Weaponized Sound

A staggering sample from Steve Goodwin’s new book Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, from a review by Geeta Dayal at Rhizome:

Goodman catalogs a litany of military uses of sound that seem like sinister science fiction fantasies. The “Urban Funk Campaign” was a suite of audio harassment techniques used by the military in Vietnam in the early 1970s. One such technique was called “The Curdler,” or “People Repeller,” a panic-inducing oscillator with the ability to cause deafening impact at short distances. The Windkanone, or “Whirlwind Cannon,” was a sonic weapon planned by the Nazis. The “Ghost Army” was a unit of the U.S. Army in World War II that impersonated other units to fake out the enemy, employing an array of sonic deception techniques with the help of engineers from Bell Labs. “The Scream” was an acoustic weapon used by the Israeli military against protesters in 2005. That same year, the Israeli air force deployed deafening sonic booms over the Gaza Strip—producing powerful physiological and psychological effects. “Its victims likened its effect to the wall of air pressure generated by a massive explosion,” Goodman writes. “They reported broken windows, ear pain, nosebleeds, anxiety attacks, sleeplessness, hypertension, and being left ‘shaking inside.’ “

The LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device)

February 05, 2010, 4:10pm

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Pierre Barbaud: French Gagaku (excerpt, 1968)

From the album Pierre Barbaud / Akira Tamba

Note: This is part of a collaborative post in conjunction with Continuo’s Weblog. The rare LP from which this track is taken is available there along with a biographical overview of the composer.

In 1948 (the same year as the first broadcasts of musique concrète in Paris) Nobert Wiener published his groundbreaking book Cybernetics.  Released in a new edition entitled The Human Use of Human Beings in 1950, Wiener’s book launched a new intellectual discipline.  Cybernetics (from the Greek word for steering or piloting) was concerned primarily with the analogy between machines and organisms.  Wiener argued that machines could be made to learn through the implementation of feedback, whereby the results of previous actions were channeled into the system in order to guide future actions.  Needless to say, this idea was crucial for the formation of early computing and theories of artificial intelligence.

But what does this have to do with music?  The idea of machines for composing is not a new one.  Already by the 17th and 18th centuries, composers had begun thinking of a piece music as a system of units which could be manipulated according to mathematical formulas.  Around 1650, the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher invented the Arca musurgica, a box filled with cards containing short phrases of music.  By drawing the cards in combination, one could assemble a polyphonic composition in four parts, composed in perfect accordance with the stylistic constraints of the time.

Another example of this kind of automatic composition is found in the musical dice-games which flourished in the late 18th century.  But in both of these cases, the unit of musical construction is the phrase as opposed to the individual note or sound.  And the object here seems to be the automated composition within a given period style, rather than the exploration of new formal possibilities.

The next step in this process was the reconception of sound as information, which was made possible by 20th-century recording technologies, and specifically magnetic tape, which on account of its ease of editing became the primary recording medium around mid-century.  An important conceptual stride toward the implementation of cybernetic or “systems” thinking in music was taken by Iannis Xenakis, who wrote an essay in 1955 entitled “The Crisis in Serial Composition,” in which he argued that contemporary music, although written note-by-note, was creating musical structures that were heard statistically, as cloud-like agglomerations of sound, rather than the points and lines of traditional contrapuntal organization.  (Indeed, in his 1980 book Vademecum de l’ingénieur en musique, Pierre Barbaud credits Xenakis with “the liberation of music from dodecaphonic pillory.”)  By the late 1950s a number of composers, including Barbaud, Xenakis, Lejaren Hiller, Herbert Brün, and Roland Kayn, had begun to pursue what they called algorithmic or cybernetic music.

French Gagaku is a fascinating example of “motion within stasis” for thirty string instruments playing in quarter tones.  Composed with the aid of the TONITA (Tonal Integrator Tabulator) and ANITA (Analytical Integrator Tabulator) programs of the Honeywell-Bull company.  In the words of Michael Philippot, this music “is not the result of the symbiosis man/machine but the product of human imagination reinforced by a precision and a sense of humility which only the machine can bestow.”  The intriguing association with the ancient Japanese court music gagaku seems to be based on an affinity with the austere indifference of that music.

February 04, 2010, 7:59pm

Acousmata, Year Two: A New Format

Dear readers and listeners,

February 18 will mark the one-year anniversary of the launch of Acousmata.  I’ve been pleased with the progress so far, and encouraged by the feedback I’ve received from various quarters.  I will continue to work toward the goal of making this blog a premier resource for all that is musically obscure, adventurous, and outlandish.

