Two doves and synchronicity

Carl Jung developed the concept of synchronicity. In the notes of the historic The Vancouver Soundscape, Jung's concept of synchronicity is mentioned, a propos a recording made during a celebration of Vancouver's Chinese community, which includes the performance of the Lion's Dance. Firecrackers and drum beats are used in this dance to "chase away evil spirits and call back good fortunes." At one point the rhythms of these seemingly disparate activities "synchronize exactly."

The idea of synchronicity has always been on my mind. Today I experienced a quite surprising example of this concept. During a walk around my neighbourhood, two doves, perched on two trees, relatively distant from each other, sang this, exactly as written:

I wish I had a recording device that could record continuously what I hear. Besides my memory, that is...

The king of sound

 

Tony Schwarz in his studio, 1982 (borrowed from McLuhan Galaxy)

I became aware of Tony Schwartz's work during my days as a graduate student at Simon Fraser University. His book The Responsive Chord (originally printed in 1972,) was required reading. It also became an inspiration.

Tony Schwartz was called by the NYT the "king of sound." He pioneered new methods of communication through sound that revolutionized the advertising, political  and educational worlds.  At the time of the publishing of his book, Marshall McLuhan said about it that "this is a totally untouched field and Tony Schwartz has a monopoly in this area."

Steve Peters interviewed Schwartz in 1985 and this interview remained as a draft since then. Peters now decided to publish it. Check here for this amazing document.

The Pulse of the Planet

 

Jim Metzner recording on Great Gull Island Jim Metzner / Library of Congress

Jim Metzner is a key figure in the world of sound. He collected thousands of sounds, from around the world, and a significant part of this material ended up as the theme of a two-minute episode of a program called The Pulse of the Planet. The program went on from 1989 until quite recently. 

Metzner's collection is massive and, according to the Smithsonian Magazine, "the work to digitally preserve it has only just begun, says the Library of Congress in a statement. The radio producer has thousands of recordings to his name, including more than 2,000 audio cassettes, over 1,000 digital audio tapes, and nearly 100,000 sound files created with digital recording gear over the last two decades. Additionally, the collection includes photographs, handwritten journals and storybooks. In total, the collection houses 28,000 mixed material items, spanning from the 1970s to 2019."

Around the year 2000 we agreed to make a Portuguese version of the Pulse of the Planet, but sadly, technical and bureaucratic difficulties prevented me to go ahead with the plan.

More than meets the eye

In 1974 I was going through a complicated and serious process of evaluating my role as a composer. Portugal was under a revolutionary process, everything seemed possible, all our inner and seemingly implausible dreams could suddenly become reality. But at the same time, overwhelmed by all these new possibilities, music, all music, seemed too much music. One late night, as I was walking through an empty field, on my way home, I was struck by the sound of thousands of insects, small cicadas, which to this day I haven't been able to identify properly. These insects produced short clicking sounds, similar to this..I guess it could be, who knows, Tettigettalna aneabi or Tymapnistalia Gastrica. It was, in any case, a magnificent "concert."

I stood there for a really long time, listening. And throughout that process the answers to my problems started to unravel. Instead of worrying about music and my role as a producer of (yet more) sounds I should stop to listen and pay more attention to the sounds around me. Some time later I picked up a copy of a journal I used to get regularly at that time, called Musique en Jeu. Issue #18, the one that came out after that moment of epiphany I described, included an intriguing article in its Chroniques section. It was titled La Musique de la Ville, and it reported on a project called The Vancouver Soundscape (2 discs, 33 tours, stéreo EPN 186, plus un livret 72 pages, Direction R. Murray Schafer, $1 CAN, hors commerce...) This document was produced by an organisation called World Soundscape Project. The article included an address, and instructions to obtain this disc. I immediately requested my copy, and less than two weeks later, I received my copy and some other materials, produced by the WSP, accompanied by a beautifully written letter from the director of the project himself, who took the time to answer to this totally unknown person from Portugal. He described the project, inquiring about the reasons for my interest in it and opening their resources to any endeavours I would be willing to pursue here. Later on I received copies of all the other WSP publications. Sometime later, UNESCO's Courier included more information about Schafer and his WSP.

This was also the time I acquired my first portable tape recorder, with which I recorded every sound I could hear. It was also a time of intense and serious study. Slowly realising the full consequences of the concept of acoustic ecology that Schafer presented in his writings and public appearances. A concept deeper than I ever thought. There was literally more to it than meets the eye.

