1991
Max Neuhaus
AUDIUM
Project For A Global Aural Space
Some Observations On Spoken Language and Global Communications
I am fascinated by the way that the language we speak determines how and even what we can hear. When we learn a new language we discover there are a whole new set of phonetic sounds which we can not distinguish. They sound the same to us, while the native speaker not only finds their differences obvious, but through small nuances in them which are completely imperceptible to us, is able to determine the geographical origin of a speaker and many things about his personality or mood.
A visual analogy might help us to realize just how acute this aural discrimination is, and the complexity of our process of understanding spoken language. For instance, if we equated the entire visible spectrum from red to violet to the entire range of "sound colors" we are capable of recognizing, then all the language sounds of the world could fit into a hue of only one color, say green. Differences between each of the world's perhaps twenty thousand phonemes would be very minute differences in this particular green, while the small differences in each individual's pronunciation would be unimaginable visually -- so small as to be completely beyond our visual discrimination.
As children, we learn to understand words before we can say them. Speaking involves an additional step; not only do we have to know how the word sounds, we have to match our sound producing actions to that sound. Speaking is an intricate process of control over breath and muscles where we continually compare the sound we are producing with of the word's sound, and constantly adjust our muscles and breath for a match. If we were to suddenly loose our hearing, it would be impossible for us to continue to speak accurately.
The fact that we take this complex aural ability completely for granted in our native tongue means that as we learn to understand and speak a language we develop an extremely fine discrimination between the "hues" of our mother tongue. It is as though we develop a built in microscope on this particular area of our hearing and the ability to vocalize it.
The two most widespread forms of global electronic communication are some of our earliest: radio broadcasting and telephony. They are both extensions of forms we have also had for a long time. Broadcasting is an extension of the idea of one person talking to a group; the public speaker. The telephone is an extension of conversation between individuals.
They have opposite natures, in some ways they are antithetical. One is a one way path, the other, two way; one is a way of disseminating an idea from one to many, the other a means of exchanging ideas between individuals. One is passive, the other active; one is often an individual activity, the other a social one. Both however, are vast expansions of the original forms in the numbers of people involved, and this changes their nature, fundamentally .
Pre-electronic public speaking involved a body of listeners gathered in one place. Like any audience their proximity generated a group dynamic. The size of the group was limited by the range of the voice. In broadcasting, though the listeners are dispersed and act more as individuals than as a group. The number of the listeners is limited only by a common language.
The two principle forms of broadcasting -- television and radio also differ in many respects. Radio, because we don't see it, stimulates imagination -- it's less passive than TV and less engulfing. Radio's means of production are simpler and less costly removing pressure to constantly seek the lowest common denominator of interest and allowing it to be more diverse.
The telephone, our electronic two-way vehicle, allows us to converse beyond our immediate environment. It has the potential to free us from many limitations of geographical distance including, perhaps provincialism. It forms an almost instantaneous aural link between over four hundred million (432,880,000) individual locations in the world. As a system, it has the potential to let us all move in one common interactive place.
The telephone allows an interactive exchange of ideas. Not just the statement and response of written communication, but the simultaneous interchange of information with the voice. Anyone who has experienced a poor long distance connection which was one-way (one where they could only hear the other person when they themselves stopped speaking) will realize how important this difference is. If we are not able to hear and react to the responses of the person we are talking to WHILE we are talking, not just when we finish a statement, the conversation becomes awkward ant stilted.
A telephone call accomplishes many of the things that traveling to a face to face meeting does, but because it is purely aural it has a different character. Instead of reading facial expression and body language, we focus on tone of voice and extralingual sounds and pauses. Like radio, it is more imaginary than talking face to face. The question is not so much whether the telephone is a better form of communication than face to face conversation, it is another one with a different character and dimensions.
Cost also determines the nature of the telephone. Long distance rates vary indirectly with the sophistication of the system --a ten to one difference between developed countries like America and Japan and some underdeveloped countries. In Japan and America, due to its low cost, the telephone has evolved into a casual social vehicle over long distances. In Europe, where costs can be four times as high, a long distance telephone call is still treated as a serious action to be completed as efficiently and quickly as possible. In certain underdeveloped countries, where a phone call might cost a weeks pay, it must be quite another matter, entirely.
In a number of ways the telephone system is analogous to our system of streets and roadways. It is a connecting path between people -- a form of thoroughfare. We could say that its cost structure is perhaps now at a stage of development equivalent to the early network of roads in Europe. Traveling wasn't common and travelers paid "what ever the traffic would bear" to use the road at each stage of the way. The concept of the right of free passage didn't exist. Yet somehow this concept did evolve in spite of what must have been very strong private interests -- no small feat when one considers the real cost of constructing and maintaining a highway.
