Phonographic Failure: The Discovery of Noise as Aesthetic Choice

Dave Wall

Music 580Dr. Mark Hannesson

December 7, 2011

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Phonographic Failure: The Discovery of Noise as Aesthetic Choice

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter.Try again. Fail again. Fail better.(Samuel Beckett, Worstword Ho)

The vast majority of music we hear arrives not directly from a shimmying violin string or an undulating column of air, but from grooves on vinyl, particles on tape, pits in plastic, electromagnetic waves and pulses of light.(Collins 1)

We have been preserving and conserving our experiences for millennia. From cave painting to Aristotle to present day we have created representations of things in one way or another. It is not until the invention of the phonograph in 1877, however, that people begin representing sound. The phonograph is significant for a number of reasons, the following being perhaps the most important: it acts as an aural mirror, allowing us greater self-knowledge; it initiates a search for perfect fidelity, leading to new technologies and a new awareness of noise; and it is the beginning of a relationship with sound-reproducing machines, a relationship that extends into the present. People were engaged in relationships with musical instrument-machines long before the phonograph, but the phonograph was not a musical instrument (not yet) but a sound reproducer. At the beginning of phonography, music was just one of many sounds to be reproduced, and it would be decades before the phonograph would be considered as a musical instrument in its own right. .

In this paper, I want to explore the phonograph in its role as the initiator of a new type of relationship that people formed with machines that were designed to reproduce sound. This relationship would foreground the idea of noise as a failure within the machine-system. Through this foregrounding, two things happened: 1. Generations of sound technicians would attempt to eliminate noise, and 2. Composers would begin to see noise as a resource for the creation of new work. The production of noise art would make it possible to experience failure as positive, a place of discovery and knowledge, a place to seek out rather than avoid. In light of this, I want to see the art produced through use of the machine as the “…art of open systems, relationships…which may lead to unexpected and errant outputs” (Barker 43). The phonograph produced these types of outputs through the representation of sound, enabling humans to take a closer look at aurality. What they found beyond the voice, nature and music, was a world of noise. The deepening awareness of noise that this produced allowed for a deeper consideration of the role of failure in the facilitation of art.

My interest in noise/failure centers around what it suggests by the ways in which it foregrounds possibility, freedom, and unexpectedness. Failure communicates as noise, an aberrant signal in a system of communication and a deviation from intention, and also as a signal of the potential for “a strategy of misdirection” (Nunes 3). Noise encourages us

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to see failure as the opportunity for creative thought and reconceptualization of existing structures. I will be looking at the history of sound technology - the phonograph in particular - to determine the ways in which failure has been used creatively in media related to sound representation, and the ways in which it has changed the way that music and sound is produced. I begin by contextualizing failure within the world of art, and then look at the history of “old” media, focusing on the phonograph, the impact of recording on music, and the role of noise in this context. This leads to a discussion of the resources found in new media, and how these have impacted the practice of sound art and the use of failure and noise. I end with a look at glitch, a form of noise referring to a fault in a system, which artists such as Christian Marclay and Yasunao Tone have consciously made use of in producing their art.

Failure

It would take more than 70 years after the invention of the phonograph for an auditory turn to be initiated as sound technology experienced exponential growth in the late 1940s, and composers began to work directly with sound and without a score. In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan argued that electronic media was “causing a shift in the sensorium,” replacing the visual with the immersive experience of the ear. This immersive experience enhanced by sound technology accepted noise as a means of expression, working against the dominant ideology of information control which arose through concern for profit based on efficient and accurate relays of information. The auditory turn, then, became a subversive act, accepting failure – in the form of noise - as aesthetically valid. While success may be satisfying, “…failure and doubt are engaging, driving us into the unknown” (Le Feuvre 17). By the time the present moment arrived, digital media further transformed the ways in which we encounter and engage with sound, and gave us more resources for the production of failure through the production of noise.

