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A role for contingent histories in teaching electronic music?
No full textThis theoretical paper comes from observing the experiences of my postgraduate students over a number of years as they struggle to relate their own work (commonly in live electronics) to the various 'official' histories of electronic musicking. I ask whether what might be called for is to encourage a proliferation of contingent histories to emerge as a central part of a pedagogy of practice, and whether this could also be of more general benefit to the live electronic discipline.
The suggestion rests on a number of assumptions and observations. First, that although, in principle, the old normative hierarchies have been displaced that unapologetically privileged 'serious' music over all others (Emmerson, 2001), this does not seem to be operationally true insofar as students still arrive with the assumption that this hierarchy remains and, moreover, it is surprisingly difficult to persuade them otherwise. Second, that this state of affairs is due, at least in part, to the discipline's few canonical texts being still very much concerned with the standard histories and that, assuming this will remain the case for some time, some other more agile approach is needed to deal with the problems that arise. Third, that having students that are in the process of forming their voices contorting to account for their work in terms of traditions with which they have no resonance may well be not so much character building as confidence sapping and that, consequently our schooling remains narrowly normative and insular. Finally, that this is not just a pedagogical issue but has a disciplinary manifestation also, insofar as the range of musical relationships and valences that live electronic researchers have in practice is conspicuously broader than what appears in formal discourse.
What I suggest is needed is some structured and sustained way of admitting in to our discourse with students accounts of and relations to musics that they can make sense of and that can help them make sense of their own work. This is not, I think as trivial as it sounds. We do not simply wish to abandon all electronic music history to date to be replaced with an individuated and solipsistic corpus of musical autobiographies. Rather, I’m assuming we want to foster robust criticality in the ways that students engage aurally, practically and discursively with received histories, musical encounters and with their own work, and that an omnivorous but reflective attitude to music is to be encouraged.
One possible way this could be pursued is to have a much more overt focus in teaching on linkages rather than isolated incidents. In particular, I wonder if the approaches demonstrated by Eshun (1998) – creating speculative ‘sonic fictions’ that traverse unlikely interconnections and relations – or by Norman (2004) – similarly exploring alternative pathways of works and artists – could offer useful pointers as a way to proceed. This, in turn, evokes the approach taken by Gell (1998; also Born, 2005) in treating collections of work as objects distributed in time and space. It may be that by working hard with students to probe such (possibly speculative) distributions we can enable better and easier engagement with their own and others’ work, and possibly enrich our own collective notions of what musicking is worth discussing, and how
The Victorian Synthesizer
No full textFor some 15 years, I have had an ongoing project I refer to as The Victorian Synthesizer. The basic idea is to explore devices with the features we associate with hardware music synthesizers (oscillators, filters, LFOs, means to shape signals and modulate them, and so forth) but with means that were known to the Victorians (strictly 1837-1901). Some inventions, then, are strictly off-limits: oscillators made by feeding back an amplifier’s output to its input await analysis by von Barkhausen in 1921. Magnetism, mechanics, electrics (not electronics) and electro-mechanics become our preferred technical idioms. Moving-coil loudspeakers, though, were known to the Victorians (independently investigated by physicist, psychical researcher and occasional mystic, Oliver Lodge in 1898, and Ernst Siemens in 1877). Pairs of coils engaging and disengaging switch-gear form the basis of Elisha Gray’s musical telegraph (1874).
My designs are much more minimal than Gray’s, though. I connect a battery’s terminal to a loudspeaker via crocodile clips and hear a pop as another wire between the battery and the speaker makes or breaks the circuit - an old sound engineer’s trick to check on a speaker’s health but actually, unrecognised, the basis of The Victorian Synthesizer. By incorporating a tilt switch into the circuitry and placing it on top of the speaker’s cone, self-oscillations, which can be surprisingly long-lived, are possible. By duplicating the circuit with two loudspeakers, tilt switches and power sources, and by crossing over the switches between speakers, cross-modulations are possible. The simplicity of the set-up invites an incremental experimentation - for example, adding nuts and bolts to rattle as they are bounced around by the cone or using a textured conductive surface (like a nail-file) to make and break the circuit. The hand can be introduced to manually restrain the apparatus and provide a filtering or enveloping effect. And so on. The Victorian Synthesizer has become a mainstay of instrument-making workshops by myself and others, including Nic Collins, who devotes a chapter to the technique in his Handmade Electronic Music textbook.
