Dr Carla Thackrah
doctoral research & thesis
music, sound & video portraits
Sound Portraits
The title of 'sound portrait' is well used as the multitude of 'sound portraits' that come up in a simple google search attest. It can range from a simple tune bearing no relation to a person or even an object in anything except name, to businesses that sell voice 'sound portraits' ranging in price depending on length of recorded interview, a group that create sound portraits via improvisation directed by God, through to a man with an antenna implanted into his head who can turn the colours of a person's face into audible sounds.
A challenge for this research will be to discriminate which portraits are in quality, equivalent to peer reviewed writings or professionally curated gallery exhibitions.
Another challenge with regard to many audio works that call themselves sound portraits will be to determine the features I would regard as definitive as 'portraits' for this research. Radio sound portraits such as those listed below, while being undoubtedly storytelling via sound about people, are often not portraits as I would define it for the research.
Something of the quality of visual art portraits these stories lack -
1. likeness (obviously)
2. a sense of the sitters inner identity
3. if there is a sense of an inner identity it's not presented in an esoteric way - that is, the viewer is not given the opportunity to play a role in bringing their own interpretation to the identity being presented because the portrait form and content is 'closed' and holds a fixed narrative.
4. the content of the portrait is not integrated as a whole - ideally all elements should work together to lead to an interpretation. Like the lines of the rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari 1987) they should form an 'assemblage' of 'filaments and stems' that are put to 'strange new uses', Voice and words ideally are not necessarily leading to a narrative end but rather are a part of the incomplete assemblage of elements making up the portrait. Music and sound ideally are not necessarily leading to a harmonic completeness but rather acting as discreet, meaningful elements in the assemblage.
I'll list a few here:
Radio Sound Portraits
Of course there is a lot of radio sound portraits - all largely interview or recorded voice interactions between individuals, occasionally with snippets of seemingly unrelated incidental music. Usually quality journalism and interesting stories built with the classic 3 act narrative arc.
For example:
This American Life
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/
The Moth
Audio Portraits Australia
https://soundcloud.com/bonz-inc
Public Radio Exchange New York - sound portraits
https://www.prx.org/group_accounts/2295-soundportraits
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Neil Harbisson - Sound Portraits
https://youtu.be/Ss8UGJnKPYQ about
Harbisson is well known on Youtube from his Ted talks about hearing colour via the receptor implanted into his skull. He is completely colour blind but with this device, developed with scientist, Adam Montandon, he can hear colours as specific musical tones. In this work, he names many celebrities and records the tones his head/brain generates when viewing the colour range of their faces - their skin, lips eyes hair. He writes the notes he hears and then plays the portrait as a single chord.
Epiphany - sound portrait music ensemble
http://www.epiphanymusic.org.uk/sound-portraits
http://www.pickingapplesofgold.com/having-a-sound-portrait/ Jules
Epiphany create an individual improvised sound portrait inspired by their christian faith. As one recipient said "As they played I felt all kinds of things but one thing that was the most powerful was it was like God was calling my destiny out of me as they played" (Jules 2015 above)
soundportraits.ca - a business specialising in sound portraits
Ranging in price from $1500 to $5000, this company interviews an individual about their life or special event and edits and packages it in a CD.
ASCAP - audio portraits of the musician's they represent
https://www.ascap.com/audioportraits
An organisation in the US the equivilent of APRA collecting royalties for composers. They have a series of audio portraits of their musos. All the same formular - music intro, voiceover of composer talking about his process, music fade up, down, voice over again.
Like all the others, the voice is merely a voice telling a narrative or informing and not part of the composition itself.
Acousmatic Narrative / Sonic Narrative/ RadioPhonics
Quite different to the above sound portraits, these examples of sonic narrative or acousmatic narratives incorporate voice - both interviews 'in the present' and archival recordings, soundscapes and music in the form of a symbiotic assemblage of equal parts intended to evoke an experience for the listener rather than a composed 'work' with established form and structure, or a film music structure with music acting as merely an interlude between the storytelling voice.