In using recording technology , we transfer ourselves into it, our memories and our imagination and by extension, our failures. At the same time, people attempted to eliminate noise and error inherent in both the technologies and the representations of the world these technologies created. This had the effect of erasing, as it were, a part of ourselves, while at the same time creating a different type of relationship with machines. This would lead, throughout the course of the 20th century, to people creating commonalities between themselves and the machines that they made. In fact, as early as 1924, Surrealism’s founder Andre Breton used the term “modest recording instruments” in the first Surrealist Manifesto, “…implanting a trope into the brain where technology could not go” (Kahn 7, 1992), and recording the incessant chatter of the unconscious mind through the practice of automatic writing. Already, people were using recording technology as a metaphor for tapping creativity, and had begun creating a perceptual space that would lead to what we now think of as posthumanism.

Recording technology has created the interesting oxymoronic situation of the search for authenticity in a medium of reproduction in which an illusion is created through a process

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of repeated performance and extensive editing. Editing with the intent to eliminate noise creates a dishonest representation of the real thing, since, as Susan Ballard says, “Once captured, sound and noise are indistinguishable as both are made of vibration; they are continuous” (Ballard 61). In other words, noise is always an integral aspect of the real thing. Adding to this, Rick Altman says that, “The real can never be represented; representation alone can be represented. For, in order to be represented, the real must be known, and knowledge is already a form of representation” (Altman 46). In other words, direct experience itself is real, not the knowledge of direct experience. And noise is always an integral part of direct experience. From this point of view, eliminating noise makes no sense since extraneous sound is not only part of the direct experience of the world, it is integral to it. Ballard continues: “Movement, no matter how imperceptible, introduces noise. As soon as something moves, it picks up traces of dust and dirt, glitches, mistakes, and error. Without movement there is no information, and without noise there is nothing to hear” (Ballard 60). In spite of this, editing remains an important aspect of recording.

The effect of this as Jacques Attali says, is that “the unforeseen and the risks…disappear in repetition. The new aesthetic of performance excludes error, hesitation…” (Chanan 18), the control of which, in Attali’s view, is a reflection of political power. The work becomes frozen, giving it an artificial kind of authority, and discouraging dissenting views. The ability to perfect a performance, the desire to present the definitive version, robs music of some its most interesting aspects - the sense of risk, discovery, and unexpectedness – which work against authority and the status quo. These aspects are all found most fruitfully in the acceptance and use of failure.

As Joel Fisher says, “Where failure occurs, there is the frontier. It marks the edge of the possible or the acceptable, a boundary fraught with possibilities”(Le Feuvre 118). And as novelist Colson Whitehead has said, “It is failure that guides evolution; perfection offers no incentive for improvement” (Cascone 393). Deleuze and Guattari argue for failure as part of a rhizomatic experience in which all things are interconnected in an intertextual way, eliminating hierarchical structures. These hierarchical structures impose themselves on rhizomes, however, and are countered by “ruptures”, a situation in which lines of flight – insights outside the status quo – break up ossified structures and allow for free thought. Ruptures often occur in the form of accidental encounters, which rhizomatic experience encourages. In other words, accidents (failure) are instrumental to the production of free thought and new ideas. With this point of view, we wait in anticipation, not dread, for the next mistake, because it often becomes the next meaningful idea.

Mistakes imply negative judgement - an unwantedness - in the minds of most people. However, since mistakes in the context of art are often accepted and even sought-after, they are not unwanted, and therefore not mistakes within that context. This is a variation of Paul Hegarty’s argument about noise being not-noise once it acquires meaning: “…at what point does noise lose its noisiness and become meaning…” (Hegarty 1). Unlike the

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mistake, noise is sound material, and can be identified as such and used objectively. Mistakes, however, are actions that happen randomly, cannot be identified beforehand, and are experienced subjectively. Because of this subjectivity, and because of training within the culture, our reflexive reaction is one of fear that we did something wrong. This negative experience is transformed into material for the artist. For the non-artist however, it tends to remain negative. Unlike the culture in which we live, then, art trains us to make good from bad, to experience fear and transform it into fodder. It trains us not to consciously produce failure, but to encounter it in a positive way when it occurs. Brian Ferneyhough has given this some thought: “… you play and you make a mistake, right? Well, you’ve made it! … And therefore it authentically exists; it’s there” (Bunch 6). The idea of validating the mistake by recognizing its authenticity is a compelling one, and provides another way of seeing failure as positive.

