2 + 2 =

A math primer for the hard of hearing :-

Nigel Helyer
"Are the sounds issuing from (the instrumentation connected to) Stelarcs body real, or not?"
Such was the concussive topic which concluded a day of specialised presentations at the Sound in Space
forum, this was the talkfest accompanying the rst national survey of acoustic arts at The Museum of
Contemporary Art, Sydney (May-July 1995).
That a debate amongst discipline specialists could mire itself in such a prosaic manner caused me to speculate
that perhaps certain people in the hall were, as yet, unaware of the operations of the telephone!
More productively this incident, marks the habitual dualistic manner in which sound is conceptualised - as
real or as virtual, as signal or as noise, as low- or as hi- et al - establishing the conditions of dilemma - when
it may be more useful to consider sound as effectively lling and owing between the poles of such binary
categories, rendering them as marginal denitions rather than central characteristics.
Our (in)ability to recognise and describe sonic experiences is in part due to a dearth of appropriate acoustic
metaphors. The metaphoric structure of English is visually overdriven and typically surrenders experience of
the aural dimension to the nearest codied category; Music. As a surrogate conceptualisation of all sound,
Music and to some extent the Voice, absorb our acoustic experiences and suppress the invention of alternative
categories of expression.
Morphology :-
And now another true story:-
The young man spent those difcult pubescent years in purgatory, obsessively working every spare hour of the
day in the kitchen of a restaurant , even during the hours of sleep, plagued by nightmares of crockery
contaminated with tenacious melted cheese. Finally his torments came to a close, cash in the bank he
approached the Music Master only to be devastated - he possessed the wrong shaped mouth (embouchure) to
play the Trumpet! He is now a ne Saxophonist (and a sound theorist!).
This is a tale of the t, look or feel of a literal morphology (the mouth) with an instrument - it points to the
inextricable relationship between sound, as a dynamic index or sign, and its (dynamic) source, or referent in
the sensible world. But even here at the ground zero of sonic production sound is simultaneously phenomenon
and representation always both real and virtual. The polymorphous existence of sound; its ability to
simultaneously inhabit the corporeal and the imaginary has long been acknowledged. In the Tempest,
Shakespear conjures a sonorous Island elaborating a view of the natural world under metamorphosis, between
noise and music, plying between the evil and benign expressions of a unied life force. Within this context the
island itself is an articial (or rather magical) construct that operates as the architecture for the events of the
drama. Sound is the principal vehicle for the differentiation of actual from magical moving between natural
soundscape, music and dream imagery.
Be not afeared; this isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices
that, if I then had waked, after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches Ready to drop upon me,
that when I waked, I cried to dream again.
William Shakespear, The Tempest.
Harmonics :-
Take this page and fold it in half (2) fold it in half again (4) then again (8) then again (16) and again (32) and
yet again (64) should we continue (128) on to (256) the page is now (512) rather small (1024) and becoming
(2048) somewhat difcult (4096) to read (8192). Logos + arithmos provide the fundamental structures for
biological growth and until the introduction of the metric system (a system designed for and by shopkeepers)
provided the basis for virtually all systems of measurement.
Absolute Certainty :-
Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is dealing with numbers, because
it does many things by ways of unnoticed conceptions which with clear conceptions it could not do. Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz.
During the 6th Century B.C. the Pythagoreans established harmonic correspondences linking micro-cosmic
with macro-cosmic structures. Employing the Monocord (an instrument equipped with a single string and a
movable bridge) to experiment with musical ratios, principally the integers 1, 2 , 3, and 4, the Pyhagoreans
sought to relate the length of a string (or pipe) to pitch enabling them to formulate the oldest Mathematical
expression of the Natural world.
This prototypical arithmetic modelling of the world assembled abstract mathematical principals and geometric
forms as a structural underpinning for the subsequent analysis of natural morphologies and cosmic
movements. The numerical ratios which form the musical scale were developed into a Universal theory and
projected by the Pythagoreans into the heavens, where by analogy, as all moving bodies produce sound so too
must the planets form the Music of the Spheres. Such an assumption relies upon the propriety of exact
correspondence between the quantitative (the numerically calculated) and the qualitative (the actuality of the
sensible world). This certainty is expressed in the parable of Platos cave which is premised upon both the
existence of absolute truth and mans ability to seek and recognise it.
