Seminar by Joost Fonteyne

Sound Art and the use of concrete sounds of the city.

Musique concrete or concrete music refers to sounds (objects, discrete sounds) derived from the world and from synthesis brought together into a collage or sound sculpture as a structure to be experienced through listening.

Pierre Henry is the inventor of concrete music.

Soundwalk Editions features artists and composers who use environmental field recordings as a point of departure in their work. By recording sounds outside of the conventional studio you are in the act field recording, audibly engaged with ears that gradually refine a sonic experience, like the eye looking through a camera lens. Field recording  is often synonymous with phonography, in which sound takes the place of image in documenting a location, physical act, or a natural occurrence. Drawing attention to the quality and experiential nature that can exist in the soundscapes of our environment, these works allow the viewer to have an intimate experience with the various compositional approaches practiced by each individual artist. Through listening to these recordings we have the opportunity to become aware of the various dialects that can exist in the language of field recording compositions.`

Joost Fonteyne:
'Sound become something 3 dimentional. 
It has an 'imaginary quality and a physicality.'

Binoral recordings are not exactly audio illusions in the sense that they do not ‘trick’ us into hearing sounds which are impossible or non existent. The recordings make it sound like you are actually there, in presence of what is making the sound. Binaural recordings are simply recordings of sounds using a special microphone setup which factors in the natural crossfeed and sonic shaping of the head and ear. This is what happens naturally when we hear a sound which is the reason why binaural recordings sound so realistic and immersive. Binaural recordings are only effective when listened to through stereo headphones.

Soundwalk artists:
Akio Suzuki
Christina Kubisch 'Binoral Recordings'
Janet Cardiff 'The Walk Book'
Bures Miller
Stephan Piat
David Helbich

Luc Ferrari composed works that have moved away, more or less, from purely musical preoccupations, some of which could be branches of the same tree - the problem being trying to express passing ideas, sensations and intuitions through different means, observing daily life in all its reality - social, psychological or sentimental - in the form of texts, instrumental scores, electroacoustical compositions, reports, stage works, etc.

Musique anecdotique est le nom donné au genre électroacoustique utilisant des sons reconnaissables plutôt pour leur aspect anecdotique ou narratif que pour leur potentiel abstrait. La première œuvre à porter ce son (Hétérozygote de Luc Ferrari).

Ferrari refers to as "anecdotal music," there are fragments of conversations, and other sounds and noises from nature and daily life presented in an organized and poetic, although non-plot oriented manner. He used three types of recordings:
- specific recordings in certain places
- used recordings of interviews with young women
- electronic sounds that he never used and he found it interested to combine with the other two kind of recordings

Luc Ferrari 'Unheimlich schön'

 

Chris Watson 'El Tren Fantasasma'

 

Jacob Kirkegaard 'Church'

 

At first time it is a kind of monotome sound but within this sound of undergrond tone there is something happening

First merging the sound of two cities. The story about Bill Fontana.

Heterozigot means having two different alleles (one dominant, one recessive) of a gene pair or bacteriophage that has two different copies of its genetic material and so produces two types of offspring. 

A heterozigot sound refers to bring together things that do not match at all at first sight.

Joost Fonteyne:

'In sound you are able to create your own habitat, your own universe.'

Dominique Petitgand is a composer specialized in experimental and concrete Music. He has combined his musical aspects with visual works.

Dominique Petitgrand’s work looks diferent depending on the way it is diffused: Released music, sound installations or concerts in darkness. He defines his productions as “stories and mental landscapes”. His work is thus the result of the constuction, the cut and the mix of recorded voices, silences, breaths and music. He plays with the joint of elements creating a succesion of mental representations. 'Exhalaisons (Ville)'

Derek Jarman 'Blue'

Blue is at once Jarman’s most moving film and his most experimental and idiosyncratic. Visually, the film comprises of nothing more than a blue matt screen, over which Nigel Terry, John Quentin, Swinton and Jarman himself read passages from his diaries that poetically trace his struggle with AIDS, his increasing blindness, the loss of friends and loved ones to the disease and his own impending death. Blue actually began as a proposed project about the painter Yves Klein, whose monochrome paintings, often contemplations of pure blue, Jarman greatly admired. However, as Jarman’s health and sight deteriorated, the project began to evolve into something at once far more personal and universal. On one level, he simply lacked both the stamina and the eye-sight to shoot another film in the conventional manner; more importantly though, the format of Blue provided Jarman with a solution to the problems of effectively representing the nature of AIDS on film. As Jarman wrote, “[n]o ninety minutes could deal with the eight years HIV takes to get its host. Hollywood can only sentimentalise it […] the reality would drive the audience out of the cinema and no one viewpoint could mirror the 10,000 lives lost in San Francisco to date”. For Jarman, AIDS was not a subject for entertainment and he thought that to depict the “progress” of AIDS through characters, narrative and even images would immediately cheapen and debase it. Therefore, “Blue‘s rejection of artifice is an aesthetic decision inspired by specific political and ethical criteria”.

Links

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