http://www.digitalperformance.org/Sonic.htm

Fall 2004

Sonic Alchemy
An Interview with Bruce Odland
by Digital Performance Managing Editor Karin Diann Williams

In their sound installation Blue Moon, Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger (O+A) transformed city noise at the World Financial Center Plaza into music in real-time, mixed by the moon and tides. Three "tuning tubes" installed in the North Cove Harbor created melodies and chords in response to the sounds of the city (helicopters, jets, boats, voices, waves, ferry, sailboats). The sound was played back through five "cube" loudspeakers arranged in an arc on the plaza, creating a zone of real-time harmonic city sound. As the tides rose and fell the mix of tuning tubes changed key, modulating with the orbits and cycles of the moon.

KW: After experiencing your sound installation “Blue Moon” at the World Financial Center Plaza this summer, I have been thinking about how technology interacts with our natural environment. Would you be willing to do an interview for digitalperformance.org?

BO: My focus is not on technology - I perceive it as just a tool, like a shovel or a pen. Each tool, however, changes our perception of the world…but, like a painter who does not make "brush art" I use computers without making "digital art." With that caveat, sure.

KW: I agree that “digital” in an of itself can’t define an art form…but GSRT is using the idea of “digital” performance to help define ways in which performing arts are changing, and ways technological tools can change our perceptions of art, and our means of expression. Do you think this has happened in your own work?

BO: Technology inspires my art in the same way listening and paying attention to the world around me does. If I am outside and hear a bird singing it may give me an inspiration and a connection to the loop between myself and nature. Listening outside with a good directional microphone to the bird is a different experience, one where technology functions as a prosthesis, extending the quality and experience of listening in a way that I can control and direct, much as I can control and direct my attention. This prosthetic attention allows my mind to surf the currents of the experience of living with extended attention. I'm also inspired by what I learn from the technology, and then what I can do with my senses. For instance the tuning tube technology that O+A uses allows the enhancement of order and harmonics within our perceived hearing sphere. But after listening to the overtone series in the tubes, I can hear overtone series in everything around me - with no tubes. My listening can now form an active filter, which can actively tune in to the existing resonances around me and hear the overtone series in pouring water, ventilation fans, driving cars, even the basic resonant frequencies of the room I’m sitting in. The experience of listening enhanced by technology trains my ear and attention to draw the order out of everything around me.

KW: Has your artistic work changed as a result of the technological innovation that has occurred over your lifetime?

BO: Certainly my work has changed through use of the computer - including completing this interview via email, while imagining your voice. We have learned to take this radical invention for granted, giving it no more importance than making a grocery list, but it alters my communication patterns and abilities - including the way I collaborate with my partner, Sam - quite radically. I learned how to telecommute in pursuit of international projects with a phone and fax…but now we can trade audio samples, conceptual diagrams - even complete site specific designs - over the internet, while sharing bits we wish on our website with people we’ve never met, and may never personally meet. It’s important to make these spinoffs from the military industrial complex our own, to redefine their uses in a positive way that follows our own ideals, and colonize the technology with positive artistic intent. If not, then we will find ourselves colonized by their original intent.

KW: A sound installation, like theater, is inherently interactive. Do you approach a sound installation differently from a musical composition - which is not interactive? And where does theater sound design fit in?

BO: I see nature as interactive, reading a novel as the best-yet interactive virtual reality, going to a dance club as haptic interactive body-oriented art, theatre as group cathartic gestalt from the time of the Greeks. My question is: does the use of advanced technology in the hands of artists make the media more democratic? Can it do this? Since the invention of the microphone, do we hear more or fewer voices? How can we enhance the many-to-many communications we desire, and move away from the one-to-many model of propaganda?

KW: How has technology transformed the everyday soundscape?

BO: Technology, especially the dependence on fossil-fueled energy contraptions which have proliferated in this gleeful age of free energy with baroque abandon, has made the public soundscape almost unlivable. People now must spend as much as 50% of their psychic energy eliminating all these stray and gratuitous signals. This sick cultural waveform contains almost no useful information for our sensitive hunter-gatherer hearing systems, so we protect ourselves by sculpting our attention away from this sonic chaos towards the remaining useful signals, with huge calculations in the noise receiving and decoding part of our brains, leaving precious little processing power for deep thought or communication. Perhaps another choice that’s now available is to replace the soundtrack of the world with a private soundtrack, direct to ear canal with headphones. Now the world, thus detached, becomes your movie - and you are a camera floating in private space. But it becomes personal, detached space - not democratic shared space.

