Sine Waves and Simple Acoustic Phenomena in Experimental Music

291 Pages·2013·1.44 MB·English

Sine Waves and Simple Acoustic Phenomena in
Experimental Music - with Special Reference to the Work of
La Monte Young and Alvin Lucier

Peter John Blamey

Doctor of Philosophy

University of Western Sydney

2008
Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my principal supervisor Dr Chris Fleming for his generosity,
guidance, good humour and invaluable assistance in researching and writing this thesis
(and also for his willingness to participate in productive digressions on just about any
subject). I would also like to thank the other members of my supervisory panel - Dr
Caleb Kelly and Professor Julian Knowles - for all of their encouragement and advice.
Statement of Authentication

The work presented in this thesis is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, original
except as acknowledged in the text. I hereby declare that I have not submitted this
material, either in full or in part, for a degree at this or any other institution.

..........................................................
(Signature)
Table of Contents

Abstract..................................................................................................................iii

Introduction: Simple sounds, simple shapes, complex notions.............................1
Signs of sines....................................................................................................................4
Acoustics, aesthetics, and transduction........................................................................6
The acoustic and the auditory......................................................................................10
Listening in experimentation, technology, and music.............................................14
Outline of thesis............................................................................................................17

1. Creating a wave in the nineteenth century: from sound into sine.....................26
Defining and decomposing musical sound and noise.............................................27
Sine waves: some mathematical considerations........................................................37
Resonators, isolation, and machines for visualising sound.....................................40
Water and waves............................................................................................................50
Fluid in the ear...............................................................................................................55
The condition of sine....................................................................................................60

2. Sine sounds, electronic instruments, and the expansion of
musical resources in the early twentieth century..............................................68
Technologies of sine-sound (and sight) ....................................................................70
Simple sounds, electronics, and musical instruments..............................................76
Acoustics, electronic sound and the extra-musical...................................................80
New tools for new music.............................................................................................97

3. Tracing the steady tone: La Monte Young, 1958-1965.....................................104
Constant beginnings and listenings..........................................................................105
Listening inside sounds..............................................................................................110
Pre-Tortoise music.........................................................................................................118
Numbers, intervals and ratios....................................................................................121
A Theatre of Eternal Music.......................................................................................126
Sustaining sounds........................................................................................................130

4. Listening to sine waves in the Dream House and the ear:
La Monte Young, 1966-1974............................................................................136
Tail of the Tortoise........................................................................................................137
Sine waves, ‘drift’ and assembling the Dream House...............................................140
A (conceptual) Map of 49’s Dream..........................................................................147
Sound inside a listener................................................................................................154
Hearing sines/waves/tones.......................................................................................160
Sine wave and piano coda..........................................................................................168
i
5. “Making the inaudible audible”: Alvin Lucier, 1961-1972................................174
Beginnings....................................................................................................................176
Amplifying alpha.........................................................................................................182
Articulating spaces......................................................................................................191
Altering vocal identities..............................................................................................203
‘Seeing’ sounds.............................................................................................................207

6. Hearing and seeing the shapes of sounds: Alvin Lucier, 1973-1984................218
Still and moving sines.................................................................................................219
From space into sound, via sine...............................................................................225
Persons, shapes and feedback...................................................................................234
Visualising sines...........................................................................................................240
Sweeping, spinning and seesawing...........................................................................250

Conclusion: Not-so-simple acoustic phenomena?..............................................260

References Cited..................................................................................................272
ii
Abstract

This thesis explores a series of relationships between music and acoustics in
order to develop a basis for discussing and critiquing aesthetics in post-Cagean
experimental music. Specifically, it examines the acoustic and aesthetic theories that
inform the practice of American composers La Monte Young and Alvin Lucier. One
particular theme - the sine wave - emerges, both as a prominent feature in the work of
these two composers, and also as a nexus point between music and acoustics. Pursuing
this theme, the thesis begins by looking at issues in the science, technology, and
ideology of acoustics in relation to the study of musical sound in the late nineteenth
century. It then aims to situate the sine wave historically, culturally and technologically
within a range of scientific and aesthetic practices in operation in the first half of the
twentieth century. Finally, it explores the deployment of concepts from the field of
acoustics by artists of the avant-garde, and considers what contribution these factors
played in broadening the developing discourse of sound within the arts. These
discussions then inform detailed investigations into the work of both Lucier and Young,
examining their use of sine waves to explore and produce simple acoustic phenomena.

iii
Introduction: Simple sounds, simple shapes,
complex notions

It’s ... stopping people in their tracks so that they can pay attention to that
phenomenon which they otherwise don’t pay any attention to or they miss. I don’t
mean it just as an exercise in perception. You know, that wouldn’t interest me; to me
that’s sort of a dead end. Instead, it’s putting people into a beautiful relationship to
those phenomena. - Alvin Lucier1

