Sound Transfer

Sound in general, and voice and music in particular, have often played a key role in cultural techniques of transmission and knowledge exchange, as well as in the reflection about conversation and enquiry. On the one hand, sound is associated with the notion of immediate connection between phenomena, and the experience of being affected over distance. On the other, it forms a basis for the transmission of signs, and therefore listening is also related to an activity of decoding, to the extraction of meaning that is based on a convention or protocol. Thus the same sound can be perceived in two different ways: as a direct effect of a more or less remote sound source, or as a message encoded into the sound, and left to a listener’s interpretation.

Of course, a sound wave itself can be transmitted through a wide range of materials and structures (such as water or electricity) and equally, it can be passed on in the form of signs such as text (e.g., a score or poetry). For instance, in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1909, a telephone exchange was combined with a music room to provide customers with live piano performance over the phone line (Fig. 8.1, cf. the Telharmonium). Since the invention of phonography and telephony, the means to encode, transmit and decode acoustic events have flourished, and have merged into other media infrastructures, such as film or the internet. Most examples of network pieces, as we will see, relate in one way or the other to such transmission techniques.

Figure 8.1 The Wilmington based Tel-musici Company, from the 18 December 1909 issue of Telephony

Note: http://earlyradiohistory.us/1909musi.htm

The possibility of fast numerical operations on computers has brought the concept of number into a key position within almost all processes of transference. Numerical representation is a carrier for transmitting and reproducing sound, and at the same time it opens an extraordinarily wide field of translations and manipulations. In this role, the digital is subject to both confidence in its faultlessness and doubts about its stainless fidelity. The development of media has been accompanied by an ambiguity between the fascination of identical reproduction, telepresence and remote access, and a distrust of the authenticity of mediated effects.

As we will see, in the aesthetics of network music both the concept of transparent telepresence and the demonstration of the opaque character of media play a significant role.

Opacity and Transparency

Over time, the need for transfer of information between geographically separated places has led to a multiplicity of media techniques, forming coexistent historical and functional layers of infrastructure. While normally those techniques ‘simply function’, artistic and scientific investigation is interested in appreciating their constraints and their cultural implications.¹ For network music the choice and combination of transmission media is in itself a considerable element, so that fields like the history of science, materials research, or other natural sciences become important reference points. Furthermore, due to the social relevance of communication, media techniques are always subject to power struggle and control. It is therefore common for network art to have its context in political theory or cultural anthropology: the often intricate combination of physical characteristics (e.g. due to physical properties of materials or processes) with the historical, social and aesthetic implications of media allows, and in a way, causes, the artist to be part of a broader cultural discourse.

A good example for an artwork that combines the physical with the cultural issues of transmission is Firebirds (2004) by Paul de Marinis. In this installation, recorded speeches by Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler are transmitted over gas pipes and played back by flames in bird cages, one after the other. The technique of using flames as loudspeakers can be traced back to the invention of the vacuum tube over a long series of ‘orphaned technologies’.² While this piece investigates the translation between different sound-transmitting techniques (voice, microphone, mechanical engraving, electricity, loudspeaker, gas, flame), it does so not in isolation, but in its historical (the almost forgotten techniques of sound induction and the gas pipes being one of the first major urban networks) and political (e.g. the enclosed, delayed and channelled character of mediation and the collective space created by media) dimensions.

The distinction between the mediated and the medium is a significant part of artistic discourses in the twentieth century. While in traditional concert music, the contribution of the instrument to the artwork is usually well discerned, in music that goes beyond established sound production techniques this is often not the case. As a consequence, the investigation of transmission media themselves, as opposed to the idea of transparent transmission, has been of importance in many musical works. The sounding object, for instance, in David Tudor’s Rainforest (1968), is not simply a transmitter, but its specific resonant behaviour in response to induced vibrations is essential to every realisation of the piece. The sound event itself as an object, on the other hand, is a central idea in musique concrète, being concerned with an aesthetic that derives from recordings, but erases all traces of their origin, locating the sound source in the loudspeaker itself.

