Sound arts year 1

Electronic music and women – Daphne Blake

Daphne Blake Oram was a British composer and electronic musician born in the 20th century who created a technique for creating electronic music that uses sound drawing. She is also the first woman to design and create an electronic instrument.

Her adventure with music begins from an early age, when she learned to play the organ and piano. In 1942 she was offered a job at the Royal College of Music, but chose a position as a junior studio technician and sound director at BBC radio. Her tasks included reconstructing audio recordings of previously recorded concerts, creating antenna sounds and monitoring live broadcasts. She often stayed in the studio after hours, recording tapes and working on the sound by cutting, splicing, speeding up and slowing down the tape - which can already be considered the beginning of work on the development of concrete music, i.e. music that used pre-recorded sound as source material. Currently, similar techniques are used by various DJs when creating their sets - but she did it all analog, using tapes. An example is her composition called "Snow". Nevertheless, she devoted her time to composition, thanks to which, among others, "Still Point" was created - considered the first work that combines orchestral music with electronic music played in real time. Unfortunately, this project was rejected by the BBC.

Isadora Duncan - story of modern dance 
She was born in San Francisco in 1877 or 1878 as Angela Isadora Duncan, and from 1899 she lived in Europe. The bold artist rejected the classic white pack (tutu) and ballet shoes. She danced dressed in an airy Greek tunic, barefoot and with her hair loose, in which she pinned red flowers. She was the first dancer to appear on stage dressed only in a tight leotard, boldly exposing her bare arms and legs. 
An important role in her performances was played by stage design - she performed against the background of blue draperies, performing characteristic movements and gestures, the so-called serpentine ones, which were a kind of body language. This approach to dance, based on a primal, authentic experience and numerous references to nature, was the result of Isadora's friendship with the French actress and choreographer Loïe Fuller. Combined with the swirling movement of fabrics. She looked like a butterfly or a bird that changed color with each movement of its wings. She called the serpentine dance and that was the name of her show number, extremely spectacular, attracting crowds to the theatre.

Pina is said to have revolutionized ballet. The first one combined dance with other arts: acting, music, song, creating a new genre - dance theatre. What was most remarkable, however, was her method of working. She used to say, "I'm looking for people who dance, not dancers." During rehearsals, sitting in a cloud of cigarette smoke behind a table full of notes, she asked the dancers strange questions: What did you feel when you first fell in love? How did you imagine love? What made you laugh or scare you as a child?

Her questions concerned the dancers' personal experiences. Because for Pina, the most important thing was to appeal to their own emotions, and only then she asked to find the right expression for these emotions in movement. The dancers looked for solutions themselves, often in secret. And when they found it, Pina made adjustments, had it repeated, and finally the script was born. It was as much improvisation as murderous training. It did not impose anything, rather it inspired, released previously unknown energy. This made dancers, who usually wander from one company to another, stay with her for decades. Many performed even in their fifties. Because Pina also preached the thesis that everyone and at any age can dance.

One of her dancers, Russian Andrei Berezin, described the specificity of working with Pina in this way: “The most important things in her ballet are feelings, and not as in traditional ballet – the geometry of the body and the classical ideal of beauty created as if against man and his nature. With us, technology follows the soul – not the other way around.” She herself said about her work: "I start without any tools, without any weapons except the feeling inside, for which there is no appropriate word or image." And in another: "The steps originate elsewhere - they do not originate in the legs. We work out the traffic along the way. Gradually, we build short dance sequences that we remember. In the past, to induce a state of fear or panic, I would start with movement, avoiding questions. Now I start with questions."

Immersive sound a visual art- RYOJI IKEDA: THE TRANSFINITE

The artist takes viewers on a journey through a maze-like studio space, forcing them to question perception, time and space. Participants were able to experience, among other things, the feeling of entering a black hole... Ikeda is known for challenging the human ears and mind.

Visit to Swiss Church, London.

pictures from Google.

