Sonic Thinking

by Bernd Herzogenrath

  2.Field recording is not it. It is impossible to share a listening experience. Listening is internal, psychological. It is a very personal and active process that filters and mixes in a creative way within every listener, and is not only determined by the physiology of the ear, its frequency range or the drop or loss of it, but also by knowledge and education and personal preferences based on the individual’s biography. Whatever sound appears, it enters through this psychological antechamber and leaves it changed, modulated by the acoustics of the mind. These cannot be recorded and also not shared, like all experiences that are full of “qualia,” notorious for being inaccessible for others and impossible to share. (I do not even go into the topic of insufficiency of any microphones involved in the recording attempt.)

  3.Field playback is not it. What we have is the playback of a loudspeaker-emitted noise, which is surrounded by various amounts of other (not loudspeaker-emitted) noises. A sound created by a loudspeaker is not a sound, it is a loudspeaker-created sound. Whatever the recordist asserts, what I hear is a loudspeaker generated sound, the loudspeaker stands in my room and sounds not very interesting.

  Therefore the place, the seed around which our creative process unfolds, cannot be a geographical one. Is it non-geographical, and therefore non-temporal? A fluid da capo between the present that has passed and the overture of the present that has not yet come? No, the “eternal now” commonly associated with music is not it. If there was a now, there would also be a memory of that now which begets a memory of the remembered moment and so forth: the now never appears without a timeline. This timeline is not horizontal, it almost hurls down into the dim haze of the unconscious where it quickly becomes invisible. It is like walking through a minefield, and for sure memory traces will be triggered, probably many marks that are memorized as unpleasant will respond, and it is impossible to predict when this will happen. This becomes important for the process of defining durations, the appearances and the general density of events within a piece.

  My audiovisual works are often characterized by a very low event density. To work with the attention span is almost like the painter working with his brush: these lines are lines drawn with an invisible ink, shapes that disappear and re-emerge and are experienced as a palpable part of the work’s texture. Its reception is therefore shaped by absence (of attention) as well as presence. (In my occasional and rare occupation as a Pop/Rock/Techno remixer I use a mundane variation of this technique in the sense that I work with absence in the mix much more than with presence, with absent signals that do not appear in the mix but nevertheless provide texture, echoes and trails, etc.)

  True attention is like sound: it is able to penetrate almost any object. Fading attention is also like sound, a distant hum that dissolves in the background. Beyond the limits of attention span there are wild, uncharted territories. These are fields worthy to record! There is a temptation to stretch this space of attention even further, and it keeps expanding and eventually collapses into the tiniest point that I above referred to as seed.

  My wife is doing Yoga, and I understand that Yoga is about learning to make a connection to the source which is, according to the Hindu/Yoga tradition, of course vibration. This tradition claims that the internal, “unmade,” “unstruck” sound arises from the heart region (therefore it is called anahata nada). It is in rare moments of deep meditation/concentration, when the “outer world” actually feels inexistent, that this sound appears. According to my experience I would locate it rather on the right side of the body, between chest and right ear. I heard it as a very thin sound, like an infinitely long and elastic spider’s thread, and with a very high pitch. It is the most subtle, fragile sound I have ever heard. Does this mean one is able to perceive life in all its aspects as one single music? Or does it rather indicate a tinnitus?

  The “unstruck” sound is not it. It is as any meditative state a kind of autosuggestion.

  The transformation of ordinary experiences into deep listening situations is not it. The gesture of attributing value to one situation and denying it the other is a violent one. All events in the universe have the same value, that is, no value. Who would be in the position to assign it anyway?

  And a composer’s assertion that “the composition” is “complete” is immediately disproved by claiming the opposite. Her/his assertion can never be verified, which means that we do not have a single complete composition: Music does not exist. And how could it? The beat has no presence and can only point to the following beat, the insubstantial note depends completely on its neighbors in the melodic line, the chord is dispensable after its harmonic release and one abstract noise obstructs the other. These elements are obviously marginal, peripheral gestures that I have emphatically peripherized in my work.

  The only expression that is independent and able to communicate itself is tone color. Tone color is not a sign, but a spectral power that enables resonance. And as it became clear, the mysterious seed, the topos of all sonic expression, lies in tone color, or the awareness of it, which is its resonance. The textbook definition of tone color can only describe what it is not: qualities of sound not related to pitch, volume, or duration. Tone color is therefore the absence and yet the total presence. For example, a mother reading a fairy tale to her child is reading words made of letters, but the child hears the mother’s “I love you” in her voice. This is resonance.

  I throw a pebble in a lake and there is resonance. If the pebble is dirty, there is still resonance. There is a sense of purity. Thoughts create resonance. Sounds create resonance. Resonance is pristine, detached of the object. Appearing as tone color, sound has the potential to become its own resonance, effortless and luminous.

