Douglas Kahn @DNK-Amsterdam, Sonic Acts and Steim Listening Session on 10 October 2011
18 OCTOBER 2011
On monday 10 October, STEIM, Sonic Acts and DNK-Amsterdam invited Douglas Kahn, Professor of Media and Innovation at the National Institute of Experimental Arts, at the University of New South Wales, to STEIM following his lecture at Stedelijk Museum on Sunday 9 October. Douglas, author of the acclaimed Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, more recently has written on naturally occurring electromagnetism in the science and the arts. Within the scope of this research topic he co-edited the brand new Source – Music of the Avantgarde, 1966-1973 (University of California Press, 2011).
Sonic Acts’ Arie Altena gave a short introduction on Kahn’s earlier work before Douglas himself started to delight the numerously attending public with the listening session, featuring works from Karl-Birger Blomdahl and Alvin Lucier. From the beginning, it isn’t quite clear what Douglas’ talk is going to be about precisely. Of course, the public knows about the title of the session 1966: Natural Electromagnetic Sounds, From Brainwaves to Outer Space, but unfortunately he fails to give a structural introduction. This omission could easily stem from the assumption that the audience at STEIM has a collective knowledge of his work en the works he will be talking about.
Before presenting Lucier’s and Blomdahl’s artworks, he introduces the public to the beginnings of telemetric measurement of electromagnetic waves, during the so-called International Geophysical Year 1957-58. Sputnik II was orbiting in 1957 with dog Laika on board, mystifying the Sovietan scientists as of the sounds the receivers would play back. The sound that Kahn plays to the audience at STEIM, a sound of beeping first, changing rhythmically to a crackling, unclear tone, was first believed to be Laika’s heartbeat. Later, it appeared to be the beeping of the rocket, blurred by the Doppler-effect. This conclusion led to more specific research regarding electromagnetic waves, their diffraction and the received sound.
The increasing awareness that one, as a scientist, could receive the electromagnetic waves that follow from an earthquake on the other side of the world and that those seismological waves had already travelled the opposite hemisphere ended the history of the sky as being “stigmatized by fundamental christians, as now there were some truths in it”, as Kahn states. Although this introduction is necessary for the conclusion he is working towards, and is interesting beyond question, its length makes it difficult to concentrate on what this talk is about.
When scientific research on electromagnetism flourished, artists discovered the implications of electromagnetic sounds for sound art. Karl-Birger Blomdahl, Swedish composer and conductor and, when he made Altisonans in 1966, head of the national Swedish broadcasting station Sverige Radio, in this piece used bird sounds mixed with telemetric electromagnetic waves and black-and-white visual footage. His “piece of experimental television” had a clear modernist approach, even mocking the expected relation between audio and video. The audience is first confronted with some minutes of pure bird sounds and a black screen, before the visual part sets in, and the spectator most likely starts to wonder if there is any relation between sound and image.
While scientists such as Edmond Dewan experimented with brainwaves as to their power to help paralyzed patients to communicate with the world, Alvin Lucier, composer of experimental installations and sound installation and long-time music professor at Wesleyan University, as well started to experiment with electromagnetic waves. In his 1965-piece Music for Solo Performer he makes use of Dewan’s findings, showing that a person can even control instruments with his mere brain activity and the proper technology. Two years later Whistlers deploys the magnetic disturbances in the ionosphere, inspired by scientific experiment conducted by Millet Morgan in 1955. In this piece, ‘whistlers’, the long descending sounds caused by lightening, are made audible during a live performance.
It is striking that Kahn lets his enthusiasm for the topic and the listening samples overrule the talk as a structured speech content-wise. As we see, natural electromagnetic sound, being the measured audibility of electromagnetic waves, appear to play an important role as a measurement tool of spatiality in both science and art. Listening to those -mostly strange- sounds that actually surround us everyday, but in a non-perceptive way, makes aware of the ubiquitous but invisible traits of mother nature. However, this is not the whole conclusion of Kahn’s talk. While he vividly talked about Lucier and Blomdahl as pioneers of the brainwave sound art, he runs out of time to explain John Cage’s appropriation of brainwaves. In his 1966-piece Variations VII he uses “as sound sources only those sounds which are in the air at the moment of performance”. His focus thus lies on the temporality of sound. This, as Kahn explains, is one of the main differences with the ‘Brainwaves scene’ that focused more on spatiality, especially keeping in mind the close attachment with artworks using electromagnetic waves from outer space.
Douglas Kahn’s analysis of the development of the usage of electromagnetic waves in sound art, enriched with the sound fragments of different pieces, is a strong and interesting one. His enthusiasm and clearly great knowledge of his examples is striking, and his willingness to answer questions from the audience make this evening special and thought-provoking. Nonetheless, time is short for a researcher such as Douglas Kahn: John Cage’s piece takes a back seat in his argumentation, where it should have host the main two topics: brainwaves sounds as well as the sounds from outer space.