But also a relatively simple and seemingly transparent displacement of sound into a new context is a way to investigate the field: Luc Ferrari’s music promenade (1969), for instance, consists of an edited field recording of a promenade, played back in a concert room: ‘musique concrète was a kind of abstractisation [sic] of sound – we didn’t want to know its origin, its causality … Whereas here I wanted you to recognise causality – it was traffic noise it wasn’t just to make music with but to say: this is traffic noise! (Laughs) Cage’s influence, perhaps.’³ Apart from its other political implications (Ferrari considers the piece ‘a panorama of society’), this type of work demonstrates the fact that localities are not neutral, but are just as particular as the transmission and encoding media themselves.

Perhaps it is such an irreducible property of location (or situatedness) that is responsible for the fascination that accompanies the imagination of telepresence, or any kind of ‘action at a distance’. Such an interest in unusual sonic spaces can be found in many network art pieces. Inspired by the spiritist Friedrich Jürgensen, who believed he could channel the voices of the dead via short-wave radio, the Swedish composer Carl Michael von Hausswolff built an installation, Operations of Spirit Communication (1998), that makes atmospheric electromagnetic fields and electric currents audible. Remote causation of yet another kind takes effect in Richard Teitelbaum’s piece Alpha Bean Lima Brain (1971), transmitting brain waves via telephone from California to drive a pot of jumping beans in New York (Chadabe Reference Chadabe1997). Generally, amongst the immediate precursors of network music, one can find many transmission-specific art forms that stage the situation of telepresence their infrastructures provide: Radio-art, for instance, uses the assemblage of diverse sources by a combinatoric switchboard, and stages the possibility of fakery, like Orson Welles’ 1938 War of the Worlds.

Constructing a montage of previously unrelated sources, the switchboard operator is the simplest paradigm of a network node, the connection point of a network. Maybe the most far-reaching network music project of this type is Radio Astronomy, a live internet broadcast of the acoustic output of different scientific radio telescopes from Australia to Hawaii. Dependent on astronomers’ target observations, atmospheric and technical conditions, the radio waves of different astronomical phenomena are combined in an automated composition, bringing cosmic noise into the context of a reading as musique concrète, glitch, or even as an indeterministic, contemporary reiteration of Kepler’s harmonic music of the spheres.⁴ While assembling the fragments of unimaginable distances and times, this piece also confronts the fascination of channelling with the intrusion of a third participant that is neither medium nor message, but their indistinguishability: noise.

Protocols and Relations

So far we have discussed the transferences in the structured continuum between displaced sound and sounding channel. For networked computer music, not only processes based on transmission of sound energy are of interest, but also those of symbolic information, such as numbers or signs. Such a symbolic sign is special, because it can form a generic placeholder, standing in for something in respect to some interpretation.⁵ As its meaning depends entirely on interpretation, it can be translated into other signs according to a set of rules, which makes it convenient as a way to transmit a message. There is a problem here though: both sides of the transfer must have had something in common already before they try to communicate. This common convention, the protocol, defines the basic rules according to which a message is interpreted.⁶ Protocol, in this way, is nothing inherently different from a common language that forms a convention of how to interpret signs.

Be it simply that the participants are separate from each other, or that they improvise over a common musical basis, in a way the whole point about transferring a message is that the receiver’s context differs from the sender’s context in some respect. Because the same sign may cause different interpretations, it becomes itself the branching point within a network of meaning. The sign thus generates divergent chains of causation: the exact same message could, for instance, be interpreted as a description of how to produce a sound algorithmically (e.g. as program code); it may also be measured data (e.g. recorded sound data), musical information (such as note values), or it can be interpreted as an abstract change within the receiver’s current context (Fig. 8.2).

Figure 8.2 Flyer by Rich Gold for the network ensemble The League from 1978, showing the different types of musical data exchange.

While any computer program can be regarded as such a causal network, message-oriented programming paradigms are a good example for how context dependency can form an explicit foundational element of a computer language. In a polymorphic structure, the interpretation of a symbol, such as an operator, depends on its receiver, so that the same message may cause different chains of events. Alan Kay notes that it took him a long time to realise that one can invert the idea of a process that operates on objects (Kay Reference Kay1993). This delegation of control from the subject to the object (both in the grammatical sense) means that the concept of an active power from the outside (process or declaration) that controls passive entities (data or description) is no longer valid. In a system in which there are only behaviours in response to messages, the structure of inclusion and control become inherently relative.