Certainty :-
The movements of the heavens are nothing except a certain everlasting polyphony. Kepler
Within a theological context Absolute truth translates as both the omnipotent position of the God-head and
dogma required to maintain this state (of grace?). From the initial pre-christian harmonisation of the cosmos
structured around an absolute schema, scientic development was to witness a gradual slippage toward a
dynamic form of chaos as a principle of cosmic organisation; resisted at every turn by theological forces.
In processing the mass of data on the motion of the planet Mars, collected by the Danish astronomer, Tycho
Brahe, Kepler was to realise a fundamental discrepancy between the calculations for circular planetary motion
and the observational data. This nally lead to Keplers proposition of elliptical orbit patterns, a proposition
radical enough to demand some form of redemption! In Harmonia Mundi Kepler strove to develop his
astronomical system and succeeded by redening the Music of the Spheres in establishing a ratio for each
planet - derived from its maximum speed (when nearest to the sun) and its minimum speed (when most distant
from the sun) and integrating these ratios within the musical scale. The remarkable feature of Keplers
planetary ratios is their close correspondence with the integers prevalent in earthly harmonics.
UnCertainty :-
Whilst theoretically pure and appropriate for earlier melodic sequences, mathematical models for polyphonic
harmonic structures rapidly turn nasty. The strict arithmetic lay out of pitch produces dissonance in the form of
harmonic beating - the bad fth, for example, was so dissonant it was labelled The Wolf. Bachs The Well -
Tempered Clavier was one methodology for eliminating, or rather dispersing such dissonant chaos across the
keyboard, as is the contemporary method of equal tempered tuning which progresses each note by the ratio of
the twelfth root of 2:1 distributing dissonance and consonance throughout the range.
Consonance is the blending of a higher with a lower tone. Dissonance is the incapacity to mix, when two tones
cannot blend, but appear rough to the ear. Euclid.
Such dissonance is a small reminder that natural harmony is a uid rather than absolute state. That many
professional piano tuners work by ear in order to build texture into the range of an instrument speaks of
dynamic listening systems which are much more complex than originally proposed by arithmetic formulation.
Euclid demonstrated that between the geometric construction of the Golden Section (the paradigm of harmonic
beauty) and its precise harmonic proportion there exists a minute deviation of 0.007. Slippage in the
mathematical precision of harmonic systems is also compounded with the distortions and discrepancies which
arise from incremental inertial loss in the transmission and reception of sound - the energy required to set
objects in motion being in effect drawn from the sound event - even the human ear has an energy demand
when it is set in sympathetic resonance to initiate hearing.
The French mathematician Poincar closed the door on the concept of unequivocal mathematical models of
nature by demonstrating the shortfalls of Newtonian physics for planetary motion (he proved it was
mathematically impossible to predict the exact future behaviour for even a three body orbiting system;
whereas Newton has stopped at two and assumed the remainder!). In so doing Poincar illuminated the
incommensurability that exist for a precise t at the interface of scientic analysis and actuality.
The certainty of uncertainty was nally enshrined by Werner Heisenburg who formulated the collapse between
the scientic subject and the object of study in 1927 in the form of the Uncertainty Principal which states that
in choosing the area of study; one, in effect, creates the object of inquiry, echoing Flaubert :-
"The more developed the telescope, the more stars there will be". Flaubert
Chaos Theory, with its iterative events, successively looping to congeal about strange attractors is one of the
heirs of this retreat from certainty which perhaps puts Platos fettered slaves back in the ickering cave with an
eternity to gure it all out again!!!
Sounding Bodies :-
A phenomenon by denition is inextricably linked to the possession of a sensory body. Naturally it is our
habitual (and inevitable) use of the bodys perceptual horizons as indexical mechanisms which have created
topologies of embodied and dis-embodied events or thresholds of the tangible and the intangible. As any foray,
beyond a world bounded by Newtonian physics will demonstrate, our perceptually framed understanding of
spatial and temporal reality fails to recognise objects and events which refuse to conform to the scale and
velocity of the Procrastes bed which the frame of our body has become.......Nigel Helyer 1992, An Unrequited
Space, in Working in Public. Confusion abounds when we attempt to imagine beyond the limits of our own
horizons to encounter the Weltanschauung afforded by instrumentation or as possessed by other species. Even
the simple scaling of the eshy vehicle has a dramatic effect upon perception and the morphology of
perceptual structures.