Artists have long been using failure through experimentation to push past assumptions of what they think they know. The nature of artistic work is such that, “The inevitable gap between the intention and realization of an artwork makes failure impossible to avoid” (Le Feuvre 12). Put another way, every decision that is made on the way to a completed work is a failure if changed or revised. With the advent of sound reproduction and the deepening awareness of noise, however, failure became an aesthetic choice rather than simply an unavoidable part of the process. When that choice arrived, it became possible for the act of making things to be about discovering, and even reveling in failure. The machine, which initially helped to make this choice a possibility in the world of music was the phonograph. Through the phonograph, we began to hear the sound of technology being used and abused.

Multimedia artist Paul Demarinis has identified three sets of sounds that are heard whenever the phonograph is used. They are: 1. The sound of the recorded performance. 2. The sounds of background noise, which the phonograph has helped to bring into people’s awareness; and 3. The sound of the machine itself. Unlike the first two sounds, the third would not exist without the machine. Demarinis calls this the shadow of the technology. Nicholas Collins acknowledges the performative potential of the phonograph in this “shadow” when he says, “ The medium is no longer the message - it has become the instrument”(Collins 1).

Demarinis identifies a fourth aspect of sound that he calls “autobiographical.” This is the dimension of sound that exists in the wearing out of vinyl records, expressed in the pops and crackles produced by accumulation of dust and scratches. Even if kept in the best possible condition, the record slowly degrades and the sound becomes more and more muffled. Failure is built into the medium through its use. In this way, failure is a record of how we have spent part of our lives in the presence of recorded sound.

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History

From the phonograph to contemporary media arts, technology and sound have been enduringly connected. After the phonograph a number of technologies arose as a response to the desire for improved sound quality, which would – it was hoped - reflect more accurately our selves and the world we in which we live. These technologies include: the invention of the triode in 1907; application of sound to cinema in the 1920s; commercial use of magnetic tape and the invention of the transistor in the 1940s; the modular synthesizer in 1959; dolby noise reduction in 1966; quadraphonic sound in the 1970s; and digital recording and later the compact disc in 1982. This is not a comprehensive list, but points to the desire to have our technology, in essence, show us ourselves through an idealized image of ever greater “fidelity.”

When Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877 the medium itself produced most of the noise and the recording of music was only one of many things on his mind. Indeed, it was behind letter writing and dictation, phonographic books, and the teaching of elocution on a list he created outlining its possible uses. Preserving languages, toys, various educational purposes, and a “connection with the telephone” (an answering machine) were also on the list (Chanan 3). At this early stage, noise reduction was not yet an important consideration.

While the uses listed above have all been achieved, and are what the general population generally considers to be the extent of recording technology, composers have been using the technology as a creative tool since the 1920s. At that point, composers like Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toch, motivated by curiosity as much as composerly intention, played around with the effects of playing records at different speeds (Manning 1). In 1930, Neue Musik Berlin premiered a new genre of music called Gramophonmusik, works created exclusively for the gramophone as an instrument, in an early example of what Caleb Kelly refers to as manipulation – “…the extension of the technology beyond its originally intended use” (Kelly 32). During the festival, Hindemith and Toch played pieces exploiting the phonograph’s technical abilities. Hindemith used the technology to transpose the pitch of one vocal part down by four octaves, and another up by four octaves. The piece alternates normal speed with double and half-speed versions and uses overdubbing. An instrumental piece for xylophone and viola featured Hindemith changing the speed of the recording to produce different string timbres. Using disc-cutting phonographs and microphones, he recorded the viola part on one phonograph, the xylophone on another, and made a third recording to combine the two parts. During the recording process, he would have had to record the viola, and then record the recording of the viola while changing the speed of the phonograph. Toch sped up a fugue comprised of vocal parts to the extent that he was able to produce what was, at that point, an unrecognized aspect of the human voice, impossible to produce in any other way. This work represented the compelling nature of audio imitation, which brought with it a sense of new artistic possibilities and an increase in theoretical and practical activity. Due to a variety of circumstances, however – economic depression, authoritarian regimes, war,

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censorship, and the role of institutions in terms of access to technology and the arts in general – experimentation with recording technology was cut short for years. The invention of magnetic audio tape by Fritz Pfleumer in 1928 would make the process that Hindemith and Toch were engaged in much easier, and eventually change the way composers thought of sound. Like the phonograph, the issue of noise inherent in the medium of tape was overlooked in favor of its novelty.

