Section outline

    • Andreas Ammer/WDR3 Hörspiel On the Tracks - Auf der Suche nach dem Sound des Lebens URL

      WDR Hörspielspeicher re-published the following audio-drama

      On the Tracks - Auf der Suche nach dem Sound des Lebens

      Here's the blurb from WDR.

      Jeder Mensch ist ein Kosmos und trägt ihn folglich mit sich herum. Wohin? Das Hörspiel folgt unbekannten Menschen auf der Straße. Aus den Protokollen dieser Verfolgungen und der Musik von Console wird der Soundtrack von siebenmal Leben.

      WDR Hörspielspeicher republication of Andreas Ammer's 50 minute audio drama On the Tracks - Auf der Suche nach dem Sound des Lebens, originally published by WDR in 2002.

      Radio dramas are a quite a marginal and interesting format.If a public broadcaster like WDR (also Finnish YLE and Danish DR have some amazing productions both ongoing and backlog) wouldn't produce them, nobody would! On the other hand the second wave of podcasting is going well, and audio books are quite popular too. How would you characterize how audio dramas, podcasts and audio books differ from one another? How is an audio paper (Krogh Groth and Samson 2016) different from audio drama? How are they similar? What is good for what purpose? What stuff we have learned on this seminar would be useful for making audio dramas? Do you know some so-called "audio games"?

      If you listen to the On the Tracks - Auf der Suche nach dem Sound des Lebens, how are the creators composing everyday sounds, music, tone, body-noises to create a mood, an atmosphere, a story and a sense of place and time? Is it convincing? What would you do otherwise? What machines, computers and software can you imagine in the drama?

    • A soundscape from Klagenfurt

      Audio by Mace Ojala (CC BY-NC-SA)

      Audio, photo and spectrogram image from Audacity (GNU GPL v2) all by Mace Ojala (all CC BY-NC-SA).

      Isolating that very high-pitched sound object close to 19000Hz between 00:45 and 00:57 first with a high-pass filter at 16000Hz, then pitch-shifting -1 octave and -3 octaves to bring it within human hearing range. The original was picked up by the high-fidelity recorder, but is almost inaudible especially in the noisy street context.

      Spectrogram image by Mace Ojala (CC BY-NC-SA), using Audacity (GNU GPL v2).

      -1 octaves (by Mace Ojala, CC BY-NC-SA)

      -3 octaves (by Mace Ojala, CC BY-NC-SA)

      This is the sort of things we find in our sonic subconscious when go through some (psycho/techno)analysis beyond our everyday perception! ;) What does causal, semantic and reduced listening (Chion 1993) tell us about that sound?

    • Digital Audio Workstations (DAW)

      Besides our familiar Audacity, we can get a little peeks into two other, commercial digital audio workstation (=DAW) software, namely Ableton Live and FL Studio. You can check out an Maya-Roisin Slater's interview with Gerhard Behles and Robert Henke titled One adds and the other subtracts about Live and how it rose from the needs of their project Monolake. An interesting story of art and technology merging in software, and then getting a live (pun intended) of it's own. FL Studio too is a development of Fruity Loops, an influential, loop-based sample player software. Both, as well as Audacity and Pure Data (Pd) which we used to make our own synthesizer can host "virtual" instruments and effects inside of them from lively market of "VSTs". Live, FL Studio, Audacity and other DAWs are organized around the timeline view with tracks, automations, instrumentation etc. Such left-to-right view is not unfamiliar from sheet music. For the history of the this view, and it's implications you can see Andrew Lison's paper. "New Media, 1989: Cubase and the New Temporal Order" in Computational Culture, link in the course syllabus.

      (timeline view of Steinberg Cubase 1.51, quoted from Andrew Lison's "New Media, 1989: Cubase and the New Temporal Order" in Computational Culture, 2020)

      Seriously stranger, non-linear, process-oriented and "Bergsonian", or we even queerer (non-straight) time-axis manipulation (Kittler, see also Winthrop-Young; KrÀmer) is achieved with software such as Pure Data (Pd), MaxMSP, SuperCollider instead.

      The track or "performance" view of DAWs simulates often even skeuomorphically a studio mixing desk... elevated to the status of the main instrument itself as an instrument by legendary Jamaican dub studio engineers such as Scratch "Lee" Perr, King Tubby, Scientist... itself a major inspiration for "dub techno" sound, looping back to Monolake mentioned above, as well as "dubstep" from UK.

      Here is youtube user mihrantheupsetter demonstrating the style of performing with the mixing desk

      And here is classic Berlin sound aka Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald aka Basic Channel

      Observe how the sound of the equipment (noise, compression, distortion, what can be done with the controllers) plays into the work. Observe and appreciate the sound of your equipment in you audio paper.

      A definition for culture:

      culture
      praxis influences technology influences praxis

    • For exploration

      Work on your audio paper, and prepare to present (draft) project in Audacity and/or other audio editing software.

      • What is the current status?
      • What is your research question?
      • What are your sources... literature, sounds, ideas, designs, inspirations... stuff from other seminars is more than welcome
      • How is audio the unique and best format to conduct this research?
      • What do you need help or feedback with?

      Work together and collect feedback to improve the paper content (interestingness, relevance, focus etc.) and implementation (levels, noise, pacing and flow, project organization etc.).