In the 1960s and 70s, such relational concepts became increasingly influential for computing, such as in object-oriented programming (e.g. Smalltalk), or the actor model (e.g. Planner). The attempt to model the world as a network of relations led to a concept in which each part of a program can act like a whole computer that interprets messages sent to it: ‘The mental image was one of separate computers sending requests to other computers that had to be accepted and understood by the receivers before anything could happen’ (Kay Reference Kay1993). While in the 1950s, relationality was part of the modelling of individual concept formation, and the program mainly a tool for problem-solving, within the following twenty years the idea of programming became increasingly conversational (coinciding with the development of the early internet). Notions of symbiosis between programs and their writers (Licklider, Engelbart, Ashby) led to systems, such as JOSS, LCC, Lisp or Smalltalk, that were more suited for interactive reasoning and for communicating ideas to other programmers. Network-oriented computer music languages, such as SuperCollider, ChucK, Serpent or JSyn, and also communication protocols like Open Sound Control (Wright and Freed Reference Wright and Freed1997) and graphical programming systems like Pure Data and Max, are derived from and inspired by such concepts. These systems combine the concept of a program as a group of communicating individuals with a more conversational approach to code. In this way, they allow the network of human relations to include the algorithmic network of the program, and vice versa.

Formalism and Information

A language, or a protocol, functions not only as a decoding mechanism. Being something that needs to be shared between participants, it is also a description of this mechanism, however generic. In other words, a protocol serves not only as the enforcement of a law, it is its explicit formulation. Just like for computer music as a whole, for many network music pieces, this explicit character has been a significant thematic element; and perhaps it is one of the interesting aspects of algorithmic music in general that description is not a mere means to reach a goal, but description and sound often are equally part of the artwork, exploring and structuring the complex field between the generic and the singular.

Even before 1920, artists had employed formal instructions to generate art: the Dadaists made the proposal that a painter could now order pictures by telephone and have them made by a cabinet-maker (Kaç Reference Kaç1992). Duchamp’s ready-mades were mostly the result of a formal instruction of actions, such as how to acquire an object from a department store.

It became central to constructivist and formalist art to embrace explicit convention as a way to construct independence from dominion by tradition. The idea of a universally valid artwork, existing beyond individual manifestation in a collective space, was an important factor. Perhaps even more important was the conviction that art should be available for everybody: a formal description, provided to the public, makes the work reproducible and understandable, instead of hiding away its makings behind the doors of a genius. Conceptual art in the 1960s took a further step and established the instruction itself to be the art piece, its realisation becoming unimportant. By contrast, in the early forms of telecommunication art, the message is only transmitting the rules for the artwork. This is the case in Moholy-Nagy’s telephone pictures from 1924 (see: Kaç Reference Kaç1992, pp. 47–57), which serve as an early antecedent of the 1969 exhibition Art by telephone, featuring works that were implemented by the curator after verbal instructions by the artists over telephone.

The notion of an objectivity of aesthetic qualities inspired information aesthetics in the 1950s to work on universal rules for the composition of art, which in turn became influential in integral serialism (Grant Reference Grant2001). According to Abraham Moles, algorithmic mass reproduction and ‘the annullation of the value of the original’ (Moles Reference Moles1984, p. 39) aids in overcoming exclusivity and individual ownership as well as traditional conceptions of aesthetics. In a synthetic reversion of the analytical procedure, programs are written by the composer that create works from networks of relations derived by information theoretic considerations. In such a way, the algorithm is the implication of a whole distributed family of works, which all follow the same, explicit principle (this idea lives on in generative art). Moles describes the artistic expression, in reference to the mathematical theory of communication (Shannon Reference Shannon1948), as a message transmitted by an artist (the transmitter) to another individual (the receiver) over the systems of perception (the channel) (Moles Reference Moles1984, p. 13–18; see Fig. 8.3). In the cybernetic aesthetic theories of this time, objectivised concepts of information and the computational universality of the Turing Machine were expected to provide a starting point for a thorough understanding of the artistic domain, and for science and society in general.

