{"id":276390,"date":"2013-06-12T10:15:43","date_gmt":"2013-06-12T14:15:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newmusicbox.org\/?p=21757"},"modified":"2022-04-13T18:35:08","modified_gmt":"2022-04-13T22:35:08","slug":"faithfully-re-presenting-the-outside-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newmusicusa.org\/nmbx\/faithfully-re-presenting-the-outside-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Faithfully Re-presenting the Outside World"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cIt was then I first realised the difference between a painting and out of doors. I realised that a painting is always a flat surface and out of doors never is, and that out of doors is made up of air and a painting has no air, the air is replaced by a flat surface, and anything in a painting that imitates air is illustration and not art.\u201d <\/i><\/p>\n

\u2014Gertrude Stein, Paris France<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

One seemingly unresolved issue in the realm of field recordings is the tension between authenticity and abstraction. One can view an artist’s work with \u201cthe field\u201d as existing somewhere between these two different, though not mutually exclusive, concerns. On the one hand, some artists strongly adhere to maintaining the perceptible accuracy\/authenticity of their location, whereas others simply take elements from it as necessary, unconcerned with the legibility of the source.
\n\"Recording<\/a>
\nLet’s imagine a composer who is enamored with the sound of the Swiss Alps and decides to make a field recording there. This composer wants to portray the most accurate, pristine document of the aural landscape as possible. Such a composer is motivated by authenticity, likely hoping to make the listener feel like he\/she is actually there, or perhaps hoping to entice the listener to travel to the location. Generally this privilege of locational authenticity is assumed to be the driving force behind field recording work.<\/p>\n

On the other end of the spectrum, we can imagine a composer who is interested in using something from<\/i> the aural landscape, perhaps the canned music played by an ice cream truck as it travels through his\/her neighborhood, simply as one amongst many other sounds. In this mode of working, one does not particularly care whether or not the recording’s location (or source) is intelligible. This locationally independent, or more abstract, mode of working is assumed to belong to the realm of electronic music, and furthermore assumed to be different than field recording.
\nBrandon LaBelle outlines the concern regarding authenticity in field recording work, specifically regarding the R. Murray Schafer founded World Soundscape Project<\/a>, as follows:<\/p>\n

The intention behind the WSP was based on capturing environmental sound in all its breadth and diversity across the globe, preserving important “soundmarks” and gaining insight into people’s understanding and awareness of acoustic environments…To cast a net of microphones across the globe sets our ears on finding the truth of sound, so as to arrive finally at the original soundscape.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Every time I read this quote, though, I have this nagging series of questions in the back of my head: how can one realistically expect to arrive at \u201cthe original soundscape\u201d? Isn’t the motivation to record some soundscape fundamentally based on one’s personal interpretation and, therefore, an abstraction to begin with? Could one ever say that my experience of the sound of the Swiss Alps is the same as anyone else’s?<\/p>\n

Herein lies the issue with this supposed opposition between authenticity and abstraction: as individual listeners, we each have a different experience of the outside world. There is no perceivable \u201cursound\u201d (to use LaBelle’s terminology), no fundamental source of the aural landscape in the same sense that there is no perceivably definitive color \u201cblue.\u201d Similarly, the tools (or technology) that one uses to capture parts (or all) of the soundscape have the ability to shape (or abstract) the document of the field further.<\/p>\n

Michael Pisaro’s writing on standing issues in field recording work<\/a> hints at some of the inherent problems in attempting to document the totality of the acoustic environment:<\/p>\n

A recording is a reduction. The immersive sensual experience of an environment will in the end be represented purely in terms of sound. It is possible that a sound recording device will in some cases hear more than we do, but it will obviously never capture everything that is sounding. It will be limited in time and in the perceptible borders of the soundscape.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Recording abstracts the environment. Microphones are designed to accept certain frequencies, reject others, as well as accept\/reject sounds from certain angles of incidence. Moreover, the impulse to make a recording in a particular place, at a particular time, using a particular set of equipment, abstracts\/limits the amount of the field to be recorded.<\/p>\n

I am uninterested in starting a kind of \u201cpunk or not punk\u201d debate here because, frankly, it is a waste of time (\u201c[name of recording] is a REAL field recording because of [insert rationale regarding perceptible authenticity here]\u201d). What is interesting, however,, is that there are many works that simultaneously present a clear picture of the location and employ extreme abstractions via compositional or conceptual moves. Michael Pisaro\u2019s Transparent City<\/i> and Toshiya Tsunoda\u2019s O Kokos Tis Anixis (Grains of Spring)<\/i> seem to typify this friction, and a more detailed analysis of these works will unearth what is unique about attempting to balance both extremes.<\/p>\n

Michael Pisaro’s Transparent City<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

The complete Transparent City<\/i> project spans four CDs (two double-discs) on the German-based experimental music record label Editions Wandelweiser. Volumes 1 and 2 feature recordings made throughout Los Angeles between December 2004 and August 2006, while Volumes 3 and 4 span October 2006 to February 2007. The liner notes explain:<\/p>\n

Each recording is an unedited ten-minute take from a single location. Sine tones and mixing completed in Michael Pisaro’s home studio in Santa Clarita, California. Each ten-minute piece is followed by two minutes of silence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In short, all four volumes of Transparent City<\/i> feature three elements: recordings of urban environments in Los Angeles, sine tones, and silence.<\/p>\n

\"Michael<\/a>

Michael Pisaro<\/p><\/div>\n

The environment presented across these four discs is relatively similar sounding, filled with general city ambience and car sounds. However, Transparent City<\/i> also features recurring instances of a compositional move that is simply magical: a particular sound will naturally appear\/disappear out of the stereo field to reveal a soft, tuned sine tone as accompaniment. In one track, a high tone subtly fades in only to be joined by the sound of a passing car. The car and tone blend seamlessly for just a moment before the car disappears from the landscape. Sometimes the sine tone remains, sometimes it disappears with its environmental collaborator. At another point, a tone becomes a dyad when another one appears, offering a kind of chordal drone under chirping birds and air. When chords are present, the listener realizes that all coincidences of sounds in the environment can be heard as chords, that melodies are unearthed with a subtle shift of perspective across numerous sources.
\nPisaro’s unedited field recordings authentically present the aural location but become something entirely other when combined with tuned sine tones. One could think of Transparent City<\/i> as a kind of training regimen for reinterpreting the soundscape of Los Angeles. In a way, it is a digital proof of concept of Cage’s 4’33\u201d<\/i>: Pisaro adds simple, musical accompaniment to urban Los Angeles to assert the musical appreciation of the aural landscape. One is also reminded of Joseph Fourier\u2019s theory that any complex sound can be divided into a collection of sine tones<\/a>. Transparent City <\/i>proves the utility of this theory, giving the listener countless examples of sine tones disappearing within environmental sounds.<\/p>\n