient recordings of same interior with and without equipment hiss.
Playback on square of 4 speakers. Rerecord.
5,6,7) Produce ambient recording of neighbouring interior. Rerecord blackbird (1) and
ambient recordings (3&4) above and playback on loudspeaker pair from same.
8) Attempt to rerecord the installation with the ‘real’ blackbird singing to its recorded
song.
RECORDINGS
Foreground recordings (1); background recordings (3,5); Foreground rerecordings
(2,6); background rerecordings (4,7); archival rerecording (8).
EQUIPMENT
OSX; Installationplayer v2.22; 8 channel soundcard; 8 loudspeakers; ambisonic
microphone; touchscreen.
1
JOHN CAGE 1981
2
Installationplayer v2.2 OSX Max 5.1.5 RH11
RUTH HAWKINS 2011

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SONICINTERACTIONS (2005 & 2011) 259
Fig..2. Sonicinteractions v2 (All windows).

Fig. 3. Sonicinteractions v2 (‘Shell’ window OFF and ON).

Fig. 4. Sonicinteractions v2 (‘Operator’ window OFF; ‘About’ window).

DOUBLERECORDINGS (2005 - 2007) 262
DOUBLERECORDINGS 140705-151105 CDR051115_01_c5 RH2005
Rerecording (DoubleRecording) 01:19

rer051109_25_x (r051031_21 01&02)
Rerecording (DoubleRerecording_Ambient@NaturalListeningLevel(Rerecording_Recovered (DoubleRecording))) 01:56

rer051114_06 (r051114_27 01&02(rer051111_28 01&02(r051105_43 01&02)))
rer051114_08 (r051114_29 01&02(rer051111_34 01&02(r051105_68 01&02)))
Fig. 5. CDR sleeve: ‘Doublerecordings 140705 - 151105’ 1 (CD051115_01 Clone 4).

DOUBLERECORDINGS 140705-151105 CDR051115_02_c5 RH2005
rer051115_05 (r051114_26 01&02(rer051111_27 01&02(r051105_42 01&02)))

Rerecording_Recovered (DoubleRerecording_Ambient@NaturalListeningLevel(Rerecording_Recovered (DoubleRecording))) 01:56
rer051115_06 (r051114_27 01&02(rer051111_28 01&02(r051105_43 01&02)))
rer051115_08 (r051114_29 01&02(rer051111_34 01&02(r051105_68 01&02)))
Fig. 6. CDR sleeve: ‘Doublerecordings 140705 - 151105’ 2 (CD051115_02 Clone 5).

Fig. 7. Doublerecorder 2.0 (All windows).

“DENSE BOOGIE” (2007 - 2011) 265
Fig. 8. NAB building, Goldsmiths, University of London (© Goldsmiths, University of London).

Fig. 9. Installation view 1.
“DENSE BOOGIE” (2007 - 2011) 266
Fig. 10. Wall text (Title). Fig. 11. Installation view 2.

“DENSE BOOGIE” (2007 - 2011) 267
Fig. 12. Touchscreen and wall text (Background recordings). Fig. 13. Blindfolds.
“DENSE BOOGIE” (2007 - 2011) 268
Fig. 14. Touchscreen (Screenshot). Fig. 15. Wall text (Background recordings).
“DENSE BOOGIE” (2007 - 2011) 269
Fig. 16. Wall text (Maryanne Amacher quotation).

“DENSE BOOGIE” (2007 - 2011) 270
Fig. 17. Installation Player v2.2 (All windows with “Dense Boogie” 2011 and Sonicinteractions
adaptation).
‘FOR THE BIRDS’ (2008 - 2011) 271
Fig.18. Installation view 1 (Main room window and balcony with 2 loudspeakers in quad array).
Fig.19. Installation view 2 (Stereo loudspeaker pair in corridor and main room).
‘FOR THE BIRDS’ (2008 - 2011) 272
Figs. 20 & 21. Installation view 3 & 4 (Main room loudspeakers: quad array and stereo pair).
‘FOR THE BIRDS’ (2008 - 2011) 273
Fig. 22. Wall text (Study). Fig. 23. Installation Player v2.2 (‘about’ window). Fig. 24. Touchscreen
‘Blackbird IV’ (Screenshot).
‘FOR THE BIRDS’ (2008 - 2011) 274
Fig. 25. Installation Player ‘For the Birds’ 2010 (All windows).
‘FOR THE BIRDS’ (2008 - 2011) 275
Fig. 26. Installation Player 2011 (All windows).

