A cluster of children in matching outfits cycle joyously by the side of a lake in the Austrian Alps. Cut. A woman sits facing them in a horse-drawn carriage, gesturing, conducting, pointing at them with a whip. Cut. An aerial shot of a formal garden. They all dance in formation, singing…
‘DO(e) a deer a female deer.’
They stand upright on the surface of the earth, their movements synchronised. They bend and run and shuffle permutationally.
‘RE(y), a drop of golden sun.’
The camera breaks from its trajectory, panning away from them, moving skywards, jerking around, searching for the origin point of their solar system. Following some frantic scanning, the sun barges into frame, its luminous intensity overloading the camera’s sensor. On the audio track, the children’s singing continues, their repetitive pitch patterns acting as perceptual anchors in the dimensionless whiteness of the blown out image.
‘MI, a name I call myself.’
A microscopic drawing appears in the bleached abyss: three straight lines, fused at a single point. It tumbles in ultra-slow motion smoothly and irregularly towards the lens, getting incrementally bigger or closer or both. The lines claim territory, extending ever outwards. Or maybe we’re zooming in? In sympathy with this new perspective the whole soundtrack gradually slides down in pitch, like the sound of an active turntable that’s been powered off. One octave. Two octaves. Time in the audio domain decelerates to half speed, to quarter speed. Centred in the frame, the object is clearer now. Three hard black lines. A diagram. Or a system of reference.
The diving pitch fills the speakers with a filtered rumble, like the recording equipment has been plunged to the depths of the ocean and is straining to capture surface activity. Low frequency vibrations settle like a deep layer of organic matter, tangled together and active just beyond the limits of perception, thick as humus on the floor of the Amazonian jungle, more a feeling than a sound.
Without warning, the volume begins to increase. The unruly weave of vines and plant matter carpeting the jungle floor bulges, stretching upwards. The dancing children’s voices resemble the bellowing of a fantasy creature as it flails into a bottomless pit or the creaking planks in the belly of a huge galleon. Their supercooled subterranean formants burst through the dense decaying crust like the scene at the end of a science-fiction movie where the underground city is untethered from the earth, revealing itself to be a spaceship after all. Their waveforms groan canopy-wards, viscous, hollowed out, all texture and nuance amplified for inspection…
‘FA(hhhhhhhhhh),
ahh
looong
looooooong
wayyyyyyyyyy
toooooooooooooo
runnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn’
each and every word stretched to an extruded sinew of sliding tones. Fluid phonemes slew unevenly up and down, their beginnings and endings intermingled like rhizomes.
The camera moves continuously, catching a lens flare as it follows the linear object. Three lines, three right angles bound together. Three edges implying three planes, a section of a wireframe render of a cube or one corner of a planetary-scale tumbling dice with silent spooling roll, pitch and yaw. The cinematographer adjusts the exposure and the background skips from white to a light blue. As the decelerating axes encroach on the camera, another sloppy slow motion vocal sequence raises its multiple child heads above the ambient threshold…
‘SOooooooo,
aaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh
neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeedllllllllllllllle
puuuuuullllllllllllllllllllllliiiiiinnnnnggggggg
threeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaddddddddddddd.’
Each of the object’s axes extends outwards into space as if drawn by an invisible hand holding an invisible pencil. The camera tracks it downwards and the Alpine town’s topology comes into view once more. Without warning, the alien structure comes to rest silently on the earth. Its right angles assert their moral authority, their right-ness, one line still shooting continuously skywards. The other two continue to rocket away from the origin at right-angles to each other, through fields, and along pavements and roads, lancing matter like tipless spears. Wood splinters, glass shatters and living things are punctured. Elephantine voices dredged from the heavy drone rise in another incremental crescendo…
‘Laaaaahhhhhhhhh.’
The only note in the song which isn’t an animal, a physical phenomenon, or an appellation. The only note in the song that is just a note.
The editor dials a couple of values into the software, trapping that particular fragment of audio and the inhaled quasi-silence that follows it. It catches in a flip-flop loop under the still rolling visual material, cycling periodically like a beacon.
‘Laaaaahhhhhhhhh ……………………………..’
The camera begins to zoom out. The costumed singers shrink to dust. It’s a drone shot. The sheer scale of the axes, telescoping way beyond the edges of the screen, asserts their bid for universality.
‘Laa …’
With the click of a button, the editor cuts the note short and with a few swipes of the mouse, bounces the audio track to a WAV file. She drags and drops, disconnects her phone from the USB port and carefully places her headphones over her ears. The city casually absorbs her as she exits the building, the rumbling, hissing
‘Laaaaahhhhhhhhh ……………………………..’
loop keeping her company on the bus home. She opens a book and pulls out the hard-drive receipt which marks her page.
