Trouble in Paradise

I’ve been thinking about the notion of work quite a bit over the last year. Recent developments at SENSA have again brought these thoughts to the fore.

As a consequence of the above, I’ve had to write a number of letters, some of which will appear below. It’s sordid business but perhaps has to be said, in spite of the associated unpleasantness. I shall add to this post when time permits, or when it appears to be necessary.

Dear artist,

The notion of work is hard to describe in accurate terms. In the context of the arts, where the spectre of the bohemian recluse, who contentedly functions within lack and largely lives without compensation, becomes impossible to dispel, defining the notion of work becomes even harder. This spectre is by no means innocent. Even a cursory investigation would quickly show that it arises, maybe even unavoidably, within a broader system that in any way benefits from limiting or leveraging contributors. How this mechanism can be countered is a hard question to answer. Often, particularly in music on the fringes, the earnings from one’s creations are minuscule¹, and the sheer amount of work that would be needed to administer non-exploitative compensation for work delivered would render such an effort counterproductive. The lack of automated avenues on platforms such as Bandcamp, to effect compensation for multiple artists taking part in compilations, further complicates this problem.

Creating environments that are equitable with regard to all involved parties is a huge task with many aspects that deserve attention and is probably beyond the ability of any individual or body to decide, which essentially means that only an open, self-correcting structure stands any chance of addressing these issues. What’s relatively easy to see though is that any system that either trivialises issues around work and compensation, or makes it impossible for participants to such a body to determine whether money is changing hands, is doing something wrong.

When an artist approached me some weeks ago, asking whether SENSA has been earning any income from Drone Day compilations, an alarm bell went off. I had been noticing, with increasing concern, that sales were taking place on Bandcamp and I knew well that it would be a next-to-impossible job to distribute these moneys fairly. The fact that a contributor had been unaware of this and had in fact become upset about it made matters worse. Even more concerning was the fact that some of the tracks that SENSA hosted were for sale on other platforms, or as part of other albums, also on Bandcamp, and often for higher prices than what was asked on the drone Day Compilations. I had raised my concerns before but had been met with vague replies, generally to the effect that we should speak about it some time but not now. In order to avoid some of these issues, I offered to raise the price on an album that I knew would create problems if sold, to a figure that (hopefully) rendered it unattractive to purchase, and also made it possible to pay out the correct amount to artists if it does indeed sell. This seemed to work, as the album in question had generated no sales up to the point when the artist contacted me. When one of the organisers (someone who had been made aware of the potential problem on more than one occasion) unilaterally lowered the price of the compilation, I knew that I would have to raise this troubling subject again, so I sent him a friendly Whatsapp message.

To my surprise my concerns were not only dismissed out of hand as trivial but I was met by personal allegations, i.e. that I am dramatic and displayed a pattern of nitpicking and seeking out problems to fixate upon. I had spoken about this mindset to an artist friend of mine before, someone who has contributed to Drone Day on more than one occasion and whose work was affected by these actions, and articulated how this kind of shifting of responsibility may lead to larger issues later on. When I therefore mentioned to them how my concerns were being dismissed, she felt that, as an artist who was directly being affected by these actions, she had to communicate her views on what was taking place.

When the particular organiser received the letter she wrote, he lost his cool, stated that I should never contact him again, and removed my access to the SENSA gmail and email accounts, web page, WhatsApp group, PayPal account, Facebook group, and the Instagram and Bandcamp accounts, even though I had personally created and administered many of these and despite the fact that some of them had belonged to me personally. Initially unaware of being locked out, I fortunately managed to restore access to my PayPal and gmail accounts a few days later, but decided not to bother with the rest. Things quickly became ugly after that. I sent the other organisers a letter to try and defuse the situation without damaging the organisation or community any further, but was met with silence.

Other than sending out a letter to all involved artists to belatedly ask permission to use funds generated by SENSA sales for maintaining current platforms and for organising further events (and receiving a handful of replies,) I have maintained my own silence on these matters. As far as I was concerned, the sharing of information on the more sordid aspects of an organising body was as unlikely to engender trust in said body as it was to benefit the larger community. It has however begun to appear that I might have been wrong about that as the information that has been selectively leaked seems intent to portray me as some kind of bad actor (and in so many words,) something that I never was.

This, combined with the fact that a body that I am a founding member of and have spent literally 1000s of hours of uncompensated work on over the last few years and was hoping to promote as avenue to organise many further events going forward – a body that now seems to have been made inaccessible to me – is the reason for breaking my silence.

Those who have enjoyed working with me might be happy to hear that I’ll be continuing my work, even if it means having to create another platform for doing so. It is a pity that the actions and bad faith of one or two persons have been allowed to mar what was an otherwise beautiful project. I have always endeavoured to promote an open, friendly, ethical, and equitable environment for exploratory expression and will continue to do so.

Kind regards,

Jacques van Zyl

hAshtAgblAck.n.o.i.s.e

¹ What is small to one person might of course be substantial to another, and in it only makes sense, I think, if the contributor decides this level of significance.

MY SUBSEQUENT LETTER TO SENSA

Dear Rosemary and team,

It’s with a heavy heart that I have had to witness the dysfunction, which has been gradually seeping into SENSA over the past year, unfold to its present state. I have been asked to come up with a possible solution to any future involving SENSA. Though it is unusually hard for me to type through this letter, I shall attempt to do so now – and as briefly as possible.

The only equitable, ethical and practical way forward for SENSA that I can see is for Aragorn Eloff and Stephan Erasmus to resign with immediate effect. What would happen thereafter is unclear, but I believe, somewhat optimistically I know, especially in the light of what has been happening recently, that things would soon after settle back into the ethos that the founders had originally set out to portray. Exactly how this would play out is of course impossible to determine from where we stand now, but I believe that the momentum gained thus far would be largely independent of details when the collective starts attracting individuals whose concerns lie with exploratory music itself, rather than the furtherance of more personal agendas.

At present I am not certain whether I would remain a member of the organisation I’m envisioning, at least in the way that I have been up to the present, but I would certainly hope that those who stay on or subsequently become involved would find a way to actually grow the community – not necessarily in numbers but in the ways that it would portray an ethos that many of us would want, in both the worlds of exploratory music and, contingently perhaps, in life in a broader, more quotidian sense.

To succumb to bullying and strong-arming is the same as supporting it. I cannot see myself doing that. When a collective of this kind falls prey to overgrown egos and unchecked self-promotion, it loses every iota of its essential vitality, even though it might seem to be growing. One need only look at large corporations, or countries that have been allowed to actually believe that their exceptionality relies not merely on a set of endemic, self-serving illusions, but on something that has been bequeathed to them by some higher, external universal.

When nomenclature such as “bringing the organisation into disrepute” is brought to voicing legitimate concerns of participating musicians, and then leads to the singling out of individuals who do speak out against the shortfalls that had caused these concerns in the first place, in order to coerce them onto a type of makeshift altar of submission to the selfish expediency of those responsible for both the coercion and the shortfalls, much else fails. One’s so-called concerns for the community becomes nothing more than a ruse for protecting one’s own questionable positionings, and a more or less plausible counterfoil to actual transparent conduct. In so doing, it becomes as difficult for a collective to maintain the course that it has set out upon as to honour the expectations that it has created during its period of holding to that trajectory.

I shall not be party to that.