This assertion from American composer Alvin Lucier exemplifies a specific
approach to composition that arose within the context of the experimental arts and
music milieu of the 1960s. This context could itself be seen as a set of responses to the
provocations of that prototypical musical experimentalist, John Cage. The key
components of Cage’s attempts to disassemble the edifice of traditional musical
language - through the use of chance operations, indeterminacy, and a reappraisal of the
material aspect of sound on its own terms - informed the work of a large number of
artists across a range of disciplines during this era. However, while the interrogation of
form, structure and purpose implicit in Cage’s writing and compositions cleared the
ground for others looking to reconfigure the arts, it also created a crisis: if sounds were,
as Cage had decreed, to be allowed to ‘be themselves,’ how were artists to involve
themselves in both producing and representing sound without simply re-enacting Cage’s
1
own methodology?2 As composer, violinist and film-maker Tony Conrad simply asked:
“What was the composer to do?”3
The work of the two artists who provide a key focus for this thesis - La Monte
Young and Alvin Lucier - constitute approaches to music making that incorporate both
an investigation into the nature and behaviour of sound, and an exploration of the
interactions between sounds and space. In other words, what these two artists share is a
practice that involves the realisation and elucidation of specific acoustic phenomena. This
thesis aims to detail the aesthetics of a compositional practice focused on producing
these phenomena, and to examine the role that acoustic phenomena play in the account
of perception (in the form of hearing), attention (in the form of listening), and of sound
itself, that the works of Lucier and Young present.
Acoustic phenomena surround us. They are the natural physical actions and
interactions of every sound event that occurs in the air or is transmitted through other
solid, liquid or gaseous media. Therefore, the sound of any and all music is, of course,
on at least a scientific level, comprised of a complex of different acoustic phenomena.
What distinguishes the work of Young and Lucier is the aim to utilise only one or two
types of acoustic phenomena as the subject of a given work, and that the generation of
specific kinds of phenomena, and the subsequent audition of those specific effects by an
audience, comprise the very subject matter of a composition. These phenomena are
often the result of the propagation of sound in space: acoustical beats, echoes, standing
waves, diffraction effects and combination tones. As such they can be categorised as
basic or simple acoustic phenomena, which in turn are the foundation for an array of
more complex acoustic interactions.
That these simple types of natural acoustic phenomena should, in the wake of
Cage, form the basis of new musical compositions may not in some ways be
unexpected. The employment of natural sonic occurrences in music surely finds a
2
thematic precedent in the incorporation of quotidian and ambient sound running
through the arts in the first half of the twentieth century, from Luigi Russolo’s ‘Art of
Noises’ through to Cage’s own 4’33”. Like worldly sound, acoustic phenomena resist
any simple textual representation in the form of a musical score. Similarly, as they result
from the natural, physical behaviour of sound in space, acoustic phenomena take place
irrespective of aesthetic considerations. As with Cage’s compositions, the use of simple
acoustic phenomena as the subject of compositions equally required an attentive
audience keyed into listening for aesthetic experience in sounds beyond the
instrumental. Therefore, the notion of a music which attended to these natural sonic
interactions was dependent on the kind of shift in focus that Cage had previously
enacted within western art music - from composition as a form of utterance to
composition as an act of audition.4
However, despite the fact that acoustic phenomena are natural events in
themselves, an aesthetic that emphasised only one or two of these simple acoustic
phenomena established an altogether different relationship between artist and materials
than that proposed by Cage. This did not necessarily mean that composing with simple
acoustic phenomena contravened Cage’s dictum by drawing hard and fast distinctions
between different types of sounds, or even classifying sounds. The importance would
rest not in the sounds ‘in themselves’, but in the range of acoustic effects that a given sound or
sounds might exhibit or elicit. These effects were realised through the physical interaction of
two or more sounds with each other, and through the interaction of sound with the
environment in which it was both made and heard: it was music-making by way of the
careful selection and presentation of natural sonic behaviour.
That there was already in existence specific terminology that could define and
describe these kinds of acoustic phenomena signifies that Young and Lucier were not
working in some hitherto uninvestigated area of sound. In their explorations of the
3
physical aspects of sound, both artists drew heavily on a range of theories and
techniques from the field of acoustics - the scientific investigation into the formation,
behaviour and audition of sound.

Signs of sines
Case studies of the art of La Monte Young and Alvin Lucier form the bulk of
this thesis. The examination of their aesthetic involves exploring the significant role that
sine waves have played in the realising of acoustic phenomena in their compositions and
installations. Unlike the naturally occurring acoustic phenomena, the sine wave
represents a specific model of sound; one that is reductive, abstract, theoretical, and, in
its technological manifestation, synthetic. The term sine wave is an ambiguous one: it
conflates the mathematical sine curve - a two-dimensional graph of the equation
y = a sin x, with the acoustical sine tone - a sound containing a single frequency. The
popular notion of the sine wave as the fusion of sound and waveform rose to
prominence within the theories of musical sound popularised in the late nineteenth
century by the work of experimental scientists such as Herman von Helmholtz, John
Tyndall and John William Strutt (Lord Rayleigh). Accompanied by an incipient
technology for both the explanation and the creation of harmony extrapolated from
J.B.J. Fourier’s Analytic Theory of Heat, the sine wave was the most ‘perfect’ of the range
of other irregular waves realised by acousticians in the late nineteenth century, and
became the building block from which a model of musical sound was constructed.
In the wake of the application of Fourier’s theorem to the question of the
composition of musical sound, two specific and interdependent claims were made of
sine waves. As the exemplar representation of simple harmonic motion, the sine wave
became the simple sound, the basic unit of musical sound production. The
4