As Almides says:
"Acousmatic storytelling centres on the recorded spoken word as a means for telling stories in conjunction with a composed world that is based in, but departs from, the heritage of acousmatic music. This hybrid approach is not centred on the evolution in time and/or manipulations of sound objects in the formation of works, but rather on the creation of an experience for the listeners that is closer to storytelling, in which verbal narrations and sound objects coexist in the formation of a hybrid – less interested in exploring spectral attributes of sounds, and more aware of the importance of creating a hybrid drama." (See Acousmatic Storytelling by Panos Amelides) (p 213)
Occasionally they will be portraits as I would define them - explorations of an individuals life and psyche - but more often they explore space and temporality.
John Cousins - Doreen (2008)
A portrait of the artist's mother:
"Cousins is present in the work as an interviewer, while Doreen is the narrator, unfolding the storytelling in a first-person perspective. Cousins combines most of the elements of acousmatic storytelling – verbal narration, music quotations, field recordings and transformed sounds – in a single work. Abrupt sonic gestures interrupt the story being told, emphasising the meaning of the moment and highlighting the added value that acousmatic techniques can bring to the experience of acousmatic storytelling. A characteristic example can be found at 08′03″ when Doreen says ‘and then that particular night we watched the fireworks’. That phrase triggers a set of abrupt firework explosions (scaring the listener) that amalgamate with Doreen’s extreme laughter and cough. That sudden gesture changes our comfortable state of listening to an old lady telling her love story, and at the same time highlights the previously told story about her making love with Ted. The music quotation used in Doreen is the song ‘It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie’. Here, Cousins chooses not to include an audio recording taken fromelsewhere, but rather to have the protagonist of the story perform the quotation by singing it. Further, just like in the cases of Alexandros and Ricordiamo Forli, in Doreen the composer takes advantage of the electroacoustic studio’s expressive tools, merging fragments of the protagonist’s recorded expressions (like laughter and coughing) with other sonic material; for example, at 14′10″ when an abrupt explosion is combined with Doreen’s cough.
Through all of these expressive means, Doreen provides another example of acousmatic storytelling in which the emotional theme, the parallel storytelling layers of oral and composed-world stories, the expressive tools of the electroacoustic studio, and the method of interviewing have all been utilised in order to shape a new form for the story being told, from the subjective perspective of the composer." (See Acousmatic Storytelling by Panos Amelides) (p 220)
Panos Amelides - Alexandros (2012)
A story told by way of interview and radio archives integrated with soundscape, about the events surrounding a Greek politician when he tried to assasinate the president Georgio Papodopoulos.
"This combination and coexistence of multiple layers and time scales – a layer of voice-narration, a layer of referential recordings relative to a place and a layer of abstract, transformed materials and their interconnections – with the political theme of the work are, I believe, a clear example of the characteristics of the hybrid ‘acousmatic storytelling’ genre described above" ((See Acousmatic Storytelling by Panos Amelides) (p 220)
Delia Derbyshire’s - Invention for Radio No. 1: The Dreams (Derbyshire 1964)
Other works - http://delia-derbyshire.net/
Early British electronic sound artist pioneer, composer of the Dr Who theme
"The Dreams is a radiophonic work comprising a group of edited and restructured interviews of people describing their dreams. The composer attempts to re-create some of the specific impressions of dreaming – for example, the experiences of running away, falling, new landscapes, being underwater and colour – thereby dealing with themes that offer archetypes of human behaviour and nature that correspond to common sensations and perceptions. In terms of the
perspective of the stories being told, all testimonies were taken from real life, and the personal stories of dream experiences are in the first-person. Throughout this work there are two parallel stories: the verbal, untransformed narration and the composed world. The personal experience being related is an experience for
the listener to relate to and identify with. At the opening of the work, right after the overture, we hear the characters
