Beyond Me

1988. My radical girls band split and by chance I land a job in a progressive studio in the early days of acid house music. I’m cutting beats for Graeme Park of the Hacienda and struggling with understanding MIDI, and loving to make humanly impossible rhythmic patterns banged out with Notator on Atari 1040STFMs and Akai S900s and the best bits are when things crash or lock up spewing super sounds I would never think of. A door opens. Not only does digital technology enable the making of other forms of music, but it can provide trajectories beyond me. The hook becomes not only how to find more of these situations to make new music, but how to use what they offer.

 

Around seven years later I’m sipping coffee in a Manhattan loft with the host of my previous night’s first MIDI violin solo in New York. A compilation CD that had just come in the post is playing on the huge sound system and this stunning sound emerges that I am swamped by. It seems synthesized yet creates one of those epiphanic moments when you realize you don’t need to do it any more as the job is done. This sound is it. Then of course it becomes a mission and so I go, pre-Internet, to seek out the maker.

 

It’s Alan Lamb, simply amplifying and recording 30m long steel wires stretched across the Australian outback that expand and contract with the changing temperature of the day, so altering the frequencies at which they vibrate as they’re struck by insects land- ing, winds blowing, twigs touching, humming, until without warning their resonant frequencies are found and they lift off. An invisible, tumultuous choir, only heard when amplified, and entirely acoustic. In essence, Alan and I are both working with strings but doing the opposite thing: me using a steel wound string of known pitch that I play, break down, and transform in purposeful ways through daily hours of experiment and digital processing; him using untuned steel wires pinned outside, their music created by the unpredictable and ever-changing patterns of the weather.1

 

Having been using microphones in nearby spaces to provide chance sounds for solo shows for years, the reality of my using not just sounds but systems of unpredictable patterns as source to play or from which to make sound, became a possibility a year later on the uninhabited Scottish island of Sanda. With a bunch of digital artists, writers, and world champion kite flyers, we embark for a week of experiments to catch the wind speed, direction, and shifting intensities of light through a huge kite carrying sensors hovering 30 metres above the top of the highest hill. Beneath it we crouch in a transparent tent with laptops, receiving the kite’s gathering weather data via radio, with me turning the streams into MIDI through Max/MSP and feeding it into my live sam- pling gadget LiSa, to start and stop sampling of the fat, taut kite string, its playback or looping, determining its filters and pitch shifting. The weather in effect is doing what I would normally do on stage and the result is sublime. Noisy and patterned and oth- erworldly. Combined with weather-processed text from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, I make Weather Made (1999).2

Ten years later I am standing with Jon Shelley (Environment Agency) and artist Laura Harrington inside a glorious noise fest that is the sound of the river Tyne at Riding Mill, Northumberland. Jon is telling us how they’d been counting and measuring the fish and the river since 1996. ‘All that data!’ I yell. ‘ Imagine! We could make wild tunes with it and take them to children in riverside schools and make songs together. It’s got to be the migrating wild salmon journey we follow. We could even make an incredible opera together!’ And so we did. Working with local coder Adam Parkinson and Max/MSP, we make melodies using 2010 data charting the number of wild salmon coming up and down the Tyne to breed then depart to Greenland, determining the rhythm from the river’s flow, while the whole piece is shaped by the variety of the seasons and the river’s route through the earth’s shifting topography.3

 

The results are astonishing and precise in their seasonal variety. Springtime fish-count data over rushing springtime flow really does make high-pitched energetic tunes; summertime slowing and becoming more chilled; sensuous, autumn lush and groovy; and winter, still and rich in monochromatic greyness. Using this direct sonification of river data to pitch and rhythm, the tunes created are also surprisingly tonal and singable for groups of eleven-year-olds or just inspirational for their own songwriting. The interesting point is that we had not only found a way to make music we never would have otherwise made, but that it provided an irresistible way into listening, awareness, and thinking for children who have this river rushing through their back gardens that until that point they had failed to see beyond its surface, least of all to write their own songs inspired by it. 4

 

For me, having been a maker who had not written or wanted to write a tune since 1986, this technique also produces a meaningful and quite unexpected way of reconsidering melody and rhythm as worthwhile components of new music making again.

 

Earlier that year I spend a week underwater with hammerhead sharks (Sphyrna lewini) in the Galapagos archipelago, being mesmerized by their ancient beauty and power as they swoop and cruise in circles around me.5 On land I meet shark scientists who, over the ensuing two years, give me the traces of six of them that they tag and track over twenty- four-hour durations. The sharks are out night-time hunting. Swimming alone in straight lines at depths as great as 300 metres, maybe going as far as 4 km, then turning round and coming back in straight lines, finding their way in the dark, the researchers think by reading the shift in the Earth’s magnetic crust through their under- head phenomenal electroreceptor system (see Figure 27.1).