AHEM provides an opportunity to review 15 years of experimentation, pedagogy, performance practice, and reflection on the very idea of electronic music prompted by The Victorian Synthesizer, and its further, perhaps philosophical, implications. I will discuss a range of constructions I and others have made adding to the basis provided by an impulsive pop as current flows through a coiled wire in a magnetic field. This will include hand-cranked synthesizers where coils in a motor/dynamo arrangement are listened to directly, as well as hybrids where fundamentalist Victoriana is interbred with digital technologies (including bizarre attempts to physically model The Victorian Synthesizer in software). I reflect on The Victorian Synthesizer as the most minimal electronic musical instrument possible - it must be, having only a power source and being its own means of musical-sonic reproduction - and hence speculatively reconstruct the history of electronic instruments as developments from this otherwise unrecognised Ur-instrument. Developing my previous work on the concept of ‘infra-instruments’, I characterise The Victorian Synthesizer as an Unmade, with due salutations to Marcel Duchamp, as a loose assemblage of components in provisional contact with each other, which through their relationships give a little bit of their natures away. Developing some remarks of David Tudor, I characterise performing The Victorian Synthesizer as a matter of ‘discovering and disclosing’ componential potentialities - a matter which I will discuss also in relationship to Graham Harman’s writings on Object Oriented Ontology and Bruno Latour’s compositionism. Like Tudor or Gordon Mumma’s circuitry, The Victorian Synthesizer puts the composer ‘inside’ electronics but, here, in a radical sense: there is no circuit diagram, there is only contingency. The idea of an ‘escape from the diagrammatic’ will be discussed in relationship to the thought of Deleuze and Guattari and Tim Ingold’s writing’s on lines and meshworks.
These may seem like grandiose claims: that from a battery popping a loudspeaker a whole philosophy is unfurled. Perhaps an academic hoax or at least high pretentiousness. Perhaps. But, equally, that could be my whole point. By reductions and unmakings, we can expose ourselves to what is taken for granted or ignored, perhaps at our peril, in technologies, commodities and great works. We can start again, we can think again, make new histories and lineages, and conceive of new futures. Let us begin with a pop
A Brief Speculative History of EA in Canada
No full textCanada was an outlier to the French, German and American electronic music scenes, exacerbated by being physically huge, and having grown from two european colonial powers. An unpromising start. The early traditional history of electronic music in Canada has the names Hugh Le Caine, University of Toronto Electronic Music Studio [UTEMS], acousmatic music legacy [in Montreal], and empreintes DIGITALes. Sometimes added to this is soundscaping, and, granular synthesis. These events are separated by around 4,500 kilometers.
From the 1940s, – McLaren and Le Caine, until the late 1980s there were multiple parallel timelines and little personal, aesthetic or cultural connection between many of the major developments.
This presentation will talk about some of the less-known contributing features of electronic music / electroacoustic studies in Canada that are either only locally-documented, anecdotal or possibly apocryphal. The subjects include:
multi-channel pieces from the early-1970s – from McGill University
Canada’s EMS representative – Otto Joachim
live electronic music groups – Canadian Electronics Ensemble, MetaMusic
continuous promotion of electroacoustics to the public
local / regional associations [Acreq, Music Gallery, BEAMS]
performing / concert production group [CECG/GEC – ÉuCuE, GEMS]
numerous individual initiatives – Contact List for Electronic Music eg
integration into pop music – disco
archival collections of pieces – the 3,000+ works in the Concordia Archive, McGill
publications – Q, Q-résonance, Newsletter/Bulletin, and others
conferences – 1985-1993
development of university and private studios
attempts to have Canadian ea recognized nationally and internationally
and eventually, the coming together of some 100 practitioners to form a national association – a Canadian electroacoustic community.
As is characteristic in young countries with poor communications – another example being Australia, like the helicopters from the maple tree, many seeds appeared, few survived more than one or two freezing winters.
By the late-1970s Montreal had become recognized as the center of electroacoustic activity in Canada, eventually with four major educational / research mandates. The particular educational, historical and political history led to four somewhat different interpretations regarding what electroacoustics is, with three – Université de Montréal, McGill, Conservatoire having Master and Doctoral level programs, and Concordia having ‘in-house’ multi-disciplinary opportunities including performance art, theater, dance, animation, film and mediatic arts.
The presentation will first provide the broader context for the history of ea in Canada, and then follow many of the threads noted above, with examples, leading up to the Google-, Wikipedia-, YouTube-age, when the histories of ea nationally and internationally essentially ceased to exist in isolation.
