YHF is one of my favorite albums (I have it on vinyl, CD, and MP3, which are all worn down from too many plays). As S. Renee Dechert writes in Pop Matters, YHF is “an exploration of the barriers to communication.” Lead singer Jeff Tweedy’s fascination with radios, which has been incorporated into previous albums, takes on a life of its own in YHF. Dechert continues,

“On YHF, Wilco use short-wave radio as a metaphor for communication in a relationship. Short-wave radio allows people to speak who are not in physical proximity, but there’s no guarantee that the coded messages will be received successfully, and atmospheric interference is a given. People involved in a relationship often find their communication imperfect and cryptic, not unlike the experience of those relying on radio. After all, language itself is inherently flawed, inaccurate, and misread — a code often misinterpreted; further complicating matters are external distortions and distractions — a metaphoric radio static. With all of this interference, can we ever succeed in communicating with someone else?”

You can read the whole article here: http://www.popmatters.com/music/reviews/w/wilco-yankee.shtml

And if you’re interested in seeing how the sounds on the album were invented, I highly recommend checking out I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, a Wilco documentary by Sam Jones):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4c9bF8G-pFU

With the explosion of communication technologies in our current mediascape—mobile phones, blackberries, internet (twitter, email, facebook, etc.)—communication is becoming increasingly complex. There are also more opportunities for noise and interference. And more opportunities to invent creative languages and to find new ways to communicate (the remix being one example–which inspired this particular noise collage).

Communication is hard enough when there isn’t technology involved. However, since the industrial revolution, the question of communication has become more complicated, and for some, more worrisome. The ineffectiveness of language and the inability of humans to understand one another is a dominant theme in modernist literature. For example, in “The Penal Colony,” Kafka uses the impressive and horrific writing machine to make a radical statement about communication/language. As Arnold Weinstein states, “the full exchange between the officer and the explorer, the reader and the text, fails to deliver its message, fails to penetrate one’s being, to get through one’s skin, to make an entry” (54). Kafka believes that to truly understand something, we need to understand it viscerally; we will only become enlightened by the penetration of knowledge. We have to learn with our whole bodies, our whole sensory system. Or we won’t learn.

Although we are all open systems (our bodies are leaky boxes as far as information is concerned), we may appear impenetrable to others. In Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, for instance, Lily Briscoe often contemplates humans’ failure to communicate with each other. Woolf writes, “how then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another about people, sealed as they were?” (37). We are not literally sealed off from the world or each other (information constantly flows in and out of us in various forms), yet noise (in the form of mixed signals, silence, literal static, etc.) often interrupts or distorts how we receive or perceive information, or if we receive it at all.

I do not mean to confuse or conflate information and meaning here. As Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver write in The Mathematical Theory of Communication, “the concept of information applies not to the individual messages (as the concept of meaning would), but rather to the situation as a whole” (9). So, we are open systems when it comes to information flows (which feed in and out of us) and we have some control over this information in terms of selection. In this sense, we could choose to read noise as a kind of information as well. But at the level of meaning, there are more obstacles, barriers, chances for misunderstanding.

I encourage listeners to “read” this sound experiment on the levels of both information and meaning. If there is information that comes through clearly, does its meaning(s) also come through clearly? When is noise considered interference and when is it a source of information? What does this remix of extracted noise communicate about communication?

About the construction: I layered and manipulated sounds from the freesound project. This website has a massive library of sounds and is one of the few websites that does not charge users. If you’re ever in need of sounds for a project, please support it. http://www.freesound.org/index.php

Samples used from Freesound.org

April 18, 2009
By NoiseCollector (http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=4948)
peace and anarchy6.wav (http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=5616)
vm.wav (http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=61944)
mall phone memo.wav (http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=15911)
By ingsey101 (http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=556708)
Cockney weather news.wav (http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=50377)
By uberhuberman (http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=108939)
Stop that talking.wav (http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=25721)
By 833-45 (http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=5805)
atc.mp3 (http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=11723)
By KB3JUV (http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=30131)
Egg Harbor, NJ.wav (http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=11132)
By m:o (http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=46387)
G.W.Bush – An empire of oppression.wav (http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?
id=15376)
By lgarrett (http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=58726)
lg jfk airport.wav (http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=17078)
By mindtriggerz mom (http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=484323)
voice mail.wav (http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=60845)
By rwm28 (http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=424289)
hello.wav (http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=48188)
—————————————
Works Cited:
Kafka, Franz. The Complete Stories. Ed. Nahum N. Glatzer. New York: Schocken Books, 1971.