The radio raised important conceptual issues. In 1933 Rudolf Arnheim, emphasizing the awareness that recorded sound brings to music and speech – and by extension all “natural sound” - wrote that "[t]he rediscovery of the musical note in sound and speech, the welding of music, sound and speech into a single material, is one of the greatest artistic tasks of the wireless.” He stressed the influence music might exert upon the new art: “Wireless [radio] must not take any part in enlarging the gap between music and natural sound” (Freire, 68). Unfortunately for Arnheim, this gap has been enlarged to the point that “natural sound” – or naturally occurring, uncontrolled sound (noise) – has been eliminated in the editing process. While this has created an artificial division between music and noise, it has also created the possibility of an autonomous noise art independent of musical structure.

While tape and radio allow for the exploration of sound in unique ways, they do not hold the same kind of potential as performance tools in live situations that the phonograph does. Tape and radio cannot be manipulated in the same way as a platter. While “scratching” is easily done with tape reel, or even cassettes, the platter offers surface area with which to add a much greater variety of material for the phonograph’s needle to make contact with. The cartridge on a phonograph offers a component that can be manipulated as well. John Cage’s Cartridge Music is perhaps the most famous example of this.

Before Cartridge Music, however, Cage experimented with the possibilities inherent in the phonograph as an instrument. As he saw it, “…the only lively thing that will happen with a record is, if somehow you would use it to make something it isn’t. If you could for instance make another piece of music with a record” (Kelly 111). In Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939) he used muted piano, cymbal and two variable-speed turntables with frequency records, which were designed to test the frequency response of the phonograph. When the speed of the turntables were changed, the pitches of the records changed. In Imaginary Landscape No. 2 (1942), Cage modified the turntable, replacing the stylus with a coil of wire, and in Imaginary Landscape No. 3 (1942) he used three variable-speed turntables, two with frequency records and one with a recording of a generator whine and a cartridge with a radio coil. It was Cartridge Music that proved to be most influential in terms of cracked media, however, as Cage replaced the stylus with a variety of foreign objects, and produced sound by striking or rubbing various objects with the cartridge. Contact microphones are also used, and were attached to pieces of furniture. The cracking of media by the modification of its components (as in Cartridge Music) implies destruction, and no artistic group or movement in the 20th century is more connected to destruction than Fluxus, an interdisciplinary group whose members were

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known for, among other things, destroying musical instruments. One in particular – Nam June Paik – used the turntable in conjunction with tape collage and live theatrical and musical performance.

Two works by Paik, Random Access and Random Access (Schallplatten-Schaschlik) are significant in regard to cracked media. In the latter, the tone arm was removed from the phonograph and attached to it with an extension. The user could then use the tone arm to play a rack of records that had been stacked up on the phonograph using nuts and bolts. The work gives users access “…to over twenty discs at a time, allowing them to jump…from record to record, radically cutting up the tracks” (Kelly 138). Paik ruins the phonograph for regular playback and requires the audience to create the sound of the work.

Fig. 1 Wolf Vostell playing Random Access

Another artist associated with Fluxus was Milan Knízàk, who created broken music in the early 1960s by transforming records in various ways: “…sticking tape over records, painting over them, burning them, cutting them up and gluing parts of different records back together…” (Kelly 144).

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Fig. 2 Milan Knízàk – transformation of records

The cracking of media in this way by artists such as Cage, Paik, and Knízàk created unexpected, unknown results and made possible further explorations by a new generation of artists.

