Sound must have air. In outer space, so the copywriter's line told us, no-one can hear you scream. Music abhors a vacuum, for without the medium of air, the physical vibrations that constitute sound cannot begin to make wave forms, spreading through space. The 19th century physicist, John Tyndall, conducted experiments based upon discoveries made more than 2 centuries earlier. A bell mechanism was constructed in a glass jar. A pump then extracted the air from the jar to create a perfect vacuum. »You know see the hammer striking the bell,« wrote Tyndall, »but you hear no sound. Even when the ear is placed against the exhausted receiver, not the faintest tinkle is heard. The bell is suspended by strings, for if it were allowed to rest upon the plate of the air-pump the vibrations would be communicated to the plate, and thence transmitted to the air outside.« Proposing a 19th century distinction between music and noise, the German scientist Hermann Helmholtz wrote: »The sensation of a musical tone is due to a rapid periodic motion of the sonorous body; the sensation of a noise to non-periodic motions.« We 21st century listeners may disagree with this definition but the basic principle remains: sound is an expression of periodicity.
Music articulates time yet the most basic exploration of sound begins in space (though not outer space). The nature of that space determines the character of a sound. You can experiment in the most simple way, just by taking two objects into different environments. A small bowl and a pencil will do; tap the bowl with the pencil, immersed in bath water, then with the bath empty, in a room with drawn curtains, outside in the street, at night or in the middle of the day. In every place, the sound travels through different kinds of air (or through water and air, if the bowl is in the bath), then reflects back from the surfaces within its sounding space, or becomes absorbed by fabric, books and all the other objects with which we surround ourselves in our buildings.
All this is obvious and barely needs repeating. Then I switch on my computer, double click on a music program, open a new 'song' and copy or record a sound into that sector of the program. Maybe the sound needs air up until this point. I might play something on my electric guitar, or some breath noise from a flute, or a fragment from a CD, listening to make sure I captured the exact moment I chose.
From this critical juncture, a strange process begins. How strange that process really seems will depend a lot on age, cultural background and other complex factors. To be 10 years old and then taking this sound and playing with it in virtual space, no space at all in fact, is unlikely to be strange at all. The difference between a screen icon – perhaps a cute little drawing of a book that turns its own pages to illustrate the fact that the computer is not being lazy – and a real book will surely be smaller that it would be for a retired professor of German literature born in an era when books were the principle means of communicating stored information.
Whoever initiates this process of transferring audible sound into the digital domain engages with the same paradox. Take the original sound and transform it within the digital domain: timestretch it, lower the pitch, add distortion, cut it into pieces with the tiny icon representing a pair of scissors, drag the pieces into a different order by clicking and holding down the mouse, reverse some of these fragments, click the small icon representing an eraser and rub some of them out, join whatever remains, then save into memory.
An unlikely scenario, though possible: all of this work on sound can unfold in silence. A composition can be constructed solely by visual means. No air is necessary, except the air that enables our operator to stay alive. »On The Sensations Of Tone« was the title that Helmholz gave his great study of sound, published in 1862. »Music stands in a much closer connection with pure sensation than any of the other arts,« he wrote. »The latter rather deal with what the senses apprehend, that is with the images of outward objects, collected by psychical processes from immediate sensation . . . in music, the sensations of tone are the material of the art.« If our computer operator were content to leave his or her musical composition as a visual assemblage within the digital domain, never to be heard, then Helmholz's definition would need to be revised. Or perhaps Helmholz could stay unchallenged but the digital assemblage would need to be called something other than music. There are historical precedents for this situation. Musical notation, for example, is a kind of virtual composition, a language that records the silent imaginings of a composer for future interpreters to reveal them as sensations of tone. Before the age of digital music, a composer would have to pay an ensemble to perform this work. A first rehearsal with an orchestra would be the first opportunity to discover the actuality of complex instrumental combinations only heard on a single instrument, such as the piano, or in the mind. Now, using MIDI, the interface that enables sequencing software to communicate with electronic instruments, a desktop music publishing package such as Sibelius, invented by university students Ben and Jonathan Finn at the beginning of the 1990s, offers the possibility of hearing a composition as it progresses.
Envisaged as a short cut to the arduous, error prone business of writing and copying musical scores, Sibelius has the potential to alter our relationship to notation. If notation can be written automatically by the computer program as a piece of music is played on a MIDI instrument such as a keyboard, the necessity of learning notation becomes less of a priority for musicians who need to communicate or document their compositions in this way. Some commentators have speculated that this facility may have the paradoxical effect of reviving oral musical culture, though the use of any language, even if generated by computer, demands some degree of understanding.
Musique concrète and tape music allowed silent transformations of stored audio, though in practice, most composers would listen to the results of their work in development. One exception was John Cage, His tape piece, »Williams Mix,« created by a large team of helpers in 1952, was a collage of tape fragments, cut to length from a library of source materials. »Length and specifications were carefully drawn at a one to one scale on quadrille paper,« wrote David Revill in »The Roaring Silence,« his biography of Cage. »The tape was cut according to it, 'like a dress-maker's pattern'.« All of the compositional decisions were determined by casts of the ancient Chinese divinatory Book of Changes, the I Ching. Bebe Barron, one of the helpers who contributed to Williams Mix, recalled the process of making this piece for Cage. »He had us make all these sound recordings (which today would be called samples),« she said, interviewed in »Incredibly Strange Music Volume II,« »and categorise them eight ways: natural sounds, country sounds, city sounds, electronic sounds, voices, small sounds (like striking a match), etc. Then, of course, we spent immeasurable amounts of time cutting them up into little tiny, tiny pieces of different shapes, like triangles. I doubt if anybody ever 'heard' all that went into the work, but John knew it was there.«
In 1969, John Cage edited a book entitled »Notations.« A collection of music manuscripts donated to benefit the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, »Notations« contained scores such as Richard Maxfield's »Dream:«
»You WILL.« (With exceptionally beautiful musical tints and resonances underlying)
(2 sec. pause)
»I am going to mind the rainbow.« (In voice like Peggy Lee.) (2 sec. pause)
»The I« (Frequency limited like small pocket radio announcer, as if cut off before finishing.)
