Informal commentary on sundry materials found on USB attributed to M August Mountweasel.
Presen... more Informal commentary on sundry materials found on USB attributed to M August Mountweasel.
In 2015, I attended the Aesthetics After Finitude conference in Sydney, Australia. At that time, ... more In 2015, I attended the Aesthetics After Finitude conference in Sydney, Australia. At that time, I was able to present items of research surrounding themes of synthesis and control as practiced by the Phonoegregore, a hitherto barely-known “sonic cabal” whose activity became audible during Marc Couroux’s seminal presentation at Tuning Speculation in Toronto, 2013. The research I presented came to me via a colleague who has requested total anonymity, and was attributed to M. August Mountweazel, although this is almost certainly a pseudonym. At the time of that conference, some researchers requested further elaboration on the research, probably due to the general paucity of scholarship in this area. Although the folio containing the research was quite thin, it was accompanied with a few notes from the researcher. These appear to be personal in nature, although some of the explicative content indicates that they were intended for a readership of some kind. Although undated, the context suggests that they come from during or immediately before the previously presented research. As before, I cannot vouch for the veracity of any of this writing. However, I’ve chosen to publish these selected writings here in the hope that they will provide some insight into Phonoegregoric methods. Please note that the numbering has been added to these excerpts based on the order in which they were collated: these numerals were not in the original text.
Extract from an unaddressed letter attributed to M. August Mountweazel
Accompanies sound piece f... more Extract from an unaddressed letter attributed to M. August Mountweazel
Accompanies sound piece for Viseu Rural 2.0 Exhibition, Portugal (Binaural Media)
Recently, Marc Couroux drew attention to the workings of the Phonoegregore in relation to the syn... more Recently, Marc Couroux drew attention to the workings of the Phonoegregore in relation to the synthetic ear worm. This is here hypothesised to be a manifestation of an ongoing project of soundscape manipulation traceable to the Pythogorean era, later manifest in the religiomaterialism of the Maya and the more recent neuroformalist strategems. Synthes/is is understood to involve the Phonegregrogic attempts to achieve actual control via the folding of the material of the soundscape (enspacement) into subjectivity (entrapment). Actual control is defined as control that persists—such as genetic algorithms—rather than ‘absolute control’, which is transitory. Given that the several plateaux outlined here discuss strategies of entrapment toward actual control, they are likely to have been drawn from research performed by sympathetic parties to the Phonoegregore, although their origins remain unknown due to the circumstance of their retrieval. For this reason, they should be understood a speculative, rather than authentic Phonoegregoric accounts.
Dick undoubtedly had, at many moments in his life and his writing, a living experience of the wil... more Dick undoubtedly had, at many moments in his life and his writing, a living experience of the wildness of radio. He encountered voices through his own radio that had encoded messages for him alone, and his novels are rich with radios that are engaged in all manner of unsettling activity: they change form and regress, they carry cryptic messages that can collapse entire political regimes, they spy and report on people and they reconfigure cultural life for survivors of an apocalypse. When domesticated, the radio can play a normalising role in terms of producing space, time and self by articulating the logics of cultural institutions; when encountered as wild, however, radios reframe experience according to the unfamiliar orientations of the non-human: the ‘plot holes’ of elsewhere, elsewhen and otherwise. This paper explores the wild lives of radios through the various encounters in the worlds of Philip K. Dick, with an emphasis on Time Out of Joint (1959) and Dr Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965).
‘Miranda…!’ There was no answering voice. The awful silence closed in and Edith began, quite loud... more ‘Miranda…!’ There was no answering voice. The awful silence closed in and Edith began, quite loudly now, to scream. If her terrified cries had been heard by anyone but a Wallaby squatting in a clump of bracken a few feet away, the picnic at Hanging Rock might yet have been just another picnic on a summer’s day. Nobody did hear them. The wallaby sprang up in alarm and bounded away, as Edith turned back, plunged blindly into the scrub and ran, stumbling and screaming, towards the plain. (p. 36)
This early moment of Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) is at the centre of the tragedy that ripples outward, spreading beyond the cloistered community of the girls boarding school into the community of 1900s Victoria. The fate of a teacher and three girls who wandered off during a school picnic into the Australian bushland of Mount Macedon remains unknown to the reader, aside from this parting scream from a fourth girl, who was excluded from the fate of the others.