Starting immediately I will be changing the format of my posts in an effort to bring Acousmata to a new level of quality and engagement.

Until now, there has reigned a certain ambiguity of purpose between simply getting the music “out there” on the one hand, and providing commentary and background, on the other.  The result has been an unevenness in the amount and character of the writing, ranging from one-paragraph blurbs to researched mini-articles, with the average post being somewhere in between.  Though it has been fun to indulge in this freedom of format, I would like to move toward a more consistent tone.  Thus, starting immediately, I will begin concentrating my efforts on longer posts, with a consequent (but hopefully not too drastic) reduction in their frequency.  At the other extreme, however, I will begin experimenting with posting music with no commentary at all— for example, if a certain piece has appealed to my ears without engaging my brain (not a bad thing, that), or in cases where information about the music (but not the music itself) is readily available on the web.

Thank you for your support and please don’t hesitate to let me know what you think about this reorientation.

Happy listening,

Thomas

January 30, 2010, 6:36pm

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György Ligeti: Ricercare - Omaggio a Frescobaldi (1951)

From the album György Ligeti Edition 6.  Keyboard Works

When you think of organ music, you probably think of the North German masters of the late Baroque, composers such as Bach and Buxtehude blasting radiant sound-beams of Protestant piety to rattle the stained glass and shake the souls of the faithful.

But in fact the pipe organ tradition goes back further, at least to the early 17th century, to intrepid, non-German composers with names like Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck and Girolamo Frescobaldi.  The latter is the subject of this musical homage, an early work Ligeti written before he left Hungary for the other side of the Iron Curtain.

Built around a dolorous theme that wends chromatically ever downward, Ligeti’s Ricercare is a tribute to the lugubrious glories of early Baroque counterpoint. (And if you don’t think 17th-century music could be so wonderfully dissonant, listen to Sweelinck’s Fantasia Chromatica.)

This one begins very quietly, but builds to a powerful din.  Don’t blow out your speakers.

January 22, 2010, 5:35pm

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Martin Luther King, Jr.: “A Preacher Leading His Flock”

From the album In Search of Freedom

From a sermon given at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on February 4, 1968.

January 18, 2010, 9:50pm

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Richard Maxfield: Pastoral Symphony (1960)

From the album An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music: Fifth A-Chronology, 1920-2007

If Richard Maxfield had not committed suicide in 1969, and if his electronic music pieces were not so difficult to find or to hear, then our ideas of how music has changed and opened out during the past thirty-five years might be very different….  At the heard of avant-rock, hybrid electronics, and plunderphonics, yet completely obscured by the vagaries of history, is Richard Maxfield. (David Toop, Ocean of Sound)

Young Maxfield seemed destined to scale the heights of midcentury musical modernism: during the 1950s he studied with such heavies as Sessions, Krenek, Copland, and Babbitt, as well as with Dallapiccola and Maderna while in Italy on a Fulbright Scholarship.  But in the later part of the decade his interests began to turn toward experimental and electronic music, and it is in this domain where his influence, though subterranean, is still felt.

In 1959, Maxfield took over John Cage’s class on experimental music at the New School for Social Research in New York City.  He used this forum to teach techniques of “pure” electronic music (using synthetically generated sounds, as opposed to those recorded by microphones), albeit of a style quite distinct from the usually austere productions of Stockhausen and company in Cologne.  According to La Monte Young, who studied with Maxfield and was one of his earliest advocates, Maxfield was the first American composer of purely electronic music.  But Maxfield also worked with recordings: his 1960 tape piece Amazing Grace is a surrealistic collage based on the recorded voice of a revival preacher.

Maxfield’s electronic music combines purity of sound with a twittering, frenetic energy that anticipates the atomized textures of much later electronica.  In Pastoral Symphony, as in the longer kindred composition Night Music, electrophonic production, driven to its extreme, miraculously evokes the primal, pre-human utterances of insects, birds, and cosmic rays.

It seems to me that pure electronic music
is self-sufficient as an art form
without any visual added attractions or distractions.
I view as irrelevant
the repetitious sawing on strings and baton wielding spectacle
we focus our eyes upon during a conventional concert.

(Richard Maxfield, “Music, Electronic and Performed”)

January 14, 2010, 11:51am

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John Cage and Lejaren Hiller: HPSCHD (1967-69)

From the album HPSCHD

On May 16, 1969, the 16,000-seat Assembly Hall of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was the site of one of the most ambitious multimedia spectacles of the 20th century: HPSCHD (from the computer abbreviation for harpsichord), a collaborative work by John Cage and Lejaren Hiller.

