Symposium Program

• Papers
• Abstracts

May 12, 9:30am-6pm
ARTS Building, Performance Lab

9:30-10:00
How Musical Were the Neandertals? Call for an Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Sang Hee Lee (UC Riverside Department of Anthropology)

10:00-10:30
The Interrelationship of Sound and Video as an Aesthetic Experience
Marsia Alexander_Clarke (video artist, Riverside, California)

10:30-11:00
The Cologne/New York Sound Environment
John McGuire (composer, New York)

11:00-11:15
Break

11:15-11:45
Hearing the Silent World
Lawrence D. Rosenblum (UC Riverside Department of Psychology)

11:45-12:15
The polyphonic environment: sound as autopoietic system
Paulo C. Chagas (Symposium chair, UC Riverside Department of Music)

12:15-2:00
Lunch

2:00-2:30
Where Sound, Technology and Environment Meet: Acoustic Communication and Soundscape Composition
Barry Truax ( Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia)

2:30-3:00
Tapping into the Internet as an Acoustical / Musical Medium
Chris Chafe (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, Stanford University)

3:00- 3:30
The Personalization of Sound, Environments & Performance
Michael Acorn (Sonic Art Research Centre, Queens University, Belfast, North Ireland)

3:30-3:45
Break

3:45-4:15
Research Reports for the Ears: Soundscape Art in Scientific Presentations
Jim Cummings (Acoustic Ecology Institute, Albuquerque, New Mexico)

4:15-4:45
Ninety Seconds with Charles Dodge
Miller Puckette (Center for Research in Computing and the Arts, UC San Diego)

4:45-5:15
Ethnomusicology and the Study of Small Sound
René T. Lysloff (Symposium co-chair, UC Riverside Department of Music)

5:15-5:30
Break

5:30-6:00
Open discussion

Papers

The control and personalisation of sound, environments and performance
Michael Alcorn (Sonic Art Research Centre, Queens University, Belfast, North Ireland)

The Interrelationship of Sound and Video as an Aesthetic Experience
Marsia Alexander-Clarke (video artist, Riverside, California)

Tapping into the Internet as an Acoustical / Musical Medium
Chris Chafe (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, Stanford University)

The polyphonic environment: sound as autopoietic system
Paulo C. Chagas (Symposium chair, UC Riverside Department of Music)

Research Reports for the Ears: Soundscape Art in Scientific Presentations
Jim Cummings (Acoustic Ecology Institute, Albuquerque, New Mexico)

How Musical Were the Neandertals? Call for an Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Sang-Hee Lee (UC Riverside Department of Anthropology)

Ethnomusicology and the Study of Small Sound
René T. Lysloff (Symposium co-chair, UC Riverside Department of Music)

The Cologne / New York Sound Environment
John McGuire (composer, New York)

Ninety Seconds with Charles Dodge
Miller Puckette (Center for Research in Computing and the Arts, UC San Diego)

Hearing the Silent World
Lawrence D. Rosenblum (UC Riverside Department of Psychology)

Where Sound, Technology and Environment Meet: Acoustic Communication and Soundscape Composition
Barry Truax (Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia)

Abstracts

The control and personalisation of sound, environments and performance
Michael Alcorn

One of the most striking developments in new media in recent years has been our ability to parameterize, control and personalise artistic environments. This has had wide-ranging implications for the creation, delivery and reception of music and our interaction with artistic practice and performance in general. Through a series of examples of work underway at SARC, this paper will explore some of the keys issues in the control and personalisation of sound, environments and performance.

The Interrelationship of Sound and Video as an Aesthetic Experience
Marsia Alexander-Clarke

How does sound impact video or vice-versa?  Can they compliment each other or are they a distraction one from the other? Can they create something larger together than individually?  Can found sound be molded into compositions of pleasurable interest or do they ultimately remain just noise?  Three short videos (2 minutes each) will be presented: one completed video with no sound, a second unresolved video which experiments with pedestrian sound and a third video with a possible resolution of the second video. The floor will then be opened for discussion.

