Our point of departure for making a paper and graphite instrument was a spark from Swedish composer Ann Rosén, in 2018 I was fortunate enough to see her at work. Rosén and her husband did a residency at the Norwegian centre for Technology in Arts and Music ( Notam ), where I work. She demonstrated a graphite mixer, sending audio signals through lines of graphite drawn on paper. The audio signal was connected from an analogue synth with crocodile clamps, drawing and erasing lines would route the signal, I was dazzled by the idea. In connection to Extended Composition I started experimenting with the technique. At first having huge trouble with ground noise, bad connections, non-sheltered cables and what not. Eventually I gained control over the technique and was able to expand on it as well. My contributions to this technique are to enter the human body as a source of the sound and as a link in conducting the sound signal. In this context the conductor is that which the signal travels through, normally a cable, and as you see, it can also be a body. Linking the human body into the conductor means that the drawing on the backwall becomes a tactile instrument and the whole system turns into a cybernetic sound system.
The sound signals wait potently in the graphite near their point of entry, where each signal enters through the crocodile clip. And the player's body has a cable attached to her skin. When she touches the graphite the sound-signal finds its way from the graphite, through her body, back into the cable and the sound system. The following is an account of the major turning points in this process.
At first Ellen and I experiemented with different musics. The signal between speaker and amplifier was cut and we connected each end to ourselves. In this way the signal would reach the speaker when we touched. We experimented with the fast and loud songs of the rock band Rival Sons. The aim was to find a contrast between the intimacy of soft touch and the sudden bursts of loud music from big rooms. This worked in terms of contrast, but using such a powerful readymade tilted the whole situation to be more a comment on the Rival Sons. The well-known idioms of rock music spoke louder than us. We had established a signal path which we ourselves were part of and we thought the contrast between touch and rock music was effective. However, the sound could not be an existing recording from an outside source. This lent force to the sentrifugal powers at work and pushed the composition towards a collage. We wanted a composition with stronger connections.
Our next strategy was to try and record something rock like. We brought in a drumkit, a guitar and a vocal mic. The idea was to try and assemble the Creedence Clearwater Revival song Long as I can see the light by overlaying uncoordinated recordings done on the spot. This fell apart before we even gave it a proper try. Having a drumkit and a guitar in the situation gave away the potential of the room. These are such potent symbols. They sent our associations in a very strong direction and closed the door on imagination.
We had the cybernetic signal route, the sound signal sent through the cable, into the graphite, through a body and back to the sound system. We still felt the music could be rock, this was to contrast the art idiom which we work within. We also felt that doing recordings on the spot added a value. From this point we tried recording a scat version of Kyuss song Hurricane, only substituting the words with shoobidoa, yeah. Again, we recorded in uncoordinated layers, so as to mildly disassemble the music. This solution stuck with us for quite a while, and at this stage we experimented with sending the signal into the drawing and hooking the other part of the instrument to a body, so that when we touch the drawing we pass the signal through ourselves and back into thew sound-system. When this started working, it became clear that this way of sending the sound through the graphite and then into our selves had potential. It also revealed that the sound we had at the time was too complete, with a vocal track on one connection, rhythm on the second and a scat guitar part on the third, we could only overlay and combine three elements, we needed more elements and simpler elements. The reason was that the paper and graphite turned towards being an instrument, something more intricate than simply a part of a cable that we could connect. At some point it dawned on us that we needed simple sounds that could be building blocks in a music.
The first choices for these building blocks were non-pitched noise of different qualities. We could improvise and felt it worked musically. But we had lost the contrast between our idiomatic art-situation and the music. A noise impro is what one might expect from a room with this potential, so we had created a situation that confirmed itself rather than contradict itself. The latter is a preferred strategy, remembering Bachelard´s words everything comes alive when contradictions accumulate (Bachelard 1958, p. 39)
A goal in Bly was to have a wide palette of very different materials, without tearing the work apart. This is an important balance to be aware of when seeking a situation where contradictions open up the possibilities for long leaps of association, and the formal composition keeps the elements together. With this in mind it was clear that a noise impro in a modern art situation closed the room and confirmed itself, leaving little room for an audience imagination to create something for themselves. The situation was solidified as the music did little other than confirm the expected.
Through the spring of 2021 I struggled with the music, what was it to be? Alongside this, the instrument was stabilized and sources of noise were eliminated. At this stage it became clear that it was an instrument. Keeping it simple at first, we gave it a G minor scale, initially with sine waves. When they proved too painful to listen to, we recorded ourselves whistling the scale. We tried some folksy tunes, a nice touch and contrast. We tried Frère Jacques in a sort of Mahler symphony 1, 3rd movement-like version. Also very nice, but too heavy, sad and dark music in a minor key. And it's a song everyone knows, so again we had the weight of a colossal pre-existing symbol entering the situation, much like the Rival Sons, making us the comment on itself, it was not viable.
The whistling and live recording of the scale became a part of BLY. These were important steps into solidifying BLY as a piece that performers produce, perform and control on stage.
