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.
Transit Sites & Rural Spaces
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Art of the MOOC: Experiments with Sound
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NOTATION, HOW MUSIC TRAVELS & PUBLIC SPACE
This lesson begins by focusing on the relationship between experimental practices and scores or notation systems. It also examines how sound has been used and understood by artists in specific urban contexts, such as ports, train stations, and airports, as well as rural settings, including forests, gardens, and the wider landscape. We conclude with an examination of how sound and music travel, be it through the populations who produce it, or the objects and digital files that are used to record and share it.
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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
Like with the train station,
there are so many examples that we may think
of in urban spaces that are actually transitional spaces.
They are spaces in between A and B,
train stations, airports, bus stations, etcetera.
Harbors.
Harbors, and these are fascinating spaces to understand sound,
but there are also often the spaces where composer, sound artist,
and even people who think about sound at the policy level,
decide to give us sound,
but it's a sound that is quite particular.
It's music that we're supposed to have it there,
but it's supposed to stay in the background.
It shouldn't be in the front end.
And as early as the early 20th century,
composers like Erik Satie had a concept for this,
he called it music furniture, or furniture music.
For this case study,
we will begin by reading a quote by composer and artist Brian Eno.
"As the listening brain becomes habituated in a way similar
to the way the eye does if we stare at something for a long time,
the common information gets cancelled out and we begin to only notice the difference."
Brian Eno came up with the term Discrete Music and he meant by it that,
the sound is just meant to occupy the background.
It's not meant to give you any emotional information,
just simply set the mood without any feeling,
so Discrete Music becoming the background.
It was this interest of Brian Eno of occupying the background,
that brought him to the works that he did for airports,
where he in fact, musicalized the airports
by setting music composed generatively with computers of course,
over long periods of time,
deliberately to be at the background.
And he did so,
because he had studied the cycle effects of sound over
a long time in this kind of spaces.
Let's think a little bit more about these works of Brian Eno
in the airport with the idea of perspective,
specifically the local and intimate perspective.
Eno as an artist,
had the possibility to think of this entire space, the airport,
as a local environment in the sense of perspective;
to create music, music that is to stay in the background.
So it was a comprehensive local environment.
Yet, the perception of that sound,
and that music is almost exclusively intimate,
because there are never any groups of people at airports trying to
listen to what comes from the loudspeaker and really pay attention to it as music.
They only ever hear it from their individual perspectives in the background.
Right. And the territories that they walk
also not only changes the intimate quality of it,
it also changes the direction where they listen to and from.
So, the panning of sound completely varies over time as you pass by.
And that also makes the interesting thing about concurrency,
because of course, if you just look at the music at the background,
it's not concurrent to anything.
But if you'd hang a microphone over a hall at the airport,
you would definitely hear so much more conversation, people walking by,
trolleys hitting each other, luggage and all that,
with the music running in you, and then,
you would have a very complex environment of concurrency.
This next case study,
which is one of my favorite in the entire course,
also deals with the space of transition,
or a space in between.
As we were talking about the airports,
they'd have to deal with flights,
and international travel, this one is about harbors.
Right? Ships, ports, but specifically a harbor.
Right. So the mechanics of this piece which is called Harbor Symphony,
thought of by Joe Carter,
and then put to practice by Hildegard Westercamp.
The whole idea is, you have a bunch of ships in a harbor,
and you organize them to honk during a specific time at different intervals.
There are massive horns,
and the resulting sound is what is at stake here.
Not only that, but also how the space,
how the harbor is set,
the architecture of it,
how many people pass by and all that.
So, it's a very complex system or environment,
but this is what we are going to be analyzing.
So, the horns of all these ships at harbor,
they usually have one clear significance,
that of, "Careful, here I am," or something of that.
So, that significance gets completely transformed,
and it becomes instrumental to a artistic process.
And our idea of time frame here is actually quite
interesting because in most compositions,
the artist has a big say in what the time frame is.
In this case, it's the port authority who has a much bigger say.
So, even though the artist has a voice,
it's a tiny voice negotiating with a very big voice
of the port authority and all of the functions it has to perform.
Of course. And then, there are all these ships that
are blowing the horns and then one might get fed up and say,
"No, I'm not participating any longer."
So, that time frame needs also to be considered.
And going back a little bit to this idea of function,
it's interesting to think of perspective but also scopes of attention,
which we haven't talked about that much yet in the MOOC,
but there is really a relevant example,
because while people who are at the harbor, on the boat,
at the harbor, at the piers,
their initial experience of the work
may still hear the horns in their functional capacity.
