Month: August 2022

Following all of my research, I have been making notes on how all of this information can be sewn together to form a coherent audio paper with a clear, specific topic and a clear direction. I have decided to with the title “Ambient music as a mode of being”. I have chosen this because I want to cover the history of ambient music briefly and then focus the subject matter on ambient music’s ability to heal over time and be used within therapy, which ultimately stems from my own personal experiences with ambient music and meditation respectively. I feel ambient music has a pivotal role on our lives whether we realise it or not, and the nomadic attention that it can offer us towards our everyday surroundings, and the potential for the music to transcend our mind state, leads me to believe that ambient music is as much a mode of being as it is a genre of music.

I feel I have enough research and sources to produce a compelling audio paper that I hope can have the potential to ignite a discussion on ambient music’s role in therapy devices and healing actions.

My overall plan is:

• introduce the audio paper with a personal experience I had with ambient music and how I came to have the idea to talk about it.
• describe what the audio paper is about
• talk about lockdown and a heightened sense of global awareness, and how ambient music was a perfect companion to the isolationism we all faced through lockdown
• transition into a brief history of ambient music – focus on brian eno
• explain the difference between ambient and new age and reinforce why that is important to this audio paper
• discuss music therapy practice and include quotes/references from my sources to help explain what an ‘ambient mode of being’ is
• reinforce my point with other references – chill out rooms at raves, examples of albums, talk about ambient as a ‘genre-less genre’
• case study on music for airports by brian eno and his ambient manifesto, which is included on the sleeve notes of that album
• talk about virtual reality and new techniques of incorporating ambient music in therapy (leslie deere)
• conclusion summing up my thoughts and why I think this is important, along with possibilities for the future

I will expand these notes into a concise script that gives more detail about what I am going to be talking about, which I will then use as a basis to record the audio paper before editing and mixing it.

Research on the ambient mode of being, music therapy and ambient music’s potential to heal.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-jHTGel69uNWkn4MekBzexQfln0RvrK_?usp=sharing

BIBLIOGRAPHY –

Viega, M. Voices.no. (2013). View of Listening in the Ambient Mode: Implications for Music Therapy Practice and Theory | Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy. [online] Available at: https://voices.no/index.php/voices/article/view/2228/1983#:~:text=In%20the%20ambient%20mode%20of,the%20here%2Dand%2Dnow.

‌and, V. (2022). Music Therapy in Virtual Reality – Jeanette Tamplin. [online] Vimeo. Available at: https://vimeo.com/193860627/c17c891fc9

lesliedeere.com. (2022). Research | lesliedeere.com. [online] Available at: https://lesliedeere.com/VR.html [Accessed 13 Aug. 2022].

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Ambient music before Eno and Japanese New Age music’s ability to heal.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1snxrun0Jxm3SfPYC5WEfbPpbYgpG6Y5e?usp=sharing

BIBLIOGRAPHY –

Watson, M. (n/a). ‘A Short History of Ambient and Downtempo music’. https://ambientmusicguide.com

Eno, B. (1978). ‘Ambient 1: Music for Airports’. EG Records. Vinyl

Following my last post I am deciding to go down the ambient music route. With time of the essence, it is important that I am thorough in my research but quick at the same time so I can move on to actually putting the audio paper together. I feel like a week and a half of dedicated research will be enough, assuming that I will put in considerable hours every day whilst keeping up with my other projects.

I’ve started my research off by reading an article on the Barbican website called ‘An Introduction to Ambient Music’, written by Jon Dale (1). I enjoyed reading the article very much as it covers a wide range of topics and branches within ambient music whilst having a very introductory tone. Immediately this feels more natural than my research into generative music, because my ideas are flowing and my head feels a lot more clear. I feel like there are a lot of options for me to narrow down my subject matter into something that I can cover in more depth.

