Sounding
& Sampling
Contracted notes on the conceptualisation
of music technology
published
in New Music Articles No.6, Melbourne 1988
The
history of music technology in this century is generally
presented as a series of interfaces between man and machine,
coloured by man's endeavours and the wonders of machines.
Rooted in the programmes, forecasts and desires of the industrial
revolution (and therefore slightly suspect in a post industrial
epoch) the predominance of the man/machine interface indicates
ways in which music technology is still conceptualised.
It is not surprising, then, that the more developed and
sophisticated music technology becomes, the more generalised
and schematised that interface, resulting in pseudo neutralised
terms like 'user' and 'hardware'. But while there has been
an undeniable increase in music technology applications
over the past decade (especially with the merger of professional
and domestic usage) which to an extent accounts for this
symptomatic streamlining of the man/machine interface, it
would be unwise to view historical antecedents and formations
of music technology as somehow 'inevitably' leading us up
to the digital revolution. There are other possible ways
of viewing the history of music technology. This short article
suggests some, by focusing on how the concept of a man/machine
interface has informed many major developments (technical
and theoretical) in music technology.
Accepting
that the very concept of such an interface is historically
and culturally determined (transplanting Renaissance man
into the machine age to foster a romance with technology)
and therefore subject to change through time, there is no
reason why one can't now invent different projections and
readings for 'man' and 'machine' in regards to the subject
of music technology: if one can view 'man' as the active
producer of sound, and 'machine' as anything that can be
sounded, it then becomes difficult to imagine how an interface
between man and machine could not eventuate in the event
of a sounding. Consider these two examples: (i) man deliberately
controlling his breath rate to produce a tempo and rhythm
to be experienced as such (man becomes machine) and (ii)
man manipulating dead matter (hollow log, stretched hide,
etc.) to make objects for the production of sound (machine
needs man). One wonders if man's musical existence could
at all be separated from his technological (physical/mechanical)
relation to the (internal/external) world.
These
two examples (many more could be projected) are presented
to suggest that the man/machine interface is not a construct
but a given - a paradigm that doesn't need to be demonstrated
because there is little chance of escaping it. This means
that a history of music technology which establishes and
promotes a framework of man/machine interfaces (pinpointed
chronically and mapped out chronologically) is an inept
model for articulating the man/machine 'abstract' - that
is, the ways in which man generates and articulates a musical
existence by producing and working with technologies. The
implication here - a feasible one, too - is that every instance
of man's musical existence is in fact a juncture of the
musical and the technological; an event predicated on the
situation of actively 'sounding' something.
The
man/machine interface would be better conceptualised as
a matrix: a self interlacing and self superimposing configuration
of interactions, dialogues, dialectics, usages, manipulations,
abuses and exploitations. Here the man/machine interface
is broken down and detailed as a fractal network constructed
by and between (in no order) man, machine, human, device,
composer, technology, moron, instrument, artist, material,
musician, sound, creator, tool, etc. etc. etc. The angle
of connection (as an incident) is more important then the
interface itself. Furthermore, this network is not constructed:
it eventuates, as lines drawn out and across every juncture
of the musical and the technological. These junctures could
be termed 'ordinances': events upon those projected and
directed lines which shape this network's expansive and
pervasive matricular form.
If
there is a 'logic' to this spread of matrices it is to found
in the ceaseless collapse between man and machine, wherein
each musical/technological event creates its own ordinance
in the matrix, virtually independent of man's endeavours
and the wonder of machines. A 'network of matrices' is thus
conceptually more attuned to the continual flow of occurrences
('soundings'), for each ordinance is not simply a musical/technological
juncture, but more precisely an instance of this collapse.
To boot, each event of 'actively sounding something' fails
to distinguish between the two most conventional visions
of the man/machine interface - invention and application.
To invent is to apply, and to apply is to invent, especially
in regards to man's perception of himself as a machine and
the machine as a displaced self. This accounts for the formation
of projected and directed lines in the matricular network
- maintained, customised and reassembled as they are by
each and every application/invention of music technology.