Figure 8.3 Adapted from Shannon’s ‘schematic diagram of a general communication system’

(Shannon Reference Shannon1948)

The Other

The attempt to find a solid foundation for the arts by means of assumedly universal perceptual qualities, that was influential in this era, turned out to be problematic. Towards the 1960s, the paradigm of the artist as a sender of information was increasingly questioned (Giannetti Reference Giannetti2004) and the inclusion of the observer into the network of relations caused a paradigm shift within cybernetic aesthetics. This shift coincided with a change in the notion of the artwork that had already happened over the first half of the century. The question was not so much any more about the work as an autonomous (however reproducible) entity created by a gifted, introspective individual, but about how art comes about, or happens, in a collective process. As the observer became part of the work, media technologies became the subject of an art that started to critically investigate the power structures of mass distribution and intervened in the unidirectionality of transmission channels (Chandler and Neumark Reference Chandler and Neumark2005).

Communication media, as well as the computer, inspired artistic games with formalist rules, the investigation of new conversational situations and the invention of objects that could be reconfigured by the audience. Alsleben and Passow understood their computer graphics (1960) as a visual correspondence with the computer (Giannetti Reference Giannetti2004), and the fluxus mail art movement aimed at distributed authorship (Osthoff Reference Osthoff, Chandler and Neumark2005). The artistic concern in such conversational and participatory art is not so much the expression of an existing intuition or dexterity, but the opening towards the unexpected. Under such circumstances, formal and algorithmic methods are a source of experimental exploration, their generic character aiming for new, and possibly unexpected, situations rather than for universal truths. In the form of an interactive, conversational relationship, the algorithm became an integral part of the art event (Drucker Reference Drucker, Chandler and Neumark2005).

In the 1970s, inspired by composers like Cage, Tudor and Wolff, the early network music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area used the first low-end microprocessors to implement sound algorithms and conversation rules. The League of Automatic Composers was an ensemble that declaredly consisted of composers and computers equally: ‘the League is an organization that seeks to invent new members by means of its projects’ (Brown and Bischoff Reference Brown and Bischoff2002, 1.1). In this way, an active participation of the algorithm moved the composer into the position of an observer. Just in the same way as this turn of perspective opened up the social relations amongst the musicians, it also changed the role of the audience. Including the observer as an active participant into the system, the relational structure of a social and musical network cannot be based on an absolute reference system, but results in multiple points of observation: in a way, it has no single outside any more.⁷

The shift of interest to processes instead of products was evident in the exploration of the immaterial or nonlocal quality of artworks that exist only within a telecommunication network, within a conversational situation, between participants of a mail art exchange, or in the unpredictable character of a fluxus performance.⁸ Over time, many projects have developed such concepts of extended or hybrid networks, converging with networked mobile games and opening a wide field for computer music: concerts and environments with audience participation, psychogeography and dérive, machine listening concerts, site-specific sonifications, gameboy and mobile phone orchestras, augmented environments, circuit bending, nomadic music instruments, participative seminars, massive multiplayer game networks, internet radio networks, ubiquitous computer music – these are only some of the multiplicity of fields that carry on the ideas of participation art and form the context for today’s network music.

Topology

As we saw before, a number of networked computers is not inherently different from the graph of a single program. Since one program can contain multiple processes, just as several computers can participate in the same program, the underlying network implementation does not necessarily represent the factual interdependency of a situation: a network music piece might deliberately make this implementation structure the subject of discussion, but often, the resulting effective structure differs from its implementation.⁹ Although a topology can thus be reduced to the logical structure of causal relations, due to the openness of music systems, it does matter how the algorithmic network is embedded in geographical, social and acoustic space. By creating connections where there were none before, and excluding influences which were relevant before, it intervenes in the causal milieu of an environment. In this sense, what is interesting here, is not so much something like a network of cables and hubs, but the variable and interlocated structure of causal topology.

