tracing moving circles

i know that i'm prone to hyperbole, but if there were ever something to make me rant hyperbolic it is the inimitable 'house on the rock.'

first the tourism: jennifer and i, on our 'fake honeymoon' (read: post-wedding/picnic trip back from minnesota) drove through the heart of wisconsin's farmland, just south of the 'wisconsin dells' to frank lloyd wright's stomping ground (a town called spring green where wright's 'Taliesin' retreat is located). alex jordan built a house to spite wright on top of a high rock outcropping. well, it doesn't stop there. the parking lot was near full on a tuesday at mid-afternoon with license plates from alaska, missouri, michigan, new york, new jersey, arizona, and florida, and the age range was from about 25 to well over 70.

there are three major attractions here:

1) a house built in a japan-meets-james-bond style on the top of a mountain
2) the world's largest carousel
3) the world's largest musical automaton orchestra

this being a blog about audio-tourism, let it be said that the house is loaded soup-to-nuts with smaller automata and music boxes, and the carousel is flanked by a 100 foot ceiling 3 console organ-room.

there are no words for how crazy this place is. if the brother's quay had babies with the ringling brothers and joseph cornell oversaw the christening you might get close to the feel of the place. NONE OF THE PICTURES TELL THE TRUTH. but... as it's late, i'll post some pictures and audio soon. until then...

160 feet below the earth rests an organ whose delicate tones ring forth from 7 million year old stalactites. it does ring, as it is not a pipe organ in the traditional sense (courses of pipes, volumes of air). each of the 37 stalactites is struck by a solenoid (when a solenoid receives an electrical pulse, it fires a pin), these 37 notes were chosen out of all the thousands of ascending and descending formations because they ring equal-tempered pitches (a shame harry partch didn't get at it). since much like the equal tempered scale, nature didn't place tonotopically organized rocks in close proximity, they are spread throughout the cave, some at quite a distance and with wonderful results. the tour is close to 2 miles and the pipes are spread throughout: the resulting sound is beautifully spatialized.

now... as this is another example of audio tourism, and the pièce de résistance of the hour-long tour, it is not without human intervention. for the majority of the tour, the guide shows people what is beautiful about the cave, by offering (rather weak) mimetic references: "that rock is shaped like scooby-doo," "if you look closely you'll notice that that rock, besides being the largest and most perfectly formed 'geologic drapery' also looks like a piece of 'virginia bacon.'" However, when the organ is revealed, we are finally allowed silence in which to witness nature's seven million years of geologic progress set to work in a rousing rendition of "a mighty fortress is our god."

i will post an audio recording and pictures of the solenoid tappers after the sonic fragments conference ends this weekend.

perhaps the best audio tourism ever. well...for personal reasons. my girlfriend and i planned a trip to france bookended by a gig of mine at the blockhaus in nantes, and her 5 week research trip to the cinematheque in paris. we had some days to see france so we booked a hotel in the town of chinon in the loire valley. both of us being sound people (she writes about sound in the films of the nouvelle vague), chinon caught our eye because the rough guide to the loire valley had an insert about the Famous Echo of Chinon. the sign on the road behind the 15th century ruins of a chateau would read 'ici l'echo'...here is the echo.

well then, chinon it is. the guide book informed us that the townspeople would stand in this spot facing the castle walls to recite: 'les femmes de chinon sont-elles fidéles?' and the echo replies 'elles?' they they would confirm by saying 'oui, les femmes de Chinon!' and the echo replies 'non'.

just a tad misogynistic. but...being diligent audio tourists we had to check it out. after a lovely dinner of white wine, an omelet and a galette, topped off with 'une café', we started our climb. we reached the top and hunted but alas could not find the sign of which the guidebook spoke. instead, we found the 'clos de l'echo' of the couly-dutheil vignoble. it was sunset, there was a bench facing the view and my plan had worked better than expected. i proposed to her and she accepted! we ran screaming up the road and voilà! the echo...many happy returns indeed. many happy returns.

in philadephia, there is a wonderful subterranean room in which you can call people who would have been alive at Benjamin Franklin's time:




hard to see from my camera phone, but you can call Balzac and Kant for sure. the phones themselves are pushbutton but dial with a rotary sound when you've entered the number. the numbers are worn down to incomprehensibility. apparently ALOT of people call byron, lord.

there are also demonstrations on the franklin's wonderful invention, the glass harmonica every day at noon.

i've been to the ringing rocks state park three times now and have never managed to write anything about it. this is on par with the ear of dionysus cave in sicily that has for years unflinchingly held the top spot for great audio tourism.

in short...you bring a hammer, hit the rocks and they ring like bells. this seems pretty simple, right? well, when you have no less than 10 tourists with hammers at a time you can imagine the beautiful audio exploration that happens. people using hammers to explore geography for its sonic content! there is nothing like the average jane and joe out for a weekend jaunt (with a hammer) investigating with abandon the fine timbral nuance of a haptic interchange with glacial detritus.

On Sound

Ten thousand things are heard when born,
But the highest heaven's always still.
Yet everything must begin in silence,
And into silence it vanishes.

Wei Ying-wu (8th c. Chinese)



this will be old for people who have followed this blog before live journal...but as it seems the old entries went the way of the dodo along with server i thought a re-print wwould be warranted.

and since this one is timeless....

in a book of poems by hafiz that i've had for years...tonight i opened to this page...

