Sandpit 2 JISC, Imperial College London, July 14th 2015

Sound Matters applied today for funding the Phase 2 of the project. If the bid is successful, we expect to develop a prototype connecting the latest grassroots technologies for the processes of Relational Playback and Interrogation in the framework, according to specifications that will be created by the Sound Matters community together with developers.

We want to have a listening-led environment with a friendly and free modular system that enables researchers working creatively with field recordings and speech to create listening experiences for a diversity of audiences and render these experiences in a diversity of interfaces.

Details of this and other projects funded by JISC are being published on the new wiki page of Research Data Spring:

Wiki for Sound Matters

Wiki for all projects

Fingers crossed!

Thanks to all participants!

Sound Matters Framework team

From these sounds he created an installation in 2010 in the lifts of London College of Communication, during a Research Fellowship at CRiSAP. He re-uses many of these sounds also for film and theatre plays.

Since 2003 he has been collaborating with Moushumi Bhowmik, in The Travelling Archive , a sound project that collects memories around Bengali culture, its connections and transformations through the memories of music, but it goes beyond music involving the Bangla language and many other elements associated to this culture. The archive is ‘travelling’ because it goes to people to experience it, searches for people, as opposed to the traditional way of people going to the archive:

When people listen to the archive, the story expands, as they bring more elements to it.  The purpose of the project is to go beyond the known history of traditional perceptions of Bengali culture, for example, in East London.  In that way a new landscape can be created through the connections between memories of people:

The Travelling Archive opens as an installation to the public in Rich Mix, London June 22^nd to July 5^th , a great opportunity to find connections with Bengali culture as well as with stories of people who live in and between multiple homes.

Within the Sound Matters framework, he finds interesting the possibility of having ‘sonic memories’ as search criteria, that goes beyond the search for a particular sound, but that facilitates an encounter and a connection with links between scattered memories:

 
Do you identify with Sukanta’s experience, research and ways of looking at an archive?

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To interweave these materials he used algorithmic techniques in the visual programming software Max/MSP, which helped him to convey his satiric intention of revealing the impossibility of choice that surrounds us politically and in everyday narratives as we interact with technology. He also folded in commercial radio adverts, and a meaningful phrase from American political discourse:

Ron explains technically how the installation worked and how he controlled the different banks of sound:

 
Fragments of speech were chosen to highlight various subtexts within the original recordings, which, as a semi-determinate layer, were combined with a completely indeterminate layer of sound within the algorithmic process.

 
The eight-channel installation was eventually rendered into a binaural recording for wider dissemination, which does not necessarily offer the same spatial dimension of the 8-channel piece, but does offer an approximation. Listen to “Let Freedom Ring” here.

Within the Sound Matters framework, he finds all the components to be integrated. For him the process of ‘Relational Playback’ is especially compositional. He imagines an interface that searches semi-randomly within multiple archives, using some kind of filtering. He says it’s like walking into a library with bits and pieces of material being thrown up to grab people’s attention, and enabling them to stop and dig deeper at any point, to listen to one as a departure for discovery.

 
Do you identify with Ron’s practice, research and technical development and ideas?

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Reflecting on this experience, he thinks that more sophisticated ways of archiving this material will be beneficial, as the material will reside in the local community museum, and can be re-used by them. Accessibility and ownership are important within the collaborative process:

After being in Brazil he created two works: one piece broadcast on Resonance FM Rio: An Outsider, Inside, and a video piece, Carioca Sound Stories:

As a single author, re-visiting the recordings, he was struggling with what the sound could say to others, and how the voices of others will be represented. This process provoked him to look for questions rather than answers. He is re-using his own recorded material that derives from a collaborative experience:

Regarding use and re-use of sound he is interested in different levels of ownership of the material: thinking too much about copyrights and public and private ownership, can generate from his perspective, a creative paralysis. For him it is important to define the role of the field recordist and composer in the first instance, to free the recordings and to achieve all the creative research learning through doing:

Do you identify with Tullis’ practice, research and technical needs working participatory projects with field recordings?

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Tom also makes radio programmes, most recently Govindpuri Sound for the BBC World Service. This programme was produced in collaboration with urban researcher Dr. Tripta Chandola and was informed by her PhD research. It explored the sonic environment of a settlement known as ‘the slums of Govindpuri’ in Delhi, India. Recalling its production he reflects on the value the sound recordist gives to the material and also the value that others might add:

When he records interviews Tom is aware of the sonic space in which people are responding to his questions. In this respect, the differentiation between field recording and speech is complex, as in his work voices and ambient sounds are closely intertwined. He feels this represents a challenge when it comes to labelling recordings:

Another realisation from the Govindpuri Sound project was that he and Tripta had unintentionally and rather suddenly created a sound archive and he wonders about the future of this recorded material:

When searching for recordings made by others, Tom finds it easiest to search online and finds people usually provide useful tags. Looking for material to include in the Govindpuri Sound programme he found a rich archive of street criers in India collected by the artist Rashmi Kaleka:

He also imagines that a good way to find sounds would be to reach out to, or search within, the community of researchers and artists, tracing specific research interests. e.g. underground transport systems, sounds in hospitals or wildlife recordings. Searching this way creates scope to forge relationships with researchers, to deepen ones knowledge about the recordings and to develop new ideas for how the materials might be re-used.