This event is interwoven with two types of silence. Miranda’s silence is the silence of the rock which has loomed precariously over the community until the moment of collapse. The absolute silence of Miranda is a productive force: it produces noise without making its own articulation: it produces a scream, a landslide; but never its own voice. It is this occult silence that makes Picnic at Hanging Rock a preeminent antipodean weird tale, insofar as its generative narrative force remains inexplicable and outside genre. The fleeing girl, Edith, in enveloped in another silence; if Miranda has become the silence of the rock, Edith has become the marginalised voice of the wild. A threat to the institution, she can no longer speak with its voice, and her scream is the articulation of the elsewhere that cannot be overheard. This second silence is desire, the silence that screams, the voice that exhausts itself into nothingness as it runs towards the words of the institution. In many ways, the novel evokes a soundscape that is rich with silences as both generative and destructive, and the literary soundscape of Picnic creates and sustains various listening subjects in a field of relation. This paper examines these the dual approaches to silence in Picnic and the precarious subjectivity they both allow and destroy, with the hope that these will suggest strategies for listening that understand silence as something other than an absence.
This paper examines Dick's insights into the strange materiality of radio, particularly through t... more This paper examines Dick's insights into the strange materiality of radio, particularly through the novels Time Out of Joint (1959) and Dr Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965). Presented for the 2014 international conference, The Prosaic Imaginary: Novels and the Everyday, 1750-2000.
When affective experiences form the ground for the figures of subjectivity and semiotics, a seism... more When affective experiences form the ground for the figures of subjectivity and semiotics, a seismic shift in that ground will problematise all the habitual structures that have been constructed on the initial premise of the finitude of sensation. This, perhaps, is part of the trangressive quality attributed in political discourse to pharmacological experimentation. However, science fiction has also speculated the possibility of such a shift occurring with the nesting of nonhuman experience within human subjectivity. This is sometimes posited in the context of immediated perception, where biotechnical affordances offer the potential for synthetic esthetic sensation.
In this paper, two such scenarios are examined, as proposed by writers Clifford D Simak and Philip K Dick. Simak’s (1944) ‘Desertion’ is one of the earliest explorations of pantropy, that is, the genetic modification of humans to adopt the environmentally embedded apparatus of another species. Dick’s The Owl in the Daylight was discussed in the weeks prior to his death in 1982 but never written. His proposed novel was to explore a sympoietic entanglement between two species: a human composer and a life form with nuanced technics of colour apprehend a single perceptual stream.
Although the xenoperceptual structures are notably different, both of these stories emphasise the role of pleasure in relation to acoustic and visual composition, and examine the potential for this pleasure to undermine and reconfigure sociopolitical structures.
This paper discusses a three-year radio project Cathode Immersions, which was aired on 2SER in Sydney Australia. The audio that accompanied free-to-air television was remixed and rebroadcast in real time without latency. It explores the human and non-human aspects of the convergence of these two media, introducing ideas of xenocasting and media adjacency. The weekly xenocast of Cathode Immersions afforded unique translations of cultural narratives, from commentary on the Gulf War to machinic perspectives on the desires that surround commercial broadcasting.
Many approaches to listening assume a listening subject, who is given an imperative to situate ac... more Many approaches to listening assume a listening subject, who is given an imperative to situate acoustic value. These models follow the logic of subtractive synthesis, with acoustic experience filtered through a centralised subjectivity that is constantly monitoring meaningful relation. Arguably, however, human acoustic encounters with sound occur through a range of technical relations, where value operates as a secondary emergent function rather than as an organising centre. Following the general philosophy of early “West Coast” modular synthesis, this paper explores the possibility of asemiotic listening as the practice of modulated encounters rather than filtered signification.
