Christopher Haworth

Sound synthesis procedures as texts: An ontological politics in electroacoustic and computer music

This article describes a set of “textual” technological practices that have been emerging over the past decade in the work of underground electroacoustic and computer music composers, focusing particularly on Florian Hecker and Russell Haswell. Guided by methodological insights from the field of software studies, the article zooms in on two computer programs, PulsarGenerator and GENDYN, presenting a genealogical analysis of them as cultural objects and outlining how these lines of descent are aestheticized in their works. In the hands of these artists, sound synthesis procedures carry an author function, and this transgresses both their legal status as technological “inventions” rather than texts, as well as their ontological status in the electroacoustic music genre. Combined with a compositional focus on “sounding” the materiality of these technologies—the particular affordances, limitations, and quirks of their operative functioning—this textual practice contributes to a new aesthetic, one that challenges the prevailing logic of secrecy, alchemy, and semblance in this music. Using the notion of “ontological politics” inherited from science and technology studies, I show how these practices highlight zones of contestation over electroacoustic music’s ontology.

Sound synthesis with auditory distortion products

This article describes methods of sound synthesis based on auditory distortion products, often called combination tones. In 1856, Helmholtz was the first to identify sum and difference tones as products of auditory distortion. Today this phenomenon is well studied in the context of otoacoustic emissions, and the “distortion” is understood as a product of what is termed the cochlear amplifier. These tones have had a rich history in the music of improvisers and drone artists. Until now, the use of distortion tones in technological music has largely been rudimentary and dependent on very high amplitudes in order for the distortion products to be heard by audiences. Discussed here are synthesis methods to render these tones more easily audible and lend them the dynamic properties of traditional acoustic sound, thus making auditory distortion a practical domain for sound synthesis. An adaptation of single-sideband synthesis is particularly effective for capturing the dynamic properties of audio inputs in real time. Also presented is an analytic solution for matching up to four harmonics of a target spectrum. Most interestingly, the spatial imagery produced by these techniques is very distinctive, and over loudspeakers the normal assumptions of spatial hearing do not apply. Audio examples are provided that illustrate the discussion.

EchoSnap and PlayableAle: Exploring Audible Resonant Interaction

This paper presents two projects that use the audible resonance of hollow objects as the basis of novel tangible interaction. EchoSnap explores how an audio feedback loop created between a mobile devices microphone and speaker can be used to playfully explore and probe the resonant characteristics of hollow objects, using the resulting sounds to control a mobile device. With PlayableAle, the tone made by blowing across the top of a bottle is used as a method of controlling a game. The work presented in this paper builds upon our previous work exploring the concept of resonant bits, where digital information is given resonant properties that can be explored through physical interaction. In particular, this paper expands upon the concept by looking at resonance in the physical as opposed to digital domain. Using EchoSnap and PlayableAle to illustrate we present a preliminary design space for structuring the continuing development of audible resonant interaction.

'All the Musics Which Computers Make Possible': Questions of Genre at the Prix Ars Electronica

This article explores the workings of genre in experimental electronic musics. Predominantly sociological in orientation, it has three main foci. First, it addresses practitioners’ and theorists’ resistances to the concept of genre in experimental musics. Drawing on recent developments in genre theory, it discusses the problems of agency, mediation and scale that any discussion of genre calls forth, pitting them alongside theories that emphasise genre’s necessity and inevitability in communication. The second section examines the politics of genre as they play out in practice, focusing on the Prix Ars Electronica festival and the controversy that ensued from the decision to change the name of the Computer Music category in 1999. The analysis focuses on issues of institutional mediation, historicity, genre emergence and the politics of labelling as they come into view when two broad spheres – electroacoustic art music and ‘popular’ electronic music – are brought into the same field together in competition. The third section deepens the analysis of Ars Electronica by zooming in on one of the represented genres, microsound, to examine how it is shaped and negotiated in practice. Using digital methods tools developed in the context of Actor-Network Theory, I present a view of the genre as fundamentally promiscuous, overlapping liberally with adjacent genres. Fusing Derrida’s principle of ‘participation over belonging’ with ANT’s insistence on the agency of ‘non-human actors’ in social assemblages, the map provides a means to analyse the genre through its mediations – through the varied industries, institutions and social networks that support and maintain it.

Ear as Instrument

ABSTRACT The desire for instrumental qualities in computer music often leads the artist to a process of “synthetic limitation,” wherein constraint is designed into a performance system, permitting creation only within prescribed limits. These practices can emerge as a consequence of the sheer dearth of possibilities available to the digital artist: as though the path to new sounds and ever more intimate control leads ultimately to a retreat. The authors response to this perennial dilemma has been to try to discover instrumental limitations within the ear itself. He describes an “ear-as-instrument” approach to the composition of Correlation Number One (CNO), an eight-channel computer music work he created in 2010 that uses a self-authored form of Distortion Product Oto-Acoustic Emission (DPOAE) synthesis.