Out there, three pieces for headphones and real places by Martin Parker, commissioned by the East Neuk Festival 2009.

Writing for headphones

Aside from the obvious risks you face when crossing roads or riding a bike whilst listening to music, portable mp3 players pose a threat to the health of your ears. Consider that the ambient noise level by a city road is around 83dB [1]. Don’t worry about this number but do remember that in order to hear music over this level, you may well be playing 85-90dB (double the volume) next to your ear [2]. Then consider that the UK Health and Safety Executive recommends employers actively protect workers exposed to levels of 85dB for long periods [3]. So, in order to hear your music, you walk around the city with an in-ear headphone pumping industrial-strength loudness right at your ear-drum. Obviously, there is something wrong here but few of us seem to mind, why?

In 1977 Murray Schafer, composer, sound theorist and pedagogue warned that city dwellers faced a ‘universal deafness’ unless the noise floor of modern cities could be reduced [4]. It has not reduced, only increased in the last 30 years. Perhaps the popularity of portable music players can be put down to a kind of ‘personal-choic’ deafness; city sound being so stressful, irritating and sonically aggressive that we prefer to block it out with our own private soundscape. This makes sense musically too. The speed of traffic, bustle of shoppers and commuters achieve a poetic flow and grace when decoupled from their sound sources and viewed through the strains of Aphex Twin, Piazzola or Mahler.

Filmmakers well know how music interprets image and have trained us to respond to this device, it may explain why we carry around these sounds as they help us to re-interpret our environment as a cinematic and visual experience. Portable music players offer a personal, private space for individuals to re-see their world but we now also behave with music in a way that is perhaps different to modes of listening and access we’ve had up until recently. ‘Flash mobs’ [5] (where groups of people gather to perform acts of guerrilla resistance or individuality) are also associated with portable music players. ‘Silent Disco’ [6] and ‘Mobile Clubbing’ [7] are events where people dance together whilst listening to their own choice of music through headphones [8].

A particularly famous silent disco was staged at Victoria Station in London in 2007. One suggestion on the youtube video comments below is that activists should use this action as a form of protest. Perhaps the next iPod flashmob in London will stop traffic, grinding the city to a silent halt. These events/protests/actions are organized online and link with another feature of portable music devices and the internet, namely social networking, torrent sharing, blogging and podcasting. Whilst we may not be experiencing the same music together at the same time as in the days of the public concert or even radio broadcast, we do share playlists, creating intimacy by publishing our taste, choices and opinions freely. The isolation of a headphone music experience does not mean we are not made aware of something larger than ourselves.

I’ve often thought that my music belonged in the city where contemporary culture thrives but this commission has offered me an escape from this way of thinking. By using another trick from film [9], I’ve mixed environmental sound from the places themselves under and around the music. This has helped to create a plausible cushion for the electronic musical language I usually work with. There is no need to listen to this music at loud levels. Let the sound of the environment in.

Headphones are not a new vehicle for sound, music and art, Janet Cardiff, Christina Kubisch (to name couple of famous examples) and many theatre projects have made use of headphones in innovative and interesting ways but it is still comparatively rare to find music specially authored for portable playback. We have poetry on the underground, why not music for the underground too; pieces of music commissioned especially for playback between certain points on the Circle line? I’m not describing historical narratives or museum guides but actual music, crafted with the noise floor of the environment in mind and designed to expand one’s commute in a sonic direction usually obliterated by the noise of your ride.

A version of this note appeared MUSO magazine in July 2009.