Sincerely,

Jacques van Zyl

What is an Instrument? An Introduction to Net-connected Neuro-electrical Instruments

In a paper by titled The Neuroid: A Novel and Simplified Neuron-Model, Argüello, Silva, Castillo, and Huerta describe a model of a functional neuron named the “neuroid”. Its behaviour is characterised as follows:

From a functional perspective, the phenomenon described above looks like a pulse frequency modulation-demodulation process, only if the stimulus is strong enough to overcome the activation threshold. Thus, the first operation involved in neuronal activity is a comparison, as McCulloch and Pitts established in their neuron-model, whereby it is possible to conceive a first block similar to a comparator, such that if the incoming analog signal exceeds the threshold value, it will pass through the block. On the contrary, if the incoming signal is not strong enough to overcome the threshold, then the outcome will be zero. As the next step, if the relationship between the amplitude of the incoming signal and the firing frequency is assumed as proportional, the second block can be conceived as a pulse frequency modulator, whose outcome is an impulse train with a frequency that varies proportionally to the input’s amplitude. …

Finally, from this functional approach, we constructed a novel neuron-model, the Neuroid, which preserves the functional essence of the cell. We thought that as android is to man, neuroid is to neuron.

Reading this paper brought about a type of eureka moment. The neuron and nerve circuits that I’d been building lately had moved away from the topologies described by Mark Tilden in his various texts on BEAM robotics. The initial circuits had all been Nv (nervous) nets, though this description breaks down when skin resistance and -routing enter the picture. A brief foray into Nu (neural) and hybrid Nv/Nu topologies culminated in circuits with either no (or very large) resistive elements (as these would anyway be supplanted by skin resistance/capacitance and/or parasitic elements during operation) or circuits without either capacitive or resistive input elements. But the realisation that had proved to be elusive was that each individual neuroid element had not only an integrator/differentiator input section, but also acted as a switching amplifier with PWM output, especially when a resistance appeared directly across the input and output of the particular Schmitt trigger/comparator that constituted the active portion of the element.

These neuronal elements had been acting like neuroids all along, precisely because of unavoidable parasitic resistances and capacitances and similar conditions brought about by intentional physical contact with human skin, aside from the net routing that these latter mechanisms allowed. In other words, both the graded potentials and action potentials described in analyses of biological neurons could, at least to some degree, be accounted for in the NNIs that had been built to date. In fact, by disposing of some of the input components, functional “swamping” of the effects of skin and touch was almost entirely eliminated, without the feared consequence of too little interconnection between the individual neurones².

What perhaps needs to be pointed out is that this praxis, though deriving from it, does not aim to be accurately analogous to (the electro-chemical processes of) biological nerves and neurons. In fact, it hopes to define an architecture and process train that is fundamentally different from the kind of neural activity and physiologies present in animal (and sometimes plant) bodies, but that somehow exhibit broadly similar emergent behaviour to these structures. If there is indeed a correspondence, it is chiefly taken as an indicator that nerve-like behaviour may be occurring. In contrast to the so-called “neural nets” that are colloquially equated with large-language models and similar instances of current-day, computer-based “artificial intelligence”, these devices that I build are by no means structured to be simulators of neural processes – they are intended to be broadly nerve-like objects in and of themselves. Whether this creates a meaningful difference from computerised AI is not known. Thinkers such as Roger Penrose have argued that Turing processes could never be equivalent to what happens in human (or animal) brains, chiefly to demonstrate that “consciousness” – whatever that may mean – could never be expected from what we understand today as computers. Penrose attributes this to the possibility that animal brains incorporate (non-Turing) quantum processes, which are posited as essential for the emergence of consciousness.

Whether this is correct or wrong is merely contingent upon the praxis which is described here. The nets that are described here may or may not conform to such “intelligent” behaviours, but the main purpose of their design and manufacture has always been their role as (at least fractionally) autonomous musical devices, and chiefly in an improvisational setting, where they are influenced by among other things a human musician/player. They are therefore in some fashion seen as “instruments”, but not significantly more so than improvising human musicians may themselves be seen as instruments. In order for this condition to be met they are treated as “others” in an ethical and philosophical sense, in the same way that fellow improvisers would be treated as others.

It would however be misguided to find that anthropomorphism drives the thought process of this undertaking. If anything, this endeavour, at least to some degree, constitutes a practical investigation into this proposed “otherhood”, which may or may not illuminate the rampant anthropomorphism that drives much of the current academic and commercial practices that define contemporary AI and robotics.

For the purpose of generalisation, these devices are here to be referred to as net-connected neuro-electrical instruments, or NNIs.

Note that the “net” which is being referred to here does not exclude human (whether by a single or a group) interactions, nor any other interaction by something which may be seen as exhibiting agency. The question quickly becomes, who is playing whom?, even in musical collectives that are comprised of only human participants. Indeed, any part of any musical collective can be described as an NNI.

Musical instruments, in this sense, may be thought of as sound-creating bodily extensions that supplant or support sounds that are created by the body alone, such as body slaps or singing. To those able to control their voice or movements to comply with established notions of musicality, at least to some degree or threshold, it may be hard to understand that some may not possess this ability. This intuition makes for a weak argument though, especially if this is thought to indicate some form of “natural” musical proficiency; for it bootstraps naturalness to some order of established form. However, dexterity with regard to the broader category of bodily extensions may to some degree be seen as “natural” – if allowance is made for the fact that learning to use something might also be natural in some way.

If one assumes the above, i.e. that one’s instrument comprises a “seamless” bodily extension, it isn’t hard to accept that some kind of new, emergent unity is created from this conjunction of body and instrument. At the risk of perhaps too predictably and unnecessarily comparing sport with music making, this reminds of a conviction shared among the ranks of motocross riders: that you cannot ride competitively if you don’t become completely one with your motorcycle. Not only that, but once this singular condition is attained, it allegedly becomes possible and indeed imperative, not (only) for the motorcycle to drive you in some fashion but for the combined entity (rider+bike) to be played/ridden by the sport of motocross itself.

This seems to indicate that there is some type of agency or even intelligence that can be attributed to a specific range of activities under special conditions.

Switching metaphors – once one’s instrument and oneself are in this way subsumed into some kind of Gestalt, this rupture of structure becomes evental. There is a collapse of being deducible from the structure of what has been into an order which isn’t continuous with what preceded this break. It is not even contiguous, but arises in what can be seen as a separate world from what was before. In this way it manifests as an irreducible interruption of the repeatable. What’s more, this new emergent structure not only answers to new modes of being but gives rise to them. This new particle, as it were, gives rise to a governing field, just as this emergent field of possibilities defines an ontic particle.

Inevitably, this type of reasoning would suggest a type of reversal in terms of time. Causality is turned on its head as effects begin to cause their own antecedents; their own causes.

Instrumentality is of course a conduit for ideology. As soon as you have an instrument, it appears as an object that’s embedded in/as a spectrum of (oftentimes hidden) rules – rules which cannot stand outside of politics, of some kind of “order” in its broader sense. These ideologies, somewhat sadly, and most likely unavoidably so, are self-repairing. An instrument may be used in a new and subversive way, but rules always catch up. Repetition is a powerful force, especially in an activity that seems predicated on it, or when a reward system is attached. In order to meaningfully break or push aside rules, you need to do the same thing often enough to make it recognisable/rewardable, which is another way of saying “create new rules”. Even stochastic music is self trapping in this way – something may sound “not like Cage but more like Wolff”, exposing a new(ly) hidden order of politics.

Playing (on) an NNI is a study in frustration. If this had to reflect some type of politics it would be a politics of powerlessness. The instruments often don’t play at all, especially before they are “trained”.³ They are sensitive to light, humidity, temperature, vibration, electromagnetic radiation, built-up skin oils and dried saliva. The slightest repositioning of one’s fingers may cause the sound to change dramatically, often irreversibly or with huge dynamic jumps, or even lock up the instrument in a stable state. Sometimes the output would switch from simple oscillatory behaviour to almost completely stochastic outbursts and back, for no obvious reason other than that time had passed. As MOSFETs with open gates are used, it may even break the instrument, either turning it into something else altogether or irreversibly rendering it silent.