Throughout the presentation there will be a number of observations, perhaps occasionally irreverent, of what it was like developing a national ea profile when 90% of the contact between members of the community was having listened to the same LPs and eventually many of the same CDs, but not having met each other. And knowing what ‘cold’ is
The problem with pioneers: how media narratives of exceptional women distort the history of female involvement in electronic music
No full textSince the publication of Tara Rodgers’s Pink Noises: Women On Electronic Music And Sound (Rodgers, 2010), which situated female practitioners within a history of electronic music that had hitherto excluded or minimised their contributions, a growing number of articles, studies, recordings, museum exhibits and initiatives have addressed the issue of women’s involvement in electronic music and sound.
While some of these interventions are welcome attempts to redress an historical imbalance and forefront the work of notable figures, the trope of the female “pioneer” can be reductive as well as inaccurate, dominating discourse at the expense of more complex narratives. The female pioneer narrative can downplay queer and trans perspectives and histories, while its promotion through online and print media and the independent music industry commodifies visual archival material to the point of objectifying female practitioners. In a presentation whose starting point was a talk given at the Fawcett Society’s Sound Synthesis and the Female Musician event in 2014, I will draw on the work of Rodgers and others to survey alternative approaches including the writing of counter-histories and practice-focused studies that ask, for example, what constitutes a feminist process when working with sound.
In a recent article, “Tinkering with Cultural Memory: Gender and the Politics of Synthesizer Historiography” (Rodgers, 2015), Rodgers addresses the portrayal of female electronic musicians as “isolated exceptions to the norm”. She presents a study of female synthesiser enthusiasts of the 1950s as a community of interest that shaped the development of synthesizer technology, rather than examining the achievement of an individual innovator. I will consider other counter-narratives, such as that of Carol Parkinson, the director of New York’s Harvestworks, who in the 1970s founded the Public Access Synthesiser Studio.
I will consider how women’s electronic music-making has been both aligned with and separated from issues of sexuality by re-examining Martha Mockus’s Sounding Out: Pauline Oliveros and Lesbian Musicality (Mockus, 2007), which proposes a "shared space of musical innovation and lesbian domesticity, and the dynamic relationship between them”, with regard to Oliveros’s early tape pieces. How and why have such concerns been pushed to the background in more recent reappraisals of her work? I will propose – with reference to my work at The Wire – that one way in which a queer narrative of women’s electronic music has been reduced is through the more commodification of the archive to sell magazines or reissued recordings. This tendency often elides instrument/studio design and the musicians using the equipment, resulting in objectification of female artists for a presumed male, heterosexual audience. I will consider how the media might approach feminist and other alternative histories of electronic music differently, when media platforms are increasingly based around visual content.
I will conclude by citing a recent blog hosted by activist group Female Pressure, Visibility, to which female electronic musicians submit photographs of themselves at work, in order to show how plentiful they are. With reference to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s The Epistemology of the Closet (Sedgwick 1990), I will consider how visibility in this context comes to stand for progress, an idea which has been central to the recent reclamation of female histories of electronic music, but which prompts the question: to whom must women become visible to, in order for their histories to be considered significant, and what is discarded or forgotten in order to effect such visibility
Generation of continuous wave terahertz frequency radiation from MOCVD grown Fe-doped InGaAs and InGaAsP
No full textThis dataset contains experimental data presented in the paper titled 'Generation of continuous wave terahertz frequency radiation from MOCVD grown Fe-doped InGaAs and InGaAsP'. The IV characteristics, THz signal amplitudes, bias and optical power dependence of the different InGaAs and InGaAsP wafers are given
Data associated with 'Effect of nanoscale confinement on the crystallization of potassium ferrocyanice'
Get PDFMany crystallization processes of great significance in nature and technology occur in small volumes rather than in bulk solution. This article describes an investigation into the effects of nanoscale confinement on the crystallization of the inorganic compound potassium ferrocyanide, K4Fe(CN)6 (KFC). Selected for study due to its high solubility, rich polymorphism and interesting physical properties, K4Fe(CN)6 was precipitated within controlled pore glasses (CPG) with pore diameters of 8, 48 and 362 nm. Remarkable effects were seen, such that although anhydrous potassium ferrocyanide was never observed on precipitation in bulk aqueous solution, it was the first phase to crystallize within the CPGs and was present for at least 1 day in all three pore sizes. Slow transformation to the metastable tetragonal polymorph of the trihydrate K4Fe(CN)6∙3H2O (KFCT) then occurred, where this polymorph was stable for a month in 8 nm pores. Finally, conversion to the thermodynamically stable monoclinic polymorph of KFCT was observed, where this phase is always present after a few minutes in bulk solution. As far as we are aware these retardation effects – by up to five orders of magnitude in the 8 nm pores – are far greater than any seen previously in inorganic systems, and provide strong evidence for the universal effects of confinement on crystallization
A Link Between the Tribology and Corrosive Degradation of Metal-on-Metal THRs – Supporting Data.
