SOUNDING BODIES
29 & 30 Jan 2022
REFLECTIVE NOTES: 10 hours
Part I- A Movement Session With Kate Hilliard
A. Check in with the five senses
Smell of burned wood
memory of the smell of Play-doh
Note to self...make Play-doh sculptures
Taste of plastic
B. Stability Practice
(It wakes up the body and challenges it...like a headstand?)
List of thoughts I had during the 7.5 min. slow moving meditation
listening
feeling
loving
expressing
seeing
opening
channeling
healing
feeling
empowering
channeling
grounding
blessing
earth
rooting
feeling
loving
speaking
voicing
showing
writing
hearing
seeing
resting
blessing
thanking
giving
healing
loving
being
living
resting
C. Creative Flow (no editing or censoring)
First...
1. Walk/travel around the room you are in.
2. Draw the path traveled, not the floor plan, draw the path.
3. Re-walk the room.
4. Draw the shape of the topography.
5. Go to a place in the room where you have not been and become part of the room's architecture.
6. Draw the room from this architectural perspective.
(I sat on one of the window sills and became the window...looking into the room.)
Then...
1. Impose a period of time.
2. Use repetition and tempo.
3. Fracture a piece of my own thinking and take it out of context.
4. Search for something I've said lately and treasure it.
5. Make a commitment to regularly (daily or weekly) to spend 5 minutes writing a deconstruction of that that thought or element of speech.
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Part II- Critical Immaterial Art: A Workshop with Zeerak Ahmed
The Voyager Golden Record Defined
The Voyager 1 probe is the farthest human-made object from Earth.
Both V1 and V2 have reached interstellar space, the region between stars where galactic plasma is present. Like their predecessors Pioneer 10 & 11 that had a simple plaque both V1 and V2 were launched by NASA with a message aboard— a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate to extraterrestrials a story of the world of humans on Earth.
The contents of the record were curated for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University. The selection of content for the record took almost a year. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind, thunder and animals including the songs of birds and whales.
To this they added audio content to represent humanity spoken greetings in 55 ancient and modern languages including a spoken greeting in English by U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/… and a greeting by Sagan's six-year-old son Nick other human sounds like footsteps and laughter (Sagan's) the inspirational message Per aspera ad astra in Morse code and musical selections from different cultures and eras
The record also includes a printed message from U.S. president Jimmy Carter, %This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.
The collection of images includes many photographs and diagrams both in black and white and color. The first images are of scientific interest showing mathematical and physical quantities the Solar System and its planets, DNA, and human anatomy and reproduction. Care was taken to include not only pictures of
humanity but also some of animals, insects, plants and landscapes
Images of humanity depict a broad range of cultures. These images show food architecture and humans in portraits and humans going about their day-to-day lives. Many pictures are annotated with one or more indications of scales of time size mass. Some images contain indications of chemical composition. All measures used on the pictures are defined in the first few images using physical references that are likely to be consistent anywhere in the universe.
The musical selection is varied featuring works by composers J.S. Bach interpreted by Glenn Gould, Mozart, Beethoven played by the Budapest String Quartet, Stravinsky, Guan Pinghu, Blind Willie Johnson, Chuck Berry, Kesarbai Kerkar, Valya Balkanska and electronic composer Laurie Spiegel, Mugham Azerbaijani folk music by oboe player Kamil Jalilov.
The inclusion of Berry's "Johnny B. Goode" was controversial with some claiming that rock music was "adolescent" to which Sagan replied "There are a lot of adolescents on the planet." The selection of music for the record was completed by a team composed of Carl Sagan as project director Linda Salzman Sagan, Frank Drake, Alan Lomax, Ann Druyan as creative director artist Jon Lomberg ethnomusicologist Robert E. Brown, Timothy Ferris as producer and Jimmy Iovine as sound engineer.
