The art of natural sound.
Our technology has become mysteriously silent. Right now, I'm surrounded by three computers in my office, and the only sound they're making is the quiet whirring of the hard drives and the occasional crackling of the processors. They beep when some new mail arrives and thunk when an error occurs. The sound of my typing, too, is quiet: It's more of a plasticy clacking rather than the muscular chunkiness of, say, an electric typewriter. I'm sure there have been many dissertations written on the effect of all this quietude on writing itself, with its loss of percussive rhythm and how that affects the mind/body connection, which in turn affects the language itself, and so on. As if in reaction to all this quiet scribbling, three new CDs have emerged that examine the physical properties of writing and the mechanics surrounding its production, as a sort of commentary on the phenomenon of writing made audible.
Throughout the last century, modern composers furiously incorporated these sounds into their work. As early as 1917, Erik Satie included the sounds of a typewriter clattering away with an accompanying clanging of a return bell in his ballet score "Parade." Likewise, in 1950, the light music composer Leroy Anderson wrote a piece called "The Typewriter" in which keys tapped in time along with the orchestra the way drums normally would. In the 80s, bands like the Tom Tom Club alluded to Satie with the typewriter intro to "Wordy Rappinghood." As the technology moved on, so did the sounds. In the early 90s, the Dutch composer Paul Panhuysen hooked up five dot matrix printers and processed the sounds through various filters normally used for rock music, creating a new sort of post-industrial mechanical psychedelia.
In a weird glance back at the past, these new CDs have extended this tradition in unexpected ways. Instead of focusing on new technology-unlike the glitch-based composers of recent years who use the sounds of digital media as the basis for new electronic compositions-these discs are exercises in nostalgia for a time when writing was louder: One employs the sounds of old copy machines, another dot matrix printers, and one simply uses the sound a pencil makes when it scribbles as the basis for its compositions.
Take Stefan Helmreich's Copying Machine Music. He's the purveyor of something he calls "xerophonics," that is, music based on samples of recordings of actual copying machines. Anyone who's ever spent time in front of a xerox machine knows how seductive the rhythms of paper feeding into the machine are. Any student of world or modern music will note its complex polyrhythms, particularly when it's chugging away with another machine in its vicinity, forming a white-collar ballet mecanique. On this disc, Helmreich features the sounds that a wide variety of copying machines makes, each spotlighted on their own short demonstration track. He notes their page-per-minute speed, as well as the size and weight of the paper stock being fed through, all as conditions that affect the sonic outcome of his experiments. Sure enough, each piece sounds different, but all employ tropes familiar to electronic, industrial and dance music-phasing, polyrhythms, ascending and descending tones.
Thomas McIntosh and Emmanuel Madan, an architect and composer who go by the name of [The User], pick up where Paul Panhuysen left off by setting up 14 dot matrix printers that are played by an orchestra of personal computers, all conducted by a file server. Varying arrays of letters and numbers create their own unique sounds, which form the notes of this piece. Over the course of 41 minutes, the symphony unfolds sounding-well-like a bunch of well-timed printers in unison. The tonal range is necessarily limited, but it's better to think of this as a piece of constraint-based music, with the constraint, of course, being the sounds that these now-obsolete technologies are capable of making.
Gerhard Rühm, an Austrian conceptual artist, poet and composer who has been working for over 60 years, has made a remarkable disc that goes in the opposite direction of the others. It's just a soundtrack of Rühm making drawings with a pencil. The table appears to be mic'd so that each time the pencil touches the paper, a different sound is created. Sometimes it's a consistent banging (making dots) and other times, it's just the quiet whoosh of lines being made across the page. With the knowledge that he's being recorded, the process raises the question: Is he making a drawing, or is he making a recording? Often times, it's clear that he's making noises for the sake of the recording, which obviously influences the image appearing on the page. But then, looking at the photographs of the 20 elegant drawings that are reproduced in the CD booklet, it makes me think that we're simply hearing the documentation of drawings being made.
It's a trend. A few months ago on these pages, I reviewed a new disc by Golan Levin called Dialtones: A Telesymphony, composed of a cell-phone orchestra. The Dutch sound poet Jaap Blonk has teamed up with the techno wiz Radboud Mens to produce a disc called Bek, which is all dance music derived exclusively from the sounds emanating from Blonk's amazing mouth (think human beat box taken to a techno extreme).
In this reality-driven esthetic environment, with every sound and image constantly being recorded and archived, the fear, but also, the great promise, ultimately comes to not writing at all, rather machines writing for other machines. As the Canadian writer Christian Bök states, "If we want to commit an act of poetic innovation in an era of formal exhaustion, we may have to consider this heretofore unimagined, but nevertheless prohibited, option: writing poetry for inhuman readers, who do not yet exist, because such aliens, clones, or robots have not yet evolved to read it." Imagine the soundtrack to that poetry reading.