A
key figure in this blurring between application and invention
is John Cage's prepared piano. It is simultaneously a renovation
of the object and a reinvention of the instrument. But still,
one is left to ask: prepared for what? Countering the sonic
tactility of this instrument, the sounding of the prepared
piano smacks of the wonder of transformation, where each
tink and clunk declares its refined 'nonpianoness'. Historically
important as it is, this invention/application is typically
ignorant of the predestined collapse of such human interfaces
and modernist tamperings. If one considers the strategy
of deadening the strings, constricting their pitch and recontrolling
their hammers, one is actually brought back to the original
design principles of the piano - indeed, of all musical
instruments made of dead matter and sounded through acts
of violence (pressure, force, friction) by man. Cage can
yen his way until the globe becomes flat, but he is no less
necrophiliac than the deadest of European culture and its
morbid 'mastering of nature'. He simply prepared - or mummified
- the piano differently from its original process, throwing
nuts and bolts into the works like an anarchist tampering
with the machine to signify the noise of pitch. Such are
its most interesting points.
The
prepared piano perversely prepares us for nothing - especially
if one accepts that musical/technological distinctions and
frameworks based on man/machine interfaces and constructs
were and are illusions in the first place. The prepared
piano is essentially a declaration of transformation: a
modernist gesture of sounding which calls attention to the
act more than its sound. In a sense, an 'empty' gesture,
but an emptiness that is in the nature of the flow within
the network of matrices of music technology developments
which empty man and machine of each other. The integral
impulse behind such developments is not only the desire
for invention (of the new) but a mania for supersession
(by the new). Obsolescence is not planned as much as it
is readily accepted. Each 'invention' (presented as a development)
is thus ultimately an empty gesture, but nonetheless capable
of generating lines of direction and projection for the
supersessional flow. This is all relative to the matricular
network wherein everything is to be continually adapted
and replaced - an activity perfectly suited to the modernist
brief of building upon the past.
While
the prepared piano adapted an object (the piano) and replaced
its sound (with 'non pianoness') its status as gesture constitutes
an attempted blockage in the flow of invention and supersession
- to halt things in order to call attention to the act.
Of course no such blockage occurred: the prepared piano
did not become an instrument of its own making. One may
well ask today (rephrasing Barthes' Musica Practica) "Who
plays the prepared piano today?" The 'reason' for its existence
is primarily artistic/philosophical and not necessarily
utilitarian. Yet as an artistic endeavour the prepared piano
paradoxically rides the conveyor belt of artistic needs:
Cage 'needing' to break down musical barriers in order to
explore sonic possibilities; Varese 'needing' the tape recorder
20 years before it was invented; Schoenberg 'needing' a
means for the emancipation of dissonance; Partch 'needing'
new instruments for his musical sound; etc. Popular yet
suspicious claims. Artists simply feel the need to create,
to invent, to produce - some might even call it a neurotic
condition. Their drives are manifested in their objects
and compositions, marking them as true inheritors of the
'empty' impulse to invent and supersede, to continually
maintain, customise and reassemble. Synchronous with the
creative impulse in 20th Century art, true obsolescence
in music technology is to be found in the re-exploration
and reinvention of areas which already are adequately serviced
by an existing stage or phase of development. Still, empty
eventfulness of the non invention and re design of instruments
and machines is central to the man/machine matrix, where
man feels a need to invent, create or produce something
when there is no extant use for it. The 'need' is created
in the event of its creation.
I
am not denigrating the artistic value of the creative impulse.
I am questioning the use value of technological invention
by attempting to demonstrate its links with the core vacuousness
of creative activity. There is nothing perverse about this
if one believes that art and technology are the two most
amoral practices of the 20th Century (as vociferously proposed
by the dadaists at the start of the century). To discuss
these practices under moral terms thus to me seems imperceptive
or dismissive of the subsequent delusory spread of these
practices' purported ethics and ideals which - under their
banner of creation and invention - are solipsistic at heart.
If one reconceptualises the man/machine interface - in a
more amoral and less humanist tone, and with more flow and
less structure - one could better realise alternative performances
and functions of music technology: the collapse between
man and machine the lack of distinction between invention
and application; the inevitability of warranted and unwarranted
supercession; the neurotic impulse to adapt and replace;
and the act and event of non invention.
