Weakness, Ambience and Irrelevance: Failure as a Method for Acoustic Variety

Author(s): Tim Feeney

Source: Leonardo Music Journal , 2012, Vol. 22, Acoustics (2012), pp. 53-54
Published by: The MIT Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23343804

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 Artists' Statements

Weakness, Ambience find this technical perfection impor the shape of each grain, which might
and Irrelevance: tant, and I have lost the discipline necadd microrhythms or unexpected pitch
Failure as a Method essary to achieve it. By accepting this content into the resultant timbre. Many
for Acoustic Variety failure of will, though, I experience a composers must find a way to program
this randomness into digital descrip
world of deeper possibility: I can really
Tim Feeney (improviser, percussionist,
hear the sound my hands create. tions of grain size and shape; I get it for
lecturer), University of Alabama, ¿02. free.
1 have just completed a recording for
Moody Music Building, 810 Second
a single snare drum [1] (Fig. 1), made I notice these effects better the lon
Avenue, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487, U.SA.
in a three-story atrium. For 45 minutes,ger I sustain a roll, as my attention span
E-mail: <tim@timfeeney.com>. Web site:
I played rolls with my fingernails and slows and attunes itself to its surround
<www.timfeeney.com>.
with sticks, holding each as long as ings. Rolls initially feel undifferentiated
possible, until physically exhausted. and overloaded with information, but
Supplemental materials such as audio
Sitting directly above the drum, I heardwith patience I experience their rich
files related to this article. are available at
the impact noise from my hands in inner lives. My ear might lock into loud
<www. mitpressjournals. org/toc/lmj/-/22>. fine detail, but had less sense of the or pulsating pitches reinforced by the
filtering room, only to find them missing when
effects of the surrounding tile
ABSTRACT
and concrete. I installed microphonesI turn my head, and my skull absorbs
in different locations to catch sound sound at those frequencies. Its attention
The author, a percussionist, finds timbral
reflected off the walls: behind a stair might bounce back and forth between
interest in the failure to consistently execute
a common technique. column, facing a tight corner, and closehigher- and lower-frequency bands
to the ceiling. The combined result of interacting in a rhythm that decelerates
When I was an 18-year-old percussion this drum-and-room system was a bub as I tire, and the alternation between
student, I spent countless hours practic bling field of slow-changing harmony; my hands becomes irregular. It might
ing drum rolls. Piling hundreds of tiny fingertip rolls produced sounds similarcompare the sound of a roll with tim
bounces on top of one another, I hoped to noise filtered into pitch bands, whilebres it remembers from the past. The
to create the aural illusion of a continu rolls with sticks generated chords built long duration of the piece allows my
ous, unchanging stream of sound. A from a prominent fundamental and brain time to make these perceptual
inharmonic overtones close in fre shifts and discoveries.
great roll was smooth, effortless and
perfect, and I thought that someone quency to members of triads. This listening is the performance:
who could play one somehow also In essence, any drum roll is hand the drumming is secondary, and the
became smooth, effortless and perfect. made granular synthesis. By changing real music is a psychoacoustic phenom
As a young klutz, these were things I striking position on the drumhead, I enon unfolding in my imagination, as I
wanted very much to embody. am altering the pitch content of indiexplore an environment growing out of
It was many years before I could vidual grains of sound; since my sticksthe interaction between physical sound,
appreciate the irony of working so are bouncing according to the rules my body and the surrounding space. As
hard to create what amounted to ,a of damped harmonic motion, succesan experiment, this process has made
drone. At 35,1 perform mostly as an sive grains exhibit changes in ampli me realize that I care about this inves
improviser, working with players who tude and attack envelope; faster handtigation most when I make my music.
are interested in exploring slow-moving motions increase grain density. We do That's enough.
sound as the force driving their music. not hear these phenomena at the level
I learned from these players how to of individual bounces, but as affectingReference
listen, to appreciate the beauty of detail an emergent textural stream. My hands 1. Tim Feeney, Weakness, Full Spectrum Records, to
within sounds. This attention to timbre perform these functions at a lower level be released in fall 2012.

has become the center of my creative of consciousness than I want to con

practice. trol: I view technical failure as a factor
Received 2 January 2012.
I was too young then to understand, introducing random fluctuations into
but I used this ethic of listening con
stantly when practicing rolls. While
playing I made countless judgments
based in the sound of a roll: Was one
hand louder than the other? Did each Fig. 1. Still life,
drum-and-room.
hand motion produce the same pitch?
Did I hear a break in the sound when (Photo © Tim Feeney)

changing hands? I listened intently with

these factors in mind, regarding any
fluctuation as a sign of failure; being
smooth, effortless and perfect is ruth
less work. To my surprise, I no longer

© 2012 ISAST LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 22, pp. 53-59, 2012

