Gordon Monro - Waveform 2001

Noise = Signal

This is a short report on the Waveform 2001 conference, which was organised on behalf of the Australasian Computer Music Association by Julian Knowles (University of Western Sydney) and held at the School of Contemporary Arts, University of Western Sydney. Usual disclaimer: this is a personal account of some of my experiences at the conference, not a definitive statement.

Julian made a successful attempt to bring together both "academic" computer music people and some practitioners from the "underground" or non-academic scene (not quite an accurate description, as it turned out).

The conference was held in the Centre for Contemporary Performance, a building with cavernous spaces located (as Julian said) on the side of a hill in the middle of a paddock. The student residences were in the middle of another paddock about 20 minutes' walk away, and amenities such as food were generally located in Penrith, several kilometres distant. The organisers provided lunch on site, and a shuttle bus to Penrith in the evenings. It was pretty cold the whole time, and the heating in the room where the paper sessions were held made a lot of noise, so in general it was turned off.

There was the usual mix of paper sessions and concerts, and in addition nearly 20 installations (Julian being able to take over a lot of rooms). I will just mention a couple of the installations. Iain Mott's video "Close" showed Iain having his hair and eyebrows shaved off by a professional hairdresser, in an anechoic chamber, with two little mikes stuck in his ears. The viewer was provided with headphones, so one could hear what Iain heard. Donna Hewitt's "Peep Show" was another video, showing her vocal cords (the view obtained by putting an endoscope into her nasal cavity) while Donna spoke and laughed, juxtaposed with images of lips and teeth. The sounds ranged from sexy noises to fairly angry statements about violation.

Heritage issues

This was perhaps the first ACMA conference where heritage issues came up. Paul Doornbusch (Melbourne and Holland) presented the results of a major project on the music made by CSIRAC. CSIRAC (completed 1949) was the first stored program computer in Australia, and the fifth such in the world. It is also the oldest computer in the world still in one piece (in Museum Victoria); the other early computers were cannibalised relatively quickly. CSIRAC had a speaker to which pulses could be sent: the resulting sounds helped the engineers to monitor the computer's operation.

By very clever programming, CSIRAC was able to play melodies, and it did so at the first Australian Computer Conference in 1951. This was probably the first computer music in the world, and it was real-time at that. Unfortunately it was essentially an unofficial activity, no composers were involved, and so nothing came of this pioneer activity. The music was not even recorded.

Paul Doornbusch was able to collaborate with three of the original CSIRAC team, and together they reproduced the music with what appears to be a remarkable degree of accuracy concerning both waveform (pulse shapes) and timing. Paul was even able to find a speaker of the same model and vintage as the original, which had become damaged.

Another major heritage-related undertaking was described in the paper by Ros Bandt and Garth Paine (Melbourne) on the Australian Sound Design Project. This is headed by Ros Bandt and located at Melbourne University. It aims to be a comprehensive study of Australian design for public acoustic spaces; the initial phase involves creating a database of sites, practitioners and methodologies. A call for participation has been issued, and is available at http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au.

Panel discussions

There were two panel discussion. I missed one, on computer music in tertiary education. The other was on the relationship between "academic" and "underground" computer music, chaired by Kim Cascone. It turns out that "underground" music does have connections with academia, but through art schools, media studies departments and the like, not music departments. It was also pointed out that the "underground" people would not get funding from the Music Board of the Australia Council, though there might be a small chance of funding from the New Media Board (hybrid arts).

Noise aesthetics

The concerts were dominated in people's minds by pieces involving noise and digital artefacts, even though these pieces were actually in the minority.

One example was the video made by Martin Ng (Sydney), together with Matthias Gmachl (Austria). These two are ostensibly DJs playing vinyl discs, but the original sound is so heavily processed through "virtual turntables" that only noise emerges. I asked Martin about his work, and he said that he was pushing DJ-ing so far that it ceases to be playing of records and becomes something else. A similar piece was "Salted Felt" by Peter Blamey (Sydney): "In this piece a simple mixer feedback system is used to generate rhythms, tones and pulses, drawing on two constant external sound sources, an oscillator and a radio". Again the original sound sources were processed into unrecognisability, so that only noises emerged.

The keynote artist Kim Cascone (USA) works in related territory: the program note for his piece "Dust Theories" is a fair description: "debris... residue... sonic dust... sonic residue... the sounds we mentally toss aside when filtering them out of our environment".

This was really my first encounter with this sort of music, and at this first hearing I found it alienating, and boring. However, two papers on the last morning of the conference helped me to come to some understanding of it. The first paper was by Caleb K (Sydney) on the "stuttering CDs" of Yasunao Tone, a Japanese artist who was a member of Fluxus. Almost as soon as CD players became available, Tone experimented with upsetting the error-correction mechanism by fixing pieces of sticky tape to the underside of CDs. The results certainly destroyed the much-hyped purity of digital sound.

The other paper about this sort of music was a wide-ranging contribution by Mitchell Whitelaw (Sydney) under the title "Inframedia Audio". Mitchell is talking about music which consists entirely of "errors": skips, jumps, bad edits, and the like. Tone's music is an example. If the CD (or other digital medium) is a substrate for content, this music is an attempt to hear the substrate: hence Mitchell's term "inframedia", below the level of content. This music is pure signal: it is essentially whatever voltage comes out of the D/A converter. Electro-acoustic notions such as spatialisation of sound are irrelevant: the speaker is just a transducer which lets us hear the voltage in the wire.

Several people (including me) commented that they "felt old" after this session: we have worked in a medium (electro-acoustic music) which more traditional musicians find alienating and incomprehensible, but which we find exciting; now here is a music we find alienating and incomprehensible. Most of the sounds were harsh; certainly there is an element of "Disney, fuck off", and a reaction to/celebration of the weird wired world we are now in. I can hear these sounds as a music of texture, but I'm not sure that is how they should be listened to. Volumes were not excruciatingly loud, for which my ears were thankful, but maybe these sounds are meant to be very loud.

Ros Bandt made an illuminating analogy: serialism collapsed under its own weight and the assault from music using chance operations. What emerged was minimalism, an attempt to go back to a tabula rasa, to start again. Similarly, postmodernism has eaten itself, and we have a music of digital debris, another new start.

Live performance

Long-distance live collaboration using the Internet is a well-hyped activity. Unfortunately, the only serious technical glitches in the conference were those that prevented the international live networking from taking place. In the case of the last event in the conference, intended to be a collaboration/battle among "remote DJs" in Sydney, Austria and the USA, the problem was in Vienna. Instead we got a piece of jamming by Martin Ng and Julian Oliver, using Julian's hacked video game engine.

Ros Bandt made another insightful remark: although there was a lot of live performance, and indeed the debris music that was so prominent is essentially an art of live performance, there was really no performance in the theatrical sense. Perhaps the nearest to it was the piece by Seo (Jeremy Yuille, Melbourne), where he used a laptop controlled by a sexy-looking video game controller. However, he didn't exploit the theatrical possibilities.

Conclusion

Considered as a whole, the conference was certainly a significant event. I felt that it marked a turning point for local computer music, though what the outcome is remains to be seen. Julian Knowles, Scott Horscroft, Carmen Watts and the rest of the team deserve our admiration and our thanks.