Shannon, Claude E. and Warren Weaver. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998.

Weinstein, Arnold. The Fiction of Relationship. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Woolf, Virginia. To The Lighthouse. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1994.

During my senior year at Washington and Jefferson College, I took an Emily Dickinson capstone seminar. Remembering how Emily (or “DJ Tricky Dickinson,” as I like to call her) expertly used silence and space as a language itself, I dug through my Dickinson archives to find more inspiration. There were a few poems that caught my eyes and ears (“Silence is all we dread.” 1251; “The fascinating chill that music leaves” 1480, etc. Numbers refer to The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson). However, the second verse of poem 1048 “Reportless Subjects, to the Quick,” was most fitting.

In The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening, Gemma Corradi Fiumara writes, “the creation of an empty space, or distance, within a dialogic relation might be the only way of letting the deeper meanings and implications of that relationship emerge” (102). I think this space is necessary for the act of listening as a kind of active creation. Of course, there is no such thing as total silence or deafness. As Don Ihde notes in Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, “The gradations of hearing sade off into a larger sense of one’s body in listening. The ears may be focal ‘organs’ of hearing, but one listens with his whole body” (135). Yet, we can still perceive silence as spaces between audible sounds. In addition to being able to read silence (or what we perceive as silence) as a meaningful source of information, then, it seems that we need silence or space to fully absorb that information. The duration of silence gives us time and space to actively process and create meaning.

[see working bibliography for full citation info]

About the composition:

This is deceptively simplistic. It actually took quite a long time to try to clean up the sound files (which wasn’t completely successful). I used the “generate silence” feature to accentuate the silences between words, and I attempted to filter my voice and eliminate some of the background noise, but the software wasn’t sophisticated to get all of it (hence the slight crackles from my voice recorder).

I decided to record myself reading the first two lines of the second verse:

Reportless Measures, to the Ear
Susceptive – stimulus –

Each time, I switched up the phrasing/spacing/emphasis, literally playing with (and at times remixing) the space and silences in the poem. Here I’m reading “Reportless Measures” to mean silence—which is not the equivalent of nothing because it requires time or duration (measures). Silence’s “something-ness” is further validated by the fact that our ears are susceptible (receptive) to it, and it’s a stimulus (it provokes and excites our auditory equipment because of its stark contrast to sound). Echoing Fiumara’s notion of silence, I repeat “Report Less” at the end of the poem as a recommendation of sorts. I’m urging the listener (you) to see what happens when you stop talking so much. See what happens when you don’t try to fill the silence. Instead, read it, listen to it, create within it. Though the lines of Dickinson’s poem have been extracted from the whole (and I may have distorted the intended meaning, if there is such a thing), this piece underscores that information (sound and silence) and meaning are mutable. I also have a feeling that Emily would approve of such auditory exploration.

Johnson, Thomas H. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1961.

“Every perception is already memory. Practically, we perceive only the past, the pure present being the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future” (150).

Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1991.

“Music has always sent out lines of flight, like so many ‘transformational multiplicities,’ even overturning the very codes that structure or arborify it; that is why musical form, right down to its ruptures and proliferations, is comparable to a weed, a rhizome” (12).

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1987.

For this piece, I was riffing off of cut and paste DJ culture. More specifically, I think the work of Pittsburgh’s own Girl Talk (Greg Gillis. Read about him here: http://www.myspace.com/girltalk), who is known for layering tracks from different genres, time periods, etc., captures Bergsonian time in a beautifully sonic way. Bergson’s sense of time—a simultanaeity of past and present propelling (unfolding) into the future—has been a recurrent theme throughout digital theory. So, I included some of the quotes from my own archive of materials from this semester.

Construction: After choosing a Girl Talk tune that I felt appropriately fit with Bergsonian time (“Here’s the Thing”), I extracted portions of the song and remixed them out of order with the quotes I recorded. The Quad City DJ song at the end of this piece is actually the beginning of Girl Talk’s version. I put it at the end so that it fades out and sounds like it runs back into the beginning of my song (where it picks up). This is to create a loop effect. Also, I chose this song partially because the train symbolism in this group of experiments has come to represent the desire for homeostasis across time and change (I touched on in my last sound experiment).