1. Tested midday, Edinburgh, EH8 9DF, 29th using a B&K SPL meter ↩
2. More information about the dB scale is available here: www.phys.unsw.edu.au/jw/dB.html
3. www.hse.gov.uk/noise/noise.pdf
4. The Soundscape, Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World.(1977, Destiny Books, Vermont)
5. Initiated by Bill Wasik in 2003.
6. www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWQpDaC0T-s
7. www.mobile-clubbing.com/
8. At commerical parties this is not the case, a DJ or live performer will play the same music to everyone at the same time. See www.silentdisco.com
9. Room tone

Listening

Please make sure that you are familiar with the operation of your MP3 player before playing these tracks. If at any time, the music seems too loud, please adjust the volume of your headset to a comfortable level. A good way to check that you are not playing the music too loudly is that you should still be able to hear wind, rain and nearby traffic above the sound of the music. In a quiet place, half volume level on an Apple iPhone should be plenty of level. If you find you have your mp3 player at full volume, this is almost certainly too loud. Please note these mp3s have been optimized to play-back on headphones and to be listened to outdoors. These mixes are not for listening to on home stereo systems although they won’t do any harm to your equipment, you the music is designed to be heard outdoors.

Notes on the places these pieces were originally written for

01 – St Fillan’s Cave
Credited with powers of healing the sick, St Fillan is alleged to have lived in this cave in the 8th century. It is more likely though that he took shelter here on his travels as a missionary.
In the 18th century, the town’s drunks were (also allegedly) deposited here and cured of their addiction by being tied up over night and forced to go cold turkey. www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fillan.
As the only ‘indoor’ piece of the three, I’ve tried to make a very internal and reflective kind of music. The sounds you hear are freely associated, perhaps illustrative of passing thoughts. Field recordings I’ve taken from various recording trips with my portable in-ear microphones have been used throughout. Sounds recorded in the cave are also present giving the feeling that there might be others with you. The many layers and juxtapositions in this piece allude to the many uses this cave might have had, from shelter to smuggler’s lair, from holy site to an empty space.

02 – Crail Harbor
The sleepy village of Crail boasts a peaceful and atmospheric harbor with a view out across the Forth that looks towards the Isle of May. Crail is the furthest East of the Neuk’s fishing towns and therefore the view from the harbor also reaches out beyond the confines of the wash of the Firth of Forth. This far edge of the Neuk is exposed to Denmark, the Netherlands and Southern Norway as well as the Bass Rock and North Berwick. It is from this view that sounds collected from the sea shore take you out across the ocean towards unknown places on an unknown ship. This slow, drone-based piece regards the sea as a powerfully mysterious, inhospitable and possibly frightening place, its otherness and relentlessness reflected in the sounds of processed Chinese percussion samples. The music should leave you with space to hear the sounds of wind and sea through your headphones, listening at louder levels may mask the presence of the environment you are in though. Your ship drops you back on the harbor side to the accompaniment of digital rain and a distant defensive arctic tern.

03 – Dunino Den Dunino

Den Dunino Den is a peculiarly mysterious and special location with a history of spiritual human activity dating back to the Picts and before. If you look around carefully you’ll find carvings on some of the rocks near the brook and stones from an ancient stone circle are littered around the church yard near where you’ll park when you come here.
Susan Delatour LePoidevin’s poem to Dunino Den ends with the questions; ‘a sanctuary? a sacred place? who had been here before us?’ www.skjaere.me.uk/dunino/dunino.html
This piece responds directly to the Den, and refers to its mysterious qualities and functions both historic and current as a place for ceremony and delirium. The piece slowly awakens to rhythmically processed material recorded in the forest at 5am on an April morning. As the music progresses the digital aesthetic takes over but the sound of bells coming into and out of the texture cut through this. The piece ends with a direct reference to the Den’s use by party goers using a processed drum loop donated to the piece by Acid dance musician Mike Dred www.83db.com.

Somewhere between documentary, theatre and opera, songs for an airless room is a piece of music to be performed in cinemas. Featuring the vocal extremes of Phil Minton and drive of percussionist Joby Burgess, with computer processing, live visuals and surround sound, the piece explores a potential for obsessive isolation wrought by digital technologies.