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My notes above cover the sections of the article that took my interest. There was plenty of material for me to build from and go deeper into. I am really intrigued about how Dale refers to ambient music in the current day “experiencing a moment of heightened awareness”, which is due to how it “[offers] calm and refuge from the 21st century storm.” This quote prompted me to think about the qualities that ambient music has over all other genres, and the biggest one is its ability to induce a state of tranquillity in the listener and conjure a transcendent experience. Looking into this a little further, I found an article (2) that speaks on a study that proves listening to ambient music with minimal rhythm and soothing textures “is so effective that it is able to put listener’s senses at rest, resulting in lower blood pressure and heart rate”. The study was undertaken by Florida National University, and this goes to show the potential for ambient music to be used almost as a tool for focusing and concentration.

This thought is continued later in the article when Dale references ‘chill-out rooms’ at raves, and speaks on the explosion of rave culture being a major turning point for ambient music’s development and rise to popularity. These chill-out rooms were separate from the main event and would be for people either having a bad drug experience or simply wanting some relief from the intensity of these hardcore raves. DJ’s would, and still do, mix records that had much more of an ambient influence, whether that be complete ambient songs or techno/house/jungle tracks with a more minimal and soothing approach. This idea of ambient music having the capacity to focus and induce a calming state of mind is something that I think would be good to focus on for my audio paper because it is more specific yet I can still include many references and sources within my narration.

There is a lot more on the article that I want to cover, which is more in relation to the canon of ambient music, but I feel I will leave that for another post to not bloat this post out too much and go a bit more in depth on how the ambient music canon has evolved, where it is at currently and where it can go in the future. I intend to source 3 or 4 artists/movements/approaches within the broader scope of ambient music that reflect this idea of ambient music having somewhat of a healing power.

(1) Barbican.org.uk. (2020). An introduction to Ambient Music. [online] Available at: https://sites.barbican.org.uk/ambientmusic/ [Accessed 2 Nov. 2021].

‌(2) Ward, E. (2020). Soothing, minimal music scientifically linked to higher levels of concentration and productivity. [online] The Prospector. Available at: https://www.theprospectordaily.com/2020/01/21/soothing-minimal-music-scientifically-linked-to-higher-levels-of-concentration-and-productivity/ [Accessed 2 Nov. 2021].

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After looking into generative music further, all of the sources I found were all different in their ideas and perspectives towards what generative music actually is. Whilst this is good in terms of comparing and forming a more objective viewpoint, considering I am very new to the world of algorithmic music I can’t help but feel a bit out of my depth. I wanted to write about generative music for my audio paper because it has recently become an important part of my practice, but with time constraints and the fact that I am doing three projects at once, I feel that it would be better for me to focus on something that is more straightforward. Maybe I can park this idea and possibly leave it for my third year dissertation where I will have more time to understand all of the different terms, approaches and perspectives that exist within the generative music world, because it is vast.

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Here are some notes I made during my time researching generative music. I want to clarify that my decision to change topic is down to the time it would take me, as a newcomer to the world of generative music, to formulate an audio paper on a specific side of this type of music. I already have to get my head around how to create an audio paper since this is my first time, so I want to focus my attention on something that genuinely interests me and that I can form a convincing argument about.

I’ve recently been listening to a lot of ambient music, with the likes of Tim Hecker, Brian Eno and Grouper in my listening rotation regularly. When I listen to ambient music I find it interesting how trance inducing it can be. I find that compared to any other genre of music it transports me into a meditative state and has a transcendent quality that makes me listen in a very different way than if I were to listen to, say, Hip-Hop.

I think that ambient music and its ability to transcend and ease the mind will be great to speak about. There are so many different areas in music and art that ambient music has inspired, and there are a lot of amazing artists that I could look further into.