Acknowledging that frequency tends to vary as the inverse square of linear dimension (cf the Pythagorean
experiments which demonstrated that as scale diminishes pitch increases) - we nd that in a biological context
this will produce an effect in which a creature of some 50 times smaller mass than another will be pitched, in
both its capacity to voice sound and to perceive sound, at some 2,500 Hertz (ten or eleven octaves) above the
larger being. Naturally this scalar effect has not only implications for the perception of tone but relates to the
capacity to perceive and experience other magnitudes of depth in time. All this of course would have had
serious implications for both Alice in her curiouser and curiouser expanding and contracting universe phase
and for Gulliver in his various conversations with the Emperor of Lilliput, whose voice was shrill , but very
clear and articulate.....his Imperial Majesty often spoke to me and I returned answers, but neither of us could
understand a syllable.....
A corollary to this dimension/frequency relationship is the evolution of morphologically divergent structures
for communication and environmental perception. Ironically this phenomena is more clearly illustrated by the
size of the eye as compared between animals of varying mass. By juxtaposing the dimensions of the eye to
body size of a mouse with the (proverbial) elephant it becomes clear that the ratio of eye:body is
comparatively much larger for the mouse, than the eye:body ratio for the elephant. It would seem that all eyes
are developed from an original biological pattern which is only operational within a certain dimensional range.
Moreover the limiting cause here rests with the size of the rod and cone receptor cells which remains constant,
irrespective of the size of eye they form (the receptor cell being in turn constrained by the frequency of light
they react with).
It is signicant that smaller creatures, such as insects, have evolved optical sensors which avoid the diffraction
problems which would inevitably occur in shrinking the mammalian style eye - by developing compound eyes
(which coupled with antennae systems) open sensory windows beyond our conception of visual. (cf. DArcy
Thompson On Growth and Form).
We should acknowledge that the Procrastes bed which the frame of our body has become. is largely
responsible for the anthropomorphism by which we stumble past the inhabitants of plural worlds and plural
spectra. Although the mammalian ear is the most developed in the biosphere, the human ear only amplies
ambient sound by a factor of x18 - low gain when compared to the Kangaroo mouse which operates at x100
amplication. To return to the proverbial elephant, we nd ourselves disenfranchised, and perhaps surprised,
to nd that elephants generate a very low frequency growl from their stomachs, giving them the ability to
communicate over vast distances of savanna. As physical body size diminishes the morphology of sensory
devices must adapt to higher frequencies (ie shorter wavelength). Most insects mirror the networked structures
of their optical sensors (ommatidia) with arrays of vibration sensing hairs (usually found on their legs)
individually linked to nerve cells and routed directly to the brain - the length of hair determining the frequency
response - a compound hearing! Hearing at the micro-scale is often highly adapted to particular a function -
the sensory hairs which form mosquito antennae are arrayed like tuning forks which sympathetically resonate
at the exact frequency of its species wing beat - a resonant circuit adapted for a singles bar routine!
Mnemotechnics :-
What can be sung can also be written down. Moreover, there are many other new things latent in Music which
will appear altogether plausible to posterity. Jean de Muris.
As the voice may be considered analogous with thought, so text becomes its mnemonic technology, as do
conventional, harmonically structured instruments and musical notation propose grammars and vocabularies to
store partial areas of our sonic experience. The development of mnemonic forms capable of encoding sensory
experience is un-even. Systematised forms of visual mnemotechnics predate those of text and sound, with the
areas of haptic and olfactory experience totally lacking any substantial, communicable mnemonic form
(although a good cookery book goes a long way with taste!!!).
Schizophonia :-
In The New Soundscape, R.Murray Schafer coins the term Schizophonia (split + sound) to refer to the cleavage
of sound events from their source. Stripped away by recording technologies from their origin dislocated
sounds circulate in a vast proliferation of de-centred reproduction. As sound by nature androgynously
embraces the real and the virtual, it is able to masquerade convincingly in this double role. Conversely, being
relatively opaque technical media, the photograph or video image must constantly announce their mediation in
the mnemonic process.