One of these artists was Otomo Yoshihide, an influential member of the Japanese experimental music scene. His work is significant in that he is one of the first people to dispense with vinyl records, and to use the phonograph itself as the sole producer of sound. After operating as an extreme sampler with vinyl records in the 1980s, he turned away from this approach, saying, “I quickly get tired of things that I can control myself. I started to think that using the turntable without records and…gathering noises…that this kind of process, which was much less controllable than sampling, was extremely interesting” (Kelly 193). This search for a lack of control is essentially the desire for discovery through failure. It is interesting to note that, as late as the end of the last century, the turntable was still relevant.

Janek Schaefer has extended the performance capabilities of the phonograph with the production of a triphonic turntable, a machine outfitted with three tone arms. Schaefer explains the design of the machine:

"I could use each tone arm for the left, the right and the centre channels of the stereo field. The revolution speed needed to be as flexible as possible so that any speed within its boundaries could be set. Micro-variable control. Very importantly a reverse mode was essential and just for good measure I designed it so that up to 3 records could be played at once. This was possible by putting a 7" or 10" on top of an LP on the platter and then by using a central spacer another disc can be placed above and played by the third arm which I fitted at a higher level. Practically speaking this covered all potential possibilities [except one arm playing upside down on the underside of the raised disc]. Finally I routed the

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stereo signal from each arm through an integrated mixer to make it truly self contained."

One wonders what Cage would have done with micro-variable speed control and a reverse mode in Imaginary Landscape No. 1 or No. 3. Although Schaefer doesn’t mention it, this turntable, with its ability to stack records, points back to Paik’s work with Random Access. At any rate, Schaefer’s work demonstrates that the turntable is capable of evolving, and that it continues to be relevant in the face of the production of new types of playback devices throughout the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century.

New Media and Posthumanism

New media, as distinct from old media such as the phonograph, television or radio, refers to digital technologies and/or processes such as cyberspace, virtuality, and interactivity. These technologies imply immersion and a different sense of space, providing a bridge between “…real and mythic spaces, such as the space of the screen, the space of the imagination, cosmic space, and literal, three-dimensional physical space” (Dyson 1), and ”…depends on redefining embodiment, space, reality, and experience in ways remarkably similar to notions of immersion and transcendence associated with audiophony” (Dyson 182). In terms of reproduction, new media, in the form of virtuality, extends the world instead of representing it. As Michel Gaillot says, “With the virtual image, one no longer finds one’s self frontally across from a wall, but in the presence of new horizons which one can enter and experience singly and collectively”(Dyson 187). This may seem like a logical stretch, but it points to the reality that new media engages our imagination in ways that old media cannot. It enhances the sense of our body in space through interaction with the digital realm - either in virtual reality or in terms of sound - through creation and/or interaction. I think of interaction here as performance and manipulation of digital media, be it live coding in a programming language, the destruction of equipment in the search for new sounds, or the creation of, and performance with, synthesizers in the domain of digital audio workstations. It should be no surprise that many of these new media are closely related to sound, since of all the senses, hearing is the most immersive. Sound surrounds us, mimicking the quality that media mediates: the feeling of being immersed in an environment. And of course, within this immersion exists noise, created by failure or a lack of control.

The possibilities for interaction with new media far outstrip those of old media, largely because of accessibility. Making television or radio required professional studios. Sound editing in the medium of tape manipulation required access to academic institutions or research centers such as IRCAM. Digital media, by contrast, allows engagement in these activities with a laptop and the appropriate software. In an era of ubiquitous computing and constant access to the digital realm, people are finding more ways of interacting creatively with machines than ever before.

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As the computer becomes more ubiquitous and less obvious, it is able to be used more intuitively. Mark Weiser feels that the idea of a personal computer is misplaced, and he is working on ways to make the computer vanish into the background:

Such a disappearance is a fundamental consequence not of technology, but of human psychology. Whenever people learn something sufficiently well, they cease to be aware of it …Computer scientist, economist, and Nobelist Herb Simon calls this phenomenon "compiling"; philosopher Michael Polanyi calls it the "tacit dimension"…philosophers Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger call it "the horizon" and the "ready-to-hand”… All say, in essence, that only when things disappear in this way are we freed to use them without thinking and so to focus beyond them on new goals (Weiser 1) .