About the voice recordings: I played with the pitch of my voice throughout to emphasize the instability and mutability of sound (and information generally). This is to highlight how easily things can be manipulated in digital environments. Information is not static.

Finally, the idea of the archive is significant here. Clearly, a DJ’s archive can make or break her career. Similarly, a scholar’s work depends on the knowledge they have accumulated and stored over the years (and how deftly they can sample that material and remix it with their ideas). Artists depend on archives too. And engineers. And so does anybody trying to create anything. In the end, we all rely on archives. Essentially, we’re all DJ’s.

Works Cited (or just influential)

Girl Talk. “Here’s the Thing.” Feed the Animals. Illegal Art. 2008.

“All of this is to say that feedback and feed-forward, or recursivity, in addition to converting distance into intensity, folds the dimensions of time into each other” (15).

“The body doesn’t just absorb pulses or discrete stimulations; it infolds contexts…How could this be so? Only if the trace of past actions, including a trace of their contexts were conserved in the brain and in the flesh…Only if past actions and contexts were conserved and repeated, autonomically reactivated but not accomplished; begun but not completed” (30).

Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.

“as an artist, you’re only as good as your archive” (16)

Miller, Paul D. (a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid), Ed. Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008.

“The fold becomes a strategy for dealing with history or time from the point of view of the present: a way to read events not as historical inevitabilities but as pliable possibilities for the present” (41).

“Information is mutable because it is always produced through dynamic, contingent yet sustained relations between people, technologies, locations, and institutions” (79).

“past and present can exist simultaneously” (99).

Munster, Anna. Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006.

This piece is a mini-collage of these body-based sounds and rhythms. I used some free sound effects from soundsnap.com, and also recorded myself to produce others. When I started messing around with the layering of the tracks and the rhythms, I noticed that the repetitive chain of sneezes sort of sounded like a train chugging along. So I enhanced the train-like pattern by layering and amplifying the breathing sounds, and repeating the whistling noise. I am really pleased with this accidental transition/transformation because I think it captures the machinic quality of bodily maintenance. It also picks up on the theme of running out of steam (which we hear at the very beginning when the man is heavily panting and needs to refuel his system with water in order to keep it going).

Note: Train sounds became common in popular music as soon as they started becoming a part of the modern landscape (and soundscape). As Joel Dinnerstein writes in Swinging the Machine: Technology, Modernity, and African American Culture between the World Wars, “By putting the train into the music, musicians enabled listeners and dancers to ‘wear’ their cultural identity through an embrace of technology, optimism, speed, and power in the form of big-band swing…The fast, fluid, powerful sound of the big bands provided a sense of history, familiarity, and hope to Americans at a culturally precarious moment of technological pessimism. Train-driven big-band swing allowed Americans to keep their faith in techno-progress without leaving their old selves and experiences behind.”

It’s interesting to me that the sounds of trains have always been associated with a kind of rhythmic regulation and conditioning, especially in response to circumstances that disturb or upset the psychic/bodily system.

TRAIN MIX
1. James Brown, “Night Train” (1961)
2. Little Axe, “Crossroads” (1994)
3. Wynton Marsalis & The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, “All Aboard” (1999)
4. Delta Rhythm Boys, “Take the A Train” (1947)
5. Henry “Ragtime Texas” Thomas, “Railroadin’ Some” (1929)
6. James Cotton, “Mississippi Freight Train” (1994)
7. Lightnin’ Slim, “Mean Ol’ Lonesome Train” (1956)
8. The Neville Brothers, “Waiting at the Station” (1962)
9. The Impressions, “People Get Ready” (1965)
10. Rahsaan Roland Kirk, “Clickety Clack” (1972)
11. Quad City DJs, “C’mon n Ride It (The Train)” (1996)
12. Duke Ellington, “Daybreak Express” (1933)
13. Junior Parker, “Mystery Train” (1953)
14. Thelonious Monk, “Locomotive” (1966)
15. Blind Willie McTell, “Broke Down Engine” (1931)
16. Otis Rush, “So Many Roads, So Many Trains” (1960)
17. Sister Rosetta Tharpe, “This Train” (1939)
18. Golden Gate Quartet, “Golden Gate Gospel Train” (1937)
19. Little Eva, “The Loco-Motion” (1962)
20. Marion Williams, “The New Gospel Train” (1993)
21. Bo Diddley, “Down Home Special” (1956)
22. Lee Fields, “Steam Train” (1999)
23. The Equals, “Funky Like a Train” (1977)
24. Wilson Pickett, “Engine Number 9” (1970)
25. Rufus Thomas, “Memphis Train” (1968)
26. Chuck Berry, “Downbound Train” (1956)
27. Louis Jordan, “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” (1946)
28. Howlin’ Wolf, “Smokestack Lightnin’” (1956)
29. Tiny Bradshaw, “The Train Kept A-Rollin’” (1951)
30. The Coasters, “Keep on Rolling” (1961)
31. The O’Jays, “Love Train” (1972)
32. Gladys Knight & The Pips, “Midnight Train to Georgia” (1973)
33. T-Bone Walker, “Railroad Station Blues” (1953)
34. Johnny Cash, “Folsom Prison Blues” (1956)
35. The Clash, “Train in Vain” (1979)
36. Beck, “Broken Train” (1998)