Audio Recording (Analogue or Digital) is a mnemonic technology in which sound is made to ow back and
forth as an electro-mechanical analogue, of an event distant in temporal and spatial terms, to debouche into
architectural space and/or the space of the ear, to re-create an equivalent aural experience. This transaction
goes beyond the representation s of Visual culture, or the open framework for imagination, provided by
literature, representation in sound approaches a condition of re-incarnation.
Although perhaps this was not always the case with early attempts to capture the essence of the sound
environment :-
....to my indescribable astonishment and horror, the devilish metal funnel spat out, without more ado, its
mixture of bronchial slime and chewed rubber; that noise that possessors of gramophone and radio sets are
prevailed upon to call music. And behind the slime and the croaking there was, sure enough, like an old master
beneath a layer of dirt, the noble outline of that divine music. I could distinguish the majestic structure and the
deep wide breath and the full broad bowing of the strings..." Hermann Hesse. Der Steppenwolf 1927.
In any event, all forms of representation trade in loss, certain aspects of the environment are excluded as they
are loaded into the narrow band-width of the technical vehicle. This is most obvious for the photograph, which
excludes almost everything of the world beyond a fraction of a second and a particular angular point of view.
Sound is a more complex phenomenon, being dependant upon the type of recording and transmission medium
involved. The massive compression we experience in telephone sound constantly announces the voice as a
simulacra, co-substantial with itself. But this ghosting is increasingly difcult to locate within high-delity
systems in which sound is transparently mapped back into experience - sound here becomes simultaneously a
unique event and a representation : although at a fundamental level this characteristic (of being simultaneously
an index and a referent) applies equally to naturally occurring sounds as it does for recorded sounds.
The poor cousin in any discussion of sound concerns another Morphology - Architecture - even in a
conventional Musical performance the (ideal) concert Hall is a transmission and moulding mechanism,
dynamically fused with the orchestra and the listener. An entire architectural sub-history forms a web of
metaphoric correspondence between the physical structures of the body with those of architecture, music and
biological structures.
Architecture is frozen Music . Goethe.
or was it :-
Stone is frozen Music. Pythagorus.
Architecture lends its morphology to not simply to contain or propagate sound but to modulate and designate
sound within a spatial identity. In this respect sound memorises the spatial and textural character of
architectonic space, sound being the primary key in our perception of space. Italo Calvino describes a king ,
transxed upon his throne - trapped immobile, listening at the centre of his kingdom.
Vestibules, stairways, loggias, corridors of the palace have high, vaulted ceilings; every footstep, every click of
a lock, ever sneeze echoes, rebounds, is propagated horizontally along a suite of communicating rooms, halls,
colonnades, service entries, and also vertically, through stairwells, cavities, skylights, conduits, ues, the
shafts of dumbwaiters; and all the acoustical routes converge on the throne room. Into the great lake of silence
where you are oating rivers of empty air, stirred by intermittent vibrations. Alert, intent, you intercept them
and decipher them. The palace is all whorls, lobes; it is a great ear, whose anatomy and architecture trade
names and functions; pavilions, ducts, shells, labyrinths. You are crouched at the bottom, in the innermost
zone of the palace-ear, of your own ear; the palace is the ear of the king.
Italo Calvino. The King Listens - (Under the Jaguar Sun).
Writing in The Grain of the Voice , Barthes develops a morphological site for the voice, operating as a dual
production at the juncture between music and language.
The grain of a Russian tenor is....directly the cantors body, bought to your ears in one and the same movement
from deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages, and from deep down in the
Slavonic language, as though a single skin lined the inner esh of the performer and the music he sings.
all this detached from individual expressivity to act symbolically - it is body without personality, one entirely
cosubstancial with its cultural and environmental context.
Digisphere :-
Well! Ive often seen a cat without a grin," thought Alice; "but a grin without a cat ! Its the most curious thing
I ever saw in all my life!
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland.
