Author: Sean

Plane of Slight Elevation

Posted on by Sean
chamber ensemble + fixed media electronics
8'29"
Louisville, CO, 2020/21
The electronic portion of the piece alternates between algorithmically generated canons of sampled instrumental, pitched sound materials and soundscape recordings of interior airport spaces from across the world. Written during a time of isolation, where travel feels both nostalgic and also more privileged than ever— the piece confronts the minimal difference between the imagined and the real. The acoustic ensemble is positioned to mediate such a gap from a position of incomplete knowledge—of locality, pitch alignment, and performative expression. The incompleteness of the fixed materials draws upon the musical sensibilities, intuitions, and feelings of each instrumentalist that may arise at the intersection of performative listening (to the electronic part and each other) and reflective voicing (instrumentally, through microtonal pitch-matching and open articulation and dynamics).

The title of the work is taken from Eleanor Kaufman’s description of a unique verticality associated with Middle America, what we too often refer to as “fly-over” country. As she states:

This space has its own verticality, which is the verticality of vast flatness, occasionally set off by a small yet pivotal elevation. This space is marked by what I’d like to call a plane of slight elevation, which could range anywhere from the space of about a story high to the space of not being yet six feet under — or to the space of thought itself.*
 
In a time of physical confinement, this piece was written within the space of a second story walk-up on the edge of that vast flatness, caught between memories of movement and the presence of place.
 
*Eleanor Kaufman, Deleuze: The Dark Precursor (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 146.

Performance: SEAMUS 2021 National Conference, Barely There: A concert of quiet music.

Organized by Georgia Southern University

  • Diane Kessel, flute
  • Francisco Corthey, violin
  • Russell Brown, Bass Clarinet
  • John Thompson, Guitar

Audio: Fixed media electronics

Score:

On the transparency of seeing through

Posted on by Sean
fixed media immersive sound
5'17"
Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna, FL, 2018
R. Murray Schafer pointed out in 1977 that our soundscape is increasingly lo-fi, often the sound of traffic or, especially at the Atlantic Center for the Arts where this piece was composed, planes. While quiet is harder to come by, there are wonderful new sounds too, like the spray-paint can clicking of a hard-disk failure or powering on a belt sander. And yet, we increasingly fetishize a return to not just natural soundscapes, but the natural. Once we frame nature as being different (as a thing to return to), reality becomes an appearance of itself— obfuscating the naturalism of architecture, pharmaceutics, and software engineering under a guise of transparency. Are we ourselves not the nature to which we desire to return? In the “broken” appearance of this composition’s soundscape, perhaps we can hear ourselves in relation to the natural world as, echoing William Carlos Williams, “touched but not held, more often broken by the contact.”

Leave No Trace

Posted on by Sean
fixed media, stereo
13'18"
Denver, CO, 2017
I often think about Thierry de Duve's claim that contemporary sculpture "is an attempt to reconstruct the notion of site from the standpoint of having acknowledged its disappearance"- an insight that echoes and reinforces Robert Smithson's observation that the site of all in situ art is a 'non-site'. We are currently undergoing such drastic ecological change that the disappearance of site is no longer conceptual or speculative, but rather phenomenological. As someone who lives in a city and travels into the wilderness to hike, camp, and fish on most weekends, my repetitious behavior cultivates a sensitivity to the fuzzy boundary between environmental stewardship and the signifiers of the unnatural. Following that idea so central to Deleuze's thought, "repetition can always be 'represented' as extreme resemblance or perfect equivalence, but the fact that one can pass by degrees from one thing to another does not prevent their being different in kind." None of the sounds used in this piece come from environmental recordings; a fact that doesn't prevent the piece from being listened to as if all the sounds were.

I.

II.

III.

What Rough Beast Slouches?