For most people, listening is a lifelong activity. Sound flows within and around us as a mutable ... more For most people, listening is a lifelong activity. Sound flows within and around us as a mutable stream. From this stream, we create signs that allow us to interact with our environment in a meaningful way. This creative act of making discrete signs from complex sensations is a dynamic process of composition, and is carried out constantly by the individual in a cultural context. This compositional process is explored in various ways throughout this dissertation, and a framework is created to trace the dynamic process whereby meaning emerges in the soundscape (the complex domain of shared acoustic activity and sensation)
Presented as part of the School of the Arts and Media, UNSW Seminar series, October 2018
The Aus... more Presented as part of the School of the Arts and Media, UNSW Seminar series, October 2018
The Australian sampler and synthesiser Fairlight CMI was released to market in 1979, and went on to shape much of popular culture, adopted by music icons such as Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Stevie Wonder and Herbie Handcock, and was used in soundtracks including Liquid Sky, Full Metal Jacket, Tron and The Never-Ending Story. Although its impact on the cultural landscape is formidable, this tells us little of what it means to have a relationship with this machine as it stands now. So, celebrating the recent restoration of UNSW’s own Series II Fairlight CMI, today’s seminar explores both the lineage of and encounter with this instrument from the peripheries of its reception.
Nicole Saintilan contextualises this instrument in relation to the constellation of machines that surround the Fairlight CMI. Isabella Loong presents her new work Circuit and explores Fairlight composition through the lens of Kate Bush. Adam Hulbert reconsiders the implications of the Fairlight’s notorious two-second ‘orchestra stab’ presets.
This paper reports results of a survey that was conducted to assess the use and efficacy of sound... more This paper reports results of a survey that was conducted to assess the use and efficacy of soundscapes composed for an DAB+ radio station and on demand audio App 'ABC-Kids listen' provided by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). The soundscapes were a series of previously composed pieces titled <em>Sleep Through</em>. 21 people who had listened to one or more of the compositions completed the survey as part of a qualitative study of how music can aid sleep. Results suggested very high overall efficacy, but also revealed applications to situations that did not involve aiding the parents and/or their infants to sleep. These included using <em>Sleep Through</em> for pleasure, and for breast feeding. Open-ended responses to the survey were organized into themes labelled: Relaxation (the most prevalent theme), Associations (often linked to the title and environments portrayed in the soundscape), Distraction (strongly related to Relaxation), and ...
Archaeologies of Tele-Visions and -Realities, 2015
This paper discusses a three-year radio project Cathode Immersions, which was aired on 2SER in Sy... more This paper discusses a three-year radio project Cathode Immersions, which was aired on 2SER in Sydney Australia. The audio that accompanied free-to-air television was remixed and rebroadcast in real time without latency. It explores the human and non-human aspects of the convergence of these two media, introducing ideas of xenocasting and media adjacency. The weekly xenocast of Cathode Immersions afforded unique translations of cultural narratives, from commentary on the Gulf War to machinic perspectives on the desires that surround commercial broadcasting.
Informal commentary on sundry materials found on USB attributed to M August Mountweasel.
Presen... more Informal commentary on sundry materials found on USB attributed to M August Mountweasel.
In 2015, I attended the Aesthetics After Finitude conference in Sydney, Australia. At that time, ... more In 2015, I attended the Aesthetics After Finitude conference in Sydney, Australia. At that time, I was able to present items of research surrounding themes of synthesis and control as practiced by the Phonoegregore, a hitherto barely-known “sonic cabal” whose activity became audible during Marc Couroux’s seminal presentation at Tuning Speculation in Toronto, 2013. The research I presented came to me via a colleague who has requested total anonymity, and was attributed to M. August Mountweazel, although this is almost certainly a pseudonym. At the time of that conference, some researchers requested further elaboration on the research, probably due to the general paucity of scholarship in this area. Although the folio containing the research was quite thin, it was accompanied with a few notes from the researcher. These appear to be personal in nature, although some of the explicative content indicates that they were intended for a readership of some kind. Although undated, the context suggests that they come from during or immediately before the previously presented research. As before, I cannot vouch for the veracity of any of this writing. However, I’ve chosen to publish these selected writings here in the hope that they will provide some insight into Phonoegregoric methods. Please note that the numbering has been added to these excerpts based on the order in which they were collated: these numerals were not in the original text.
