#performance research

Research Stage - 

My live setup starts with the brain of the operation - Ableton as my choice of DAW on my laptop. Then running all into Ableton through USB connection, my AKAI APC Key25 (far left), Novation LaunchPad (right), Novation LaunchControl XL (top right), Native Instruments Maschine Mk3 (lower right) and finally the Pioneer DDJ-200 (far right).

The equipment that I own had already dictated a large part of how the setup would work - 2 launchpads as mobile ‘decks’, a mixer, drum machine and digital turntables suggests a Hip Hop styled performance and that is indeed what this will be. 

However, the finer details such as how each piece of equipment would be placed, assigned (as part of a logical system that can be remembered, developed and effectively used) and integrated with the rest of the equipment.

Furthermore, knowing that the musical material that I would be playing would be some of the reworked songs of the ‘Buffet Beats’ album - I started the creative process already with a pretty clear idea of how I wanted the performance to look.

Sound is incredibly important in communicating mood, meaning, and context.

Your level of awareness of the acoustic environment at any given time is an issue central to the inter-discipline of acoustic ecology, which suggests that we try to hear the acoustic environment as a musical composition and that we are responsible for its composition.

R. Murray Schafer, musician and composer, founded the concept and philosophy. He noted the incredible dominance of the visual modality in society. Eye culture reveals that children’s ability to listen is deteriorating. He argued passionately for listening skills to become an integral part of the national curriculum. He termed these listening skills “sonological competence”. Practical exercises such as listing environmental sounds that you remember hearing on a particular day revealed that many students could not recall having heard any sounds during the day and many cannot complete a five pronged sound list even after 15 minutes. The antidote to this problem was to develop a range of your cleaning exercises such as sound walks. The walking meditation has the goal of maintaining a high level of sonic awareness.

Sounds that are particularly regarded by community and it’s visitors are called “sound marks” – in analogy to landmarks. Natural examples can include waterfalls and wind traps, well cultural examples include bells or the sound of traditional activities.

The sound of a particular locality can express a communities’ identity that to the extent that the settlement can be recognized and characterized by their soundscape. Unfortunately, since the Industrial Revolution, an ever increasing number of unique soundscapes have disappeared completely into the cloud of homogenized, anonymous noise that is a contemporary city soundscape.

There is a huge contrast between pre-industrial and postindustrial acoustic environments.

The preindustrial soundscape could extend for many miles. Thus, sounds enemating from the listeners own community may be heard at a considerable distance, reinforcing a sense of space and position and maintaining a relationship with Home. The sense is further strengthened when it is possible to hear sounds ensnaring from adjacent settlements, establishing and maintaining relationships between local communities.

In a post industrial soundscape meaningful sound can be masked to such an extent that an individual’s “aural space” is reduced. Where the effect is so pronounced that an individual can no longer hear the reflected sound of their own movement or speech, aural space has effectively shrunk to include the individual, isolating the listener from the environment.

The pre-industrial soundscape is balanced in terms of level, spectra and rhythm. The post industrial soundscape features an almost constant level creating a “sound wall”, which isolates the listener from the environment. Due to the 24 hour society, the rhythms of daily routine are, in some localities, significantly eroded.

Sound is the mediator between listener and the environment.

As the soundscape deteriorates, so awareness of the subtleties of environmental sound has withered in proportion. as a result, the meaning sounds hold for the listener in contemporary soundscapes tends to be polarized into extremes, like loud and quiet, or good or bad. Compare this level of sonic awareness with the Kaluli men of Papa New Guinea who, according to Feld, can “imitate the sound of at least 100 birds, but if you can provide visual descriptive information on nearly that many.”

Networks, transmitters, and satellites extend the acoustic community across the entire planet, a fact that has been utilized for fair deeds and foul Schafer refers to latter use of sound as “sound imperialism”.

A 1966 report noted that “councils receive 300 complaints about unacceptable noise from neighbors”, and more disturbingly “over the past four years 18 people have been killed due to disputes over noisy neighbors”.

The psychological significance of sound used as a controlling force is that the environment and the community become the enemy. As with any war, the environment becomes a battleground and suffers as much as it inhabitants. Schafer estimated that the battle between sonic expression in control was helping to increase environmental sound levels annually.

The use of sound as a sound wall to block the unceasing inner dialogue and uncomfortable emotions the dialogue evinces provides illusion of mastery over emotion. The psychological and physical cost of an unexpressed emotion is an epidemic of stress related illnesses that reflect a struggle to adapt to a new way of living.