Recording pure abstraction :-
Well, I hate to say this but...digital sound does not exist. Digital storage, transmission and manipulation of
sound analogues do. The sporadic Analogue versus Digital debate principally hinges upon which boxes
contain sounds, once out of the box its all analogue anyway; until, perhaps it hits the nervous system! (and we
could have various conversations about Synaesthesia here!!!).
A (dis)connection between experience and information is a central characteristic of all mnemonic
technologies. In music terms such a cleavage between performed sound and an informatic system which
contains sound data arrived with the player piano. As a descendant of the Jarquard loom (as are computers)
the player piano provided a mechanical recording, not of sound (as did the Gramophone) but of the
information required to re-constitute the musical event. Although dependant upon the condition of the re-play
instrument, player pianos were theoretically perfect transcription devices, leading Percy Grainger, the
prominent Australian composer, to remark that the piano roll represented him as he would like to play.
Early electro-acoustic experiments relied upon analogue synthesis to invent new instruments, soon abandoning
clumsy (and expensive) attempts to numerically simulate natural sounds. Such analogue synthesis, which
could be considered less radical than the player piano, have aquiesced to the contemporary coupling of digital
sampling possibilities with MIDI. interfaces which have effectively transformed our conceptualisations of
sound as a mutable substance, rendering (recordings of) natural sound as raw material in a new musicalisation
of the world. The deciding factor in the ascendancy of either numerically derived sound, or sampled material
seems to be the technical relationship between processing speed on one hand and storage on the other -
naturally the new Video/lm studios in Moscow use all digital control systems to operate analogue storage
equipment!!!
The complex forces which have motivated the development of digitisation echo Pythagorean concepts of
abstraction and purity. Digitisation is an absolute hygiene of sound divorced from the (now acknowledged)
chaos of physicality to be corralled in the realm of the Digisphere. Claude Shannons pioneer work in
Information Science established the concept of Information as a primary substance, equivalent to matter or
energy, permitting Sound, in a laboratory/studio context to becomes a pure substance available for re-
formation and re-constitution upon demand. Sound in digital storage is rendered without a referent and ipso
facto without a morphology, thus doubling Schaefers anxious schizophonia. An ideal substance capable of
being transformed to ow into the mould of new referents, new morphologies, new sonic architectures - a
sympathetic magic, in which the world is captured by a transparent recording medium and then asked to lead a
life of indenture - assigned to the MIDI keyboard.
Like Kepler, analogue adherents continually fold back into the palpability and inherent complexity, of
actuality. This return should not simply be interpreted as a nostalgia for obsolete technologies but rather seen
as an acknowledgment of the operational relationship which such technologies share with natural dynamic
processes.
Perhaps we should recall the (possibly apocryphal) anecdote of a North Vietnamese defector who landed his
Mig. 21 at an American Military base. Delighted with its rst intact specimen, the Federales crawled all over
the machine - proclaiming in sheer delight when they discovered that all of the Migs instrumentation was
valve powered. The euphoria at discovering this technical anachronism was instantly cooled when one of the
technical team pointed out that valves were not affected by atomic blasts whereas transistorised circuits
instantly fuse.
Noise + Ambience :-
There is a special place - a low mountain range in the Western desert. Rocky slopes on which to do nothing - I
have spent a good deal of time there doing just that. It takes two whole days for the tyre rumble to subside
from the ears - for the nerves to re-set to zero. Then at night listening becomes possible - It becomes possible
to hear absolutely nothing. As for the tape-recorder, it simply inscribes its own irrelevant hiss. Here is an
immense quiet; a quiet resting under the luminescence of the Milky-Way; a full quietness. The rocks are
singing away the day's heat at some inaudible pitch, the heart-beats of reptiles are slowly rolling down
thermal gradients - it is a quiet of solid repose.
But then there is another form of silence. An un-stable silence that peels away behind the stereo voice, drawn
into a vacuum of inky and dimensionless space. Arrayed across the horizon, and appearing both proximate
and distant are the voices - voices which address us, which converse without falter. Somehow they simply
appear, hovering at coordinates plotted into radio-phonic position - whilst all around them the architecture
has been demolished. All surfaces, even the very ground, has slipped over the edge of a cataract of silence.
That which remains is the space of the promised after-life; a life in which quiet does not exist.
