This is a draft version of an idea I’m working on for a sound/video/performance piece.

In it I use a set of binaural microphones, and my body, as an instrument. I use the microphones backwards (i.e. facing into my ears as opposed to out of them), exploring the sounds of me touching my head as heard internally, and later in the piece the microphones become directly implicated as an instrument of sound production as I use them on the surface of my head/ears/face to make sounds.

This piece is sort of intended as a critique of the idea of binaural recording, a fascinating but flawed technology, and stereo imaging in general, both being ultimately one dimensional and only concerned with the ears, and not with the body’s other means of experiencing vibration.

Ideally I’d like this to be a live performance piece however I’m kind of terrified of the potential for these mics to produce feedback, having not yet had an opportunity to test them out with a PA system. For the moment it seem to work pretty well as video.

Apologies for my face! I’m not an actor or a model and there’s nothing staged about what my face is doing, although maybe there should be. That’s just how my face looks when I’m making sounds/playing instruments/composing.

We begin playing at about 31 or 32 minutes in.

I don’t know how long PBS are going to keep this available, I guess it depends on the size of their server. In the meantime enjoy!

By the way if you’ve ever wondered what I sound like playing guitar with the flu…that’s what I sound like.

By the end of my first year of undergrad I pretty much had to give the guitar up altogether. Luckily (?) I was able to get away with this as performance on my instrument wasn’t a front and centre concern for a composition degree however it was a far from ideal situation.

I had no one to blame but myself, I’d put myself in this situation through bad habits. My practice had been lazy, inefficient, bullish.

I took a year off guitar and in 2009 began a series of attempts to repair my ability to play. I went to a physio for a while, took a class in Alexander Technique at uni, began practicing yoga again, and between the skills I picked up I cobbled together a rehab program for myself.

Within a year I was able to play basic rock guitar a couple of times a week without significant pain, and I’ve been very carefully re-developing my guitar technique since then. In the last couple of months I’ve been able to resume practicing regularly, if I’m sensible with what I do I can practice every day.

What’s the point of me writing all this?

I’d just like to share a few lessons I’ve learned the hard way about playing instruments and about practice, and hopefully whoever reads this might avoid a couple of pitfalls.

So…

Playing an instrument should be easy

That’s not to say it’s not complicated, or challenging. That’s the art of practice, learning to make progressively complicated tasks easy to execute. Amazing instrumentalists, Hendrix, Menuhin, whoever, play complicated music with ease. For you this might be a quick process or it might be a slow process, it depends. You might be lucky and slip naturally into a really efficient technique, or you might be really good at analysing problems of technique and be able to consciously self correct relatively quickly. If this doesn’t happen for you it doesn’t matter, enjoy what you are able to do with ease and look for small ways to refine and improve what you do. The worst thing you can do is force the matter.

For example a lot of people (myself included) get hung up on how fast they can play. A natural thing to do if an increase in speed doesn’t come easily is to tense up and try to force your hands to move faster. This will work for a while. However if the only way you know how to maintain this ability is through tension and force then you WILL burn out sooner or later, that’s guaranteed.

In this example the route to increased speed is smaller movements, with less energy expended.

Pain is your body telling you you’re doing something wrong

If any part of your technique is causing you pain stop, rest it and try something else. If it’s a pain that’s persistent for minutes or more after you stop, rest it for a day and try something else. If it’s a pain that doesn’t go away at all after you stop (this will happen after years of bad practice) rest it for as long as it takes for the pain to ease, in some cases this could be weeks or months. You need to rest anything causing you pain. You have pain for a very good reason, it’s built into your body at a very primal level and it’s a vital survival tool. Anyone who tells you to “play through” pain doesn’t know what they’re talking about, and they’re on the path to disaster themselves. Follow at your peril.

The only instance in which pain is not something to take too seriously is when you first begin playing an instrument and get some stinging on your skin where you need to form a callus. Even in this instance you need to allow the skin sufficient time to toughen up.

