Stagione 1
A bird and a jackhammer, playing at the same moment. Then the same two sounds again, with nothing changed but two faders. Not one sample of either recording moved, and the whole scene turned around. That is mixing: you are not changing the sounds, you are changing their relationship, and that relationship is the mix. This is the audio lecture for the fifth module, where a soundwalk recorded and edited over the past two modules becomes a finished piece. The episode's argument is that a mix decides where the listener stands: what is close, what is far, what they turn toward, and what they only half notice. Level is taught through Pauline Oliveros's focal and global attention, as one person's act of listening handed to someone else. Panning is demonstrated, a slow drift against a nervous flicker, and then turned into the question every soundwalk mix has to answer: do you put a sound where it was, or where you want it? Automation comes in as a performance you can edit, from the days when a mix took several pairs of hands on a console, to Daphne Oram drawing sound onto film. Then one question for the artists: where is the mixer? In the room, for Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room. In the artist's own narrating voice, for Hildegard Westerkamp's Kits Beach Soundwalk. In the listener's own ears, for Maryanne Amacher and Jacob Kirkegaard. And still in the studio that grew out of Pierre Schaeffer's work, with Kassel Jaeger. It ends on who gets to hold the fader, from Janet Cardiff's The Forty Part Motet to spatial audio in your earbuds to software that will happily balance a mix for you, and why a point of view is a little unbalanced on purpose. Headphones recommended. Pairs with the Module 5 pages and the mixing and automation screencasts. Sound credits "Nightingale song 2" by inchadney, licensed CC BY 4.0. Excerpted, mixed, panned and automated for this episode. https://freesound.org/people/inchadney/sounds/54374/ "jackhammer.wav" by overmedium, released under CC0 (public domain). Excerpted and mixed for this episode. https://freesound.org/people/overmedium/sounds/652837/ Chapters 00:00 Two sounds, two faders 02:58 Level, and the mixer you already own 06:13 Space, and where things actually were 09:25 Automation: a performance you can edit 13:55 Where is the mixer? 18:16 Who holds the fader
Two sounds, played in one order, then the same two sounds in the other order. Nothing changed except the sequence, and the meaning moved completely. That is editing, and this episode will not tell you what those two sounds meant, because that part belongs to you. This is the audio lecture for the fourth module. It starts with the confusion that trips everyone: the word "editing" doing two different jobs. Technical editing cleans up a plan that already exists. Creative editing is the plan. The tools are identical, and the only difference is intent. From there, what creative editing actually feels like, which is improvisation with a pause button: make a move, listen, keep or discard, until the piece tells you what it is. Then the six words worth having, grouped as the four that shape a whole piece (form, tension and release, pacing, texture) and the two that live at a single seam (transition, juxtaposition), each with the mistake that usually comes with it. Why a release works backwards and borrows all its weight from the tension before it. Why subtraction is almost always the stronger move. Why a crossfade is an argument rather than a politeness. Then the lineage, and the thread running through it: Pierre Schaeffer cutting a sound loose from the thing that made it, Brion Gysin and William Burroughs shattering a work and letting chance reassemble it, and Rasheedah Phillips of Black Quantum Futurism cutting time itself. Three generations who found that taking something apart is how you get past your own intentions. It ends on what the deciding is worth in a moment when software will happily edit for you, on what it means to become capable with tools that can make somebody appear to say what they never said, and on the fact that you will never fully know what your choices do to the person listening. You make them anyway. This week there is nothing due for a grade. Spend the week moving things around and finding out what you think. Pairs with the Module 4 pages and the editing screencast. Sound credits "Nightingale song 2" by inchadney, licensed CC BY 4.0. Trimmed for this episode. https://freesound.org/people/inchadney/sounds/54374/ "jackhammer.wav" by overmedium, released under CC0 (public domain). Trimmed for this episode. https://freesound.org/people/overmedium/sounds/652837/ CC BY 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ CC0 1.0: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