Tapping into the Internet as an Acoustical / Musical Medium
Chris Chafe

Recent work in network audio transport transforms advanced networks into a new kind of acoustical medium in which sound waves propagate as if traveling through air, water, or solids. Waves sent through the medium are reflected or altered as they bounce between hosts. Propagation delays are used to create echo chambers and build the resonances for "distributed musical instruments." As a side-effect, tones created by network resonances can be used to monitor the quality of the underlying network.

The presentation presents three areas of research:

1. auditory methods for monitoring QoS, especially for networks supporting real-time, interactive, bidirectional flowsremote musical collaboration using professional-quality, low-latency audio
2. empirical study of human factors affected by some unique acoustical properties of the medium

Network latency, jitter and delay asymmetry affect the speed of sound and are never uniform. By creating distributed virtual sound objects like instruments and rooms and by studying distributed ensembles, we can begin to understand this new sound world. Some effects have been measured empirically and the results contain some surprises. For example, latencies can be low enough that musicians at opposite ends of a path are essentially in the same room, and echo cancellation becomes unnecessary. Multi-channel "echo construction" can be designed to enrich the experience. For audio use, the new territory that is opening is unlike any previous telecommunications medium.

The polyphonic environment: sound as autopoietic system
Paulo C. Chagas

Based on Niklas Luhmann’s distinction between perception and communication, polyphony can be defined as the mode of operation of consciousness that gives form to simultaneous perception of the acoustic environment. This form of this operation is defined as sound, which is the difference between self-reference (internal world) and hetero-reference (external world) in acoustic perception. This definition of sound implies also that consciousness must establish a differential relationship to the environment in order to delimit the boundaries of sound itself. These boundaries are represented through distinctions such as between sound and not-sound, or between sound and silence, or between sound and noise. However, those boundaries are not derived from any quality of the sonic vibrations in themselves, but remain internal operations of the system.

This paper examines sounds as a virtual form of polyphony based both on the understood possibilities of hearing and on the structures of the social system that creates meaning through sounds. Sound is also the basic distinctive element of the medium of language, and language is the main medium of communication, which is the basis of the autopoiesis of social systems. The definition of sound is thus the particular embodiment based on our possibilities of perceiving acoustic vibrations as meaningful elements. Our sonic experience is shaped by the definition of sound in the social system.

Research Reports for the Ears: Soundscape Art in Scientific Presentations
Jim Cummings

Contrary to common and intuitive sense, scientific research into such fields as bioacoustics and the anthropology of sound is generally presented to the academic community and public in the same form as used for all other fields of study: long papers full of words, in particular, words about sound and listening.  The Acoustic Ecology Institute has initiated a program aimed at highlighting the work of researchers who are exploring ways to use creative soundscape composition as a means of sharing their findings with peers and the public.  Featured in this presentation will be soundscape compositions by David Dunn, who’s been studying the acoustic behavior of bark beetles in pinyon pine forests, and Steve Feld, who spent 25 years studying the relationships between forest sound and the musics of the Bosavi people in Papua New Guinea, and has more recently been investigating the rolls of bells in European, African, and Asian societies.

How Musical Were the Neandertals? Call for an Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Sang-Hee Lee

Origins of music have been a captivating yet elusive topic.  Inevitably interdisciplinary in nature, this quest has resulted in a body of literature from a wide range of fields, from evolutionary psychology to ornithology.  In studies of human evolution, many researchers use fossils and archaeological artifacts to attribute the origin of music to Neandertals.  However, except for the “Neandertal flute”, most evidence tends to be vague and indirect at best.  Perhaps the “how and why” of this event needs a hypothesis involving more than a single field.  This paper proposes that cave-dwelling environment was a necessary condition for the development of music and calls for an interdisciplinary collaboration to examine origins of music in human evolution.