In 1977, R. Murray Schafer came to Lisbon, Portugal, to give a seminar on sound and music education at the Gulbenkian Foundation. He had with him a copy of his then newly published The Tuning of the World. Remembering, no doubt, our previous contacts, he had kindly invited me to attend that seminar. It was a deeply intense experience. Parallel to our daily work we had long personal conversations on matters in which we were so passionately interested and  involved. Our discussions, the reading of his book and others he had written, complemented by my own progress and studies in this area, changed my life forever. I became who I am today because I was fortunate to meet Murray this way, and chose to follow his path.

We kept in close contact, we met regularly at the congresses and conferences organised around the world on acoustic ecology and related matters, I invited him to be the artistic director of  the historical Coimbra Vibra!, undoubtedly the most important event included in the program of the Coimbra, Capital Nacional da Cultura 2003 project. I was also responsible for his appearance at the 12th International Congress on Sound and Vibration in 2005 here in Lisbon, as a keynote speaker. He presented an unforgettable essay titled I Have Never Seen a Sound, that kept over 1000 acousticians, engineers and architects tied to each and every word, in absolute silence. These are historical milestones that I witnessed.

On this day,  similar thoughts are most assuredly crossing the minds of hundreds of other people with whom Murray established close relationships along the years. People who were also deeply influenced by him, who had also their lives radically changed, who are no doubt experiencing the same feelings today as I am now and will no doubt also miss him as much as I do.

One thing I can personally assure you all: I have never seen anyone like dear, dear Murray,

(photo by our mutual friend Marc Crunelle, at Koli, Finland, 2010)

Nature's on fire!

photo by Greenpeace

The New York Times is a commendable newspaper, despite having its moments. We all do, but this does not mean that these moments shouldn't be examined, if and when they are detected. Specially if they seem to reveal something more beneath the surface.
An interestingly titled article popped up yesterday in my inbox from the NYT' morning summary. It talked about nature and essential field recordings.
This is a vital area for me, something in which I have been involved for over 40 years, you can imagine it did ring some bells. The NYT has produced commendable articles focusing on the problem of noise and the importance of the acoustic environment, so I hoped this one would be along these lines. We need as much press as possible for these causes.
I jumped into the article and immediately noticed that some of the most important pioneers in this field were absent, although contemporary and well respected names were indeed included. 12 recordings were listed, deemed as "essential listening", produced by people that have systematically or occasionally used sound recording to document nature, for their artistic projects or some other purpose. Of these, ca. 50% include the sounds such as those of Midwest casinos, empty rooms of Chernobyl, natural vibrations of pipes, bottles, fences, and other "natural" gems.
Absent from this list of essentials were pioneer composers and sound ecologists from the Canadian World Soundscape Project, founding members of the French GRM (although Luc Ferrari comes to the rescue with a piece that includes such natural and essential sounds as "bicycle bells (and) puttering boat motors",) prominent people like Bernie Krause, and literally hundreds of names of people that have dedicated their lives throughout the world to preserving the natural acoustic environment by recording it extensively.
This is an important topic. Why does the sound of the natural environment matters? Field recording is a key component in answering to this question and an essential tool in the environmental struggle. A list of self-entitled essential field recordings of the natural world should thus be based on clear criteria and the product of a much more carefully selected set of choices. Absent from the article is a call for the importance of the act of listening and an invitation to pay attention to the natural acoustic environment. I wonder why the author titled his piece "Need More Nature? Listen to 12 Essential Field Recordings" (my italics.) Of course we need more nature, but whatever the concept of nature Mr. Weingarten exactly had in mind, it may be the reason why so many people keep their eyes closed to the fact that the natural world is on fire today.

Noise, panels and Ferraris

# 1 You open, say, a restaurant. You want to make a living. 

# 2 You don’t care about noise, to your architects and interior designers this is not even an issue.

# 3 What you all care is simply to make a living. 

# 4 Most of your patrons don’t care about noise either, and behave like jerks. You give a helping hand by playing loud music through the PA. Food poisoning by sound starts to happen.

# 5 Some of your clients and even your staff complain. 

# 6 Noise abatement rules are not being followed.

# 7 Apps show that your restaurant is not totally hip anymore.

# 7 You start to lose business.

# 8 You still don’t care, most of your patrons don’t care, but noise suddenly became a problem. 

# 9 Not simply a problem but a serious obstacle to your success. Yet, no one seems willing to change their behavior, to care about the issue in hand and take some serious measures.

# 10 You just wanted to make a living, stuffing your clients with food and loud music. The designers wanted to make a living.

# 11 Someone who did care about noise discovers a miracle “panel" that supposedly solves your problem.

# 12 Noise is still an issue – the sound sources are still the same and nobody really cares. But now there's less reverb. The panels disguised the acoustic stench.

# 13 The situation didn’t change: most of the patrons are still behaving like jerks, the restaurant is a living muzak hell, but now there’s less reverb and someone’s making a pile of money with that trick.
# 14 You'll loose more and more business, but the genius who invented the panel is buying a Ferrari.