As a metaphor this is doubtless handy. It casts a question mark over almost every aspect of improvised or even strophic or through-composed music: agency, musicality, authorship, mastery, order, complexity, composition, time, form, will, self-organising behaviour, statistics, tonality, aesthetics, sentiment, figure-and-ground, listening … And these subjects could easily be expanded into philosophical or mathematical domains.

But it is also something in itself – just an instrument with a double learning curve; especially when you accept that music is only music as long as it has no unbent rules.

Footnotes and sources:

¹ Argüello, Erick & Silva, Ricardo & Castillo, Cecilia & Huerta, Mónica. (2012). The Neuroid: A novel and simplified neuron-model. Conference proceedings : … Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Conference. 2012. 1234-7. 10.1109/EMBC.2012.6346160.

² The somewhat archaic word “neurone” had been adopted earlier because of the clumsiness in having to constantly differentiate between Nv and Nu elements, especially in the increasingly many cases where it isn’t even clear which (integrating or differentiating) mechanism is dominant.

³ “Trained” is a somewhat presumptuous word in this context, especially when compared with LLMs, and it is also not always clear who is training whom, but the NNIs clearly exhibit memory effects, and perhaps it serves to illustrate the point being made here.

Links to videos:

Feral Circuit is an ultra-low-voltage, hex NNI with competing neuroids: https://www.instagram.com/p/DHjmOfpu5Pq/

This is Feral Circuit running on a solar cell, playing with a optical resonant low-pass filter feeding back to itself: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DJY9HU3Oljd/

Two NNIs, Killer (it used to kill ICs before it was fixed) and Longlegs 1i “conversing” at some length via a high-impedance PSU named PAG Montomov: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOWWtgMjhq5/

An NNI named 7i coming up with some convincing Harsh Noise Wall pretty much on its own. This is a straight recording: https://www.instagram.com/p/DOrC-OTCRmi/

A noise theremin Thereminex that failed to work starts showing neuroid behaviour as soon as the supply voltage drops under around 1 Volt and does a reasonable theremin impression: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIY87wpOIYi/

Feral Circuit, band passed: https://www.instagram.com/p/DHjmOfpu5Pq/

Killer, saying Mamma: https://www.instagram.com/p/DF2tNbau74H/

6i, my first NNI, on low voltage: https://www.instagram.com/p/DFvUXemOay4/

Killer, almost making noise: https://www.instagram.com/p/DFd641Tuxkt/

Longlegs 1i playing a tune: https://www.instagram.com/p/DE-T82IOlNJ/

Feral Circuit, in a previous incarnation: https://www.instagram.com/p/DFDkZmvuQe2/

2o2i – a dual,cross-connected, 3-neuroid net with adder: https://www.instagram.com/p/DDnNco8OMXc/

Drawings:

The following circuit blocks are typically connected together in loops or strings. Parasitics (typically skin resistances or capacitances) complete the circuit. Any Schmitt-trigger output can serve as either an output or as a positive power connector. Outputs can also be taken from a current monitor PSU such as PAG Montomov.

The BEAM (Nu) neuron:

The BEAM (Nv) nerve:

The basic, free, integrating neuroid:

Basic integrating neuroid with parasitics:

Basic differentiating/integrating neuroid with parasitics:

Component values can of course vary.

This document, its designs and findings are registered with the Creative Commons under the CC BY-NC-SA license.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

This license enables reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. If you remix, adapt, or build upon the material, you must license the modified material under identical terms. CC BY-NC-SA includes the following elements:

BY: credit must be given to the creator.

NC: Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted.

SA: Adaptations must be shared under the same terms.

About

About PHI // hAshtAgblAck.n.o.i.s.e

Everyone, But Not You

A turning point in my thinking about silence occurred when, during an argument with an old friend, he asserted that John Cage’s 4’33” was essentially a null statement. The particular friend was an unusually devout admirer of Bach, and only listened to a specific canon of Baroque music, starting with Handel, glossing over Telemann, and pretty much ending in Vivaldi, with a hesitating concession to Mozart. He also worked in information technology, notably with the erstwhile bookseller that later became the CIA’s storage partner.

We stopped being friends for over two years.

During that time I became even more confused about the essential differences between noise and silence. The fact was that there’s practically no difference. Neither strictly existed, and both could either be loud or be quiet. Yet they were treated as opposites, as much colloquially as in academia.

The friend and I had known each other since high school and had grown closer during math and physics classes at university, dotted by poetry meetings in the evenings. Little had we realised how much our views had parted, and that over the ostensibly non-existent.

Why non-existent?

Quantum mechanics had taught us that even at absolute zero (provably the coldest possible temperature) vibration persisted. There certainly was quiet, but there definitely was no such a thing as silence.

Noise, though demonstrable as noisiness and entropy, was a theoretical construct, the root of which held sway in weighted distributions of stochastic processes. Iconically, white noise was defined as an equal-amplitude distribution of all possible frequencies. More accurately perhaps, it is the distribution quantified as an equal likelihood of any vibration amplitude to occur at any given time. Not only did this allow for zero and almost infinite amplitudes, neither of which could occur in nature, but also for truly random processes, which were as unrealistic. So, silences were louder than silence, and noises were never quite as loud as noise was said to be. In fact – silence, amplified sufficiently, was about as noisy as things can get.

A thought began to form. Silence was noisy, so noise had also to be silent, at least somewhere. And what was black noise?

Enter noise music, at first in an unmarked, pink CD that was sold as a remix of Merzbow by a number of notable figures in the experimental/IDM genre. Was this also a contradiction, and if so, between which things exactly?

To start, none of the common formally defined noises were musically interesting. White noise was as bland as pink or blue or brown noise were. It might as well have been silence. Even noises associated with physical processes, whether Johnson or shot or black-body or Brownian noise, were as pallid. What went as Noise in music was rampantly interesting by comparison. Pointedly, it was more interesting to me than almost any other form of music, which was often plain trite and sentimental.

One could of course return to physics for answers. Wolfgang Pauli had thoughts about the sweet spots between chaos and boredom. Others such as Lee Smolin emphasised scalability. But I was as unconvinced then as I am today. An artist friend recently pointed out a third possibility – apparent randomness offers one very little chance to curate one’s experience of it. This to me corresponded to my experience of listenable noise music, even the kinds of pointedly unattractive sound creations that musicians like Junko are known for.

In the meantime the proponents of particularly Harsh Noise, were bending towards inferring emotion to successful noise music. This spurious requirement is by no means exclusive to any so-called genre, but HN was relatively new to the discussion, and perhaps a little anxious to legitimise itself. The most common emotion attributed was anger – sometimes even veering towards right-wing anger. How contradictory could this get? Musics that espoused the uncontrollable were now pursuing reactionary causes. In my own experience noise listeners spontaneously (and often instantly) divided into two groups – those whom Harsh Noise upset and made restless and those on whom it had the opposite effect, and under whom I number myself.

Dredging up emotion to justify a class of music intuitively rang false. But what about sentiment in a broader sense?

The divide between naive and sentimental art quickly proved to be as flawed an attempt to pin an affective distinction between the extremities of genre classifications. Noise could certainly be formalised, and had acquired enough of an historical impulse to be canonised in a number of forms. Naive noise could be as unbearable as its quieter or less dense counterparts.

Could there then be a portal here for the ridiculous to present itself in music, as Dada reportedly had done in the visual arts as so-called anti art, and musicians such as Schnittke, Kagel, and Ligeti have subsequently introduced in Western Art Music?

Yet, this proposed rupture had already been effected, and at least as long ago as when the Futurists started rubbing at things, both physical and conceptual. But well before it too, particularly in Eastern and African musics. Despite Zappa’s eponymous excursions into humour’s validity in serious music³, the answer proved to be elusive when it came to noise. Looking towards farce and levity in their defining capacities, even a cursory glance at the recording of Cage’s Water Walk should quickly convince one that humour is perhaps an inappropriate response when faced with noise, despite the actions of musicians such as Petr Válek and Crank Sturgeon.