‘FOR THE BIRDS’ (2008 - 2011) 276
Fig. 27. ‘Blackbird IV’ 2011.

AUDIO : NOTES 277
EQUIPMENT:
Recorders and mixers: Sony Dat Walkman; Sound Devices Mixpre; 442; 744T; MacBook Pro
Microphones: 1 stereo recording - binaural (Soundman OKM); 2 stereo recording (Schoeps

CCM); 2-1 ORTF; 2-2 A-B; 2-3 X/Y; 3 ambisonic B-format recording ( )
decoded to stereo; 4 unknown.
Please note:
reason the levels have not been normalized and remain variable. Although much of the audio
content is moderately or very low level, this is occasionally not the case. The user is therefore
advised to adjust the recording levels at the start of playback to a putative ‘natural’ level.
DVDS and CDs:
below.
2 8cm CDs:
Blackbird II 05.06.08 RH08&11 (edgeless 01) 3:16

For the Birds 25.06.11 RH08-11 (edgeless 02) 15:33
AUDIO: FIELD RECORDINGS (2002 - 2011) 278
Track Time
Goldsmiths EMS 1
6 041029 00:27
Dawn chorus 3
102 061116_02_X 01:43
3
50 070219_01 02:20
Recordings lying down under cherry tree on sunny day 1

105 070415_01 02:06
106 070415_02 01:46
107 070415_03 01:25
Rerecording with ambient tails of stereo rerecording of ambisonic

recording 3
070613_02 02:20
AMBIENT 3
ambient recordings from studio window
070619_01 05:16
070621_01 05:23
RERECORDING 3
Rerecording of ambient recording (see r070619_01 above)
070622_01 05:16
Rerecording of ambient recording (see r070621_01 above)
with ambient tail
070622_06-07 13:13
Bird at studio window (edgeless 112) 2-1

101 070719_01 05:45
2-2
27 070811_01_01 01:16
Child clapping in church 1

31 070818_01_01 00:44
1
28 070818_02_02 00:58
103 071113_01 05:11
6 AMBIENT RECORDINGS 10.04.08 1

55 080410_02 02:02
Track Time
63 080410_03 01:15
64 080410_04 02:10
65 080410_05 00:38
66 080410_07 01:14
67 080410_08 01:07

68 080502_01 04:35
080502_02 02:02
080502_03 02:43
080502_04 03:01
080502_06 03:27
080502_07 03:30

080503_01 05”07
080503_02 02:07
080503_03 02:25
080503_04 00:53
080503_05 00:43
080503_06 05:05
080503_07 03:30

080505_01 01:48
080505_02 01:03
080505_03 02:04
080505_04 00:48
080505_05 13:11
080505_06 01:37
080505_07 03:46

080508_02 13:48
080508_04 01:18
080508_05 09:48
(080508_07 – see ‘Blackbird 1’ below) (11:35)
080508_08 01:43
080508_09 03:44
080508_10 04:08

080509_01 03:07
Track Time
080509_02 06:24
2 interiors 2
080520_T01_X 00:47
080520_T05_X

080529_T01 02:03
080529_T04 01:35
080529_T05 01:26
Wind 2
080514_T03 05:12
edgeless 143 2-1
104 090928_01 04:08
Ambient recordings from window 2-3

110422_T02 01:26
110422_T03_X 07:02
110422_T05 05:21
110422_T09 08:01
100 110422_T11 01:48
30 110614_T02_X 05:19
AUDIO: SONICINTERACTIONS (2005 & 2011) 281
Track Time
Sonic Interactions Conference recordings 2-2
Lawrence Casserley Presentation (full) 58:14

