EARS HAVE EYES // Episode 27
Airing Wednesday, May 8, 2024 at 8 pm MST
on CJSW 90.9 FM & Golden Co-Op Radio
MARGINALIA:
sounds from the archives
ARTISTS:
Akari Komura
Alison Bigg
Amber Drift (Clare m. Duckett & Wayne Garrett)
Andrea Bolzoni
AnimaeNoctis (Silvia Marcantoni Taddei & Massimo Sannelli)
Matthew Waddell
Noel Begin
Pedro Monkeyfinger (Brad Hawkins)
Ryan Bourne
Hosted by Caitlind Brown, produced and edited by Caitlind Brown, supported by Wayne Garrett, Kaamil Kareemi, CJSW 90.9 FM, Claire Dibble, and Golden Co-op Radio. This program is volunteer-run.
Image from Wikimedia Commons, showing photoelasticity of a cassette tape. Source here.
EARS HAVE EYES is a monthly sound art radio program airing on CJSW 90.9 FM in Calgary/Mohkinstsis, and Golden Co-op Radio in Golden, BC. You can listen to podcasts of previous episodes here.
This month’s program is a collage of sonic experiments, old sound sculptures, sketches for songs, archival materials, recordings from prolific audio engineers, and a few works from our own archives, including some sound art we couldn’t play on previous episodes. Participating sound artists were invited to dig through their personal sound archives, in search of under-shared gems and diamonds in the rough, offering insights into their creative processes.
Thanks to the participating artists and our friends at CJSW & Golden Co-op Radio!
Akari Komura (b.1996) is a Japanese composer-vocalist whose works center around contemplative engagement with listening and soundmaking. She is interested in curating a participatory performance space that invites a multi-sensorial experience for both performers and audiences alike. Akari is currently a Ph.D. composition student at the University of California San Diego.
A repetitive bird call opens and closes In a Flock. The opening is a synthetic digital signal while the ending is a real animal call in the natural environment.
The soundscape composition captures a bustling train station in the corner of Tokyo, Japan. The auditory perspective shifts from waiting on the station platform to the railroad crossing, and finally to the ticket gates. The currents of passengers add a fluctuating drone of footsteps and chatter.
Alison Bigg
As an artist with degenerative hearing loss, Alison Bigg starts a conversation about new ways to navigate this quickly fluctuating and information-saturated world. Working with sculptural assemblage, printmaking and ceramics, Bigg offers fresh ways to engage with and cope with this noisy world by sparking a sense of curiosity using humour and irony.
About Alison’s sound sketches:
“These sound sketches are how I imagine my Aurical sculptures communicate their use. The Auricals are assemblage sculptures that can be used to navigate this noisy world.
As unmanageable amounts of information have been made available through various digital devices, some “hearing” frequencies have been lost. It is either too much to take in so that what is hardest to hear is consciously or unconsciously ignored, or the empathic listening is lost due to information overload, causing a communal deafness. Each Aurical tool has a use which is open to interpretation. The user might use the device to filter misinformation, to amplify sound, to focus on the signal, to help with critical thinking, or to silence the noise.
Examples of what these devices might be communicating:
01-“for scrambling the vibrations, decoding the signal”,
02- “for grasping the airwaves that are floating below”,
03-“for vacuuming irritating sound out of the void”,
04- “for tethering the static so it’s easier to hear”
05-“For reaching the music from inside the ear”
This sound was first published in the Victoria Arts Council’s online magazine, UNTIL, Issue 12, “Mixtape Soundscape”, 2022″
Amber Drift
Amber Drift is an undocumented basement band comprised of vocalist, musician, artist, and gardener, Clare m. Duckett, alongside artist, musician, and usual EARS HAVE EYES co-host Wayne Garrett.
(The duo was invited to share work on this program at the request of today’s host, Caitlind Brown, in part because Wayne is not able to co-host today’s show, and in part because Black & Blue is a solid sound sketch from the archives).
Black & Blue is an unreleased sketch recording, created in 2020 before the COVID-19 pandemic. While the world was reeling, the piece disappeared into a digital archive, awaiting safer circumstances for further attention and polishing. In the intervening years, it was forgotten, only resurfacing earlier this week for today’s show.
Andrea Bolzoni
The main scope of Andrea Bolzoni’s collection of pieces was to explore the potential, and the limits, of composition from the perspective of timbre. More specifically, Bolzoni chose to investigate a computational approach to timbre analysis and sound generation. The sounds were produced from different sources and, towards the end, in tiNNbre Shadows, Bolzoni introduced a component of stimulus and reaction.
