The invention of magnetic tape during the Second World War afforded greater flexibility, durability, and reproducibility of recorded sound outside factory processes and brought about a wave of new work that took advantage of tape’s potential. It was the development of digital sound in the late 1960s, however, that caused a true explosion in the number of artists working with sound. The development of progressively cheaper and more powerful personal computers has both opened up sonic transformations that are impossible through purely analogue means and have made such techniques accessible to a much broader range of sound-makers. The increasing availability of high-quality consumer or ‘pro-sumer’ recording equipment, the development of gestural interfaces for controlling digitally produced sound, and the possibility of sharing one’s work widely on the internet have all fundamentally changed who produces artistic work with sound and how they do so. As one might expect, these changes have been particularly transformative for women and gender-non-conforming musicians. Where once male composers and technicians could limit access to expensive studio spaces to ‘experts’, today an entire professional production studio can be contained in a laptop. Our title is borrowed from electronic pioneer Joanna M. Beyer’s song for soprano and clarinet, Ballad of the Star-Eater (1934), and refers to the star power usually reserved for white, cisgender men. Though there are still barriers to access, today’s composers, sound artists, performers, and sound-makers who use electronics represent a far more diverse array of working methods, aesthetics, and backgrounds (in terms of gender, race, geography, income, and much more) than ever before.
In this chapter we cover some of the diversity of this late-twentieth-century and contemporary work through artists’ own words. We developed a survey of fifteen questions (see Appendix for these) which we sent to twenty-four composers, sound artists, instrument builders, and programmers.1 Our respondents range from emerging experimental artists to pillars of academic electroacoustic music; they also represent a cross-section of genre influences, working processes, technical means, and aesthetic aims. Despite their varied backgrounds and the sometimes vastly different sounding effects of their final audio output, a number of important commonalities emerged in our respondents’ descriptions of their work and processes. Taken together, along with our own perspectives as women working with electronics, these commonalities begin to describe a state of the art for electronic sound at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In general, our respondents do not work in popular music, although synthesisers and digital audio workstations have come to dominate production of the vernacular sound of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Perhaps the most important trait our surveyed artists share is their unabashed love of the sonic medium. This holds true regardless of the avenue that brought an artist to working with electronics. Some of our respondents followed a relatively well-trodden path through playing an instrument, beginning to compose, and studying a traditional curriculum of Western art music, while others studied audio engineering, visual art, or other fields. Our survey, while non-comprehensive, confirmed our intuition that younger artists come from a wider range of educational backgrounds. Nearly all respondents seem to have been drawn to electronics for the expansive range of ways they allow one to manipulate sound. Mara Helmuth, for instance, often writes for instruments in combination with interactive electronics and ‘love[s] to work off the performer’s unique sounds and set up environments for them to improvise or perform with’, while Niloufar Nourbakhsh ‘enjoy[s] using electronically produced sounds that would not otherwise be possible with an instrument’. Many employ a range of methods and position the resultant sound, rather than particular technical processes, as the driving force of their work. Seongah Shin feels particularly strongly about the priority of sound over means: ‘I consider myself a composer who is dealing with all sorts of sonic events on this earth … The method of making music and sonic events does not really mean anything to me.’ Karen Power concurs: ‘I use whatever is necessary for the needs of an individual piece. For me, it’s all about the sound.’