describing their experience of ‘running’ in their dreams (01′06″) or falling: ‘then … I was falling over a cliff’ (07′54″) or ‘I am standing on an embankment’ (07′00″). The idea of non-linear unfolding of the story (by using flashbacks) is important to the work. At 25:43, we hear the phrases ‘seems to go down, down, down’ and ‘it was very deep’, which were heard earlier at 13:19 and 13:50. This flashback comes again at 28:19 (‘down, down, down’). While stories are all presented in the first person, narrative time is uncertain. The stories described by the interviewees have no historical or chronological factor surrounding them. The listener experiences reminiscences in the ‘now’, but with stories taking place in the undefined ‘past’, providing an example of the temporal narrative fluidity made possible by the acousmatic storytelling form." ((See Acousmatic Storytelling by Panos Amelides) (p 218)
Hildergard Westercamp - Kits Beach Soundwalk (1989)
http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2016/02/sof_20160205_2130.mp3
Other works https://www.sfu.ca/~westerka/
"She places herself in the story without experimenting with different narrative points of view. Her voice remains
untransformed throughout the work and she uses a first-person perspective of narration, giving information
of the place and time in combination with the soundscape recordings of the place: ‘I am on Kits Beach’ (00′22″), etc. Her calm voice creates the expectation for an unfolding of a story as she takes listeners into a story of techniques in combination with awareness: ‘I could shock you or fool you by saying that the soundscape is this loud … but it is more like this’ (01′42″). Westerkamp’s story has en educational character; she intends to leave for the listener a trace of knowledge and a seed of will for further exploration into how they experience the soundscape they live in. Westerkamp provides specific ways of learning how to experience the soundscape: ‘but I am trying to listen to those sounds in more detail now’ (02′29″). It is obvious that her intention goes beyond creating an artwork
based on the formation and transformation of sounds, but rather for the work to acquire a pedagogical aspect
and be an object of heritage."(See Acousmatic Storytelling by Panos Amelides) (p 217)
I like her work very much - the integration of voice and environmental sounds with hints of music - all combine to create evocative soundscapes and is certainly the sound palette I'm exploring.
One thing to note - and its something I observe in many film that also use evocative foley in their sound design - is that they all convey a similar 'other worldly', 'deeply spooky' feeling/meaning. Great for a film wishing to evoke this mood, or a pure work of art in sound, but this is something that is not appropriate for portraits of very different personas - after all - how many people do I know that have their psychic home in a space ship exploring deep unknown space .. I'll have to work on this ...
John Young - Riccordiamo Forli (2005)
https://electrocd.com/resultats/ricordiamo%20forli
Using recorded interview, storyteller, archival recordings, soundscape and composed music it is a beautiful work. - I think because the music is stronger in this work than the others, and I like it very much. It is neither electronic in the usual sense of spooky space sound, nor conservative film music with overheated cultural associations. It is said that the music is based on Verdi's Otello and the bells of the Forli duomo but I don't recognise either in the sections I've listened to.
"The testimonies given by Alex – Young’s father – collected during the interviews regarding his
memories of Forli, the soundscape of Forli, and the bells of the Duomo together with the transformation
honed by the composer, together help the listener to experience past events in a new, imaginative way and possibly to undergo a virtual time travel back to where the events took place. The work explores the potential of recorded audio information to trigger imagination as well as to create memory of specific stories for the audience." ((See Acousmatic Storytelling by Panos Amelides) (p 219)
Luc Ferrari -
Far-West News (2009)
http://lucferrari.com/en/analyses-reflexion/far-west-news/
Recorded on a trip across America with his wife. Recorded voices on the fly, overlaid and assembled with recorded natural sounds, occasionally snippets of music (drums, electronic) but not 'composed' - each movement with a similar structure and feel.
As Ferrari says:
"It’s not a report or a soundscape, not a Hörspiel or an electronic work, not a portrait or a recorded reality exhibit not a transgression of reality or an impressionist account, not a so on or so forth.
It’s a composition. At first I thought it was manifest, a soft, derisory manifesto. I also thought that my “radiophonic” compositions were a new way of writing a biographical book. Then I called it a sound poem around a real voyage since it may very well be that poetry is playing life like an accordion, and that composition in some cases, especially in mine, and increasingly in my life, is a perverted game with truth." (retrieved above 12/02/2018)
Dangerous Visions (1998)
http://lucferrari.com/en/dangerous-visions/
I've included this because of his use of female voices as part of a work where the music content is minimal and repetitive. The voices are in essence the 'solo' line expressing strong emotions without use of words. Love it.
Visages V (1970)
DJ style manipulations of the tape - we thinks about the technology not the story. Old style ...
