Tutorial 1 – converting gestures into sounds
Turning a visual gesture into a sound – bring sound-making devices, recording units, headphones, laptops, interfaces and your emerging analyses along for this session.
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There is a venerable tradition of generating graphical material from sounding work. One of the most famous examples is Rainer Wehinger’s graphic score of Ligeti’s 1958 piece for tape Artikulation. Wehinger made this score in the 1970s and the piece and score are now almost inseperable.
The key principle to take away here is that analysis of sound has led to the creation of a score, rather than the other way around. Once in graphic form, the score has the potential of course to be re-interpreted as sound once again.
What I find interesting is the selective process of reduction that Wehinger has put the sound through, not every detail has been logged and visualised, but the gestural essence and clarity of layering, soloing and different types of sound material, whether they are embedded within reverberation or not has been shown visually. The process of making the score has involved listening and analysis of events in time, getting back to a map in time of events. Ligeti also had a score, but it was more like the tabularised lists we were discussing in week 3, Wehinger’s score is a listening score, designed to get the ear into hearing more of the detail and to feel-into the piece in a different way.
Interestingly, Yotam Mann made a Max patch that renders a similar score to Wehinger’s in real time, you can read about it in this paper:
Yotam Mann. “Artikulate: Ligeti Style for Any Audio“, Vis.Berkeley.edu.
And here’s a link to a version made with processing by Ioannidis Emmanouel-Fotinos
It’s time to start thinking of your analysis as a list of “incentives and suggestions for action;” (Wolff).
This paper talks about the limits of human perception and includes a range of diagrams and maps relating to shot length in film over time:
Could this sorts of diagrams be useful to you, or do you need more of an interpretive approach if you’re going to use what’s on ‘paper’ to motivate interesting sounds?
Have a look at some of Jo Ganter and Raymond MacDonald’s work
www.eca.ed.ac.uk/research/graphic-scores
joganter.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/11am.jpg?w=994
Here, fading light is used as the motivation for creating scores that eventually become sound:
Converting Gestures into Sound – Foley
Working with takes in Reaper, some advice
The above ReaperBlog post explains a way to setup reaper so you can do takes and comp editing. Comping is where you put together a finished edit from different takes.