Identities
Many of these artists also seemed reluctant to subscribe to a single label for themselves. Though some were content to call themselves by familiar names like ‘composer’ or ‘sound artist’, many either listed a number of such terms, preferred to talk about the range of ways that they work rather than artistic identities, or even resisted particular terms on principle. Pamela Z calls herself ‘an extremely “hyphenated” artist’, noting that while she is ‘best known for [her] solo performances of works for voice and electronics with gesture-controlled sound and video’, she ‘work[s] as a composer/performer – sound artist – installation artist – voice artist – composer for dance, film, and video – experimental theatre artist – etc.’ Cecilia Lopez goes further, disliking even a multi-category identity: ‘I don’t usually observe the distinction between music and sound art and I am, in fact, specially interested in producing works that inhabit the intersections of these disciplines or concepts.’ Lauren Sarah Hayes feels somewhat similarly: ‘I move through such a mixture of domains and making sound and music that it seems funny to try to draw such distinctions in my practice. People can call it what they like, although I don’t really see much difference in what I do when I improvise noisy electronics versus sitting down to play some Schubert on the piano.’ She goes on to say that she describes herself as an improviser and sound artist, mainly to avoid using the term composer, which she doesn’t really identify with anymore. Others also resist the term composer in particular. Sadah Espii Proctor writes that she calls herself a sound artist because she struggles with the title ‘composer’, as she associates it with ‘traditional classical or jazz composition and do[es] not see a space for [her]’. Russell Butler argues for a broader, more general conception of their practice, while acknowledging the necessity of describing their work in ways legible to audiences: ‘I choose to use the broader title of artist, as this better represents my potential in exploring the creative process … “sound artist” or “musician” function more as convenient terms that I use to say that I use sound to express myself and to connect’. Jess Rowland describes her work in similarly general terms, eloquently tying that decision to her way of being in the world:
I never know quite what to call myself – that goes for my art and my identity more generally. I usually just say ‘artist’, which covers most things (composing, sound arting, inventing, building, etc.). I have always staked out ground that falls between the cracks, no matter where those cracks form. Maybe this comes from being a contrarian, or also because this is where I feel comfortable in a world where I never felt like I quite fit.
Finally, some have even coined new terms that they feel best convey the breadth of their practices; Elizabeth A. Baker, for instance, calls herself a ‘New Renaissance Artist’ encompassing her many artistic practices.
Approaches and Practices
In general, our respondents work in and across four main areas of electronics: fixed media, live electronics, instrument or environment building, and installation works. Much like the artists themselves, the boundaries between these four areas are not always neat, and multiple identities can overlap within a given work. For example, many pieces contain both prerecorded fixed media and live, interactive elements. Helmuth has written pieces with electronics that are entirely fixed and others that are ‘completely interactive’, but she often mixes these methods to facilitate the technical needs of the work. Her Irresistible Flux (2014) for tárogató and electronics uses this ‘best of both worlds’ approach, triggering sound files when it would be too difficult to accomplish particular processing live. Other artists also use prerecorded audio as an element to be triggered or manipulated by a live performer. Power often writes music using self-made field recordings of environmental sound combined with instruments. In Nourbakhsh’s METRO (2018) for dancer and electronics, the dancer moves around a self-assembled Arduino-based sensor system that controls playback of electronic material consisting mainly of recordings of female-only train carriages in Nourbakhsh’s native Iran. Using sensors in this way allows for a gesturally rich exploration of the particular social and sonic space of these train carriages, using the dancer’s body to sketch the train’s confines both physically and sonically. Though all the piece’s sound is prerecorded, its performance is dynamic and demanding. Finally, while there can be a striking difference in the demands of performing with fixed-media track and live electronics, in practice these two experiences can sometimes be closer than one might think for an audience. As Nourbakhsh observes, ‘depending on the piece, fixed media can actually work in a way that looks [as] if it’s interactive’. She writes: ‘There is a certain flexibility in timing that comes along with live electronics that I highly enjoy. At the same time, the advantage of fixed media is the predictability of it. So, I try to use both elements in my pieces.’
Even when the actions of performance are digital, the sounds sparked by those actions can draw on acoustic sources. Unmute (2018), a laptop ensemble piece by Flannery Cunningham (one of the authors of this chapter), uses such a technique, with ‘quasi-vocal’ samples of voices resonating piano strings controlled through facial motions via a webcam, hand tracking with a motion sensor, and keyboard input. In this way, Unmute aims to open up the experience of communal singing to those who cannot (or do not want to) use a physical voice through a kind of ‘voiceless choir’. Rebecca Fiebrink also loves the richness of acoustic sounds and the skills of acoustic players, noting that ‘[h]aving this expertise at hand takes some pressure off the technology to be capable of the range of expression, structure, improvisational flexibility, etc. that an expert acoustic musician can bring to the table’.