5 Lawrence Casserley Presentation (extract) 01:00
Other participants
Alejandro Viñao_(extract) 05:00

Aki Pasoulas (extract) 05:00
Chris Halliwell (extract) 05:00
Simon Zagourski-Thomas (extract) 05:00
Li Chuang Chong (extract) 05:00
Lukas Pearce (extract) 05:00
Dominic Murcott (extract) 05:00
Oliver Bown (extract) 05:00
Sebastian Lexer (extract) 05:00
DVD II: Sonicinteractions/Audio_conference/
Sonicinteractions Other
050421 00:19
SONICINTERACTIONS-DOUBLERECORDINGS 2
DoubleRecording (see 060801_01_01&02 below)
051027_03 01:41
DoubleRecording (see 060801_01_01&02 below)
061003_01 00:29
DVD II: Sonicinteractions/Audio_other
‘Interlace 021004 cl13 44 16’ 2
01/19 00:00
1 02/19 00:44
03/19 00:47
04/19 00:03
05/19 00:00
06/19 00:01
07/19 02:54
AUDIO: SONICINTERACTIONS (2005 & 2011) 282
Track Time
08/19 00:00
09/19 00:00
2 10/19 00:09
3 11/19 00:11
12/19 00:00
13/19 02:04
14/19 00:09
15/19 00:00
4 16/19 00:16
17/19 00:00
18/19 01:15
19/19 03:08
DVD II: Sonicinteractions/Audio_other/Interlace/

AUDIO: DOUBLERECORINGS (2005 - 2007) 283
Track Time
‘Doublerecordings 140705-151105’ 2
CD051115_01
Rerecording (DoubleRecording)
7 rer050714(r050705_05 01&02) 01:19
(Rerecording_ Recovered (DoubleRecording)))

10 rer051114_05 (r051114_26 01&02(rer051111_27 01&02 01:56
(r051105_42 01&02)))

11 rer051114_06 (r051114_27 01&02(rer051111_28 00:44
01&02(r051105_43 01&02)))

12 rer051114_08 (r051114_29 01&02(rer051111_34 00:06
01&02(r051105_68 01&02)))
CD051115_02
NaturalListeningLevel (Rerecording_Recovered
(DoubleRecording)))
15 rer051115_05 (r051114_26 01&02(rer051111_27 01:56
01&02(r051105_42 01&02)))
Track Time
(DoubleRecording)))
16 rer051115_06 (r051114_27 01&02(rer051111_28 00:44
01&02(r051105_43 01&02)))
(DoubleRecording)))
17 rer051115_08 (r051114_29 01&02(rer051111_34 00:06
01&02(r051105_68 01&02)))
Track Time
CD060206
DoubleRecording
r060201_36_01&02_X 01:01
Rerecording (DoubleRecording)
rer050714 (r050629_14_01&02) 01:31
DVD II: Doublerecordings/CDR/CD060206
‘Doublerecordings 030706 & 040706’ 2

CD060720
DoubleRecording (delay 236 ms) @ 12:34.36

29 060704_11_01&02 01:10
18 060704_13_01&02 02:33
DVD II: Doublerecordings/Applications/Max
Other doublerecordings 2
DoubleRecording (random delay) -

26 051105_03_01&02 02:18
DoubleRecording (delay 31 ms)
19 060704_12 01&02 01:17
DoubleRecording (delay 200ms) -
20 060725_04_01&02 01:00
23 060725_08 01&02 01:00
21 060731_02 01&02 00:30
Track Time
DoubleRecording (random delay) -

22 060801_01_01&02 00:30
Rerecording_Recovered (DoubleRecording 060725_08 01&02
above)
24 070120_02_X 00:59
DoubleRecording-Recovered (variable delay 400-0 ms) - banging
25 070203_02_400-0ms 01:47
AUDIO: “DENSE BOOGIE” (2007 - 2011) 287
Track Time
“Dense Boogie” Installation recordings
2-2
47 070813_35-40mins 05:00
3
51 110503_02_07 04:59
Ambient 3
48 110622_T07-T08 09:52
Rerecording (ambient) 3
49 110625_02_03_X 09:52
“Dense Boogie” Archival recordings 2-3
User playback
120 110706_02_04 04:59
Installation (extract)
46 110706_01_05-06_X 12:44
‘Measurement No. 1’. Lucia H. Chung 2011 (extract)
119 110706_01_03_X_LHC.aif 03:27
‘Ambient, Horspielstreifen, Rerecordings’

