TECH1030_12 Lecture Week Eight – Sound Collage
Thinking about sound, and the fundamental basis on which it is understood, has got me pondering about the way that we make sense of what we hear and the connotations that we draw from the sounds around us, both in the way that sounds emerge and grab our attention, but also in the way that we are immersed in a sound environment that we, by-and-large, take for granted.
Our first encounter with sound reproduction technology is often one where sound is considered to be an almost exclusively linear experience. That is, it is assumed that the sounds that we hear are directly representative of an originating phenomenon that emerges from a sound source, and which is supposedly intrinsically connected with that source.
Sound, in common-sense terms, is conceived as an ‘analogue’ experience, where it directly relates to the thing from which it emanates. Sound is thought to maintain a direct relationship with the thing, or things, that produce it or originate it. Think about how a ticking clock stands-in as analogue of passing time, or how breathing sounds are an analogue of a living body.
In cinema and television, in radio plays and radio reportage, sound is, for the most part, expected to function as realistic signifier of a physical object (Bradshaw, 2007). That is, sound is expected to be something that exists in the real world, and which therefore has to be understood as a direct representation of a proto-generated sound event. A car door closing shut, a clock ticking, a fly buzzing around a room. All things that we expect and assume have a direct veracity and verisimilitude with ‘real life’ and events that are taking place before us, and all which have a highly characteristic and associative recognition. We are so used to hearing these sounds that we truncate the mental process of association and just assume what it is that is creating the sound is the actual event itself.
Now, Collecting sounds and fixing them on a recoding medium has been possible only since the late Nineteenth Century, with the invention of the phonograph and other forms of sound capture devices. But the reproduction of sound has been thought about for a considerable time. Francis Bacon talked about how sound might be technologically (as opposed to naturally) manipulated, as early as the Seventeenth Century. It’s worth reading through what Bacon wrote in his book ‘New Atlantis’.

We Have Also Sound Houses“We have also sound houses, where we practice and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmonies which you have not, of quarter sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; together with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep; likewise divers trembling and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which set to the ear to do further the hearing greatly. We have also divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and as if it were tossing it; and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice, differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have also means to convey sounds in tubes and pipes, in strange lines and distances…” (Bacon, 1648). [Spoken Word Extract (Bacon, 1627)

The key event of the development of media in the Twentieth Century, however, was the synchronisation and linking of sound with pictures in a format that could be reproduced en masse, and played back to large audiences – cinema. The breakthrough moment in the development of the ‘talkies’ (as opposed to the ‘sounds’) is generally typified in the of the Jazz Singer in 1927, which was the commercial manifestation of a whole series of creative and technological experiments and process developments that had been taking place over many years before. The power to arrest and preserve a voice in synchronisation with an image, and then repeatedly play that image back in synchronisation was a significant leap in changing the way that we think about sound.

With the invention of the phonograph it be came possible for sound enthusiasts to capture the sounds in the world around them and preserve them for posterity. The British Library has over three million sound recordings in its Sound Archive, which range from classical music performances to recordings of the environment and nature; from oral history recordings to recordings characterised by the different mechanisms and equipment they were produced using (British Library, 2011).

http://sounds.bl.uk/Default.aspx
The idea that we can preserve sound has a counter-intuitive feel to us, mainly because we usually feel that sound is an ever-present and consistent phenomenon. We assume that sounds don’t change. That sound is timeless. When we look back at photographs, in comparison, we can see subtle markers or signs of change. We look young. The cars parked in the street are different and from a former age – they are ‘vintage’. Street furniture has been renewed, fixed and adapted so it is more up-to-date. We can easily capture the passage of time in an image, but in a sound, it is much more difficult.
Some sounds are timeless. The crashing waves on a beach and the twittering of birds in a forest? But the aeroplane caught in the background flying over-head?. The tractor mowing a meadow with a subtly different engine than tractors thirty years ago. The associated sounds of technology and the social environment changes as humans interact in different ways with the world around them. Do we need to collect sounds and store them in a museum? Electric Milk Floats? Mechanical Telephones? Mechanical Film Projectors? What has changed in your lifetime that now sounds different?

http://www.milkwood.org/soundscape.html
Found Sound:
What is emerging now, thanks to social networking sites such as Facebook and Soundcloud, are a whole series of communities who have a common interest in sharing sound and discussing how and in what way these sounds are meaningful.

http://blog.soundcloud.com/2011/06/28/found-sounds-catch-a-wave/

http://soundcloud.com/groups/found-sounds
With the advent of the internet it is now much easier for communities of sound-geographers, or photographers to share the sounds that they are collecting. Websites such as

http://www.noisejockey.net/blog/

Or even applications on mobile devices, such as Ambiance or Shoudio, which allow users to share a moment captured in sound with users across the world on their mobile devices.

