Music-Radio piece based in read Texts, Miku Stomp pedal, 6 mini speakers hanging from the ceiling when played live, Slide saxophone, Analog synthesisers, Field Recordings. The piece was started as a study on the use of the pitch and noise in the context of psychoacoustics, as a way to research into the basic sense of music making. The sense that I found for the piece was to consider sound as stimuli, as an initial energy that appeals to other energies to happen. Considering Music as a question that can appeal new languages to be born, showing us the freshness of a language in it´s most basic genesis. As a way to ask things, to show us how things communicate.

The psychoacoustic elements used in the case of pitch are quadratic and cubic combination tones. In my studio previous work for the piece, I made a selection of pure sine tones that triggered the Miku stomp, a pedal that makes your instrument sound with the voice of an Animé Japanese Character. Triggered by the sine tones the pedal offers a quite peculiar material. This operation was produced 8 times. These 8 voices are offered combined in a radical panning, in order to produce specific distortion phenomena in the internal ear, that makes the ear produce other tones. These 8 voices are diffused live by the main PA and subdivided in 6 mini speakers hanging from the ceiling.
These same mini speakers are used in a second part of the piece to amplify another series of pre made recordings, that I made with the slide saxophone, producing air-glissandi at three different velocities. I recorded the range of the instrument playing air noise at a 1 , 2 and 3 minutes velocity. Then the same several times , adding each time a little bit more of pitch. These recordings are offered in the piece amplified in two mini speakers each glissandi, creating a space dimensioned noise masking phenomena that covers real time playing of the slide saxophone.
In the piece are used also short pre recorded texts taken from books by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and notes of concepts that I took from a Keith Rowe speech while sharing a project in 2002, as much as my own words. I also use different kind of synthesisers, field recordings. Texts are read in Spanish and English, others are kept in their original languages Japanese and French.

Text Translation to English

Text by Jean-Luc Godard.
-Mum, what is language?

-Language is the home human beings inhabit.

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Text by Maurice Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception. Page 220 English version.


It is impossible to superimpose on man a lower layer of behaviour which one chooses to call ‘natural’, followed by a manufactured cultural or spiritual world. Everything is both manufactured and natural in man, as it were, in the sense that there is not a word, not a form of behaviour which does not owe something to purely biological being—and which at the same time does not elude the simplicity of animal life, and cause forms of vital behaviour to deviate from their pre-ordained direction, through a sort of leakage and through a genius for ambiguity which might serve to define man. Already the mere presence of a living being transformS the physical world, bringing to view here ‘food’, there a ‘hiding place’, and giving to ‘stimuli’ a sense which they have not hitherto possessed. A fortiori does this apply to the presence of a man in the animal world. Behaviour creates meanings which are transcendent
in relation to the anatomical apparatus, and yet immanent to the behaviour as such, since it communicates itself and is understood. It is impossible to draw up an inventory of this irrational power which creates meanings and conveys them. Speech is merely one particular case of it.

Strictly speaking, then, there are no conventional signs, simple notation of a pure and clear thought by itself, but there are words in which the history of a whole language is contracted and which carry out communication without any guarantee, in the midst of incredible linguistic vagaries. If it seems to us that language is more transparent than music, it is because most of the time we keep ourselves in the constituted language, we give ourselves available meanings, and in our definitions we limit ourselves, like the dictionary, to indicate equivalences between them. The meaning of a sentence seems to us to be fully intelligible, separable from this sentence, and defined in an intelligible world, because we suppose given all the participations which it owes to the history of the language, and which contribute to determine its meaning. On the contrary, in music there is no presupposed vocabulary. The sense appears linked to the empirical presence of sounds, and that is why music seems to us to be mute. But in reality, as we have already said, the clarity of language is established against a dark background, and if we take the inquiry far enough we will finally find that language says nothing outside of itself, or that its meaning is not separable from itself. It would be necessary then to investigate the first sketches of language in the emotional gesticulation by which man superimposes the given world, the world according to man.
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Text by Lucio Capece

We could in fact use music as an instrument of this inquiry by giving sound the mission of being a stimulus applied to things so that they are driven to produce signs capable of making us witnesses of the birth of a language.
If an ear is not only a receiver but also a creator of sounds, we can consider it as a creator of signs and if these signs have some perceptible logical correlation, we can consider hatred as a generator of language.If an ear is not only a receptor but also a producer of sound, it can produce signs, and if they have a perceived logic, can be considered something close to a language, the same for an eye, for a body, a space, a Japanese robot, a synthesiser stimulated from an external source. We are not speaking here about “playing” them as instruments or to produce interesting material to be perceived by them. But to offer them stimuli, with a certain level of ambiguity in order to create the basic conditions that can allow them to start producing signs indecent of our meaning wishes, that can become languages.
Languages in their primal steps, although with a certain intriguing level of abstraction. With capacity to produce a certain kind of understanding, independent of the meaning that we would give to them if they were used as instruments or receptors of our ideas and commandments. Positioning then ourselves as stimuli producers, trying to create conditions to allow languages to be born and to start creating their own syntax and semantics.

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Translation from Japanese of the explanation of a scientist that is developing in robots, the capacity to speak.

Even if a person does not know the meaning of a word, she can reproduce the sound of this word. This means that people uses already learnt information to intuit how to move the indie of their mouth, in order to produce a certain sound. It is following this idea that we began to research about the autonomous learning. To this robot we cannot teach all the sounds, but we can do it in a certain degree, and afterwards the robot can us the results of this learning. This means that even if the robot hears sounds that it does not understand, the robot can intuit the movement that it needs to make with it´s mouth, in order to reproduce the same sound

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Text by Keith Rowe

Weight
Frequency
Volume
Ambiguity
Placement
Moment
Room
It´s History
Projection
Sequentialness. Isolation
Pulse
Context (It´s effect on other sound)
In Time . As Time
Originality
Relationship to instrument
Expression / non expression
Degree of gesture

Keith Rowe


Keith Rowe

28/09/2003 - 29/09/2003, Bains::Connective
Brussels, Belgium
Treatise Residency-concerts supported by Q-O2

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Automatic text created out of the Keith Rowe´s text as a sound stimulus, by the Hatsune Miku Stomp pedal, in Japanese

ばつ あ ああ あなあ あ うーみち あー いー たー たー にア あー ういーままーうむ あぁああ こっち わかるわーいー

バック わた ばーか あー ばか 1 あーいーまた あー あらやだうーみーまー

うううーウーあーああアア ち 良い

Translation from Japanese to English of Hatusne Miku´s translation.

situation ah ah You ah Umi Ah - oh - o - ya ah well done

well aya here I understand back cotton Hoe ah moron 1

Ah-me again ah Oh no you Uooooooooooo Ah ah Chi good


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Text by Jean-Luc Godard

We start, but we start what?

God created the sky and earth, but it sounds a bit too open and easy . It would be better to say, to say that the limits of language are the limits of world, that the limits of my language are the limits of my world, and that speaking I limit the world, I finish it . But if randomly things become clear, can be maybe through the appearance of consciousness, after this, all comes together.




I hear the advertising on my radio

I leave quietly on the path of dreams

And I forget the rest

I forget everything

But once I'm at zero

I realise ... that it is from there that I must restart.