This immersion in computers, the fact of knowing the machine so well that it disappears, is a strong indicator of posthumanism and a deeper engagement with machines. Psychologically, immersion creates a situation in which the machine increasingly becomes part of our unconscious, operating in the background. Since the invention of writing, humans have placed their thoughts, feelings, memories - their consciousness - into technology. With the invention of the phonograph along and the kinetoscope around 1880, technology begins to “take over functions of the central nervous system…” (Kittler 16). The computer deepens this phenomenon with its capacity for storage and playback of various media far outstripping previous technologies.

What is the effect of immersion? The negative effect involves desensitization through constant contact, resulting in a loss of control of experience. The positive effect involves a deeper sensory experience and a greater awareness of what is happening around us. Art plays a role here in its ability to maintain and increase awareness of our experiences by continually enhancing and renewing them. The role of failure in art is to discover and/or produce results that could not have been discovered or produced otherwise, and by doing so, to keep experience fresh. Failure, then, is an artistic tool that we use to maintain our sense of ourselves as we progressively and incrementally merge with our machines. One of the roles of the artist is “…to prompt a glitch or an error to arise in a specific system, then to reconfigure and exploit the generative qualities of the unforeseen error” (Barker 44). Since art is particularly good at accepting and using failure, it allows for the control of immersive experiences. The practice of glitch in particular - discussed in more depth later in this paper - allows musicians to focus on error in sound reproduction, thereby allowing “…musicians and listeners to demystify technology, which otherwise threatens to become ubiquitous and therefore unquestionable” (Demers 73). Our machines help in this regard, reminding us of ourselves. They have failure built into them, forcing us to live with error everyday. The hesitations of our computers, the slowing down, the bugs, the crashes - these things occur regularly. We take them in stride, often with

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impatience, always with acceptance. We understand that there is no eliminating the error. We understand on some level that error forms our connection, our relatedness, to the machine. The machine, in this sense, is human.

This sense of acceptance of error and noise has its origins in the human body. We live with the noise of the body, its lack of perfection and its process of dissolution. The use of machine metaphor - “hard-wired” behaviour, overloaded “memory banks”, being “plugged in” or “off-line” - is habitual in describing human behaviour and points to our sense of posthuman relatedness with machines. In the same way that we try to contain the noise of our machines we try to contain “…the cough, the sigh, the strain, the hoarseness, the wheeze…”, those bodily expressions that Roland Barthes calls “the grain of the voice” (Barthes 181). Barthes uses the grain of the voice as a metaphor for the jouissance of the body, the animating, expressive, noisy aspect of communication. Without it, our expressive capabilities are diminished.

This relationship to our machines, in particular our computers, has led to a fusion of understanding and practice reflected in the ways in which we use our computers to easily create an array of communicative strategies: blogs, video, sound, image. All of the products created through these strategies are full of error. We have become accepting of this since all of it is editable; the understanding exists that anything in cyberspace can somehow be fixed, and so we have gradually become more accepting of error. We exist as a set of processes: error-production, editing, reconstruction, and dissolution. Through these processes, which new media has made more obvious, we have become more comfortable with failure.

In using the machine as a posthuman collaborator, Michael Bussiére has been investigating the possibilities inherent in “distributed performance”, the use of broadband for the “…creation and presentation of experimental multimedia over high-speed networks, with particular emphasis on live, interactive performance forms” (Bussiere 73). The “failure” of latency remains an issue for a broadband-based repertoire. Marlena Corcoran has embraced this failure of the technology. In The Gallbladder Sonata - performed in real time on the internet – latency exposes the “…voyeuristic expectations of concert performance…” and, more importantly for the purposes of this paper, “The displacements occasioned by transmission sometimes segue into frank failure; and this too is incorporated improvisationally into the sonata” (Corcoran 74). Corcoran, then, embraces failure, calling for the need for people to practice with the machine in getting to know better the way in which the time of transmission can be used creatively instead of simply eliminated.