This is probably also a valid metaphor for today's environmental policies.

(photo by https://svnrestaurants.com/why-restaurants-became-so-loud-and-how-to-fight-back/)

Worth seeing again and again

A film by Raquel Castro

Climbing a flight of sounds

I cannot pinpoint what exactly drives me so strongly to write about Joana Gama's concerts. It may be the beauty of her sound, the repertoire she chooses to play or the often defying circumstances she accepts to perform it. Her rendering of Satie's Vexations was a recent, hard to describe tour de force that I will forever recall.
Today's concert at the  National Pantheon in Lisbon was the new challenge to which she courageously submitted herself.
First off the magnificently selected and carefully ordered works. Satie's Quatre Ogives could very well be the National Pantheon official hymn, instead of that totally unacceptable Beethoven Muzak played through a despicable PA before the concert, maybe in an effort to "set" the mood.
I am also sure that Satie (had he been able to finally listen to his organ-piano today) found this particular version, played at this particular site, the very epitome of this work.
Cage's 4'33" was played exactly as originally requested by the composer without any tricks or in any strange versions. The National Pantheon, I am positive, never sounded like this!
Feldman's Palais de Mari closed the program. Satie's beautiful Quatre Ogives sketched and probed the place. Cage's classic responded echoing the still sounding acoustic signature of the Pantheon, while the shadow of the Ogives chords kept roaming the room. Feldman's Palais made use of all these collected materials and combined them. The listener could finally be able to find a narrative in all this, were one willing to listen.
The National Pantheon has a special significance, being the burial ground of some major figures of Portuguese history, along with some controversial others. There is a general atmosphere of respect albeit not of a religious nature. By enhancing its acoustic qualities in this non-sacred but also certainly non-profane way, this concert created an unexpected link between the elements that permanently inhabit this space and those that happened to have crossed it today.
Finally, Joana Gama has chosen to exhibit her qualities in this unquestionably challenging atmosphere, demonstrating yet again, apart from her obviously outstanding musical qualities, a courage and stamina that seem to be her trademark.

(foto A.ClaudiaB.Cruz)

Running a marathon while standing still

I first came across Satie's Vexations in the early 70s, through an article John Cage wrote about a concert he'd organized, where the piece was played in its entirety. It was I think a world first. I remember his remark that throughout the entire 24 hour or so concert, there was always at least one person in the audience. All these years later I finally had the opportunity to listen to a performance of Vexations. Portuguese pianist Joana Gama played it at the main hall of the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon.

It is very difficult to find words to describe Vexations. One could mention Satie's ever present humor, present both in the musical content, in the structure and in the idea of repeating a simple musical phrase 840 times. Humor is also present in the way the upper chords seem to smudge the intriguing theme, hiding it and thus making it even more intriguing.

But the musical aspects are probably the least interesting characteristics of Vexations. To me the most distinctive aspect of this piece is the unusual time and listening experience it provides. Few composers dared dealing with time and listening the way Satie did in this piece written in the 19th century...
I am not sure if Satie was at all familiar with Max Plank's quantum theory, let alone Niels Bohor's interpretation of it, when he wrote Vexations. But the idea that a particle doesn't have any properties until it is observed and measured applies perfectly to Vexations. Time becomes real. The experience of listening to Vexations, to its simple musical components and to listen to each repetition in sequence, reveals time, builds time. It does not measure time, it produces time.

Simultaneously it provides a fascinating listening experience. In the performing space, Vexations slowly becomes a soundmark (to use R. Murray Schafer's terminology) after a number of repetitions. Against it the dynamics of the surrounding acoustic environment slowly evolve. Every sound, every whisper, cough, cell phone ringing, child running or chair dragged is measured against this "acoustic reference" that the piece becomes after a while, thus determining the balance or lack of it of the particular acoustic environment in which the piece is being performed.
In time with each repetition, a quite delicate set of acoustically mediated, ever changing, relations is produced. No repetition is the same however immaculately it is performed. As it was the case here.

Vexations functions, in a way, like an installation. But it is based on the tension building fact that it is being performed under daunting conditions by a human being. It is this seeming contradiction that provides such a unique experience.

If it is difficult to find words to translate the experience of listening to Vexations, it is virtually impossible to praise successfully and to adequately express my admiration for the performer. 

Performing Vexations is like running an ultra marathon. It involves the exact same physical strength. the same discipline, the same courage. I know that she was monitored throughout the performance by a medical team from the School of Human Kinetics of the Lisbon University. 

However instead of running, the performer has to keep as still as possible, stay focused and exert an unbelievable amount of restraint during the 14 hours or so that the piece lasted.