The paradox of this kind of silent conceptual score is its potential for suggestion. Subjective responses to a reading can be all the more vivid by virtue of the fact that each person will have a unique and secret vision of what such music could sound like. John Cage was one of the pioneers of visual scores – scores that encourage relatively free interpretations of the composer's intent yet seek to structure a performance by graphic means ranging from drawings, ink marks and lettrist texts to maps, diagrams and collage – and by the 1960s, many composers, particularly those associated with the Fluxus movement, used this method as a starting point for music performances.
Of course, many of these performances fell outside the customary definitions and expectations of music. The most notorious and significant example is John Cage’s »4' 33“«, in which a performer on any instrument takes the stage and then makes no sound for the timed duration of 4 minutes and 33 seconds. During the premiere of this piece, given by pianist David Tudor in 1952, many members of the audience became very upset. »There was a lot of discussion,« composer Earle Brown recalled. »A hell of a lot of uproar.«
In John Cage's case, the conundrum of a silent piece of music was inspired partially by a series of all-black and all-white paintings created by artist Robert Rauschenberg in 1949. In the 21st century, these profound connections between visual and sonic arts have been reinforced in unexpected ways by the nature of computer software and the graphic interface of standard operating systems. Editing waveforms in a sophisticated editing program such as ProTools, for example, can feel like cutting and pasting abstract expressionist paintings. Certain waveforms have the character and beauty of Japanese or Chinese calligraphy and the sound can be instinctively transformed simply by making visual judgements. Unwanted clicks can be edited out of a piece by magnifying the waveform, locating the spike that protrudes from an otherwise gentle flow of shapes and lines, then redrawing the contour using a pencil tool.
This curious sense of sound becoming an interchangeable medium, a flux point between the heard, the unheard and the seen, takes human beings a long way from the simple idea of a singing voice filling the air around it, recounting stories and thrilling to the emotional, physiological and socially bonding effects of music. Silence in tangible space can form social bonds also. Just as the quasi-silence of John Cage's »4' 33“« had the effect of 'gluing' together feelings of outrage or empathy at its first performance, so silences organised to demonstrate a collective mark of respect or the public commemoration of tragedy act as bonding agents that stop sound, hence stop time.
Conceptual artist Jonty Semper's recent CD release of two-minutes silences recorded at Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday ceremonies held in London since 1929 documents the peculiar nature of such events. Despite being captured on media such as newsreel film footage, the impact of these silences is most powerfully felt within unmediated social space where the unusual absence of sound, despite being temporary, illustrates the symbolic significance of sound moving freely through air. Noise can indicate the machine of society in working order; extreme noise can voice disapproval of social dissonance; silence can express loss, withdrawal and a sense that social rupture has been narrowly averted. In the digital age, these distinctions are blurred. Perhaps for this reason, certain sound artists are working towards a recovery of the intimate relationship between the physical and the intangible. German artist Carsten Nicolai and Icelandic sculptor Finnbogi Pétursson have both explored the phenomenon of sound as physical vibration, expressed through light.
Consciously or unconsciously, their work seems to refer back to the research of Swiss scientist and painter Hans Jenny. These investigations into vibration and periodicity were described by Jenny as Cymatics, derived from the Greek word for waves. Created in the 1960s, his photographs of the patterns created by the impact of sound on materials such as sand, powder, milk, water, mercury and glycerine are poetic demonstrations of the beauty of this interaction.
Jenny also made photographs from experiments with a tonoscope, an apparatus that registers sound vibrations on a diaphragm. This allowed him to document the visual equivalent of familiar musical compositions by Bach and Mozart. »If we look at these passages on a silent film,« he wrote, »we can at first make nothing of them. If, for example, we see the Jupiter symphony without being able to hear the music, we should never guess from the visual effects with their flowing and constantly changing patterns that we were seeing music . . . But if the sound is turned on, everything flashes to significance for the eye. Hearing is added and restores to experience its full content. It takes training to be able to 'hear by seeing'.« Hans Jenny was influenced in turn by the 18th century scientist Ernst Chladni, who discovered in 1786 that if a metal plate covered with sand was activated by a violin bow, then the sand would form itself into patterns that corresponded to the sound. It seems likely, if speculative, that at some deep biological level humans have an innate understanding of the effect of sound on matter. Simple, pure tones can create a calming effect; complex compositional structures can provoke deep emotional resonance and intellectual inspiration; dissonance, noise and chaos can be hugely energising. Myopic moral perspectives and a scarcity of co-ordinated scientific research limit our understanding of these issues, yet the digital calligraphy of waveforms viewed on a computer monitor seems to confirm a profound link between the structure of sound and the beauty of its visual representation.
Personal computers are recent events in human history and music software, let alone the idea that a computer can be an instrument, just like a violin or a piano, is so recent that the implications are barely beginning to be felt except at the most crude level. Currently, we have no way of knowing where digital music will take us. Perhaps this new way of making music is embedded with some ancient memories of its own. Music may once have been indivisible from spoken language, ritual drama and the events that such dramas were designed to control. The silent presence of music in the virtual space and fake air of a computer display may be a new start, a rediscovery of sound that begins again at the beginning.