Architecture and packaging tend in the modern schools of design to gravitate together under the rubric of envelopes; sculpture absorbs the design of all sorts of small solids and containers; painting extends to include flat shapes and planes of all sorts, like those of weaving and printing. By this geometric system, all visible art can be classed as envelopes, solids, and planes, regardless of any relation to use, in a classing which ignores the traditional distinction by ‘fine’ and ‘minor’, or ‘useless’ and ‘useful’ arts.
She looks out the window, wondering whether this model might help her to think about music? Or more generally, about sound? ‘Laaaaahhhhhhhhh’ cycles continuously in the background, propelling her trance-like through the troughs and ripples of her own brain. In time, she comes to rest suspended above the faceplate of an ancient electronic instrument, its various controls laid out like lab equipment, like cockpit instrumentation. As is the standard, each physical element is mapped directly to a single specific sound characteristic. Each is labelled with a techno-scientific term like ‘frequency’ or ‘modulation’. To one side is a group of sliders labelled envelope. She’s thinks back to the text on the page. Maybe this might be a point of contact?
Envelope. Her bodymind recalls pushing and pulling, linguistic hunches produced and stored at least partly in her muscles. They are also partly there in her brain, although she can’t imagine extracting that particular word from its semantic mesh without tearing its meaning limb from limb. Somewhere among nerves and capillaries however, is a sense of envelope, anchored in the mundane office stationary variety and still slowly deforming over time, continuously added to and sculpted by encounters with the word in places other than the post office or newsagents.
First among these were computer manuals she stumbled upon in her youth, with their rudimentary sound synthesis flow-charts and time-plots. She spent hours flicking back and forth through pages of diagrams, all extracted from or generated to simulate trajectories of pitch (frequency) or volume (amplitude). Attack, decay sustain, release: each envelope proposed a model to approximate the quantum shimmers and blurs of acoustic sound with various flavours of geometry.
Over time and through such interactions, her sense of envelope developed. Right now, it feels like it has something to do with enclosure. More specifically, it feels like it relates to the defining contours of some thing or phenomenon, the limits or boundaries of its containing membrane. She recognises an envelope-ness in the gestalt that a building’s interior spaces might produce for an external observer, like a sheet thrown over a pile of boxes. She feels like this might have something to do with what architects call massing, but isn’t 100% sure.
‘Laaaaahhhhhhhhh ……………………………..’
Slipping off her headphones, she steps off the bus to walk though the suburbs for a while. It’s dark and drizzling, but the taste of fresh air brings a smile to her lips and she finds herself singing: ‘RE(y), a drop of golden sun’.
–
The following day, she’s slouched on the sofa sipping from a cup of tea, zoned out and staring at her phone. Without warning, it exhales a stream of fizzing mollusc-encrusted sinewaves. The lull before the call amplifies its impact. It takes her a couple of seconds to shake off the shock and press the green button.
She smiles at the roughly compressed face bobbing around on her display. The frame rate is initially quite low. As the headshot stabilises she says, ‘Hey Beatrix, it’s been a while! Good to see you. Wow. Have you been out in the sun?’
‘Well, y’know…it’s summer here. It’s a bit intense to be honest.’ Beatrix wipes her forehead for comic effect and smiles. ‘Great to hear from you! What’s up? How have you been? What’s new?’
For some reason they always talk about the new stuff first.
‘Well…I’m not sure if I told you…I think I did…but I finished that sound design course and managed to get a job.’
‘Woah. That’s right. I remember. Great news! Respect!’
Denise reaches for her tea, catching the video chat software off guard. The frame rate decreases momentarily to compensate for her motion, breaking up the image. ‘Thanks. It’s a relief more than anything. Someone I knew, knew someone who was heading off to “find themselves” so they needed a replacement. It’s still mostly video editing though…pretty much what I was doing before…but I’m getting to work on a little bit of sound design stuff too. That’s been cool.’
‘So you’re lost in the woods at last?’
Denise pauses and then pulls a quizzical expression, a bit confused. ‘What? You mean like sound effects? Like Foley? No it’s different to that…’
‘No. I know…but I remember you saying something about…actually, not wood…maybe it was timber?’
Denise laughs out loud. ‘Ahhhh…you mean timbre? Yeah, I’m lost among the timbres alright’. Smiles.
Beatrix laughing, ‘I knew it was something like that. Sorry. You’ve told me about timbre before, but I’ve forgotten the details. I know it’s important though. What is it again?’
‘It’s kind of nerdy…but anyway. It’s the thing that differentiates one kind of sound source from another. So it’s something like the guitar-ness of a guitar. Or the piano-ness of a piano. Say they both play the same melody…like DO, RE, MI, FA, SO, LA, TE DO for example. Even if they both play the same actual notes, the guitar still sounds like a guitar and the piano still sounds like a piano. That’s timbre. It’s to do with the specific character of a sound. Guitar-ness or piano-ness.’