Because a computer music network usually includes various active participants (people, processes) that are spread over space but are all potentially connected in the most unusual ways, causation becomes a really interesting issue both for audience and for the musicians (Rohrhuber and De Campo Reference Rohrhuber and De Campo2004). When confronted with behaviour of a certain complexity, it is often uncertain for an observer whether it is random (could as well be otherwise), consequential (due to a rule), or intentional (aiming at something). In such a way it may be a matter of perspective whether and how a given system ‘works’ or not. In systems for remote collaboration, for example, it is usually beneficial to make the interdependencies comprehensible and allow for a very structured delegation of control (Barbosa Reference Barbosa2006; Hajdu Reference Hajdu2005; Weinberg Reference Weinberg2003), while for improvised network ensembles, this uncertainty of causation is often an integral part of the aesthetics. The fascination of self-regulating feedback networks, where causation is delocalised into an emergent pattern, is a common theme in cybernetics and music networks. Thus, since the early use of feedback in analogue synthesisers, the theory and aesthetics of dynamical systems has gained influence. Peter Blasser’s electronic circuits, for instance, produce sound in an almost but not entirely unpredictable way, which brings the musician once again into the position of an experimenter and listener. Such self-regulating systems have sometimes been treated as an authentic natural state, that is freed from the strict laws of formalism. In recent works, the indeterminacy of algorithms, as well as the power structure of implicit regulation, is contextualised more carefully (Arns Reference Arns2004; Doruff Reference Doruff2006; Wieser and Rohrhuber Reference Wieser and Rohrhuber2006).

Letters and Tandems

Within network music, as we have seen, there is a tendency to delocalise causation. At the same time though, there are always notions of something, that happens, or that is being changed (this notion is called state). Such states are common in two ways: information can be passed between the participants, or it can be accessed concurrently. Independent of a particular network infrastructure, distributed state can be modelled just as well as state can be passed around, within limitations. What seems more appropriate is rather an aesthetic decision: the metaphor of the postal system and its circulating letters is not without charm, just as the idea of a private shared space. The name of the early computer network ensemble The Hub (Fig. 8.4) originates from the interesting problem of how to share information amongst participants of a networked music group. In this ensemble, the players each have their own musical rule systems, but use a common data space (the hub) to integrate their individual approaches.

Figure 8.4 The network music ensemble The Hub, 1989 (top photo: Jim Block) and 2006 (bottom photo: Chianan Yen)

A shared object (Fig. 8.5) is based on the idea of one single state that participates in more than one context, allowing several persons (or processes) to share one and the same causal milieu, which may be purely acoustic, but also visual or textual (Barbosa Reference Barbosa2006). Noah Vawter’s WebSynths (2004), for instance, allowed online guests to remote control a selection ‘of rare and boutique synthesisers’, and to listen to the result via audio stream. Such a multiplayer or tandem instrument exists only in a single instance: in this way, WebSynths can also be seen as a slightly ironic comment on the exclusivity of analogue equipment, and the fact that sharing this equipment may mean cooperation, or even conversation. In such a way, a shared sound object can function as a hybrid form between communication channel and a composition environment. In Auracle (Neuhaus et al.), participants can use their voice to control a shared virtual acoustic space, which can result in a special kind of cross-cultural vocalisation when people from different language backgrounds join into musical conversation. In KeyWorks (Doruff) and in PeerSynth (Stelkens), the participants collaborate by manipulating shared graphical objects that represent sonic structures. Quintet.net (Hajdu), on the other hand, provides shared access to a musical score for collaborative composition, and in systems like JITLib (Rohrhuber) and Co-Audicle (Wang and Cook) the participants communicate with program text.