Right.
But as the work starts happening, they become conscious.
Unlike the airport example,
where people never pay attention to the music in the background,
here background becomes foreground as the piece develops.
Right. And also, a very beautiful thing about the fact that this is in
such a huge place because harbors are no small places and very, very overlarge places.
And so, there the concept of concurrency is immediate because there is not
one place where you can hear the complete work.
In any place, you only hear a fraction of it because you might hear one hunk
much closer to you and then one that is just an echo of something.
And so, it becomes like a canon of echos
and then it gets really crowded with concurrency.
In this part of the MOOC,
we're going to be talking about an artist and a composer.
And through her work,
we're going to discover an amazing sight that we're
going to be focusing in at the section of our analysis.
Pauline Oliveros is a very well known composer who sadly passed away a few years ago,
and she came up with this term of deep listening.
And what she meant with it,
is that in a Cajun manner to say everything around us can become artistic sound you,
you just need to listen and to carefully focus on that.
So that's very simple.
That's the terminology.
With that in mind,
she found a band which was called Deep Listening Band.
And then, they found these amazing cistern,
the Don Harpole fort near Seattle,
and this building is water cistern in the basement.
It's not a basement, it's even just a hole in the ground and then this huge building.
And they composed or improvised music in that cistern.
And what the properties of this building will be,
we'll talk about it in the analysis.
It's beautiful.
It has an acoustic property that is very particular to it.
It has an echo of 45 seconds.
So, whatever you say,
sing, or shout in that building,
it will be constantly there for the next three-quarters of a minute, which is amazing.
So, if you think about it,
then the building itself becomes sound.
So, the material frame,
it is itself with the person inside doing the sound.
But, the funny thing about it is that once you say something,
it gets blurred into the sound of the building because when you start adding up,
that also blurs the whole thing so that there's
no way to hear the sounds where it comes from.
Which interestingly, it's quite unique in all of our different cases, in that,
it totally erases the intimate aspect of
perspective in terms of sound because whatever you say in this space,
everybody else can hear it in that 45 second,
and you don't even know who is saying what because
it all becomes part of this intense sound.
Local. It's completely local. It's a bubble.
And you can't even start thinking about concurrency.
In a way, it doesn't matter where you are in this space.
You get the same experience.
In this case, we're going to present to you
a piece by a Austrian composer called Peter Ablinger.
He composed a landscape opera called Landscape Opera Ulrichsberg,
which has seven acts.
And we're going to be talking about the first act,
and that consists of planting trees in
a particular hill in Austria according to acoustic criteria.
So, not only did he have to respect the landscape that was protected,
of course, he also had to look at the visual design of things.
So, how will trees look in 20 years from now.
But, he also had to devise a system to choose which kind of trees will sound in
what way and at what place so that the wind and
all the interactions will give him the sound he's looking for.
The time frame dimension of this work,
this landscape opera is quite fascinating.
On the one hand,
as Matthews was saying,
this is only part one of a seven piece opera.
So, in the mindset of the artist,
the composer, that is part time frame.
But, even if we just stick to part one and consider that a time frame in itself,
we're talking about decades,
if not centuries because this is natural environment that has been transformed.
And as long as the trees don't get
destroyed or the landscape doesn't get destroyed, it will always be there.
So, the time frame is potentially timeless or eternal.
Continuous, you would say.
Yes, it's continues. But, then there is also the timeframe of experiencing that space.
Like how long were people perceiving the sound of the Opera walk through the space.
And there's the other timeframes that may lead us to think more of frequency.
Right. So, when you think about seasons and how seasons
change the soundscape of that particular hill where the trees are growing.
So, definitely the density of sound will vary
much according to wind conditions and seasons, weather, and all that.
So then, you can talk about this.
You can look at this hill and try to figure out how frequent things sound like.
The seasons come of course in handy to explain that,
but then they vary a lot.
And so, you can see maybe two frequencies over
and over a determined time frame like a month,
or a season, or even a second.
So, it's very flexible. But, I think the very interesting thing about it is
this continuoucisy and it doesn't need a listener to be performing.
And in that aspect of frequency,
also big changes can happen.
So, in the summer,
you may have lush leaves that produce changes in the material frame.
Right.
Because the leaves will sound completely different if they're lush in the summer,
than if they're gone in the winter and it's
only the branches that make sound.
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