Post-Euphoria - A Reincarnated Ruin (Part 2)

2016

How do we receive personal musical memories emerging out of the Holocaust experience? My question is addressed to that moment of individual hearing: to the intimate point where we encounter experiences shared with us, where we are positioned as listener and witness. This article draws on a series of oral history interviews made in 2008 in Sydney with Jewish Holocaust survivors who participated in a project of documenting and preserving private musical experiences and memories during the Nazi era. In presenting these cases, I am arguing for two considerations. First, I wish to advocate a scholarly model of care, of attentive listening to a wide variety of archival material, including living musical testimony of survivors. It is fairly uncontroversial to acknowledge that sonic experiences remain in memory and travel with us throughout our lives, providing moments of nostalgia, evocations of past connections, ties to culture, friends and family, frames of reference. Is it confrontational to extend this ability of our sonorous bodies to imagine that musical memories of dark, distant and difficult times continue to be embodied within and around us? Second, and more specifically , I wish to draw attention to the diversity of experiences at the point of liberation. The resonance of a musical memory awakens the fragility of an aporetic moment between oppression and freedom, where the testifier may allow themselves the space for doubt, uncertainty, questioning and absurdity.

As a multi-sensory composer I am concerned with the interrelationship between the human voice and abstract sound and the use of rhythm, intonation, accent and tone as an original source for compositional exploration. In practice, this represents the use and application of voiced sound recorded in public spaces, including political demonstrations and rhetoric, as the stimuli for computer-aided composition. Using the inherent rhythmic patterns that occur in this context, I am concerned with the creation of a melodic abstract response while engaged in contemporary composition. Representing an opportunist and creative response to rendering sound using digital technologies without imposing predetermined images, the need to "picture" a response is unnecessarythe imagery is in the sound and individual social, cultural and personal experiences. The Musicians of Memory intends to illustrate how irregular and regular audio phrases pass between generations, creating opportunities to reflect on the potential of digital sound to enhance our sense of space, time and compositional processing. This new work creates opportunities to consider the implications of using digital technologies as a means to a creative end. What is gained from processing sound in this way? What is lost when marginalising the analogue techniques of the past? How are new technologies influencing the ways we interact with and experience sound?

communication +1: Vol. 3, 2014

In David Tudor’s electronic music, home-brew modular devices were carefully connected together to form complex feedback networks wherein all components—including the composer/performer himself—could only partially ‘influence’ one another. Once activated, the very instability of mismatched connections between the components triggered a cascade of signals and signal modulations, so that the work “composed itself,” and took “a life of its own.” Due to this self-producing, perpetuating nature of his works, Tudor insisted on what he called “the view from inside,” focusing more on the internal observation of his devices and sound than in materials external to the immanence of performance. When Tudor passed away in 1996, it became apparent that the sheer lack of resources outside the work—scores, instructions, recordings, texts—had made many of his music impossible to perform in his absence. The works that took a life of their own could not survive their composer’s death partially because of his utter reliance on them to do their work. By connecting often mismatched resources obtained from extended research on Tudor, this paper presents modular observations that seem to offer certain perspectives on the issue of life and death surrounding Tudor’s music. A comparison with developments in systems theory, most notably autopoiesis, outlines a mechanism for the endless life of sounds that compose themselves. Moving out of this theoretical reflection, a fieldwork report of an ongoing attempt to ‘revive’ some of Tudor's works is offered. This report demonstrates the observer shifting from one ‘inside’ to another—from an electronic circuitry inside a particular device, to a network composed of several devices, and further into the activation of a composite instrument. Meandering away from the archives, the composer’s “view from inside” of his electronic devices is set side by side with recent insights of object oriented ontology. A certain portion of this observation then feeds itself back to the perspective of autopoiesis, while others proceed to extract a distinct notion of ‘life’ out of object-orientation, this time in programming: an indeterminate ‘waiting’ time inherent in each ‘object’ that cannot be computed within a singular universal time. This latency embedded in objects that await activation correlates to the trajectory of the observer who is always in a transit from one ‘inside’ to another, finding different objects on each level of observation, and for whom, therefore, the delineation between life and death is always indeterminate. This view provides further explanation to the operative mechanism of Tudor’s music, wherein mismatched components sought to activate and influence one another, constituting an ‘electronic ecology’ endowed with a life of its own, but filled with partial deaths. The paper thus observes ultimately a parallel between the composer’s trajectory within his performances and that within his life, while attempting to reenact the complex nature of these said trajectories through the meandering manner of its own delivery.

