Sonorous Fractals

This episode of Sonorous Fractals investigates the relationship between listening and argumentation. This podcast pivots around the question: can listening be an argument? Attempting to answer this question leads Justin, our host, into the archives. Sifting through ancient texts and interviewing experts in the field, Justin is able to discern how listening has come to be understood as a passive sense. However, simply foregrounding our problematic relationship to listening is insufficient. Utilizing the work of avant-garde artists like Pierre Schaeffer, John Cage, Paul D. Miller, and Girl Talk, Justin traces the emancipatory potentiality of using listening as a mode of invention. He argues that listening to the ordinary sounds of the everyday provides artists with an index of possible tropes that tap directly into social memory. In other words, it affords artists the ability to resonate with their audience, persuading them into different states of being. Our handsome host concludes by noting that listening is a mode of argumentative invention because it provides arguers a reservoir of relevant sounds to guide the assembly of a piece.

Sonorous Fractals: The Podcast

Listening to John Oswald's "Pretender (Dally Proton)"

High pitched, fragmented sounds shift and change fancifully as they are sped up and slowed back down, dramatically lowering in pitch until Dolly Parton’s famous voice takes over the focus. Her voice is gradually altered, and the breaks make it seem as if she is stuttering on the ends of her words, slowly deepening her voice to a rich, soulful bass and eventually to masculine depths of pitch. As the frequency slows so does the speed of playback; the background music and singers lag operatically. About two and a half minutes in, the track reaches an pivotal point and begins to speed up again, rapidly, as the vocal layer returns at its original pitch and speed. Finally, three minutes in, Dolly’s voice is split, or doubled, in a schizoid alteration that allows her a concluding duet with her bass alter ego. Most of the final minute is a quiet and consistent vocal loop. What could be the intended meaning of this piece adapted from Dolly Parton’s already-distinct cover of the classic song from the 1950’s? Is there a self-referential play on words here between the content of the song and the changing vocal identity of the singer?

The first minute of Jukebox Capriccio by Christian Marclay : a Listening by Andrew Edwards

Sounds crackle, an object emerges. Flickering and popping. It collapses and wiggles, then explodes outwards again, forming a recognizable representational image in my mind, though shrouded in more twisting and contortions. Its almost impossible for the landscape not to take on recognizable forms here. Higher brighter sharpness shoot out of the main form. They coalesce into a denser form and then collapse. One cycle emerges, repeating and folding back into itself while a second tries to form recognizable images but is continually exploding out of it. The whole field forms a jumble and then Breaks into a static screech. A cascading rhythm falls away then trickles in itself lower. Wiggles and thumps. A twisting blast and then hoarse wheezing honks loop. Melody tracks slips beneath moving honks wheezing. Recognizable rhythms attempt to emerge, but on top of them a twisting melding stream spirals around and then falls away. Three trains of motion, One: rhythms chomping away until they form another cascade that falls from high to low, while TWO; The wiggle melody is trying to squirm its way though, while THIRD: A steady chordal harmonic song is rising. Then as the First falls into cascade the Second twists and spirals in on itself, and the drumming rhythms take over the field. A honk emerges and folds itself to the right. The THREE forms battle for the stage as the rightward honking blasts one, two, three. It is growing with higher blips. Rhythm and shards of melody loop and continue… This work is dense, with multiple lines twisting alongside each other. The stage is never still, with new lines pushing down others continually. It is always changing.