Eight Lectures on Experimental Music

by Alvin Lucier

  What we have explored very little as musicians are sounds that our ears create. There is good research about this. Your ears emit sound a few minutes after you die. They actually emit as well as absorb and receive sound. In the early days, musicians probably were aware of this phenomenon more intuitively. In Tibet, people tune and produce sounds that their ears create. Some of these sounds are called difference tones, which are second-order effects that are mechanical responses of the ear—actually the signal going through your ears—then being put together in some part of your brain as an information pattern that actually gives shape and form. These are very powerful. You’ve probably heard it in your own music with certain kinds of beat phenomena—not amplitude modulation. It is an effect that comes from the unison when you have stereo, you have to have two ears, with the major third or fifth you can actually have it in mono. It’s not beating. No one knows what’s creating it. It’s part of your nervous system that’s putting this information together. It happens in a lot of ways in my music [that] I’m not even aware of. I’ll go back and try to hear something, and if I’ve been listening too long to one part so that I’m already kind of programmed in my head, I really have to be careful because you’re shaping a lot of melodies from basic information. I was drawn to it recently by some CD collections that I’m on. I’m not very interested in ordinary CDs. I would like to make interactive audio CDs. People would have scores in their home and could do various transformations. My own work is done architecturally. I use multispeaker systems in several rooms, so it’s not very fitting to have two speakers in your living room. I was startled to hear the other music because the composers used a lot of what’s almost like exoskeletons to me. They put in not so much reverb but delays. It makes such a solid chunk of something that it’s like your mind … it’s like you’re not reading that much in anymore. They don’t sound that unique because they have a very strong color. There are many aspects to it, to reading in, which our minds do. The strong effects when our ears produce other tones actually sound like they are right here. You feel you can actually touch them. In the past, it was not possible to study difference tones. People used to hear them intuitively, but now you can actually make programs to control them. You do not have to think only of the tones in the room. You can also give equal notion to the sounds the listener creates in his ears. The sound the listener creates in his ears is as much a sonic dimension as the acoustic tones that are sounding in the room. You can create them consciously. When you studied harmony in school, you learned about musical tones. Actually, the tones that your ears produce are responsible for why you recognize a major third or fifth. At Johns Hopkins, they call it otoacoustic emission. They have interesting articles in which they call it “a tiny loudspeaker within the ear.” This is very much in the commercial world of music. At Universal Studios, in the Back to the Future exhibit, one of the effects they use is a very low subliminal tone, maybe twenty cycles per second. They even have a name for it—frequency injection—and it’s used to make a much more thrilling ride. I read a book called A Textbook of Aviation Physiology that gave different vibration frequencies for different parts of the body. I was shocked to discover that in very low regions, the effects are critical. At six cycles per second you might feel sick, but at eight you might feel good. At seven it affects your eyes or may even cause blindness. People working in theme parks are paying attention to this phenomenon, whereas people in the musical world are not.

  As someone who does location-based installations and performances, I go to a place and, if it’s a major work, I usually work there for three weeks—once I got to work six weeks—with the sound because I want to make something happen. To that end, I have developed what I call Mini Sound Series in which I invent sound characters. Maybe one part of the work is one week long, then it continues into the next week or the week after. It’s wonderful when people come back.

  The first installation I did was in San Francisco. I had six weeks to work on it. Mostly I do them in Europe or Japan because most people are reluctant or don’t understand that to create sound for certain specifications, you need to work and be there at the location. I recently read about people working for two months on location-based installations in Las Vegas—working out and perfecting everything on hard discs. Once they get it running, they do trials with numbers of people; they can alter things on the hard disk; it’s an accepted thing. Whereas in the field of alternative music, if you want a little time, they think, “My goodness, give over the space to a composer for this long?” I think things will change now. Another tendency is the creation of interactive scores for people at home. CD-ROMs are very primitive, and probably audio would actually be more effective. The visual aspect is not going to take off until we have real three-dimensional experiences we can get by wearing glasses or in some other way. We actually had this in the home instead of CD-ROM where you’re looking at a screen. But, actually, there are many ways of thinking about designing incredible worlds and scripts in which people may make transformations of your music and bring other things in.

