This section of the site works a little differently to the rest and is designed to hold those of my various writings that don’t fall into neat “academic” categories (these can be found in the “texts” section which you can access via the link on the left).
- The posts here are shown in excerpted form in chronological order.
- To read one, simply click on the title line (it turns blue).
- To return to this page, click the “back” button of your browser or click on the “blog” link on the left.
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There are innumerable literary perpectives upon the subject of autumn, many of them metaphorical. As the nights become earlier and colder the prospect of book and armchair becomes ever more alluring and the consideration of literary procedures becomes a seasonally defensible activity, especially where it reflects one’s own situation. You may perhaps read that statement as being, in itself, something of a personal metaphor, reflecting the prospect of my own imminent retirement. This, in our culture, is one of the major symbolic acknowledgements of advanced age, as certain as arthritis, liver spots and hands with reptilian skin where one was softer, pinker flesh. The senses are attenuated, shrunken, reduced in responsiveness and we are forced to admit that we are victims of a process that we have so long denied. Hardly surprising, then, that, at this problematic juncture, we often feel the need to equip ourselves with the experience and wisdom of others. Some of us get religion, some join clubs and others………….politely withdraw
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You may find some oddities in the formatting of my blog pages: certainly previous visitors will notice changes in presentation. Please bear with me as I’m engaged in an update to my whole website (of which the blog is a part). For technical reasons, the blog pages have to be inserted into conventional web pages in a rather time-consuming fashion. Not the least of the issues involves re-formatting the pages, hence the change in appearance. I hope this doesn’t prove too much of a hassle: it will hopefully be worth it in the end!
At a height of around 100,000 feet, the sky is pretty much black, the Earth is predominantly blue and the curvature of the horizon is quite apparent. To all intents and purposes, save for the continued presence of gravity, one is in space. Officially, however, space begins at 100 kilometres (62 miles, otherwise known as the Kármán line) above the Earth’s surface except when it’s necessary to talk about the first American spacemen at which point the threshold suddenly drops to 80 kilometres (50 miles). By either criteria, Joe Kittinger never became a spaceman nor, in his return to terra firma, did he fall either as far or as fast as John Glenn or those who followed him. Perhaps for this reason or perhaps because he ascended modestly by means of a helium balloon rather than in spectacular fashion, lashed to a thundering ex-missile, Kittinger’s record-breaking ascent is often forgotten. However his ascent is, in some respects, nothing special: stratospheric balloon flights had been made previously and were made subsequently although Kittinger’s personal best of 102,800 feet remains the record. What is more remarkable, however, is his descent and in particular, the manner of it: he simply jumped from the balloon gondola and fell headlong towards the high desert lay some 20 or so miles below, an act that, on the face of things, seems extraordinarily courageous or, more rationally, starkly and simply insane.
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At last I’ve finally reformatted and published the original texts of my researches into audio technologies. These were originally written a goodly number of years ago and, if you read them, you’ll find no small number of errors and anachronisms. (Do please note that the “publication” dates shown at the bottom of each item are the dates on which they were published to the site and not the dates upon which they were written.) This is intentional since I intend to show how these texts are revisited and recreated in the light of new knowledge and changes in my approach to writing. The idea is to read the revised versions in the context of the originals.
The work will take quite some time: the originals took over a year to research and around four months to write: the original text in total amounts to a little short of 40,000 words in its’ original form and I intend to revisit the whole thing word by word. Progress will often be slow but progress there will be because, after this, there will be no more; my academic activity will end.
It may seem odd to announce the end of something by declaring a beginning but this is, I think, appropriate not least since it reflects a change in my attitudes and my faith in the present state of academe. So much has become compromised by the financial opportunism of our so-called “managers” who see universities as either being successful profit centres - or failures. In the present climate, there is, it seems, no longer any place for the liberal approach to higher education in which I believe and to which I have been committed for most of my professional life. So, in compromising my academic style into one that expresses more than the merely factual, I’m indulging in a final tilt at a windmill. I think everyone is allowed that indulgence once in their career so, with only a year left in mine, it seems high time to kick over the traces, cock a snoot at the Management and have some creative fun with ideas and words.
Why not come along for the ride ? Everyone’s welcome.
This work began as the preparation for a series of lectures on the evolution and influence of audio technology. An interest in the possibilities of distance learning led me to produce a series of illustrated essays to function as virtual lectures when delivered by electronic means. When, some years later, I revisited these lectures with a view to revisions and updating, it was suggested to me that they might form the basis of a thesis and the present document has developed as a result of this suggestion.
