At the risk of saying too much about the ‘intent’ of this piece (something I usually steer clear of), I feel as though explaining a bit about how it was constructed might enhance the listening. As a production project for a class in ‘Audio Experiments,’ I tried to find screams that were as “authentic” as possible – some of my sources were CVR (cockpit voice recorders) from plane crashes, phone calls from WTC on 911, and sounds from the Haiti earthquake aftermath to name a few. In other words, screams as media that were never meant to be media, the most unwilling participants in art you’ll ever find. Pulling these together and listening to each one was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever worked on – just completely draining emotionally.
There is one scream of my own, made by taping a homemade piezo transducer mic to my throat and screaming into my pillow. The scream was 4 seconds long, but I time-remapped it to 5 minutes, the length of the piece. Then I remapped the other screams at various lengths and used these to form the backbone of the “symphony” – the underlying rhythm and melody – trying to layer them in a way that was eerily musical. Other layers were then added, including many of the screams heard at their original speed.
WARNING: Some have found the content of this piece disturbing. Proceed at your own risk.
Listen with a good set of headphones if at all possible: [Runtime: 5:00]
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References:
Barbie Dolls, Love Story, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, KC & The Sunshine Band, Jaws, Queen (the band), Barry Manilow, Pong, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Google, Woody Woodpecker, Altered States, True Red, Run Lola Run, The Shining, Dead Alive, The Six Million Dollar Man, ET, The Elephant Man, One Got Fat, The Wolfman, Age of Turbulance, An American Werewolf in London, Physical Aspects of Puberty, Olga’s House of Shame, Carrie, 70′s Bic Commercial, 60′s Wilkinson Sword Commercial, Frankenstein, La Belle et La Bete.
As promised (to the class), here’s the deck for my presentation on Remix Culture given to the SVA grad seminar last week. My apologies for the formatting – some of the fonts & images didn’t translate well to Slideshare. The audio and video didn’t translate at all, so to watch/listen to the examples, you’ll need to click on the buttons on the slides.
So, this is my first foray into sound art, apart from audio I’ve designed for live performance pieces. It’s the first production project for my ‘Radio Narratives’ class at The New School, a three-minute sonic collage created almost entirely from appropriated materials, mostly soundtracks from military training and educational films, and follows the guidelines for the Third Coast Festival Short Docs Challenge. I’ve included a brief statement of intent below, but my suggestion is to listen to the piece before reading, if you choose to read it at all.
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Statement of Intent:
The piece was actually inspired by a Brecht quote about “an inescapable profusion and confusion in the tower of Babel.” I thought that “I didn’t know that” would be a good starting point for an exploration of state-controlled “truths” with the title phrase representing the public’s naive willingness to accept what we now recognize as mistruth and propaganda. I wanted the tension between time periods to emphasize how relativistic these messages are, depending on when we hear them – hopefully the mixing of periods emphasized the relationship between contemporary and dated material.
I originally titled the piece ” I Didn’t Know That: A Triptych” because I tried to create three distinct sections. The first is the monologue of media controlled messages, the second is a dialogue between the messages. The third section actually begins with Brecht himself reading a poem in his native German entitled “To Those Who Follow in Our Wake”, which, in translation, begins:
Truly, I live in dark times!
An artless word is foolish. A smooth forehead
Points to insensitivity. He who laughs
Has not yet received
The terrible news.
Layered on top of this is the voice of McLuhan discussing his idea of “resonance” – nonlinear, nonlogical comprehension of sounds and images. These are the 2 voice of “authenticity” that are eventually buried by the familiar voices introduced in the first two parts, which are layered over them to create a cacophony that is (hopefully) a sum greater than its parts. Anyway, I removed the subtitle since it didn’t strictly fit within the Third Coast guidelines and I’m sort of glad I did, as I felt it opened the piece up to a greater breadth of interpretation.