Extract from an unaddressed letter attributed to M. August Mountweazel
Accompanies sound piece f... more Extract from an unaddressed letter attributed to M. August Mountweazel
Accompanies sound piece for Viseu Rural 2.0 Exhibition, Portugal (Binaural Media)
Recently, Marc Couroux drew attention to the workings of the Phonoegregore in relation to the syn... more Recently, Marc Couroux drew attention to the workings of the Phonoegregore in relation to the synthetic ear worm. This is here hypothesised to be a manifestation of an ongoing project of soundscape manipulation traceable to the Pythogorean era, later manifest in the religiomaterialism of the Maya and the more recent neuroformalist strategems. Synthes/is is understood to involve the Phonegregrogic attempts to achieve actual control via the folding of the material of the soundscape (enspacement) into subjectivity (entrapment). Actual control is defined as control that persists—such as genetic algorithms—rather than ‘absolute control’, which is transitory. Given that the several plateaux outlined here discuss strategies of entrapment toward actual control, they are likely to have been drawn from research performed by sympathetic parties to the Phonoegregore, although their origins remain unknown due to the circumstance of their retrieval. For this reason, they should be understood a speculative, rather than authentic Phonoegregoric accounts.
Dick undoubtedly had, at many moments in his life and his writing, a living experience of the wil... more Dick undoubtedly had, at many moments in his life and his writing, a living experience of the wildness of radio. He encountered voices through his own radio that had encoded messages for him alone, and his novels are rich with radios that are engaged in all manner of unsettling activity: they change form and regress, they carry cryptic messages that can collapse entire political regimes, they spy and report on people and they reconfigure cultural life for survivors of an apocalypse. When domesticated, the radio can play a normalising role in terms of producing space, time and self by articulating the logics of cultural institutions; when encountered as wild, however, radios reframe experience according to the unfamiliar orientations of the non-human: the ‘plot holes’ of elsewhere, elsewhen and otherwise. This paper explores the wild lives of radios through the various encounters in the worlds of Philip K. Dick, with an emphasis on Time Out of Joint (1959) and Dr Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965).
‘Miranda…!’ There was no answering voice. The awful silence closed in and Edith began, quite loud... more ‘Miranda…!’ There was no answering voice. The awful silence closed in and Edith began, quite loudly now, to scream. If her terrified cries had been heard by anyone but a Wallaby squatting in a clump of bracken a few feet away, the picnic at Hanging Rock might yet have been just another picnic on a summer’s day. Nobody did hear them. The wallaby sprang up in alarm and bounded away, as Edith turned back, plunged blindly into the scrub and ran, stumbling and screaming, towards the plain. (p. 36)
This early moment of Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) is at the centre of the tragedy that ripples outward, spreading beyond the cloistered community of the girls boarding school into the community of 1900s Victoria. The fate of a teacher and three girls who wandered off during a school picnic into the Australian bushland of Mount Macedon remains unknown to the reader, aside from this parting scream from a fourth girl, who was excluded from the fate of the others.
This event is interwoven with two types of silence. Miranda’s silence is the silence of the rock which has loomed precariously over the community until the moment of collapse. The absolute silence of Miranda is a productive force: it produces noise without making its own articulation: it produces a scream, a landslide; but never its own voice. It is this occult silence that makes Picnic at Hanging Rock a preeminent antipodean weird tale, insofar as its generative narrative force remains inexplicable and outside genre. The fleeing girl, Edith, in enveloped in another silence; if Miranda has become the silence of the rock, Edith has become the marginalised voice of the wild. A threat to the institution, she can no longer speak with its voice, and her scream is the articulation of the elsewhere that cannot be overheard. This second silence is desire, the silence that screams, the voice that exhausts itself into nothingness as it runs towards the words of the institution. In many ways, the novel evokes a soundscape that is rich with silences as both generative and destructive, and the literary soundscape of Picnic creates and sustains various listening subjects in a field of relation. This paper examines these the dual approaches to silence in Picnic and the precarious subjectivity they both allow and destroy, with the hope that these will suggest strategies for listening that understand silence as something other than an absence.
This paper examines Dick's insights into the strange materiality of radio, particularly through t... more This paper examines Dick's insights into the strange materiality of radio, particularly through the novels Time Out of Joint (1959) and Dr Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965). Presented for the 2014 international conference, The Prosaic Imaginary: Novels and the Everyday, 1750-2000.
When affective experiences form the ground for the figures of subjectivity and semiotics, a seism... more When affective experiences form the ground for the figures of subjectivity and semiotics, a seismic shift in that ground will problematise all the habitual structures that have been constructed on the initial premise of the finitude of sensation. This, perhaps, is part of the trangressive quality attributed in political discourse to pharmacological experimentation. However, science fiction has also speculated the possibility of such a shift occurring with the nesting of nonhuman experience within human subjectivity. This is sometimes posited in the context of immediated perception, where biotechnical affordances offer the potential for synthetic esthetic sensation.