Jonty Harrison - Undertow (2007)
https://www.electrocd.com/en/album/2351/Jonty_Harrison/Environs
Manipulated sounds of waves, above and below the water
Robert Normandeau -
Rumeurs (1990)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGSDzEHaHu4
Doors, footsteps, sharp percussive sounds, belllike sounds, metal, creaking.
StrinGDberg (2001)
https://www.electrocd.com/en/oeuvre/14028/Robert_Normandeau/StrinGDberg
Manipulated sound of hurdygurdy and cello - one parameter only.
Trevor Wishart - Red Bird: A Political Prisoner's Dream (1980)
Disturbing manipulated sounds reminisent of screaming, speaking, roaring, whispering, pain etc.
Lauren Sarah Hayes
Young Scottish sound artist/composer - a modern Derbyshire - no voice which takes it out of the interest area for me.
Anne Walsh & Chris Kubik – various sound installations
https://www.dropbox.com/s/lnvqhjub3url0bq/soundlibrary-%20a%20motion%20picture%20event.pdf?dl=0
Sound artists from California using mostly foley sound effects in gallery settings. I can’t say I find the works either deep or significant but interesting their use of glass as a resonator and setting within galleries and museums is interesting.
www.doublearchive.com/projects
Visual Music
The term Visual Music was first used in 1912 to describe Kandinsky's paintings, largely because, as some of the first abstract paintings, their form and content comprising many colours and figures scattered througout the canvas, could be read as a temporal journey, much like absolute abstract music. Certainly Kandinsky saw the parallels and named them often with musical terms - Fugue, Sonata etc.
Hence a definition of Visual Music today could be defined as an ‘experience of pure time, without the burden of a story. Where cinema is audiovisual novel, visual music is audiovisual poetry’ (Piche´ 2003; quoted in Garro, 2012 Sonic art to Visual Music p103)
Visual music indicates a form of art in which the combination of moving imagery and sound establishes a temporal architecture in a way similar to absolute music (Evans 2005 Foundations of a visual music) both through the articulation of the visual and the musical and through the interaction and interplay between them. They are typically non narrative and so use a different form of montage to classic cinematography that uses more traditional montage techniques to establish a story, no matter how obscure; shots and cuts done linearly. In visual music, the visual and sound montage and movement happens organically often using similar parameters via computer programming.
"The uneasy relationship between video montage and the electroacoustic idiom is often resolved in
visual music works utilising video morphing in lieu of cuts or transitions (the traditional arsenal of
montage)" (Garro 2012 p109)
According to Garro 2012, "electroacoustic music carries within itself the seed of the journey that took it beyond the acousmatic, mono-mediatic paradigm. Visual music composers have, from their viewpoint, done nothing more than going one small step beyond" (p105) The visual becomes merely another media element not in any way meant to distract from the sound - never allowing it to become merely "pit music" (Chion 1994 p80)
Jean Piche - Australis (2011)
Sound and visuals by Piche
Non synchronised image slowly morphs to the electroacoustic sound.
The main shot is a children's parade (unrecognisable) with voices of Michael Jackson - seemingy completely unrelated and non-narrative.
Nick Cope & Tim Howle - In Girum (2007)
Hope (composer and Howle (visuals) create a synchronised visual music with more traditional montage of shots and cuts however with no narrative except for location which is a fun fair.
Diego Garro - Patah (2010)
Sound and visuals by Garro
"an investigation into (mainly abstract) spectro-morphologies articulated in both the audio and the visual domains. It features electro-acoustic sounds combined with computer-generated animations, as well as filmed footage. A possible viewing strategy, which is somewhat in line with the composer's design, may consider the role of the sonic material in permeating the 'fractures' ('patah' in Indonesian) of the streaked visual textures and the dramatic effect that results from such interaction." (Retrieved at above 16 Feb 2018)
Oskar Finschinger (1900-1967) (1938) An Optical Poem
A colour and form tone poem to Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody -
Sound/music is a fine example of complete parallelism synchronisation.