Liliane Lijn – “I Want People to See Sound”

An interesting clip by Tate on Liliane Lijn about the relationship in art between sound and visual arts. The oscillating cone piece was quite interesting to see, especially the way she links it to physical femininity. Whilst discussing her kinetic revolving cylinders piece, she says “What interested me here was looking at form in a completely new way, so instead of walking around a shape or looking at the way a shape changes, what you’re seeing is a code transmitted by light and you’re seeing every change on the surface of that cylinder.” The music that is used to accompany some of the pieces is extremely soothing, creating an atmospheric ambience that, in my opinion, really takes the visual art to a new level.

Upcoming Assignment Brainstorming

One of the goals in my presentation is to show the research of how other people’s work inspired me to create my own project. I want to show the influence of the visiting practitioners on my work too, as well as my own research as evidence for me to create my own piece of work. I want to blend the use of real piano and make the visuals on the Maze Tools software. This will take place in The Swiss Church in London, and the visuals will be shown from a projector. It really feels like the perfect environment for the showcase; the space is wide, the walls are spacious and white and there is plenty of floor space. There will be a pianist that will improvise music in relation to the projected visuals. I want this to be mainly based on intuitive playing, and showcase the way in which an artist associates music and sound and therefore composes based on their associations. I will partly compose, partly improvise along to the visuals. the visual piece will be a mixture of colours, shapes and drawings all working alongside each other to influence the improviser with different ways of notation. 

Linda’s Musical Visual Diagram

I did a little more research into the creative processes of Linda Perhacs and I came across an image of a diagram, or musical map. This image shows her notes on how she experienced the ideas for one of her songs.

https://kenleephotography.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/songoftheplanets-graphicarrangement.jpg 

Above and below are two images of Linda’s scribblings, drawings of her synesthesia, recollections and notes building her musical works. This is the first time I have seen a visual diagram of the work of an artist creating musical work with colours and visual drawings. There’s something quite astounding about how one can contain an understanding of the relationship between music/sound and visual patterns that they are able to produce musical works by implementing both into their process. 

https://kenleephotography.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/prisms-gregorianceltic-graphicarrangement.jpg 

From taking a closer look at individual details on the diagram, I’ve noticed how she strongly associates certain sounds of instruments with very specific colour combinations. For example, in every section of the song that contains strings, we are seeing a combination of a vivid pink and yellow, weaving along one another. We see she writes “Strings: to add lift, love sweetness”, along with pink and yellow lines blending into one another and rising along the middle of the page. In addition, I can see that the “synth key” sections contain tiny black circles with orange dots splatted over them throughout the page. The ways in which she creates particular moods and achieves particular feelings work in unison with the way she puts across the patterns and colours on the page. I feel that in this method of illustration, the artist is viewing the project or song as one entire visual / sonic story, rather than a stream of sound where there is a beginning and an ending. In this way, we can understand the songs as one entire piece with parts existing all at once, where, whilst listening, we can travel through and experiences the different parts to understand it as a whole. I’d love to implement some of these concepts into my own work, whether it be my sound and visual assignment or future works.

Music and Visuals: Linda Perhacs and Synesthesia 

A fellow student of mine sent me a short documentary about Linda Perhacs during a discussion about my sound / visual project ideas. The relationship between sound and visual arts is something I’ve wanted to take a deeper look into since researching the work of Kandinsky. Linda Perhacs, released one experimental folk album (“Parallelograms”) in 1970, a body of work that derived solely from her musical mind and her experience with the phenomena Synesthesia. 

She describes how, during a drive down the freeway, she experienced something unlike anything she had seen before. She describes it as a moving sculpture with intricacies, wavelengths and frequencies in an array of different colours. She claims that at the time she knew she was seeing music. Afterwards, she went on to create a musical body of work that derived from her experiences with visual music. She claims that she has yet come across anything similar to what she had seen other than in the Moca Museum’s “Visual Music since 1900” study. She relates this phenomenon with higher dimensional energies and spiritualism that is beyond the human capacity of thinking,