Fiebrink presents an interesting case in terms of identity; she is a musician, performer, and composer, but professionally she considers herself primarily a programmer and ‘interaction designer’. She views herself foremost as ‘someone who makes tools for others, informed by a variety of other people’s practices and experiences’. Her own artistic practices do aid her work, by ‘giving [her] some intuition about what is likely to be useful to others’, but her goal is to make software that is interesting and broadly useful for other artists. Her Wekinator software has become a standard for musicians who wish to leverage the power of machine learning in their practice, through providing an open-source platform in which an artist can feed a system examples of their desired behaviour through simply matching input and output data. Though working with machine learning presents new challenges of its own, such an adaptive ‘black box’ allows for the creation of systems that would not only be almost impossibly complex to code, but that are also robust to the variability of human gesture. Margaret Schedel (one of the authors of this chapter) used Wekinator to create After | Apple Box (2018), which was inspired by her mentor Pauline Oliveros’ piece Apple Box (1965). In After | Apple Box, performers ‘fill’ ammunition crates with the sounds of loved ones who have passed away through recordings of those loved ones and their memories of them. Using Wekinator the performers then ‘train’ their boxes so that tapping in different positions triggers and affects the prerecorded sounds, allowing simple wooden boxes to become expressive instruments.
While Wekinator provides an environment that facilitates the creation of a wide range of pieces, other artists build hardware, software, or combined set-ups that they conceptualise as more akin to musical instruments; systems that are distinctive (and thus not limitless in potential), but which offer sufficient variety and richness to sustain multiple works. Such a tradition of instrument-building stems back to work such as Laurie Spiegel’s mid-1980s ‘Music Mouse’ intelligent instrument. Spiegel writes that:
It is extremely gratifying to have created an instrument that has enabled many more of the people who love music but lack previous musical training to be able to play music of their own, and to help expert music-makers to break free from entrenched musical habits and find new ways to love the process of making music again as though it is fresh and still new.
Today, such set-ups are sometimes called NIMEs (New Interfaces for Musical Expression), though some artists prefer simply to call them instruments. Artists build these systems for a range of reasons, but often seem to create them to fill a sonic, gestural, or experiential vacuum in existing acoustic or electronic instruments. Akiko Hatakeyama, for instance, feels that ‘there are no other instruments or interfaces that allow [her] to realise the world that [she] want[s] to create with [her] music […]’. For Hatakeyama, ‘creating and playing custom-made instruments enables [her] to reflect certain bodily gestures that come from deep inside [her], cultural associations, personal experiences, and memories in [her] performances’. Contemporary research and development of NIMEs often focuses on expanding the sonic possibilities of acoustic instruments or restoring the tactile, vibrational feedback of acoustic instruments to digital or hybrid digital/analogue systems. Hayes, for instance, played classical piano from the age of four. She writes: ‘When much later I started to perform with computers, the disconnect between sound and touch left me unfulfilled as a musician.’ This missing linkage between touch and sonic result led Hayes to develop a hybrid piano, with digitally augmented sound as well as vibration-based haptic feedback.
Besides the hybrid piano, Hayes performs using a variety of combined analogue/digital electronic systems. She describes these as ‘assemblages of various components, including analogue synthesisers, hardware drum machines, various MIDI and game controllers, foot pedals, and bespoke software built using Max/MSP’. This kind of hybrid practice, especially the adaptation of existing game/MIDI controllers or building new controllers to create a personal set-up, was pioneered by artists such as Pamela Z and has become a fairly widespread approach. Z performs primarily with her voice, electronics, and video using custom gestural controllers (built with her collaborator, Don Swearingen) with Max/MSP and Isadora software to create ‘dense, complex sonic layers’ through processing her voice in real-time. Z has worked with this system over a long period and has a single Max patch that serves as her main console for performance. While new works sometimes require her to add new effects to her patch, this continuity has helped Z develop a deep compositional and performative virtuosity on her instrument, which she considers to be the entire system of her voice and electronics set-up. Indeed, the possibility of developing physical skills akin to those required to perform on wholly acoustic instruments is a core attraction of an instrument-building approach. Z observes: ‘I think of music as a very physical thing. I think that part of its power is that it gets into our bodies […] I find it very moving and engaging to watch musicians playing music that requires great physical skill and concentration […]’. Hatakeyama shares this view on the importance of physicality, and is particularly interested in physicality as a way of knowing; she writes that ‘the presence of a human body, particularly my body presence is extremely important in my art … Many times, my body navigates for me the ways to move in my performances.’