Figure 8.5 Shared object

Somehow, as soon as state can be accessed by more than one person, the question of the owner appears out of thin air. Many archive music pieces play with the various implications of access, often entering a plunderphonics territory. Freeman’s N.A.G., for instance, assembles a collage of online soundfiles derived from keyword search, and Thomson and Craighead’s Unprepared Piano randomly downloads MIDI-files from the internet and plays back aleatoric recombinations on a player-piano. A playful comment on privacy issues is also The Hub’s appropriation art piece Borrowing and Stealing. Here, elements of the musical score are accessible to all participants, leading to divergent modifications of the privately edited sound material. As soon as a new melody pattern comes into play, the collaborating players immediately use it as material, taking it apart, interpreting pitch as rhythm or rhythm as timbre and transforming it beyond recognisable connection to the original (Brown and Bischoff Reference Brown and Bischoff2002).

Yet another piece by The Hub, named boss, consists of a virtual mixer that is only accessible to one band member at the time, who can use it to control everyone’s output level. At any moment though, someone else may decide to take over control, leaving the former boss behind without control. This last example shows that, instead of concurrently changing a single object, one may also pass objects around like letters, being modified further and further, in each step changing the causal topology of the system. Such distributed objects exist in multiple concurrent versions at different locations (Fig. 8.6).

Figure 8.6 Distributed object

In networked live coding and collaborative composition, the participants send each other score or program text, which is applied in each local context to the composition, or the running sound, modified and sent on. Such code chats proliferate sound in form of its description over a network, as well as comments or other conversation, so that program text appears in a mixed, rather literary context, functioning not only as functional module, but more so as a form of public reasoning (Rohrhuber and De Campo Reference Rohrhuber and De Campo2004; Rohrhuber, De Campo and Wieser Reference Rohrhuber, De Campo and Wieser2005). Techniques from literary art, such as the surrealist cadavre exquis may thus be combined with formal languages, algorithmic composition becomes a conversational game, and the roles of senders, messages and receivers may swap positions. Sitting with their laptops in the audience space, the ensemble powerbooks unplugged consists of a cloud of distributed code, processes and messages, resulting in similarly delocalised clouds of microsonic pulses that find their way through the narrow band of laptop speakers. Here, various layers of distributed state come into play at the same time – small pieces of program text, comments on the current state of affairs and network messages causing sound events on different computers, almost completely dissolving the link between individual action and sound location.

In this example, the asynchronicity of the wireless network is part of the compositional strategy, merging the effect of acoustic spatial delay with the topology of network latency. Chris Chafe’s works show that network latency can also be used directly for sound synthesis: constructing feedback loops over internet connections, Network Harp (2001) derives tones from network delay, so that the slower connections result in lower pitches than the fast ones. Just as other pecularities of transmission are part of the aesthetics of network music, the unavoidable latency in networks is an important issue. From a historical point of view, computation and telecommunication have many common aspects, the impossibility of a unified time being one of those with maybe the most immediate relevance for network music. While there are various schemes for arranging the situation in a way that network asynchronicity can be ignored, many systems, such as the above, decide to make the temporal incompleteness their foundation (see Chafe Reference Chafe2002; Barbosa Reference Barbosa2006).

Sending a message always takes time, and in the mail coach era, the correspondence with the beloved often had to include intricate descriptions of one’s own travel plans so that the next letter’s destination could be determined. A common time was maybe the last notion of unified observation that persisted in science after having adopted an essentially relational view. While today, more than a century after the publication of the theory of special relativity, we can lean back and remark that ‘there is no now without here’,¹⁰ telecommunication has never stopped struggling with synchronisation problems. The letter may well arrive at its destination, but while it is not only always late, even worse, time itself has meanwhile turned out to be a multiplicity. Looking back and planning ahead – perhaps we have no choice but to interact with slightly incoherent shared objects or to leave traces on chains of letters, engaged in negotiation, conversation and experiment.

Conclusion

Having discussed some of the history, the culture and techniques of network music, we hope to have provided an overview of some important aspects that are characteristic for this field. We have seen in what respect the two basic questions, how to transmit, and how to form a network of relations, play an important role. Further, questions of power-structure, rules, authorship and group-formation become important when the relation between artist and audience is redefined. In including the observer, the network paradigm becomes more complex, and brings up interesting problems of synchronicity and causation. Computer music networks form especially well suited environments for combining technical and cultural, formal and aesthetic aspects of networks, opening up a wide field for invention, intervention, and surprise.