  Let us liberate sound into the radiance of the clear space!

  sonic thought iii

  The Sounds of Things

  Heiner Goebbels

  First,

  and much too early, you invent a title for your lecture and many months later you start thinking what you actually should be talking about. So I was happy that I could use this academic bluff as an opportunity to rethink what the “things” or “the sound of things” meant to me in my works—as well as in my musical composition and my theater works. And surprisingly I discovered that, for example, my first tape composition, written thirty-five years ago, was based only on a recording of the unnerving, annoying bells in the foyer of the Frankfurter Schauspielhaus.

  “What’s this? By all the gods I hear something.” (Sophocles)

  I do not know if those bell sounds are still the same, I have not been there for a while. Their function was to call the audience to the seats at the beginning of the performance or to call them back in time after the break, and the classical form of a drama always has breaks. Basically it was the same bell-sound as the one I experienced in the secondary school of my childhood at 7.55 in the morning. It does not surprise me that the theater has a tendency to treat its audience like class members. And maybe it’s true what some people say about me, who know me quite well, that the widespread and musical use of noise in my compositions is a reaction to the fact that I hate noise in reality—a revenge. However, the bells turned into a sound composition for an Oedipus performance directed by Hans Neuenfels in 1979. I recorded the sound of the ringing bells as they are, added layers of those recordings, produced unexpected interruptions and rhythms, and slightly changed their pitch by speeding up or slowing down the tape machines to create an alarming microtonal cluster—I do not remember its exact dramaturgical function in the play, it was probably to prepare for, or to mark, a tragic catastrophe on stage. But I promise, at that time it was not consciously meant as an anti-institutional criticism on the Stadttheater. But for an audience which was used to following this signal, an adaptation and amplification of the house bells turned into the soundtrack of this performance might have confronted the system with its own authoritarian structure.

  “I shoot, I’m not joking!” (A Policeman)

  A few years later—as
my first single record to be released in 1981—I composed “Berlin Q-Damm 12.4.81”. The composition is focused on a documentary field recording of civilian policemen, protesters, and onlookers during a demonstration in Berlin. And it starts with a constant repetition of the sound of smashing a glass window. This characteristic sound is a sudden opening for the rhythm of the piece, marks the violence of the situation and punctuates the voice of a moderator, who presented and commented the dramatic acoustic scenery on the radio the same day:

  About 9.30 pm in front of the department-store Wertheim on Kurfürstendamm, the protest march has left in the direction of the Gedächtniskirche. Two young men throw stones into two small glass cabinets. Suddenly two elder men in plain clothes break off the crowd of spectators and lunge at those who threw the stones. “Stop! Police!! Or I shoot!” A gun is unlocked and held sideward to the head of one arrested. “Stop! Come along! I shoot, I’m not joking!” “Who are you?” “Police!” “Show me!” “You can see it later!” “Take the gun away! Take the gun away!! Take the gun away!!!”

  The five-minute sound collage includes several different composition-techniques: programed analog synthesizer phrases, filtering, tape-scratching, cuts and loops, temporarily played backwards, a prepared piano, cembalo clusters, screaming trombone sounds, a heavily distorted e-guitar followed by a smoothly played acoustic guitar—on various layers of looped trombone and cello-parts, which I had recorded with the method of so called “Frippertronics.” Everything (except the trombone) was performed by myself. But the core of the piece, with which everything started—musically and in reality—is the breaking glass; the confrontation between “violence against things” answered by the threat to shoot. But to tell you the truth: the documentary recording did not include the smashing of the glass, the journalist switched his tape recorder on only after the glass cabinet was destroyed; so I recorded that sound much later at home while a flat in my neighborhood was renovated.

  “The sound is plaintive, high-pitched, somewhat nasal.” (Alain Robbe-Grillet)

  Ten years after—in 1991—I looped the sound of high heels walking and added a sequence of instrumental chords to the regular pulse of the steps, which I had recorded on a sideway in Boston the year before. I used it to produce the voyeuristic atmosphere of a novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet called La Jalousie. The double meaning of “La Jalousie” in French (jealousy/window blind) allowed him to totally avoid mentioning the emotion, but to evoke it in the reader by a description of the “things” and the sounds instead: the window blind, the unfolding of a letter, a hairbrush, the house, the shadow of the pillar, a banana plantation, the car etc. All described very precisely by an absent narrator around a woman named with the letter “A.”

  The narrator also mentions Franck, a friend of the house, who is making (too …) frequent visits. And the scene culminates when this friend offers “A” a ride in his car to the next largest village store in order to do some “shopping”—and by the character of the writing we are suggested to think of her as the wife of the narrator. The structure of the novel stays seductively vague and is hard to grasp, we cannot be sure that this trip ever happens; and if and why Franck and “A” had to stay overnight; because the car had a mechanical problem …? Whatever happens—it is only in the narrator’s or even more in the reader’s imagination.

  In his autobiography Ghosts in the Mirror Robbe-Grillet spoke about the indescribable world, which is created by the sounds around the house in his novel. “How is it,” he said, “that so little has been said about the role of hearing in his novel” (Robbe-Grillet 1991: 29). That’s what I tried to do in this composition for a chamber orchestra originally commissioned for the Ensemble Modern.