Besides her large-scale solo voice/electronics works, another area of Z’s practice is installation works. Other respondents, especially Rowland and Proctor, shared this dual pursuit of performance and installation works, which are meant to be experienced on a timescale that the viewer/listener controls rather than one determined by the composer or performer. Often these installations involve sounds that are the result of the viewer’s/listener’s interactions with the piece. Rowland, for instance, uses a digital design process to create plans for conductive material, and the conductive material is then cut and ‘printed’ onto flat materials like paper with analogue circuitry. As she explains, ‘at that point, the final product is a physical object which can be explored and interacted with without using any digital technology at all’, giving her audiences a concrete, material way to engage with Rowland’s work. Proctor often takes a less material approach to interaction, but it is nonetheless important to her, as in her works for virtual reality in which an avatar’s movement in an artificial landscape determines the sonic progression of her pre-composed material. Whether interaction is physical or not, a visual element is often an important aspect of a viewer’s/listener’s interaction with installation-based work. Indeed, installation-based sound art can even be deeply concerned with sound without sounding at all. Maria Chavez’s sound art spans a wide range of experiential approaches that range from carefully placed speakers that listeners must stand between to hear fragmented sections of text to paintings of microscopic images of vinyl records and turntable needles; the latter works make no sound, but Chavez still considers them sound art pieces. She explains: ‘Sound art doesn’t just have to be about emitted sound … I’m interested in sound in all of its physicalities, whether it’s how you visualise it in your mind, how it presents itself through speakers in a space, or how you can present sound beyond sonic emission.’ Besides sounding or non-sounding installations, though, Proctor, Rowland, and Chavez all also create works meant to be experienced within the more controlled timescale of a performance, further demonstrating the ways in which many of the artists we surveyed work across multiple electronic practices.
Alongside this widespread fluidity, some artists also have deep-seated aesthetic or philosophical commitments to particular practices. Schedel is deeply interested in interactivity, rarely creating fixed media. While she does not completely eschew using recorded audio material, she is interested in a more extensive kind of in-the-moment interactivity than, say, triggering short sections of audio. Indeed, it may be most useful to conceptualise both ‘liveness’ and interactivity on a kind of spectrum, from wholly pre-arranged fixed media played back on speakers, through practices such as in-performance triggering of fundamentally fixed audio material, to something like Schedel’s ‘ferocious interactivity’, in which extracted data about musical parameters and/or performer decisions often deeply affect the form or sound of a work.
Hardware and Software
Our respondents use a wide range of technologies to create sound. For artists with long careers, the gear they use has often undergone significant changes over time. Joan LaBarbara, for instance, began performing solo with her voice and electronics around 1974 and primarily used commercially available hardware audio units such as the Roland Space Echo, Electro-Harmonix Frequency Analyzer, and others to modify the signal from her vocal mic. During the period from the 1970s to 1990 she moved to multitrack analogue recording, and around 1990 she began to work more with digital audio workstations (DAWs). Today, DAWs such as ProTools (which is LaBarbara’s software of choice) provide powerful, flexible environments for artists to record acoustic instruments; create sound with software instruments built from sample libraries; modify tracks with audio effects and plug-ins; and arrange their sounds with the help of visual interfaces. In general, DAWs have allowed more detailed editing to be done much more quickly than would have been possible before the advent of digital sound. Z reflects on the effect on her compositional choices: ‘I make a lot more minute sound edits with digital editing software than I would have had the patience to make when I needed to use a razor blade and splicing tape for each one.’ Today, artists creating fixed media may need no more than one or two microphones, an audio interface, a laptop or desktop running a DAW, and studio monitors or monitoring headphones to create their music.
For artists who work with interactive elements instead of or alongside fixed media, other software becomes important. Max and its open-source cousin PureData (Pd) – visual programming environments built for working with audio – are the most commonly used software programmes for controlling interactive elements amongst our respondents. Both environments allow users to extract data from audio inputs, process sound in various ways, and output it to a flexible number of channels through an interface consisting of boxed ‘objects’ interacting in a ‘patch’. This is in contrast to platforms like ChucK, SuperCollider, C#, and C++, which are more traditional line-based coding languages used for audio applications that are also used by our respondents.
