Students of this course may try their hand at their own sound interventions and musical compositions, or simply focus on learning more about diverse musical traditions, sonic experimentation, and acoustic phenomena in everyday life. Designed by artist and Duke professor, Pedro Lasch, and UdK composer Mathias Hinke, this course is also co-taught by scholar and musician Jace Clayton (DJ Rupture) and curator Candice Hopkins (Documenta 14). The lectures link major artistic developments of recent decades to wider ideas about sound in specific social and spatial contexts. Also included are guest presentations from key thinkers and practitioners, like: Christopher DeLaurenti, Jen Delos Reyes, Tina Haver Currin, Quran Karriem, Christina Kubisch, Thomas Kusitzky, Scott Lindroth, Mark Anthony Neal, Bill Seaman, and John Supko. As the ‘ART of the MOOC’ title implies, learners and participants are encouraged to treat the MOOC itself as a public art medium. This happens mostly through the course’s optional practical components, local project productions, global exchanges, and critical feedback. While no prior sound production or musical experience is required, projects also offer challenging options for advanced learners. For other course offerings or language versions in this series, just search 'ART of the MOOC' in the Coursera catalog.
Sound of the Net, Plunderphonics & Brain Opera
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From the course by Duke University
Art of the MOOC: Experiments with Sound
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From the lesson
LISTENING AS PRACTICE, GLOBAL FORMS & THE SOUND OF THE NET
This lesson provides an overview of the methods and ideas from different schools of listening. It also presents a critical examination of the term ‘world music’ and how it has evolved in relation to economic and cultural globalization. With this global perspective in mind, the concluding portions of our lectures are dedicated to acoustic experience and musical experimentation on the net, the radio, cellular networks, and various social media, including all of the glitches, accidents, and failures we associate with these platforms.
Meet the Instructors
Pedro LaschVisual Artist and Associate Research Professor
Duke Art, Art History & Visual Studies
Candice HopkinsDocumenta 14 Curator, Producer, and Author
Jace ClaytonComposer, DJ, Author, and Lecturer
Mathias HinkeComposer, Researcher, and Professor University of the Arts (UdK) - Berlin
[NOISE]
>> This week we'll be talking about the Sound of the Net.
And we're going to be doing so, asking ourselves two very important questions.
What is it that we can consider the shadow sound of the Net to be,
or maybe what is what we can do with it artistically?
Since the Internet doesn't provide any physical material
to work with to make sound, so
we have to think about what are those elements that could help us be creative.
And for that, I would like to introduce a couple of them,
they are Glitches, Jitter, Feedback and Latency,
things that have been also described by very famous Kim Cascone, was a writer.
>> Yeah, in fact, Cascone, as a composer and
an electronic musician, he also publishes, and
he wrote a very influential text about, called The Aesthetics of Failure.
And particularly in this area of Net music, or Net sound,
failure has become a great source of inspiration for musicians like Cascone,
because the most interesting things often happen by accident, right?
So the question is like, how can those emerging things,
that were not planned, become the very source and material for
new art forms that would be unthinkable, without the medium of the Net.
>> We tend to get used to the speed of the Net,
according to where you live in the world, to be as a given.
But in the 80s, that was not the case at all.
So, it was of course very easy to share ideas with the Net over lists and text.
But once you wanted to share a file of sound,
that could really really getting trouble.
So, there was this guy decided to, instead of sending the file per say,
[INAUDIBLE] just to send the recipe of the file.
Given if you have a computer at the other end,
the computer will resolve that for you.
>> That's right. So with this idea of the recipe that
Thomas Dolby Robertson kind of developed around sonifying the web,
there's actually this very nice quote where, how he captures this idea.
You can't send a wedding cake over the telephone, but
you can send the recipe if you have flour, water, eggs on the other end.
And so the concept is actually that sample.
It's basically, if you have the elements of sound and
sound production on any end in the net, you really only need that recipe,
those rules to put it together, and then you can assemble it locally.
>> So our first case study is called Plunderphonics, which was
invented by a composer, Canadian Composer called John Oswald.
This composer
set an idea of, because the internet and the communication
technology is allowing everybody to have gained enormous access to everything.
So he said, well,
I'm going to be composing just by plundering an existing material.
With the idea of just mess up the material as much
as it pleases me as a composer, but still be recognizable from where it came from.
In this case, that John Oswald was using the material of Michael Jackson.
It is also worth noting that his compositional prerogative
was about audio piracy, so
that is the starting point of any composition, stealing from other people.
And I'd like to say something else about it.
These compositions headed, headed as I said before, analoguely.
That means that at one point, he had the recording of Michael Jackson
with the tape, cut it over 40,000 times, still analoguely.