From
here we move on to what is perhaps the key contemporary
issue in music technology, especially in a socio cultural
context: sampling. While various binaries and dichotomies
nave set sampling up in terms of simulation versus representation,
such a critical method ignores the greater historical lineage
of music technology (which I have attempted to introduce
as matricular in form). If 'sounding' is the situation of
actively producing sound, I fail to see how sampling as
a mode of production can be severed from other means of
man manipulating materals to produce sound. I can (barely)
comprehend a certain folky melancholy, or even a dogmatic
ideological stance, both of which express concern over the
'direction' in which sampling is headed, but such concerns
put preformed fears of the state and condition of sampling
before considered observations on its performance and function.
In reference to the afore mentioned conceptualisation of
the man/machine interface, I wish to suggest that this 'issue'
of sampling versus sounding is another collapse; another
ordinance, another collision point to be found in the man/machine
matrix. But for it to be accepted as such we need to trace
some of those bad binaries (whose progressivist/positivist
lineage is beyond the scope of this article) that posit
digital electronics as some sort of new and fearful dimension
in music technology.
We
start then with analogue electronics (often termed 'reductive'
in nature) where filtering is the key operation. To filter
is not simply to reduce: it involves selecting, shading,
shaping a sound. In effect it is a form of 'culturing' a
sound; of transforming frequency to pitch and back again
through voltage control; of demonstrating the degree of
manipulation that determines the act of sounding. The Moog
synthesiser - as the most famous instance in the domestication
or 'musicalisation' of electronic synthesis - based its
design/invention and adaptation/replacement on transforming
the keyboard. Here filtering was put to the prime service
of generating a change in tone corresponding to a rise in
frequency (such as when shorter lengths or greater tension
in string vibration and wind passage flow cause a sharper
tonal definition). Seemingly 'naturalistic' in its drive
to replicate a pre existing set of acoustic musical technologies,
this mode of filtering also draws attention to itself, to
its feat in controlling sound in the act of sounding. This
is the prepared piano revisited - this time removing the
nuts and bolts, the tinks and clunks in an attempt to naturalise
the electronic, to effect not the noise of pitch but the
sounding of pitch.
Most
importantly, this desire or tendency to filter is determined
by a particular conceptualisation of the keyboard as an
operating base or general headquarters for an envisaged
man/machine interface - indeed, the keyboard is a construct
of such an abstract. The concept here is of a keyboard as
a flow chart, facilitating a series or sequence of pitches;
a (pre)arranged and controlled flow (left to right; low
to high) of the key elements in musical composition. Essentially,
the relative change in tone through filtering is to reaffirm
the original design of the keyboard as a device that maps
out pitch, because the keyboard now maps out tonal change
as well. The incorporation of a keyboard into sampling components
evidences a very different notion of the keyboard. In sampling
keyboards there is no flow or sequence, but rather a continuum
of breakages where each key is an entity - an isolated trigger
- which only happens to be relative to notions of pitch.
Each key or note on the sampler keyboard is not only total
as an event (the capture, snare or snatch of a sounding)
but also in material, substance and form. Quite simply,
this means that as you move up and down the keyboard, the
sample (or 'sonic entity') is accordingly altered in pitch,
duration and timbre - replicating the contrasts effected
by magnetic tape speed changes. Each different key struck
thus makes one aware that one is experiencing a transformation
of an 'original' sound. Yet another visitation by the prepared
piano and its mode of transforming a pre existing sound
identity. Ironically, it is the state of too much filtering
or tonal change which renders the sample keyboard artificial.
The
point here is that while Cage's prepared piano signaled
the end of the keyboard academy and the start of the experimental
apparatus, the re-employment of the keyboard in analogue
and digital sound generation has largely determined both
the dead ends and new horizons to be reached in this realm
of music technology, especially in regards to the merger
of professional and domestic usage. To fully appreciate
this one only has to consider (in logical order): (a) the
reaction of musicians against using a computer keyboard
in digital synthesis and musical composition; (b) the number
of parameters in analogue and digital synthesis geared around
keyboard manipulation, interaction and performance (sensitivity,
dynamics, tonal contrast, etc.); and (c) the rampant/prolific
reconstitution of sampled sounds into musical soundings,
where a 'pattern' played on the keyboard transforms the
isolated sample into a melody. Cage was one of the first
to seriously (albeit rhetorically) question ''Who plays
the piano today?" Well, today a legitimate answer confronts
us: anyone and everyone.