Some artists also draw on software that was not specifically developed for audio or music. Helmuth and Proctor both employ the game engine Unity in their installation work, and game engines have become widespread and powerful tools in the burgeoning field of virtual reality (VR). A fair number of our surveyed artists also work with video in addition to audio, drawing in a visual component to their work. This can be fixed video that is created with recording and video-editing software, algorithmic visuals reactive to audio parameters, or other means controlled by the composer/sound artist, but often such projects represent a collaboration with other artists. Both Proctor and Spiegel, for instance, have worked significantly in creating sound for theatre. When doing so, Spiegel tries ‘to support the emotional content of the central-focus medium’, while other artists negotiate the role of sound in multimedia productions differently. Across the board, though, our surveyed artists (including those who do not work with video or other ‘scored’ visual elements) displayed a deep cognisance of the importance of an audience’s visual experience to their understanding of the work. Some even draw in other senses besides vision and hearing, as in Hayes’ use of embedded transducers in risers to create a tactile response for audiences. Nearly all of our respondents understand an audience’s reading of their work as one in which sound cannot easily be teased out from other modes of reception. Jennifer Walshe puts it succinctly: ‘I don’t agree that people can listen in a pure way which ignores all non-sonic information. If we could do that they wouldn’t need blind auditions for orchestras.’
Whether for audio with video or audio alone, software-based set-ups are more common today largely because they allow new sonic control, flexibility, and possibilities for interactivity or algorithmic control. Fiebrink reflects on the effects of this access: ‘I wouldn’t be in this field if electronic music still required such specialised equipment. I got into programming and electronic music because they were activities that were possible on my home PC in the mid-1990s.’ Software set-ups also often reduce the costs of creative innovation; adding an audio effect to a Max patch does not require buying something new, as adding an effects pedal would. Transitioning from an analogue to a digital composition and/or performance set-up is not unambiguously positive, however. Analogue gear has a physicality like that of acoustic instruments, which we have already seen artists such as Hayes try to emulate in NIME design. Even digital recreations of analogue equipment lack their materiality. Spiegel, for instance, notes that ‘[t]he response curves of emulated control devices are … often not well designed’, and she thinks that ‘the quality and design of digital simulation of analogue control … makes [it] less musical when in actual use’. Though Z ultimately prefers her current digital set-up, she ‘found that [she] both gained and lost in the process of moving from hardware processors to software. It became possible to be completely accurate with delay time, for example. But I lost the ability to do some pieces that were built around some of the strange quirks of my hardware delays.’
Indeed, besides physicality, it is the very fallibility or imperfection of some kinds of hardware that attracts certain artists. Lopez, for instance writes that ‘in terms of technology, there is something about precariousness that [she’s] interested in’. Furthermore, she connects this attraction to broader social attention:
There is something about hi-fi technology related to sound, that it’s supposed to be neutral and it’s not. For me it talks about many things that come up that are related to class, social structures, power structures. And I guess for me it’s interesting to break that down, or investigate other ways in which technology works that it’s more marginal, or the noise of an apparatus.
That investigation has included creating unstable acoustic feedback systems in works like Lopez’s sculpture/instrument RED (2015). Other artists working with non-digital materials share this interest in using their process or in interrogating social structures or barriers. Though Chavez’s work as an abstract turntablist seems more motivated by an aesthetics of exploration than of precarity, she also uses breakdown (in the form of damaged or broken records) as a driver of sound and structure. While digital sound has opened up access and possibilities for many creators, there is a significant subset of artists who continue to use analogue hardware exclusively, repurpose that hardware in new contexts, or combine it with digital techniques. Some even resist an analogue/digital divide. Butler finds it ‘a tiresome debate that [they] really wish would go to bed’ and ‘feel[s] that any artist in this age must interact with a hybrid of either technology to their own taste and ease’, pointing out that they use a (digital) computer to record (analogue) modular synthesisers. Others draw on both technologies, but do feel them to be separate strands of their practice: Cat Hope ‘think[s] digital and analogue creation and reproduction both sound so different, so [she] use[s] them very much as different instruments’. Hope exclusively uses analogue effects pedals in her solo electric bass performance, a practice drawn from experimental rock, but works with digital production in other streams of her music making. Overall, it is an age of hybridity for many artists in terms of the gear and techniques that they use.