It is a chamber – play of live electronics and performance. The stage is set with a backwall of drawing-paper, an overhead, a sound-mixer, a light-dimmer, a microphone and a recording device, in addition to simple purpose-built means. With these elements the performers produce their material, perform and control everything, it is live-art. Through variations on elements in constellation and in form, a surreal dreamy world is performed into excistence.
In May of 2021 the turn came to try a music with a slight touch of the sacral. I borrowed heavily from the Italian renaissance composer Palestrina, applying his rules for contrapuntal music, and then adapting the music to the instrument, this stuck. The whistled tones, the minor scale, the graphite and paper instrument, the signal going through the player and the tonal music with a hint of the religious. In my mind this is a situation where contradictions put elements into motion leaving vast amounts of possible associations to follow, allowing the audience to partake. At first the music had two parts, we hear this in the first performance in BLY_medium_cut at 11.06. Later, when it became clear that the overall form was to be a variation form, we worked on different ways of varying the music, also considering bass notes and another recording session. But BLY as such was already so much about building situations and so little about playing, that this was not an option. At some point it dawned, why not just whistle a third voice? Ellen took the challenge and mastered it, heard in BLY_medium_cut at 23.35. Ellen records the pitches, plays with two hands, whistles the third voice, is the source of sound, is a part of the instrument and is a part of the technology where an analogue sound signal passes through her body. Being in the music and of the music, whilst playing it.
Cecilie observes:
Ellen's movements that stretched and floated over the paper and the lead drawing - the body as an extended moving surface, where her pressure, stroke, breath, glissando and whistling, starting from an exquisite composition of a few single notes - looked incredibly strange and poetic - music, visual arts and dance all at once. Recognizable and completely new.
When Ellen takes a deep breath of air and blows it out between her tightened lips, she creates 587,33 riples in the air per second, this is what we hear as a pitch, and in our classification of pitches we have named it d5. This air strikes the diaphragm of the microphone and induces corresponding fluctuations in the voltage produced by the condenser microphone. The voltage or the current is an analog of the sound. The analog electric signal is then transferred into discreet digital bits, chopped both horizontally and vertically so to speak. In the software that Mads Kielgaard Nielsen wrote, the recorded snippets that Cecilie chose are masked with a fade in each end and then looped back with an overlap. From there the digital signal is again rebuilt into an analogue electronic signal. It is sent into the cables that connect to the crocodile clamps, and into the graphite of the drawing. Here, the signal is dormant, a potent signal waiting to connect to an outlet. The outlet comes in the form of Ellen’s fingers. Ellen touches the graphite with moist fingers, and she has a cable attached to her arm. The cable´s copper is stripped of insulation, moistened and taped to the skin Kabel_hud.jpg. This is enough to transfer the signal from the graphite, into Ellen’s body, out through the left arm and back into the machinery. From the air in her lungs, pushed over her lips, recorded by the machinery, sent into the graphite, through Ellen’s body, back into the machine and out through the speakers, waves of pressure through the air and into our ears where the eardrum vibrates and sends these vibrations to three small bones in our middle ear, malleus, incus and stapes. The bones amplify the vibrations and send them to the cochlea. The vibrations cause the fluid inside the cochlea to ripple and hair cells – sensory cells, ride the wave. The hair strokes against overlying structures, causing the stereocilia to open, chemicals rush into the cells, and this creates an electrical signal. The auditory nerve carries the electrical signal to the brain for interpretation.
The unusual link here is the travel of electrical signal through the flesh of the performer. The poetic potential lies in knowing that Ellen whistles the pitches for the recording device that Cecilie controls, and Cecilie sends the signals into the instrument that Ali is drawing, from there it travels through Ellen’s body as an electrical signal, Ellen is in effect a cable and a performer at once, a part of the machinery. Then, the signal travels back into the mixer and out to the speakers.
This situation, where Ellen produces the sounds for the instrument, performs on them as well as having them led through her body in the process, this is an unusually intimate situation between performer, machinery, sound, instrument, and audience. Whilst playing, Ellen becomes a cyborg, much in the same way that a person with a pacemaker or a hearing-aid is a cyborg. Only in the case of a pacemaker, the machinery is clearly a part of the human, whereas in Ellen’s case, when she conducts the signal much like a cable, she becomes a part of the machinery. The sound that enters into the ear of an audience member as a pressure wave, and into the brain of an audience member as an electronic signal, has previously travelled through Ellen’s body as an electrical signal.
Thanks to Ann Rosén for the initial impulse into this process.
FINGERPRINTS OF A PIANIST
In the beginning, the instrument was totally out of control. Every time I played, there was something that didn’t work or went wrong. Suddenly the sound of the recorded whistling was extremely loud when I touched the dots, making your ears ring; sometimes the sound was practically inaudible. Christian worked doggedly to fix the problems. I tried to familiarize myself with the instrument, but this was a challenge as it sounded so different each time we set it up for recording and playing. Every time we replaced the piece of paper, the drawings were new and the dots representing sounds had different distances between them.