In
sampling applications the collapse of the man/machine interface
is further marked by an open disregard for who is capable
of what, giving us a socio cultural breakdown between composer
and listener as opposed to the polemical/rhetorical claims
of experimental music. This is to be found in the dissolution
of the roles of producer and consumer, for with sampling,
to produce is to consume and to consume is to produce all
at the push of a button, the trigger of a key. While some
bemoan this to be some sort of frightful last straw (based
on musical ethics), the point is that the production/consumption
dissolution is far from being a recent phenomenon.
One
could easily view the diatonic scale architecturally spread
across the keyboard as set of dos and don'ts (sharps, flats,
naturals) as the presentation of a predetermined frequency
range of spectral excerpts, designed for consumption more
than production. To his credit, Cage's prepared piano was
intent on experiencing a fuller spectrum than the keyboard's
excerpts allowed. In this sense, Schoenberg's emancipation
of dissonance via the keyboard is but a conceptual victory,
leaving others like Partch, Ligeti, Bartok and Penderecki
to reinstate frequency and flow into the architectonics
of musical composition (by sliding, blurring and dissolving
pitch rather than constructing it). To put it another way:
Cage tried to position himself between the strings of the
piano frame; Schoenberg tried to move unconsciously between
the lines and spaces of the music stave; and Penderecki
et al tried to disappear into the cracks between the keys
on the keyboard. In this light, 20th Century music is as
much about the keyboard as it is about tonality, harmony,
sound and acoustics. Not surprisingly, the keyboard is prominent
in music technology: whereas both acoustic and electronic
keyboards control frequency as pitch, the sample keyboard
controls sound as pitch. And just as sampling is in a sense
the cooption and corruption of musique concrete's material
manipulation, it is likely that all keyboard music no matter
how avant garde or experimental in some way requires the
constriction and control of sound (through filtering, selection
and excerpting), and that the keyboard (as abstract and
construct) is largely responsible for such a condition.
Finally,
the sample keyboard signals the return of sounding through
dead matter. It is a 'return' because analogue electronic
synthesis marked the first crucial shift from sounding the
sonic potential in dead matter to the sonic application
of live energy the sound of electricity. Based on voltage
control, it transforms live energy into material for musical/sonic
manipulation. Analogue synthesis is thus mostly 'eventful'
in that one is continually controlling energy in order to
shape a sound, as opposed to acoustic sound production which
is determined by the employment of an instrument which is
already a crafted and completed object designed for the
production of sound. The application in the former is live;
in the latter it is given; electronic sound is generated
while acoustic sound is produced. Digital synthesis - with
its modulation of frequency (FM) - then marks the first
shift away from the totality and unification of mediated/unmediated
energy, dealing with a multiplicity of and interaction between
energies (the principle of 'additive' synthesis). Sampling
devices and systems effectively confuse these issues of
energy control, because energy is subsumed into the servicing
of record/sample functions. While the sounding of a sample
is dependent on an internal (microchip) control of energy,
the sound of sampling signifies the absence or phantom presence
of energy; of either an acoustic occurrence, a material
transformation or a musical event. Samples sound recorded;
in their simulation of the real they only confirm their
artificiality and prove their illusion.
The
'dead matter' this time is thus not the physical state of
the instrument, but the nature of the material, substance
and form of the sample. Here, issues of simulation and representation
are overidden by notions of animation and reanimation. The
point though is the return to and of dead matter, for just
as the act of acoustically sounding something 'animates'
dead matter (causing particle resonance and effecting wave
displacement to produce vibration as sound) the sample 'reanimates'
such an occurrence by absenting matter in the very act of
sounding (disintergrating the difference between sounding
and sampling). While sampling causes confusion due to its
hyperreal effect which is amazingly not dependent on real
material and matter, sounding and sampling are remarkably
similar to one another, for in the end, both necessitate
an act of sounding. This is the nature of their collapse
into one another. Both means of sound production testify
not to the death of silence (a physiological impossibility)
but to silence's inability to sound us - its inability to
make us conscious of sonic potential without being put in
the situation of actively sounding something, wherein our
musical existence is determined by our technological (physical/mechanical)
relation to the (internal/external) world.
