1991
Public Supply I - IV and Radio Net
The drawing describes the first work in 1966. It represents the aural space which was formed by a radio broadcast covering one thousand two hundred square miles of the New York Metropolitan area, and its telephone network. The work was initiated by advertising a phone number and a broadcast time. It was also necessary to explain that their calls would be put on the air, as this was well before the time when the format of a radio phone-in program was practiced.
People entered the space through a game of chance. There were many more callers than incoming lines. A caller was able to enter if his call coincided with the exit of another person (callers were limited to a maximum of three minutes each.) I listened to each person and joined them into broadcast groups which were then put on the air together. While they were on the air I acted as a balancer or moderator of the group by adjusting the way their sounds were mixed together. I re- proportioned them according to what each person was doing, as a way of developing activity within the group -- a way of getting them to listen to what they were doing and what others in the group were doing.
In the second work, realized in Toronto in 1968, the callers were not formed into different groups, but they were all put directly on the air as their calls came in. Their arrivals and departures formed one evolving group. In order to balance the group I built a "finger mixer" which allowed each of the five fingers of one of my hands to control the levels and stereo position of the sounds of two callers. This moved the work into a different time scale; it evolved from the callers moment to moment reactions to their weight within the group rather than to the gradual shifts of balance of the first work.
In the early nineteen seventies, I began to think about forming these works by having caller's sounds activate special "musical instruments". The first realization of this idea appeared in Chicago in 1973. In addition to caller's sounds being balanced by the finger mixer, each line was also attached to a special circuit controlling the pitch of a tone. Thus, there was a bank of ten tones (one for each caller) which gradually shifted in pitch according to the nature of each caller's sounds. The sounds themselves rode on top of this slowly shifting pitched texture.
The next step was to imagine callers doing their own mixing also --making the mixing process as an "instrument". In 1977, a work encompassing the continental United States was realized on the National Public Radio Network. (illustration #2) There were five call-in cities -- New York, Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles and Minneapolis. I built a system for each city which received the calls and combined them into a sound responsive mix: it listened to each caller and mixed their sounds together according to what they were doing moment by moment. This mix was passed into a configuration of loops; wires which circulated the sounds from each city past a central point in Washington where they were intermixed, and sent back out to the cities. Each pass of a sound around the loop shifted its pitch and changed its character slightly, so that they formed layers of themselves as they circulated across the country. The one hundred and sixty stations of the network, spaced around the country along the loops, broadcast the sounds at their particular point to their local area. Ten thousand people entered the work and made sounds during a two hour period.
My part in these Broadcast Works has gradually changed through their evolution. The first work was executed completely manually. The third added an autonomous pitch bank which responded to callers sounds. By the time of Radio Net the complete idea had become embodied in the architecture of the system itself.
My role was not that of a composer or conductor. It was closer to that of an architect -- a constructor of aural spaces -- a shaper of a network of sound links and sound transformations.
The gradual autonomy of the work from manual control came about for two reasons. The first was that I found my ideas outpacing the ability of two hands. The second was the fascination with the idea of building non-static form of architecture, implementing ideas in the form of processes which responded to what was going on, making an architecture which reacted to the ways people used it -- a live embodiment of idea. This work, Radio Net, was the culmination of eleven years of work with these ideas and led me to Audium.
Max Neuhaus
Excerpted from a talk given at the New School for Social Research, New York, March 1982 with addenda from 1984 and 1990. The concept of Audium dates from 1978. First published in German in: Vom Verschwinden der Ferne: Telekommunikation und Kunst, Dumont, Cologne, 1990.