We cannot imagine this anymore.
And then put all these snippets of tape together.
Combine them, mix them over.
And then create these wonderful pieces that you can listen to.
[MUSIC]
[MUSIC]
[MUSIC]
>> There are some features in the case study for
this entire section that are actually overarching.
They apply to pretty much every case study, and
that is because of the medium of the net, right, since we're focusing on that.
So before we go into each case study, we thought it's good to provide that analysis
for all of the ones that we're presenting, since they share that.
And that way you can just keep those in your head, and in future cases,
we'll just highlight what is unique about that particular case study.
So, what happens with the sound and
music over the net that is very specific to it, but is overarching.
First thing, may sound obvious but it actually isn't, and
it's the idea that remember perspectives, the intimate, the local and the global.
>> In many of our other case studies from previous weeks,
we dealt with the local and the intimate.
But actually it was relatively difficult to find examples of the global.
In this week and all of the net art, or
net music case studies, the global is basically inherent.
>> Right. >> It's by definition by existing on
the net, even in closed and private networks, it is a global option, right?
>> Right. >> And so
that's one very important common feature.
>> Right, and the other very interesting thing about it is that, because it's on
demand and you can listen to it, at least the listener got by listening and
by using this material the way you might want.
Like to have it less loud, you want to have it more, the whole building
should listen to it and I'm just interest in listen to the first three seconds,
you might be interested in listening to the last minute.
And I like to play her over and over again, and
you only want to listen one time.
So, the listener is, in fact,
over remastering, plundering the net, like John Oswald did previously.
And become, actually the composer,
the re-arranger of the material that is provided by the net.
>> So the control of the timeframe of the listener becomes almost like the control
of the composer.
>> Right.
>> And just to lastly point out that
the material frame of net art is incredibly challenging, right?
If we're always constantly thinking of the entirety of the net as the material frame,
it can become quite, well technically that is accurate.
It can become quite difficult to understand specific practices.
So, when you think of the material frame of the net,
it is very important to focus it and narrow it down,
which aspects of the material frame are at play in that particular project?
>> Right. >> The second case study
we want to talk about is that of the Nebula.M81.
That's a group that invented, or wrote,
software called the same way, Nebula.M81,
which is a free download, with which you can open
raw data from anywhere, from pictures to videos to texts, etc, and
reproduce it as it would be a midi file, in other words an outer file.
And in that way they invented a machine that would
produce glitches on [INAUDIBLE].
[SOUND]
[SOUND]
>> Our last case study for
this section is called the Brain Opera and Tod Machover did this piece,
which is basically like an interactive, walk in model of the brain.
But it's a really great early experiment with internet art.
He was of course, inspired by earlier processes, like experiments in art and
technology, where composers and
scientists work with artists like Kluver and Rauschenberg and Whitman.
But also the and media lab at MIT.
So what this opera, this Brain Opera,
effectively became was a way to create hyper instruments, ways for
users in live interaction with the Internet,
manipulate the composition overall, right, so it was always changing.
>> During performance.
>> Yep, during performances, so it's this constantly changing and varied composition
that directly uses the Internet as a tool, not just as a reception mechanism.
>> Right.
[MUSIC]
In this lecture, we're going to be talking about artists
dealing with the airwaves, or how to convey art or
whatever using telegraph masts, telephones, GPS, and all that.
And there's one particular case, as far as 1906,
a man in New York called Thaddeus Cahill,
invented an instrument called a teleharmonium,
which in fact was the earliest broadcast machine of sound.
So he was able to send over the telegraph
a whole concert from one city to the other one.
And of course he wanted to make money out of it, like a service,
like a streaming service, and
of course he went bankrupt because nobody believed that he was going to.
But he was visionary enough to,
what we now consider as normal streaming, he was doing it in 1906.
>> Fast forward a few decades, but also still quite early in 1966,
Max Neuhaus was a very important musician,
composer, avant guarde artist, did this piece called Public Supply.
Right, which basically allowed listeners to participate,
with the telephone in the production of the work, right.
And this is, we again,
we've gotten used to this idea of people calling into the radio, and so on.
There were later works, also done by Neuhaus, that actually use the entire
structure of the radio too, but this idea of calling in and
using the telephone as a compositional structure, was a really great example.
>> Well, it was a collective endeavor,
because he was inviting people to send in over the telephone a particular sound,
which he in turn would lively mix into the overall composition.
So it was not just his piece, it was his idea of inviting people to collectively.
[NOISE].
[MUSIC]
>> This is Public Supply, WBAI's composition by Max Neuhaus,
supplied by the listening audience.
Call Oxford 78506, Oxford 79526, Public Supply.
[NOISE]
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