toneagain

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Quick Ai recap of our session:
The meeting focused on troubleshooting audio issues and discussing potential settings for future meetings. The team decided to stick with the original sound setting and record the session for future reference. The meeting was characterized by disjointed and unclear communication, with no clear decisions, alignments, next steps, action items, or open questions provided.

The complete 4366 char report as .pdf. Hilarious.

a series of unclear statements, interjections,
and exclamations
we are rebels escaping capture ... are we?

Individual sound recordings - silences edited out: 4 different durations, 4 different patterns, 4 different styles, 4 different microphones, 1 processing algorithm.
Soundfiles available for research via a private message to one of the members.

10/03/24 9pm CET
Droning
Atunement 5 min of SUNN O))) - Pyroclasts (Full Album)
https://youtu.be/TNWvBZWgrAs

Three 10 min tries - difficult to organise breathing, to stay with same tone and with zoom, that glitched / crashed ... left us isolated / frustrated in the second test...
next time we will try a different platform: jitsi - less sophistication / formatting / capitalising might suit us more.

Mp3 of third droning test. Zoom can't handle our sounds and is treating Constança's voice badly,

Image of second droning test. Zoom can't handle our sounds at all, crashes, cuts , alters...

Nerina wrote:

Absence as Utterer = presence elsewhere
Spending hours listening to my daughter's breath in her sleep, learning it by heart so as to decrypt it and know when to put her down without waking her up is a form of deep listening. Not uttering but practicing what makes uttering possible. So, I don't feel far away from my fellow utterers, even though I seemingly let them down at each session.
Meanwhile, Myrte is starting her own uttering, syllables that match tones and rhythms, smiles and giggles to pneumatic utterings of our own. It's a different time, and yet fully immersed in it, it demands and facilitates the kind of presence our band also requires.

12 / 05 21h droning again with attention to rhythm (breath, modular, relational). We will try the common.garden platform. (results/consequences soon to come)

Atunement https://youtu.be/H3oaOKRNwxE
PHILL NIBLOCK / Nothin To Look At Just A Record

Image of testing common.garden 22/04

Is "social virtuosity" a concept we could use?

Nicols outlines what has contributed to her concept of ‘social virtuosity’. This concept was developed in tandem with her own extensive lived experience of music making, both with musicians acknowledged as ‘virtuosos’ in their field and with those in a wide range of facilitated and self-regulated community music making. Nicols coined the term to describe the profound excellence that can come from deeply connected, collective music making amongst participants of varied abilities. Both individual virtuosity and social virtuosity have an important role to play in the arts, but their cultural impacts are very different. The tendency for commodification of art based on exceptional individual virtuosity creates a subjective aesthetic supremacy which dictates what is and what is not ‘valuable’ art and music, negating the possibility that everybody has something valuable to offer, discouraging participation and excluding some of the most interesting contributions. Maggie Nicols 2023 in https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003307969-7/practice-social-virtuosities-maggie-nicols

Via https://youtu.be/0LH4yHDzE74 Social Virtuosity with Eva-Maria Houben at IKLECTIK

22 / 12 6pm CET back to zoom ( There is no possibility to have separate audiostreams in common.garden. We could try youtube embedding but would have to tinker all this ourselves - no one seems to be inclined to do that. )

Atunement inspired by the listening session we are doing since one month.
Stars of the Lid: Austin Texas Mental Hospital, Part 2, - The Tired Sounds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMeANDX2Qpo

more listening/listening harder
the movitation to utter is relational
very little almost nothing

Here is a sort of transcription of our conversation before and after this session:

Shut the fuck up STFU
Curt: likes the noise during silence - responding to the noise in a silent chamber - responding to the pulses we can hear in the algo - to the non-silence the algo is making
Nerina : no frustration in the listening - the silence as an extension of being present a quality, language vocab
theme attunement? Curt : very little almost nothing
40 min
the hive mind falling asleep - too much of nothing - not an even mix volumewise (Daniel can fix this in editing, but would that be good? these differences are part of what happened (might be different for each of us)) (Constança is not leaning backwards - she thinks the algo makes her less loud because of pitch (high pitch is easier to distinguish and so treated - we can see if that is the case if we watch the video) Curt tells he was very silent this time. Constança tells it might be that she is not using headphones.)
Life audio on was nice, Daniel feels he could also hear our surroundings. and someone say something - these are also triggers.
Can almost nothing be loud? Not being responsible for someone feeling uncomfortable? - less feeling it necessary to join help others.
Idea: Staying with the same instruments, roles). Modulating the same instrument, not jumping to another one, playing it but still also listening!
Being happy with sounds, being annoyed by sounds (animal sounds?), missing sounds (sounds of languages). We evolved around other languages not verbal like and we liked that phase, we may come back to working on that when we do roles.
Learned from listening sessions : we should try to stay longer with something, we were too often switching when something was going somewhere.
Staying longer seems more important than trying something new as having each one a different instrument ... ? Not insisting on something you like, but going along ... How do we keep things longer as a group, not necessarily as an individual. Listening, which is tiring when you are really paying attention.

(next time pay more attention to volumes - Annie was too loud)

download mp3 extract From session on 12 / 05 : common.garden is prioritazing conversation, singular voices and interferes largely with our sound production. the algo is in fact the most determining factor in the process and result. this can be nice if you play with it (Annie likes the result), but also very annoying (Constança hates it). We would like to try separate soundstreams.

Halima Malek a assisté à la session. Voici son compte rendu à son professeur Marcello Vitali Rosati. Merci Halima!
"Je n'avais que très peu d'indications a priori et je ne savais pas du tout que j'assisterais à une performance. J'étais un peu déstabilisée au début.
Le groupe a commencé par faire quelques tests techniques pour se familiariser avec la plateforme et ses fonctionnalités. Ensuite, les deux autres invités et moi avons assisté à une performance de 15 minutes et une autre de 5 minutes. Les artistes voulaient surtout tester la réception de leurs quatre voix. Nous pouvions entendre quatre voix distinctes simultanément sauf lorsqu'ils faisaient du humming. Le fait que la plateforme ne priorise pas une voix comme Zoom peut le faire était un point positif pour eux. J'ai apprécié que le volume du son dépende de la distance à laquelle nous étions l'un de l'autre. C'est également très intéressant de pouvoir se déplacer dans le jardin commun.
Quelques réflexions me sont venues à la suite de cette rencontre, notamment sur les notions de présence et coprésence, la communication non-verbale et l'excommunication de Galloway, j'ai également pensé au réel et à la vérité selon la réception souhaitée et à comment la transparence, mais dans ce cas aussi l'opacité, de l'outil peut influencer l'expérience du spectateur. Les artistes ont les yeux couverts, leur performance est uniquement basée
sur ce qu'ils entendent, pourquoi ce n'est pas le cas pour le spectateur ? Je pense que je m'éloigne de leur projet, mais je me suis dit qu'il serait intéressant de réfléchir à la perception visuelle du spectateur, à l'idée qu'il puisse voir sans voir ou de ne pas savoir ce qu'il voit et quelles images associe-t-il au son qu'il perçoit."

30 / 06 21h droning again with attention to rhythm (breath, modular, relational).
Session cancelled.

Context:

"By Urban Dictionary definition “Gooning” refers to the act of becoming completely self-absorbed with masturbation, such that your face and mannerisms takes on the personality of a goon:tongue out, vacant expression, grunting, muttering. My reading of the gooner is of one who has abstained from speech/language as we know it and is absorbed and moved entirely by the desirous body."
From https://performingborders.live/writings/limbs-everywhere-on-speech-self-and-the-body-harmanpreet-randhawa/

Two interesting books:

Mladen Dolar: A voice and nothing more.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262541879/a-voice-and-nothing-more/

HIS MASTER'S VOICE: On Voice and Language; Editor Inke Arns. with essays by Inke herself, Bojana Kunst, Florian Kramer, Katarina Zdjelar and Liesbeth de Mol.
https://www.hmkv.de/shop-en/shop-detail/his-masters-voice-on-voice-and-language.html

Intention was to use here.here by Houben as atunement

related : https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-extraordinary-ways-rhythm-shapes-our-lives/ "The music historian Ted Gioia has described Gregorian chants as “so rich in overtones that you have the impression they are angels, not men.” Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart and I have discussed the calm yet alert and energized state that drone compositions — musical pieces consisting of sustained sounds produced by monochords or other instruments and manipulated in the studio to swell and build — can induce."

Network[ed] Listening—Towards a De-centering of Beings by Franziska Schroeder.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263410912_Networked_Listening-Towards_a_De-centering_of_Beings

"As a performer who has listened very closely, corporeally and intently in and to the network over the last few years, network[ed] listening prompts a similar distribution of attentions: outward towards others, removing the performer from the centre of his or her self-preoccupation while, paradoxically, simultaneously also focusing on such self-preoccupation; thus opening up different ways of thinking about human presence. This means that the network makes us listen in different ways—not only to others but, particularly to ourselves. Listening in and to the network comprises a constant move on behalf of the performer between what is ‘here’—the local haptic body/instrument space and what is ‘out there’—the virtual, non-visualised, dark space of other absent presences. Network[ed] listening asks the performer to engage in an intimacy not only with her instrument and her sound, but also it urges the performer to be intimate with the mirror of her sound, a sound relayed through the network, with the sound of the disparate instruments, as well as with the sounds as projected by the differing acoustics of other (networked) spaces. It is a listening that is characterised by a certain fragility, by the paradoxical situation of focusing on oneself while resisting one’s self-preoccupation in order to allow for the essential unselfing, a state of moving from oneself to the other."