More information about the piece can be found at this website: www.airless.tinpark.com

Reviews for Airless room are here:

http://living.scotsman.com/music/Gig-review-Songs-for-an.6094305.jp
http://www.edinburghguide.com/reviews/music/reviewsongsforanairlessroom-4951
http://www.musolife.com/trapped-in-a-box-with-songs-for-an-airless-room.html

A live performance at the Concept Space gallery in Gunma, Japan using drum pads, gel loudspeakers and the resonant frequencies of the room.
This new project was developed in collaboration with fine artist Alan Johnston who invited me to join him on his trip to several galleries in Japan where he produced a series of wall drawings.

In response to Alan’s well defined shapes, scratched onto the walls of the space using pencil, I placed small Gel-Based loudspeakers on the walls of the room.  These loudspeakers are very special.  They are designed to be attached to almost any flat surface.  Once connected, they make that surface resonate turning the entire surface into a resonating body.

Using measurements of the room’s dimensions, I devised rhythmic patterns and frequencies that would emerge from the walls in 6 channels around a seated audience.

The performance above took place on October the 8th at the Concept Space gallery in Gunma, Shibukawa, Japan.

sd.caad.ed.ac.uk/event/wp-content/audio/beginner_drummer.mp3

Oboe, Bass Clarinet, Percussion and Computer.
The score, parts for performance and software are available from sumtone.com | sumtone.com/work.php?workid=193

sd.caad.ed.ac.uk/tinpark/media/sound/grab-mix3.mp3

written for New Noise London in March 2008.

Premiere performances:
Purcell Rooms, London
The Bluecoat, Liverpool
Djanogly Recital Hall, Nottingham

Reviews of Grab

…Grab, by Martin Parker, was the highpoint. Scored for oboe, bass clarinet, percussion and computer, the trio effectively became a sextet, with the computer semi-randomly sampling and manipulating each instrumentalist’s contribution to create another three voices… producing some disturbing dialogue reminiscent of passages from Berio’s Visage.  The work gave the flesh-and-blood performers a chance to shine – Burgess in particular let his hair down with some excellent solos – a highly effective and enjoyable piece performed with considerable flair.

David Bignell, Classical Source, May 2008

Martin Parker’s Grab employs a live computer-generated shadow of the oboe, bass clarinet and percussion trio, which is triggered by the on-stage performers, growing Hydra-like until it threatens to utterly overwhelm them. This simple arc is made much more interesting by the complexity of the live music the performers are required to play, even as the rich details of their efforts are obliterated by the computer. The drama was in the palpable sense of waste and futility as performing skill and commitment was digitised and then redeployed against itself.’

Tim Rutherford-Johnson, Musical Pointers, May 2008

Martin Parker’s Grab, receiving its world premiere this evening, was one of the highlights of the concert.  With an exciting interplay between the live elements and electronics, the bass clarinet provided a lovely timbral variety to the oboe sound and the two complimented each other very well.
The percussion held all the disparate elements together and served as the main driving force for the work.  This was an exciting and dramatic work, which was given a highly convincing first performance.  I have no doubt that this will become a part of the core repertoire for this combination of instruments, and I look forward to hearing more from Parker in the future.
Carla Rees, Seen and Heard, May 2008

Accompanied by maracas, Steve Reich’s Four Organs took a dominant chord on an epic sleigh-ride. Kreuzspiel, for oboe, bass clarinet, piano and percussion, reflected Karl-Heinz Stockhausen at the start of his maverick career.  Thanks to computer resources, a trio became a dramatic sextet in Martin Parker’s Grab, the evening’s other new work.  Electronics helped to conjure the muted sounds of Pedro Gomez Egana’s recent Clark Nova, as well as the magic of Dennehy’s exploits in overtones.’
Peter Palmer, Nottingham Evening Post, May 2008

This was a commission from Theatre Cryptic to generate real-time visuals and sound/music for a version of Brendan Keneally’s adaptation of Euripides’ Trojan Women in 2005. The work was premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 2005 and toured Scotland between September and November 2005.