Posted on by Sean
fixed media, 8-channel
11'36"
Ormond Beach, FL, 2014-

Denver, CO, 2016

Across its entirety, What Rough Beast... 'slouches' toward the musical culmination of various sonic trajectories. Pitch deviation, reverberant space, and tempo, are some of the most significant sound parameters that appear to shift across the duration of the piece. What first appear to be nuanced, intentional, and well-timed sonic events begin to appear as more a matter of happenstance. As more voices are introduced, each follows its own logic - complicating the composite sonic image that we continue to try and listen into. Some sounds appear to gradually speed up; others appear to slow down. Nuanced juxtapositions turn into complicated, irregular configurations. Nevertheless, there may emerge a growing sense of directionality. Toward what end do these sounds reach? At what point in time and space might they arrive? As we listen in an attempt to resolve the whole, relative to each of the pieces, we perhaps slowly encounter the non-existence of the whole. And yet, the whole (the composite sound mass) retains an ability to both structure and direct our attention toward the regularities that emerge across each of the sounds. What Rough Beast Slouches? is simply the playing out of algorithmically defined, globally convergent sonic trajectories; the consequence of which ultimately forces us to confront our own irruptive, discontinuous, and divergent aural attentions. 

Fleeting Conversations

Posted on by Sean
fixed media, stereo
5'12"
Denver, CO, 2016

Fleeting Conversations took shape as a series of intuitive responses to three recordings of a generative musical system. I developed the system as a wave-shaping and subtractive synthesis instrument with parametric control through multiple and hierarchical convergent functions. After generating several output streams, I selected three recordings that seemed different to each other while still individually reinforcing a sense of intrinsic directionality. I then treated each recording as a short movement, a foundation upon which (and against which) I could begin to make increasingly intuitive decisions. Most decisions concerned the emergence of continuity. I sought continuity not through a commitment to drone, but rather through deference to perceptual linkage when faced with interruption. So the bulk of my post-algorithmic compositional work focused on causing problems (on interrupting myself) by choosing how and when to interject divergent materials (including silence).

I hear the finished piece as an internal monologue of sorts-- a monologue about nothing, really, beyond the fetishization of a failure to speak. Such failure does not simply reaffirm that music is not-yet-language, but rather points toward the reflexivity inherent in talking to myself and being my first listener. As listener to myself, a perspectival change often places me in opposition to myself— the self I recognize being spoken through the sounds I hear. I imagine undergoing an fMIR brain scan while listening to my own music, and already objecting to what I believe the results of the scan will be before the scan is complete. "Yes, I did that, but that's not me now!" So I hear this music as quite claustrophobic. But for other listeners, there's perhaps a sense of lightness to it; fleeting conversations about a subject always in the process of being rewritten, always up in the air.

Which inside are you out of?

Posted on by Sean
prints on vinyl, wood, picture frames, and utility lights
8' x 47.5' x 2.5'
Boulder, CO, 2015

Positive musical experiences often elicit feelings of transcendence— of being outside oneself, of non-verbal connection with others, or even feelings of a complete, unified sense of self beyond the pesky mind/body distinctions that characterize our boring everyday lives. In the places we listen to music, event production often aims to expand such transcendental experience by accentuating departures from normalcy; musical performance is augmented with light-shows, perhaps some evocative images or video, or maybe physical objects that range from furniture to weird reflective thingies hanging from the ceiling (disco balls...??) But perhaps what's more remarkable than actually experiencing transcendence through musical performance is our constant yearning to realize such a moment.

The installation design for the 2015 CMKY Festival opening party at madelife uses light, image, and physical material in a slightly different, more immanent, way: to hide the walls behind re-constructed photographic images of the scene that lies just behind each wall. And yet, in the absence of the original walls, a wall nevertheless remains, as one always does between us and the great outdoors. The wood studs placed between the viewer and the large-scale images help maintain this sense of enclosure, an invisible wall through which we must constantly peer. Ernest Bloch noted time and again how the only transcendent thing is our desire to transcend. As we look outside ourselves (to music) to help us transcend, perhaps we can also catch a glimpse of ourselves inside the frame we seek to move beyond.

Three-Sense Windows

Posted on by Sean
interactive electroacoustic objects
 
steel plate, acrylic, photographic transfer, touch-sensitive electronics and audio
 
12" x 12" (each)

Denver, CO, 2015

CONCEPTUAL NOTE:

"A window is the moment when the bells ring through."  (after Hölderlin)

TECHNICAL NOTE:

A series of four objects, which confront the viewer through three modalities of experience: visual, tactile, and aural. Each object consists of a steel plate, layered with acrylic paint over a  photographic transfer. Should the viewer touch the object, by placing a hand on the steel plate, the object will turn into an aural window/speaker allowing the listener to hear pre-composed audio. The audio is different for each panel— continuously looping it's respective ten-minute-long soundtrack. 