Carla Thackrah & Paul Brown - Sandlines (1998)
http://www.paul-brown.com/GALLERY/TIMEBASE/SANDLINE/INDEX.HTM (Java required)
Thackrah (composer) composed an unsynchronised soundtrack to Brown's computer generated visuals.
Christine McCombe & Carla Thackrah - Fastness of Forgetting (2005)
https://christinemccombe.com/video/cross-media-works/the-fastness-of-forgetting-final/
McCombe (composer) and Thackrah (visuals)
Unsynchronised visuals with the exception of the general languishing slowness of both the visuals and sound. The visuals suggest a narrative with the use of evocative archival images of people, letters and text across the screen rather then morphing computer graphics, so is it Visual Music or Art Film & Sound? I think it's not Visual Music but have included it here to ask that very question.
Artists who work across media both
FILM & SOUND:
Jacob Kirkegaard - Danish sound artist who records environmental sounds with simple video footage of the environment recorded, often treated in the same way as the sound.
4 Rooms (Aion) - sonic resonance of 4 abandoned rooms at Chernobyl.
http://fonik.dk/works/aion.html
The room sound was recorded and then played back into the room up to 10 times, and the recording continued, setting up a resonance. The film that accompanies each piece is filmed in the same way - filmed and then projected into the space and the filming continued.
Attended showing at People's Republic of Camperdown, 12 March 2018
Sabulation - sound of sand dunes recorded and filmed
40 Days of Silence - soundtrack for a film by Saobat Ismailover
Beautiful music (as opposed to sound spacial recording) Visual also sparse and beautiful and not created by Jacob
Norman McLaren - Canadian film maker and visual music maker.
Synchronomy (1971)
Dots (1940)
Blinkity Blank (1955) music by Maurice Blackburn
https://vimeo.com/thenfb/blinkity-blank
Won the Palme D'Or short film - better music - orchestral
Canon (1964) music by Maurice Blackburn
An exercise in complete synchronicity with silly electronic music - animated (drawn directly onto the film) film and music by McLaren - sometimes others wrote the music. Very cute. A modern Oscar Finschinger
David Lynch - Great US director and sometime song writer
Crazy Clown Time - music video. (2012)
I'm Waiting Here (2013)
video not by Lynch
Thank You Judge (2001)
Standard form music videos. Music and film by David Lynch - well, he creates his music in collaboration with other musicians much like film making - he doesn't treat it as a solo creative process.
Yannis Kyriakides - composer and sound artist and creator of music-text-films
Dreams of the Blind (2007)
http://www.kyriakides.com/dreams_of_the_blind.html
Music by Kyriakides played live to projected film of text. (Beautiful music)
See article by Kyriakides Hearing Words Written (2016)
Eve Klien - singer artist
Vocal Womb (2018) performed at MOFO 2018
https://www.eveklein.com/vocal-womb/
Her own composition and performance as singer with sampled instruments. Projected image is her vocal chords as she sings
Carla Thackrah -
The Art of Sound & Sex Drugs and String Quartets (2002 & 2003)
Sound and visuals by Thackrah
Created first as four Radiophonic portraits for ABC Radio, visuals were added at a later stage to create a documentary style video and sound portrait. Using traditional montage and screen style music and sound, it is a hybrid work crossing the boundaries between documentary and video/ acousmatic art.
"Thackrah is "a composer whose work challenges categorisation and media demarcation. It can be argued that these works reflect an ‘intermedia aesthetic’ in which various media and modes of presentation and engagement are utilised by the composer/creator to explore and articulate an expressive intention" (McCombe, 2006 p300)
Circus Sweet (2004)
Sound and visuals by Thackrah
Another hybrid work crossing the boundaries between film, music video and video/ acousmatic art. using either live or prerecorded sound/music with highly edited archival footage creating an obscure narrative with a strong emotive tone.
Thackrah’s Circus Sweet creates an intriguing collage of disparate images in which the music and soundscape suggest and evoke many layers of associative and emergent meaning. The music creates a narrative, Thackrah using the visual images to manipulate and enhance the impact of the music, while the sound and musicprovoke a variety of reactions to the visual material. The nature of the work is such that themes and concepts explored are evoked primarily through the interaction between music and image." (McCombe, 2006 p306)