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Tim Feeney is an improvisar who has toured motion of those conjoined waves in
the United States and abroad with musicianstime and place. The sounds are found
including cellist and electronicist Vic Rawl
in the ripples in tide pools, peals of
ings, vocalist Ken Ueno, trumpeter Nate thunder, geology of arches, snap of
Wooley and others. He is Assistant Professor
knapped flint resonating on a cave wall.
of Percussion at the University of Alabama. The sound in the conch is a filter found

by the ear. The objects are points of

departure for exploration and defini
Sonic Objects, Resonance tion.
and Chaotics
A swept sine wave drives a transduced
Phil Edelstein,
Port Washington, object and informs each resonant node
NY, U.S.A. E-mail: <p.edelstem®
that then informs another object. The Fig. 2. A collage of fractal textures as a
cieweb.net>. Web: <www.cieweb.net/
simultaneity results in a place in space sample score and study for new works.
(© Phil Edelstein)
pedelsteinx where these voices sound together. The
sounds are constructions of reticulated

Supplemental materials such as audio networks. Composition is a framing of

files related to this article are available at
<www. cieweb. net/pedelstein/lmj>.
ABSTRACT
space that occurs through a process of
mic structure. Feedback and iteration
exploration and functional structural
construction. are fundamental structural elements.
Acoustic environments are found Refinement of structure is the charac

surfaces for the ear. Topology offersteristic of the control loop, of how the
The author describes structural elements for and
output informs the input. Recent works
the conditions and contextsfundamental
within which operations for instrument
he creates
are the structural elements that form
construction
his work. The recurring use and composition.
of fractals The
and resonance
apparent
is integral to the construction of sound
soundis aobjects.
signal wrapped installations
on or performance. Improvisa
a surface, folded and rendered to feed tion is in the expression of how the ear
There is an entire medium of work the ear. informs the hand.

found in the exploration of resonant My new work is the sonification of a

fractal series (Fig. 2). Chaos is not used Acknowledgments
objects in time and space and the nooks
and crannies of turbulence. as an emotional state but as structural
I acknowledge the source literature and inspiration
In a recent moment, I recognizedmaterial
the derived from the enharmonic
of Beckett, Borges and Bowles; the Cageian depar
organizing principle for one of my earlycycles of sunspots, the resonance tures,
of Artaudian passages and Cunningham arrivals
circuits in a demonstration of fractals in Mandelbrot, Chua and Lorenz; and, begrudgingly,
earthquakes, the elasticity and stiffness
Nassim Taleb's swans. A thin favorite gem is the com
on YouTube. The original work (Shrieks of materials, stickiness and correla positionally informative Chaos and Order in the Capital
and Nuptials [1975]) was a duet fortions, per Hurst exponents. Raw material Markets by Edgar Peters (Wiley, 1991/1996). Miller
Puckette's Pure Data (Pd) and its community have
formers joined by a single variable for andobject construction is found inprovided
the updated tools and an invaluable form of
obligated to navigate in oppositionelasticity
or of financial markets and non Mentors and collaborators that have
education.

Newtonian fluids. been essential community along the way include

in concert along one degree of freedom
John Driscoll and Matt Rogalsky in the current in
in a realm of non-linear possibilities.I am interested in the implementa carnation of Composers Inside Electronics; E.A.T.;
The original circuit is a simple cross tion of non-finite state machines, of Laurie Spiegel, Joel Chadabe, Pauline Oliveros, Al
vin Lucier, Andres Bosshard, David Behrman, Bob
coupled function-generator pair that un-Turing machines, systems that tranBielecki, Tom DeWitt and, most of all, David Tudor,
exhibited nodes of silences between scend the plane between harmonicfor sounding the way.
howls. The sonic behavior of that circuit structure and the roll of dice. This is

is described in a fractal algorithm. the exploitation and exploration of Received 2 January 2012.
fractal uncertainty, of leveraging wob
I am seeking ways of creating sounds
Phil Edelstein is a founding member of Com
bles and eddies.
in specific places in space and ways of posers Inside Electronics, a collaborative group
offering those spaces to participants. I dream of manifesting sounds dedicated to the composition, installation and
Consider sound as a plastic medium as of solids, Möbius strips, Klein bot live performance of electroacoustical construc
tles—sounds
shape, place and duration: The sculpt that can be folded and
tions using software, sculptural objects and
ing of sound is the utilization of the unfolded, bent and molded—construc circuitry.
physical properties of waves, still or tions of high-amplitude gradients in
in motion, ephemeral or persistent, space that I use as basic compositional
focused or dispersed. instruments. I use sounds found in

There is delight working with real the amplitude gradient of ear buds, in
and virtual sculptural, instrumental, elliptical rooms, in transduced objects
architectural sonic objects. These and bone conduction, in tracking head
objects have fronts and backs and topspositions, in amphitheaters and enclos
and bottoms, entrances and exits; theying surfaces. My compositions are for
are objects that define the shape of holographic sonic instruments not
sound. The objects are manifested asquite yet available, though tantalizingly
close in simulation, the sound element
landscapes to be navigated by participa
tion/traversal, to be within. equivalent of a pixel.
These are sound constructions built I seek a taxonomy of uncertainty and
with elemental physical properties. resonance, where step impulse is used
Waves meet at defining points in space.to perturb a resonant object, and the
Compositions are choreography of resonant
the nodes are used to derive rhyth

Artists' Statements

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