In this paper, two such scenarios are examined, as proposed by writers Clifford D Simak and Philip K Dick. Simak’s (1944) ‘Desertion’ is one of the earliest explorations of pantropy, that is, the genetic modification of humans to adopt the environmentally embedded apparatus of another species. Dick’s The Owl in the Daylight was discussed in the weeks prior to his death in 1982 but never written. His proposed novel was to explore a sympoietic entanglement between two species: a human composer and a life form with nuanced technics of colour apprehend a single perceptual stream.
Although the xenoperceptual structures are notably different, both of these stories emphasise the role of pleasure in relation to acoustic and visual composition, and examine the potential for this pleasure to undermine and reconfigure sociopolitical structures.
This paper discusses a three-year radio project Cathode Immersions, which was aired on 2SER in Sydney Australia. The audio that accompanied free-to-air television was remixed and rebroadcast in real time without latency. It explores the human and non-human aspects of the convergence of these two media, introducing ideas of xenocasting and media adjacency. The weekly xenocast of Cathode Immersions afforded unique translations of cultural narratives, from commentary on the Gulf War to machinic perspectives on the desires that surround commercial broadcasting.
Many approaches to listening assume a listening subject, who is given an imperative to situate ac... more Many approaches to listening assume a listening subject, who is given an imperative to situate acoustic value. These models follow the logic of subtractive synthesis, with acoustic experience filtered through a centralised subjectivity that is constantly monitoring meaningful relation. Arguably, however, human acoustic encounters with sound occur through a range of technical relations, where value operates as a secondary emergent function rather than as an organising centre. Following the general philosophy of early “West Coast” modular synthesis, this paper explores the possibility of asemiotic listening as the practice of modulated encounters rather than filtered signification.
For most people, listening is a lifelong activity. Sound flows within and around us as a mutable ... more For most people, listening is a lifelong activity. Sound flows within and around us as a mutable stream. From this stream, we create signs that allow us to interact with our environment in a meaningful way. This creative act of making discrete signs from complex sensations is a dynamic process of composition, and is carried out constantly by the individual in a cultural context. This compositional process is explored in various ways throughout this dissertation, and a framework is created to trace the dynamic process whereby meaning emerges in the soundscape (the complex domain of shared acoustic activity and sensation)
Presented as part of the School of the Arts and Media, UNSW Seminar series, October 2018
The Aus... more Presented as part of the School of the Arts and Media, UNSW Seminar series, October 2018
The Australian sampler and synthesiser Fairlight CMI was released to market in 1979, and went on to shape much of popular culture, adopted by music icons such as Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Stevie Wonder and Herbie Handcock, and was used in soundtracks including Liquid Sky, Full Metal Jacket, Tron and The Never-Ending Story. Although its impact on the cultural landscape is formidable, this tells us little of what it means to have a relationship with this machine as it stands now. So, celebrating the recent restoration of UNSW’s own Series II Fairlight CMI, today’s seminar explores both the lineage of and encounter with this instrument from the peripheries of its reception.
Nicole Saintilan contextualises this instrument in relation to the constellation of machines that surround the Fairlight CMI. Isabella Loong presents her new work Circuit and explores Fairlight composition through the lens of Kate Bush. Adam Hulbert reconsiders the implications of the Fairlight’s notorious two-second ‘orchestra stab’ presets.
This paper reports results of a survey that was conducted to assess the use and efficacy of sound... more This paper reports results of a survey that was conducted to assess the use and efficacy of soundscapes composed for an DAB+ radio station and on demand audio App 'ABC-Kids listen' provided by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). The soundscapes were a series of previously composed pieces titled <em>Sleep Through</em>. 21 people who had listened to one or more of the compositions completed the survey as part of a qualitative study of how music can aid sleep. Results suggested very high overall efficacy, but also revealed applications to situations that did not involve aiding the parents and/or their infants to sleep. These included using <em>Sleep Through</em> for pleasure, and for breast feeding. Open-ended responses to the survey were organized into themes labelled: Relaxation (the most prevalent theme), Associations (often linked to the title and environments portrayed in the soundscape), Distraction (strongly related to Relaxation), and ...