With the RE/Mixed Media Festival a week behind me and the ‘official’ post-mortem with the band a week ahead – I need to start recording the experience. Maybe it’s just snips of memory, conversations, thoughts or feelings that floated through. A lot ‘happened,’ but this festival was something that came together between the cracks – that became a living being with breath and movement and thought – when we weren’t looking… while we were occupied ‘doing’ everything that needed to be done. It’s the baby that started growing after a night that started with a feeling – one of love, we hope – who needs your attention every day before it comes into the light, but who you do not ‘know’ until that day it’s born. [continue reading this post...]
So yesterday evening, I was interviewed by a fellow named Garfield Stinvil who runs an online vidders community called Vidders.net. I haven’t actually listened to it yet, as I cannot stand hearing myself talk, but I give a ton of info on the RE/Mixed Media Festival, it’s background and origin, the formation of LOFI & what we’re trying to accomplish, and the kinds of stuff you can expect to see at the festival on the 30th. It was booked very last minute, so I didn’t have a lot of prep time – hopefully I’m not too ramble-y. If you have an easier time of listening to my voice than I do, you can listened to the archived interview here:
On February 26 2010, in a piece called “The Free-Appropriation Writer,” The New York Times’ Randy Kennedy reported on the recent controversy over German novelist
Helene Hegemann, and whether the use of another writer’s work in her novel was theft or an allowable form of “sampling” or “remix.”
In this piece I’ll try to show how Kennedy’s article misses the central issue around the copyright/appropriation debate – the idea/expression dichotomy – and further,
Helene Heggmann: plagiarist or remixer?
how the article misrepresents the interests of artists and copyright activists. I will demonstrate that while Helene Hegemann’s actions were, in fact, plagiarism, Kennedy’s presentation of the issue reflects a cultural bias towards ownership of expression, and away from the idea of copyright as a trade agreement designed to encourage creativity and serve the public good. His article proposes to examine both sides of the appropriation issue, but the result of Kennedy’s bias is a report that uses the Hegemann story as a platform to condemn an entire area of critical thought and opinion, based on the actions of one proverbial bad apple.
The Idea/Expression Dichotomy
In a 1996 article in the Yale Law Journal, Neil Netanel wrote, “As all authorship involves a degree of borrowing from earlier works, an overly broad copyright represents an unacceptable burden on creative expression.”At the center of the controversy reported in the Kennedy’s article is a concept that he only barely acknowledges in his piece, known as the “idea/expression dichotomy.” This is essentially a legal construction, dating back to the founding of the United States, which differentiates between an idea and the explicit expression of that idea. In Copyrights and Copywrongs, Siva Vaidhyanathan claims “James Madison and others insisted that American copyright clearly protect distinct expressions of ideas for a limited time, while allowing others to freely use, criticize, and refer to the ideas that lay beneath the text.” (28) The question of ideas vs. expressions that has gained attention in the past 20 years is typified by the legal conundrum over digital sampling in hip-hop, i.e. is sampling an idea or an expression? What is the language or the alphabet of sound? These is just two of many difficult questions, ones that should seem significantly clearer in cases of literature. [continue reading this post...]
Me: Tom Tenney: producer, performer, artist, digital media professional, student, and director of the annual RE/Mixed Media Festival in Brooklyn. Yeah, I wear a lot of hats, and spend a lot of time thinking about the complex relationships between art, culture, media, consciousness, education… I have a rich and varied (albeit somewhat checkered) past in the underground performance scene, and currently play around a lot with sound. Read more...
Sound
We Are All Underground
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Scream Symphony #1
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Off the Grid
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I Didn't Know That
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Reunion
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Great Expectations
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At the risk of saying too much about the ‘intent’ of this piece (something I usually steer clear of), I feel as though explaining a bit about how it was constructed might enhance the listening. As a production project for a class in ‘Audio Experiments,’ I tried to find screams that were as “authentic” as possible – some of my sources were CVR (cockpit voice recorders) from plane crashes, phone calls from WTC on 911, and sounds from the Haiti earthquake aftermath to name a few. In other words, screams as media that were never meant to be media, the most unwilling participants in art you’ll ever find. Pulling these together and listening to each one was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever worked on – just completely draining emotionally.