About tiNNbre Shadows:
“For the production of sounds for tiNNbre Shadows, I went back to the microKORG. However, despite being still focussed on composition by timbre, the process differed from the previous three pieces. In this case, I was interested in exploring the encoding of stimulus and reactions in a neural network and the generation of the sound material for a composition from it.
I defined four timbres I would use as stimulus and I recorded a 3-minute improvisation with each, which I put together in a 12-minute track. Afterwards, I recorded four different tracks, while listening to the stimulus track, to generate the training material as reaction. So, at this point, I had a 12-minute track as a stimulus and four 12-minute tracks as reactions.
I also wanted to explore two different techniques for sound generation. The first was granular synthesis, the second was neural sound synthesis. For granular synthesis I extracted MFCCs from each grain, for neural synthesis I extracted the spectrum of the tracks using the Constant-Q Transfsorm (CQT). I trained eight models in total: four using the MFCC of the stimulus as input and the MFCC of each of the four reactions as an output, and four using the CQT of the stimulus as input and the CQT of each of the four reactions as an output.
Finally, I recorded an 8-minute improvisation with the timbres used in the stimulus track and, afterwards, I used it as an input to generate from the eight models. I obtained eight tracks, which I imported in a DAW and mixed to obtain the finalised piece.”
Thank you to Eryk Salvaggio of Latent Space for sharing this work with us!
AnimaeNoctis
AnimaeNoctis is a multimedia duo: Silvia Marcantoni Taddei (1994) & Massimo Sannelli (1973). They live and work together since 2019. They have published 3 albums with NN Records label (What Did You Miss Mayakovsku?; Aeons Of Climbing – Raw Impromptu; Futurists Of All Countries, Unite!) and 1 with Beached Records (Observation Affects Reality).
Your Lives Will Never Be The Same is the montage of Silvia’s very first recording in 1995 (she was born in 1994), when she performed a few words in Italian about the parents’ new life with a newborn. In 2024 Silvia recites them again in English. From the family archive to the multimedia up-to-date practice.
Matthew Waddell
Matthew Waddell is a digital artist and educator based in Calgary, Canada. He has been involved in the digital arts for nearly two decades specializing in creative coding, 3D animation, projection mapping, interactive installations, and audiovisual design for live performance.
Life Pipe: A Tribute was made for a final assignment for Matt’s first year electroacoustics class at Concordia University in December 2005. The piece includes a brief callout to Steve Reich and his seminal tape loop piece It’s Gonna Rain which was one of the first pieces of really thought-provoking and challenging music that, in the artist’s words, “fucked me up as a teenager. I actually consulted briefly with a neuroscientist to get some of the brain language correct.”
Pedro Monkeyfinger
Pedro Monkeyfinger is a project of Calgary-based musician, noise artist, and prolific sound engineer Brad Hawkins.
About January 20 2023 Take 3:
A sound experiment from the monolithic archives of Brad Hawkins, extending across decades and events, documenting a seminal part of Calgary’s noise and sound art community. Brad made this recording as part of a body of work under the moniker Pedro Monkeyfinger, elaborated on here.
Noel Bégin
Noel Bégin is a practical observationalist within the field of contemporary art, working spatially with objects, all manner of projected media, and performance. Noel has exhibited and/or curated installation, performance, and media art with the 2013 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art, Decidedly Jazz Danceworks, Particle + Wave Festival, Art Gallery of Calgary, the Glenbow Museum, Banff Centre, the Mountain Standard Time Performance Festival, the Art City Festival and Calgary area Artist-Run Centres including EMMEDIA. Noel has served on the board and committees of numerous artist-run centres in Calgary.
Pulled from a series of Sound Sculpture experiments recorded on April 18, 1999, Noel writes the following about his life at the time these recordings were made:
“We used to live in a cool old house on Royal Ave near 8 St. I would make stuff in this room in the basement that had been painted an odd green probably in the 1940s. I had hung dozens of pairs of old headphones on one wall, which I called the Headphone Museum.
Mostly, I had heard Sound Sculpture works while listening to Brave New Waves, which was an awesome late night CBC show that I listened to lots, and which was hosted by Brent Bambry. I got the SK-1 from a thrift store, and hacked around on it sometimes, but not toward music. When I was little, my grandmother had an old piano in the old farmhouse in Ontario, and when I was there I’d make these abstract compositions on it. So the impulse was always there, and I majored in Sculpture at ACA. …”
Ryan Bourne
Ryan Bourne is a Calgary/Mohkinstsis based songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and interdisciplinary artist.
About New Recording 73:
“A voice memo piano sketch for a song I’m working on; off-off-off broadway vibes.”
Thank you to the artists & listeners!
Special thanks to CJSW.
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THE HIBERNATION PROJECT 