Archaeologies of Tele-Visions and -Realities, 2015
This paper discusses a three-year radio project Cathode Immersions, which was aired on 2SER in Sy... more This paper discusses a three-year radio project Cathode Immersions, which was aired on 2SER in Sydney Australia. The audio that accompanied free-to-air television was remixed and rebroadcast in real time without latency. It explores the human and non-human aspects of the convergence of these two media, introducing ideas of xenocasting and media adjacency. The weekly xenocast of Cathode Immersions afforded unique translations of cultural narratives, from commentary on the Gulf War to machinic perspectives on the desires that surround commercial broadcasting.
Uploads
Hyperstition
Presented at Tuning Speculation IV, Toronto
Dr. A. Hulbert
Sydney, January 2016
Accompanies sound piece for Viseu Rural 2.0 Exhibition, Portugal (Binaural Media)
https://soundcloud.com/binauralmedia/adam-hulbert-studies-in-xbduction?in=binauralmedia/sets/sonic-explorations-of-a-rural-archive
Sound and Literature
KEYWORDS: Domestication, radio, plot holes, science fiction, schizophonia
This early moment of Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) is at the centre of the tragedy that ripples outward, spreading beyond the cloistered community of the girls boarding school into the community of 1900s Victoria. The fate of a teacher and three girls who wandered off during a school picnic into the Australian bushland of Mount Macedon remains unknown to the reader, aside from this parting scream from a fourth girl, who was excluded from the fate of the others.
This event is interwoven with two types of silence. Miranda’s silence is the silence of the rock which has loomed precariously over the community until the moment of collapse. The absolute silence of Miranda is a productive force: it produces noise without making its own articulation: it produces a scream, a landslide; but never its own voice. It is this occult silence that makes Picnic at Hanging Rock a preeminent antipodean weird tale, insofar as its generative narrative force remains inexplicable and outside genre. The fleeing girl, Edith, in enveloped in another silence; if Miranda has become the silence of the rock, Edith has become the marginalised voice of the wild. A threat to the institution, she can no longer speak with its voice, and her scream is the articulation of the elsewhere that cannot be overheard. This second silence is desire, the silence that screams, the voice that exhausts itself into nothingness as it runs towards the words of the institution.
In many ways, the novel evokes a soundscape that is rich with silences as both generative and destructive, and the literary soundscape of Picnic creates and sustains various listening subjects in a field of relation. This paper examines these the dual approaches to silence in Picnic and the precarious subjectivity they both allow and destroy, with the hope that these will suggest strategies for listening that understand silence as something other than an absence.
In this paper, two such scenarios are examined, as proposed by writers Clifford D Simak and Philip K Dick. Simak’s (1944) ‘Desertion’ is one of the earliest explorations of pantropy, that is, the genetic modification of humans to adopt the environmentally embedded apparatus of another species. Dick’s The Owl in the Daylight was discussed in the weeks prior to his death in 1982 but never written. His proposed novel was to explore a sympoietic entanglement between two species: a human composer and a life form with nuanced technics of colour apprehend a single perceptual stream.
Although the xenoperceptual structures are notably different, both of these stories emphasise the role of pleasure in relation to acoustic and visual composition, and examine the potential for this pleasure to undermine and reconfigure sociopolitical structures.
Sound and Media
This paper discusses a three-year radio project Cathode Immersions, which was aired on 2SER in Sydney Australia. The audio that accompanied free-to-air television was remixed and rebroadcast in real time without latency. It explores the human and non-human aspects of the convergence of these two media, introducing ideas of xenocasting and media adjacency. The weekly xenocast of Cathode Immersions afforded unique translations of cultural narratives, from commentary on the Gulf War to machinic perspectives on the desires that surround commercial broadcasting.
Disssertation
Conference Presentations
The Australian sampler and synthesiser Fairlight CMI was released to market in 1979, and went on to shape much of popular culture, adopted by music icons such as Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Stevie Wonder and Herbie Handcock, and was used in soundtracks including Liquid Sky, Full Metal Jacket, Tron and The Never-Ending Story. Although its impact on the cultural landscape is formidable, this tells us little of what it means to have a relationship with this machine as it stands now. So, celebrating the recent restoration of UNSW’s own Series II Fairlight CMI, today’s seminar explores both the lineage of and encounter with this instrument from the peripheries of its reception.