My approach involved developing a continuous soundscape that was played by computer and distributed to a 5.1 surround system.  The computer part was performed by an operator (Angelica Kroeger) who learned to play the piece extremely well.  Live sound from the virtual chorus (Katie Dickie and Itxaso Moren) was converted into spectral data that windowed a processed choir of distant female voices.  These effects and other sounds were combined with a series of tracks that were brought into and out of focus by Angelica as she followed the emotional trajectory of the narrative.

Myra McFadyen as Hecuba
Kate Dickie as Andromache
Itxaso Moreno as Cassandra
Candice Edmunds as Helen
Keith Macpherson as Talthybius and Menelaus

Direction by Cathie Boyd
Design by Julia Bardsley
Lighting by Giuseppe di lorio
Sound design, composition and real time visuals by Martin Parker

sd.caad.ed.ac.uk/tinpark/media/sound/TrojanWomen-HelenTheme.mp3

This piece attempts to illustrate what arbitrary, non-sentient but controlled music can sound like.   The piece runs on terms defined by the computer itself, makes its own decisions based on criteria that it invents as time passes but that are based on data extracted from the live input. Like most improvisations, initial musical ideas are first considered but shortly after this period, the machine begins to explore material dynamically, chewing on its own matter, quickly becoming self-referential and eventually running out of energy or coruscating into maximal debris.

Auto Route has been performed in several incarnations. A version was made for the Glasgow-based video artist Rob Kennedy and performed at Machinista in Glasgow in 2004. Two other versions have been made and performed without the composer present; once on a tourist boat trip in Belfast as part of the Sonorities festival, the other was performed in Newcastle by Mark Summers (Viol) and the Palindrome dance company.

The recording presented here was generated from a Marais Fantasie performed by Mark Summers (Viol) for whom the piece was written.

www.tinpark.com/wp-content/uploads/2004/10/output_2autoroute.mp3

The input source : Fantasie 41 by Marin Marais for solo viol performed by Mark Summers:

www.tinpark.com/wp-content/uploads/2004/10/input_fantaisie-411.mp3

It is a continuing struggle to make computer-based sounds that breathe with their own life and to play the computer like a musical instrument. Interfaces for transferring real-world data into the computer such as fader boxes, tracker-ball mice, graphics tablets, game controllers, wireless devices, motion tracking etc., are increasing in flexibility and interest and through software such as Max MSP , these interfaces can offer reasonable ways of converting human movement into sound. Joysticks, for example, are a ubiquitous, inexpensive and a generally reliable piece of technology. An external MAX object was written by Adam Schabtach in 2001 to collect joystick data and view it within Max MSP.

However, there is nothing inside the hardware of most joysticks to curb a gesture. They can be pulled between extremes in milliseconds, while with a real world instrument such as a saxophone, extremes are very hard to reach and have to be found with care to avoid complete breakdown of the system and a split note. Therefore, grafting the joystick’s extremes to the extremes of one’s software may result in an artificial and possibly unfulfilling musical experience.

One way in which to create some ‘resistance’ is to imagine the joystick as a tool for travelling rather than for gesture mapping. In computer games for example, one is never in the same place for long. Pushing forwards with differing degrees of intensity means that one travels forward at different speeds. This approach has been implemented in the Spectral Tourist, although the landscape traversed is not one of snipers and guard dogs but the hilly terrain of a spectrogram.

HAZE was written for members of the Paragon Ensemble and computer. Rather than interactive, HAZE is reactive. Essentially, the role of the live performers is to trigger computer based sound synthesis. The computer listens for pitch and amplitude data a re-maps this onto synthesis parameters.

This version was prepared to open a concert and was created to be punchy and brief. The score was used as a very literal guide for the performers who found it useful to follow because of very restricted rehearsal time.

The software for HAZE was written in the MaxMSP environment (www.cycling74.com) and makes use of the following third party external : Ted Apel’s MSP port of Miller Puckette’s fiddle~ which is downloadable from the following site: http://crca.ucsd.edu/~tapel/software.html (current as of 21/03/04).