Pierre Schaeffer certainly attempted his best to waylay this dearth of defining qualities in what he referred to as concrete music, at the surface pandering to definition and form in his treatises. He had had an immense vision, but at heart he worked as a technician. Ironically perhaps his lexicon – a collection of, essentially, sound fonts, has more recently been published as a 3-CD album, which allows it to be seen as a composition rather than a library, the purpose of which was to practically illustrate his thoughts. Something asks to be wrong here, but where the mistake might lie isn’t that clear.

This preoccupation with form had somehow led to form becoming content – to the point of the former becoming a totality. If you asked certain musicians, just reading scores was deemed as sufficient exposure to a composition – the actual performance was gratuitous, an infantile indulgence at most. It certainly differentiates between a certain elite and those that do not belong to it. Likewise, claiming that recorded music should be replayed with adequate fidelity is an argument that met with equal scorn.¹ Surely the notes should be enough. At the very least, it seemed to me, it conforms to Smolin’s requirement of scalability.

Music had indeed become an industry, but an industry tinged with almost religious fervour, where not only recording and publication have been co-opted to a system of control without evident controllers, but even its performance and its study.

A Kafkaesque scenario ensued. Cultural hegemonies blossomed, where the rules governing what exactly music should be, started slipping from the grasps of even those at the so-called forefronts, before filtering down into the apparati of teaching and funding and researching musics it no longer had purview over. Some months ago a performance of progressive music recruited an ensemble that I had relatively recently become a part of. The convener had made a largely unvoiced decision that everyone should take part except the noise musician: everyone, but not you, and it wasn’t personal. Then what was it?

A persistent thought had begun to establish itself in my mind – what has been failing desperately in formal music is a sense of openness – not only to cultural and personal difference, but to the ability of sound to organise itself in open generative systems. Stochastic process in music has lately almost become as tokenist as inclusivity, and certainly only welcomed when performed by vetted computational systems, ironically those which by Roger Penrose’s argument concerning machine sentience should structurally not be capable of exhibiting any such a phenomenon as self-organisation.² (Emergence might indeed be cosmopolitan, but self-awareness seemingly needs something more.) Music had to be top down – that seemed to be the silent consensus.

This silence of not voicing the norms that control the creation of new music had become louder than the music itself.

Could it be, as with so many other things, that the inversion between form and content, or, at least, between figure and noise, had already occurred? That what is generally seen as music is mere noise, and what’s seen as noise might be the only music? Have we become so mechanistic in our thinking that even card-carrying mechanisms have become human in comparison? The English might indeed not like music, as Beecham claimed, but only the sound it makes. But the English might have been right all along.

Viewed thus, noise began to take on the character of aspects of our lives that are rendered inaudible by that which has become too commonplace, too agreed upon, to be conscious. This “commonplace” not only powered an unawareness of the physical noises that we are immersed in while cycling through our daily patterns, but also of the narratives and structures that fuel and form these repetitions. Noise is what is forced into silence by repetition, by narrative and normative structure and reflexive naming. Noise (as silence) can only recoup itself to attention by either being louder than what surrounds it or by not becoming part of the much more destructive din of signs and the re-signations that they necessarily engender. (Or, of course, both.) Noise is not formless, but it is the sound of form escaping from wanton identification and replication. It does not offer as much an inversion of figure and ground as a reconfiguration of audibility, of attention, of what it is to be aware. It recoups sound to attention by re-avowing sound to musical expression and by returning silence to audibility – both in the widest sense.

If the above were all true, we become obliged to stand away from authorship. Listening becomes not only concomitant but prior to creating. All that we can really do as musicians is to recognise change when it occurs, and to admit, with as much integrity as it takes, that much of it exists outside of what we think we control. Music will follow.

Noise, in this sense, might perhaps be an only way to break free from this hegemonic grip of compulsive “languaging”, primarily because of its being silent in spite of sometimes being loud. It’s apparent lack of formalisable structure and its vast inclusiveness makes it too slippery to assimilate into the industry of narratives, or any other industry for that matter. Even what is said here needn’t apply, or could be prepared and eked out as music itself, undermining its own story, much as the “musifying” of Schaeffer’s Solfege pushes to the side its inherent falsifiable narratives. If anything, noise is a type of resonant shape-shifting that escapes as fast as it approaches.

A practical solution, to my mind, to making noise music is so simple that it’s almost trivial – conceive of a democracy of sound. Simple is anything but facile. We have the tools for increasing or decreasing loudness. Use these. Make noise quiet and amplify silence. Find one’s difficulties elsewhere than in difference – because one needs these. There is no safety in music. Open up sounds to listenability – to musicality, if you will – and listenability to sounding. Reconsider the nature of the conformal tradition in music – recover the need for brokenness in expression. Consider that unsounded music is little else than a score – that anyone that produces a sound from any form of code is a musician, even when they simply push a play button on a device, and that everyone that creates any code that leads to sound is a composer. Not all musicians are good musicians of course, but what a good musician is, is no small matter. It is the topic of the investigation that every musician ineluctably finds themself embarked upon. Remember that in spite of bidirectional influences, the lack of skill and thoughtfulness among the practitioners of a genre does not cast a question over a genre itself, but only over the culture of its consumption, and by whomever consumes it, including the practitioners.

There are some clues to what music may be when viewed in this way, but these are as sketchy as children’s drawings: a musician does not exist in isolation (even when playing on their own there are at least three interchanging actors – a performer, a listener, and an environment). “Open music” is an oxymoron. Music is radical openness if nothing else – to change, to time in its varied forms, to the notion of the other, to guided plication and the unfolding of the implicate, to (an)aesthetics and (un)belonging. As consequence it is an openness to noise, and therefore, ultimately, to silence.

¹ Instructively, HNW needs excellent reproduction to be intelligible.

² Roger Penrose: Consciousness – where he convincingly argues that it is structurally impossible for any Turing process to exhibit consciousness.

³ Frank Zappa: Does Humour Belong in Music?

Karabo

The challenges of inducing a commercial, non-open-source robot such as the Nao-6 to constructively improvise with a collective of classically trained and/or experimental musicians should be clear from the outset. In order for either an artificial or organic entity of any kind to improvise, the minimal essential abilities would seem to at the very least comprise 1)an ability to be in some way or another influenced by audio impinging on them, 2) a consequent ability to process said influence in some or other way to generate tropes or biases for action, and to 3) act upon said tropes in a way that could be defined as musical. How exactly the second and third requirements are met are largely contingent, and perhaps define the space of possible outcomes and conclusions that an endeavour such as this would require to be articulated.

An initial assumption that this entity (which we shall henceforth refer to as Karabo, or the robot) should in some way possess either knowledge or training with regard to extant forms of music, be they from the larger corpus of music that exists today or merely the output of the particular collective, while attractive, appears to be spurious. One needs to search no further than the thoughts of John Cage or simply consider the existence of wind chimes or of trees whistling in the wind to know otherwise. Form, and a propensity for form to act with or against outside influences, whatever all these terms may signify, seem to be an adequate requirement to act in a way that may be deemed “musically”.

When Karabo arrived, a crucial assumption we had made was blown out of the water. Karabo’s camera had been damaged by a power surge, not only leaving her¹ blind, but seemingly unable to act upon input from her microphones. At a first glance this seemed to be catastrophic. If true, it would have meant that she had no contact at all with her environment, thus falling short of our first requirement. However, further consideration proved that this was untrue². Had this isolated condition been the actual case, it would have made it impossible to improvise with her in any way that could meaningfully lay claim to the term “collective improvisation”, especially considering the three minimal requirements arrived at earlier³.