It also included sounds of humpbacked whales from the 1970 album by Roger Payne, Songs of the Humpback Whale... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Re…
Part III- with Zeerak Ahmed
Day 2 workshop's 20th Century Conceptual Sound Works and related in-session exercises inspired me to write these pieces:
John Cage's 4'33" original performance
____
www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTEFKFiXSx4
www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8lXRusTpY4
www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcHnL7aS64Y
____
My Take on Lamont Young's Composition 1960 #7
drone
aligning
balancing
comforting
calming
drone
aligning
balancing
comforting
calming
drone
aligning
balancing
comforting
calming
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b7jO60JQ6o
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Anna de Keersnaber & Steve Reich's 1966 performance Come Out, Diagrammed
Dancers/performers
2 (female) bodies- female
both wearing the same haircuts
both dressed in the same costumes/clothes
both seated on the same type of stool
Architecture/glass/space/stage
womb that is "glazed", i.e. cold
Sound
tape loop of male human voice detached
(from the female performers)
Notes
dancers movements are minimal
grid of the glazed building/stage is minimal
music is minimal
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouYiTiiY3vg
____
Documented "Unglazed" Sound and Movement
Steve Reich and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker's
Violin Fase - Violin Phase
www.youtube.com/watch?v=i36Qhn7NhoA
____
I Am Sitting In a Room Listening to a Recording of Alvin Lucier Smoothing Out His Stutter
----> Lucier's discernible male voice reading...
I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now
I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves
so that any semblance of my speech
with perhaps the exception of a rr-rh-rhythym
is destroyed
what you will hear then
are the natural resonant frequencies of the room
articulated by speech
I regard this activity nnnot so much as a demonstration of a physical fact
but more as a way to ss-ss-smooooth out
any irregularities my speee-eech might have
----> is looped and played over and over and over and over...
----> As the sound loop repeats it gets more and more and more echo-y
----> Until slowly and eventually his voice morphs into a non-gendered drone
www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAxHlLK3Oyk
____
Boomerang...based on Nancy Holt's voice recorded by Richard Serra
I
am
word...
void...
I think
I am by
the words
pouring out
I feel reality
words boomeranging
bouncing in
empty
space
I am
lost
without
words with
audio trouble
I
am
lost
words
space
reflection
I heard
my own voice
delayed
mirrored
reflected
I heard
my own voice
I am surrounded
stimulated
The light
shines
down
and
I see
my
mind
is sound
www.youtube.com/watch?v=8z32JTnRrHc
____
My Golden Record
Saturn
Mars
Earth
waves crashing
numerical overlays
X-ray of a human head and torso
dogs barking
birds chirping
lamb bleating
counting backwards
baby cooing
crying
symphonic music
human genitalia diagram
fetal measurements
(my husband interjecting...)
Pygmy music
oval maps of the earth
(Robinson Projections)
mathematical calculations
leaves with dew
dolphins flying
animals drinking
Jane Goodall with chimps
Baltic singer
man dismounting an elephant
men running a race
Stravinsky's Rite of Spring
children with hand on a globe
cotton being harvested
people eating
sailboats
rickshaws
jet taking off
Indian Raga
singing
man in
space
space
ship
launch
____
Two-minute Deep Listening
four...
a car driving by
...my breathing
...writing with this
pen on this paper
three...
hearing my own
voice reading what
I am thinking
processing and
writing
two...
white noise
(aka tinnitus)
one...
my breathing
All of the above
in unison
(a symphony)
____
Become aware of using more auditory language, words and vocabulary
____
Sensory Revelation
My senses are gendered
I mean for example that my
hearing or auditory
functions are masculine
It is because my dad
an auditory
had a big
baritone
voice and
with it
brought
music and
everything
around us
alive
Whereas my
sight/seeing/visual
perception
functions are
feminine
via my mother
who is a visual
She recently
told me that
when I was
first born
she took
one look at
me and
thought
oh she's
an artist
She was the
first person
to "see" me...in
every sense of
the word