Along these lines, our respondents tend not to have an ideological attachment to particular kinds of software or hardware. Many express interest in using new technologies in the future, especially DIY circuitry, and some note the constant process of learning that working with electronics today entails. Nourbakhsh, for instance, calls herself a ‘generalist’ and says that she tries ‘to challenge [herself] to learn something new with every piece’. Most of our surveyed artists choose technologies that they feel will best allow them to create the sound or performative experience that interests them in a particular piece. Some of our respondents also expressed frustration with or resistance to expectations of demonstrating membership of a scene through having the ‘right’ gear or displaying technical mastery of that gear. Such expectations can sometimes have uncomfortably gendered overtones based in historical assumptions about who belongs in particular spaces and has the intellectual chops to create ‘complex’ electronic music. Hope ‘hate[s] shopping for gear’ and writes: ‘I often feel I have to prove my technical prowess (even when I don’t have it) due to my gender.’ Others actively resist such pressure. Hayes writes that she is ‘not interested in working environments where the goal is to demonstrate some kind of technical mastery, make the most noise, or show off the most gear’, explaining that she ‘spent a long time in those scenes and … find[s] them quite boring’ despite her interest in technical work. While many of our surveyed artists in fact cited warm support from mentors and colleagues – men as well as women and gender-non-conforming artists – in the communities they work in, others described a gradual process of overcoming worries that they came from insufficiently technical/musical backgrounds. Spiegel explains how she was discouraged from pursuing music:
Because I had not had a standard childhood music education, of ongoing music lessons on a classical European instrument, I was told very clearly there was no way I could become a musician. Later[,] after I had persisted anyway, I was told I might, if I was lucky and worked very hard, get far enough with music to be able to teach it. I was never encouraged. I was told it was impressive that I could write music at all because women generally couldn’t do that.
In contrast, Proctor found huge support and encouragement through the laptop orchestra and the Digital Interactive Sound and Intermedia Studio at Virginia Tech, where she was ‘inspired to not be embarrassed about [her] arts background and to embrace the advantage in building a story/experience, and [learned that] the math and science can be learned to support that rather than withdrawing because of it’.
Of course, there is a final piece to the gear puzzle, and one that is not always so directly in artists’ control: speakers and microphones. High-quality speakers and microphones can be prohibitively expensive and bulky to own and transport, meaning that many artists depend on venues to provide them. Most of our respondents primarily use stereo sound, meaning two channels (left and right). A stereo set-up allows for one’s work to be performed/diffused in a wide array of venues, and its low number of speakers also maximises the chances of high-quality equipment. (Some artists even take the simplicity of stereo a step further; Shin often works in what she calls ‘big mono’, aiming for a particularly robust sound with a single audio channel.) Even those who work in other set-ups often utilise stereo as a fallback option. Practicality married with a deep concern about sound quality/audience experience is a hallmark of nearly all the artists we surveyed, and it speaks to both the constraints our respondents are accustomed to and their creative responses to such constraints.
The main alternative to stereo seems to be a quadrophonic set-up (‘quad’), which still involves a relatively low number of speakers but allows for basic spatialisation of sound because of its introduction of rear left and right speakers. Power writes the majority of her works in quad, and LaBarbara and Walshe each also have at least a few works designed specifically for the set-up. Those who work with larger numbers of speakers are more apt to work with much larger numbers, such as the hundreds of speakers Proctor used at The Cube at Virginia Tech or at the SARC (Sonic Arts Research Centre) at Queen’s University, Belfast. In these cases, spatialisation of the sound becomes a primary feature of the work, and the resulting pieces are tied to a small number of possible venues.
Of course, it is not only the number or arrangement of speakers that matters, but also the type. All speakers ‘colour’ sound by boosting some frequencies and attenuating others, and they vary greatly in both self-noise and power. Many of our respondents preferred not to make particular requests that venues might not be able to accommodate. Walshe never requests particular models of speakers, and besides her custom-built speakers, Rowland is not usually particularly concerned with the speaker set-up. Others do feel strongly about particular speaker choices for particular works. Hope always makes specific requests, and she enjoys using a wide range of speakers, including instrument amplifiers, multiple large subwoofers, and ‘tiny, quiet speakers’.