Glitch/ Imperfection

Sound expansion was key in the development of 20th century avante-garde practice, involving extended techniques, prepared instruments and the use of nontraditional sound-producing devices. Part of this trajectory of sound expansion was the use of modified,

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cracked or broken technologies originally intended for the mediation of sound. Work mentioned earlier by Cage, Paik, and Knízàk are examples of this trajectory. Inherent in these cracked technologies is the use of noise and the development and practice of noise art.

The practice of noise art as separate and distinct from music and musical structure has taken some time to establish itself, however. The people most often referenced as pioneers in regard to the use of noise and/or natural sound are Luigi Russolo, John Cage, and Pierre Schaefer. All three, however, used noise as extra-musical sound, which “…was then progressively brought back into the fold in order to rejuvenate music” (Kahn 3, 1992), instead of emphasizing a practice of sound art outside of the strictures of music. The effect of this, says Kahn, is to eliminate sound’s associative qualities and inhibiting “…the fusion of artistic ideas and activities with sociopolitical realities, with trenchant critiques and rapturous moments culled from aurality in general…” (Kahn 3, 1992). The approach of the noise artists discussed below address the issues that Kahn raises.

While imperfection is often created through error, noise artists are not making mistakes; through the practice of glitch, they are using imperfection as an approach to creating art that physically compromises new technologies, “…extend[ing] them beyond what their designers intended, pushing them until they collapsed or simply stopped working” (Kelly 7). Intentional failure – destruction - of this sort creates materials with which to produce art, and can also become part of performance itself. These artists make it possible to hear noise, not as something undesirable, but as personal style distinct from musical structure. Error remains in the background as the symbolic source of imperfection and as a way of distancing sound from musical signifiers. Noise itself is explored in this context as a source of communication as it is increasingly produced for its own sake instead of for the sake of music.

Christian Marclay is an influential artist working in this area. Using the clicks and pops produced by damaged vinyl records instead of the noise of compromised new media, he is considered a precursor to glitch artists such as Oval. He is one of the first non-hip-hop musicians to use the turntable, working with damaged records as early as the 1970s. Like Knízàk, Marclay would craft the sounds of these damaged records by breaking and mutilating them, and then gluing them back together before playing them. He describes his use of imperfection as a method for creating loops, not noise: “… I would use skipping records to record loops on the cassette recorder and those became the rhythms for the band…I would find an interesting sound on a record and glue things, little stickers to create the loops, to make it skip.”(Kahn 19, 2003). This would lead to various performance setups including the use of four turntables and looper in performance situations.

Marclay doesn’t make mistakes; he incorporates imperfection by using it as an idea to

enhance the media with which he is working. In this way he essentially builds a new 13

sound palette and uses it both compositionally and improvisationally. Improvisation finds much of its interest in the possibility of failure, most obviously when structure of some sort is imposed as in jazz improvisation. Failure in this context occurs when the improviser inaccurately plays a pattern that has been practiced enough to have the possibility of correctness, or when the improviser tries something new in performance and fails. This is not Marclay’s approach. Rather, he has his materials at hand and responds to the sound as it goes by, making decisions designed to heighten or extend the effect that he is creating. In his performance for Roulette TV (http://www.ubu.com/film/roulette_marclay_2000.html), he takes a very considered approach. There is no sense of a need to get the “correct” sound inserted at the “appropriate” time. Rather, his performance is a result of exploring sound through failure by the prior manipulation/destruction of records, and then improvising with the material that he has created through this process. Instead of calling this type of performance improvisation, it would perhaps be more appropriate to refer to it as indeterminate. Improvisation as I define it here holds within it the possibility for failure in performance; a correct answer hovers over the proceedings. Indeterminacy in the context of Marclay’s performance and others like it can be described as the sculpting of sound where nothing is judged as good or bad, but is simply viewed objectively and either used or discarded. Improvisational performance requires the performer to deal with the fear of failure; indeterminate performance does not. Ultimately, however, it is the performer’s attitude towards failure that determines whether fear is involved. In this respect, art gives us the tools to transcend fear by practicing failure.