‘So how do you measure that? Is there some way to quantify timbre?’
‘Jaysus Beatrix, do you ever switch off the engineer?!’ They both laugh. ‘Actually…I’m pretty sure you asked me that the last time we talked about this too?’
Beatrix smiles. ‘Probably. Sorry. It’s just the way I’m wired. I need to see everything plotted against a set of X, Y, Z axes. That way I feel like I know it, y’know?’
‘Well, I’ve seen a good few of those over the last year and a half in fairness. I remember this amazing X,Y,Z graph. You might be into it? It was actually a timbre thing now that I think of it. Some researcher in the seventies used a digital audio system to produce sixteen notes…everything about them was the same except that each was synthesised based on a different instrumental sound. Same duration, same volume, same pitch, but different timbre.’
‘Did they use a lot of envelopes?’ Laughing.
Denise feigning offence. ‘You’re just slagging me now.’
‘No I’m not.’ Pause. ‘Well maybe I am. It was all envelopes there for a while…’
‘Still is in fairness. I’m an envelope pusher. At least, if I get more sound design work I will be.’ She fiddles with her phone for a second. ‘I just found an image of that thing…here it is.’
Dialogue pops up. Accept.
‘Hmmm. Lo-res.’ Beatrix scans the monochrome line drawing. ‘That’s really unlike the kinds of plots I usually see…the way they’re clustered and joined together. It’s pretty cluttered though…all those squares…although, it’s actually just about legible.’ Zooming in. ‘It looks like it was drawn with some ancient technology. Old school digital too maybe? Nice. For some reason, it seems weird to think of sounds being visualised as cubes though. And how come there aren’t any labels on the axes? Engineering fail!’
‘Well that’s the thing that blew me away…they weren’t trying to prove a hypothesis in the classic experimental way. They wanted to figure out how timbre works…perceptually…so they played musicians loads of pairs of sounds and asked them to judge how similar they were to each other. And after that, they analysed the results and used some kind of mathematical technique to generate the three dimensional timbre space in this image. Then they placed the sounds in it. They had no idea what the X, Y, Z labels were in advance.’
‘So the experiment generated the question?’
Denise sipping her tea. ‘Yeah. Sort of. The dimensions of the question maybe?’
‘That’s mad. Sounds like big data before big data. Although I guess in this case, it was pretty small data? What about the usual thing where you press pause on the physical world and measure how one specific characteristic varies with respect to another?’
‘This study was similar in that the sounds were all standardised so that timbre was the only thing that was varied…but this diagram represents pure subjectivity. That said, it’s the combined…well…averaged subjectivity of a group of expert listeners.’
Beatrix pauses to consider this scenario. She stares at the image again for a while. ‘That still doesn’t explain why the axes aren’t labelled though?’
‘Well, they had to go back and listen to the sounds as they were arranged in this timbre space to try to figure out what the axes meant…like what does it mean to for one sound to be higher up the graph or further away than another…and it turned out that it was quite difficult to express each dimension in straightforward language. Actually, I think one was easy-ish…something to do with ‘spectral energy’…but the other two were much more complex…to do with the way things change over time. Dynamics. Quite envelope-y funnily enough.’
Beatrix grins, savouring the triumph of experimental results over language. ‘You really like this stuff don’t you?! Y’know…I think you’re finally on the right path.’ Some crunchy bleeping overlaps with her words and the compression algorithm blends them both into a lo-fi Auto-tuned warble. ‘Oh…hold on for a sec.’
Pause. She’s looking at into the camera in a weird way. The scene wobbles.
‘What is it?’
‘Shit. This is annoying. They want me in work. I thought they had this thing under control.’ Beatrix puts her hand to her forehead and rubs it slowly. ‘Damn…damn…damn!’ Rubbing her eyes and beginning to stand up. ‘I’m sorry. I’m going to have to go. Maybe we could try to connect again later on this evening?’
‘Yeah sure. I’ve got the day off, so I’m easy.’
‘Okay. Great.’ Apologetic and sincere. ‘Look … I’ll see you in a few hours.’
Denise, calmly. ‘Sure. No worries. Just let me know when you’re ready to chat again.’
‘Okay. Seeya later.’
Rolling back on the sofa, Denise reassembles the conversation in her mind. Slowly, her attention is drawn out of the post-comms void by a fly that had been buzzing around while they were talking. It bumps off the walls and the windows, trying to find its way out into the fresh air through trial and error. She walks over to the window, opens it fully and when the fly gets close, she coaxes it out into the world. As it spirals out of view, its buzz recedes quickly, cross-fading into the sound of a neighbour strimming her hedge.
Produced for Response to a Request, a project initiated by Rebecca O’Dwyer
Dennis McNulty . May 2017