  Right now, I am doing two interesting projects. One is called Gong. People are studying the titanic oscillations of the sun. They’re extremely low; each cycle takes about five minutes. There are six listening posts around the world that are tracking these slow waveform patterns. The research will tell us about the origins of the universe. There is another one that sends sounds into the ocean in order to study global warming. The waves start from California and travel around the world under water. You know that sound travels faster in warmer temperatures; therefore it’s a good way to study this. But they’ve had to delay the project because people complained that it would be very damaging to the animals. But they did something worse. They have now decided that they will send sounds only two days a week. The poor whales get a rest and then, whammo, they turn it on again. You could call up any of those laboratories. You could design a whole script that people could have at home with some music you make. You can bring in the ocean; you can bring in the waveforms from the sun. It’s incredible the kind of worlds you can invent now. When you go back in time, you realize the only way to have a first-person experience was when, for example, you experienced a symphony orchestra. You didn’t hear music anywhere else. You went to the symphony and entered this magical place. The tendency to get more and more personalized worlds developed when records appeared, and you could experience music in your own living room. You could get into any world you wanted. We are entering an age of customization—genes, drugs, you name it—everything is being customized. As a composer, you could even think of having people’s readouts for customizing music for certain bodily rhythms and parts. It’s not that far-fetched. We are in a time when we can make scores and give people opportunities to customize worlds that we initiate as composers, creators, or writers; then people may develop them in their homes. One only has to imagine these things. This is where thinking about different kinds of new forms and time is very exciting. I don’t think in the future there will be such a split between forms of pop music and alternative music. Already they are coming together. If art music continues, maybe the only distinction will be that people doing art music might design worlds that somehow are more specialized or exotic or even have watermarks, because music no longer will be made for millions. We’ve just gone through a weird period in which creepy avant-garde composers were composing weird music. Maybe they’re emblems for what in thirty years will be the watermark as a composer. You might make it for one or two people, or one museum, where it would be theirs in this perfect way. It doesn’t have to get played in a million restaurants and bookstores, like poor Bach or Mozart. But you would have a watermark, a signature, and an electronic signature that someone would have a key to. And that’s it. Many options are open. It’s just a matter of raising the questions about them.

  I just read an interview with Nicholas Negroponte, the director of the MIT Media Lab, who just published a book, Being Digital. The interviewer asked him what
he thought about biotechnology, and he said, “Well, it probably is going to be the twenty-first century, but no one knows.” Even to talk about machines doesn’t make a lot of sense now. It’s really more the physics of these elements and the potential and being aware that, for example, if there is a biological memory it will be capable of storing much more. If things develop in that direction, how are you going to function as a composer? Are you going to sit in a room and write scores and play your keyboard? You might instead be designing auditory enhancers. You might rather make a piece about the sun. Maybe you’ll discover a way to enhance your sensitivity such that you actually could experience those low sounds. I don’t know if that’s possible. You could design that piece Alvin was talking about. It was called Living Sound: Patent Pending.

  In 1980, they passed a law for patenting life forms. I had read about that four months before I made Living Sound, in the same weekend the law was passed. It was exciting to me that it was a synchronous event. It took place in Dennis Russell Davies’s music room. I had petri dishes and a funny text on music stands about making violins. There were odd visual things around the house. A biochemist had given me some petri dishes with a growing medium of agar. I had a text about the atoms in your body, having been there all these years. In the sunroom, I had an audiocassette recording of when the radio telescope designed to send signals into deep space was inaugurated. The director of the program gave a little speech about how we were the greatest and most powerful country in the world and were sending the first messages off to a planet or star or wherever it was going. He said, “We are standing in the most powerful spot in the world.” Then he said, “More details will be available at lunch.” Everyone applauded, as if they were at a concert. It was silly. This incredible thing was going on. They were sending signals billions of light years away and he said such stupid things. We hadn’t even made it to breakfast.

  When I was a music student, what I really loved about the piano was to listen to all the stuff that came out in the overtones. I really wanted to learn about that, so I studied it myself.

  It’s the same thing, playing these things over and over again in the same forms, and it’s all so much out of habit and it’s fine, but there’s a whole lot more you can imagine. There’s a lot of room for it because people will want to create these worlds at home. You can create different atmospheres, worlds where people can enter the sun, for example. It’s endless. It’s a very exciting time because we can hear everything, and, of course, we can create visual worlds to go along with this as well. I recently read about bridges and walls that sing, and there are just so many ways, I mean, I think the whole other area to think about are modes, are ways of presenting music. That’s a whole area to think about because there are other ways of doing it than putting on pieces at a concert. It would be wonderful if there were buildings designed for sound, like there are art museums. Maybe there will be because people will be able to do a lot at home, make a lot of different musical experiences; but they obviously can’t, I mean, not everyone, unless you’re Bill Gates and have this incredible house, you can’t really have a kind of experience that you could in a place that was dedicated to sound with multiple loudspeakers and sound that moves around. That will probably happen. I see signs of that. Often, I look at what’s happening in other parts of the world. For example, Disney has bought several buildings in Times Square. They’re investing in the future because they know people are going to want to go out and have a certain kind of entertainment besides just being in their homes. It was an odd time for them to invest in that because there is so much investment in media right now—interactive television and all that. They want to take over these theaters—it is kind of curious.