I will never be able to adequately praise Joana Gama or express the admiration that she deserves.

TMIE: On the threshold of the outside world

No, it is not a typo. TMIE stands for Transmembrane Inner Ear. It is a gene, active in the formation of the cochlea and then present in its tissues. It is part of the complex mechanism of electro-mechanical transduction of the sound into the auditory nerve.
Problems in TMIE may lead into deafness. The role of this protein, under normal circumstances, is to mediate the passage of the outside acoustic environment — what we call sound, i.e., the variations of air pressure that reach our ear – into the auditory nerve and then into the auditory cortex of the brain, where this information will be processed.
TMIE is the title of this work, a symbol of our connection between our outside world and our inner selfs.
In this opera two goddesses, from two different mythologies, have an improbable meeting and talk about their personal worlds. Meretseger, she who loves silence, unravels what is behind this silence. Selene, who drives her silver chariot through the skies, vibrates to the beats of the stars. Corypheaus listens to the impossible dialog and tries to interpret it.
These three characters represent real people.
Meretseger is Beverly Biderman,  the Canadian woman, deaf since she was 12 years old, received her cochlear implants at 46 and recovered her hearing. She wrote about her "journey into hearing" in the book "Wired for Sound". Selene is Henrietta Leavitt, the American astronomer. She discovered what George Johnson, the author of her biography, rightfully described as an extraordinary feat: how to measure the Universe. Henrietta was deaf but through photometry she was able to "listen" to the rhythms and sounds of the stars. Corypheaus is the Greek Pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles. He searched for the essencial categories of the Universe and was the creator of the first theory of the ear and hearing. The ear: a bell, a fleshy twig.
We relate to our surrounding inner and outer environment. After we decode what these environments signal to us, what are we left with? Consciousness? Free will? Soul?
Francis Crick suggests that a part of our brain is occupied planning future action. We are conscious of the decisions that we make, not the planning itself.
Did Henrietta Leavitt really listen to the stars? "We hear with our brain" says Biderman. Her conchlear implants produced a "trick of the mind" through which she was able to hear again. "I don't hear like you" she further noticed. Who can in fact tell what Beverly Biderman can hear? How can she know what each one of us really hears?

(TMIE premiered on September 8th, 2016, in Lisbon at the O'culto da Ajuda. The libretto is available here.)

New opera about the spiral

"TMIE, on the threshold of the outside world" is a new opera written and produced by Carlos Alberto Augusto. It features admirable Portuguese soprano Marina Pacheco who will premier it on September 8th, at the O'culto da Ajuda, in Lisbon.
The work stems from the books of Beverly Biderman "Wired fro Sound: a journey into hearing" and George Johnson "Miss Leavitt's Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe", and excerpts from Empedocles and Portuguese poet Antero de Quental.
Biderman is the Canadian woman who after a long period of profound deafness received cochlear implants and described her new experience trying to learn again how to hear. In her description we learn how we first gained that capacity in the first place. Henrietta Leavitt is the astronomer, also deaf, who produced the ground work that allowed us to measure the universe while she listened to the beat of the stars. Empedocles is the Greek philosopher who produced the first know theory about the ear and hearing. They are the characters of this story.
Deafness is indeed a thread in the narrative but TMIE tries to address other questions, namely the relation between the outside world (our surroundings, our own personal interior environment) and the inner world of our thoughts, our consciousness, dare I say our soul. From the spirals of the cochlea to the spirals of the galaxies
Marina Pacheco, the soprano, sings three different roles in this production which also features an all electronically produced music track (the Kyma system was used entirely for this production), based upon the composer's version of roulette curves applied to sound parameters. This is played through a 10 speaker system which creates the acoustic space of the opera. The performance space is defined by a specially produced video, designed to serve as setting and lighting.
Here you'll find additional information about the work.
After the premier "TMIE" will be touring some venues both in Portugal and abroad.

"Why isn't everybody running around wearing stereo microphones in their hands"?

The days go by...

The Leg-irons
(from the Prison Diary of Ho Chi Minh)

With hungry mouth open like a wicked monster,
Each night the irons devour the legs of people:
The jaws grip the right leg of every prisoner:
Only the left is free to bend and stretch.
Yet there is one thing stranger in this world:
People rush in to place their legs in irons.
Once they are shackled, they can sleep in peace.
Otherwise they would have no place to lay their heads.

The Prison Song

Music...

The evolution of pleasure

"A principle of evolution is that in general, if something feels good, evolution must have made it so - evolution must have provided a reward mechanism for synchronized movement and music making, in the same way that evolution provided mechanisms of reward when we eat and have sex." (The World in Six Songs, Daniel J. Levitin)