[NOISE]

>> This week we'll be talking about the Sound of the Net.

And we're going to be doing so, asking ourselves two very important questions.

What is it that we can consider the shadow sound of the Net to be,

or maybe what is what we can do with it artistically?

Since the Internet doesn't provide any physical material

to work with to make sound, so

we have to think about what are those elements that could help us be creative.

And for that, I would like to introduce a couple of them,

they are Glitches, Jitter, Feedback and Latency,

things that have been also described by very famous Kim Cascone, was a writer.

>> Yeah, in fact, Cascone, as a composer and

an electronic musician, he also publishes, and

he wrote a very influential text about, called The Aesthetics of Failure.

And particularly in this area of Net music, or Net sound,

failure has become a great source of inspiration for musicians like Cascone,

because the most interesting things often happen by accident, right?

So the question is like, how can those emerging things,

that were not planned, become the very source and material for

new art forms that would be unthinkable, without the medium of the Net.

>> We tend to get used to the speed of the Net,

according to where you live in the world, to be as a given.

But in the 80s, that was not the case at all.

So, it was of course very easy to share ideas with the Net over lists and text.

But once you wanted to share a file of sound,

that could really really getting trouble.

So, there was this guy decided to, instead of sending the file per say,

[INAUDIBLE] just to send the recipe of the file.

Given if you have a computer at the other end,

the computer will resolve that for you.

>> That's right. So with this idea of the recipe that

Thomas Dolby Robertson kind of developed around sonifying the web,

there's actually this very nice quote where, how he captures this idea.

You can't send a wedding cake over the telephone, but

you can send the recipe if you have flour, water, eggs on the other end.

And so the concept is actually that sample.

It's basically, if you have the elements of sound and

sound production on any end in the net, you really only need that recipe,

those rules to put it together, and then you can assemble it locally.

>> So our first case study is called Plunderphonics, which was

invented by a composer, Canadian Composer called John Oswald.

This composer

set an idea of, because the internet and the communication

technology is allowing everybody to have gained enormous access to everything.

So he said, well,

I'm going to be composing just by plundering an existing material.

With the idea of just mess up the material as much

as it pleases me as a composer, but still be recognizable from where it came from.

In this case, that John Oswald was using the material of Michael Jackson.

It is also worth noting that his compositional prerogative

was about audio piracy, so

that is the starting point of any composition, stealing from other people.

And I'd like to say something else about it.

These compositions headed, headed as I said before, analoguely.

That means that at one point, he had the recording of Michael Jackson

with the tape, cut it over 40,000 times, still analoguely.

We cannot imagine this anymore.

And then put all these snippets of tape together.

Combine them, mix them over.

And then create these wonderful pieces that you can listen to.

[MUSIC]

>> There are some features in the case study for

this entire section that are actually overarching.

They apply to pretty much every case study, and

that is because of the medium of the net, right, since we're focusing on that.

So before we go into each case study, we thought it's good to provide that analysis

for all of the ones that we're presenting, since they share that.

And that way you can just keep those in your head, and in future cases,

we'll just highlight what is unique about that particular case study.

So, what happens with the sound and

music over the net that is very specific to it, but is overarching.

First thing, may sound obvious but it actually isn't, and

it's the idea that remember perspectives, the intimate, the local and the global.

>> In many of our other case studies from previous weeks,

we dealt with the local and the intimate.

But actually it was relatively difficult to find examples of the global.

In this week and all of the net art, or

net music case studies, the global is basically inherent.

>> Right. >> It's by definition by existing on

the net, even in closed and private networks, it is a global option, right?

>> Right. >> And so

that's one very important common feature.

>> Right, and the other very interesting thing about it is that, because it's on

demand and you can listen to it, at least the listener got by listening and

by using this material the way you might want.

Like to have it less loud, you want to have it more, the whole building

should listen to it and I'm just interest in listen to the first three seconds,

you might be interested in listening to the last minute.

And I like to play her over and over again, and

you only want to listen one time.

So, the listener is, in fact,

over remastering, plundering the net, like John Oswald did previously.

And become, actually the composer,

the re-arranger of the material that is provided by the net.

>> So the control of the timeframe of the listener becomes almost like the control

of the composer.

>> Right.

>> And just to lastly point out that

the material frame of net art is incredibly challenging, right?

If we're always constantly thinking of the entirety of the net as the material frame,

it can become quite, well technically that is accurate.

It can become quite difficult to understand specific practices.

So, when you think of the material frame of the net,

it is very important to focus it and narrow it down,

which aspects of the material frame are at play in that particular project?

>> Right. >> The second case study

we want to talk about is that of the Nebula.M81.

That's a group that invented, or wrote,

software called the same way, Nebula.M81,

which is a free download, with which you can open

raw data from anywhere, from pictures to videos to texts, etc, and

reproduce it as it would be a midi file, in other words an outer file.

And in that way they invented a machine that would

produce glitches on [INAUDIBLE].

[SOUND]

>> Our last case study for

this section is called the Brain Opera and Tod Machover did this piece,

which is basically like an interactive, walk in model of the brain.

But it's a really great early experiment with internet art.

He was of course, inspired by earlier processes, like experiments in art and

technology, where composers and

scientists work with artists like Kluver and Rauschenberg and Whitman.

But also the and media lab at MIT.

So what this opera, this Brain Opera,

effectively became was a way to create hyper instruments, ways for

users in live interaction with the Internet,

manipulate the composition overall, right, so it was always changing.

>> During performance.

>> Yep, during performances, so it's this constantly changing and varied composition

that directly uses the Internet as a tool, not just as a reception mechanism.

>> Right.

[MUSIC]

In this lecture, we're going to be talking about artists

dealing with the airwaves, or how to convey art or

whatever using telegraph masts, telephones, GPS, and all that.

And there's one particular case, as far as 1906,

a man in New York called Thaddeus Cahill,

invented an instrument called a teleharmonium,

which in fact was the earliest broadcast machine of sound.

So he was able to send over the telegraph

a whole concert from one city to the other one.

And of course he wanted to make money out of it, like a service,

like a streaming service, and

of course he went bankrupt because nobody believed that he was going to.

But he was visionary enough to,

what we now consider as normal streaming, he was doing it in 1906.

>> Fast forward a few decades, but also still quite early in 1966,

Max Neuhaus was a very important musician,

composer, avant guarde artist, did this piece called Public Supply.

Right, which basically allowed listeners to participate,

with the telephone in the production of the work, right.

And this is, we again,

we've gotten used to this idea of people calling into the radio, and so on.

There were later works, also done by Neuhaus, that actually use the entire

structure of the radio too, but this idea of calling in and

using the telephone as a compositional structure, was a really great example.

>> Well, it was a collective endeavor,

because he was inviting people to send in over the telephone a particular sound,

which he in turn would lively mix into the overall composition.

So it was not just his piece, it was his idea of inviting people to collectively.

[NOISE].

[MUSIC]

>> This is Public Supply, WBAI's composition by Max Neuhaus,

supplied by the listening audience.

Call Oxford 78506, Oxford 79526, Public Supply.

[NOISE]

Sound of the Net, Plunderphonics & Brain Opera

Art of the MOOC: Experiments with Sound

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