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In this work, I have examined the historical development of various aspects of audio technology and looked at how it has provided end users with an ever-expanding and diversifying set of resources - how it has expanded the sonic palette. We come now to the unavoidable final section in which loose ends must be tidied, disparate sources of information drawn together and conclusions drawn.
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Sampling has a surprisingly long history with the first recognisable machine appearing as early as 1938 in the form of a 1936 invention by Frederick Sammis: the “Singing Keyboard”. A precursor of modern samplers, the instrument played electro-optical recordings of audio waves stored on strips of 35mm film which were triggered and pitched when the player pressed a key. Little is known of this machine and its uses but its underlying approach clearly prefigures the first practical sampling technology as employed in the American Chamberlin and its later British equivalent, the Mellotron.
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MIDI instruments first appeared in early 1983 and represented the product of a collaboration unique in an industry best known for its jealous isolationism and protectionism.The germ of the idea came at a meeting in late 1981 between representatives from Roland, Yamaha, Korg, Kawai, Oberheim and Sequential. The intention was to sever once and for all the dependence on analogue control systems and create a ubiquitous digital interface between synthesisers and other instruments from all the major manufacturers. While digital interfaces had existed previously, they had almost invariably been specific to a particular manufacturer if not to a specific instrument.
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The development of musical instruments has been influenced from the earliest times by the evolution of audio technology. Stone Age man had access to the knowledge and skills required to create a range of instruments from simple wind and percussion to early reeds. Many examples exist of fife-like instruments carved from hollow bones and contemporary non-western cultures exhibit instances of the use of naturally occurring objects such as shells or horns being used as sound generators.
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The first meeting between comedy record producer and erstwhile pop stars took place at EMI’s legendary Abbey Road Studios in North London on June 6 1962. Martin was at that time an EMI staff producer responsible for the niche-market Parlophone record label which specialised in comedy and novelty material: the Goons, Peter Sellers, Bernard Cribbins and others. His assistant, Ron Richards, took responsibility for the label’s relatively few “pop”acts: Shane Fenton (later Alvin Stardust), Judd Proctor and Paul Raven (later Gary Glitter). During Richards’ first session with the Beatles, engineer Norman Smith persuaded him (Richards) to invite Martin to join the session which he ultimately took over, thereby creating a partnership which lasted until the demise of the Beatles in 1969.
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The contributors to the development of contemporary recording practice are both numerous and diverse. In some cases, solutions have preceded problems - the 8-track tape machine being a case in point - whereas there are many examples of demand-driven developments such as digital audio processing or noise reduction.
The contributors have been musicians (Les Paul and the electric guitar), producers (Joe Meek and his numerous devices), studio engineers (Geoff Emerick’s tape manipulations), technologists (Willi Studer and his many tape machines), composers (Todd Machover and his computer-mediated hyper instruments), computer designers (Kim Ryrie and the Fairlight), electronics engineers (Robert Moog) or theoreticians (Alan Blumleins’ development of stereo) ; in fact contributions have come from virtually all areas and disciplines.
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In 1960, Britain boasted few recording studios worthy of the name. Such as there were were almost exclusively record company owned and dedicated more or less entirely to classical music recording. Even there, however, the predominant fashion was to seek out sympathetic “real†recording environments in the form of churches, halls etc. Thus many famous recordings came to be made in such venues as London’s Kingsway Hall or, more prosaically, in the town halls of Watford, Walthamstow and similar locations. (At one point a standing joke existed that good acoustics would only be found in venues whose location began with the letter “Wâ€!)
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There can be hardly more influential a piece of technology than the magnetic recorder. In its many forms, it supplies a fundamental resource for a huge industry, provides domestic and in-car entertainment, records television images and computer data and even logs flight deck conversations on aircraft. All these diverse activities depend upon the same basic process: the movement of a magnetisable medium in relation to a magnetising unit (in the recording mode) and the generation of an electric current as a result of a reversal of the process (in the playback mode). Like many such inventions, it has proved to have a breadth of application that would probably astound its original inventors and developers.
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Contrary to popular belief, the influence of electricity and its associated hardware on the audio industry does not stem from the development of electronics following the invention of the valve or vacuum tube. Electromechanical systems were used from an early date as sound generators and audio transmission via purely “passive” electrical systems was in existence contemporary with Edison’s invention of the phonograph. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this was the transmission of performances from the Paris Opera House by Clement Ader in 1881. As part of that year’s Paris Exhibition of Electricity, Ader placed a series of specially constructed microphones across the front of the stage and connected them to remote receivers using telephone lines. By routing separate microphones to separate receivers, Ader (probably unintentionally) transmitted the first example of stereo sound.
