Low Residency: Day 4 – Sound Workshop

 

 

It has been some time since the Low Residency. Many thanks to Ed Kelly for condensing into a relatively short time frame a great deal of theory and making. I was already very familiar with Audacity but there is always something to learn and I have taken on board a number of ideas. The great usefulness was to clarify and formalise certain practices that I have followed either intuitively or uncritically. The principle one is the idea of cutting or editing at zero. This avoids clicks and pops producing clean edits. The other is more a concept, that of fragmentation or deconstructing sound into atomic elements which can then be used as building blocks. This ties in with the introduction to Musique Concrete in a Skype lecture a few weeks ago.

We spent time harvesting sounds from a variety of objects. I was particularly taken by a small music box mechanism that Ed brought along. He turned the handle in short bursts while I recorded. This broke up what would have been a familiar melody into fragments of sound. It is a fascinating approach to capturing sound, so much so, that I ordered a number of mechanisms over the web with which I have started to experiment. 

Ed mentioned Pure Data, a visual programming software which was, however, too much of a learning curve for the workshop. Although I have started using it, it is too early to say if I shall be using it in the final works, much depends on whether I can find work-arounds to my aims rather than spending too much making-time learning how to use it. 

After collecting the sounds, each one of us put together a short soundwork (below). I was particularly taken by the reverberation in the stairwells  (pictured above) running up the new building at Camberwell. 

 

 

The rectangular spiral staircase resonated in my mind with the spiral stairs at the Queen’s House we visited in Greenwich.

 

 

Skype Chat 1.6: Coding

Yesterday we were introduced to the intricacies of coding in java, by Paul Abbott, with a little html and css thrown in just for fun. It was difficult to follow at times, particularly juggling four different windows at one time, thank heavens for a large screen. It felt like having to catch four piglets and trying to put them into a shallow basket… with boxing gloves. However, I survived and took away some valuable ideas that will help me, particularly when I look at the video recording of the session again. These notions can be summarised in a very cursory way as:

  • Types of coded information are kept in discrete blocks.
  • One block of information tells another what to do and the different functions and variables in each one has to correspond to those in another block.
  • The process is like constructing a flow chart in your head. For that matter, drawing a flow chart when planning code is not such a bad idea. 
  • Brackets hold different types of information.
  • The syntax of the code has to be precise.
  • Practice by copying and pasting existing code and alter one parameter at a time and see what happens. Make sure all corresponding parts match one another. 
  • It is no good just reading about code, you have to do it as you go along to understand anything at all. 

I do not know how relevant coding is to my practice. It is immensely satisfying, though, when a piece of code works. I know from my scant experience with html and css. However, it is a totally different language and I struggle enough with words. So, although I may tinker with some code and perhaps even build a rudimentary something for the internet, I think I shall leave this one to those better suited for this activity. One thing, as Paul mentioned, it does help when you can converse in the same language with someone if you need something doing or collaborating on a given project.