The ubiquitous and portable nature of recording devices has changed the way society remembers and communicates. The prosthetic nature of device located memories in the form of text, still and moving image media, constructs a digital self and not exclusively a clone of the organic self. This digital memory of this digital life is the entity which is under musical examination with The Sound of Memory. A sonification of the digital life of the audience. This project aims to develop an interpretive compositional framework to generate music from the digital memory of, that is the digital media carried by, the audience.

Interdisciplinary Journal of Language and Literature, 2016

(Following is a treatise of Poetry which emerged through a series of serious discussions for over five years between my Master, Asis Chakravarti and I. Much of what I put forward in this critical piece has been thought of and named by Him, and I do not claim authenticity of his genuine merit. On my part, I have analyzed his exhilarated outbursts of energy with a critical eye, placing his theory before what can be practically executed, and having now been more or less convinced of the fruit that it can bear, I have cherished the idea of exhibiting before the mass a new and daring idea yet unexplored, with numerous developments in the form of additions. This study shall comprise many new terminologies, which I shall discuss as and when the arguments proceed.)

Cultural Politics, 2024

The 1997 discovery of a fifty-thousand-year-old flute made from the femur of a cave bear, with its intimation of reanimating nonhumans, and the 1977 launch of the Voyager spacecraft carrying an eclectic set of sound recordings intended to be heard in the distant future by nonhuman others: two sonic events that frame the possible meanings of posthumous. Together these examples and others question whether everything audible is already over-the bear's lost life, electronic recording procedures-or indefinitely deferred until an act of listening that may never occur. An ecological address to the problems of making sonic culture at a historical turning point at or beyond terminal risk prompts a politics of the commons grounded in a general imagination (modeled on Marx's general intellect). Against earlier modernist claims for both rationality and its failure, sound cultures enact a drama of melancholy and hope in the ecological continuity of body and world at the moment of their end.

Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 2010

When somebody once described my work as physical cinema, I agreed. The sound collages I make are like filmic soundtracks for the real world … that [give] you a sense of being in a film that's moving through space. (Cardiff, quoted in Schaub 2005: 100) The Canadian artist Janet Cardiff has worked for years with the physical effects of sound in site-specific 'audio-walks' through museums and urban landscapes as well in installations. In the work The Missing Voice: Case Study B (1999), an audio-walk made for Whitechapel Gallery in London, Cardiff uses different technology and sound recordings to induce an interplay between different historical times and spaces: you

The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music Cultures, 2021

This chapter is an exploration of the embodied experience of “involuntary musical imagery” (a.k.a. “earworms”) and of the dynamics of the auditory imagination more broadly. It argues that imagined sounds regularly exhibit strange behaviors that audible vibrations cannot achieve and draws upon Husserl’s description of the living present and Sartre’s writing on intuition to construct a theory for why this might be the case. The second half of the chapter comprises a sustained attempt at a phenomenological description of a discrete experience of musical imagery. A brief epilogue muses on the similarities between imagined music and the memory of the dead, casting both as a kind of “haunting.” Throughout, the auditory imagination is presented as an ethnographic field site: a palimpsestic ecosystem of interconnection and difference within which the discrete experiences of individuals and groups matter.

There is always a song that reminds us of a place, a moment or of someone. A song takes us to the past, inspires, excites, transforms, or calms us down. A song drags our memory and body together, through our encounters with a space, through being lost or resilient. What does a song remind us of? Can a song reconcile or heal us from a loss of someone or something? Does a song make it possible to reclaim a public space we have lost? Which song makes you feel comfortable or secure in a public space?