Appendix: Survey Questions for Chapter 14, The Star-Eaters: A 2019 Survey of Female and Gender-Non-Conforming Individuals Using Electronics for Music
1. Sound art and music have something of an uneasy relationship as terms. For some, sound art is any artistic practice using sound in some way that does not happen in a linear performance but can be experienced in one’s own time, such as an installation in a gallery setting. Music for such observers is defined by its performance in time, such as a string quartet performed in a concert or a song sung in a jazz club. For others, though, music and sound art also have stylistic meanings. The string quartet or the jazz standard might be music, but not the improvised performance on a circuit-bending set-up using harsh and noisy timbres. Or, conversely, noise and/or the experience of sounds outside a formal performance might constitute important ground to stake out as belonging to the (esteemed, long-standing) category of music. In short, sound art and music are defined differently by different people. Do you consider yourself a composer, sound artist, a programmer, an instrument builder, a combination of these, or none of them? Does your work happen in a performance, installation, or another setting? Does it happen linearly in time, or can audience members change its progression or go back and listen again?
2. Digital sound has facilitated a range of audio manipulation by both broadening the array of possible effects and making many effects cheaper and easier to accomplish than in an analogue studio. It has also opened up possibilities for interactivity through live computation in the moment of performance (or audience interaction in an installation setting). Yet some artists prefer the physicality of analogue devices and find digital emulations of physical controllers (buttons, faders, knobs) unsatisfying; others express a preference for the sound of analogue gear (such as the surging popularity of Eurorack) or the aesthetics of failure that can result from pushing such devices to their limits. How do you use digital or analogue devices and why? How have these decisions impacted your process and the sounds you draw on? Have you repurposed older analogue equipment?
3. A piece with electronics can mean many things. It can mean a work for a live human player playing an acoustic instrument along with a fixed-media audio track; the same player with a system taking microphone instruments and applying live processing to that player’s sound; someone performing on an ‘all-gear’ set-up of synthesisers, transducers, no-input mixer, or other analogue equipment; video game or other kinds of controllers that control a laptop-based set-up; and much more. Some of these practices include acoustic instruments that are familiar to audiences and some do not. Do you use acoustic instruments in your work with electronics? Why or why not? If you use an all-gear set-up, do you feel that that set-up constitutes an instrument or a new interface for musical expression (NIME)? If you build instruments/NIMEs, do other people play them?
4. Developed in the 1950s, Pierre Schaeffer’s concept of reduced listening calls for an aural practice in which one attempts to ignore the source or extra-sonic associations of sounds and focus solely on their sounding character. Such a practice still has strong influence in some musical spheres, and many electroacoustic composers continue to use Schaeffer’s term ‘acousmatic’ to describe their work. At the same time, contemporary electronics have facilitated more theatrical work through sounds that have real-world associations (such as field recordings), easy integration with theatre and dance (it is often more feasible to hire a single composer to score a play with electronics than hire that composer and a chamber ensemble to perform), gestural interfaces and cameras such as the Kinect (which allow dancers or other physical performers who are not necessarily musicians to control sound), and other techniques. Does your work entail theatrical, narrative, visual, or extra-sonic elements? Why or why not? If so, how do you create and manage such elements? How do you feel this changes your audience’s experience?
5. In the early days of electronic music, studios such as Studio d’Essai and the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center were large spaces filled with bulky, extremely expensive, highly specialised equipment. They were considered spaces for experts only and required in-depth, specific knowledge and insider access. Today the computing power of the Columbia-Princeton studio is dwarfed by that of a relatively inexpensive consumer laptop, with no institutional credentials required. At the same time, the scope of knowledge required to produce ‘new’ or ‘cutting-edge’ music with electronics has hugely expanded. In some sense, a composer or sound artist working today may not need to be a specialist in the same sense as one working in the 1950s, ’60s, or ’70s, but might be aided more by knowing a bit about a number of subfields and practices in order to have a sense of what techniques exist that could be useful for a given project. How has the increasing availability and affordability of electronics equipment facilitated or changed your work? Do you consider yourself a specialist in a particular area of electronics, a generalist who is able to learn the necessary tools for each new piece, or something else?
6. A huge range of speaker configurations for playing electronic music are possible today, from a traditional stereo set-up to complex surround-sound speaker arrays, crowd-sourcing low-fi sources such as audience phones, to using transducers to resonate acoustic objects. What kind of speaker set-up do you use most often in your work? If you use stereo, is this decision driven primarily by practicality and portability or by aesthetics? If you use more complex set-ups, what do you feel you gain and/or lose by doing so? Does the speaker constitute a fundamental part of the performance for you, and do you build your own speakers, travel with your own speakers, seek out venues that have systems you like, or make specific requests about speakers?
7. One might conceptualise work with electronics as existing along a continuum of interactivity, with a wholly fixed-media piece that simply requires an operator to press play on the low end to an installation or piece where every parameter of sound is influenced by user input in some way on the high end. Where would you say your work falls along this spectrum? How and why do you use and engage with interactivity (or not) in your work?
8. There is a significant strand of work in the past fifty years that treats sound production as fundamentally embodied, whether through gestural interfaces, amplification of bodily sound, playing with our understanding of the categories human and machine through vocal processing, or other means. Do you consider the performance of your work by human bodies to be important, and if so, how do you think about embodiment in your work? If your work is not performed by humans or you don’t consider the physical aspects of performance salient to the audience’s experience, why not, and what actions constitute the performance of the work, and do you still consider it to be embodied?
9. Do you buy most of your equipment ready-made or DIY it in some way (e.g. Arduinos, instrument building, hacking commercial hardware, etc.)? If you DIY, how do you do so and what led you to it? If not, what are the barriers to entry or what satisfies you about commercially available equipment? Do you program your computer, or primarily use DAWs to create your work, and why? If both, how do you choose what procedure to use? Do you create programs for other musicians working with electronics to use? If so, please explain why and give examples.
10. Electronic and electroacoustic music today includes a large range of sound sources: non-recorded, synthesised sounds in the tradition of Elektronische Musik (electronic music); emulation of acoustic instruments through sampled software instruments; live processing of acoustic instruments; and recorded sound, including field recordings or samples from pre-existing work. Which of these categories and/or what other sound sources do you draw on in your own work? What drives those choices?
11. Venues for performing electronic music or displaying sound art include traditional concert halls as well as universities, theatres, art galleries, bars/clubs, warehouses, and underground venues of various sorts. Some work is also rarely if ever performed and mostly encountered through recordings or other means. Where do audiences experience your work? Why do you choose the venues you do, and what are the challenges of those venues? Do you wish you could perform/display your work in other kinds of venues?
12. New technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) platforms and increasingly sophisticated and responsive video and audio conferencing for telematics have enabled a broadened range of performance and experiential environments. Performers who are geographically distant can play together, audiences can watch/listen from at home, and composers/sound artists can create truly immersive audiovisual environments. Do you use VR or AR at all in your work? What about telematics/remote performance? If not, why not? If so, how and why?
13. Contemporary technology can facilitate extremely fine-grained, intentional control of all sorts of parameters of sound. Conversely, it also allows for randomness, complex algorithms with unpredictable results, and even generative systems approaching artificial intelligence (or machine learning) that can generate or respond to material in ways outside the immediate control of the composer or performer. Do you ever take any elements of your sonic practice outside your direct control in any of these ways, and if so, how? Why or why not?
14. If you would like, please tell us about a time you felt particularly supported or unsupported as an artist working with electronics. Who has been a mentor, inspiration, or hero to you and why? Or who has been an anti-mentor, example of what you don’t want to be, or source of frustration and why?