Our system of telephone thoroughfares is quite a different matter, indeed. Compared to a highway, it is almost immaterial --a major part of it is not even made up of wire anymore, but microwave and satellite links. Its construction uses much less energy and raw materials than a highway and it requires only very, very minute amounts of energy to travel along it.
Currently, the real cost of a transatlantic phone call to a telephone company is about $0.025 per minute -- less than a dollar for a half hour of conversation. What users pay is quite a different matter, and depends on where they are calling from. A call from Germany to the US. is about $70 per half hour, while one from the US. to Germany is about $20 for the same time period.
At the present time, with the breaking up of communications monopolies, the system appears to be moving in the direction of if not free passage, at least a reasonable cost of travel. Hopefully, the competition will establish a cost of communication closer to the low real cost of a phone call which modern technology has given us.
The Architecture of the Early Broadcast Works
Most people think of European post-Renaissance music -- music composed between 1600 and 1910 and current popular music -- as what music is. However, if we look even casually at music history and ethnomusicology, we find equally (if not even more highly) developed musics which exist without the benefit of orchestras, conductors, concert halls, or contemporary musical instruments.
Musics of Bali and Africa, once thought of as primitive, are indeed complex and intricate when seen in their own terms. In most cultures , music has developed as an aural tradition, unnotated, unwritten -- as a collective manifestation, a group activity rather than something to be consumed. We can see the role of composer varying from being nonexistent, to advisory, to that of an arbitrator, but the composer is rarely seen as a maker of a musical product. What we imagine to be musical absolutes -- scales, harmonic structures, pitch conventions -- are really just one dialect or linguistic convention -- one sound language out of many possible sound languages.
Structurally, radio is simply a one-way, live sound link originating in one place and extending to many places. Its significance for society depends on how it is utilized. In music, radio has been used simply as an extension of the concert hall. The works described here are only one example of ways that radio might be used to develop a new form rather than further extend an old one.
These Broadcast Works deal with the evolution of new musics: moving away from existing conventions and concepts of music into new ones. They assume that making music is natural to the human being; that music is not a product of highly developed skills, but rather a result of an empathy within the group that makes it. Music as a nonverbal dialog: not as a product, but as an activity; not as a rational process, but an intuitive, emotional and even a sensual one. Music as an activity which is not static, but rather an evolving process, constantly redefined by its present.
If we take the one-way sound link that radio provides, and add the telephone network to it, we can form something that might be called an "aural space". It becomes two-way; people in this space can hear and talk to each other. The Broadcast Works described here were made by groups of lay people in this kind of aural space. My task was not to define a musical work, but instead, to build an environment of interconnections between people, allowing a work to evolve.
There is a circular process inherent in all of our sound making activities -- from speaking a language to playing a musical instrument and even to most conventional musical composition. When we speak we are, at the same time, listening and constantly modifying our vocal tract according to what we hear it produce. It is a looping process -- sound producing action, judgment of the sound which results, adjustment of the sound producing action again.
These works are formed by adding an active element in this interdependent process -- a transformation of the sounds produced before they are heard in the broadcast -- an active score.
Public Supply I - IV and Radio Net
The drawing (illustration #1) 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.
AUDIUM
Audium proposes to create the impetus and means for an international human interchange with sound. It will form an entity for verbal and nonverbal aural exchange on a global scale: an aural community.
For most of it's past, music has taken a very different form from what it has become for us today. Historically, making music has been a communal activity rather than a performance for spectators. Highly developed musics evolved as group actions, indigenous to a community, and encompassing all its members as active participants. This once widespread human sound activity - a form of aural interchange separate from the verbal articulation of ideas --has been lost in most contemporary societies.
Spoken language, the original form for language development, evolves quickly, inventing vocabulary according to its needs. The basis for the development of each of the worlds existing languages has been simply the combination of a particular group of people in vocal contact with each other trying to communicate.
The project is composed of two parts, a Telephone Concourse and Broadcast Arenas.
Telephone Concourse
Audium proposes to extend the concept of the teleconference into an international public place. It will form a specialized network of teleconferences: a Telephone Concourse.
The telephone creates what we might call an acoustic or aural space --- a point of contact through sound. The nature of this telephone space itself provides a different foundation for social activity. Its visual anonymity, its nonphysical nature and its independence from geography, have provided us with a new forum for the development of human activity.