  Fifteen years before La Jalousie was published, Francis Ponge wrote “Le parti pris des choses”/“The Voice of Things”. And in all his poetic chapters—a collection of descriptions of things such as a candle, a stone, a bar of soap, a flower and a lot of other things—you rarely find any word about their sound.

  My composition is about twenty minutes long and the passage of the woman’s footsteps becomes a very specific moment where time stands still. Nothing else is happening: regular chords, regular footsteps, over and over again, approximately for about three minutes. As a space, an aside for our imagination.

  For Alain Robbe-Grillet the description of sounds, the sounds of often even unidentifiable things is an important part of his subversive aesthetics in his writing. Let us listen for a moment to the absent narrator in La Jalousie while he’s probably waiting for the woman named “A” to come back from her day trip to the city.

  Then a silence. But a fainter sound, something like a hum, makes the ear strain.… It stops at once. And again the lamp’s hissing can be heard. Besides, it was more like a growl than the sound of a car motor.… Now there is a duller sound, less fugitive, that attracts the attention: a kind of growl, or rumble, or hum … But even before being sufficiently clear to be identified, the noise stops. The ear, which vainly tries to locate it again in the darkness, no longer hears anything in its place except the hiss of the kerosene lamp. Its sound is plaintive, high-pitched, somewhat nasal. But its complexity permits it to have overtones at various levels. Of an absolute evenness, both muffled and shrill, it fills the night and the ears as if it came from nowhere.

  Robbe-Grillet 1959: 71–3

  Alain Robbe-Grillet describes his work as an author “in order to destroy the nightmares, the night ghosts which devastate my day life by describing them.” And in the same autobiography—he calls it auto-mythography because you never know what is the truth or how to find the right words for it—he continues:

  All reality is indescribable, and I know it instinctively: consciousness is structured like our language (and with good reason!); not so the world or the unconscious. I can’t use words and phrases to describe what’s in front of me, nor what’s lurking in my head or in my sex.

  Robbe-Grillet 1991: 11

  So it is no surprise to us that he rather trusts the uncertainty of unknown sounds to represent what he has in front of him, to surround and express his unconscious desires and nightmares, which are hidden in the head of the unnamed narrator, or maybe in his wishful thinking.

  On this bad road the driver cannot straighten out in time. The blue sedan is going to crash into a roadside tree whose rigid foliage scarcely shivers under the impact, despite its violence. The car immediately bursts into flames. The whole bush is illuminated by the crackling, spreading fire. It is the sound the centipede makes, motionless again on the wall, in the center of the panel. Listening to it more carefully, this sound is more like a breath than a crackling: the brush is now moving down the loosened hair. No sooner has it reached the bottom than it quickly enters the ascending phase of the cycle, describing a curve that brings it back to its point of departure on the smooth hair of the head, where it begins moving down once again.

  Robbe-Grillet 1959: 80

  You see how unreliable the subtle sounds of things here are, and how they provide the narrator’s and our, the reader’s, obsessive imagination. The crackling of the burning bush after an explosive car crash is turning into the sound of a motionless centipede, which we have heard before in the novel. Or maybe was it a breath? Of whom? Or rather the sound of a brush moving down the loosened hair of the woman named “A,” who is suspected to have an affair with Franck, maybe? Or is Franck maybe the name of the other lover, Last Year in Marienbad, a cine-roman by Alain Robbe-Grillet, which he wrote for Alain Resnais? You never can be sure with those Alains. And we never can be sure with the sounds, the sounds of things because they have their own secret life. They do not have our flesh and blood. We never know what to expect next. They represent the other world, which we cannot master.

  In a publication about Robbe-Grillet’s inter-medial aesthetics, his web of visual, acoustic and cinematic strategies of writing, Martin Lindwedel calls his attention towards objects a “solidarity with the things” against an “anthropocentric atmospher
e” (Lindwedel 2004: 20). And such a solidarity is what I am looking for, when I am trying to create an un-hierarchical balance in the world of sounds, which also takes place in my music theater works.

  “for the tones in the voice of the shadow were not tones of any being.” (Edgar Allen Poe)

  The music theater piece “Black on White” was composed for the instrumentalists of the Ensemble Modern in 1996 along the lines of the novel “Shadow” by Edgar Allen Poe. This parable starts with “Ye who read are still among the living but I who write will have long since gone into the region of shadows” (Poe 2012: 601) and already half a century before Roland Barthes it refers elegantly to “the death of the author.” So it is the sound of a writing hand, which intrigued me and inspired me to various electroacoustic and instrumental parts within that composition (Writing I, II, III …). The sound of the writing hand becomes more and more independent in the progress of the piece among other acoustic elements to be heard beyond the instruments of the ensemble. Also the chord of a boiling teapot, a C major triad, which first the flute player and finally the whole orchestra play along with. All those non-instrumental often electronically or acoustically processed sounds mark outer forces, to which the group of musicians, gathered in a “noble hall,” are exposed, as—all of a sudden—to the shadow on the wall in the parable of Edgar Allen Poe.