  I am very struck by the game Myst. You’re probably familiar with the CD-ROM game Myst. Two years ago, they would have had some silly melodies in that actual scene. It’s this kind of sound that perceptually you have to read in. When I was listening for a while, I actually became hypnotized by it. It reminded me a lot of my first works in which I installed microphones in different remote locations. They were called city links, and a microphone could be by the ocean in one city and then another in another city; then I would bring these remote locations together in mixing. Sometimes in these ocean experiences, particularly at night, it wasn’t the waves but just the air, and it would be very quiet. It was fascinating, you couldn’t tell quite what was in the air. This was the kind of phenomenon that was on Myst. Two or three years ago, they would have used a funny little tune instead of this partially colored noise. You actually have to read in and construct your own meaning, however unconsciously. People relate to them perhaps because they’re familiar, but it’s a different kind of involvement. I don’t think this game would have been so popular a few years ago if it used music, as it is now.

  Maybe I should say something about my work. When I did these remotes, I was at MIT. I picked up signals with a microphone in Boston Harbor, coming into my studio on a high-quality telephone line. It was great because if I went somewhere, I could make another link to it and install it either in a gallery, or do a performance or whatever I wanted with it. I actually lived with it for three to four years. Initially, I did it not because I wanted the sounds of birds or seagulls or other environmental sounds. I really wanted to learn about the spatial aspects. So I carefully installed the microphones where I could hear sounds far away or close by. I absorbed the space unconsciously. I would come home late at night and turn the system on instead of turning on the radio or a record, and because of the transmission, I had a more detached perceptual space. After a certain period of time, I realized there was a constant tone. That got me interested in thinking about the subliminal tones that are around us. I created a series called Tone of Place. In Boston, when I measured, it was ninety-three cycles per second. Later, I put a microphone in Battery Park in New York. It made me think about where you grow up and the kind of tone you unconsciously hear. What does it mean? I never followed it through, but it was an interesting thing to think about. I made quite a number of those pieces and transmissions, some from here to Europe. After that, I developed the architectural aspect of my music. It actually came with thinking about the advances in software, that if I was creating something, I wanted to create something that would not be so easily made a variation of or replicated via software. I took that as a challenge. I wanted to make something that was more dramatic. I discovered that if I installed the sound with multiloudspeaker systems, [I] might make very interesting shapes or patterns, but if I install it architecturally, I might be able to get the sound to travel around behind that back wall to meet another sound. I could actually work with the physical properties of the room or the building itself. Acousticians call that structure-borne, verses airborne, sound. The wavelength for airborne middle C is four feet, whereas in structure-borne sound it’s twenty-two feet. Maybe that’s why quiet sounds, when I have them installed structurally, have a clear, magical presence. They don’t sound as if they’re coming out of loudspeakers and hurting your ears. It became very exciting for me to do works that involved more than one room. I’ve had some good opportunities to do that recently in Japan, where there was a main space and four other adjacent areas. In one of these areas, there was a curved stone structure that had a different acoustic from the main space. I’m not in the other rooms, so I can’t hear it. So I have to know everything, I have to work there, and I have to learn the acoustics of the place for a period of time so that I know what I’m producing because it’s very controlled. So I know that if I want to make an analogy between that back room and here, or I want to make a certain kind of tone fusion … so I’ll know if someone’s in here, what it feels like and what is out there. And you can make many different possibilities—I might have a zone of power, like this curved sound space. It was amazing. When I first went there to see the space, we were walking out on a curve and I said, “We have to have sound here,” because it went up a hill! It was curved like in an old castle even though it
was a new building, and the engineer said, “We can put a speaker there.” And I said, “Maybe we don’t need to.” And we didn’t. I was able to get the sound from the speaker in the preceding room. The sound seemed to be hanging in the air. As you walked through, it kept getting louder and louder; of course there wasn’t any speaker there. It was like a hologram.