Sound Arts Intro Course

Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note.There is a recording going around of a well-known voice saying something outrageous, and it never happened. Not one word of it. A machine made it. So how would you know? What in the sound itself would tell you whether it was real?This is the audio lecture for the third module, the week we finally name the thing this course has been circling: sound art. We start with a definition wide enough to hold a field recording, a soundwalk, or a gallery installation, and with Edgard Varèse's idea that music is simply "organised sound," which quietly puts you at the center of the art form.Then the history, told honestly, as not one tidy origin but several at once: Luigi Russolo and his hand-cranked noise machines in 1913, Halim El-Dabh transforming a recorded zaar ceremony in 1944 Cairo, four years before Pierre Schaeffer and musique concrète in 1948, whose razor blade is the direct ancestor of every clip you split in a DAW. Along the way: R. Murray Schafer's soundscape, with its keynotes, signals, and soundmarks; the soundwalk, from Hildegard Westerkamp to Christina Kubisch's Electrical Walks; and the practice I honestly cannot stop doing, field recording, through Francisco López, Annea Lockwood, Bernie Krause, and KMRU, who built an international career starting exactly where you start this week: one person with a recorder, listening to their own place.It ends where it began, with that fake voice, and why telling a true record of the real world from a convincing synthetic one is not a small skill.Your work this week is simple: go outside, record your actual place, and keep a piece of it. What does where you live sound like?Pairs with the Module 3 pages and screencasts.

Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note.There is a recording of a marsquake sitting on NASA's website, free, waiting for somebody to do something with it. That is where you are this week: standing in front of more sound than you could use in ten lifetimes, about to reach in and make something.This is the audio lecture for the second module. We start with the tool itself, the DAW: what it actually does, and where it came from. Reel-to-reel tape, razor blades, and a handful of artists in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s who looked at a machine built to reproduce sound and decided to abuse it instead. That lineage runs in a straight line from Halim El-Dabh in 1944 Cairo, through Pierre Schaeffer and the idea of musique concrète, all the way to the sound you will drag across your screen this week.Along the way: where to find sounds you are actually allowed to use, one beautiful little idea about how continuous sound becomes numbers a computer can hold, and the assignment itself, Sonic Sketch 1, your first piece of sound art.The heart of it is a single move. Two sounds land against each other and do something neither one was doing alone. That is the whole art form, and everything else this semester is a variation on it. This week the making matters more than the made thing, so make something honest instead of something safe.Required listening: Halim El-Dabh, Wire Recorder Piece (1944), and Pierre Schaeffer, Étude aux chemins de fer (1948).Pairs with the Module 2 pages, screencasts, and the Pro Tools install guide in the course.

Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note.Episode 1 — Welcome, and Why ListeningWelcome to Sound Arts Intro Course. This first episode is the doorway into everything else.We start where I like to start most things, with a sound I love, and then we get to the question underneath the whole course: what does it actually mean to listen?You'll hear the difference between hearing and listening. Hearing is what your ears do all day whether you want them to or not. You can't blink an ear. Listening is the work your mind does to make meaning out of all that sound, and it's something you can practice and get better at for the rest of your life.Along the way:Why almost any sound in the world can be enjoyed, once you decide to enjoy it. The fluorescent buzz, the refrigerator hum, the traffic, all of it.Three different ways of listening, from the writer and film theorist Michel Chion.Pauline Oliveros, and the practice she called Deep Listening.Why we've become a mostly visual culture, and what we lose when we forget we're also listening creatures.How sound is more intimate than sight, and reaches parts of us that images never quite touch.A small taste of silence, and the story of John Cage walking into a room built to be perfectly quiet and hearing two sounds anyway.Try this after you listen: somewhere this week, take ten honest minutes with one question. What does it mean, to listen? Don't look anything up. Just think, and listen, and write down whatever you find. Keep it somewhere safe. We come back to it at the very end.Names to explore on your own: Michel Chion, Pauline Oliveros, John Cage.You are already a listener. You have been your whole life. This is just the invitation to start doing it on purpose. Come listen.