CURFEWS

Noise
Is a cruel ruler

who is always imposing
Curfews,

While
Stillness and quiet
Break open the vintage
Bottles,

Awake the real
Band.

in daniel ladinsky's transalation of the poems of hafiz collected as "the gift"

by default: sound art openings are lousy before you step into the gallery (i go because you have to represent the home team in a world where galleries resist sound art - less so recently - )

3 rooms. well... 1 room, a hallway, and an office.

overall a beautiful turn for stephen's work. but i'll have to go back when i can hear it.

the office: 3 of vitiello's digital prints which i think were enlargements from the small run artist book he released 2 years ago featuring newspaper, magazine, and book cut outs relating to the experience of sound and silence. perhaps not as successful as the book version, if only because the book carries with it the obsession of its making and the prints of the book seem too directed. that said, they content is necessary and wonderful.

the front room: a 5.1 surround installation with the speakers mounted in a sort of pentagram on the wall, with the subwoofer resting like furniture in the corner. i'll reserve comment for now, as the room was much too noisy to hear the obviously delicate landscape-painting-like wall of aural images.

the hallway: 16 (perhaps more, i didn't count) framed 'drawings' made by vibrating pigment on paper or dropping ink on paper while its attached to a 10 or 12 inch speaker cone.

more than chladni images of sounds vibrations -



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more than hans jenny's cymatic studies -



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these drawings explore what sound does to paper, pigment, and ink. the particles render the invisible materiality of sound visible by locking down traces of action on a solid medium; they show in the same way as a photograph the horrible banality of life separated from its place in time. a snapshot of sound, more sad than a recording, becomes taxidermy. what was once vibrant and living is now still: we can imagine its movement, we can see in its muscles the power that once allowed it to jump, and for this we imagine all the stronger what is absent in the material which death robs from the living. vitiello has created a wonderful intimation of his hands, the way he sees sound captured in the moment of his choices. while the snapshot shows life through the "gaze" of the photographer, the use of sound vibrations for the manipulation of the material mediums of visual art is at once a capturing of the artist's specific reverence for an ephemerality which is out of the eye's grasp and a way of pulling out what might be seen and heard as its fleeting beauty. drawing with sound becomes for stephen a mirror capable of showing us slices of motion, memory, and idea, and above all, that these things should be respected but not held too precious.

benjamin's einbahnstrasse (one way street) is at once sad and wonderful. speaking the unspeakable, it is one of the rare instances of a work that presents the reader with the conditions of its own genesis. it is an act of reading through the society that makes its writing necessary. its formal conventions are not progressive for any other reason than that they are required for an honest treatment of each and every subject including itself. language has been allowed a beautiful balance between iteration through pained re-writing, and the freshness of quickly written thoughts untouched by the edit.

most of the things i find beautiful are this way. not in the details, but in the gestures that make the details of any work possible even when beauty in the aesthetic sense is impossible.

i need to write. nulla dies sine linea (not a day without a line) but as benjamin said "there may well be weeks" ...so it begins: the sound i hear refuses to become material, but i write anyway and trust that in the space between the page, the performers, the audience, and the room, we can be honest with ourselves about what exactly it is we are trying to do by making music together.

excerpt of the section of one way street from which i quoted (only a section from a much longer work)

i know, i know, i just put this back up and i go and take a hiatus. well, there's a really great reason, boy howdy.

every now and again when you're researching, if you're lucky, you stumble on the pebble that brings the landslide. the one paper that brings with it 40 other papers you've never seen, paradigm unfolding. well...wrapped up in sound culture, i missed philosophy as a direct inquiry. i happened upon a paper by a philosopher/classicist/translator named robert pasnau. pasnau wrote a paper called "what is sound" in philosophical quarterly in 1999. having just plowed through aristotle's de anima, and parva naturalia again and looking at leibniz and locke....i read it, and realized that in one fell swoop he had laid a foundation for arguments that connect problems in understanding the sense of hearing and the perception of sound/sound qualities of objects from the stoics to strawson, and it held sway with all the fields that would argue its irrelevance.

so...i go back to the databases and start searching for pasnau and sound, and i find rebuttal papers by casey o'callaghan. a little googling brought me to casey's website at bates, where i downloaded 7 papers on the topic, reading references i find a billion more references and it snow balls from there. then i found casati's entry on sound (@ stanford's big old philosophy reference). but perhaps the most gratifying moment was (after opening 30 browser windows with 10 tabs each) i find that o'callaghan graduated with his phd here at princeton in 2002 and his dissertation is digitized and in the library...now, its in my new folder called philosophy of sound.

keywords: r. pasnau, c. o'callaghan, m. nudds, r. casati, n. bullot, b. o'shaunessey, j. dokic

just a quick note to start things off...

i couldn't think of a more appropriate way to beginning the second volume of these writings on sounds than today, in the midst of a giant thunderstorm in the middle of winter, in the middle of new jersey. well...maybe we could lose the jersey part. i long for almost any alternate geographic and social climate.

this thunderstorm is pointedly unique. it is pummeling against what was a foot of snow, and whats more? last week we had thunder snow. a snow storm with thunder, the thunder then was sonically dry; it was almost wholly absorbed by the snow. today though, as the rain falls, the most striking facet of this odd mix off weather is how it feels to be inside my home. I have become acutely aware in the last minutes of the volume of air in my living room (from which I am typing this entry). the snow is absorbing the rain on the ground and the roof, and the super high winds are blowing against the wall to my back and i can't help but think that the air in my space is charge with silence that is fighting against the sounds that want in so very badly. the volume of air that defines the space of my room feels enclosed by the elements making me tangibly sense all of its edges and mass. a very nice start to the weekend indeed.

after a 9 month hiatus and numerous failed attempts to recover a years worth of ripe blog material from our failed server, i have bitten the bullet and started a new blog. i'm relieved to tell you the truth, since moveable type on our server yielded about a billion spam comments a minute, my faithful readers were buried in a deluge of cialas adds and timeshare offers. not the best situation for an esoteric blog about philosophy of sound and culture. well then...lets get this show on the road.