During PUBLIC SUPPLY I, two people living in different sections of New York City, who had been childhood friends but who hadn't seen each other in twenty years, recognized each others voices and had an emotional reunion on the air. To me, this crystallized the idea of the communications network I had assembled as a public place --- they met in the same way that they could have, but didn't --- on the street.
The Telephone Concourse adds an additional dimension to the previous works. It proposes a social network as well as a musical one. It might be thought of as a construction of different spaces, where each teleconference is a space in the construction and has its own particular entrances and exits. Each of these spaces is connected by "passageways" to certain other spaces in the network --- an intricate "building" constructed from sound interconnections rather than physical ones. It is accessible from any telephone, people move between groups by changing teleconferences, they enter or leave the Concourse by picking up or putting down the telephone.
Broadcast Arenas
Audium proposes to extend the medium of radio broadcasting by combining it with the telephone. It will form large two-way aural spaces which catalyze an activity beyond language: a new form of music
The Broadcast Arenas are radio broadcasts where the voice sounds of the callers in the Telephone Concourse are transformed, and broadcast live --- a sound transformation system changes the words of callers into abstract sounds, no longer carrying verbal meaning.
Many of us can recall walking through an echoey tunnel or passageway and being inspired to make a simple acoustic experiment by snapping our fingers or clapping, and listening to the sound reflections. In the same way, the more elaborate sound reactions of the Broadcast Arena encourage people to listen and try things. These sound reactions are not static, but change and evolve with the sounds people make, drawing them into the process which their visual anonymity gives them the freedom to explore.
The Broadcast Arena acts like a large room with special acoustic qualities. Concourse callers listening to the broadcast enter this "room". By changing words into abstract sounds, the transformations of the Broadcast Arena become a catalytic force. Hearing the altered reflection of their own voices provides the impetus and also the means to explore an interaction with sound, outside of language.
The nature of Audium's structural material --software allows it to be malleable even after its physical construction. The architecture of the Telephone Concourse is composed of the configurations and nature of its pathways between groups. It will begin experimentally with two or three language groups. Observation of its activity, social conventions and inter-regional traffic will form the basis for its design and construction.
The architectures of the Broadcast Arenas are formed by the nature of their reactions to sound. Each will be developed by tuning it to the aural character of its regional language.
The project is envisioned as a constantly changing entity. The architecture of interconnections forming the Telephone Concourse, and the sound transformations forming the acoustic of the Broadcast Arenas will not be static, but will respond to and evolve with the ways people use it.
Audium, this site for an aural entity in the ether -- will develop language by language in response to its users. The activity in the Telephone Concourse is verbal; people finding a common language, talking, moving through its groups. While the musical structure -- the Broadcast Arena -- shifts the emphasis from verbal meaning to tonal contour and vocal timbre -- a starting point for the evolution of an nonverbal aural communion.
The process of realizing Audium is, in fact, an informal program of social research. Audium is not something which will be implemented, but rather something which will grow organically, evolving its own architecture and community.
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.
Audium Model
Three triangular rooms are installed in the center of an exhibition space. Each room has a telephone handset and stereo loudspeakers. Exhibition visitors are free to enter the rooms. The rooms are arranged so that the occupants can not see each other. The telephones are connected so that they can talk. (see drawings)
Implementation
The realization of one or more Audium Models is the preliminary step in the implementation of the larger project, Audium. It accomplishes most of Audium's Broadcast Arena research, both aesthetic and technical. On site adaptation of Audium Model while observing its use by the general public is the last step in that research.
One can think of Audium Model as a three-way musical instrument played by the voice. Each of its lay players has an "active score" consisting of sounds he hears over his telephone earpiece while he is making sounds with his voice. The score is implemented by analyzing the sounds a player makes into the mouthpiece, using this analysis to derive control signals which "transform" his sounds, and sending the transformed sounds back to his earpiece. This transformed reflection of his own voice sets up a listen/response dialog with the player, stimulating him to go on beyond simply talking or the obvious clichés, and enter into an interactive sound making activity.
In order for this active score to work and engage the player, it really must be a two-way dialog. As in any conversation both parties, in this case the player and the system, have to listen to, and to some extent, understand each other.
My first approach for the score's realization is to explore techniques for recognizing psychological state from the voice--using the player's changing psychological profile determine the sound transformations sent back to him. The scenario I will begin experimenting with is described as MATCH in the Audium Model block diagram and description.
The sounds that result from this conversation between the system and each player become the components for the construction of the instrument's output sound. This construction is also controlled by the conversation of the three players and the system.
Max Neuhaus, 1991