Works Cited:

Dinerstein, Joel. Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003.

“Continuity of listening is a way of organizing the rhythms of the day” (35).

-Michael Bull, Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience

So this is my first “sound experiment,” which is centered around the concept of homeostasis. I’ve been thinking a lot about feedback systems in relation to music consumption. This piece is a representation of how humans can use music to maintain psychic equilibrium/continuity. In other words, this is my attempt to musically represent a negative feedback loop (which is tightly controlled by goal-seeking or adaptive behavior in order to achieve equilibrium). These feedback loops occur in nature (the ecosystem of a river), bodies (the regulation of glucose concentration in the blood), or can be determined by machines (IV drip).

What fascinated me about this idea in relation to music is how people (me included) often repeat a specific song over and over in times of stress or uncertainty. The familiar notes and lyrics provide a predictable structure that may be lacking in other uncontrollable areas of your life. The more you repeat, the more stable the pattern becomes. You can use the song like a shield to protect you from (or at least to compete against) the chaotic rhythms you encounter throughout your day. You can balance your system with the push of an iPod button.

About the composition of this piece: It starts and ends with a very soft heart beat (which is really hard to hear on computer speakers, so if you don’t hear anything at first, just keep listening). This sound is a reminder that in addition to the multiple feedback systems that are always occuring in the world, these systems also exist inside of us, keeping rhythm, maintaining beats. The pulsating heart noise is meant to give the piece a sort of biological undercurrent. I chose a familiar and catchy indie, pop-country-ish track by She & Him entitled “Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?” as the first recognizable song. The tonal brightness and structural simplicity of this little ditty makes it easy to get stuck in your head. This song serves as a source of cohesion for the listener, a kind of sonic regulation. As the piece continues and other dissonant and abrupt rhythms enter the soundscape (here I layered various overlapping segments of jazz tunes–see “works sampled”–and also made them collide with some of “my own” beats, which were constructed using GarageBand), “Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?” continually brings us back to homeostasis when we get overwhelmed with outside noise (which could be interpreted as the countless rhythms we are exposed to daily–from the fits and starts of city buses to the different styles of people’s speaking patterns).

General Impressions: Producing this unpolished little experiment was extremely time-consuming (much more so than I expected). Coming up with a structure, choosing appropriate songs and sounds, and teaching myself to use unfamiliar software was challenging and pretty frustrating. I’m hoping I’ll get better with practice—more conditioning. Regardless, I have a newfound respect for artists who sample for a living.

Fair Use: I tried my best to follow the Fair Use copyright laws concerning music (available here: http://www.umuc.edu/library/copy.shtml#teacher). Each of the songs I sampled are under 30 seconds in length. And, although the She & Him sample is used several times, it is simply looped so the same chorus plays each time (so I’m not sampling 1:30 of material—just 30 seconds of the same part several times). These rules are annoying and creatively stifling.

Works Sampled:

Ayler, Albert. “Ghosts: First Variato.” Prophecy. ESP-Disk, 2003.

Bull, Michael. Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience. New York: Routledge, 2007.

Coleman, Ornette. “Street Woman.” The Complete Science Fiction Sessions. Sony,1971.

Coleman, Steve & Five Elements. “Salt Peanuts.” Jazz: The First 100 Years. Disc 2. Sony, 2002.

Mingus, Charles. “Hog Callin’ Blues.” Oh Yeah. Atlantic Jazz, 1987.

She & Him (Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward). “Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?” She & Him, Volume 1. Merge Records, 2008.