Considering that our supposition above was supported by a fiction of separateness, on which most western notions of ontology unerringly⁴ rest, we were forced to reconsider. A number of modalities of interaction with the environment immediately became obvious. Firstly, Karabo was permanently connected to a laptop computer operated by Tiisetso, the programmer from a hacker space in Johannesburg, who had joined us for the improvisations⁵. Secondly the proprioceptive system of the robot seemed intact – she still orientated herself in respect to her environment and its gravity field – which seemed to be a legitimate form of connection. A third modality was suggested by the fact that her “hearing” appeared to be intact, even though she seemed incapable of reacting to it in either a predictable or obvious way. Fourthly, she had a number of responsive pads on her feet and arms, which could be touched by anyone, and could influence her behaviour⁶.

Interestingly it was a fifth, relatively obscure, method of interaction with her environment that most benefited our requirements. Modern-day Intel⁷ processors are equipped with a device called an on-chip entropy source. This device provides a seed for an on-chip random number generator that is called by the instruction RDRAND. This entropy source is what’s often referred to as a “free-running oscillator”. What is rarely realised is that these devices are in fact neural nets in and of themselves, not at all dissimilar to the one that I use in my fast neural net named “Deep Thought”, which was also used in our improvisation sessions with Karabo. What this means is that they exhibit memory, and that they can be strongly influenced by their (mostly electro-magnetic) environments⁸. Through the simple act of invoking a random process we have come upon a way in which Karabo could react to elements in her environment.

The reason for the incorporation of these devices in modern-day processor architecture provides some irony. These systems are needed for cryptography, which is an essential feature of providing privacy and isolation in modern-day existence and is as much as part of the life of corporations (such as Aldebaran, Nao’s makers) as that of our own. In other words – one of the main ways of keeping Karabo’s inner workings secret was also the way to gain entry to them.

Tiisetso therefore started devising sections of code that not only selected between a range of Karabo’s mechanical and vocal behaviours by generating and mapping random numbers onto them, but were able to be influenced (in ways completely unknown to us, to be sure) by what was going on around her.

These numbers were used to direct her movements, which, by means of lights attached to or shaded off by her, influenced a trio of light-sensitive electronic musical instruments created especially for her. These instruments comprised a number of neural and nervous nets themselves, one of which was used as a direct signal source, one as a control voltage for a voltage-controlled oscillator, and a third as a yes/no controller, which not only turned on and off her own sonic contributions in a seemingly random way, but on occasion also those of Esther Marie Pauw, who was playing flute in an adjacent office to the performance space,and Carina Venter, who was playing “miked” cello in the doorway of this same performance space.

To directly evaluate the results of the resulting sonic improvisations is perhaps beside the point and shall be left to those who decide to listen to the recordings. I’m sure that the recorded sound will at least to some extent bear witness to what we all heard and experienced during the series of performances. What I am even more convinced of is that it would give a sense of the philosophical and personal ramifications of these events, and to which extent musical improvisation may act as both a counstantly self-remodeling metaphor and as an example of what this practice may uncover of our present coexistence with technological entities such as Karabo and her makers, as much as ourselves as biomechanical contrivances.

What has been opened up by these investigations involves questions about instrumentality versus agency, the human versus the mechanistic, originality versus reflexivity,musicality versus non-musicality, ownership versus belonging, identity versus interactivity, and a host of similar seeming disjuncts. Soon, questions such as how different are we from our creations and to what degree they are and have been shaping our identities will become very important if we want to continue along this path of creating devices that work for us but also remind and reassure us about ourselves. Only by treating our anthropomorphic others as true Others can we hope to approach the implications of our post-human future together in a way that won’t later turn on us in its alienness, and improvisation with our electro-mechanical counterparts is, through its radical openness, probably as good a way as any to set out on this path.

¹ We had very early on decided to name the robot Karabo – a name she had been given by the previous group that had worked with her. Her original assigned gender was male (Karabo is a name used for both male and female persons), but we decided to see her as a female.

² possibly even a little idealistic, considering that nothing can be said to be completely isolated from any outside influence

³ Simply bumbling around chaotically may prove interesting enough in its own way but would prove conceptually trivial, placing the entire onus of “playing with” on the other participants, which is a form of control, even if it would be demonstrably chaotic (or “random” in the fraught contemporary patois). This necessarily begs an important question: who would be the composer/player in such a case, and who the musical instrument?

⁴ and, for that reason mostly, erringly

⁵ During play, I jokingly started referring to Tiisetso as “God”. More interestingly – a non-playing attendee to the first day of improvising confessed to having seen a host of spiritual creatures congregating above and around us during play. What made this observation particularly compelling was that I was involved in a discussion with a fellow musician just that morning where, apropos of nothing other than telling her about our proposed playing, she volunteered information about Tulpa formation during such instances. The subsequent description of the congregating entities seemed eerily familiar when I heard of it.

⁶ For instance, she turned her head towards the side of the foot that had been touched.

⁷ We don’t know what architecture Karabo uses, but some ARM processors doubtless have similar devices.

⁸ Criminal hackers intent on stealing one’s credit card information, for instance, sometimes use strongly radiating electronic oscillators to attune these “entropy sources”in one’s credit card’s built-in processor to the emission frequencies of their devices, thus making their output much more predictable and much easier to crack by means of specialised software.

Earthbox

Sound, being an emergent phenomenon, does not exist on its own. It can only be said to exist when there’s a medium through or inside which it might propagate. Vacuum has no sound. As the banal Sci Fi adage would have it: in space, no-one can hear you scream, but even this is not as simple as it sounds, and the implications of virtuality reach further than the tritely dramatic.

For some reason, during the making of the sound, the notion of phonons started nagging at me. Sound, when it impinges on solid or liquid matter with a regular spacing of its constituent molecules, may set up standing sound waves in this matter. Not only do these arrangements of energy and matter act as particles, but they also exhibit quantum behaviour. These particles may be “virtual”, in other words deriving from larger systems of particles that may be considered more fundamental, but they are very much real. In fact, phonons, like photons, are bosons. They can be observed and measured, may have very specific position, motion, and energy, and obey all the laws that quantum mechanics imposes on particles. One of these laws is that they have a minimum energy – their energies never become zero and can only ever “go away” when they give rise to photons. In either case, they form a type of memory – a memory of all sounds that have come before.

In the case of Earthbox, this memory medium for sound is earth and water; is compacted mud and clay on its way to becoming stone, which is little more than history in a physical form. The soil “remembers” what it has “heard” – and from the beginning of its existence. Even the heat that sound purportedly converts into when it encounters matter and is absorbed by it or the photons that leave earth for space can be seen as forms of sound. The clay remembers, and the clay speaks.

This reminded me strongly of humans – if we think of ourselves (not necessarily platonically) as the intangible bundle of life which animates our physical form. Not only does this life pertain to us as individuals, but also to us as collective animals. Seen together, humans also give rise to a larger “virtual animal” with very specific characteristics and character. It also remembers and it also speaks, even if we may not be privy to the entirety of this emergent conversation.

As much as tiny bosons of heat, of sound, which only exist by virtue of their surroundings, what we embody may also only exist by virtue of others like us.

In fact, as philosophers such as Jean-Luc Nancy¹ are seeing the Being of what we consider to be human as only existing in relation to others, another wave of thinkers, mostly non-western, consider process to be the ontological primitive of considered thought. Being becomes related to memory-instances of a continual process of both becoming and moving beyond being. If this were indeed so, the question automatically arises as to what would act as an organ for such an accrual of instances of “being”. Our “sympathetic ganglion”², as Freud characterised our neocortical brain regions, would be a first and obvious contender; but so would be all books and tablets,and all electrical modes of memory. But what else?

Conceptually, during the making of the sound for Earthbox, I forced myself to think of earth as such a memory organ – as a substance that to some extent indiscriminately (but in other important ways not) collects and stores information: sonic information in this case. In other words, if I had to sensibly create something that mirrors and elucidates these processes,I had to somehow act like earth myself, which would be to indiscriminately collect sounds in the physical (but also conceptual, technical, metaphysical, etc.) environment of the evolving chamber, and then to filter these through my various working processes, and accrue a portion of them as part of a perpetually incomplete memory object, which would be the “final” composition in this case.

