[Saturday @ 1:45pm – 2:45pm, Room 4]
Joseph Auner
“Feedback as Interface”
Abstract
Dealing with feedback’s echoes, strange resonances, and annoying howls used to be a matter for sound engineers and musicians, but in the age of Zoom corralling what is usually a disruptive and embarrassing intrusion has become everyone’s problem. This paper argues that both the transgressive impact of feedback, as well as its potential as a creative resource as evidenced in styles ranging from Hendix and Santana to Japanoise and Jamaican Dub, can be attributed to the ways it forces us to become aware of and engage with networks of devices–microphones, amplifiers, speakers, recorders–with all their affordances and quirks. It is as if an assemblage of tools, designed to serve silently in the background, suddenly wakes up and finds its own voice, replacing whatever sounds we wanted to amplify with the sound of the system itself. Crucially this system includes the specific space and configuration of devices as well; and we too also shape the sound with our sound absorbing bodies. In reference to works of electro-acoustic music and sound art by Oliveros, Reich, Kirkegaard, and others, I argue that in manipulating controls and attempting to manage the distinctive sonic qualities of feedback, the sound itself serves as an interface that gives us access to the machineries of the complete system.
That this sonic interface is inherently liminal, obstinate, and playfully unworkable, resonates with composer Robert Ashley’s description of feedback as “the only sound that is intrinsic to electronic music,” pointing to its character as “both abundantly available and difficult to control.” But the concept of feedback is similarly both ubiquitous and occluded. While it has been described by Katherine Hayles as the dominant metaphor of our time, the term is strangely invisible, signaled by its absence from the indices of many books on music technology and sound studies, including those where feedback is a central topic. And yet attention to the specific and non-metaphorical emergence of the term a century ago, in writings about electrical circuits where a current literally “feeds back” through a wire, can open up ways of understanding the reflexive networks of sounds, humans, and technologies we inhabitin which all the nodes in the network become permeable, interconnected, and mutually affecting. The experience of feedback as interface can transform in turn our conceptions of the creative process, the work, and ourselves and our environment.
Biography
Joseph Auner, Austin Fletcher Professor of Music, Dean of University College, Tufts University. His research and teaching focus on Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School, Weimar Berlin, music and technologies, and sound studies. Publications include, “Learning from Contemporary Music,” “Schoenberg as Sound Student: Pierrot’s Klang,” “The Stopped Clock: Tape Loops, Synthesizers, and the Transfiguration of Harmony,” “Reich on Tape: The Performance of Violin Phase,” “Weighing, Measuring, Embalming Tonality,” “Wanted Dead and Alive: Historical Performance Practice and Electro-Acoustic Music from Abbey Road to IRCAM,” and Music in the 20th– and 21st Centuries Vol. 6. Western Music in Context: A Norton History.
Richard Beaudoin
“Wax Cylinder Music: Surface Noise as Fluttering Wings in Anna Krushelnytska’s Ukrainian Lament”
Abstract
It is customary to listen past—or listen through—the surface noise produced by early recording and playback machines. The fierce swish that they impart is generally considered separate from the music being recorded. As part of a forthcoming monograph in the Oxford Studies in Music Theory series, I listen with surface noise, paying close attention to the synchrony and asynchrony between the hissing cycles and the meter of the piece being recorded. My methodology—called inclusive track analysis (ITA)—accepts the totality of audible events on a given recording, no matter their origin. This mode of inquiry disrupts the hegemony of notated scores and investigates tracks as they are. It recognizes wax cylinders as expressive musical instruments that often operate beyond the control of composers, performers, and sound engineers.
ITA identifies six modes of expressive interaction between surface noise and the recorded performance. One of these—metaphoric development—occurs when the hissing patterns on a vocal track reflect the content of the lyric. An exemplar of metaphoric development is Anna Krushelnytska’s June 1904 recording of Mykola Lysenko’s “Z moho tiazhkoho sumu.” Lysenko’s lament sets Maksym Slavynskyi’s Ukrainian translation of Heinrich Heine’s poem “Aus meinen grossen Schmerzen” (“From my great sorrows”). The subject of the poem—the fluttering wings the narrator attaches to her songs—is imitated by the hissing swishes that blanket Krushelnytska’s recording. Far from being constant, the cylinder’s 145 surface noise cycles undergo a four-stage evolution that mimics the sound of beating wings. In this recording—which owes creative debts to Heine, Slavynskyi, Lysenko, Krushelnytska, her anonymous piano accompanist, and the wax cylinder itself—the avian word-painting is ‘sung’ by the cylinder.
Biography
Richard Beaudoin analyses audio recordings, using his research to produce scholarship and compose new music. His monograph on the unwritten music in classical recordings—Sounds as They Are—is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. His research has been published in Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Online, Journal of the Society for American Music, and Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. His music has been commissioned by Claire Chase, Dashon Burton, Annette Dasch, Estelí Gomez, Roomful of Teeth, Boston Lyric Opera, and the Staatstheater Kassel. He is Assistant Professor of Music at Dartmouth College.