Audrey is an amazing artist who specialises in the use of her own voice to create different sounds and textures, she often accompany her vocals with modular synthesisers or string instruments. Originally from the US she is now living in Berlin, place where she has been able to develop a higher growth along her artistic career.

She has been at UAL this week to present the Sound Art Lecture series, two special master classes and also performances at venues like Cafe OTO. She has also been playing around the world, Paris, Berlin or New York. On her two masterclasses given in the college she focused on improvisation, collective and solo and the student were able to improve some abilities within this field.

Being also a family person, and talking about the pros and cons of having kids on the life of a touring artist, she also informed us about other topics like artist related funding or benefits and obviously music management and gigs. This was a really valuable experience and an inspiring lecture from this guest artist.

This was a very interesting lecture from Professor Cathy Lane, she is an academic and the director of Crisap (Creative Research Into Sound Arts Practice) at UAL. She describes herself as an investigator, and her work often features spoken word, field recordings and electronic sounds.

The lecture starts with the listening of “Am I here?” a lovely twenty minutes piece which includes field recordings and speeches in French, English and Spanish; the composition is very well structured and it make us travel to different scenarios with the use of field recordings.

Another work of great importance during her career is “The Hebrides Suite”, on this project she focused on recording the sonic environment of these Scottish islands, a very peculiar area of the United Kingdom, where more that eighty per cent of the population speaks Scottish Gaelic.

She also showed us more works like the Square Peg Round Hole or experimentations with the International Phonetic Alphabet. This lecture was extremely useful, Cathy is an experienced sound artist and her presentation was really inspiring.

We attended to a very interesting lecture by Derek Baron, a musician and sound artist highly experienced and fully focus on his work, always evolving and finding new inspirations in sound composition. He is a member of the University of New York, city where he resides too and where he runs the majority of his artistic practice.

Amongst his multiple works, I’d like to highlight his installations at a planetarium, where he plays long recordings and music compositions, some of them based on cassette recordings from his young ages. Derek is also influenced by conventional visual art and artists from very diverse fields like impressionism, baroque or cartoons and that becomes a source of inspiration within his musical workflow. His main instrument is the piano, he explained about how this instrument was very important for him as a stress relief during the Covid-19 pandemic, this leaded him to write an album during this time.

Create a blog post from your notes gathered during the workshop:

This is a hard field of study where we could yet find many issues, it is also difficult to define but from an educational point of view this is a subject where when can reflect about what was taken to indigenous cultures during the colonisation, and how could we return in some way the culture stolen during that invasions.

In terms of “musical” decolonisation there are many artist whose are trying to claim that cultural legacy through their artistic practice, but in particular we’ve focused the attention to George E Lewis, an afro-american musician and philosopher who has dedicated much of his work to fusion western and African sounds during his career; we have also seen him performing on a video, he follows an opera singer with a digital setup and the composition flows smoothly.

We’ve also seen some plugins made with Max for Live and we tried them on Ableton, these instruments were called Sufi and Apotome, and they try to emulate non western sounds and scales. This was an interesting experience and we also found that there is a community behind programming non-western sounding instruments, something that claims more presence of minorities in electronic music and sound art too.

Post your autoethnography to your blog and write a paragraph or two about what you have discovered in the process – about yourself as a practitioner/researcher, about the space you have chosen to document, about listening, etc.

Ethnography – The Canteen

The murmuring of the attendants to a restaurant or bar is very characteristic, it features a tone of joy which is very distinctive, and this fun environment is rapidly filtered by our brains in the form of happiness and excitement; alternatively the smell to food is the right candidate to follow this sensation, bringing the feeling of joy from our nose to brain and down to the stomach passing through the mouth and throat as the natural pleasure of an intake of food and drink will follow up next.

Another sound that came to my ears was the cutlery clinking with the plates and other similar sounds coming from the kitchen; these sounds complete the murmurs to create that special combination which is composing one of the most recognisable sonic environments and ambiances of our lives as modern humans, the sound of a restaurant. Personally this is a sensation which evokes me a pleasant feeling, it’s worth to mention that this could be also seasoned with music where we could find a whole new range of combinations and situations to talk about.

Post your critical methodology to your blog, and write a paragraph or two about your process of developing this:

When I listen and (probably) see a piece of sound art or music I normally tend to analyse it through a couple of aspects relating its root. First I’d normally go to genre, what’s its style and the cultural context around it. What kind of elements make it distinctive of this specific genre? Is it recognisable by its sonic composition? Or is there a message on it like specific lyrics or instruments? These kind of elements would help to identify a piece of music within a genre and that would straight away give us a path to follow and more information about it.

Some other aspects to critically analyse could be the nature of the artist, his cultural background and why is he or she composing this piece. The quality of the recording or performance is another important aspect when analysing sound, the equipment used, equalisation and rhythm. If we’re talking about sound sculptures or installations we also could speak about the materials involved, its dynamism or the sonics related to it. It’s important to take into account the subjective a personal point of view, your individual taste is always important in terms of critics.

Create a blog post in which you list the research sources that you have gathered and any interesting quotes you might have found in the process:

Soundscape:

“Today’s city dweller is bombarded by a continuous stream of invisible but highly attention demanding sounds smells and micro-climates” Southworth, Michael (1969) The Sonic Environment of Cities

Ambience:

“From the most ancient times background music has soothed us one minute and tormented us the next” Lanza, Joseph (2004). Elevator music: A surreal history of Muzak, Easy-listening and other moodsong

Soundbath:

“Sound baths allow you to completely immerse yourself in the experience of healing vibrations. As you listen to the music, your body relaxes, your mind lets go of thoughts and you enter into a deep a state of calm.” Burgin, Timothy (2022) Sound Baths: Definition, Benefits and 12 tips to prepare

Refer to some of the material shared in class or found in the research resources on Moodle. Reflect on how these practices relate to notions of global/contemporary culture or to sonic practices that you know through your own experience.

Global culture has been highly influential on the development of contemporary music, sound art and electronic music, this influence goes further than the pure sonic body of these practices, but also alters the way we think, wear and political ideologies related with music and art.

Tribal cultures for example, have always put a great effort on relating their lives around music, strong rooted rituals and traditions that have never been away of music and sound compositions for their creation. If we think on tribal cultures as some form of basic evolution of the human being, we’ll find a strong connection with the western world and the more socially and technologically advanced cultures, and therefore this has been influential in the music that we can consume these days, in fact, are many the scholars and musicologist who think that electronic music and for instance other genres like blues or jazz could have had their roots in tribal music and its connection with the western culture through colonialism.

Asia is another influential culture in terms of music and sound, the eastern societies have always had a nearly scientific vision of the sonic environment and they also have very rooted on the historical development of art the implementation of instruments, sounds and melodies in their traditions. The constant evolution of technology of asian countries has also consistently contributed to the history of modern art with sound for film, video games and electronic music devices.