There is no such thing as voice in literature. That is, we assign chimerical properties to characters’ voices; fictions based on voices we have heard in relation to the description of the characters’ personalities; identities we want to confer on the characters. Whilst we read and listen to this voice, it is neither true nor false. It is the product of a careful assembly of traces and features we believe represent a person – more physically even than their own body….

Commissioned and Performed by The Living Earth Show In Collaboration with Composers: Sharmi Basu Ava Mendoza Raven Chacon Morgan Craft Zachary James Watkins

While we’ve applauded recent moves in art history and media studies challenging the hegemony of the visual, why does the waxing art world topicality of “listening” seem to be inversely proportional to sound practitioners’ waning interest in it? Does it really have to turn up on e-flux before people pay attention? Haven’t musicians, composers, and sound artists all over the world been thinking listening for centuries?… The contributors to Issue 2 face the immense material complexity of listening head on – physically, technically, formally, politically, socially. Their contributions continually orbit the question, ‘What is Listening?,’ all the while deftly dodging all ...

“Bifurcating a Resounding No!” compounds a variety of prepared acoustic situations, computer synthesis & field recordings developed in the software bidule. It strives to create a multidimensional listening experience both subtle & engaging. It is intended for listening in quiet environments through headphones or monitors with little distraction. The photograph is a book (The Queen’s Gambit), a bookmark (acid) & one of Ingmar Bergman’s favorite quotes “We come into this world with sealed orders”. All of this is inspired by smothered mate (chess) which is a checkmate delivered by a knight in which the mated king is unable to move because ...

Boids is an artificial life program, developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986, which simulates the flocking behaviour of birds.The name “boid” corresponds to a shortened version of “bird-oid object”, which refers to a bird-like object. Taking the position of the bird-like object, how does other creatures sound like? The limitation of labelling computer generated species after preexisting ones complicates our relation to the former. Digitally sythesized -oids lost in the deep sea, later found and played back in 2x speed. A group of dead -oids scattered along the timeline. It’s our choice to hear an -oid.

RHSM is a crystallization of MSHR’s live performance- an electronic ceremony that glides through four movements. Each movement acts as a virtual scape, defined by a distinct system for improvisation between the players and their handmade analog electronic instruments. MSHR’s pathway through the possibility matrix of each scape was mapped to an 8-track tape machine and digitized multiple times per track. These tracks were interwoven to create the iridescent effect of tape phasing as a compositional element, augmenting the psycho-acoustic content of the original improvisation. Scape 1: Unfolding Hyper-Shape Alap This track was recorded live in an electronics array in our bedroom ...

“yoooooowhatuhoe” was developed on a tour of the American West Coast in February 2015. The macro form of the piece was predetermined with special attention paid to temporal ratio between sections, while the material filling out the different sections was generated by procedures ranging from retyping the content of a G-Chat conversation on the Computer MIDI Keyboard to capture the typing habits of the composer and thereby generating pitch and rhythmic data, to using weighted random processes to build dense stacks of pitches. The sound sources used in the piece are the following: General MIDI (10. Glockenspiel; 38. Slap Bass 2; 54. Voice Oohs; ...

Music is not what you think

My puffy morning face cushions the small indented buttons that are my eyes, like those of an old pink armchair and remain this way until the introduction of coffee restores and dilates them. I’m standing half-dressed in a T- shirt like some obscene cartoon character, all cold feet on the tiles wishing I had put my dressing gown on before going to the kitchen or that I even owned a pair of slippers. Each day is full of choice and choice should not lead to repetition, but even choices once seemingly easy become hard. Indecision mounts to higher levels that cascade ...

MERGE LANE $3.33 / Celia Hollander Last week, within 5 days, I took a car to a bus to an airplane to an airplane to a car to my feet to a car to a bus to a subway to my feet to a subway to a train to a shuttle van to my feet to a shuttle van to a train to a subway to my feet to a subway to a train to an airplane to a bus to a car to my bed. Collecting myself horizontally, I realized that my insides had been whisked into a pureé from all ...

Yeah, I have tinnitus by now but it’s not so bad.. I’ve DJed a lot of parties and made a lot of mixtapes over the years… And now you can listen and download most of them right here. The best place to begin is 2001’s game-changing live 3-turntable mix, Gold Teeth Thief. This influenced a lot of people & opened many ears; over a decade later, the world sounds a lot more like I was hearing/blending it back then. Here’s a list of most of my mixes in chronological order for free download as V0 mp3s. After the list you’ll find cover ...