The piece comprised seven specially-composed solos for amplified harpsichord, based on aleatorically generated results of the Musikalisches Würfelspiel (Musical Dice Game) attributed to Mozart, as well as randomly selected excerpts from Mozart’s piano sonatas and samples from the music of Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Gottschalk, Busoni, Schoenberg, and others.  The harpsichord parts, to be played simultaneously or in succession in a manner determined by the performers, were accompanied by the computer-generated sounds recorded on tape and projected from a circle of 52 loudspeakers surrounding the audience.  Each tape part used a different division of the octave, with scales ranging from five to 56 steps.

For the premiere, multimedia artist Ronald Nameth prepared more than 6,400 slides and 40 films to be projected on the 11 massive screens of the hall.  The footage included Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon and the computer films of John and James Whitney.

The first performance of HPSCHD lasted about five hours and was attended by some 8,000 people.

This excerpt of the work is taken from the 2003 recording realized by Joel Chadabe, with Robert Conant playing the harpsichord solos.

January 07, 2010, 5:24pm

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Stefan Wolpe: Suite im Hexachord. Second movement, “Pastorale” (1936)

From the album Music for Any Instruments

Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972) is a lamentably under-appreciated German composer who throughout his creative life sought to synthesize the most advanced strains of European musical modernism with other, more popular elements, whether political songs, Middle Eastern traditional music, or Afro-American jazz.

In the 20s Wolpe encountered Ferruccio Busoni and H. H. Stuckenschmidt, and spent some time at the Bauhaus, where he was deeply influenced by the school’s utopian and inter-media aesthetics.  In 1933 Wolpe studied with Anton Webern, whose highly analytic approach to twelve-tone composition is reflected in much of Wolpe’s later work.  After emigrating to the U.S. in 1938, Wolpe took a series of teaching positions in the eastern part of the country, including Director of Music at Black Mountain College from 1952 to 1956.  He remained in the U.S. for the rest of his life.

Suite im Hexachord, written for oboe and clarinet, is a fine example of Wolpe’s ability to infuse the supposedly severe and “intellectual” method of twelve-tone composition with playfulness and lyricism.

January 04, 2010, 10:23am

“The Realm of Music,” by Ferruccio Busoni (1910)

Come, follow me into the realm of music.  Here is the iron fence which separates the earthly from the eternal.  Have you undone the fetters and thrown them away?  Now come.  It is not as it was before when we stepped into a strange country; we soon learnt to know everything there and nothing surprised us any longer.  Here there is no end to the astonishment, and yet from the beginning we feel it is homelike.

You still hear nothing, because everything sounds.  Now already you begin to differentiate.  Listen, every star has its rhythm and every world its measure.  And on each of the stars and each of the worlds, the heart of every separate living being is beating in its own individual way.  All all the beats agree and are separate and yet are a whole.

Your inner ear is sharper.  Do you hear the depths and the heights?  They are as immeasurable as space and endless as numbers.

Unthought-of scales extend like bands from one world to another, stationary and yet eternally in motion.  Every tone is the center of immeasurable circles.  And now sound is revealed to you!

Innumerable are its voices; compared with them the murmuring of a harp is a din; the blare of a thousand trombones a chirrup.  All, all melodies heard before or never heard, resound completely and simultaneously, carry you, hang over you, or skim lightly past you— of love and passion, of spring and of winter, of melancholy and of hilarity, they are themselves the souls of millions of beings in millions of epochs.  If you focus your attention on one of them you perceive how it is connected with all the others, how it is combined with all the rhythms, colored by all kinds of sounds, accompanied by all harmonies, down to the unfathomable depths and up to the vaulted roof of heaven.

Now you realize how planets and hearts are one, that nowhere can there be an end or an obstacle, that infinity lives in the spirit of all beings; that each being is illimitably great and illimitably small: the greatest expansion is like a point; and that light, sound, movement and power are identical, and each separate and all united, they are life.

December 23, 2009, 2:48pm

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Masanka Sankayi and Kasai Allstars feat. Mutumilaya: “Wu Muluendu”

From the album Congotronics 2:  Buzz’N’Rumble from the Urb’N’Jungle (2005)

Noisy, funky, lovely sounds from the ”electro-traditional” music scene of Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  I was hooked as soon as I heard the amazingly synth-like timbre of the overdriven electric likembe, “with its pickups made of copper telephone wire wound around crushed car alternator magnets.”  The Congotronics series (comprising three releases at the time of this writing) and its enthusiastic reception by American listeners have been intelligently discussed by Mike Powell at Stylus.

December 18, 2009, 1:03pm