The Culture of Feedback by Daniel Belgrad

Author:Daniel Belgrad [Belgrad, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press

I had stumbled upon a remarkably simple electronic network that created a site-specific “architectural raga” out of a room’s resonant frequencies. . . . Perhaps the most elegant aspect was the responsiveness of the sound itself: one “played” this system not by twiddling knobs or pushing buttons, but by moving or making sounds within field of the feedback.

The result, he wrote in 1974, was a “responsive field” that in his opinion constituted an interactive sonic intelligence. He instructed performers to “Treat Pea Soup as an alien intelligent being who is attempting to gather information about her environment and its residents.”48

Another strategy for building intelligent systems of sounds was to use the dynamics of interaction among people, instead of electronic circuitry, to form the requisite feedback loops. Michael Nyman in his 1974 book Experimental Music categorized this technique as “People Processes: These are processes which allow the performers to move through given or suggested material, each at his own speed.”49 Contextual cues gleaned from listening to the other performers instruct each performer as to how to voice next. Oliveros used this principle in her 1971 sound meditation “Teach Yourself to Fly.” But the most influential version of it was the “modular composition” form that Terry Riley invented in 1964 with his landmark work, In C.

In C is composed of fifty-three short phrases or “modules,” all in the key of C, played by any number of musicians (although the ideal number is around twenty). The performers play “together” in the sense that they are playing simultaneously and in the same space, so that they are aware of one another’s playing; but they do not play in unison. They must play the modules in the order in which they appear in the score, but every performer repeats each module as many times as he or she chooses (including zero times, which is tantamount to skipping it). As a result, of the fifty-three modules, three or four are typically in play at any given moment. The resulting performance creates washes of sound with a slowly shifting tonal emphasis. Most good performances last about an hour. Reviewing the piece’s premiere, Alfred Frankenstein wrote that “climaxes of great sonority appear and are dissolved in the endlessness. At times you feel you have never done anything all your life long but listen to this music and as if that is all there is or ever will be, but it is altogether absorbing, exciting, and moving too.”50

The success of such performances depends on the existence of a degree of diversity among the performers, which is organized by the composition’s feedback dynamics to create each rendition of the piece. This creates a soundscape ecology akin to murmuration (the patterns emergent in moving flocks of birds and schools of fish). Oliveros wrote in 1972, “Terry Riley’s In C is like a flock of migrating birds in flight”; and Riley himself likened it to “formations of patterns that were kind of flying together. That’s how it came to me. It was like this kind of cosmic vision of patterns that were gradually transforming and changing.

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