Finally, some artists even assemble or build their own custom speakers or microphones. Baker designs her own microphones and is thinking of selling her hydrophones (microphones made to work under water), while Rowland creates her own speakers. Elizabeth Hoffman (author of the section ‘In Her Own Words: Practitioner Contribution 1’ within the current volume) spent months hunting for an alternative to standard public address (PA) speakers for her permanent installation Retu(r)nings (2019) in New York University’s Elmer Holmes Bobst Library. She eventually discovered a model of studio monitors with sufficient power to project in the library’s atrium when mounted on the space’s catwalks. Rowland builds her own speakers out of paper, with printed circuits, for many of her sound artworks. In these works, ‘the material object – musical instruments/interface/ graphic score/speaker – is complicated into one charged piece of material’, as in her installation using a malleable 100-foot speaker and audio work, The Very Long Sound (2016). In general, in an installation setting – where a speaker set-up might sound continuously for days, weeks, or even years – the upfront logistical costs of sourcing or making more (or less standard) speakers may seem more worthwhile.
Challenges
The challenges of dealing with speakers are in many ways illustrative of the challenges of working with electronics today more broadly. Though we have sketched a number of widespread approaches, aims, and types of equipment, there is no real consensus about so many of the techniques that go into creating music or sound with electronics. Just as artists come up with their own individual responses to lack of speaker standardisation and availability, individual creators have their own solutions to a whole range of other challenges: producing sounds that feel like they equal the richness and complexity of acoustic performance, finding ways to inject physicality into performing with computers, designing systems that facilitate rehearsal for performers who may not be experienced with electronics, figuring out how to quickly adjust levels and effects in (often very short) soundchecks, working with precarious or unreliable systems, and much more. Many artists might welcome some sort of standardisation of approaches to these problems: a kind of shared set of best practices that has not yet fully evolved. At the same time, however, the individual problem-solving that the state of the field has necessitated has led to a certain thoughtfulness about means and aims that might not otherwise exist. A lack of common practice has led to groundbreaking individual solutions and many conceptually rich approaches to working with electronics.
Above all, the artists we have surveyed are practical-minded, serious people. They work within the constraints they experience in terms of cost and availability of equipment, access to the knowledge required to create particular tools (such as DIY hardware), restrictions of venues, and more, to deliver personal, persuasive, and often innovative sonic experiences. Many think deeply about the experience of their audiences and find ways to invite them into the work, including by using and transforming familiar natural sounds (Helmuth, Abandoned Lake in Maine (1997), LOONSPACE (2000)); creating possibilities for physical interaction by viewers/listeners in installation settings (Rowland, paper speakers and piano-roll interfaces); drawing in the element of touch through embedded transducers (Hayes); using a deeply personal reflection of self in performances with significant elements of improvisation (described as ‘me at the moment of performance like a diary’) in order to invite audiences to meditate on their own experiences and emotions (Hatakeyama); or setting up ‘feedback loops’ with an audience through groove box performances that ‘giv[e] them something to process, integrat[e] their responses, and push out that interpretation’ (Butler). They also often hope to challenge listeners/viewers, provide novel experiences, or provoke creative reimagining, such as through confronting audiences with ‘impossible transition[s] … outside our constrained conception of what sound is or could be’ (Rowland), or accepting their own sense of ‘be[ing] a stranger in any kind of society’ and the difficulty for understanding that that may pose for listeners (Shin). Taking a broader view, there is no question that this field (and the people populating it) looks different from what it did sixty, forty or even twenty years ago. It is more representative, and there have been positive shifts in the way, for example, mentorship structures have been conceived: away from single mentors and towards mentorship networks. Although institutional affiliations remain vital, advancement and access are no longer necessarily contingent on contact with a single, well-placed mentor. There is, in other words, an emerging lateral network of participants whose diverse backgrounds and approaches are transforming this area. Attending to this network and supporting it will help to continue to diversify and strengthen the future of the field.