Nigel Helyer, Bell Transfer - Ars Electronica Installation Linz 1989, The ABC and ORF Radio
I experienced my rst conscious encounter with a black-hole whilst listening to a series of Hrspiele radio
productions presented by Klaus Schning of WDR. Kln. This null effect (not dissimilar to an anechoic
chamber).was created by the hi-delity silences generated in studio processing.
In an attempt to capture content - digital media has the tendency to gate out the insignicant, the marginal and
the accidental - moreover it is destined to deny its own presence under the assumption that a disappearance of
technical means is proportionally equated to an increase in audio delity. We arrive at the myth of a total
technical transparency which mimics the perceptual masking in human hearing; our own perceptual horizons
being limited to prevent us from recognising the frequencies of our own nervous system. The ambition of
digital recording is to shadow itself in a pretence of naturalism - the black box claims to be a mirror - but a
mirror which will not reect environmental deviation, wear, tear and age very Snow White! In this place, that
which is not intended, is not simply empty, it does not exist - it is the abyss.
Resonance :-
What I sketchily propose here goes just a little further than the kindergarten information theory dualitys of
sender/receiver, noise/signal by positing an ecological model, a kind of sonic Gaia - able to generate a morphic
eld, which through the phenomenon of resonance organises the elements of the (sonic) cosmos. A mnemonic
summoning of all the elements of a sounding circuit to resonate across a matrix of (what we could call time
and space).
In the sensate world space and time are to a degree palpable; speed being taken as a measure of motility
through both domains. In sonic terms speed (of an event) is interpreted as frequency and reveals itself as pitch;
whereas dimension and mass are generally associated with resonance which ,of course, also reveals itself as
pitch!
Much attention has been paid to Virillios collapse of the domains of Space and Time into a the vector,
Speedspace.
The major problem with the Virillian logic is that it is quite literally (to use one of his own titles) War and
Cinema, dominated by conceptualisations drawn from the military/industrial mind-set with an ide xe
determined by Vision, more explicitly expressed as trajectory or vector.
Just such a Virillian collapse of all senses into the visual is echoed within the electronic reincarnation of light
in bre optic as informatique. Within telematics the spatiality so vital for the fundamental operational
categories of sound experience, surroundedness, immersion, directionality and depth are denied - the principal
focus remaining with a narrow denition of signal as content and context as noise. This denial of the
architecture of spatio-temporality is not dissimilar to the digital processing of sound which promises to return
the collapsed ambient space as Virtual Space, where time and space are naturalistically re-deployed as
metaphors literally standing-in for themselves. Why should we be interested in such Newtonian
reconstructions? Why should visual grammars cuckold the metaphoric richness of aural experience only to
nally loose perspective in speedspace - a domain in which sound simply disappears!
Henri Bergson once posed the problem; how would it be possible to perceive the actions of a hypothetical
agent, who had, overnight, achieved a doubling of the speed of all the events in the Universe? His solution was
quite simple, we would discern a great loss in the richness of experience (as phenomenon disappear through
the top of our perceptual range).
Finale :-
Every disease is a musical problem Novalis.
Perhaps it is appropriate to loop back to our entry point and re-examine our dearth of appropriate sonic
metaphors - now placed under even greater duress by the Virillian Houdini act. The cue-point is Entrainment
or phase-locking is a well recognised physical phenomenon in which elements of natural, dynamic systems
correspond to establish harmonic patterns with one another. This tendency to synchronise frequencies, or to
share rhythms is observable across the entire gamut of both the natural and constructed world. Entrainment
occurs at the level of cell growth and in the complex bio-social organisation of animal groups it inhabits the
tuning circuits of radio receivers and synchronises the habits of twin children.
By establishing Resonance as a new organising metaphor for sound experience we can conceptually assemble
both the morphological and the mnemonic domains of sonic events. Such a web-work would function to
connect historical actuality, technical mechanisms, architectural acoustics and the listening subject(ivity) into a
harmonically coupled organism. An organism capable of operating as an active net-work, constituted in terms
of multiple resonances, feeding at rst, upon the redundant metaphors of time, space and speed.
Nigel Helyer 15/03/1996
(SoundCulture 96-draft 15/03/96)