For Tom, the organisation of recordings in an indexical form demands ‘open mindedness’ and an awareness of the different types of value or meaning a recording might hold. He wonders how computers would cope with or create this kind of open-mindedness. Within the framework, he feels ‘search and retrieval’ criteria for an extensive archive and database are the most important things to explore, followed by facilities to allow relational playback:

Do you identify with Tom’s needs? What are your own experiences, issues and needs when working with speech, field recordings and archives?

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In the first part of her creative research process for making a new work she engages online and archival research, not necessarily sonic, through which she immerses herself in a particular context. This material is the basis for collecting recordings, which she will then work with creatively. When going through the collected material in a limited time, she finds it challenging to find all the material that she would like to use for her compositional purposes, both in her personal archive, and also when researching through sonic archives:

She would like to have dedicated software tools to compare acoustic and aesthetic qualities of environmental recordings and speech. To this end she has developed software called Deja vú ( working with programmer Oliver Bown) which finds matches between different sonic materials according to a variety of rhythmic qualities and frequency profile. She would like to develop more refined software which could also help find matches more accurately in large files of spoken word material ( maybe based on speech to text software). Cathy has created two major installations (both working with Nye Parry)  that exemplify her approach to memory and composition: The Memory Machine, an interactive installation which used random juxtapositions of speech that audiences left as reminiscences triggered by objects on display at the British Museum; and Beam, an installation that used data from the coming and goings around the port of Kochi in South India as parameters to trigger sounds associated with maritime life and the spice trade in the area:

The recordings were collected in a project with art students from Bangalore  and categorized according to overall themes. She reflects on the challenge of balancing documentary material and aesthetics, and she thinks that the process of recording and labelling needs more time to develop shared sonic sensibilities when working in a collaborative manner. Regarding the framework she thinks that the focus for her is on the relational playback, as it is where aesthetics can be developed and achieved by listening and developing sensibilities to the material, which is the only thing that a computer cannot learn.

Do you identify with Cathy’s needs? What are your own experiences, issues and needs when working with spoken word, field recordings and archives?

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Regarding collection of data, she struggles with the generalised surveillance culture, and the degree of cultural and technological mediations that a material can have. Following this, she has an anti-canonical perspective on archives and as a response she questions what is missing from them:

She reflects on the Internet as an archive, whose interfaces for sound need to be re-thought, to work for us from a critical perspective:

Within the Sound Matters Framework, she thinks relational playback is the most fundamental process and she is interested in ‘jamming’ the reality of archives focusing on the relationships between people and archival artifacts, possibly through mediated interfaces such as telematic technologies:

These could bridge divides, for making connections, and for ‘undoing’ traditional processes of interrogation of data.

Do you identify with Holly’s thoughts? What are your own experiences, issues and needs when working with archives and the use of sound?

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Sound Matters Framework in Mural.ly. Click on the image to view the framework.

The Sound Matters Framework is in development!

The framework illustrates a process, which involves methods, audiences, artworks and technologies already drawn from a number of sources. Sound Matters’ main objective is to create interfaces and software tools that facilitate and stimulate creative research processes for using field recordings and speech. These tools and interfaces are part of a whole system, the framework; this also includes sound files wherever they are housed (hard drive, Internet, sound archives, live streaming via the Internet or radio), and also non-sonic databases.

Our aim is that these shared interfaces and software tools will eventually facilitate and stimulate creative experiences for many disciplines (eg. history, sound art, geography, anthropology, archive studies, curation, creative computing, memory studies, visual arts), through a shared listening-led framework, specifically for new approaches to making, and re-making of cultural memory through sound and technology. This will open up field recording and speech sounds to new and, as yet, unimagined uses!

If you would like to contribute contact us on X.Alarcon[at]lcc.arts.ac.uk to receive instructions.

Thanks!

She also created a sound piece commissioned by the Reina Sofía Museum where she explored the narrative role indexical traces of sound can play. Listen to the piece via this link.

She participated in David Toop’s Archive Breathing series at Central Saint Martins with a performance where people made a paper record of the event and donated it to an ‘archive’ by crossing a line on the floor which represented ´the archival threshold´. This was a whimsical way of making explicit the moment in which a document becomes historical:

For her, working with sound is mainly about listening and she mentions “Sonic Meditations” by Pauline Oliveros (1977) and “A Sound Education: 100 Exercises in Listening and Soundmaking” by R Murray Schafer (1992) as two key references.

She is currently writing her Masters thesis at University College London on copyright for sound recordings with a focus on the 2014 exceptions on the Copyright Act for libraries, archives and museums.

Within the Sound Matters framework, she believes that all the outlined elements are connected and necessary to promote a culture of listening. She imagines the creation of a technical tool that will help her find the sounds she wants to find more easily, using very personal and subjective, nonverbal descriptions.

Do you identify with Andrea’s practices and issues? What are your own experiences, issues and needs when working with sound in this framework?

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