Sonic Garbage

Sonic Garbage is a sound art installation accompanied by a single performance. It is a multichannel piece which is built using the choroechoic compositional technique. This technique has been developed by the artist and initially introduced at the piece Wunderkammer: Sound cabinet of curiosities, which was presented at the Audio Forensics sound art show in 2008 at IMT Gallery in London.

The piece Sonic Garbage is inspired by the idea of recycled materials that are used for artistic and not only purposes. It is an effort to appreciate those unwanted artifacts for their aural qualities. The useless becoming useful, the ugly duckling turning into a swan, recycling materials used in a creative way, and parallelism of isolated individuals who reclaim their role within society, are just a few interpretations of such an artwork yet the aim of the artist is to provide the opportunity to the audience to decide which way they would like to appreciate the piece.

The installation itself is minimal in regards to visual elements as the purpose of the piece is to trigger the aural awareness of the audience. Eight active loudspeakers will be positioned within the provided space taking advantage of the architecture and following compositional rules in regards to characteristics of the sounds; high pitched 'thin' sounds will be higher in space rather than 'heavy' base sounds so that in a way space itself works as an stave and the objects as notes.

The single performance which will take place during the opening day of the exhibition will be a live demonstration of recycling sonic garbage and creating a concrete composition using these materials. Due to the importance of the meaning of acousmatics, the artist will perform the piece behind a curtain, or blindfolds will be provided to the audience. This suggests that the important element is the sounding result rather than the image or the activity of the performer. This way the audience will be encouraged to focus on the listening experience since the visual elements will have been minimized.

The performance will be recorded live and then reproduced at the gallery space through a headphone system and will be on exhibition for as long as the installation will be in a separate section. The purpose is to demonstrate the use of sonic garbage in a creative way in both space (installation) and time (performance-recording) dependent formats.

Sonic Garbage (stereo adaptation) by Sonologik

On Choroechoic Composition

During my university years I conducted a research trying to find the means through which sound objects, as the are defined by Pierre Schaefer, can be treated for exhibition as actual tangible objects.

The main difference between an object sonore and a physical one is the factor of time. A physical object once positioned and left alone somewhere, is timeless. It stands there showcasing its attributes. On the contrary, sound is time dependent. It has an onset, duration and an offset, therefore it seems that by following the laws of physics, an effort to treat a sound object as a tangible one on exhibition would be in vain.

Yet an artist undertakes sometimes the role of an illusionist. If the illusion that a sound object is timeless can be created, then the purpose of the research will be successful.

I created an algorithm in max/msp which plays back random parts of a sample and crossfades them with each other, then it is directing them to one single output. The audible result is a sound object that is always there at a specific position in space but it never ends or repeats itself in a loop thus acquiring the sense of time. Lets not forget that time is the result of a periodic gesture.

When a sound object has gone through this process it is being turned into a Choroechon (Choros in greek means space and Echos means sound).

Choroechoic composition is the compositional strategy and procedure which uses Choroecha in order to create a spacial artwork of sounds in the same manner a visual artists creates a composition in space out of tangible objects.

This procedure will be used to create an installation using choroecha that are produced by the unwanted artefacts or sonic garbage that have been mentioned below.

The Usually Unwanted

By listening to a soundscape or a recording and by investigating the elements that form it, one can observe and define sound objects that contribute to its quality and character. An original recording before being edited includes objects which are a result of the actual recording process. These unwanted artefacts are usually discarded and put aside as they are irrelevant to the context of the recorded material. By recognising this recorded material as sonorous objects we can then apply our skills and use them as the base and source for creative practice.

After observing several environmental recordings and my personal phonographic work before the stage of editing, I started distinguishing these unwanted artefacts and started a reverse editing process. The trashed materials – which anyway have already been used in previous projects – were the actual clean and natural soundscapes while what was kept as potential material for artistic applications and use were the usually unwanted objects.

A few examples of objects like these are the following:

• Wind distorting the microphone
• The on/off button of the recorder,
• Clipping due to excessive gain,
• Microphone handling noise,
• The sound of clothes,
• Breathing, Coughing

As a result, by unwanted things I define all the audio artefacts recorded that are a result of the recording process and would never be used in a phonographic work but they would normally be discarded. To achieve better definition, I will call internal sonorous objects those that are related to the context of the soundscape and the aims of the sound artist and external sonorous objects those that have no relevance to the context of the recording. We can easily then conclude that such artefacts are not only medium related (digital recorder, microphone, tape etc) sonorous objects but all the external sound objects of an intended concept.

Unwanted Object No 1 by Sonologik

Unwanted Things - Recycled Sound

People who use sound as their medium for artistic expression, and even more those that deal with concrete/recorded sound, tend to focus their efforts in capturing the perfect recording. They equip themselves with Hi-Fi equipment (recorders, microphones and editors), try to record with clarity and precision avoiding at the same time all possible unwanted artefacts like handling noise or wind distortion. During phonographic work, there will always be such artefacts that later on, during the editing process of the file, are being discarded.

Recently I was going through my environmental recordings for the project Forest in a Forest (Exhibition and installation in collaboration with photographer Naama Kostiner, April 2010 - Israel) and realised that huge amounts of audio had been thrown in the trash. I took some time to listen carefully to these Unwanted Things and observed that from an acousmatic point of view they were actually very interesting. Weird textures, amplitude differences and spectral variations danced in my ears as I was listening more and more to these trashed audio files. The more I was listening, the more I was forgetting their nature and source thus I was focusing on their quality and started treating them in my head as potential materials to be used for creative sound practice.

I decided then to go deeper into the subject and by using the time and resources provided to me during my residency in Krems, I intend to conduct a practice based research on which I will try and create an artwork using these unwanted materials.

The City of Krems

The town of Krems belongs to the region of Lower Austria and is located on the north shore of the river Danube approximately 75 Km from Vienna. Krems is surrounded by vineyards and is famed for its quality wine. The region has a very rich history and many of the buildings were raised during the 15th century and were renovated providing to the region a unique identity.

The Lower Austria company has its headquarters in Krems and each year they provide accommodation and resources to various international artists from all artistic backgrounds in order to produce original work. The town itself hosts numerous exhibitions and festivals and places like the Kungsthalle, the Factory and the Caricature Museum turning the city into an artistic resort.