Ethnomusicology and the Study of Small Sound
René T.A. Lysloff

Practically from its inception, the field of ethnomusicology has been closely associated with technology.  And, since its inception, ethnomusicology has been concerned with the cultural significance of expressive sound and musical behavior. 

By “small sound,” I am referring those brief bits of sound captured through audio technologies, circulated throughout the world as commoditized objects, and recycled as creative grist for digital musical performance.  The sound samples that are now the basic building blocks of so much electronic music are hardly regarded as worthy of study by ethnomusicologists, scholars concerned with the loftier job of salvaging entire music traditions.  Nevertheless, it is crucial for ethnomusicologists and all of us that make and listen to music (in the broadest sense of the term) to learn how even brief sounds are rooted in time and place, and how these sounds are assigned meaning as they circulate throughout the globe.  How do we try to understand the meanings of sound samples?  When we listen to a moment of recorded sound, do we all “hear” the same thing?  Does a sound sample have intrinsic meaning?  Does that sound mean the same thing to all listeners?  For example, what kinds of meaning are conjured up when we hear the first few seconds of the Islamic call to prayer?  Does such a sample mean the same thing to Christians and it does to Moslems?  How has that meaning changed in the years that follow 9/11?  Should meaning even matter to us?

Further, it is important for all of us to consider the socio-political implications of consuming digitized sound samples from other parts of the world.  Many non-Western musical sounds have become familiar to us, such as the long sustained tones of the Indian sitar.  But, while such tones might be ubiquitous, most people know little about them.  Does it matter whether listeners know anything about this instrument?  And, if listeners know nothing about North Indian traditional music, what do such samples mean to composers, performers, and listeners?  Most important, should we even care about the origins of such samples?

The Cologne/New York Sound Environment
John McGuire

John McGuire will describe his piece A CAPPELLA for Soprano and Playback and its realization at the Studio for Electronic Music, West German Radio, 1995-1997.

Ninety Seconds with Charles Dodge
Miller Puckette

A classic piece of computer music by Charles Dodge (Speech Songs, from 1972) is studied by making an approximate regeneration using a recently developed vocal synthesis technique (phase-bashed packet synthesis), and using a graphical score notation adapted to the specific needs of the piece.  This is intended not as an improvement on the original, but rather a study aid, and also to test the generality of modern methods. The result, along with several other studies and pieces of music, is available as part of the Pd Repertory Project.

Hearing the Silent World
Lawrence D. Rosenblum

Most research on human auditory perception has examined how we recognize and localize things that make sound. However, humans are also sensitive to properties of objects that are themselves silent, but act to reflect and obstruct sound. We have initiated a research program to examine the degree to which listeners can perceive properties of silent, sound-structuring objects. Initial evidence has revealed impressive sensitivity to many of these properties. Specifically, our (sighted) listeners have shown some ability to: a) echolocate the position of a board,  b) determine the location and general shape of sound-obstructing panels; and c) identify rooms based on how they structure emitted sounds. These results indicate that listeners are sensitive to ambient, as well as emitted acoustic properties, and call for a revised conception of human audition that takes into account these sensitivities.

Where Sound, Technology and Environment Meet: Acoustic Communication and Soundscape Composition
Barry Truax

For over 35 years, researchers and composers at Simon Fraser University have documented and studied acoustic environments, with particular emphasis on the way in which sound establishes relationships between listeners and their soundscapes. Throughout the 20th century, audio technology steadily changed those relationships by affecting both the soundscape and listeners, as well as the way in which sound can be represented, exchanged, designed and marketed. A general pattern that can be observed with the impact of this technology is a simultaneous extension and degradation of the soundscape and listening habits. The current practices of sound recording and studio manipulation have allowed soundscape researchers to create a range of approaches to their material, from documentary or “phonographic” presentations through to what is generally called “soundscape composition”. The multi-channel format of these compositions presents a particularly compelling immersive experience for listeners, both for realistic and imaginary soundscapes. This paper will give a survey of work in this area, and include sound excerpts illustrating a variety of approaches and techniques.