For the first few months, we improvised the music into being. I played with whatever sounds came out, accepted the unpredictable in the sound picture as a feature1, and constantly created new starting points. It felt playful and liberating. But at the same time we agreed that the improvisations had something unresolved about them. It mostly sounded like an exploration of the instrument. We wanted to have something that contrasted with BLY’s slow-building opening, something much more taut.
Christian worked out a score and the process of learning and rehearsing it began. It was tough to realise these notations because the instrument was so unstable, it was as if we had become used to the fact that the whole thing could break down at any time. Still, I erupted or got irritated if some points were extremely loud or soft, so that the lines I tried to play were interrupted. The score reminded me of a kind of choral movement with long, single notes and stretched-out melodic lines in G minor. Later Christian made the instrument more stable and I found the necessary confidence to work on the details. We put tiny pencil marks on each sheet of paper so that the dots appeared in the same place every time I played. I could play quieter by moving a few millimeters away from a dot, but at the same time it was totally impossible to get the sound to gradually increase in volume by sliding towards a dot. I had to manifest a new ‘logic’ that wasn’t always intuitive. We worked on fading a sound in and out, and found out how much moisture and graphite was needed in order to get the sound we wanted.
In order to learn the score, I established the basic ‘finger positioning’ by dividing the notes between the right and left hand. I learned the music by heart by imagining the sound picture aurally, as well as visualizing the score as in ‘normal note learning’, but also by classifying different shapes which I called, for example, ‘half sun’ or ’wandering’, to remember the movement pattern. Eventually the order of movements had become instilled in my body, my arms had learnt the score, which meant I could focus on making the lines I was physically creating with the ‘silent pencil tracks’ a part of the general polyphonic sound. I see from the video that my gestures are gentle and rounded. We needed space to breathe, for phrasing and the ‘weight’ of the arm movements, things that were stretched out visually. Several times I thought of myself as ‘listening with my arms’, especially in long sections and lines which sounded faint, I pictured a point of concentrated energy at the other end of the movement, which was pulling my arm towards it. I am curious about how many elements a musician is able to focus on while playing; whether she must to an extent choose between movements and sound, and whether it’s the body or the sound that is most in control in the various different sections.
In the final part of BLY where I am whistling live together with the whistling tones I recorded in the beginning, I get butterflies in my stomach as soon as this interactive moment starts up, as I slide slowly across my own recorded sound, and vibrate together with it for several seconds. By whistling live I can create glissandi along the pencil streaks on the paper. My live whistling tones slide down the register while at the same time one of my arms follows a pencilled line downwards on the sheet of paper. Perhaps this could be read as the arm performing the downward glissando. This also makes it possible for additional polyphony, that the arm can rise vertically upwards when my glissando goes down in register, so that you lose all logic and footholds, or that the speed of the arm movements contrast with the tempo of the whistling.
Christian asks whether it’s important that it’s my own personal whistling sound that I’m playing along with. In BLY it is crucial that it’s my own whistling, so that the sound is as similar as possible in the part where I’m whistling ‘live’ so that you can’t distinguish what is prerecorded or not. This is one of the music’s strong points, which makes it ambiguous, an exciting quality in many of Christian’s works. But at the same time it doesn’t necessarily feel like ‘me’ in that moment. Generally, when I play with different samples in various compositions, I get to know the sound via my entire listening and sensate apparatus. I imbibe every strand of colour, explore and envelop myself in the sound, try to ‘live’ it in an aural sense. I would have done this with BLY, too, if it had been me whistling along with (or against) someone else’s whistling, or sinewaves or piano tones from a detuned piano.
Whether it’s Ellen’s sound or Ellen playing is not important in terms of the actual composition of BLY, in my view. Over time the instrument became fairly reliable and can be played by others. The written score is finished, after a number of alterations made by Christian and myself. Some musicians can’t whistle, while others can no doubt make more sonorous and full-bodied whistle tones than I can. It’s incredible to think about how compositions can travel through time and space through us who play them. Think of Mozart’s music, made 250 years ago and which, even at this moment, is being replayed via millions of hands and larynxes the whole world over. Or to sit reverently at Grieg’s own grand piano in the villa at Troldhaugen2 and feel the cold ivory imprints of thousands of other pianists’ fingers; fleeting, impermanent fingerprints. There is something beautiful but also melancholy about this. At the same time musicians themselves are a kind of living archive of experiences drawn from all kinds of compositions and musical situations which have sunk deep and been released via our bodies. This lived experience is activated and developed every day in new projects, both in traditional repertoire and in the creation of new experimental works. What this accumulated, sense-based knowledge consists of and how it is put into practice is challenging to articulate.
In BLY I experienced a fascinating cycle of the process of a new instrument gently being constructed as I learned to play it. Alongside the development of the instrument and an increasing sensation of gaining instrument skills and aesthetic understanding, other elements of the artwork were generated and shaped by Christian in a playful process of artmaking, chance, experimental use of technology, dialogue with other artists and an extended musicality that mirrored the sound and the touch of the new canvas instrument.