Urban Soundmass

Music for Solo Performer
Champignon
A re-interpretation of Alvin Lucier's famous sound piece for human brainwaves "Music for Solo Performer". This interpretation was done directly from the poetic score, never having heard or seen the original music performance.

Brainwave performer: Andrew Brouse Audification by Automates Ki: Maxime Rioux Video Production: César Saez Inspiration: Alvin Lucier

All things are positioned within a point in time, in constant motion, dilated by relativity. In a system such as an online society or the development of a comprehensive search engine, action and reaction occur almost simultaneously. Modern technologically skilled society has the propensity for externalizing a vast amount of information, relations, concepts and interactions, delimiting their temporal quality. These constructs become formalized, a known thing with a value embedded within it, or a message with a specific subject. Temporalism has become fragmented within a framework driven by forces such as consumerism, economics, analysis, and prognostication. When temporality is reconfigured or absent, our perceptual faculties become less engaged with the object perceived. Although the interaction of an online society occurs instantaneously in a multiplicity of feedback, the ideas created within a temporal system present a mosaic of the assemblage. The concept that a form is a concrete, static object is not the full reality, though the objectification of the content through the formalization process. Whether fully aware of it or not, every idea expressed has a levels of formal translation. Language itself has a complex relationship of meaning, coding and interpretation.

When discussing the idea of dilation imposed upon groups of singular elements whether it is sound waves, or repetitive human activity, I am simply trying to relate these ideas to a time based framework whereby the stretching or condensing of time alters aspects of the form. The clap for example is an instantaneous event. If one takes the trace of the event, the sound wave in this case, and expand it out to 5 minutes you would witness the result time spreading out and the micro structure that comprises of the sound would have new characteristics. At the same time, condensing a piece of music originally composed for 10 minutes. When we hear sound, or the electromagnetic vibrations which, enter our ears and enter our bodies we are changed, emotionally and physically. The sound enters our body, whether it is audible or not.

Since the pioneering explorations of electronic music, sound has been thought of in a completely different way. We all produce and absorb vibrations. Sound especially designed sound is meant to reconfigure our bodies.

The process of using sound transmitted into space is an experiment attempting to inform the space and its inhabitants by taking the resonant frequencies from the material strata of the space and combinatorially reinserting it into a performance. Though this is a broad explanation of mechanics of this experiment, many of the intricacies in the translation of the sound from the participants would need to be reworked through some sort of digital software. Since any source of vibration can be formatted to bits of information and then using techniques to manipulate; fragment(disassembled) dissolve, extracted(filtered), recomposed(structure), Dilate(stretch or compress).

Within the structure of designed sound are three components. The attack, sustain and decay. The attack, the stinking of the string or the mallet it the initial input, the sustain is the deliberate exclusion of the sound.