Following up on my post about listening to podcasts, I have a much clearer idea of how to go about creating an audio essay. The scope that an audio essay offers exceeds the limits that a written essay restricts you to as a researcher trying to communicate your topic in an engaging way, and I want to use this freedom as a means to channel some of my sonic ideas and direction through research. Recently I have been immersing myself in making generative music, which is a term popularized by Brian Eno to describe music that is ever-different and changing, and created by a system (Wikipedia Contributors, 2021). In essence, as the producer/composer you create a set of guidelines that the system can follow, and from there it responds completely on its own terms which gives the illusion that the system is creating the sound itself (which it basically is). For example, on my Behringer synth I have been making generative patches where I’ll have multiple modulations controlling one another, for instance an LFO controlling another LFO’s rates. The more you modulate the modulators, the more extreme, complex and random the generative sound can become.

In light of my increasing fascination with this way of producing sound, I think it would be appropriate for me to focus on generative sound making for my audio paper. Generative sound is more relevant now that it has ever been with the ever-growing influence of artificial intelligence on society. The reality and potential of A.I means that within the next decade there will almost certainly be a whole new world that opens its doors to sound artists, in which sound making will be more of a conversation and collaboration between man and machine as opposed to man controlling the technology. I believe generative music is still extremely early in its journey, and as a result I feel this is a great time to speak on the topic. Furthermore, researching this alongside practicing it will increase my knowledge as well as my ability to integrate that knowledge into my work, and hopefully lay the path for my developing artistic identity to come into its own.

I have now got a general idea of what I want to talk about, so from this point I need to delve into my research and narrow down the subject matter a bit more. It will be a much easier and more effective project if I focus on something specific within generative music, such as generative music within A.I or comparing two or three generative artists. So my plan from here is to get on with researching!

Reference – Wikipedia Contributors (2021). Generative music. [online] Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_music [Accessed 18 Oct. 2021].

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The follow up task for this week was to listen to a couple of podcasts to get some ideas on how we could go about presenting our audio paper. I listened to two podcasts that were available on the playlist that Ingrid (our tutor) put up on the padlet.

The two I listened to are linked here:

https://www.bang-olufsen.com/en/us/story/sound-matters-episode-1

https://artmusictech.libsyn.com/podcast-365-mark-fell

I found them totally different to one another, and I feel like I’ve picked up more of an idea for how I will approach my own audio paper. The first link is a podcast called ‘Sound Matters’, and the episode was titled ‘The sound of life itself’. I really enjoyed listening to this because there was a clear narrative, there was a lot of variety in the sound design/FX and the spoken word was never too long or tedious. I particularly liked how there was often a soundscape in the background when either the lead narrator or Bernie Krause (who provided a lot of the information over the episode) were talking, and the soundscape or recording would be relevant to what was being spoken about. For instance, at one point the narrator says “now imagine you are in the Amazon jungle”, and as he continues you immediately hear the subtle nuances of sound that the Amazon produces, which I assume to be a direct field recording. In my eyes this adds so much life and dynamism to the podcast because the voice sits within an evolving soundscape. Also, the narrative of the whole episode is reflected in these added recordings, which seem to tell a different version of the same story in their own way – I think this is an idea that could easily be transferred to an audio paper because if the recordings, which could also be replaced by referencing snippets of music, work in tandem with me as a narrator to flesh out the topic I’m speaking on, then it would elevate the entire piece into a more dramatic and unpredictable realm.

The other podcast was an interview with Mark Fell, whose name came up this week in a lesson. I don’t know anything about him other than what I heard in this podcast, but his work and ideas sound really intriguing to me and I would like to look more into him. However, this podcast example is one that lacks the same level of depth and rhythm that the first one had so much of. The basic interview style is still interesting but only if you are interested in what is being spoken about, whereas the more abstract and layered layout of the first example could engage aboslutely anyone because it feels like more of an experience, as if you are walking through these interesting places alongside the narrator.

Overall, the first podcast has helped me to understand further what an audio paper could be, and in turn has generated ideas in my head for how I might present my audio paper sonically. On the other hand I think there are certain elements such as the informal tone which wouldn’t translate so well into an academic audio paper as they take the listening experience down a more comedic path. I don’t think this is a bad thing in any way, but in the context of my own audio paper, seeing as it is my first one, I feel as though I should focus on creating an experience and representing a clear idea rather than trying to be too clever.

