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Conference: Subject: 3 Inches = 77 Millimetres = 3 Min. 30 Sec. Alto Saxophone – John Oswald Performer [Noise], Synthesizer – Michael Snow Voice – John Oswald, Michael Snow, Paul Dutton
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Interview: Members Of The CCMC And Doina Popescu Alto Saxophone – John Oswald Performer [Noise], Synthesizer – Michael Snow Voice – John Oswald, Michael Snow, Paul Dutton
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Discussion: Hearing Aid
Published as a catalogue (ISBN 3-932513-34-7) for the exhibition of Michael Snow’s sound works at Gallery Klosterfelde in Berlin, Germany (June 28th to September 20th 2002). Texts by Ariane Beyn in English and German.
Interview & session recorded by Paul Hodge in April 2002.
Hearing Aid recorded by Michael Snow in April 2002.
Hearing Aid, 1976-1977
Sound installation
Variable dimensions
ENG
Hearing Aid is a sound installation with an electrical metronome, four sound recordings of 90 minutes in cassette format and four tape recorders. it is a work recreated for every exhibition.
The tape recorders are arranged on the parquet. The sound of the metronome is recorded by the first one. This recording is played and recorded by the second tape recorder, which includes the recording of the metronome with the surrounding sounds already included in the first recording. This process is repeated on the third and fourth tape recorders. Thus, the spectator hears layered “past” sounds together with the constant present of the metronome.
“Hearing Aid is about visual and aural and temporal space. It is like a linear thing where you join the dots, and you find the source of the sound. At first you can’t recognize the sound because it is completely new, so you track it down. Going through the process of discovering how it became what it is, is one aspect of it. In first planning the piece, I was thinking of a temporal point that is re-recorded at spatial points.
“The raw sound material of this particular piece is that of the metronome and the surrounding environment. But it’s not mainly concerned with the fortuitous sound—that is a kind of nuance to it that brings out the difference in time when each one was recorded. You have a kind of fan of representations of different ‘past’ time periods with the metronome as a constant ‘present’. The fact that I’ve done something to the sound, recording it and so on, is a use of unpredictable sound as music.
“Hearing Aid is, of course, sculpture, except that the individual blocks which make up the sculpture also make sound. You have a kind of circle of sound around each block, and these circles intersect. Obviously it’s a big piece of sculpture—it can’t be encompassed from one point, or even by walking around one of the blocks.”
Reference: Interview, 23 February 1977, from Another Dimension (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1977).
“Centerfold:
‘So when did you start working on that piece?’
Michael Snow:
‘A couple of years ago, The Kitchen (NY) asked me if I wanted to do a sound installation piece and I came up with that after looking at the space. It’s got one big room and one smaller but fairly large room and then there’s the stairs and it was laid out over a longer distance than the installation you just saw (installed at Alberta College of Art Gallery, part of Another Dimension). The piece went through more changes of just the quality of sound in each space. The metronome was in the very big room in the far corner and the final tape machine was on the stairs so there was a lot of range not only in the quality of sound but also the range of fortuitous sound: people walking, trucks, and so on. In this installation it’s quite pure, there’s practically no incidental sound.
Centerfold:
‘Have you ever used that dubbing technique before to amplify the spatial characteristics of a room?’
Michael Snow
‘No’.
Centerfold:
‘I like its simple functionality’.
Michael Snow:
‘The process obviously is there right in front of you but it does bring out a rich number of less obvious nuances. I’ve only done a couple of sound installations, one at Expo ‘67 in a hexagonal auditorium and there were speakers all around it each with separate tape recorders. I played 10 or 12 separate tapes of just any music—they had a lot of commercial tapes of different kinds of music—I played them all simultaneously at top volume in the dark. It was really incredible, it was like being in Niagara Falls—very, very physical. I had this band that I played with that summer called the Kinetic Ensemble, it kept changing its name, it was a free improvisation group—and in the middle of the stage in the center of this whole thing we started to play. Of course you couldn’t hear your playing at all, but the tapes ran out at different intervals so that gradually they revealed themselves as separate components and gradually that process revealed the music in the center which was live. The lights were also gradually turned on’.
Centerfold:
‘What was that piece called?’
Michael Snow:
‘I think it was SENSOLO’.
Centerfold:
‘This installation is called Hearing Aid, are there any physics relationships that you are using the work to demonstrate?’
Michael Snow:
‘It ends up having a lot to do with the instability of the tape cassette machines and it works because they aren’t in sync. If you set them up so that the first recording of the metronome was in sync with the other one you would have a single pound all the way across. But they always play differently and they always started differently so you have many kinds of phasing rhythms which come, partly from them being started one after the other, but also from the variation in speed. Theoretically the metronome is constant but maybe it isn’t. I was thinking of the metronome as being pretty close to what a frame does only in terms of time. It’s about as close as you can get to something that isolates’.
Centerfold:
‘I like the way it allows people to experience the room as a closed volume of space—the size of the room seeming to expand or contract depending upon the length of the extended echo. I mentioned earlier that it reminded me of Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room in that it it uses similar means for a similar illustration—but I prefer the methodology in Hearing Aid, it is more about the room and not the physical degeneration of the recording’.
Michael Snow:
‘There’s an interesting ricochet when you hear just the metronome, something like BING-ra-da-dah-da. I couldn’t record that—I kept trying to record it, placing the microphones every way I could think of: pointing up, pointing down—couldn’t get it and yet it’s very clear to the ears. The microphones just shave it right off. Maybe with good microphones … but I guess I am interested in what is called ‘bad recording’. I used some kinds of limited range distortion in Rameau’s Nephew and in that record of mine (Musics for piano, whistling, microphone and tape recorder). What the ‘distortion’ does is to remove the documentary aspect and put your mind to the fact that it is recording’.
Centerfold:
‘How strongly do you need to work with yourself as an improviser at the moment, musically?’
Michael Snow:
‘I am more interested in the collective, in what happens simultaneously with other things over which I have no control. I can do the other thing—I do it at home all the time, I’ve done it a couple of times in London and concerts in Montreal, it really is something separate from my main current interests’.
Centerfold:
‘I meant projects similar to the pieces that you published on the MUSICS album’.
Michael Snow:
‘There are similar pieces I have considered publishing—one is a trumpet piece, a series of overlays—it’s not that interesting technically, but musically I think it’s interesting. Another is a short-wave radio piece I did three years ago that I like. The last album is very studio-like, as in a visual artist having a studio in which he/she produces work. It’s not solo concert, it’s a solitary solo situation that relates more to an artist making a painting than solo music with an audience.’”
Reference: “Interview with Michael Snow,” Centerfold, April 1978.
Contributed by
Juan Pablo Macías