Practice how you intend to perform

A lot of people will adopt a different physical posture, tone, volume level, etc. practicing and performing. If you perform playing standing up and with a broad dynamic range then practice playing standing up with a broad dynamic range. If you practice and perform differently then you’re learning to play in two different ways, you’re essentially learning two instruments, doubling your workload. It will take you longer to improve, and any technical gains that you achieve in your practice may take a while to translate across to performance or may not translate at all.

Only play if you really want to

This one may seem a little silly, practicing an instrument takes a lot of energy and time, but I’ve met a lot of people studying an instrument at university level, who are really good at what they do, who play an instrument…because they play an instrument. They get to the end of it and find themselves at a loose end, and not really wanting to play any more. If this is you, save your time and energy for something you really care about. You’re a very capable, intelligent person, and you could be doing something far more satisfying with your time. Inertia is a pretty tawdry form of motivation, find a better reason, or find something better to do with yourself. And don’t beat yourself up over the effort you’ve already put into it, who knows you may come back to it some day with a new perspective, and if you do your insight will probably make it easier and more rewarding.

So,what is…

Sound?

Vibration

Hearing?

The apprehension of vibration and its effects by the body. The traditional assumption is that this occurs only through the ears, but this could/should be extended to include any other organs sensitive to vibration or to its effects; the skin, proprioceptive apparatus, the eyes.

Listening?

Attentiveness to vibration and its effects.

An interpretive act relating vibration based stimuli to memory and knowledge of physical phenomena, methods and means of communication, context, sense of time, etc.

Music?

The cognitive result of listening.

Composition?

The act of shaping or contextualising sounds.

Pre-emptive listening, based on a knowledge of vibration based stimuli, their effects and associations for the listener.

The Location of Music?

The body of the listener.

The specifics of how I describe each of these ideas to myself varies every day, however the general theme stays the same, that notions of hearing/listening are traditionally over-focussed on the ear and exclude much of what goes on in situations where people engage with music. My aim, for the moment at least, is to address the question of how to explore composing for this “expanded listening”.

I’m aware that these definitions are very broad, but I have a hunch they need to be in the present world. For instance language could easily come under my definition of music, which I don’t think is such a bad thing, there have been lots of attempts to wrestle music into linguistic theoretical frameworks and it doesn’t fit, it’s too vague. Whereas I think there’s a good chance language could be a music, or at least it can’t hurt to think of it in that way.

Stay tuned…

I’m the one on the far right

So, I have a new version of the old adage, may it catch on:

Those who can, do
Those can teach, teach
Those who can’t teach bad mouth teachers

Dedicated to the music teachers of the world and their insecure detractors.

Recording plan for a learning engineer (written by a learning engineer)

• Analyse properties of ensemble (instruments, voices, various percussion).
• Figure out in advance what a desirable sound for each instrument is. (identify reference recordings?)
• Figure out the gear (instruments, amps, mics, preamps, effects)/space (surfaces, dimensions, baffles) necessary to attain desirable sound.
• Do a sketch recording of song with simplest possible configuration of gear/space elements.
• Analyse structure of song.
• Figure out a mix narrative (points to tweak sound/instrumentation/arrangement to fit narrative of song).
• Amend gear/space plan if necessary.
• Figure out how the e.q. landscape is going to be covered (what instruments accentuate/are filtered out from what).
• Record a guide track of all instruments in one space.
• If optimal spaces for recording instruments are different, perform seperate recordings. (alternately and ideally record the instruments at the same time in their optimal spaces).
• Be prepared to re-record anything and/or everything.
• Figure out an order of focus for the various sonic elements (i.e. voice priority 1, drums priority 2, etc.)
• Consider aesthetic of recording before beginning to mix (does it need to be loud? clean? subtle? are there genre considerations?)
• Establish necessary buses/routing.
• Select effects according to specific sonic/narrative objectives.
• Achieve a satisfying mix on monitors.
• Test on a variety of speakers, tv, hifi, pa, large, small, etc.
• Identify corrections to be made, repeat.