Sound Collage:
“Innovations in communication technologies (the phonograph, radio, magnetic tape, and, later, digital media) gave people new ways of capturing sound and image which fundamentally changed their relationship with media… For artists armed with scissors and paste, the message in newspapers’ pages could be literally cut up, rearranged, and thus transformed with available household tools and technologies. Later, magnetic tape and celluloid were subjected to the hands-on manipulation of artists who critiqued the dominant culture” (Kembrew McLeod, 2011, p.1)

“Fundamentally, sampling is a form of the fine arts practice of collage, but one that is done with audio tools rather than scissors and glue. Collage itself is a hundred-year-old artistic practice, and it flourished through the first three-quarters of the twentieth century. Visual artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picaso, and Robert Rauschenberg regularly appropriated from images and texts made by others; similarly, writers like T.S. Elliot, James Joyce, and William Buroughs cut up other people’s words in their literary experiments” (Kembrew McLeod, 2011)

http://podcasts.resonancefm.com/archives/3936
“Sound collage became more common with the widespread use of magnetic tape in the early 1950s. Recording engineers soon discovered that tape could be cut with a razor blade and spliced back together in a different order, and even from different sources… The most famous examples in popular music are to be found in the work of The Beatles: George Martin cut up and randomly reassembled a recording of a carousel in “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” on the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band LP, and John Lennon included a long pastiche of sound effects and crowd noises on The Beatles titled “Revolution 9” (Collaborative, 2011).

Revolution 9 by The Beatles
“By far The Beatles’ most extreme venture into ‘random’, this eight-minute exercise in aural free association is the world’s most widely distributed avant-garde artefact” (MacDonald, 1995, p.230).
“This was made by layering tape loops over the basic rhythm of “Revolution.” Lennon was trying to create an atmosphere of a revolution in progress. The tape loops came from EMI archives, and the “Number 9” voice heard over and over is an engineer testing equipment” (Facts, 1968).
Come Out by Steve Reich
“The numerous contradictory sound images, textual references and meanings, and music signifiers in Come Out require a multifaceted interpretation that addresses different aspects of the piece without negating or ignoring their powerful associations” (Adlington, 2009).
“Come Out is a 1966 piece by American composer Steve Reich. He was asked to write this piece to be performed at a benefit for the retrial of the Harlem Six, six black youths arrested for committing a murder during the Harlem Riot of 1964 for which only one of the six was responsible. Truman Nelson, a civil rights activist and the person who had asked Reich to compose the piece, gave him a collection of tapes with recorded voices to use as source material. Nelson, who chose Reich on the basis of his earlier work It’s Gonna Rain, agreed to give him creative freedom for the project”
http://www.myspace.com/stevereichmusic/music/songs/come-out-40177493

Sound Design in Audio Drama:
In following this, I want to start to think about how sound might be used to tell stories, as part of a drama or a narrative. How do we construct a narrative using sound? How can we find sound objects that help us to tell a story or get across an idea, or relate the thoughts and feelings of individuals to events that they are overcoming or encountering?

http://found-sound.tumblr.com/

http://146.227.26.7/?q=node/31
Bibliography
Adlington, R., 2009. Sound Commitments: Avant-Garde Music and the Sixties. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bacon, F., 1627. The New Atlantis. [Online] Available at: http://librivox.org/the-new-atlantis-by-francis-bacon/ [Accessed 22nd November 2011].
Bacon, F., 1648. The New Atlantis. [Online] Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2434/2434-h/2434-h.htm [Accessed 22 November 2011].
Collaborative, 2011. Sound Collage. [Online] Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_collage [Accessed 22 November 2011].
Facts, S., 1968. Revolution 9 by the Beatles. [Online] Available at: http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=174 [Accessed 22 November 2011].
Kembrew McLeod, P.D.J.T.K.T., 2011. Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling. Stanford, California: Duke.
Kembrew McLeod, R.K., 2011. Cutting Across Media: Appropriation Art, Interventionist Collage, and Copyright Law. Stanford, California: Duke University Press.
MacDonald, I., 1995. Revolution in the Head – The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties. 2nd ed. London: Pimlico.
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