Yasuano Tone became active in the Fluxus movement in the 1960s and has been tremendously influential in the world of noise art. I will briefly discuss one aspect of his work that has drawn much attention since the mid-1980s, specifically his creation of new music from digital media by damaging CDs by sticking bits of transparent tape to the bottom of them in order to change the digital signals. This produces “…totally unexpected sound by distorting information, but also disrupted the CD player's control function so that the progression of the CDs was unpredictable” (Tone 12). If simply playing back the manipulated CDs, this can be a very predictable kind of unpredictability. Just a single, small piece of tape on the bottom of a CD will cause continual skipping and a motoristic clicking sound. More tape creates a different level of effect, and different kinds of tape can create a different kind of skipping – transparent tape causes the CD to act more erratically than masking tape, for instance – but once it is running the effect is clear and, in a sense, predictable. However, the sounds produced can be compelling if the listener adopts a style of listening outside of the conventional music experience. This is a type of glitching and, as such, is not intended as traditional music-making. It is closer to certain practices of generative art, in which the artist creates a “…system, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine, or other procedural invention, which is set into motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art” (de Cisneros 6).Tone adds: “the sound I generate does not come from my conscious mind or a projection of my mind. I don’t know what will come out

beforehand” (de Cisneros 6). 14

Tone’s work in particular can be seen as an attempt to rescue the digital medium from what Paul Virilio calls “…the loss of the poetics of the ephemeral,” (Virilio 48) through the reduction and dehumanization of material to ones and zeros. Virilio favors the analogical character with its small fluctuations of signal to the absolute character of digital. These fluctuations in the analog signal carry meaning that travels beneath the surface of immediate consciousness and are difficult to quantify. In doing so, they represent error and as such are representative of human experience. As I have pointed out, though, the digital realm is far from error-free. Reduction of material to ones and zeros, the glassy surface of digitization, does not remove error in the overall experience of it, nor does it remove the possibility of imposing error on the surface. Tone’s work is a demonstration of this.

In ending, I would like to point out (again) that failure only occurs when there is the possibility of a correct answer. Correct answers are almost exclusively imposed externally by structures of history or authority. We learn what they are and act accordingly. Personal guidelines or acts of rebellion that attempt to remove us from the status quo are usually created – either consciously or unconsciously - in response to these structures. Reaction formations like these do not express individuality; their very existence depends on external forces. Failure offers us a way to step outside these controls. Failure is neither conscious nor unconscious, but is rather a potentiality, an uncontrollable force that contains within it the possibility of real change devoid of human ego. All that is needed is acceptance of it, and failure can become a way of discovering a personal voice. Recording machines, beginning with the phonograph, have provided a greater potential for exploring failure by making available a deeper awareness of it through the production and representation of noise.

Bibliography

Books and Articles

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Video

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2. Christian Marclay on Night Music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=IIFH4XHU228. (Accessed December 2, 2011).

3. 2010 (Part2) | John Cage 100th Anniversary Countdown Event. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIXI6iSRJ0Y

4. Otomo Yoshihide - Playing the Turntables - Placebo-9 - June 20, 1993 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teiua5kpVO4. (Accessed November 21, 2011).

5. Otomo Yoshihide Music(s) 2 / 7. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmdCmoaQTJY&feature=related. (Accessed November 21, 2011).

6. Yasunao Tone live @ CTM09 Berlin.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFPIth9R-bw. (Accessed December 2, 2011).

7.Yasunao Tone - Part I.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odB-9jmti2U.( Accessed December 2, 2011)

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Brian Ferneyhough and Christian Wolff.” http://camil.music.uiuc.edu/~jbunch2/files/Writings%20-%20Indeterminacy%20in%20Brian%20Ferneyhough%20and%20Christian%20Wolff.pdf. (Accessed November 25, 2011).

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4. Philip Galanter: “What is Generative Art? Complexity Theory as a Context for Art Theory”, Generative Art Proceedings, Milan, 2003. Quoted in de Cisneros, Roc Jiminéz. “Blackout Representation, transformation and de-control in the sound work of Yasunao Tone .” http://rwm.macba.cat/uploads/qa/QA_01/QA_01.pdf. (Accessed December 2, 2011).

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