But, as importantly, the resulting composition would then in a similar sense become just another instance of sound impinging on earth – in the geological scale of events just a blip of noise, just as the anthropocene occurs a blip of colour and warmth against the backdrop of history of the greater universe. Not only would it be brief, but it would be strongly modulated by the physical nature of the chamber: the actual cavity and its properties, the properties of the earth and roof that give shape to it, even the humans that visit and describe it in their various ways. This blip would then be stored in earth, just as all previous sounds around and relating to the location of what is now known as the chamber were.

Considered musically, if the sound is seen as a composition, the chamber and what revolves around it becomes the instrument for which the composition was created. Aside from theoretical implications, this had a marked effect on the work process that was adopted. Not having a replica of the space³ at had where the actual composition of the sound work took place left a lot to the imagination. One had to work “as if” one were hearing the resulting sound, which was next to impossible, with the effect that conceptual “soundness” became all the more important during the compositional process. Already here process became the main actor upon the stage of the creative endeavour, rather than ultimate object or form.

Fortunately, this was by now means foreign territory to me. I had for a number of years been working with the artist Belinda Blignaut on her conceptual performative works Working From The Inside and The Call From Things. Not only did earth (in this particular case, clay) to a great degree determine the actual work process, it very strongly shifted the sound creation in the direction of process rather than product. The creation of the sound world here was done improvisationally and “live”- which to a growing degree forces one to not think too strongly in terms of an ultimate product. But these processes did nevertheless exhibit memory, although in a different form perhaps than what was required from the Earthbox sound. Each performance⁴ was recorded and formed part of the material-to-be-worked-upon of all subsequent exhibitions. Though clay was used to absorb and modify sounds, the idea had not yet occurred to me that earth (and the Earth, by extension) itself may be a repository for history – and not only for history, but for all sonic history.

This still left the question of what to use as sonic material. My answer was, as much as possible. Aside from probably days of audio collected on and around the site with my portable Zoom recorder, I adopted a fully maximalist approach. I recorded and collected recordings of burrowing and tunnelling insects, I synthesized descending Shepard tones and Schumann frequencies⁵, collected the sounds of volcanoes, earthquakes and large aquatic mammals online and frequency shifted them to more audible domains, collected and collated as many of the sounds around and in the chamber during its construction as possible, including a receding thunderstorm, and the animals and activities on the farm, I recorded the sounds of the groundbreaking and commissioning ceremonies we performed in and around the space, and I converted geographical data of the site and concept sketches of the project to sound and performed a number of basic editing processes on them (time stretch, slowing down the audio, ring modulation, pitch shifting), noticing that they very closely resembled the sounds of drilling in the chamber and burrowing insects I was using.

During this time I organised and took part in a sonic event named Drone Day. The sonic materials I had been working on for both Earthbox and another project that I had been involved with⁶ for a while could not help but be influenced by my work on Earthbox, so I found it logical to return some of these sounds to the chamber. When time-stretched in a way not unlike what naturally happens when sounds impinge on earth and are reflected in one way or another inside such a dispersive medium, I found that purely mechanically or digitally produced sounds started to resemble massed human voices, so I intensified this process and also added these sounds to the repository of sounds that I thought should find their way into the final composition.

These collected sounds were then layered into a number of sub-compositions, which were in turn layered and eroded into the twelve tracks that ultimately made up the sound that was to be played in the chamber.

Even the final installation and its many headaches did in ultimately form part of the composition as such. One instance, namely that sounds that were intended to shift along the floor of the chamber had to be moved higher in order for the loudspeakers to remain unobtrusive. What we found during installation was that the sounds appeared much more in tune with the space when not directly beamed into the chamber, but when they were reflected off of the damp clay walls of the space.

“Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once . . . and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.” This quote, attributed to either Susan Sontag or Ray Cummings, though well thought out and appealing, might create an incorrect impression. Recent research, leaning on Edward Lorenz’s assertion that very small disturbances on one side of the planet may lead to very large phenomena on the other hemisphere,⁷ found that his even this strong statement might we too weak – a single molecule might strongly determine something as large as a weather pattern, even in other parts of the world. Indeed, time might not be what we think, and we may be far less disconnected from things happening elsewhere than we hope.

Some scientists suggest that the entire universe might be inside of a black hole⁸, structures well known for wreaking havoc with time. In a sense, depending on the way we look at the world, all of time becomes now, and all space merely a swollen singularity.

In some way sound, or vibration in general, might form the very canvas on which we sketch our reality, offering not only a metaphor but a very real way to interact with what we do not yet know. Who knows what a structure such as Earthbox may become?

¹ Being Singular Plural – Jean-Luc Nancy

² This relative newcomer to the neighbourhood of neurology basically acts as an adaptive model of the information that our senses bring to us. When we perceive, we don’t perceive (as the majority would expect) our sensory inputs themselves, but this ever-changing memory model of so-called reality. Reality itself operates behind a statistical-mechanical Markov Blanket, and has very little relation to what we actually experience.

³ I don’t even have a surround-sound system, which would probably have been a terrible thing to try and compose on, never mind a 12-channel speaker array, which was the minimum that I’d have needed.

⁴ But also each meeting, each preparation session, each rehearsal

⁵ Schumann resonances are natural electromagnetic resonant frequencies of the space between our planet and its ionosphere. In particular the lowest Schumann frequency of 7.83Hz is very close to our brain’s Alpha wave frequency. This has been seized upon by some healers as an important coincidence, and as a possible way to connect with earth and thus heal ourselves from the effects of the illusion of separateness.

⁶ Juliana Venter’s multi-modal composition, based around Eugene Marais’ book The Soul of the White Ant – at that stage called Dictyopteric – which also included the sounds of burrowing insects and earth.

⁷Popularised as the butterfly that flaps its wings and causes a tornado on the other side of the world

⁸ more properly, a so-called white hole

On Generalised Music – An Interview

Riemann_sum_convergence

Q: hashtag_blacknoise … Why black noise? And why the almost pretentious hashtag?

A: The second question, strangely, is easier to answer than the first. I started thinking of the term black noise* in terms of music in the early 2000s. I was fascinated with old cassette tapes and the serendipity associated with finding a ball of crumpled cassette material – and only knowing what sounds still existed on these innards** after laboriously rewinding them onto a cassette spool and attempting to play them. At first my working name for the project was “blinkkant bo” (bright side up), which was the correct way to wind the cassette remains. Soon I started referring to the practice as black noise, and for a growing number of reasons. This of course rapidly turned into a name for myself as musician/sound artist.

When I started thinking of an online presence for blacknoise (it had since become one word), I noticed that others were also using the name, so the hashtag was at first merely a way to differentiate myself from these entities. As time passed, I naturally started drawing in other references, but the origin is quite mundane.

*Black is of course an ideal. It doesn’t exist. Black cats are dark brown, as are black humans. Children seem to understand this at first, referring to chocolate ice cream, for instance, as black.

**These have always been somehow intestinal to me.

smashed-broken-cassette-tape

Q: But certainly the term black noise doesn’t only refer to the innards of cassettes. They’re not even properly black. And with technical terms such as white noise and pink noise one would naturally ask what black noise might refer to in this context.

A: I think I’m avoiding the question because the answer is quite a mouthful, and day by day more contexts that would fit this moniker are uncovered. What makes a definition more difficult is the fact that black noise is determined by negatives – what it is is essentially what it is not, which lands one on difficult terrain as soon as you want to pin it down. It’s a little like trying to pick up a ball of mercury – not as toxic, but probably just as futile.