This unit is a lot more academic than the specialisations we chose, as we have to complete an 8 minute audio paper, to be seen as a trial for our final year dissertation in which we are able to produce an audio essay instead of written one. The idea of not having to physically write an essay definitely sounds appealing to me.

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For the first lesson we went through different types of documentary ‘modes’, which I have written down and included in the pictures of my notes above. After the class, someone mentioned that in reality all of these modes are a paradox as you can never document anything without any bias at all. Even if you are coming from the most objective angle, you are always going to write/record what you are speaking on through your own lens ultimately. I feel like the main point of the lecture was that you simply have to be aware of your bias and therefore treat your approach to your research as a cycle of investigation, interrogation and understanding of the topic you’re focusing on.

There are still many things that confuse me about ethnographic writing, but the overall idea is that it is as much about representation of a topic/culture as it is an investigation. As I move forward into researching, I think it is important that I choose a topic that I can immerse myself in and empathise with, rather than something that may be more ‘important’ but doesn’t allow me to fully immerse myself in because of my current location/access to information.

For now, I will put some thought into figuring out what route I want to go down and how I might go about researching.

I have added a melodic undertone to provide the track with some direction and mood. In my last post I spoke about William Basinski and his use of a melodic loop slowly disintegrating over time, which is something I thought would benefit my own piece a lot. I decided to structure the track by starting with the field recording and no input mixer recording laid over one another, before gradually introducing the melodic layer. From there I wanted to start fusing the sounds together in a way that feels like they are all merging into a new singular sound, which resembles the convergence of two different worlds.

I managed to end up with a slowly evolving piece that feels like a big moment, which is exactly what I was aiming for.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yhaxU-1MZtFthZWdWHOl_rgrUORNZg_p/view?usp=sharing

With the process being quite quick and fluid, I was surprised as I thought this might have taken a lot of time to get right. However, I seemed to have a session where everything went how I had envisioned it and I was left with a track that sounds very complex but is actually really simple. I think one thing I’ve learned is that it is important to leave your work alone and stop adding things, just as it is important sometimes to continue to perfect it. In this scenario, I was striving for imperfection and wanted the sound to go along its own path as much as anything, with me as the mediator.

I created a pad from scratch on a software synth called Phase Plant. It is a very simple patch with a choir sample, saw wave, a filter and some detuning to add width and dimension. I didn’t need to do too much as I felt the track already had a lot of space filled up in terms of frequencies and if I had overcomplicated things I would have started to lose elements in the mix. All I wanted was something audible that could set the tone for the duration of the track, a singular chord that doesn’t take centre stage but is loud enough to drive the piece forward. I think I accomplished that quite well. I am not well versed in music theory so I often play chords that sound right to me and fit with the tone I am after, and in this case I wanted something uplifting with a hint of unease, displaying two different worlds intersecting and the wariness of the unknown that comes with that.

I added a layer of sub bass to occupy the lower frequencies, which brought in a satisfying foundation for all of the other sounds to bounce off. Finally, I used the effects plugin RC-20, which I chose because of its ability to add texture and glue sounds together. I mimicked ‘The Disintegration Loops’ by William Basinski by having some parameters such as noise, bit crushing and distortion slowly increase over the course of the tracks runtime. This creates a track that starts off having clearly identifiable sounds then evolves into the sounds getting lost within one another, once again a representation of one world interweaving into another.

I then lightly limited the master track and added some glue compression to make sure everything was stuck together nicely, along with some minor eq tweaks to remove frequency build up. Unless I have any other crazy ideas that strike me, I would like to leave this piece as it is as I feel it is a great culmination of everything I have learned during this unit, from the studio praxis sessions to spatialisation, microphones and recording samples. My approaches towards sound creation have changed over this term but I still situate these learning experiences within my own aesthetic framework, which is exciting for me as I feel I am progressing a lot.

(PHOTOS) – https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1yW4yyZqgmOIWAxKOoFXBS2Trihyqaus4?usp=sharing