Nicole Saintilan contextualises this instrument in relation to the constellation of machines that surround the Fairlight CMI. Isabella Loong presents her new work Circuit and explores Fairlight composition through the lens of Kate Bush. Adam Hulbert reconsiders the implications of the Fairlight’s notorious two-second ‘orchestra stab’ presets.
Papers
Presented at Tuning Speculation IV, Toronto
Dr. A. Hulbert
Sydney, January 2016
Accompanies sound piece for Viseu Rural 2.0 Exhibition, Portugal (Binaural Media)
https://soundcloud.com/binauralmedia/adam-hulbert-studies-in-xbduction?in=binauralmedia/sets/sonic-explorations-of-a-rural-archive
KEYWORDS: Domestication, radio, plot holes, science fiction, schizophonia
This early moment of Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) is at the centre of the tragedy that ripples outward, spreading beyond the cloistered community of the girls boarding school into the community of 1900s Victoria. The fate of a teacher and three girls who wandered off during a school picnic into the Australian bushland of Mount Macedon remains unknown to the reader, aside from this parting scream from a fourth girl, who was excluded from the fate of the others.
This event is interwoven with two types of silence. Miranda’s silence is the silence of the rock which has loomed precariously over the community until the moment of collapse. The absolute silence of Miranda is a productive force: it produces noise without making its own articulation: it produces a scream, a landslide; but never its own voice. It is this occult silence that makes Picnic at Hanging Rock a preeminent antipodean weird tale, insofar as its generative narrative force remains inexplicable and outside genre. The fleeing girl, Edith, in enveloped in another silence; if Miranda has become the silence of the rock, Edith has become the marginalised voice of the wild. A threat to the institution, she can no longer speak with its voice, and her scream is the articulation of the elsewhere that cannot be overheard. This second silence is desire, the silence that screams, the voice that exhausts itself into nothingness as it runs towards the words of the institution.
In many ways, the novel evokes a soundscape that is rich with silences as both generative and destructive, and the literary soundscape of Picnic creates and sustains various listening subjects in a field of relation. This paper examines these the dual approaches to silence in Picnic and the precarious subjectivity they both allow and destroy, with the hope that these will suggest strategies for listening that understand silence as something other than an absence.
In this paper, two such scenarios are examined, as proposed by writers Clifford D Simak and Philip K Dick. Simak’s (1944) ‘Desertion’ is one of the earliest explorations of pantropy, that is, the genetic modification of humans to adopt the environmentally embedded apparatus of another species. Dick’s The Owl in the Daylight was discussed in the weeks prior to his death in 1982 but never written. His proposed novel was to explore a sympoietic entanglement between two species: a human composer and a life form with nuanced technics of colour apprehend a single perceptual stream.
Although the xenoperceptual structures are notably different, both of these stories emphasise the role of pleasure in relation to acoustic and visual composition, and examine the potential for this pleasure to undermine and reconfigure sociopolitical structures.
This paper discusses a three-year radio project Cathode Immersions, which was aired on 2SER in Sydney Australia. The audio that accompanied free-to-air television was remixed and rebroadcast in real time without latency. It explores the human and non-human aspects of the convergence of these two media, introducing ideas of xenocasting and media adjacency. The weekly xenocast of Cathode Immersions afforded unique translations of cultural narratives, from commentary on the Gulf War to machinic perspectives on the desires that surround commercial broadcasting.
The Australian sampler and synthesiser Fairlight CMI was released to market in 1979, and went on to shape much of popular culture, adopted by music icons such as Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Stevie Wonder and Herbie Handcock, and was used in soundtracks including Liquid Sky, Full Metal Jacket, Tron and The Never-Ending Story. Although its impact on the cultural landscape is formidable, this tells us little of what it means to have a relationship with this machine as it stands now. So, celebrating the recent restoration of UNSW’s own Series II Fairlight CMI, today’s seminar explores both the lineage of and encounter with this instrument from the peripheries of its reception.
Nicole Saintilan contextualises this instrument in relation to the constellation of machines that surround the Fairlight CMI. Isabella Loong presents her new work Circuit and explores Fairlight composition through the lens of Kate Bush. Adam Hulbert reconsiders the implications of the Fairlight’s notorious two-second ‘orchestra stab’ presets.