No full textRaw OCP and Anodic Polarisation Data for a 28mm Metal-on-Metal Total Hip Replacement Bearing articulated under an ISO Walking Profile at different cycle frequencies and different Daily Living Cycles. The processed results compared the Anodic Current to Theoretical Minimum Film Thickness; calculated using a simplified 2D model and an expression of the Hamrock-Dowson equation
Portsmouth Volunteers 1803-1805 correspondence
Get PDFTranscripts of correspondence and archival material relating to the Portsmouth Volunteers 1803-1805. The dataset is mostly letters between officer of the Portsmouth Volunteers, Major General Whitelocke, and Hampshire's Lord Lieutenant Lord Bolto
International Conference: Alternative Histories of Electronic Music, 2016
Get PDFVideo proceedings of the first international conference on ‘Alternative Histories of Electronic Music’ (AHEM2016), held at the Science Museum, London, 14-16 April 2016. The conference programme booklet (PDF), and video recordings of the opening address and closing remarks (MP4), may be downloaded here. Video recordings of the individual talks and keynote addresses delivered at the conference may be accessed via the video proceedings index, also downloadable here.
This conference was held as part of the AHRC-funded project ‘Hugh Davies: Electronic Music Innovator’, led by Dr James Mooney (University of Leeds) in partnership with Dr Tim Boon (Science Museum).
Project reference: AH/M005216/1
Interference patterns: reframing historical perspectives on interconnections between electronic music and cybernetics
No full textThis paper presents a ‘diffractive’ encounter (Karen Barad, 2003), or ‘mapping of interferences’ (Donna Haraway, 1992), between four disparate, interconnected ‘personae’:
Electronic Music: Systems, Techniques and Controls by Allen Strange, 1972 1st ed., 1983 2nd ed. Long out of print pedagogical text mainly focused on modular synthesis. References to cybernetics abound. The 2nd ed. becomes a ‘bible’ to denizens of muffwiggler. The 1st ed. has a long description of one electronic performance piece by:
Ranulph Glanville. British composer of the 60s, who in 1972 gave up music and became a cybernetician. He was a very early adopter of live performance electronics, though his not being institutionally affiliated meant his electronic setup had to be cobbled together or self-made. His approach was unconventional and resolutely DIY:
“A key notion in our work was that anyone (including us) could make music” (2001). Glanville notes “how music provided an initial developmental test bed for later work” in cybernetics, where he was tutored by:
Gordon Pask. One of the key developers of ‘2nd order’ cybernetics. Pask is not to be found in any historical study of electronic music, but his MusiColour performance system of 1953, in which a musician conducts an improvisatory conversation with a machine that generates a responsive light show, can be seen as a highly sophisticated and prescient anticipation of much later work in electronic music centred on human-computer interaction, algorithmic/generative approaches and machine learning. MusiColour, like much of Pask’s later work, was created outside of any institutional support structure, and like Glanville’s performance systems, was DIY. Pask did much work on machine learning. Glanville called him “the father of CAL” [computer aided learning], and his work of the 60s and 70s pre-figured later collaborative knowledge sharing environments to be found today online today in the shape of forums such as:
muffwiggler. The pre-eminent modular synthesis forum. Has taken Electronic Music to its heart, with many posts presenting realisations of Strange’s example patches on contemporary modular setups. Founded by Mike McGrath out of a frustration at the paucity of information online. He never promoted the forum, yet it ‘grew itself’ to become the number one source of modular synthesis information on the net. It is not without irony that McGrath tells the tale of the Cal Arts electronic music professor pleading with him to change the name of the forum so he can recommend it to his students: CA is one of the few privileged places where this information was always available, in the shape of knowledgeable synthesists, a well stocked library and some of the most important modular synth resources such as the Serge system.
A diffractive accounting troubles boundary making and linear progress narratives, as exemplified by ‘the history of electronic music’. Here, interconnections between these four players allow us to draw a circular, non-linear history that touches on: interconnections between electronic music and cybernetics, maverick designers and thinkers who operate on the margins of institutional support and structure; complex feedback networks and systems; self-generating or organizing systems; collaborative knowledge communities