There is a recording going around of a well-known voice saying something outrageous, and it never happened. Not one word of it. A machine made it. So how would you know? What in the sound itself would tell you whether it was real? This is the audio lecture for the third module, the week we finally name the thing this course has been circling: sound art. We start with a definition wide enough to hold a field recording, a soundwalk, or a gallery installation, and with Edgard Varèse's idea that music is simply "organised sound," which quietly puts you at the center of the art form. Then the history, told honestly, as not one tidy origin but several at once: Luigi Russolo and his hand-cranked noise machines in 1913, Halim El-Dabh transforming a recorded zaar ceremony in 1944 Cairo, four years before Pierre Schaeffer and musique concrète in 1948, whose razor blade is the direct ancestor of every clip you split in a DAW. Along the way: R. Murray Schafer's soundscape, with its keynotes, signals, and soundmarks; the soundwalk, from Hildegard Westerkamp to Christina Kubisch's Electrical Walks; and the practice I honestly cannot stop doing, field recording, through Francisco López, Annea Lockwood, Bernie Krause, and KMRU, who built an international career starting exactly where you start this week: one person with a recorder, listening to their own place. It ends where it began, with that fake voice, and why telling a true record of the real world from a convincing synthetic one is not a small skill. Your work this week is simple: go outside, record your actual place, and keep a piece of it. What does where you live sound like? Pairs with the Module 3 pages and screencasts.
There is a recording of a marsquake sitting on NASA's website, free, waiting for somebody to do something with it. That is where you are this week: standing in front of more sound than you could use in ten lifetimes, about to reach in and make something. This is the audio lecture for the second module. We start with the tool itself, the DAW: what it actually does, and where it came from. Reel-to-reel tape, razor blades, and a handful of artists in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s who looked at a machine built to reproduce sound and decided to abuse it instead. That lineage runs in a straight line from Halim El-Dabh in 1944 Cairo, through Pierre Schaeffer and the idea of musique concrète, all the way to the sound you will drag across your screen this week. Along the way: where to find sounds you are actually allowed to use, one beautiful little idea about how continuous sound becomes numbers a computer can hold, and the assignment itself, Sonic Sketch 1, your first piece of sound art. The heart of it is a single move. Two sounds land against each other and do something neither one was doing alone. That is the whole art form, and everything else this semester is a variation on it. This week the making matters more than the made thing, so make something honest instead of something safe. Required listening: Halim El-Dabh, Wire Recorder Piece (1944), and Pierre Schaeffer, Étude aux chemins de fer (1948). Pairs with the Module 2 pages, screencasts, and the Pro Tools install guide in the course.
Episode 1 — Welcome, and Why Listening Welcome to Sound Arts Intro Course. This first episode is the doorway into everything else. We start where I like to start most things, with a sound I love, and then we get to the question underneath the whole course: what does it actually mean to listen? You'll hear the difference between hearing and listening. Hearing is what your ears do all day whether you want them to or not. You can't blink an ear. Listening is the work your mind does to make meaning out of all that sound, and it's something you can practice and get better at for the rest of your life. Along the way: Why almost any sound in the world can be enjoyed, once you decide to enjoy it. The fluorescent buzz, the refrigerator hum, the traffic, all of it. Three different ways of listening, from the writer and film theorist Michel Chion. Pauline Oliveros, and the practice she called Deep Listening. Why we've become a mostly visual culture, and what we lose when we forget we're also listening creatures. How sound is more intimate than sight, and reaches parts of us that images never quite touch. A small taste of silence, and the story of John Cage walking into a room built to be perfectly quiet and hearing two sounds anyway. Try this after you listen: somewhere this week, take ten honest minutes with one question. What does it mean, to listen? Don't look anything up. Just think, and listen, and write down whatever you find. Keep it somewhere safe. We come back to it at the very end. Names to explore on your own: Michel Chion, Pauline Oliveros, John Cage. You are already a listener. You have been your whole life. This is just the invitation to start doing it on purpose. Come listen.