KW: Are our thinking - and our brains - evolving in response to changes in our aural environment?

BO: The most intimate and quiet part of human communication - from the whisper, to the murmur, to normal dialogue - is now buried in a roar out of our control. All communications are now reduced to the level of a shout. It’s survival of the loudest. Kids who grow up near highways acquire what is called "learned helplessness syndrome." They find they cannot alter their environment, and this syndrome laterally transposes onto other aspects of their lives. At the same time, telepresence has collapsed space around us by randomly connecting us to people in other spaces. When you see 5 people at a table and 2 are on cell phones, is it a party of 3 or a party of 7? We have learned to inhabit more than one space at once. But are we really anywhere? Time will tell.

KW: You mention fossil fuels as a significant factor in our current predicament - and I know you are working on a new piece about fossil fuels. Do you think fossil fuel technologies have had a more profound effect than digital, or computer, technologies?

BO: Yes, indeed…thus far computer technologies have not been blamed for global warming, nor have they temporarily quadrupled the crop yields of industrial agriculture. Acoustically speaking, disc drives, printers and other minor whirs may slice our brains, and alter our perceptual possibilities with standing waves at certain frequency bands, but they are only adding to the standing waves of the power grid - ventilators, refrigerators, air handling, generators, and other contributors to our cultural waveform - in a fairly minor way. MP3's and the like have only made more convenient the digital transfer of music as commodity, already underway since the music box. But fossil fuels, and other clear signs of the industrial age, are the basic sonic materials of our perceptual life.

KW: You use a lot of computer metaphors. Do you feel that digital technologies have changed our perception of ourselves? Or are you using these metaphors ironically?

BO: I’m just trying to communicate with an audience whose self-perception is more than partly learned from machines, as is mine.

KW: On your website, you talk about a discrepancy between the visual and sonic aesthetic in our everyday world. Does this apply to theater, or does theater try to close the gap?

BO: It applies to all aspects of life requiring funding, which is a generally visual process, inevitably re-enforcing visual cultural attitudes. "So, you are a sound artist…will you send me your slides?"

KW: You also - at one point - mention the "commodification of the senses?" This seems relevant to theater. As an art form theater seems to have moved away from ritual towards commodity.

BO: Well, the minute you move away from group catharsis and ritual you are on the road to "ticketmaster" and "moviephone." It’s not only theatre and music that have become the playthings of experience collectors and art "owners" - religion, science, self help, ecotourism, and the chemistry in your brain and penis have all become commodities. Just watch the ads on the superbowl for an update. It’s an extension of the advertising weapon called "niche marketing.” First, divide and conquer the populace with separate products for smaller and smaller demographics - then divide and conquer the senses. It has already gone so far that products appealing to more than one sense are called "multi media" with fanfare. We can cry about the kings’ horses and kings’ men…or we can take note of the unity of trance, dance, music, visuals, atmosphere in the shadowplay festivals of the Balinese, who say "we have no art, we do everything as well as we can.”

Bruce Odland is a sonic alchemist developing a Hearing Perspective of our culture. With his partner Sam Auinger, he has altered the sonic identity of major architectural spaces including Trajan's Forum (Rome), Kongresshalle (Berlin), MASSMoCA (US), Salzburg, Castle of Linz (Austria), Miro Labyrinth , St.Vence (France), West Side Highway, (NYC), MAK (Wien), Erasmus Bridge (Rotterdam), Alexanderplatz and Potsdamer Platz (Berlin) and The World Financial Center Plaza (NYC.) This ongoing dialog with public space, resonance and architecture hopes to provoke a retuning of our shared industrial soundscape. At Chicago’s Field Museum he created Sounds From the Vaults, a collection of virtual instruments featuring twenty-five rare musical instruments from the Field Museum’s anthropology collection. As a Sound Designer for live theater, Odland has collaborated with Peter Sellars, JoAnne Akalaitis, Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, among others. He has also composed scores for dance, film, animation, radio and television, and music for his own group, The Bruce Odland Big Band.
To learn more, visit http://www.o-a.info/