As the city represents excitement, so the countryside has come for many to represent boredom and a disconnection from life. “Life” has become associated with continuous noise and activity. Being “in touch” with the noise of opinion and technology becomes more valuable, well the quiet reality of how an individual feels can be devalued or ignored.

The pre industrial soundscape represents a deep psychological fear for anyone whose purpose is to avoid their feelings. Being quiet tends to bring emotions to the surface.

There are two ways to improve the soundscape. The first is to increase sonological competence through an education program that attempts to imbue students with an appreciation of environmental sound. This will foster a new approach to design, that will incorporate an appreciation of sound and thus reduce the wasted energy that noise represents.

-Rituals are a way to live the myth

-Masks as a vehicle for liminal travel (transmigration)

-Living beyond the metaphor

-Deep ecology: Buddhism, interconnection, the great unity, co-dependence, nature’s rights

-The mask is a door or portal to spirit, allowing movements between the veil 

-Social media as a mask. The trickster’s mask, the selfish mask. Social deviancy permissible or often conducted through mask wearing. 

Sounds that I’ve heard today:

1. Wind howling

2. Snow whipping

3. 

4. 

5. 

Sounds that I like:

1. Grease frying

2. Laughter

3. Doves cooing in the dawn light and twilight hours

4. Sounds of a meal in progress

4. The vibration of my phone when I get a text from the one I love :) aw. 

Sounds I don’t like:

1. When snow is built up in my wheel wells and shakes the car loudly

2. When men yell or get aggressive 

3. Loud chewing

4. Loved ones coughing or being otherwise ill

5. Squeaky shoes on tile floors

6. Off tune humming or singing 

-Work in sonological competence 

-Acoustic coloration

-The spectral niche

-Environmental dance is concerned with the human body’s relationship to the landscape and environment, including the other-than-human world of aniamls and plants.

-Type 1: Site-specific dance workss that are improvised at or choreographed for, particular locations. 

-Type 2: Dance theatre works for the stage that mediate some aspect of the natural world or qualities of a particular place

-Type 3: Somatic education, dance training, and movement reserach that occur either wholly or partially outside of the studio. 

-In terms of the 3rd type, environmental dance should deepen appreciation of natural world, but also generate new ecological knowledge and explore environmental values. 

-Discussions of environmental ethics are not a luxury. 

-Sustainability is a reductive notion that grows out of an egoist tradition since it emphasizes the continued meeting of our present needs rather than those of the planet as a whole.

-Environmental dance enables those who do it, and arguably those who witness it, to perceive values in nature by disclosing our being as a part of nature (by exploring human kin aesthetic consciousness of non-human nature). 

-To return things to themselves enables a return to primal unity. 

-The dance should allow more than an intraworldly experience. If some approaches reduce the environment to a ready-to-hand posession (agriculture), then the dance should be an enjoyment of and an open-handed non-possessiveness towards the environment. 

-Open-handedness can be seen in the commitment to repetition and the awareness of such; should bring a constant attentiveness and loyalty to all things and relationships, even the humblest and last spectacular.

-Encourages a paradigm shift: no pretense of purity, just connectedness and chiasmatic intertwining. 

-The dancing body develops into a symptom of the landscape (bodyscape or body topography).

-Environmental dance offers liminology: knowledge of the boundaries of thinghood, and the way in which those boundaries are breached in the lived experience of place. One does not begin and the other ends, the human skin can be like a pond surface or forest soil, not a shell so much as a delicate interpretation. Person and the environment are continuous. 

The piece activates the space in a mixture of performance, choreography, sculpture, and installation, reflecting on the notion of presence and how we relate to our surrounding spaces.

The work This is not about dance. This is not about movement. This is not about performance. will be presented at Reid Gallery as part of Whereabouts you are?, an exhibition by 10 PhD researchers at Glasgow School of Art. You are welcome to drop in and out any time. Please note, some of the performances will be filmed or photographed. See you there!

28th of October

3:00 – 3:25pm

3:40 – 4:05pm

3rd of November

2:15 – 2:40pm

2:50 – 3:15pm

3:30 – 3:55pm

Performed by: Madeleine Virginia Brown, Rowan Flint, Nikki Kane, Monika Smekot, and Donata Vezzato

Photo credit: Lucas Kao

With special thanks to: Melissa Geraghty, Eszter Biró, and Lucas Kao

Whereabouts you are? A group show curated by Allyson Keehan, with guest curator Viviana Checchia, Reid Gallery 

Glasgow School of Art (164 Renfrew Street, Glasgow, G3 6RF)