The traces I’m given are as three-dimensional data; latitude, longitude, and depth, as well as ocean temperature and shark speed. If I build a multichannel system in 3D,

Figure 27.1 Six hammerhead shark routes made through the Galapagos archipelago North of Wolf Island. Tracking and map courtesy of James Ketchum, Dr Alex Hearn, and Dr Pete Klimley, Biotelemetry Laboratory, University of California Davis. 2012.

 

I could finally make a truly spatial and architectural composition from it. Invite visitors to come lie in it on a centrally placed wooden platform in the dark that will sympathetically vibrate through bass transducers strapped underneath. So that they can feel and hear the sharks pass through and swoop over them in blasts of sudden fat noise action or hover still, gently entwining or swirling in tonal patterns you or I or a machine could never articulate. A sense of another world?!

So I call Adam, and we work with Max/MSP to develop a system of eighteen digital oscillators, three per shark, through which we feed these traces. Through a variety of settings mixed with underwater recordings, played through an eight-channel system plus stereo subs and two channels for six bass transducers positioned in an exact cube around the platform, the results are extraordinary. And it reaches and communicates to such wide- ranging audiences from babies to the elderly. ‘This is maybe how it feels to see with electrical impulses in deep ocean’.6!

From this moment, data streams from action in nature or grabbing patterns that exist simply provide parameters, like a gesture with a violin bow, to add to my toolbox of music- making techniques. But unlike my violin playing, this information has a relevance and a link to systems outside of me and my ego, and is therefore much more interesting and relevant. So there continue to be other data-driven projects, for example The Lock Shift Songs (2014). In this, from the rise and fall of a cross-England canal path and my seven-

day walk along it I make a seven-verse song. Its surprisingly lyrical melodies are created from the direct sonification of the land rising and falling over distance and are sung by a

choir gathered from the final city’s community.7 (Note: A canal, unlike a river, is a human- made structure, whose wobbly or straight-lined direction is also a reflection of the finance available to the maker.)!

Today my focus is making music that moves and changes through spaces, taking the performer and audience with it. I am doing this worldwide and collectively, making varieties of operas and audioscapes completely determined by the context for which we make them. This is the world of sonic biking, in which the audience can cruise through landscapes on bicycles mounted with speakers. The audience moves through the sound, music, noise, narratives that play, changing them dependent on where they go. To date, I’ve made ten of these pieces, understanding more each time about how to use the shift- ing context, audio landscape, passing street and its changing physical and social archi- tectures, acoustics—oh for miserable empty suburban streets or downtown Houston at night reflections!—weather, time of day, people/animal, absence/presence, social dema- gogue to determine, to enable the audio material used, made, positioned, and played.!

Apart from receiving GPS data to enable the sonic bike to interact with its location, so playing a specific sound file, there is no numerical data being read to create this music. However, the site, the moving street I realize is the algorhythm. Providing an invisible source that cannot be quantified or written down, but that utterly feeds and determines what and how things work and what therefore is made.8!

It’s a year ago and I’m sonic biking through central Brussels, hearing a guy from Guinea softly talking above the bullish traffic about how it was only when he left Africa that he realized that the world is so big. That the world is too big for him. That he had had no idea it is like this here in Europe. And I’m riding amongst cars and buses, past varieties of shops and busy humans marching up and down, sirens kicking and tears come and I am understanding something of his experience. Later I’m recording Jimmy from the Congo not wanting to talk but instead to play djimbé. He plays and sings with a passion and freedom I’ve not heard since Senegal 1986. It’s amazing. Later in the studio I’m listening to it thinking, ‘but how do I use this material?’ This is 80s world music, this is not my thing. But a few days later it’s on the bike and it hits as I ride into a soulless city street and it jumps life now and it’s the best thing. And totally contemporary.

 

 

Notes

1  http://diy.spc.org/annetteworks/html/outback/.  http://londonfieldworks.com/Project-1-Syzygy.  C.Roberts,‘Background’,https://wp.kaffematthews.net/salmon/background/

2. Kaffe Matthews, ‘Music’, March 2010, https://wp.kaffematthews.net/salmon/m-u-s-i- c/,
‘Where Are the Wild Ones?’, https://wp.kaffematthews.net/salmon/

3. Kaffe Matthews, ‘Background’, 16 April 2009, https://wp.kaffematthews.net/sharks/ back-
ground/.

4. ‘You Might Come out of the Water Every Time Singing’, http:// wp.kaffematthews.net/
sharks/.

5. ‘TheLockShiftSongs’,https://wp.kaffematthews.net/works/the-lock-shift-songs/

http://sonicbikes.net/