The first context is somewhat technical. In engineering and physics the term white noise is a commonplace – random sound (or, in the digital domain, sequences of numbers, or any form of energy for that matter) with an equal probability for any given amplitude (or number) to occur. Mapped onto a visual metaphor, it translates as white light.

Because energy increases with increasing frequency, sound scientists have come up with a type noise that is weighted so that equal energy occurs in any given band – this is called pink noise and is often used in the evaluation of sound reproduction equipment. The visual metaphor locates it somewhere between red (low frequency light) and white light – therefore the “pink”.

Black noise, in one sense, is sound (or light) that is weighted so heavily towards lower* frequencies, that it becomes inaudible, or invisible in the case of light.

In that sense, black noise becomes silence, but silence that isn’t silence. (Quantum mechanically silence doesn’t and cannot exist.)

When one starts contemplating silences that aren’t silences, it’s quick to arrive at the concept of loud silences (roaring silence, as I like to refer to them), even really loud silences. My first efforts were to take ordinary (almost/non) silences and to amplify them to such a level that they overpower any other sound. Very very quiet field recordings were amplified well into clipping, often leading to silence again (#loeriesfontein is an example), the silence of old cultures, such as that of the Khoi-khoi and the San, which have been all but obliterated by Western and African interference, have been collected as sound samples that I recorded while I was playing on a number of their quietest musical instruments (strings of cocoons, bows, tiny antelope horns) in a museum context. These samples were then layered, and also amplified into clipping (hashtag_khoe), etc.

khoe

But other forms of silences that aren’t silent or noises that have become silent exist. The silence of digital activity, the silence of electromagnetic radiation, the silence of thought, of space, of planetary motion, of plants, of oceanic animals, of sequences of numbers; the silence of that which dare not be spoken, but which shouts out at you in its silence, the silence of the highest and the lowest frequencies, no matter what the modality, the silence of the oppressed, the silence of thinking machines – all of these can be black noise.

Utter silence, on the other hand, can also be noisy. What we call silence, by which I mean the backdrop to our daily lives, can be extremely loud. These so-called silences, as loud as they may be, are constantly being rendered inaudible by some very clever filtering by our auditory system. In a concert situation, such noise levels can become exceedingly high – when these are suddenly disrupted the resulting silence can be almost painfully “loud”.

One can carry on and on in this vein, as should be obvious by now. So I’ll leave it at this: black noise is an investigation into unsilent silences.

* or, sometimes, higher

maxresdefault

Q: So black noise is essentially silence? Or the soundscape of our present (and past) existence?

A: I am very uncomfortable with the term “soundscape” as applied to my work. In fact, I find it mildly offensive. Muzak would be a soundscape. Most music, in its commodifiable nature, is soundscape. Black noise is an opposite to that. One does not walk into an art gallery and think of the works on the wall as decorations, or as embellishments of the gallery as creative expression, even though they often are.

Q: But now we are conflating music and art, or at least music and sound art. Are your sounds music or are they art?

A: Well, that would depend strongly on the context in which they appear. If you play ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” in an art gallery context, even not as part of an exhibition, I would strongly suggest that it is acting as an artistic gesture. But the artist of this gesture would not be ABBA. It would be the person/curator/artist/employee who decided to play “Dancing Queen” in a gallery space.

In the same way, a work originally intended as sound art, which is being played at a music festival would be primarily musical. Except, of course, if the artist is subverting the entire festival to act as an art space for this work. But then the experience of subversion becomes the de facto artistic gesture, not the device (the sound art piece, say) that is employed to effect this subversion.

And then this entire gesture may again be reevaluated and turned on its head. It’s complex, but it is somehow clear.

Q: But you act in both contexts?

A: I’d like to think so, yes. And mostly in the fold where these two concepts rub against each other.

Q: So, what is music then?

A: Ah, here we come to the big question. I’ll tell you what it’s NOT if you want.

Q: …

A: As careful as one should be of dichotomies, one might divide (positive) experience into two categories. (The same would probably be true for any kind of experience, and there would be contradictions and overlaps in any such split.) The first would be things which make us comfortable, and the second would be that which provides meaning. Comfort is associated with repetition, and meaning with the ineffable: that which is sufficiently unstable not to be boring, but sufficiently universal to be communicable. Communicable chaos provides meaning, in other words, bearing firmly in mind that chaos and randomness are opposites. This ties in with Jacques Lacan’s Real, although the latter is to me a much more daunting concept than what I am proposing.

Apply this reasoning to music and you’ll know where I’m coming from.

Q: It sounds a little intimidating to me anyway, having to abandon all that is familiar …

A: Well, it’s just music. It’s not as if the world would collapse. Or maybe I’m wrong on this count.

Perhaps I’m not necessarily advocating the abandoning of all that is safe and familiar, but merely more abandonment: in other words, not holding up safety as truth, or as dogma, but realising that if one wants to find real meaning, one needs to move beyond the mechanical, the predictable, the safe. It’s really the only way I can imagine. (I’m assuming metaphysics to be too uncool a prospect to include at this point.)

tumblr_n6kfr1q5UH1t0iytuo1_1280

Q: Fair enough. But what would generalised music be in that case? You suggest that the concept derives from functional analysis, from mathematics, in other words. Math doesn’t sound to me like abandonment.

A: I assume you are speaking as a mathematician …

But if I have to give you a serious answer I should add that it has been a very long time since I’ve studied mathematics – actual mathematicians might want to turn away at this point.

Generalised functions are a broadening of the classical notion of a function in mathematical analysis. Basically, functions themselves are treated as variables in analysis, for instance allowing discontinuous functions to be differentiated over parts of their domain, something which would otherwise not always be successful.

My reasoning on the subject of music went like this:

• Much of music isn’t really music any more. What’s seen as music is a smallish set of constraints, bound up with sentiment and musical cliché, and executed with some or other minimal skill set.

• These sound objects are only musical when viewed as concrete music, just like any other concrete sound that’s deemed to be musical would be. In fact, they are consumed as objects.

• Qua Pierre Schaeffer’s view in Le Solfège de l’Objet Sonore, these songs, which are operations on notes and pauses, become similar to notes themselves.

• This means that one may perform musical operations on these new “notes”, which are in fact musical objects already, whether these operations are accomplished or not.

• This is at first glance similar to what happens with functions in functional analysis.

• But if songs have become notes, what would their instrument of execution be? The instrument is the loudspeaker.

• The musician is anyone who operates this loudspeaker, whether with skill or not, and whether with large or small modifications on the specific song material. (Loudspeakers always modify sound.)

That is the long and short of it. One could of course reason further and with greater sophistication along this train of thought, and expand the definition of music to include all intended process.

Q: So a person playing a commercially produced song on her iPhone …

A: … is a musician, yes. Though, obviously, more can be said of their musicianship.

Q: And then you are hoping for emergence – for structure to arise?

A: Yes, now we enter the domain of physics, but hopefully by a different route than the jaded “music of the spheres” approach, where there appears to be hard and fast “rules” that govern whether music is beautiful/accomplished/marketable.

I tend to think of the phenomenon in thermodynamic terms, in other words as an instance of statistical mechanics. Just as I think of the cultural tropes that govern its being made as relatively simple resonant phenomena.

Q: Certainly that is not very musical – not to anyone who isn’t open to being a mathematician or physicist anyway …

A: Maybe I should loosely define a new, more general kind of music – a music that aims to create new vocabularies in order to discover implicate grammars that reassign previously inconclusive narratives by formatively reevaluating the notions of outcome and subject and identity as ambient, non-superintendent process.

Q: Certainly very fundamental …

A: Is this not the purpose of any revolutionary impetus – to create fundamental change?

Q: Sure, but it easily becomes not much more than a lot of theoretical beating about the bush. How do you physically approach music making?

A: I just start beating about a physical bush …

And who says theoretical isn’t physical anyway? As Zappa observed: “What’s the ugliest part of your body? … I think it’s your mind.”

