In class this week, the concept of Gesture and Texture, theorised by Dennis Smalley came up. Texture means something akin to the “normal” sound something makes, like the sound it would make in a steady drone. Gesture is then how that sound is articulated via action or interaction with an object. Specific gestures can also be linked to specific sounds like one expects to hear swooshing sounds when someone waves around a sword.
When I thought of applying this concept to my work, I realised that I could use it to understand if the gestures in my work are congruent with the sonic reality which is integral to something like a soundscape.
While I can apply this framework of thinking to multi-channel pieces, gesture doesn’t really exist as strongly in the digital world as fabricated noise is mostly out of context of the actions taken to create that noise and thus there would be no clear gesture. Arguably, trying to create gestures in fully synthesised pieces isn’t wanted as it makes more sense to push the boundaries of a medium than work towards mimicking a different one.
Interesting concepts aside, I have finally decided to go down the Expanded Studio Practice for 21st-Century Sound Artists route for a number of reasons.
As mentioned before, I wanted to have a heavy focus on a narrative but it would be a waste outside of an exhibition space as no one would be able to receive it properly other than my tutor. I thought was strange before but now I know that element 2, I’ve realised that if I want to do a multi-channel piece, it would make sense to do it for the gallery space where I could show other people my work.
The second reason was learning or judging what was more conducive to my learning. While multi-channel is something I’ve never done before and would be useful to have experience in it if I wanted to be that type of artist in the future, if I am a sound artist proper rather than say a sound engineer or producer, coding will as always come up in my work.
Even before I was making sound art, most of my pieces were held back by the fact that I don’t know how to code as my ideas would have some type of iterative process built in or something that lends itself to coding like a set of parameters of randomising parameters that then affect other parameters.
This focus on learning is a product of reading up on literature for my sound paper and one of the ideas that I have for it talks a lot about learning and if a university course lends itself to that.
I know that if I want to push the way I work, I would need to learn to code, so I’m decided to make a sound piece in pure data and maybe a different program too.
My ideas for the project haven’t really developed all too much since the last blog. Right now I’m stuck on what the context of my work is, as the purpose of the work is clear to me but I have no idea what the form will be like. If I still keep interactivity at the forefront of my mind the piece I make should have some easy way to control the sound generated in a way that doesn’t take a lot of creativity from the listener to do.