In performance and rehearsal, a 16 channel midi fader box is required to take care of the input and output signals.
Controllers 1, 2 and 3 are assigned to the input levels of the three instruments and channels 14, 15 and 16 control the three levels of the computer output relative to each instrument. The routing to the four or two loudspeakers is undertaken by the software, which diffuses the computer output depending upon the parameters that the computer receives from live input.

The software is compiled as a standalone application which is ASIO compatible and requires four dedicated channels of audio output and three dedicated channels of audio input.
System requirements for the standalone  Apple Macintosh Power PC running OS 9.1 or 9.2.
G3 500Mhz, 64Mb Ram, 5mb disk space ASIO drivers for ASIO compatible sound card to be placed in ASIO drivers folder. A version for OSX 10.2 and 10.3 is also included on the CD. The sound card should be Core-Audio and Core-Midi compatible the card can be configured in the standalone with ease.

The sculptures of Kassian Erhard spend most of the year in the Austrian Alps in a small village called Pillar near to the Italian border. On the mountainside Erhard creates stone ‘instruments’ including interpretations of trombones, saxophones, percussion and strings all carved from the indigenous rock.

During the late summer of 2002, I was fortunate to spend three weeks living with the sculptor and his family and had the opportunity to write some music for his instruments. Of all the sculptures in his garden, the one that attracted my ears and eyes the most was his stone violin. Not only is the body of the instrument made of stone, so are the strings and bow. The instrument’s sonic properties depend entirely upon the type of stone used to make bow and string.

A gentle scrape of stone against stone reveals tones that are essentially inharmonic, scratchy and very rich in potential for analysis within the computer. The computer software is a reactive environment, which listens to the incoming sound and generates sympathetic resonances. If you feed it noise, you get purity.

This piece was revised for Viol in 2003 and continues to reinvent itself based on input and the liveliness of the space in which it is played.

The score of Shonky Music is not a reliable guide to how the piece actually sounds. Written for tracker action organs that are able to make sound while the pipes are half drawn, Shonky exploits the unreliability of the king of instruments when prepared in this uneven manner. Certain configurations of the stops result in a keyboard that is both out of tune and consistently unpredictable; the generic scales and runs that litter the score become rhythms and melodies.

Shonky was first performed on the Reid organ, a fabulous machine housed in Edinburgh’s Reid Concert Hall. It is an organ similar to that which Bach would have used in Leipzig. A second recording was made on the Henry Willis organ in the song school of St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh, which was built in 1887.

Four and seven minutes long respectively, the Willis and the Reid organ recordings show how wildly different the piece can sound. With no tempo marking on the score, it is the player’s decision to respond to the idiosyncrasies of the instrument. When prepared, the Reid organ responded more sluggishly to touch and thus required a slower pace. For the more immediate response of the Henry Willis organ the performance was naturally much faster; labouring over the rather banal finger work would have yielded less interesting results.

http://sd.caad.ed.ac.uk/tinpark/media/sound/steinmetzarbeiten_extract.mp3

Extract performed by Edinburgh Contemporary Music Ensemble, conducted by James Lowe with Simon Smith piano, recorded by Sean Williams, Artefact Records.

The score, parts for performance and software are available from sumtone.com | sumtone.com/work.php?workid=239

Written in 1997 for the Yorkshire and Humberside Young Composer’s Competition and performed at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Steinmetzarbeiten won category A of this competition. It was first performed by Nicholas Hodges (piano) with the Athelas Ensemble. This piece was written after finding a limited edition print of Elizabeth Scherffig’s eight Steinmetzarbeiten drawings in a second-hand bookshop. Close-up viewing of the images shows evidence of a pencil that has always been moving, shifting constantly and perhaps effortlessly over the paper. This conveys movement, change, light and shade. Pulling back to view the image from a distance, the drawings are of slabs of stone, locked in dense and un-movable layers. This piece reflects a similar contradiction. The music appears to be perpetually on the move, trying to go somewhere but it is actually stuck; continually representing the same ascending scale.