I'm not sure that everyone can see Hans Tammen's post about sound art process work and curating.
It's always safe to forward it (again).
Enjoy!
Best
Juliette
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I don¡¯t feel that the discussion would be much different if I just look into digital art works. There is the question of the ¡°object¡±, in that the files, CD or other media may be the object, and the actual listening experience the ¡°residue". There is the question of ¡°documentation¡± and keeping works for posteriority, in that organizations spend lots of money transferring their audio works from one obsolete media to the next. If the work is generative (in that it uses realtime data input or realtime algorithmic calculation) the question is again how to preserve the work if the technology disappears.
> If I look at it more broadly, music/sound is ephemeral anyway. There are improvisational practices, open form compositions, graphic scores, or scores that just use text as instruction. Then, when it comes to writing for sound/timbre, there is not even a common writing convention we can all borrow from. An Indian raga is a melody that has to be interpreted by the individual performer. Renaissance scores are now understood to be open, to the extent that ensembles such as Hesperion XI ¡°just¡± improvise along the written score. It¡¯s kinda process-based anyway.
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> Coming back to digital (or electronic) works, the acoustic properties of the room create specific problems. The work does sound different on a different sound system in a different room, although it could be argued that this is just the same as presenting a painting in different locations, under different lighting conditions. However, I feel the difference is big enough, to change my own works radically, depending on the room acoustics.
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> How do you document something like this? It is not possible to transfer the listening experience adequately to e.g. a CD. So I argue that to bring your work to a CD, you should re-compose it for that purpose - listening on your home stereo, your computer speakers, or headphones is different than the live situation.
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> This is also true for multi-channel sound works. A simple stereo mix won¡¯t do for most of the multi-channel works I¡¯ve heard. When a 16 channel sound gallery closed many years ago, artists approached Harvestworks with the wish to make their 16-channel work available in other formats. Since the gallery actually had 16 different speakers pointing in different directions (!), ¡°re-composing¡± was the thing to do. All works were re-composed for 5.1 surround sound, with some doing the same for stereo as well, and one even for binaural.
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> All the best, Hans
> _____________________________________
> HANS TAMMEN
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> http://www.tammen.org
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