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One may reasonably speculate that stone-age hunters - and possibly even their forebears - knew that cupping hands round the mouth aided long distance vocal projection or that a similarly cupped hand behind the ear enhanced the directional sensitivity of the hearing process. It is reasonable to assume that this knowledge was employed purposefully in much the same manner as other mammals utilise their directable ears. I am not aware that any creature other than homo sapiens consciously seeks to project its vocalisations using such “artificial” means.
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The first use of audio technology is unknown. We might speculate that a stone age hunter cupped his hands to his mouth in order better to project a warning cry to a colleague but as to the first utilisation of external systems, no-one knows. Initial invention aside, even a superficial glance at classical Greek and Roman architecture will confirm that both cultures had a good empirical grasp of practical acoustic technology. The well-known acoustic properties of the amphitheatre are but one example. In fact, there was much more to early audio technology than the acoustic design of auditoria: Roman theatres employed simple but effective passive mechanical systems whereby the performer would stand in front of a resonating chamber built in to the back stage wall. Folded horn designs not entirely dissimilar to twentieth century loudspeakers were also occasionally used.
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At last I’ve finally reformatted and published the original texts of my researches into audio technologies. These were originally written a goodly number of years ago and, if you read them, you’ll find no small number of errors and anachronisms. This is intentional since I intend to show how these texts are revisited and recreated in the light of new knowledge and changes in my approach to writing. The idea is to read the revised versions in the context of the originals.
The work will take quite some time: the originals took a year to research and around four months to write: the original text in total amounts to a little short of 40,000 words in its’ original form and I intend to revisit the whole thing word by word. Progress will often be slow but progress there will be because, after this, there will be no more; my academic activity will end.
Ballard was not quite unique but the company he kept is indicative of his stature. I don’t mean his connections with Alldis, Moorcock or Sinclair but rather his almost unique quality of adjectivisation: Shakespear begat “Shakespeareanâ€, Swift begat “Swiftianâ€, Dickens begat “Dickensian†(oh those awful Xmas Fayres!) and, in their company, our protagonist begat “Ballardianâ€. There can hardly be any greater accolade for a writer even if this was thrust upon a modest man who would probably have hated it, however richly it may be deserved. I say this not because I use the term myself to describe the dystopian psychogeographies to which he refers so often but because any writer who achieves the consistency of vision that he did deserves recognition and accolade. The difference between most of them and Ballard is that the adjective is, ultimately, his and his alone.
I never met him and that makes me terribly sad because, throughout his work runs an almost hidden theme of the unexpected impact that sound has upon us and that, in another sense, has been an obsession of mine since my teens. Coincidentally or not, that’s round about when I first read Ballard and, consciously or not, I suspect, he has influenced much of what I’ve gone on to do subseqently.
So thank you James (or is it Jimmy?) from one of the many whose lives and thoughts were touched by your work.
French railway stations always seem to me to be of a certain age, younger than Victorian English ones but older than their shiny modern German counterparts. They seem somehow to be stuck somewhere around the 1940s with a few hastily added updates and even these manage to avoid being as contemporary as they really are. Plasma display screens may bristle but, unlike their English cousins with their massive steelwork, galvanised trunking and armoured cables, their bristling is done with Gauloise-stub-stuck-to-bottom-lip French blue-collar nonchalance from elegantly corroded wrought iron columns where they have the sense of coming from an earlier and qualitatively different time to their cousins in equally French but temporally different airport lounges. Here they are truly modern and form a signature part of the environment in which they operate but, back at the station, in their bleu de travail, they simply fail to integrate and remain an anomalous part of a time-warped place.
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Some years ago, I began a line of research into how the development of sound technologies had impacted upon what their users did with them: how, if you like, the creative process was informed by the means used to facilitate it. The outcome of my research was a series of essays which, suitably illustrated and arranged into an approximation of chronological order, were assembled into a (somewhat primitive) website designed for use by my students. As such, it was not a great success but, as my academic career approaches its end, I find myself increasingly unwilling to abandon this work which, to date, amounts to the best part of 40,000 words. Accordingly, over the next few months, I’ll be revisiting these essays (some of which still remain incomplete) with a view to publishing them online here in a completed and revised form.
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We think about places in many ways, most of them more or less based upon physical considerations (climate, distance from somewhere else, height above sea level, ease of access and so on). We may say that we like somewhere, even to the extent of returning there every summer for the annual family holiday, but we rarely think much beyond that. Most of us certainly take little notice of the emotional or spiritual impact of a particular location or look for meaning in the abstract qualities of a place.
This has often seemed to me at odds with my own experience in which many places are loaded with significance and numinous qualities. There are obvious places with historical associations but there are many more where the place itself seems almost to speak, to have a story to tell that is uniquely it’s own but, more even than that, presents an abstract sense of meaning that derives from a combination of sources. History, personal or otherwise, by itself is not the full story: in these places there is a particular quality that derives from considerations to which we rarely pay attention, usually because it simply becomes to difficult for most of us to think deliberately and analytically about something so abstract as the meaning of a place.
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Consider if you will the words “worth” and “price”. On the face of things, they’re of quite similar meaning. “Worth” means the value and, by implication, what something costs ie. it’s price: “price” measures what we’re willing to pay for it ie. it’s worth. Interchangeable, one might think. But add the suffix “less” and watch the semantic transformation. A worthless object has no value and hence commands a price that is effectively zero whereas a priceless object has a value beyond anyone’s ability to buy it and is hence of infinite worth. If nothing else, this is a wonderful demonstration of the idiosyncratic qualities of the English language.
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A recent radio news item reminded me of an oddly unsettling experience. In the summer of 2007, my book “Fundamentals of Sonic Arts” had just been published and was generating a gratifying amount of response. I was contacted by Michael Rusenberg from Germany. Michael is a great advocate of sound art and, in addtion to his own work runs a very useful website (www.realambient.de) and a regular programme with the same name on WDR3 (the German equivalent of Radio 3). He was about to visit the UK and wanted to record an interview with me for his programme so, in due course, we recorded our discussion in his London hotel. This was very much a first for me and, despite being a huge boost for my ego, was more than a little alarming when I realised that it would be broadcast by a national radio station. Fortunately, Michael conducted the interview in English and explained that I would be “re-voiced” in German for the programme. This flattered me no end: my words would be “read by an actor”, just like in the real world.
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One of the advantages of having a day job in academe is the people with whom one gets to work - not the apalling managements but the genuine academics: the older I get, the more I find myself in awe of these remarkable people. Many of my colleagues are truly talented people of great intellectual achievement and, more importantly, are superb communicators. Academic work transcends the conventional boundaries of nationality and language and many of my colleagues are at least to some extent multilingual. For many of them, the ability to deliver a conference paper in another language is as fundamental a skill as being able to write it in the first place but, to a man, they would deny that their grasp of these languages is anything other than very basic: the academic benchmark of fluency is placed very high indeed. In this respect, my colleagues occupy a strange position: able to discuss the most esoteric of subjects in a given language but often confronted with difficulties when dealing with the more mundane applications of the language in airports, hotels or restaurants. This, of course, is the opposite of the experience of the rest of us: we may just about be able to order a beer in a foreign language but have little chance of having a meaningful discussion on an academic topic.
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This post finds us very much in the bleak midwinter with temperatures of minus 5 and snow falling: the days of taking off a layer of clothing seem remote as winter takes its first full bite. How strange then that my thoughts turn northward to Scotland where the hours of daylight, scarce and precious as they are here, are even fewer. And yet somehow there is attraction in the almost-Arctic. Increasingly, the idea of hibernation for the winter appeals yet perhaps this is a mis-reading of a nostalgia for the warmth and security in the face of adversity that we tend to associate with childhood: the idea that, however hostile the outside world may be, there is somewhere that we can feel safe, comfortable, protected.
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The process of creating a blog, even one as simple as this, is far from straightforward and there will no doubt be many changes to come before I decide whether or not to carry on with the idea. To be truthful, I’m not entirely convinced that blogs are anything much more than public displays of egocentricity. Few bloggers have much to say that is of interest to the majority of readers and I’ve no reason to think myself an exception.
The main purpose is to provide me with a medium in which to express thoughts and ideas in text form and to make these thoughts available to anyone who happens to be interested. It may also prove to be a useful way of putting together tutorials on a range of subjects. For the time being, I don’t intend to allow comments or feedback on this blog: anyone who would like to respond to a post is welcome to email me using the “contact” link on the main website.
In any event, please excuse the self-indulgence that’s implied by the existence of this blog and read it with forgiveness!
Cheers
Tony
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