Maybe “approach” is indeed the proper word here. Often there is little more than an approach when I make music. But when I decide what I’d like to do, I do sometimes make decisions. I would for instance decide to listen to digital electrical processes directly. I’d then build a small neural net and simply connect the digital throughput to a mixer. Or I would use existing digital processors (the cheap microcontrollers in singing birthday cards are a current favourite) and use them in an unintended way.

Q: But this still doesn’t address the question of narrative. Do you employ narrative at all? If decision-making is chaotic, or even random, as the above seems to suggest, surely the notion of narrative becomes extraneous?

A: I’m constantly plagued by this word “narrative”. But, I guess, if I were fundamentally opposed to narrative as such, it would not have bothered me. So I have to ask myself why it bothers me. In a straight-up Harsh Noise performance the narrative becomes a simple increase of parameters (intensity, density, complexity, chaos, …), culminating in a more or less abrupt collapse, either to silence or to simplicity of some order (and then silence). In Harsh Noise Wall these parameters stay more or less constant till the end.

But this is quite boring in a way. Which makes me wonder whether all narratives aren’t boring – by nature.

The only real narratives there are are density curves, whatever density may denote in this context. Probability distributions, in a way, which again nods to generalised functions. Broadly speaking, there aren’t many kinds of these. Mostly these curves would either be periodic or cyclical, or would exhibit some or other growth or decay function, with or without a cyclical element. There could of course be a random (or chaotic) nature to narrative, but it would be hard to argue that this is a narrative at all, except where it can be accurately described (unwritten?), and especially in the former case. In improvisation there is a happy by-product of not being in control, which (if one were to be of an optimistic bent) often displays emergence. The narrative, if not agreed upon in advance, writes itself. Working with machines that make decisions by themselves (neural nets, for example) creates another kind of narrative, a narrative that might not be as alien as it seems. Maybe this is where I prefer to operate. As the urban poet says, “don’t kill your wife with work, let electricity do it.” (And of course the misogyny, whether intended or not, points right back at a part of ourselves.)

Q: So you’re a composer of narratives, but with a hands-off approach?

A: I’m not sure of the hands-off part, but I am as compelled to compose narratives as anyone else is.

Q: Except that you use a score? Do you score?

A: This is again something that makes me as uncomfortable as it interests me. Let me give an example, seen through my “generalised” lens.

A score is a live, atemporal recording of a musical intention, created with the purpose of translating that intention into the actions of a more general group of actors than just the composer-originator of the score.

If I, for instance, messaged a friend, asking them to switch on the radio, I am the composer, the text message is the score, the friend is the performer, the radio is the instrument, and whatever audible program content is featured in the broadcast at that moment becomes the musical material – the concrete notes, if you will, which would comprise the resulting musical utterance.

Things become more interesting when we switch modalities. The text message can be converted to sound in an editor, the program material can be assigned to the role of composer, dictating future actions by the new performer, who might be the original composer, writing a score in some kind of way, which in its turn could govern the actions of the person who switches on and off the radio. In other words, the process is remapped into new natural hieranarchies – natural in the sense of ‘as they arise’ (through remapping, in this case) and hieranarchy as a coined word to reflect a form of mutable structure displaying a reflective binary, where whichever duality emerges is always in balance with its perceived opposite in whatever construct is employed to mirror this divide.

Biography

42328990_10156014443352428_2572133562841038848_o

Jacques van Zyl was born in Uitenhage, South Africa in 1963. Under the working name hAshtAgblAck.n.o.i.s.e, he performs as noise musician and sound artist, touching upon the fields of installation sound art, musique concrète, harsh noise wall, and improvisation. His works and performance events unfold according to a scheme that he terms “generalised music”, where the artist or musician is any person (or non-person) who either creates or reproduces an intended gesture using sound, irrespective of either the nature of the sonic material that is being created or reproduced, or whether the instrument that produces the sound is a living or non-living object, a traditional musical instrument, an electronic or mechanical sound generator, or simply a commercial music player, and where any recorded sound becomes the raw, operated-upon material for the creation of a musical or sonic event or mode. His approach therefore skirts authorship and post-human relationality by creating a surplus of uncodifiable, unmediated bidirectional interfaces between the inner workings of human and electrical machines, which are then perceived and interpreted by the human mind through conflating the seemingly antithetical notions of silence and sound.

In a career that spans more than two decades, he has performed alongside and collaborated with a number of artists and musicians. These have at various times included Minnette Vári, Stefanus Rademeyer, Brendon Bussy, Belinda Blignaut, Jason Stapleton, Coffin Soup, Ski Crime, Gwaing, Andrea Dicò, Garth Erasmus, Justin Allart, Aragorn Eloff, Vanessa Lorenzo, Rhéa Dally, Martin Perret, Miranda Moss, Agnes Pe, Vanessà Heer, Monomort, Mia Thom, Pierre-Henri Wicomb, Esther Marie Pauw, John Pringle, Cara Stacey, Charmaine Lee, Dimitri della Faille, Juliana Venter and many others.

His conceptual project hAshtAgblAck.n.o.i.s.e is a musical exploration of the unsilent silences, whether conceptual or actual, which frame and define our various generalised sonic environments.

Jacques is currently a Research Fellow at the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Stellenbosch University.

ABOUT JACQUES VAN ZYL

The company PHI Audio is the brain child of Jacques van Zyl, where he functions as designer, owner and director. His interests and involvements are by no means limited to PHI, and spans a wide field, ranging from music, fine art and philosophy to design, cooking, and writing.

In his role as musician and sound artist he often functions under the name hAshtAgblAck.n.o.i.s.e

His involvements in these fields are too many to list here, but he is currently involved on the board of the Sonic Exploration Network of Southern Africa (SENSA) as organiser, plays regularly with the Africa Open Improvising (AOI) collective of the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation at the University of Stellenbosch, where he is currently holding the position of Research Fellow. Current and recent projects include the Earthbox installation of The Dream Commission, various endeavours with AOI, and working with Juliana Venter on a large, interdisciplinary operatic project. In between all this, he is presently involved in a number of smaller artistic and musical collaborations, both nationally and internationally.

In addition to AOI, he is a member of the musical collectives Ski Crime (harsh noise), Coffin Soup (punk/experimental), and Gwaing (improvisation).

Where the fields of music and audio equipment overlap, he has designed and built varied self-designed sound reinforcement equipment, including electronic musical instruments, PA loudspeakers and amplifiers, effects boxes and pedals, and neural nets. These latter devices are regularly employed in his own musical practice, both as largely self-playing instruments or as controllers. His electronic creations have also been employed by a list of notable conceptual and multi-disciplinary artists and experimental musicians. A workshop series named Mosfets Howling Dualities at the Moon is organised and presented by him. It teaches many of these practices to both new and experienced designers.

In addition to endeavours around art and music, he is an avid cook and food writer, has written a book and various magazine articles on craft beer and wine, and has won the SA Winewriter of the Year award for an article on the exemplary wine farm Lismore. He also earns a living through writing a travel journal on a number of exploits he had been involved in in the past, and maintains a number of blogs and a small, ad-hoc online radio station and music label named Watermelonradio.

His studies (sadly as yet uncompleted) have ranged from Physics and Mathematics to Astronomy, Psychology, Languages, and a post-graduate study program in Digital Arts at WITS.

Below are a number of links relating to the above:

PHI:

http://www.phi-audio.com

https://web.facebook.com/phi.highend

hAshtAgblAck.n.o.i.s.e:

https://www.instagram.com/hshtgblknoise/?hl=en

https://www.instagram.com/jacqueshvanzyl/?hl=en

https://hashtagblacknoise.bandcamp.com/

SENSA:

https://sensa-org-za.bandcamp.com/

https://www.sensa.org.za/

AOI: