Effective Dose:

Creating Physiological Responses to Invisible Networks

A Thesis
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Masters of Fine Arts in Digital + Media in the Department of Digital + Media of the Rhode Island School of Design By Mark Cetilia Rhode Island School of Design 2008

Masters Examination Committee

Approved by:
Bill Seaman, Department Head, Primary Advisor Jocelyne Prince, Professor, Secondary Advisor Butch Rovan, Professor, Tertiary Advisor

Dedicated to Laura

Table of Contents
iii v 1 3 5 15 21 25 29 33 35 43 47 49 Table of Contents List of Illustrations Abstract Introduction Noise Spectral Ecology Tools and Techniques I: Physiology of Sight and Sound Tools and Techniques II: Projection Tools and Techniques III: Synaesthesia Tools and Techniques IV: Algorithmic Composition Work Bibliography Documentation on DVD Software on CD-ROM

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List of Illustrations
Figure 1 Title and Source Shannons schematic diagram of a general communication system (1948) Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana, Illinois: The University of Illinois Press, 1963), 5. Pitch matrix from Schoenbergs Variations for Orchestra (1928) David Cope, New Directions in Music (Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press, 2001), 24. Thaddeus Cahills Telharmonium (1910) Reynold Weidenaar, Magic Music From the Telharmonium (Metuchen, New Jersey: The Scarecrow Press, Inc, 1995), 234. Harry Partchs Mazda Marimba (1963) Cope, 60. Luigi Russolo (l.) and Ugo Piatti (r.) with their intonarumori (1914) Marcella Lista and Sophie Duplaix, Sons & Lumires (Paris, France: Centre Pompidou, 2004), 251. Robert Irwin (front) and James Turrell (back) in anechoic chamber (1970) Jan Butterfield, The Art of Light and Space (New York, New York: Abbeville Modern Art Movements, 1993), 26. Performance of John Cages Variations VII (1966) Catherine Morris, ed. 9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theatre, and Engineering, 1966 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2006), 76. Throbbing Gristle (1981) V. Vale, ed. Industrial Culture Handbook (San Francisco, California: RE/Search Publications, 1983), 10. Kurt Schwitters Merzbau (ca. 1930) Elizabeth Burns Gamard, Kurt Schwitters Merzbau: The Cathedral of Erotic Misery (New York, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000), Fig. 1. Inside staircase of Bruno Tauts Glashaus (1914) Kurt Junghanns, Bruno Taut, 1880-1938: Architektur und socialer Gedanke (Berlin, Germany: E.A. Seemann, 1998), Figure 55 Pierre Schaeffer at work in his studio (1952) Peter Manning, Electronic and Computer Music (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 134. Dunne and Rabys diagram of Herzian space (2001) Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects (Boston, Massachusetts: Birkhuser, 2001), 102. Christina Kubischs, Oasis 2000: Music for a Concrete Jungle (2000) Antje von Graevenitz, Christina Kubisch: Klangraumlichtzeit (Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag, 2003), 46. Joyce Hinterdings Aeriology (1998) Frances Dyson and Douglas Kahn, Wrapture: Liminal Product Gets All Tangled Up in Joyce Hinterdings Art, Arbyte (October, 2000): 82. Comparison of eye and camera obscura (early eighteenth century) Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1992), 49. Schematic drawing of the human ear Hugo Fastl and Eberhard Zwicker, Psychoacoustics: Facts and Models (New York, New York: Springer, 2007), 24.

2 3

4 5 6 7

8 9

10

11 12

13 14

15 16

17

Philips Pavilion (1958) Robert Morgan, Twentieth-Century Music: A History of Musical Style in Modern Europe and America (New York, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Ltd. 1991), 393. The Groupe de Recherches Musicales Acousmonium (1980) Curtis Roads, The Computer Music Tutorial (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1996), 454. Installation view of Micol Assals Chizhevsky Lessons (2007) Polly Staple, Risk Assessment, in Frieze Magazine 110 (London: Frieze, 2007), 229. Alexander Wallace Rimingtons color organ (1912) Ari Wiseman and Judith Zilczer, Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900 Kerry Brougher and Jeremy Strick, eds. (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005), 70. Thomas Wilfreds Untitled, Opus 161 (1965) Wiseman and Zilczer, 98. Oskar Fischingers sound scroll experiments (1932) Lista and Duplaix, 210. John and James Whitney with their pendulum system (ca. 1945) Wiseman and Zilczer, 126. Woody Vasulkas use of the Rutt-Etra Scan Processor in Didactic Video (1975) Marita Sturken, ed. Steina and Woody Vasulka: Machine Media (San Francisco, California: San Francisco Museum of Art, 1996), 39. Laurie Spiegel with the GROOVE system (early 1970s) Joel Chadabe, Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1996), 161. Table of measure numbers from Mozarts musical dice game (pub. 1792) Cope, 160. KNOBS: instructions for performance of Cage and Hillers HPSCHD (1969) John Cage, Lejaren Hiller, and Ben Johnston, HPSCHD / String Quartet No. 2 (New York, New York: Nonesuch, 1969), insert. Geoffrey Sonnabends model of obliscence (1946) Society for the Diffusion of Useful Information, The Museum of Jurassic Technology: Primi Decem Anni Jubilee Catalogue (West Covina, California: Society for the Diffusion of Useful Information Press, 2002), 65. Mark Cetilias Obliscence Field (2006) Courtesy of the artist Mark Cetilias Hand of Doom (2007) Courtesy of the artist William Burroughs with Gysin and Sommervilles Dreammachine (1972) John Geiger, Chapel of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Stroboscopic Light and the Dream Machine (Brooklyn, New York: Soft Skull Press, 2003), cover photograph. Mark Cetilias Eye is to Window (2008) Courtesy of the artist Floor plan for Mark Cetilias Effective Dose (2008) Courtesy of the artist Viewing apparatus from Mark Cetilias Effective Dose (2008) Courtesy of the artist

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34

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35 36 37

Block diagram of Mark Cetilias Effective Dose (2008) Courtesy of the artist Robert Irwins Fractured Light Partial Scrim Ceiling Eye-Level Wire (1970) Butterfield, 23. Untitled video performance by Mark Cetilia and Yuni Kwon (2008) Courtesy of the artists

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Abstract
We live in an age of constant data immersion. Wherever we go, transmissions from countless wireless networks float through us as waves. Yet our senses are only capable of receiving and decoding the information carried by these waveforms through the use of technology. Cellular networks are conquering ever-larger areas of the spectrum, and have become ubiquitous throughout the developed and developing world. Though we are incapable of decoding cellular transmissions with our native faculties, they are practically unavoidable. When we experience frequencies in the audible spectrum without intentionally exposing ourselves to them, we think of these frequencies as noise. Thus, cellular transmissions may be considered a highly pervasive source of noise found in areas of the spectrum outside of human perception. During the past two years, I have primarily focused on creating instruments that use sound and video projection technologies to directly stimulate the sensory apparatus of the user / participant in order to allow access to hidden phenomena. For my thesis project, I have drawn upon this experience and my interests in noise, acoustic and spectral ecology to create a highly focused area for contemplation of cellular transmissions in the local environment in real time through the use of projected sound and light.

Introduction
I am interested in creating a dialogue surrounding the use of radio frequency spectra from the perspective of acoustic ecology, especially in relation to the rapid expansion of the cell phone industry. My thesis project, entitled Effective Dose, is a contemplative environment in which users may directly experience the traffic of cellular networks via custom-designed instruments that mine the frequencies utilized by these networks for local activity and create tangible, physiological responses through non-representational data visualization and sonification in real time. This piece is comprised of a fully immersive soundscape utilizing traditional surround sound and directional sound projection technologies in order to create a highly focused listening environment in conjunction with the use of the castglass prismatic lens to act as a mediator between computer-generated imagery and the perspective of the active viewer. As I am interested in using technology to reveal the invisible, the use of directional sound and projection through a prismatic lens enables viewers to experience these phenomena from a single vantage point. This both affords a degree of interaction that could not be otherwise achieved, and uses the medium to speak of its content. Through the process of analysis and resynthesis of data found in specified radio frequency bands using Ettus Research LLCs Universal Software Radio Peripheral1 1 in conjunction with GNU Radio2 software for data acquisition and frequency demodulation, and the multimedia programming environment Max/MSP/Jitter3, 2 I have built a space for contemplation related to the omnipresence of the cellular 3 networks in our environment. Developing an understanding of psychoacoustic phenomena and perceptual connections between sound and image has been critical in the realization of this project, so a large portion of the written work ahead is devoted to these topics, as well as to the history and theory of acoustic ecology, which helps provide a framework for the burgeoning field of spectral ecology. The final portion of this written work will include an overview of the project, technological implementation, and critical analysis. Let us begin with a discussion of what constitutes music, sound, noise, and silence from historical, scientific and art-, music-, and cultural-theoretical viewpoints, which will be important for establishing a context for the work that follows.

cf. http://www.ettus.com cf. http://www.gnuradio.org/trac cf. http://www.cycling74.com

Noise
Whether we are talking of sound, video, or scientific data, noise is generally regarded as a presence that acts upon a signal, reducing a receivers ability to understand the information transmitted by the sender. 4 A noise is itself a signal whose presence is disruptive; it is, as Bart Kosko says, a signal that does not belong there.5 The perception of noise is therefore partially a subjective phenomenon, depending not only on an individuals taste, but also the conditions at any given moment in time. A sound that I generally find pleasant, such as the sound of church bells, might just as easily become noise if I am trying to leave someone a voice message while walking by a church, or my favorite album might become noise if I am trying to concentrate on writing my thesis.

4 Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana, Illinois: The University of Illinois Press, 1963), 5. 5 Bart Kosko, Noise (New York, New York: Viking Penguin, 2006), 3.

Fig. 1. Shannons schematic diagram of a general communication system (1948) This is not to say that there are no cultural biases towards specific sounds or combinations of sounds that might label them as being inherently musical or noisy. Western music is deeply rooted in the development of organizing principles meant to provide the most pleasant melodic or harmonic relationships between notes. The history of the twelve-note scale in Western music dates back to ancient Greece, with the invention of the Pythagorean tuning system, which uses a ratio of 3:2 to determine a pitch that is five whole tones above the previous one. After repeating this process of tuning by fifths twelve times, one will arrive at a note that is slightly higher than an exact seven octaves (an octave is a ratio of 2:1) above the pitch with which he or she started. The difference between these pitches is known as the Pythagorean comma.6 Despite this fatal flaw in intonation, the Pythagorean tuning system was the primary basis for Western music up until the eighteenth century, when well temperament (lowering the intervals between successive notes evenly so that octaves line up) became the norm. In the twentieth century, equal temperament, in which each note is diminished two one-hundredths of a whole tone, has become the predominant tuning system.7 Meanwhile, the use of the Pythagorean tuning system had created an emphasis on intervals of fifths and octaves as well as fourths (an octave minus a fifth), which were viewed as consonant, while other intervals were seen as dissonant. Throughout much of the history of Western music (and much of the popular music of today), dissonance has been used to create tension, but the ultimate goal of resolving to the tonal center is merely delayed by its employment, or in rare circumstances, avoided to create a dramatic effect. In his 1722 Trait de lharmonie, composer and music theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau outlined his highly influential system of such organizing principles for the generation and analysis of harmony.8 The employment of such principles was so dominant in the music written between 1700 and 1900 that these centuries have become known as the common practice period of Western music.9 It was not until the nineteenth century that the need for resolution to a tonal center began to be questioned by composers such as Richard Wagner. Wagners Tristan und Isolde, premiered in 1865, undermined the foundation of Classical form through the use of suspended tonality in which tonal centers seemed to melt almost imperceptibly into one another.10

6 Don Michael Randel, ed. The New Harvard Dictionary of Music (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1986), 181. 7 Ibid, 837.

Ibid, 851.

9 Robert Morgan, TwentiethCentury Music: A History of Musical Style in Modern Europe and America (New York, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Ltd., 1991), 3. 10 Ibid, 5.

In 1889, Claude Debussy attended the Paris Exposition, where he witnessed a performance of a Javanese gamelan orchestra whose tuning system was unrelated to the twelve-note scale; in 1890, he met and befriended Erik Satie. The two undertook a number of compositions whose goal was to free melody 11 Thomas B. Holmes, Electronic from its traditional underpinning of keys and chords, allowing it to move and and Experimental Music: Pioneers in develop independently of any presupposed and melodramatic superstructures.11 Technology and Composition (New York, Debussys interest in formlessness is perhaps most famously embodied by his New York: Routledge, 2002), 3334. only completed opera, Pellas et Mlisande. Begun in 1893 and premiered in 1902, Pellas et Mlisande was a virtually unaltered setting of Maurice Maeterlincks 12 Piero Weiss and Richard drama of the same name without any distinct numbered sections. 12 Satie Taruskin, eds. Music in the Western departed from traditional form even more radically with his 1893 Vexations. World: A History in Documents (New This piece consisted of a short phrase written for solo piano to be performed York, New York: Schirmer Books, eight hundred and forty times. This performance, which takes over eighteen hours 1984), 418. to complete, was to be undertaken only after preparation beforehand in deep silence and serious immobility. The attention to the consciousness-changing effects of this piece are evident from the origin of the title alone. The title is an allusion to the alchemical text of the same name, written in the sixteenth century 13 David Toop, Ocean of Sound by Paracelsus, in which the author discusses the tranquility of mind that would (London: Serpents Tail, 2001), 199200. come at the conclusion of the alchemical process.13 Vexations thus intends to lead the performer to enlightenment through the act of repetition, a mechanical means of transformation. By the early 1920s, Arnold Schoenberg had formulated the twelve-tone system, in which an entire composition would be based upon a tone row (a series of twelve non-repeating notes); this series of notes could be inverted or reversed, but no note could be repeated without playing the remaining notes in the row. This strategy removed the reliance upon a tonal center, but still relied upon the use of musical motifs and traditional melody and accompaniment. In the years to follow, Anton Webern expanded upon Schoenbergs system to include timbre as well as pitch, leading to the development of total serialism by composers such as Pierre Boulez and Milton Babbit, in which every possible parameter of sound could be organized based on a series of events.14

14 Joel Chadabe, Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1996), 3637.

Fig. 2. Pitch matrix from Schoenbergs Variations from Orchestra (1928)

The analysis of timbre as a primary concern in musical expression reaches back to the nineteenth century, with the 1863 publication of Hermann von Helmholtz On the Sensation of Tone, in which Helmholtz states that any sound may be recreated by combining a series of sine waves of different frequencies, amplitudes, and phases, as mathematician Jean Baptiste Fourier had proven previously in regards to the transmission of heat.15 Helmholtz publication created an uproar in the scientific community, and the young engineer Thaddeus Cahill read it shortly afterwards. Inspired by the books pretext, Cahill began working on ways to generate complex frequencies from multiple tones. He filed his first patent for The Art of and Apparatus for Generating and Distributing Music Electrically in 1895, and began working to create the worlds first additive synthesizer, which he called the Telharmonium.16

15 Charles Dodge and Thomas A. Jerse, Computer Music: Synthesis, Composition, and Performance (New York, New York: Schirmer, 1997), 4647. 16 Reynold Weidenaar, Magic Music From the Telharmonium (Metuchen, New Jersey: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1995), 18.

Fig. 3. Thaddeus Cahills Telharmonium (1910) The Telharmonium, which eventually grew to the size of an entire factory building, used electricity to drive a number of dynamos that could produce any given frequency, inside or outside of the twelve-note scale and could therefore create complex timbres by controlling the overtone series of each note played. Unfortunately, Cahill ran into too many technical and financial hurdles for the Telharmonium to survive, but the invention was widely publicized, and the composer Ferruccio Busoni was introduced to it through an article in the July 1906 issue of McClures Magazine. Busoni was currently in the process of writing his treatise, Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music. Published in 1907, this treatise presented the Telharmonium as capable of fulfilling the need Busoni saw for music to replace the twelve-note octave with infinite gradations.

17

Holmes, 35.

18 19

Morgan, 265. Ibid, 303304.

While the use of musical scales divided into more than twelve units has been prevalent in other cultures for hundreds of years, it was not until the twentieth century that such tuning systems became acknowledged within the canon of Western art music. New definitions of tonality and the use of expanded tuning systems began to flourish in the 1920s. American composer Charles Ives Three Quartertone Piano Pieces (192324) was written for two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart from each other.17 Czech composer Alois Hba (18931973) employed quarter-tones, fifth-tones, and sixth-tones to [enrich] the previous semitone system with finer tonal differentiations, beginning with his 1920 String Quartet No. 2, Op. 7.18 In the late 1920s, American composer Harry Partch developed a forty-three-note scale and began building numerous instruments for the performance of his music, beginning with his 1933 Li Po Songs.19

Fig. 4. Harry Partchs Mazda Marimba (1963) But even a scale of forty-three notes did not come close to the infinite gradations called for by Busoni. Fortunately, Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music was to be discovered by a young composer by the name of Edgar Varse. 20 As early as the 1920s, Varse had begun referring to music as organized sound, and in his Treatise of Sound (1936), he called for the use of electronics in order to gain: liberation from the arbitrary, paralyzing tempered system; the possibility of obtaining any number of cycles or, if still desired, subdivisions of the octave, and consequently the formation of any desired scale; unsuspected range in low and high registers; new harmonic splendors obtainable from the use of sub-harmonic combinations now impossible, the possibility of obtaining any differentiation of timbre, of sound-combinations; new dynamics beyond the present human-powered orchestra and the replacement of linear counterpoint with sound-masses and shifting planes. 21 Despite his best efforts to gather funding or technical support to realize the necessary electronic instrumentation, it was not until much later that he was able to work with such instruments. For most of his life, Varse resolved himself to solving the challenges laid out in his treatise primarily with traditional instrumentation. He developed compositional techniques that would forecast possibilities afforded by the advent of analog synthesis systems of the 1950s and onward.22 Like Varse, Luigi Russolo was interested in expanding the musical palette to incorporate more complex timbres, but rather than working with existing musical instruments or waiting for electronics to evolve, he set about making his own mechanical instruments, which he called intonarumori (noise-intoners). The intonarumori were large boxes containing various implements that would be struck, scraped, or rubbed against strings, drum skins, or one another, and featured metal cones protruding from them which acted as what we now think

20 Ibid, 253254.

21 Daniel Warner and Christoph Cox, eds. Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (New York, New York: Continuum International Publishing, 2006), 1719.

22 Peter Manning, Electronic and Computer Music (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 911.

of as loudspeakers. The instruments were controlled through the use of cranks and levers to adjust the speed at which the various implements would be deployed.23 23

Holmes, 40.

Fig. 5. Luigi Russolo (l.) and Ugo Piatti (r.) with their intonarumori (1914) Although Varse and Russolo each sought to expand musical language to include more complex timbral content, they had very different reasons for wanting to do so. Varse was a trained composer whose primary goal was to change the shape of his musical compositions. Russolo, on the other hand, was a Futurist painter with no musical background who was so inspired by a performance of the Futurist composer Balilla Pratellas Musica Futurista that he set out immediately upon a quest for noise. This quest took place both in the written word, in the form of his 1913 manifesto The Art of Noises, and in practice through his invention of an entire orchestra of noise intoners and staging of public concerts.24 Russolo claimed that with the invention of machines, Noise was born, and indeed the defining characteristic of his time was the omnipresence of machine noise.25 Since listeners had become accustomed to traditional instrumentation that in its slightness and monotony no longer produces emotion, Russolo believed that the only way to create emotional impact in a piece of music was to embrace the use of noise as a key compositional element.26

24 Holmes, 3841. 25 Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises (New York, New York: Pendragon Press, 1987), 23. 26 Ibid, 2324.

Noise, according to Russolo, is comprised not only of loud and disagreeable sounds, but also subtle and delicate noises that produce pleasing sensations such as the wind, the babbling of a brook, the rustling of leaves, etc.27 Russolo also 27 Ibid, 25. looked to Helmholtz for a further definition of noise. Helmhotz defined noise as the opposite of musical sensations that could be considered perfectly stable, uniform, and invariable.28 Noise, therefore, is simply aperiodic sound. Any sound 28 Ibid, 37. that is not a pure sinusoid like the sound produced by a tuning fork must therefore consist of at least an element of noise. By extension, Russolo claims that the real and fundamental difference between musical sound and noise is that noise is generally much richer in harmonics.29 29 Ibid, 3739. This expansion of the definition of music to include any possible sound was an important development in music history, and was taken to its logical conclusion by American composer John Cage in The Future of Music: Credo, written in 1937. In his credo, Cage declared that while in the past, the point of disagreement has been between dissonance and consonance, it will be, in the immediate future, between noise and so-called musical sound.30 Years later, Cage experienced the practical application of this theory in a powerful way when he visited the anechoic chamber at Harvard University, a specially constructed space that minimizes reflections from the walls, floor, and ceiling, in which there is no reverberation,

30 John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 4.

31 Perry R. Cook, Music, Cognition, and Computerized Sound: An Introduction to Psychoacoustics (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2001), 278. 32 Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2001), 191.

and thus no sense of space.31 The anechoic chamber also muted the sounds of the surrounding space, cordoning off all environmental sounds and dampening sounds inside its waffled walls.32

Fig. 6. Robert Irwin (front) and James Turrell (back) in anechoic chamber (1970) Cage anticipated an experience of pure silence in this chamber, but instead he heard two sounds, one a high and one a low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system and the low one was my blood circulation.33 This experience, along with his exposure to Robert Rauschenbergs white paintings, led him to compose his most famous piece, 4'33".34 In this piece, the performer was instructed to be tacet (silent) for the three movements of undetermined lengths of time totalling four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The practical conclusion of this piece is at least twofold: first, that there is no such thing as silence, and second, that any sound can be considered musical, whether it has been notated or not. In 1937, Cage predicted that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard.35 Cage lived to see this prophecy fulfilled, both through a number of his own works (such as his Variations VII, in which Cage and his collaborators manipulated sounds from twenty radio stations, ten open telephone lines, two Geiger counters, and a staggering variety of household items)36 and in the development of noise music as a genre of its own.

33

Cage, 8.

34 Kahn, 168.

35

Cage, 34.

36 Catherine Morris, ed., 9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theatre, and Engineering, 1966 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2006), 10.

10

Fig. 7. Performance of John Cages Variations VII (1966) The development of free jazz improvisation in the 1950s by artists such as John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman paved the way for late 1960s Avant/Improv artists such as guitarist Derek Bailey, an early and regular user of feedback as an essential component of his music, with it becoming material in its own right, but also working as an arbitrariness that could never fully be harnassed.37 Performances and recordings in the mid-to-late 1970s by artists like Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, and Einstrzende Neubauten launched a new style of music for other industrial and power electronics groups in Europe and the United States such as Whitehouse and Controlled Bleeding. These artists utilized harsh noise material in order to target the body as listening device so that the mind-body dualism the modern Western listener has been disciplined into was undone.38

37 Paul Hegarty, Noise/Music: A History (New York, New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2007), 51.

38 Ibid, 120.

Fig. 8. Throbbing Gristle (1981)

11

39 Warner and Cox, 59.

40 Chad Hensley, The Beauty of Noise: An Interview With Masami Akita of Merzbow, EsoTerra 8 (1999): http://www.esoterra.org/merzbow.htm accessed April 2008.

Around the same time in Japan, a new movement of noise was brewing with artists such as Masonna, Hijokaidan, Incapacitants and Merzbow creating intense physical experiences of sound. Masami Akita, also known as Merzbow, is arguably the most prolific noise artist alive today, with over three hundred releases to his credit. Akita explains that he arrived at noise through his introduction to free jazz and electroacoustic composition: I saw the Cecil Taylor Unit in 1973 and it was very influential I became very interested in the pulse beat of the drums within free jazz I also became interested in electronic kinds of sounds like Pierre Henry, Stockhausen, Franois Bayle, Gordon Mumma and Xenakis.39 The name Merzbow is derived from Kurt Schwitters architectural assemblage known as the Merzbau or The Cathedral of Erotic Misery (19231937). According to Akita, Just as Dadaist [sic] Kurt Schwitters made art from objects picked up off the street, I made sound from the scum that surrounds my life.40

41 Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, eds. Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists Writings (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, Ltd, 1996), 499. 42 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 26.

Fig. 9. Kurt Schwitters Merzbau (ca. 1930) Beyond the similarities in Schwitters and Akitas work arising from the use of found objects or trash, it is important to note that both are concerned with a redefinition of architectural space. Schwitters explosion of space with accretions of every kind of discarded material41 is mirrored by Akitas creation of a physical cathedral of noise and scum through the use of sheer playback volume. In Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Jacques Attali claims that noise is violence, a simulacrum of murder.42 This is certainly a fitting description of the Japanese noise music developed by artists like Akita.

12

Recently, however, a new movement known as onkyo or onkyoei has spawned, which focuses on physical presence at the opposite extreme of listening. 43 43 Hegarty, 146. This movement is referred to as EAI or electroacoustic improvisation in regards to artists outside of Japan. By utilizing extremely high pitches that quiver at the threshold of aural perception, artists such as Sachiko M, Otomo Yoshihide, Toshimaru Nakamura, and Keith Rowe create a powerful physical presence of sound with the utmost economy of means. These artists use tones that may initially seem painful, but slowly recede into the background like a television set on mute in conjunction with almost inaudible clicks and pops, akin to Stockhausens colored silence. In these regards, there is a marked similarity to the space created by practitioners of onkyo and the architectural space created by Bruno Taut. Critic Robert Hughes described Tauts 1914 Glashaus at the Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne as follows: Light shone into the double-glazed dome through prisms, and was reflected from its outer skin by mirroring; the walls and steps were of glass blocks, and kaleidoscopic images were thrown into a deep violet well of water from a projector.44 The sound of Onkyo is similarly projected into space 44 Robert Hughes, The Shock of the like scintillating fragments of light reverberating through a crystalline structure. New (New York, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 178.

Fig. 10. Inside staircase of Bruno Tauts Glashaus (1914) In my own work, I am very much interested in exploring the physical sensation of sound. The numerous layers of sound I have employed in Effective Dose range from dense, churning masses of noise to pointillistic grains of static, bubbling transmissions and needle-sharp projections. Each layer clearly fits within the realm of noise, and its heritage is directly linked to the history of noise music. However, these sounds are employed in order to bring awareness to the violence perpetrated by the unavoidable cellular transmissions in our environment without resorting to the creation of an oppressive atmosphere that might repel my audience. This dense sonic landscape thus allows for contemplation by those entering my installation, rather than simply reenacting an act of aggression.

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Spectral Ecology
In the introduction to his seminal text on the field of acoustic ecology, Our Sonic Environment and the Soundscape: the Tuning of the World, R. Murray Schafer quotes John Cage: Music is sounds, sounds around us whether were in or out of concert halls: cf. Thoreau.45 This is in reference to Walden, in which Thoreau spends an entire chapter cataloguing sounds: sounds of birds, trains, wagons on bridges, sounds that turned Thoreaus mundane life into a drama of many scenes and without an end.46 Schafer refers to this rich palette of sounds as the soundscape, which is comprised of three primary classifications of sound: keynote sounds, signals, and soundmarks.47 According to Schafer, keynote sounds are those that make up the background of a given place, against which all other sounds are heard. Signals, on the other hand, are the foreground sounds that we intentionally pay attention to. Their meaning is necessarily derived from their relationship to the keynote sounds. Schafers third classification of sound, the soundmark, is a sound that is unique to a given place. Like landmarks, these sounds are worthy of preservation.48 Acoustic ecology, therefore, is the study of the soundscape in relationship to the life that inhabits it. Schafer claims that we are in the midst of an evolution from the hi-fi soundscape to the lo-fi soundscape. In the hi-fi soundscape (one comprised of a favorable signal-to-noise ratio), distinct events, such as the sounds of insects, birds, wind in the trees, may be heard. This ability to discern distinct events gives us perspective on our relationship to our surroundings, whereas in the lo-fi soundscape of urban society, this perspective is lost.49 The ultimate lo-fi soundscape is one where the background sounds are equally as loud as the foreground sounds, and it is no longer possible to know what, if anything, is to be listened to.50

45 R. Murray Schafer, Our Sonic Environment and the Soundscape: The Tuning of the World (Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books, 1993), 5. 46 Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Or Life in the Woods (White Plains, NY: Peter Pauper Press, 1946), 111. 47 Schafer, 9. 48 Ibid, 910.

49 Ibid, 43.

50 Ibid, 71.

The shift towards the lo-fi soundscape, he claims, started with the Industrial Revolution, which introduced a multitude of new sounds with unhappy consequences for many of the natural and human sounds which they tended to obscure. 51 51 Furthermore, Schafer claims, the rise in ambient noise was a significant force in driving the Industrial Revolution forward. The sound of machines constantly churning set people in motion, and inspired them to make more machines: if quiet machinery had been developed, the success of industrialization might 52 not have been so total.52 Furthermore, Schafer claims, making sounds that can be heard from far away is a tactic that has been used to claim space throughout history. Bell sounds from churches would declare the reaches of their parishes; the clamoring of the armor and banging of drums would declare the space of a conquering army. In the field of acoustic ecology, this practice is known as sound imperialism, and it can be found everywhere from traffic noise on the street, to airplanes overhead, to Muzak in our shopping centers and office buildings. The dream of acoustic ecology is to reunite with the Ursound, from which the sound world itself was born.53 In order to achieve this goal, and to preserve the soundmarks before they disappear into the lo-fi soundscape, R. Murray Schafer founded the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University in the late 1960s.54 The members of this organization set out to record and catalogue sounds from all over the world. But as Brandon Labelle points out, place is always more than its snapshot and in order to capture this pure essence of sound, certain liberties must be taken by practitioners of acoustic ecology: microphones, audio tapes, headphones, radio broadcasts, speakers and amplification systems function as magical tools for tapping into the buried unconscious inside environmental sound, locating its messages by partially hallucinating in front of the acoustic mirror of its recording. 55 Hildegard Westerkamp, a research associate at the World Soundscape Project from 19731980, is a prime example of an artist who works within the framework

Ibid.

Ibid, 78.

53 Brandon Labelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (New York, New York: Continuum International Publishing, 2006), 204. 54 Nick Collins, and Julio dEscrivn, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 190. 55 Ibid, 205.

15

56 Warner and Cox, 77.

57

Ibid, 19.

of acoustic ecology but uses the techniques available through the recorded medium to reveal the underlying meaning of the sounds representative of that space. This practice can be traced directly to the techniques of listening employed by practitioners of musique concrte such as Pierre Schaeffer. In his seminal work, Trait des Objets Musicaux ,Schaeffer introduces us to his concepts of sonorous objects and acousmatic listening. A sonorous object is a sound whose means of production and prior symbolic content has been stripped from it in order for the sound itself to become the focus of the listener, such that the act of listening becomes the origin of the phenomenon to be studied not the external references of the sound but the perception itself.56 This act of listening, then, is known as acousmatic listening. It is also referred to by some practitioners as reduced listening, as the sounds have been reduced from sound sources to sound objects. In order to achieve the conditions appropriate for acousmatic listening, Schaeffer suggests not only the use of the loudspeaker to create physical distance from the sounds source, but also the utilization of recording technologies to remove the sonorous object from its source of production entirely. Furthermore, Schaeffers approach calls for the application of various playback and manipulation strategies in order to acquire the most information about the sonorous object. Assuming that we limit ourselves to a single recording, we can still read the latter more or less quickly, more or less loudly, or even cut into pieces, thereby presenting the listener with several versions of what was initially a single event.57

Fig. 11. Pierre Schaeffer at work in his studio (1952) For contemporary artists such as Francisco Lpez, the answer lies somewhere between Schafer and Schaeffer. Lpez employs tactics from musique concrte, but does so with an ecological intent. Referring to the listening strategies employed as profound listening, because the term reduced listening connotes simplification, Lpez maintains that this practice doesnt negate what is outside the sounds, but explores and affirms all that is inside them.58 Furthermore, he claims that there is no such thing as an objective perception of sound, whether presented as a recording or heard in real time and space. We edit the soundscape simply by focusing our attention towards specific details, and the act of recording and

58 Ibid, 8283.

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re-presenting the soundscape is an artistic one, from which a new, hyperreal environment is born. Unlike most acoustic ecologists, however, Lpez insists that the natural world is not necessarily a quiet, pastoral environment, citing the rainforest of La Selva, Costa Rica as an example of a wonderfully intense powerful broadband sound environment of thrilling complexity.59 This sentiment 59 Ibid, 86. is echoed by Brandon Labelle, who defines the soundscape as all sounds that flow and get carried along in the full body of the sound spectrum, from above and below audibility, as pure energy, molecular movement, in fractions of sonority that integrate through a reciprocal subjectivity [of] human experience with the earthly whole.60 60 Labelle, 202215. I propose the field of spectral ecology, then, as an examination of the relationships between the inhabitants of an environment and the activity within what Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby have termed hertzian space. Hertzian space is comprised of the frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum that are outside the range of our sensory apparatus. Dunne and Raby describe hertzian space as a new, invisible but physical environment created by electromagnetic radiation from electronic devices. 61 But to simplify hertzian space to the transmissions and byproducts of electronic devices alone is the equivalent of listening to only the sound signals in the soundscape and ignoring entirely the keynote sounds: the electromagnetic spectrum is populated by a variety of naturally occurring phenomena as well.

61 Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects (Boston, Massachusetts: Birkhuser, 2001), 8.

Fig. 12. Dunne and Rabys diagram of hertzian space (2001) For instance, disturbances in the ionosphere caused by lightning create phenomena that scientists call whistlers, tweaks and bonks.62 In 1967, composer Alvin Lucier was introduced to recordings of these atmospheric sounds made by Millett Morgan of Dartmouth College. Over the next twenty years, Lucier did a variety of experiments, performances, and installations using these sounds, both in real time and in the form of recordings. His piece Sferics (short for atmospherics), released in 1988 by Lovely Music, features recordings of these events captured by the composer using a pair of homemade antennas and pieced together in chronological order. In 1984, as part of the Siteworks Southwest festival in El Moro, New Mexico, he installed a number of antennas at the top of a mesa and provided headphone listening stations where visitors could listen to these sounds in real time.63

62 Alvin Lucier, Sferics (New York, New York: Lovely Music, 1988), 1.

63 Ibid.

Christina Kubisch, a first-generation sound artist has been working with sounds of hertzian space since the 1970s, using open circuits to capture sounds carried by wires through the process of electromagnetic induction. In her early installation work, she would transmit sound via electrical wires, and installation visitors would be invited to listen to the sounds carried by holding small cubes containing an amplifier circuit and a speaker next to the wire. In the 1980s, she expanded upon this work by building wireless headphones with large copper coils that visitors would don. The act of their walking through the installation space would then mix the sounds carried by the wires.64 64 Antje von Graevenitz, Christina Kubisch: Klangraumlichtzeit Kubisch set the headphones aside for years to focus on other projects. But in 1999, (Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag, 2003), 43. when she was commissioned to do a large-scale installation, she decided to work with the headphones for this piece. When she picked them up, she was surprised to hear so many strange sounds: humming sounds, rhythms, and all kinds of

17

65 Christoph Cox, Invisible Cities: things that, of course, disturbed me, because I didnt want them there.65 What An Interview With Christina Kubisch, she soon discovered was that the sounds she was picking up were in fact the Cabinet Magazine 21 (2006), 93. electromagnetic fields in the local environment. She discarded the notion of picking up prerecorded sounds using electromagnetic induction, and set out instead to build a pair of headphones that were especially sensitive to these occurrences in the environment. This resulted in her Electrical Walks series, in which participants are provided the aforementioned headsets and a map of the surrounding area. They are then sent out to experience the electromagnetic 66 Ibid, 96. fields in their environment firsthand.66

Fig. 13. Christina Kubischs Oasis 2000: Music for a Concrete Jungle (2000) Australian artist Joyce Hinterding has also created a number of recordings and installation works that explore the electromagnetic spectrum. Her Aeriology installation uses approximately twenty miles of magnetic wire stretched between two columns to act as an antenna that gathers frequencies hidden in the areas of the electromagnetic spectrum that are inaccessible to our senses. These frequencies are then broadcast through several loudspeakers using only the energy gathered from the atmosphere to drive them. According to Douglas Kahn, the frequencies that Aeriology attracts are all over the place: high, low, and in-between, pointing to the fact that this hybrid antenna is not efficient and is not meant to be.67 The result is a dense portrait of the inaudible portions of the spectrum, moving, buzzing, and resonating with each other.68

67 Frances Dyson and Douglas Kahn, Wrapture: Liminal Product Gets All Tangled Up in Joyce Hinterdings Art, Arbyte (October, 2000): 83. 68 Ibid.

Fig. 14. Joyce Hinterdings Aeriology (1998)

18

While Lucier, Kubisch and Hinterding have allowed listeners to access hertzian space in real time, they all do it through direct means, that is, through the use of antennas or electrical induction. In my work, however, I am interested in exploring hertzian space through tactics more related to those proposed by practitioners of musique concrte, in order to dissect these signals from a variety of angles and draw out more information about what is inside of them. While I am primarily interested in analyzing the sounds generated by cellular networks, I see these sounds as part of a larger ecological system outside of the limits of the human hearing range. My work utilizes both the keynote sounds (the noise of the natural world found in the frequency bands I am analyzing for cellular traffic) and the sound signals (in this case, the cellular transmissions themselves) in the creation of a new hyperreal listening environment. The natural world is indeed a noisy place, and it is my intent to create a physical presence for both keynotes and sound signals in my environments. My intent is neither to create a system in which we feel the natural world slipping away as technology overtakes it, nor to create a neo-Futurist work that insists upon the dominance of the machine. Rather, I am interested in bringing an awareness to the use of the hertzian space by creating an environment for contemplation of our surroundings. Giving my viewers time, mental and physical space to process the relationship between the natural and the manmade is pivotal to my work. If the Ursound is the primary sound (or the Big Bang, to avoid sounding too newagey) from which all other sounds have rippled, then it may be found in all sounds, whether we perceive them as noise or as sounds of great beauty.

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Tools and Techniques I: Physiology of Sight and Sound Paul Virillio has been quoted as saying that machines for seeing modify perception.69 This statement applies to all prosthetic devices that we use to augment our sensory apparatus. As we have discussed, Thomas Cahills Telharmonium was not only a technical advancement that allowed its users to create complex timbres from electrical currents, but was also an artistic achievement that inspired musicians, artists and composers to rethink their views on the nature of sound and musical form. The development of such tools and techniques (both scientific and artistic) has shaped our perception of the world around us, and we shall look at other important developments shortly. Let us examine not only these developments, but also the physiological characteristics and the history of our understanding of two of the most prized components of our sensory apparatus: sight and sound. We begin our investigation by recalling the apparatus known as the camera obscura. A camera obscura is created by cutting a small hole into a wall in a completely darkened room. An inverted image of the world outside the room is projected onto the opposite wall when light comes through the hole. The camera obscura has been used for centuries as a model to describe the physical construction of the eye dating back to the time of Aristotle, who asked why, when light shines through a rectangular peep-hole, it appears circular in the form of a cone70 69 Chrissie Iles, ed., Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 19641977 (New York, New York: Whitney Museum, 2001), 73.

70 Aristotle, Problems: Books IXXI (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000), 341.

Fig. 15. Comparison of eye and camera obscura (early eighteenth century) Over the centuries, the camera obscura became known not only as a model for understanding the physical construction of the eye, but also as a metaphor for consciousness in which the individual is positioned as a coolly isolated observer

21

71 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1992), 27. 72 Ibid, 79.

73

Ibid, 78.

looking onto a world outside themselves. By the late fifteenth century, this had become the dominant paradigm used to explain both the mechanics of optics and the philosophical implications thereof, and remained so through much of the eighteenth century.71 The nineteenth century, however, was rife with scientific growth and progress in our understanding of our sensory apparatus. In his account and critical discussion of these developments, Techniques of the Observer (1992), Jonathan Cary relates that the compartmentalization of the body into separate and specific systems was primarily responsible for these changes.72 This need for compartmentalization grew out of physiologist Xavier Bichats analysis of death, which he discovered to be a fragmented process, consisting of the extinction of different organs and processes: the death of locomotion, of respiration, of sense perceptions, of the brain.73 According to Crary, one of the primary systems to be studied in the nineteenth century was that of vision. At the forefront of reassessing its role in terms of ties to the construction of consciousness were philosophers Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Arthur Schopenhauer. In his Theory of Colours, Goethe said: If we look at a dazzling, altogether colourless object, it makes a strong lasting impression, and its after-vision is accompanied by an appearance of colour.74 The experience of these after-images is therefore not based on a cognitive process of an observer analyzing what he or she has seen, but is instead a purely physiological reaction to stimuli. Schopenhauer was similarly convinced that vision is a physiological process. In the second volume of his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer stated that representation is a very complicated physiological occurrence in an animals brain, whose result is the consciousness of a picture or image at that very spot.75 According to Schopenhauer, the job of the cerebrum, therefore, was to receive information from the outside as mere stimuli, create representations of this information primarily as motives and pass on the result of the brain-function to the motor nerves, which would act on the muscle as stimulus.76 Since the cerebrum is susceptible to stimuli perceived by the sensory apparatus, then, there are also conditions available for [increasing] the attention and [enhancing] the susceptibility of the cerebral nervous system. One can manufacture conditions that [calm] down the blood circulation and, through the aesthetic enjoyment of a work of art, create an absolute silence of the will, required for the purely objective apprehension of the true nature of things.77 Johannes Mller, who has been called the founder of modern physiology, published his Elements of Physiology between 1837 and 1840.78 In this text, Mller unraveled the body into a myriad of separate apparatuses, each with its own function. Of special note was Mllers study of the physiology of the senses, particularly his study of vision.79 In his description of the physiological conditions of vision, Mller broke down the barrier between internal and external sensation, stating that light and colour are sensations of the optic nerve and the retina, and that the appearance of darkness before the eyes is the sensation proper to the state of repose, or unexcited condition of the retina.80 According to Mller, light and color are sensations produced when specific parts of the retina are excited by any internal stimulus such as the blood, or by an external stimulus such as mechanical pressure, electricity, etc.81 Thus, Mller proved that perception is in fact the result of a complex set of physiological forces. Furthermore, Mller showed the defects of our physiological apparatus and revealed the ways in which it can be manipulated in order to produce experience for the subject.82 These possibilities included undulations or emanations of light, mechanical influences such as a blow to the head, electricity, chemical agents such as narcotics and stimulus of the blood in a state of congestion.83 Of these possibilities, only the first option is available to us in terms of the context of a media installation. Therefore, I turn to the nature of light itself to create

74 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1970), 16.

75 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume 2 (Mineola, New York: Dover, 1958), 191.

76 Ibid, 255-256.

77

Ibid, 367-370.

78 W. T. Sedgewick and H. W. Tyler, A Short History of Science (New York, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1917), 376. 79 Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century, 8889. 80 Johannes Mller, Elements of Physiology (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Lea and Blanchard, 1843), 719. 81 Ibid.

82 Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century, 92. 83 Mller, 1064.

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physiological experience in my installations. As explained by Goethe, the use of projected light in a darkened room followed by darkness produces an afterimage that appears to float before the observers eyes. Thus, if a viewer is to look into a light that flickers on and off in rapid procession, he or she will experience a third state in the color generated by the after-image. Retinal after-images have been a central component in the work of artists such as Olafur Eliasson, whose 2004 Your Colour Memory was an oval-shaped room with walls that emitted light of constantly-shifting tone. The resulting colors were specific to each viewer, whose retinal after-images would define the colors experienced. According to Jonathan Crary, Eliasson employs their use in order to allow a viewer to cease to be a mere consumer of radiant images or energy from screens, monitors, pages, and other sources that clutter our lives to recognize ones self as a generator of luminous phenomena.84 Effective Dose, as we will see, uses such devices to generate retinal after-images as a reminder that we cannot escape these radiant fields. Direct manipulation of the sensory apparatus through such physiological responses to light has become a crucial element in my work. I am also drawn to the use of optical devices such as the prism, which confounds the eye with its internal reflection of light and its ability to reveal projected images only from specific angles of incidence. Developing an understanding of both physiological and optical responses to projected light has allowed me to create a complex visual language with an economy of means. Likewise, an understanding of auditory perception has shaped the approaches I have taken in my work. Therefore, I shall turn to a discussion of the structure and function of the ear in order to understand its properties and how these properties may be manipulated in practice. The human ear is comprised of three primary regions: the outer ear, the middle ear, and the inner ear. The outer ear acts as a sound collector and helps determine the direction from which a sound arrives at the ear. The middle ear is connected to the outer ear by the tympanic membrane, or eardrum, which passes variations in air pressure to the tiny hammer bone in the middle ear. When the hammer strikes the anvil, the stirrup is vibrated, thus transmitting its vibrations to the basilar membrane of the inner ear. These vibrations create oscillations in the liquid-filled inner ear.85 The inner ear, also known as the cochlea, is easily the most complex component of our auditory apparatus. Its basic function is to convert these oscillations into nerve impulses in the auditory nerve, which is also known as the eighth nerve or spiral ganglion. This conversion is accomplished as vibrations are passed from the basilar membrane to the inner hair cells of the organ of Corti. The movement of the inner hair cells creates nerve pulses that are passed on to the brain via the auditory nerve.86

84 Jonathan Crary,Your Colour Memory: Illuminations of the Unforeseen, in Olafur Eliasson: Minding the World (Aarhus: ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, 2005), 5.

85 Hugo Fastl and Eberhard Zwicker, Psychoacoustics (New York, New York: Springer, 2007), 2325.

86 Perry R. Cook, 5.

Fig. 16. Schematic drawing of the human ear

23

87

Ibid, 2.

88 Ibid.

89 Ibid, 2-3.

Perception of a sound signal may be affected by a number of factors. A listeners shoulders may reflect soundwaves towards the outer ear. His or her head can block sound by casting an acoustical shadow. The physical structure of the outer ear may also guide the sound towards the middle ear more or less effectively based on the frequencies perceived.87 These effects are only apparent when the sounds wavelength is comparable with the dimensions of the structures.88 Waveforms that are shorter (i.e. high in pitch) affect our perception of smaller forms, such as the effects of guidance created by the physical construction of our hearing apparatus. This sensation is most pronounced at 7 kHz, while the shadowing effect created by the human head is most pronounced at around 2 kHz, and the reflective effects of the shoulders may be felt most at around 1.5 kHz.89 Another important factor in auditory perception is the way in which pitches are perceived. When the basilar membrane is vibrated, different hair cells are stimulated depending on the speed at which the membrane is set into motion. These hair cells then send nerve pulses up the eighth nerve to the brain. If two waveforms that are very close together in pitch are perceived simultaneously, some of the hair cells that are stimulated are shared by each of the tones. 90 If these pitches are only a few cycles apart, we hear a single tone whose amplitude is rising and falling. The further apart the tones are from each other, the faster this amplitude change becomes, and the more like beats the result sounds. When the pitches are separated further, a complex sound with a more metallic timbre develops. Eventually, as we move the pitches further and further apart, we cross a threshold beyond which the tones become distinct. However, if the higher tone is quieter than the lower tone, it may be masked by the lower tone.91 The strategy of masking sounds has been used throughout history from the creation of water fountains in outdoor plazas to mask out the sounds of traffic to the use of loud ventilation systems in office buildings to mask out voices in the room next door.92 The implementation of such a frequency within the context of an installation allows an artist to mask the sound outside the space, creating a virtual bubble in which their work may be experienced. A deep, constant rumble may be useful not only in terms of creating a physically engaging sensation for ones audience, but is also effective in masking unwanted noises. In order to cut through this thick cloud of sound, I have looked to the utilization of contemporary directional sound projection technologies.

90 Ibid, 7.

91

Ibid, 8.

92 Schafer, 223224.

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Tools and Techniques II: Projection

In 1936, Edgar Varse stated: We have actually three dimensions in music: horizontal, vertical, and dynamic swelling or increasing. I shall add a fourth, sound projection that feeling that sound is leaving us with no hope of being reflected back, a feeling akin to that aroused by beams of light sent forth by a powerful searchlight for the ear as for the eye, that sense of projection, a journey into space.93 Varese called for the use of beams of sound which would allow 93 Warner and Cox, 18. for the creation of zones of intensities that would be felt as isolated. In the early years of the loudspeaker, sound would simply emanate omnidirectionally from a vibrating diaphragm. Throughout the twentieth century, various advances in speaker technology would allow sound to become more directional. A common method of sound projection uses separate speakers for specific frequency ranges, thus creating a more directional listening experience. Frequencies lower than about 60 Hz are thought of as being omnidirectional (at least indoors) while the 94 Simon Emmerson, Living source of a frequency above 3 kHz is more easily distinguishable.94 Electronic Music (Berlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 20007), 146.

Fig. 17. Philips Pavilion (1958) A number of systems have been developed for this type of sound projection. One of the most famous examples is the elaborate system installed at the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels Worlds Fair in 1958 for the presentation of Varses Pome Electronique.95 This system was comprised of four hundred and twenty-five loudspeakers with twenty amplifier combinations. A perhaps lesser-known but equally fascinating system was the Groupe de Musique Exprimentales Gmebaphone, developed in 1970. The Gmebaphone was comprised of fifty loudspeakers separated by frequency, such that it became not only an orchestra of speakers, but an instrument in itself.96 In 1974, the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) premiered its Acousmonium, which projected sound through eighty speakers. Its sounds were mixed via a forty-eight channel mixer, thus achieving a complexity of sound image rivaling that of an orchestra.97

95 Chadabe, 61.

96 Emmerson, 151152.

97 Curtis Roads, The Computer Music Tutorial (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1996), 454.

Fig. 18. The Groupe de Recherches Musicales Acousmonium (1980)

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More recently, immersive sound experiences have been incorporated as an essential part of the cinematic viewing apparatus, and the development of 5.1 and 7.1 surround sound systems have allowed for ubiquitous immersive sound experiences in home theaters and listening rooms as well as cinemas and concert halls. However, even with such sophisticated systems, sound is diffused throughout the room rather than being isolated in a single area. Using these technologies, the only way to create an illusion of sound moving through space is by increasing volume on one speaker and decreasing the volume on another. While this type of aural panning creates a feeling of motion, the sound can still be heard throughout a room. Since high frequencies are more directional, the use of ultrasound (sound outside of the human hearing range) in the creation of a directional sound projection apparatus has been a topic of interest in the scientific community since the 1960s.98 In the 1990s, two companies (American Technology Corporation and Holosonic Research Labs) emerged with commercial solutions that use acoustical heterodyning to create highly directional sound. Curtis Roads explains the phenomenon of acoustical heterodyning as follows: When two sound sources are positioned relatively closely together and are of a sufficiently high amplitude, two tones appear: one lower and one higher than either of the original tones. For example, if one were to emit 90 kHz and 91 kHz into the air, with sufficient energy, one would produce the sum (181 kHz) and the difference (1 kHz), the latter being in the range of human hearing.99 The result of this technology is a highly focused beam of sound that acts like a flashlight: the sound is projected off of whatever comes in its path. Thus, if the resulting sound beam is to be pointed at a spot on the wall, all who enter the room would agree that the sound was emitting from that spot. If one person were to walk in front of the speaker, however, that person would hear the sound much more clearly, while the rest of the people in the room would agree that the sound was emitting from the person who walked in front of the speaker. While there are few artists working with such technologies at the moment, one artist who has used directional sound is the sound artist Bill Fontana. In 2007, Fontana positioned four of Meyer Sounds SB-1 parabolic speakers, which are capable of producing 110 dB output at 100 meters, on the top of four skyscrapers overlooking New Yorks Madison Square Park. From these speakers, he projected sounds of bells that had been silenced for over eighty years through a spatialized field of sound to create a complex real-time composition.100 Fontana has been using sound projection of various sorts throughout his career, and to striking effect. A recurrent theme in Fontanas work is the use of projection as a means of relocation of sound through time and space. In his 1990 piece Landscape Soundings, Fontana transformed a plaza in Vienna to its original and natural state before it was an inhabited area by installing sixteen microphones across acres of the wetland forests in the eastern part of Austria and broadcasting the sounds they received into the plaza as a spatialized multi-channel sound installation.101 In this piece, Fontana minimized the presence of the loudspeakers so as not to disturb the normal visual aspects of the Maria-Theresien-Platz.102 Surely, however, his intent was not only to maintain the normal presence of the plaza because of zoning restrictions or personal fancy, but rather to transform the site into its primordial state through an acousmatic listening experience diffused through physical space. To travel through such a space is to navigate its interface, and this is the type of kinaesthetic experience that critic Margaret Morse claims can be a kind of learning not with the mind alone, but with the body itself.103 Micol Assals 2007 installation entitled Chizhevsky Lessons is an excellent example of a piece that uses the body to navigate such an interface. In Chizhevsky Lessons, Assal used large copper panels in conjunction with a custom power generator to transform the gallery into a giant electrical condenser, giving each visitor a weak

98 Emmerson, 167.

99 Curtis Roads, Microsound (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2001), 33.

100 Bill Fontana, Panoramic Echoes (http://www.resoundings. org/Pages/Panoramic.html accessed March 2008), 1.

101 Bill Fontana, Landscape Soundings (http://www.resoundings. org/PDF/Bill_Fontana_Landscape_ Soundings.pdf accessed March 2008), 7. 102 Ibid, 8.

103 Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer, eds., Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art (New York, New York: Aperture / BAVC, 2005), 158.

26

electric charge.104 Thus, when one was to touch another person or object in the gallery, a small electrical discharge would occur.

104 Polly Staple, Risk Assessment, in Frieze Magazine 110 (2007), 229.

Fig. 19. Installation view of Micol Assals Chizhevsky Lessons (2007) While my work also aims to create such physical experiences, they do so not through the sense of touch, but rather through the projection of sight and sound. This direct stimulation of the sensory apparatus acts as an interface through which an awareness of hidden aspects of ones environment may be revealed. As the work I am undertaking simultaneously engages both the optical and the auditory systems, it is useful to compare it to the history of visual music and frame the work in relationship to the psychological condition known as synaesthesia.

27

Tools and Techniques III: Synaesthesia

In 1886, Emil Du Bois-Reymond proposed that it should be possible to heal together optic and auditory nerves, which would result in the ability to hear lightning with the eye as a bang and see thunder with the ear as a series of visual impressions.105 This gedankenexperiment or thought experiment reflects an interest that has compelled artists and scientists dating as far back as ancient Greece producing an art of light and sound. Aristotle regarded colours [viz. all those based on numerical ratios] as analogous to the sounds that enter into music,106 and developed a system for translating color to pitch based on shades from dark to light which corresponded to pitches from high to low.107 In the seventeenth century, Sir Isaac Newton classified what we think of as the colors of the rainbow based on his interests in aligning colors with pitch. The seven colors he identified (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet) were matched to a note in the key of C major (C, D, E, F, G, A, B).108 In 1734, the Jesuit priest / mathematician Louis Bertrand Castel invented the clavecin oculaire, which used candlelight to illuminate twelve colored strips of paper, each of which was allocated to a note in the musical scale. Castel had high ambitions for his invention, envisioning mass production of 800,000 units, but ultimately his plans for large-scale distribution failed.109 It was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the resurgence of interest in color music took place. One of the artists at the forefront of this movement was the painter Alexander Wallace Rimington, whose ten-foot tall Colour-Organ was built upon the supposed relationship between the musical scale and colors in the spectrum. This silent light instrument allowed a performer not only to project various colors of light onto a screen, but to control the hue, saturation and luminosity of these colors.110 Rimington used this instrument to accompany musicians in concert settings, and claimed that the invention heralded the introduction of the time element in visual art and the liberation of color from form.111 By the turn of the century, color music performances had increased in popularity, often appearing in conjunction with musical performances. The score for Alexander Scriabins Promthe featured a part for color organ. Scriabin is often described as having the neurological condition known as synaesthesia, in which regions of the brain which do not usually communicate, such as the visual and auditory cortexes, show signs of what is known as crosstalk.112 In Scriabins case, key changes in a piece of music triggered perceived changes in color. To Scriabin, the key of C was red, D yellow, and F-sharp blue. Thus, the color projections would change at pivotal moments during the piece, rather than with every note played, as in the performances of Rimington, whose performances felt bombastic and overwhelming for his audiences.113

105 Paul F. Cranefield, ed., Two Great Scientists of the Nineteenth Century: Correspondence of Emil Du BoisReymond and Carl Ludwig (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 162. 106 Aristotle, On Sense and the Sensible (Adelaide: The University of Adelaide Library, 2007), 10. 107 Cretien van Campen, The Hidden Sense: Synaesthesia in Art and Science (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2008), 45. 108 Ibid, 46. 109 Ari Wiseman and Judith Zilczer, Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900, Kerry Brougher and Jeremy Strick, eds. (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005), 70. 110 Ibid, 71. 111 Ibid, 71.

112 van Campen, 1.

113 Ibid, 5153.

Fig. 20. Alexander Wallace Rimingtons color organ (1912)

29

114 Wiseman and Zilczer, 76.

115 Golan Levin, Painterly Interfaces for Audiovisual Performance (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2000), 24. 116 Wiseman and Zilczer, 82.

In 1922, Thomas Wilfred premiered his clavilux at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. Wilfreds performances were silent, as he claimed that the art of light in time and space should not be played in the manner of music because the two arts are so different in nature.114 Perhaps to distance his work from its musical leanings, or to ensure that his work would live on beyond him, Wilfred abandoned these performances in favor of building self-contained lumia devices that could be run for months without repetition.115 These devices utilized incandescent light passing through a moving stained-glass color wheel and a moving reflecting cone aimed at rotating shaped-aluminum reflectors to form constantly changing images on a translucent screen.116

Fig. 21. Thomas Wilfreds Untitled, Opus 161 (1965) As film became available as a medium for use by artists, the translation of visual or color music to film was inevitable. By the 1920s, artists such as Oskar Fischinger had began experimenting with the possibilities this new medium afforded. Fischinger is most famous for his abstract film compositions that employed various strategies

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drawing connections between sound and imagery. Some of his films were meant to be viewed silently, while others were made explicitly as visual interpretations of pre-existing musical scores. Often overlooked, however, are sound scroll experiments undertaken by Fischinger. Fischinger hand-painted waveforms that were then exposed onto the optical soundtrack of the film.117

117 Ibid, 31.

Fig. 22. Oskar Fischingers sound scroll experiments (1932) By the early 1950s, John and James Whitney, who are most known for their pioneering work with computer-generated graphics, had developed another system for generating optical soundtracks using pendulums to interrupt a light used to expose film stock.118 118 Ibid, 32.

Fig. 23. John and James Whitney with their pendulum system (ca. 1945) With the advent of video technologies in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a variety of new tools became available which allowed for the simultaneous generation / manipulation of sound and image. As Nam June Paik put it: Sound goes up to

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119 Judith Richards, ed. What Sound does a Color Make? (New York, New York: Independent Curators International, 2005), 13. 120 Yvonne Spielmann, Video: The Reflexive Medium (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2008), 99.

20,000 Hertz. Video goes up to 60,000,000 Hertz. That is the only difference.119 One of the important innovations was known as the Rutt-Etra Scan Processor, which allowed the scan lines found in video signals to be modulated by analog synthesizers.120 This system was widely used by cutting-edge video artists such as Paik, Steina and Woody Vasulka and Gary Hill.

Fig. 24. Woody Vasulka's use of the Rutt-Etra Scan Processor in Didactic Video (1975) In the 1970s, composer Laurie Spiegel, who had been working with Max Matthews GROOVE (Generating Realtime Operations On Voltage-controlled Equipment) system at Bell Laboratories since the 1960s, began incorporating computer graphics into her work. The GROOVE system was a hybrid digital-analog computer, which allowed users to connect a variety of input devices to a variety of output devices via a room-sized computer running custom software written by its users in FORTRAN.121

121 Laurie Spiegel, Graphical GROOVE: Memorial for the VAMPIRE, a Visual Music System, Organised Sound 3:3, (1998), 187.

Fig 25. Laurie Spiegel with the GROOVE system (early 1970s) After Spiegel met computer graphics pioneer Dr. Kenneth Knowlton in the early 1970s, the two began collaborating on what became known as VAMPIRE (Video and Music Program for Interactive Realtime Exploration / Experimentation), which allowed Spiegel to control the GROOVE system as well as visual processes with a graphics tablet in real time. An important part of this system was the use of algorithms and powerful evolutionary parameters in sonic composing, and the idea of organic or other visual growth processes [algorithmically] described and controlled with realtime interactive input.122

122 Ibid, 190.

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Tools and Techniques IV: Algorithmic Composition

An algorithm is a set of rules for solving a problem in a finite number of steps.123 Algorithms are employed in most computer programs, and range from simple procedures for calculating the weeks payroll to sophisticated procedures that use probabilistic models to analyze biomolecular sequences. In terms of compositional process, the use of algorithmic procedures frees a composer or improviser from the restrictions of legislating every detail of a composition or performance, leaving some of this work to a predefined process or set of rules established by the composer. Additionally, taking an algorithmic approach to composition may open up a number of possibilities in the realization of the piece that previously would have been unimaginable. 123 Random House Websters Unabridged Dictionary, Second Edition (New York, New York: Random House, 2001), 52.

The use of rules and mathematical equations for deriving musical compositions is, of course, nothing new. A riddle canon written by Bach, the undisputed champion of such rules and regulations, was discovered in 1974. This suite of fourteen short canons (BWV 1087) comprised a riddle left to be solved through various contrapuntal devices. In 1996, Reinhard B published the complete answer to this riddle, which amounted to two hundred and sixty-nine movements 124 Collins and dEscrivn, 109. totaling seventy minutes of music.124

Fig. 26. Table of measure numbers from Mozart's musical dice game (pub. 1792) The Introduction to the Composition of Waltzes by Means of Dice, a work attributed to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, also employs rule-based compositional methods. This musical dice game consists of a thirty-two bar structure comprised of four eight-measure sections. For each of the bars, eleven variations are provided, and two dice are rolled to determine which variations are to be played.125 This piece provided not only inspiration but also the harpsichord parts for John Cage and Lejaren Hillers HPSCHD. Hiller, a researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana, had begun using computers to create compositions through restricted random walks in 1955, the result of which was 1957s Illiac Suite for String Quartet, co-composed by Hiller and Leonard Isaacson.126 In 1967, Hiller invited Cage to visit him at the University of Illinois at Urbana to collaborate on a piece. By this point, both Cage and Hiller had been working with chance operations for over ten years: Cage through his use of the I Ching, and Hiller through his random walks. The result was a piece for three harpsichord players, fifty-one tapes, eighty slide projectors and seven film projectors. The piece was premiered in full with all of these technical requirements at the University

125 John Cage, Lejaren Hiller, and Ben Johnston, HPSCHD / String Quartet No. 2 (New York, New York: Nonesuch, 1969), 1. 126 Chadabe, 273.

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127 Ibid, 277.

128 Ibid, 276.

of Illinois at Urbana in 1969 to an audience of nine thousand people.127 While a twenty-minute recorded version of the piece exists, and its performances typically last about four hours, the piece itself has no structured beginning, and no structured end, as Cage said, like the weather.128

Fig. 27. KNOBS: instructions for performance of Cage and Hiller's HPSCHD (1969) The desire to create works approaching the complexity of natural systems is a common reason that composers have chosen to work with algorithmic methods. Iannis Xenakis became interested in using what he termed stochastic (probability-based) methods in order to create sound masses with the complexity of the collision of hail and rain with hard surfaces, or the song of cicadas in a summer field.129 His first piece to feature the use of probability models, the 1956 Pithoprakta, employed operations based on the theory of Brownian motion to determine the distribution of pizzicati.130 Throughout his career, Xenakis employed such chance operations within limited constraints partly in reaction to the tendency which he noted in The Crisis of Serial Music for serialist compositions to generate unreasonable and gratuitous dispersion of sounds over the whole sound spectrum.131 This tendency was also noted by serialist composers such as Gottfried Michael Koenig, whose PR1 computer program utilized the parametric description of sound as identified in serialism but replaced the series itself with random numbers. This strategy led to Koenigs development of methods for shifting the range of random numbers associated with a given parameter throughout a composition, opening it up more and more to give the composer more influence in the input data, and to give room for the way parameter values are selected before theyre put into that score.132 By the late 1970s, Koenig had expanded his system to control external synthesis parameters, thus outputting music in real time rather than as a score.133 With this logical step, the algorithm truly became a process that could evolve in time rather than simply a tool for generating scores that were set in stone or as composer Larry Austin put it, music without a beginning or an end, music of the moment.134

129 Ibid, 279.

130 Collins and dEscrivn, 116.

131 Ibid, 115.

132 Chadabe, 282 133 Ibid.

134 Ibid, 285.

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Work
When I first arrived here nearly two years ago, I was primarily concerned with the gestural control of audiovisual systems in realtime performance environments. I began working with computer graphics tablets and analyzing pressure of the pen on the tablet, angle of incidence of the pen on the X and Y axes, and motion of the pen across a two-dimensional surface. These five controls afforded a high degree of control of a number of parameters simultaneously, and allowed me to create an instrument that I used in my Obliscence Field performance piece. Obliscence Field was based on Geoffrey Sonnabend's theories of forgetting presented by the Museum of Jurassic Technology, and the visual trace left by the pen created an abstract landscape that rippled slowly throughout the piece.

Fig. 28. Geoffrey Sonnabend's model of obliscence (1946) My conception of the obliscence field came from thinking of memory as a fluid surface, which can be impacted by outside forces. About midway through the piece, a dramatic shift takes place in which both the sound and the visual content are modulated by a high frequency outside of the field, and the content is transformed into complex audiovisual noise. The outside modulation source eventually slows down and dies off, but as the piece draws to an end, the sound and image emerge as a subtly changed version of the original.

Fig. 29. Mark Cetilias Obliscence Field (2006) Examining this piece taught me a great deal about my interests in creating audiovisual performance systems, and I began a more in-depth exploration of specific gestures. The act of writing or drawing, I decided, was not simply the

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result of moving an implement across a page, but instead the result of a complex set of forces at a specific moment in time. That is to say, the pressure of the index finger, middle finger and thumb upon the implement and the motion of the wrist provide more information about a gesture than the pressure of the pen on the page or its position in a two-dimensional plane. Thus, I began building a system to analyze these sources of information and translate them into audiovisual phenomena in real time. The result was a glove controller system made of PVC, sensors and wires that I called the Hand of Doom. The output of the Hand of Doom was, naturally, a bombastic audiovisual assault on the senses that utilized techniques derived from the Rutt-Etra Scan Processor to erase my own image from the screen.

Fig. 30. Mark Cetilias Hand of Doom (2007) I determined that the most interesting part of this piece was in fact the translation of imperceptible gestures slight motions of my fingertips and wrist into large-scale events, and began looking into realms where information might be hidden from our perception. This question led me to examine the field of study associated with what is known as EVP, or Electric Voice Phenomena. EVP believers claim that machines of various sorts (computers, tape recorders, camcorders, etc.) can capture sounds outside of our sensory perception, and by that listening back to these recordings carefully enough, one can discern voices of the spirits. Some believers claim to maintain communication with loved ones who are now deceased by asking questions and recording the silence, then listening back to the results. Having done a number of experiments with spectral analysis that allowed me to increase portions of the spectrum below a given threshold (a kind of inverse noise gate, if you will), I realized that there was a need for software that could do this in real time and output an audio recording for its user. Thus was born my EVP Recorder program, a freeware application that I made available for the Mac OS X and Windows platforms and posted to the major EVP forums around the world. The development of this program started a new line of enquiry for me. Common among all of the works that sprung up afterwards is the conflation of experiences that are mystical with technology that attempts to allow their concrete realization. In this way, I see my work as very closely linked to that of contemporary artist Peter Coffin. Since 2002, Coffin has been creating aura portraits that strip away 135 Peter Eely, Peter Coffin: his subjects and leave only a coloured haze on a white background, and models Disparate Models: Abstraction and of the universe in three dimensions (Log with Model of the Universe, 2005) where Mysticism, Curiosity and Skepticism, the fourth dimension is simply represented by a source of light.135 As critic Peter in Frieze Magazine 106 (2007), 135. Eely explains, Coffins work is neither overly complicated nor snide, but rather, is

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born both of intense curiosity and skepticism.136 This is precisely the approach I have taken in my work, and I hope that the results are capable of creating experiences that are challenging both to my audience and to myself.

136 Ibid.

Fig. 31. William Burroughs with Gysin and Sommervilles Dreammachine (1972) My interests in using technology to reveal the invisible fused with my interests in the direct stimulation of the sensory apparatus in my project Dreammachine v2 and its successor, Dreammachine v2.1. These pieces were based on the infamous Dreammachine apparatus created by Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville. Gysin and Sommervilles device used flickering light to stimulate theta waves for its viewers, and like their namesake, my Dreammachines aimed to stimulate brainwave activity. However, my versions recreated not only the theta waves, but all activity associated with an entire nights sleep within a condensed timespan. This was accomplished through the use of projected image and, in Dreammachine v2.1, synchronized sound, thus creating a full-body experience. In this piece, viewers were invited to enter the room and close their eyes, looking onto the projected image in order to experience physical phenomena associated with sleep in a waking state. Another experience that seemed frustratingly impossible to perceive without technological mediation was that of looking squarely at ones own eyes. If you have ever tried to look yourself in the eyes in a mirror, I am sure that you have noticed that you can only look at one eye at a time; the other bounces around crazily. This experience led me to create my Eye Is to Window software, which uses feature recognition to find ones eyes in a given scene. The software then locks onto the eyes, blowing them up full-screen, and applies cellwise temporal envelope following to ensure that the eyes do not jitter too rapidly. Again, this software was made available as a free download for users to experience intimately in the privacy of their homes.

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Fig. 32. Mark Cetilias Eye is to Window (2008) The primary source of hidden information that became interesting to me, however, was the cellular network. Cellular networks have become increasingly ubiquitous, and as the technological advances made in transforming cellular phones into mobile computers become more and more prevalent, I can only imagine that their use will become even more widespread, resulting in a major shift in our spectral ecology. Thus, I have created a mechanism that allows its users to directly engage with the traffic of cellular networks that constantly surrounds us but lies beyond the realm of human perception. The installation environment is a 10' x 15' room containing a 5' x 10' antechamber and a 10' x 10' observation area / installation space. Participants enter the installation via the antechamber, which is a small, dimly lit room containing a single subwoofer that emits subaudible tones. Inside the observation area, participants find a viewing apparatus and a number of loudspeakers used to reveal local cell phone traffic hidden in frequencies outside of the limits of human perception.

Fig. 33. Floor plan for Mark Cetilias Effective Dose (2008)

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 The sound for the installation is projected via an eight-channel system specifically designed to take advantage of physiological characteristics of the human auditory apparatus. The system is comprised of four Mackie HR-824 mid-field studio monitors, one Mackie HRS-120 subwoofer and three hyperdirectional speakers: one HSS T-120, and two HSS H-450s. The 500-watt subwoofer is capable of generating frequencies that are below the range of human hearing, and will therefore be used to produce subaudible frequencies, creating a powerful physical presence of sound that can be felt but not heard. The quadraphonic sound field is used to mask the sounds outside the room and provide an immersive experience of the naturally-occurring sounds contained in the frequency bands used by GSMbased cellular devices. The three directional speakers are positioned at the top of the room such that they target the participants head from the left, right and center, and are used to project sounds generated by the presence of local cellular activity in real time. The visual component of the work is comprised of three prismatic lenses mounted on an observation table. Underneath the prism lies an LCD screen whose backlight has been removed. The backlight has been replaced with fluorescent tubes mounted in a wooden box that is attached to the underside the table. The image projected through the prisms is a solid field of flickering color that varies between slightly different shades of black. The resulting effect is the creation of a combined optical / physiological experience, with distortion created by the prismatic lenses, traces of motion as the screen tries to approximate these subtle differences in shades of black, and shifting colors resulting from the retinal after-images induced by flickering light. The intensity and speed of the flicker are impacted by the data carried by the cellular networks in the local area, thus creating physiological responses to these networks without didactically visualizing the data. Like Sponge, the collaborative art research collective established in 1997 by Laura Farabough, Christopher Salter and Sha Xin Wei, I am interested in setting up compelling conditions that enable people to make their own meanings out of built spaces and environments137 rather than creating works revolving around the 137 Sponge, The Surface That Holds distribution of content that is overtly politicized or easily digestible. the Image is Unstable, in Ec/arts 2 (2002), 99.

Fig. 34. Viewing apparatus from Mark Cetilias Effective Dose (2008) Effective Dose leverages a number of key technologies for its implementation. Data acquisition and frequency modulation is done using Ettus Research LLCs Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP for short) in combination with GNU Radio software. GNU Radio is an open source initiative that seeks to transform the personal

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computer into a device capable of sending or receiving data on any specified frequency band. It has been used in radio astronomy (as in Luciers Sferics), the acquisition of television signals, tracking of radar transmissions from airplanes, and numerous other contexts.

Fig. 35. Block diagram of Mark Cetilias Effective Dose (2008) GNU Radio runs on Mac OS X, Windows, and various flavors of Unix, but given that most of its users are running the Linux operating system, it seemed most beneficial for me to stay within this realm. I decided to go with Fedora Core 7138 using the Planet CCRMA kernel139, which resolves a number of dependencies necessary for GNU Radio. This is a real-time kernel, and thus allows operations to take place at audio rate or higher. The code blocks utilized by GNU Radio are written in Python, so the majority of the work I have done on the Linux box is in Python.140 At this point in its development, GNU Radio software has been used primarily in conjunction with the USRP, a black box containing a motherboard with high-speed digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital signal converters and a field programmable gate array for high-speed data processing. The unit hosts up to four daughterboards: two for sending data, and two for receiving data. My current setup includes two daughterboards that are capable of receiving data on the 850 and 1900 Mhz bands utilized by North American GSM transmissions. Transmissions are demodulated using GNU Radio software and passed on as audio data to a computer that generates auditory and visual interpretations of this data. This computer is running custom software built in Max/MSP/Jitter that utilizes a pitch-tracking algorithm to look for specified frequencies amongst the transmissions from the GNU Radio software. Once these frequencies are discovered, reactions are triggered in a generative system that creates a unique and constantly changing environment for those who enter the room through the duration of its installation. Working on this project opened up a number of interesting avenues for me artistically. First and foremost, I now have at my disposal a tool that will allow me to create sound portraits of cellular activity in real time. This opens up exciting possibilities, such as folding these sounds into my performance practice. This could allow participation and exchange between my audience and myself as a performer in a number of ways. If an entire audience is to shut off their cell phones during a performance, the only sonic material I would have to work with would be the natural sounds floating through the ether, resulting in a subtle ebb and flow of these frequencies. The potential for subtle interplay between these two extremes by myself and audience members opens up a fascinating new realm of performance for me as a sound artist, one that is akin to the open work proposed by Umberto Eco. The works Eco describes are not only open to a continuous generation of internal relations which the addressee must uncover and select, but also invite their audience to make the work together with the author.141 Likewise, Effective Dose has caused me to think deeply about time scales available to a sound artist working in an installation environment. I am currently working on a

138 cf. http://fedoraproject.org 139 cf. http://ccrma.stanford.edu/ planetccrma/software 140 cf. http://www.python.org

141 Umberto Eco, The Open Work (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989), 21.

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site-specific sound installation that is to be installed in a former train depot across the street from my childhood home in rural southwest Virginia. This piece is based on the train schedules and uses the sounds of trains passing by the depot to drive a generative system that manipulates these sounds. The manipulated sounds are played back through a line of speakers situated across the wall parallel to the train tracks and a subwoofer powerful enough to cause the room to shake. At times, the sound of the train passing by will reverberate through the room without interference from my work. At other times, the memories of the passing trains will linger in the room, like remnants of the past or premonitions of things to come. The most curious thing about this project is being given the ability to work with a longer span of time, something I began experimenting with in Effective Dose, but am interested in taking much further. The potential for creating systems capable of evolving over the period of days, months, and years is fertile ground for exploration, and such exploration is not possible in other contexts such as improvisational performance or traditional musical composition. I look forward to working more closely with the highly focused projection of sound and video, thus creating a very physical sensation of motion even for a static viewer. My group Reduxs piece From Pillar to Post, presented at SoundWalk 2007 in Long Beach, CA, utilized a motorized turret to rotate a hyperdirectional speaker, thus allowing a highly focused beam of sound to tear apart and build back the room it was presented in. In this piece, the speaker tracked around its axis according to the presence of sound played through it. To expand the focus of sound projections into the third dimension would open a floodgate of new possibilities, especially in regards to the combination of sound and image, as both could be presented as deriving from the same location in physical space. I am also fascinated by the possibility of creating physical viewing experiences through the use of transparency / translucency to reveal content via a users motion through architectural space. Robert Irwin comes to mind as an example of an artist who has engaged his audience through what critic Colin Rowe has called the literal and phenomenal use of transparency.142 According to painter / theorist Gyorgi Kepes: Transparency means a simultaneous perception of different spatial locations. Space not only recedes but fluctuates in a continuous activity.143

142 Colin Rowe, The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1987), 160. 143 Gyorgi Kepes, Language of Vision (Chicago, Illinois: Paul Theobald, 1944), 77.

Fig. 36. Robert Irwins Fractured Light Partial Scrim Ceiling Eye Level Wire (1970) Robert Irwins work with scrim exemplifies this type of fluctuation. Scrim is a translucent material commonly used in stage productions for its unique properties in regards to lighting. When lit from the front, it appears to be solid. When lit from

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144 Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert I am interested in combining this type of physical engagement in architectural Irwin (Berkeley, California: University space with the use of projected video. An untitled video performance piece I of California Press, 1982), 183. created in conjunction with my colleague Yuni Kwon is an interesting starting point for such work. This piece involved the use of translucent fabric strung between us as a projection surface that was projected onto from both sides. We both held a web camera and a light source used to reveal our eyes, mouths and hands in various combinations over the span of the performance. Each web camera was connected to a laptop, which analyzed the incoming video signal for sections containing light. These were the only portions of the image through which the image from the other users camera was allowed to shine. Thus, images would only be revealed when both users worked together, and each user could only see the other by illuminating themselves. The unexpected result was the way in which the image bled through the fabric, creating a doubling of the image, but with a great deal of complexity. This complexity arose from the fact that the shape through which one users image would be revealed was in fact the image revealed within the shape of the image from the other side of the screen. Combining such projection strategies with the use of materials such as scrim could open up possibilities for physical engagement of viewers that would be otherwise impossible.

behind, it disappears almost completely. Irwin uses scrim on an architectural scale, creating walls that appear to be solid on first glance. Upon further examination, however, portions of these walls, which are lit from behind, recede from vision and allow viewers access to additional spaces that would otherwise be hidden. Lawrence Weschler, author of Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin, describes his experience with Irwins 1977 Whitney retrospective as follows: The pristine scrim was by turns utterly transparent and then utterly opaque, both at the same time, but then neither at once. As you walked around the space, under the scrim, into the corners, along the walls, the room itself seemed to stand up and hum.144

Fig. 37. Untitled video performance by Mark Cetilia and Yuni Kwon (2008) Technology is not only changing the world around us, but the ways in which we relate to our surroundings. My goal is to create physical environments that use technology to give viewers the ability to directly engage with aspects of their surroundings that would otherwise be hidden from their perception. I am interested in utilizing projected sound and video to elicit physiological responses, as well as finding ways to use the body itself as an instrument for learning. It is important to me that the experiences of those who enter my installations are capable of being defined on an individual basis. Rather than creating work that is didactic or overtly politicized, I strive to create contemplative environments that allow for exploration and discovery. My work ultimately lies in the creation of physical spaces that allow access to experiences outside of human perception via tangible, physiological responses to projected sound and light.

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Bibliography
Artistic Context Butterfield, Jan. The Art of Light and Space. New York, New York: Abbeville Modern Art Movements, 1993. Cox, Christoph. Invisible Cities: An Interview With Christina Kubisch. Cabinet Magazine 21, (2006). Brooklyn, NY: Immaterial Incorporated: 9396. Crary, Jonathan. Your Colour Memory: Illuminations of the Unforeseen. In Olafur Eliasson: Minding the World. Aarhus: ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, 2005. Dyson, Frances and Douglas Kahn. Wrapture: Liminal Product Gets All Tangled Up in Joyce Hinterdings Art. Arbyte (October, 2000). New York, New York: Artbyte Magazine Inc.: 8283. Eely, Peter. Peter Coffin: Disparate ModelsAbstraction and Mysticism, Curiosity and Skepticism. Frieze Magazine 106, (2007). London: Frieze: 135. Fontana, Bill. Panoramic Echoes. http://www.resoundings.org/Pages/ Panoramic.html accessed March 2008. Fontana, Bill. Landscape Soundings. http://www.resoundings.org/PDF/ Bill_Fontana_Landscape_Soundings.pdf accessed March 2008. Gamard, Elizabeth Burns. Kurt Schwitters Merzbau: The Cathedral of Erotic Misery. New York, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000. Geiger, John. Chapel of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Stroboscopic Light and the Dream Machine. Brooklyn, New York: Soft Skull Press, 2003. Graevenitz, Antje von. Christina Kubisch: Klangraumlichtzeit. Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag, 2003. Hughes, Robert. The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change. New York, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. Hall, Doug, and Sally Jo Fifer, eds. Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art. New York, New York: Aperture / BAVC, 2005. Junghanns, Kurt. Bruno Taut, 1880-1938: Architektur und socialer Gedanke. Berlin, Germany: E.A. Seemann, 1998. Lista, Marcella and Sophie Duplaix. Sons & Lumires. Paris, France: Centre Pompidou, 2004. Morris, Catherine, ed. 9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theatre, and Engineering, 1966. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2006. Society for the Diffusion of Useful Information. The Museum of Jurassic Technology: Primi Decem Anni Jubilee Catalogue. West Covina, California: Society for the Diffusion of Useful Information Press, 2002. Sponge. The Surface That Holds the Image is Unstable. Ec/arts 2, (2002). Paris: Ec/arts 2: 98106. Spielmann, Yvonne. Video: The Reflexive Medium. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2008.

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Staple, Polly. Risk Assessment. London: Frieze Magazine 110 (2007). London: Frieze: 228231. Sturken, Marita, ed. Steina and Woody Vasulka: Machine Media. San Francisco, California: San Francisco Museum of Art, 1996. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, Or Life in the Woods. White Plains, NY: Peter Pauper Press, 1946. Vale, V. ed. Industrial Culture Handbook. San Francisco, California: RE/Search Publications, 1983. Weschler, Lawrence. Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1982. Musical Context Cage, John, Lejaren Hiller, and Ben Johnston. HPSCHD / String Quartet No. 2. New York, New York: Nonesuch, 1969. Chadabe, Joel. Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1996. Collins, Nick, and Julio dEscrivn, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music. New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Cope, David. New Directions in Music. Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press, 2001. Dodge, Charles, and Thomas A. Jerse. Computer Music: Synthesis, Composition, and Performance. New York, New York: Schirmer, 1997. Emmerson, Simon. Living Electronic Music, Berlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 20007. Hensley, Chad. The Beauty of Noise: An Interview With Masami Akita of Merzbow. EsoTerra 8 (1999): http://www.esoterra.org/merzbow.htm accessed April 2008. Hegarty, Paul. Noise/Music: A History. New York, New York: Continuum International Publishing, 2007. Holmes, Thomas B. Electronic and Experimental Music: Pioneers in Technology and Composition. New York, New York: Routledge, 2002. Lucier, Alvin. Sferics. New York, New York: Lovely Music, 1988. Manning, Peter. Electronic and Computer Music. New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Toop, David. Ocean of Sound. London: Serpents Tail, 2001. Weidenaar, Reynold. Magic Music From the Telharmonium. Metuchen, New Jersey: The Scarecrow Press, Inc, 1995. Scientific Context Cook, Perry R., ed. Music, Cognition, and Computerized Sound: An Introduction to Psychoacoustics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2001. Fastl, Hugo and Eberhard Zwicker. Psychoacoustics: Facts and Models, New York, New York: Springer, 2007.

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Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Theory of Colours. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1970. Kosko, Bart. Noise. New York, New York: Viking Penguin, 2006. Mller, Johannes. Elements of Physiology. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Lea and Blanchard, 1843. Random House Websters Unabridged Dictionary, Second Edition. New York, New York: Random House, 2001. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation, Volume 2. Mineola, New York: Dover, 1958. Sedgewick, W. T. and H. W. Tyler. A Short History of Science, New York, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1917. Shannon, Claude E., and Warren Weaver. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana, Illinois: The University of Illinois Press, 1963. Paul F. Cranefield, ed. Two Great Scientists of the Nineteenth Century: Correspondence of Emil Du Bois-Reymond and Carl Ludwig. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. Synaesthetic Concerns Aristotle. On Sense and the Sensible. Adelaide: The University of Adelaide Library, 2007. Campen, Cretien van. The Hidden Sense: Synaesthesia in Art and Science. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2008. Levin, Golan. Painterly Interfaces for Audiovisual Performance. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2000. Richards, Judith, ed. What Sound does a Color Make? New York, New York: Independent Curators International, 2005. Spiegel, Laurie. Graphical GROOVE: Memorial for the VAMPIRE, a Visual Music System. Organised Sound 3:3, (1998). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 187191. Wiseman, Ari, and Judith Zilczer. Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900. ed. Kerry Brougher and Jeremy Strick. London: Thames & Hudson, 2005. Theory (Art) Aristotle. Problems: Books IXXI. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1992. Eco, Umberto. The Open Work. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989. Iles, Chrissie. Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 19641977. New York, New York: Whitney Museum, 2001. Kepes, Gyorgi. Language of Vision. Chicago, Illinois: Paul Theobald, 1944.

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Dunne, Anthony, and Fiona Raby. Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects. Boston, Massachusetts: Birkhuser, 2001. Rowe, Colin. The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1987. Stiles, Kristine, and Peter Selz, eds. Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists Writings. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, Ltd, 1996. Theory (Music / Sound) Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan University Press, 1961. Kahn, Douglas. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2001. Labelle, Brandon. Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. New York, New York: Continuum International Publishing, 2006. Morgan, Robert. Twentieth-Century Music: A History of Musical Style in Modern Europe and America. New York, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Ltd. 1991. Randel, Don Michael, ed. The New Harvard Dictionary of Music. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1986. Roads, Curtis. The Computer Music Tutorial. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1996. Roads, Curtis. Microsound. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2001. Russolo, Luigi. The Art of Noises. New York, New York: Pendragon Press, 1987. Schafer, R. Murray. Our Sonic Environment and the Soundscape: The Tuning of the World. Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books, 1993. Warner, Daniel, and Christoph Cox, eds. Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. New York, New York: Continuum International Publishing, 2006. Weiss, Piero, and Richard Taruskin, eds. Music in the Western World: A History in Documents. New York, New York: Schirmer Books, 1984.

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Documentation on Dvd
3:16 4:32 4:30 0:31 0:16 2:01 3:50 Obliscence Field (2006) Hand of Doom (2007) Untitled (with Yuni Kwon, 2008) Eye is to Window (2008) EVP Recorder (2008) Dreammachine v2.1 (2008) Effective Dose (2008)

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Software on Cd-Rom
Dreammachine v2 (2008) Based on the infamous Gysin / Somerville device known as the Dreammachine, this application reenacts the cycles of sleep in an amount of time specified by the user. This application is available for the Mac and Windows platforms. EVP Recorder (2008) This application is meant to make recording Electronic Voice Phenomena a more intuititive process. The audio spectrum is analyzed for changes below a very low threshold value, and the results are amplified greatly. This application is available for the Mac and Windows platforms. Eye is to Window (2008) This Max collective is meant to give users the ability to look directly in both of their eyes at the same time. Max Runtime required, version 4.6 recommended. For more information, go to: http://www.cycling74.com/ For recently updated versions of this software, please visit my website at: http://mark.cetilia.org/

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