Recording Complex 09.06.06 to 28.02.07 (X)
AMBIENT
Ambient exterior 3
37 060609_03 03:18
RERECORDING 2
Rerecording of ambient exterior (extract) (see 060609_03 above)
38 070215_07_X 01:18
ambient tails and fades
39 070215_08_02_X 02:20
HORSPIELSTREIFEN 2
070215_08 above
40 070218_01_X 02:20
41 r070218_01_X_fades 02:20
RERECORDING - HORSPIELSTREIFEN 2
Rerecording crossfaded to horspielstreifen (see
(070215_08_01_X and 070218_01_X above)
42 070215_08-070218_01 04:04
Track Time
AMBIENT 2
43 Centre of room on windy day 02:20
070228_01_X
RERECORDING 2
Rerecording of horspielstreifen (r070218_01_X above)
44 070228_02 02:20
Rerecording of r070218_01 above with 30s ambient tails
45 070228_03 03:26
‘Ambient & Horspielstreifen (Blackbird II & Cicadas)’ 3

Recording Complex 02.02.09 (X)
HORSPIELSTREIFEN
Stereo speakers on
090202_T04 05:55
Stereo speakers on
090202_T04_xfadeIn 05:55
Stereo speakers on
090202_T08 04:57
Quad and stereo speakers on
090202_T10 06:03
Quad speakers on
090202_T11 06:04
AMBIENT
090202_T05 05:06
090202_T05_xfadeOut 05:06
090202_T09 05:14
AMBIENT TO HORSPIELSTREIFEN
090202_T05-T04 05:55
090202_T09 -T08 09:41
AMBIENT TO HORSPIELSTREIFEN TO HORSPIELSTREIFEN

090202_T09 -T11-T10 16:22
DVD II: Dense Boogie/Recording_complex_090202
“Dense Boogie” Other
2-2
070813 56:35
Track Time
53 Ambient recording of room afterwards; same position (extract) 3

070507_04_X 00:59
DVD II: Dense Boogie/Audio_other

AUDIO: ‘FOR THE BIRDS’ (2008 - 2011) 290
Track Time
‘For the Birds’ Installation CDs
‘Blackbird II 05.06.08’ 2-1 03:16

“For the Birds 25.06.11’ 3 15:33
See CDs
‘For the Birds’ Installation recordings
FOREGROUND
Stereo (main room): ‘Blackbird IV’ 2-3
54 110606_T11_X 02:49
Quad (main room); ambient 3
113 110430_01_02_X 02:49
Other (corridor); rerecording 3
114 110613_02_07 02:48
BACKGROUND
Stereo (main room); horspielstreifen 2-3
116 110613_T02_X 11:16
Quad (main room); ambient 3
117 110416_T05-T06 15:00
Other (corridor); rerecording 3
115 110505_02_02 14:59
‘For the Birds’ Archival recordings (Blackbird IV and recording) 3
User playback rerecording

121 110425_02_05 02:24
Other rerecording
122 110426_02_06 04:18
123 110430_02_03 02:18
124 110430_02_04 02:18
CD ‘For the Birds 25.06.11’
110 110625_01_02 15:33
‘Ambient, Horspielstreifen, Rerecordings’ 3

Recording Complex 02.05.08 to 12.08.08 (X)
AMBIENT exterior
080502_01 04:35
Track Time
080502_03 02:43
080529_T01 02:03
080529_T04 01:35
RERECORDING
Rerecording of ‘Blackbird II’ (see CD ‘Blackbird II’)
111 080804_T01 03:16
Rerecording of ambient exterior (080502_03 above)
080804_T02 02:43
Rerecording of ambient exterior (080529_T04 above)
080804_T03 01:35
AMBIENT & HORSPIELSTREIFEN of playback room after

rerecordings above
080804_T05 05:00
080804_T07 05:00
080804_T08 05:00
RERECORDING with ambient tails