In Peter Ablinger’s work, the listener is often asked to cross the distance between sounds. These types of comparative actions fall into at least three categories. One of these categories is a comparison between two sound sources: a recording and a reproduction. The term Ablinger uses for these reproductions is “phonorealism.” Another type of comparison is between a sonic memory and the sound that is present. I’ll play two examples later that activate specifically musical memories through a process called “verticalization.” We’ll start, though, with yet another type of distance that is to be traveled, this time in the sonic imagination, ...

Voice, drums, recordings here and there. Composed July – August, 2015 I started this piece walking down by the Limmat on a cold, windy day. Whitecaps chopped the water and I was a bit out of breath from fighting the wind and trying to keep warm by moving at a brisk pace. Under the Hardbrücke the deep resonance there swallowed me up. A long rowboat chained to the concrete pilings of the bridge whipped to and fro in the strong current. I headed up the stairs to my studio. Schulhaussingen happens twice a year at my kids’ school. I usually go and I ...

The Berlin-based producer and artist Steven Warwick presents a unique audio-visual ‘mixtape’ on PAN, compiled of a series of darkly lyrical and sonic musings, as well as personal snapshots, written stories and videos taken across trips whilst residing in LA and Berlin. Arriving as his first musical release under his own name, Warwick (aka Heatsick)’s latest venture also utilises a new sonic repertoire allowing for a new route for his music, “It’s a reset in a way, creatively and emotionally”. Titled ‘Nadir’, the release reflects on a somewhat sardonic, and at times melancholic and unsettling mood. Recorded in both Los Angeles, ...

Audio Excerpts, Movements 1.5, 2 March 21, 2014, EMPAC, Troy, NY The notion that underlies this piece is levitation, both literally and metaphorically. When composing I imagined the possibility of the sonic elements existing in a parallel dimension, the aural aspect holding matter suspended as if it were an apparition in an interstitial space. In the presentation of the work, a literal manifestation or demonstration of low-end frequency levitation takes place using hand-crafted subwoofers with materials hovering in the windows of the boxes. The piece evolved out of studies accompanied by drawings and texts as investigations of threshold states. It is comprised ...

The Pitch “A framework of understanding.” The pitch is a playing field. Four players trying to pitch something, an idea, a sound. A tone of definite frequency. The Pitch is a co-sharing of musical space, of certain parameters, limitations and an instrumental awkwardness collectively carried into brightness. Working out simple ideas to see how far we can take them. How long we can play them. How often we can handle them. Modes of interaction, rules of engagement, aesthetic agreements, instrumental limitations. Reducing material until we’ve reached the core. Initiative, shared intuition, collective composition, instrumentation. Bass harmonics doubling the clarinet, vibraphone rounding out the harmona, sine tones combining instrumental forces. The harmona is missing pitches. Playing such an archaic, flawed ...

SUFI PLUG INS is an interdisciplinary project by Jace Clayton. Version 1 is a free suite of music-making software apps, based on nonwestern notions of sound & a poetic interface. “it’s one of the few digital tools I’ve seen that I would also consider art. It’s a tool that is not only designed to help musicians make new sounds, but also to self-consciously influence what is produced. Interface design decisions are guided both by functionality concerns and the creative expression of its maker.” – Paddy Johnson, Art Fag City More than 15,000 people have downloaded Version 1, and the plug-ins have been ...

Computer Program as an Artefact At first, the computer program is neutral and exists only in terms devoid of any reference other than to itself. The program is its function. It is a tool. It does something; it instructs a computer to perform a task. Its working is often imperceptible beyond the surface of its interface – screen based or physical – the material extension to the inner depths of its digital structure, the code. Focusing solely on a functional aspect of software limits our engagement with its wider assemblage of connotations beyond technical analysis. Beyond the functional and ostensible neutrality ...

“To understand the trajectories of the stars through a galaxy, Michel Hénon computed the intersections of an orbit with a plane. The resulting patterns depended on the system’s total energy. The points from a stable orbit gradually produced a continuous, connected curve. Other energy levels, however, produced complicated mixtures of stability and chaos, represented by regions of scattered points. […] The nested detail, lines within lines, can be seen in final form in a series of pictures with progressively greater magnification. But the eerie effect of the strange attractor can be appreciated another way when the shape emerges in time, point ...

THROAT’ is the new album by composer/producer Aaron David Ross (ADR). Arriving as the New York artist’s second release on PAN, ‘THROAT’ is made entirely from vocal sounds. It could only be crafted in the ultra-present; an age where the poetry of songwriting is flattened into catchy hooks. As words are sliced into sounds, ideas are reduced to sibilant syllables that still contain a range of emotional power, but deliver it in subversively different ways. ‘THROAT’ exploits these ways, borrowing vocal fragments from everywhere to collage a choral congregation of singing servers; pinging one another to create open-source equal-opportunity electronic pop music. Reichian ...