Audio Excerpt:

No-Place, Inconsistently

Posted on by Sean
built object-network and generative sound installation
(at least) 12' x 4' x 3'
Boulder, CO, 2015
Cain Czopek, Photography & Image Transfers

This multi-object installation, involving visual, physical, and sonic materials, treats the representation of place like a slot machine, where image, material, and sound slide against each other. Each piece consists of a photographic print transferred onto the surface of an unrelated physical object. The objects themselves further serve as resonating surfaces— as loudspeakers the objects give voice to soundscape recordings. The sounds eventually move from one object to another following algorithmic spatial trajectories. While all photographs, materials, and sounds were taken from specific sites along the Front Range, the result the artists' reconstructions keeps any particular notion of place up in the air. 

Given the Materials at Hand

Posted on by Sean
generative sound installation with text on acoustic panels
9' x 4' x 4.5"
Ormond Beach, FL, 2013

Given the Materials at Hand confronts viewers/listeners with three elements, each of which interferes with the other two. First, the sound is only coming from behind the viewer who (visually) attends to the panels and the text painted on them in black. Second, the text appears meaningless (devoid of content), but in consideration of its repetitious presentation/variation across the six panels, suggests pattern (though it is a pattern that is not obvious). Third, the panels themselves might initially appear as though they are traditional art-objects, perhaps with a canvas surface, while closer inspection reveals that they are not; being made of acoustically absorptive material covered in a thin, breathable fabric, the panels appear to have been intended to oppose the sound.

The text was generated algorithmically by applying the mathematical permutation that describes the word repetition pattern of a Sestina to sequential sets of six words, and then interlacing the sets according to a different offset factor for each panel. The algorithm is cyclical; when the permutation is applied to panel six (the panel that is semantically intelligible) the text for panel one (first on the left) is produced.

The work as a whole does not seem to be entirely knowable. Rather, as a result of the divergent appearances of the work's various components, viewers encounter their own inability to address it as being whole; the work is perceived as nothing but a series of irreducible gaps between its components. The inability to know what the work means, its presupposed universal meaning, comes as a result of the viewer's own inability to perceive what it actually is. The absence of universal meaning (a way to know the piece) is thus not a mark of our finitude, but of the ontological incompleteness of the work itself, its being any consistent thing.

Audio-only excerpt

 

Mildly Sympathetic Conversationalist

Posted on by Sean
interactive electroacoustic object with realtime music notation
3.5' x 4' x 2'

Ormond Beach, FL, 2013

Technical Note: 

Microphones attached to the top of the guitar stand provide audio input to a generative sound program running in SuperCollider. This program determines a range of sound synthesis parameters by analyzing the audio input, using that data to update the trajectories of (otherwise) independent algorithmic processes, and then triggering sound generation and output. The sound generated by the computer is reinforced using two tactile transducers (HiWave HIAX25C-8/HS 8-ohm exciters) mounted to the soundboard of the acoustic guitar. In this way, the guitar itself serves as the resonating body for all electronic sounds. The pitches being played by the guitar are also being notated on a computer monitor adjacent to the guitar. This is accomplished by sending OSC messages from the sound synthesis program (SuperCollider) to an application drawing the notes in realtime (as they occur). The notation program was written in Processing.

Conceptual Note: 

The guitar's status as a whole, or fully constituted art object is undermined by its own relation to the context of presentation and modes of viewer/listener access. The guitar is not completely anything; it is not a physical art object, nor a piece of music in and of itself. It is not solely an interactive electroacoustic toy, nor is it a device for musical transcription, and so on. Any one functional determination regarding its being is revealed to be unavoidably incomplete. The work is titled and a (purposefully vague) instruction appears on the gallery pedestal as well, which reads: "Touching Allowed." It is presented as necessarily being in relation to Art given its gallery setting, but the work undermines that very same necessity, by presenting an ontologically fractured nonobjective art. It is not 'really' for our visual consideration, nor is it 'really' a piece of concert music or an instrument to perform upon; it is nothing but our ability to encounter its materiality differently.

Audio-only excerpt