Rerecording of ‘Blackbird I’ (extract) (see 080508_07 below)
080807_T01_X 04:00
Rerecording of ‘Blackbird II’ (see CD or 080605_T02 below)
112 080807_T02 07:10
AMBIENT of playback room after rerecordings above
080812_01 05:00
RERECORDING with ambient tails

Rerecording of ambient exterior (080502_03 above)
080807_T05 06:38
Rerecording of ambient exterior (extract) (080529_T04 above)
080807_T06 05:29
Rerecording of horspielstreifen (extract) (080804_T08 above)
080807_T08_X(sr080804_T08.wav) 04:00
AMBIENT
080812_03 05:12
DVD II: For_the_Birds/Recording_complex_080502-080812

Track Time
‘For the Birds’ Installation: other blackbird recordings 2-3
Blackbird I
89 080508_07 11:35
CD ‘Blackbird II 05.06.08’
108 080605_T02 03:16
Blackbird III
109 100525_T01 06:01
Blackbird IV
125 110422_T08 02:18
126 110510_T02_X 05:58
127 110610_T05_X 04:18

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1

The Smooth Space of Field Recording

Sonicinteractions, Doublerecordings, “Dense Boogie” and ‘For the Birds’

Goldsmiths, University of London

PhD MUSIC (Sonic Arts)

recording and real-world environments. The dissertation and projects attempt

recordings that links these to haptic expressions of spatiality and perception,

in acoustic ecology (including R. Murray Schafer; Hildegard Westerkamp).

public environmental musics. Multiple and repeated instances of recording are

These concerns are practically explored through environmental and mimetic

non-sonorous forces together.

Part I: Sonicinteractions (2005 & 2011)

Part II: Doublerecordings (2005 - 2007)

Part III: “Dense Boogie” (2007 - 2011)

5. Insects and technologies 143

Part IV: ‘For the Birds’ (2008 - 2011)

‘ . . . to introduce space and air, chance and memory into an

‘But the air, our air, is in the process of becoming denatured,

and copresence . . . it has become less and less a voluptuous

The four thesis projects - Sonicinteractions, Doublerecordings, “Dense Boogie”,

had mainly involved the contingent production of recordings from wherever I

recording formats to organise and structure the works.

Earlier works (2000-2004)

Examples of previous works include: ‘Heads’ (2000), where randomly

recordings made using in-ear binaural microphones. Another series of

background. For example, one of ‘31 random recordings’ (2002) is of loud

explored more explicitly in a series of recordings made from performances and

methodologies and critical concerns that had already been suggested or

realised in response to an invitation or other event.

individual examples; the development of customised software players. The

recording content, as described below.

Environmental sound of recordings

I initially became aware of both environmental noise and musics through

This developed into a closer interest in the repetitive, unremarkable sounds

environmental and technological noises (e.g. rural background ambiances;

intended to be - at least partly - experienced as generic or banal. Many of the

either recorded or real-world sounds 4.

practice ‘in its own right’ (Montgomery 2009-1:1).

In relation to the projects and individual recordings described here, untreated,

in a range of locations. Private and close-up noises of production (e.g.

musics (whether by documenting environmental noise, or as examples of

‘objects’; whether in terms of an individual production (Wollscheid 1999: 7), or

Spatial paradigms of recording

An environmental depiction of recording has often, like Connor’s above, been

recordings have not been depicted as a conspicuous part of the problem of

recorded and real-world sounds and to accurately simulate these. In either

recordings described here also produced a material awareness of recorded

Despite the increasing availability of recording technologies, within a context of

or impossible to achieve, whether through informal restrictions or through

Environmental characterisations of recorded sound depict both background

and no conventional performance or compositional skill is required.’ (Cutler 2010: 15).

Personal environmental experiences of recording have also produced a more

recordings are broadly considered alongside these. Whilst often reproducing

distinctive examples of these, each of the projects juxtaposed and related

post-genre accounts of recorded sound (see Fink 1998; Kassabian 2001).

12 E.g. Edgeless website.

Whilst this was partly practically achieved, by the different methodologies

of real-world sounds, with existing discourses of environmental recorded

apart from tropes of capture and enclosure, towards alternative accounts of

theoretical models and examples of composition were found in response to