AN ARTISTIC POSITION
Long ago in the pages of Hand’s End: Technology and the Limits of Nature (1), I talked about how artificially tired I would feel after playing a Yamaha WX7 wind controller, a MIDI instrument with the look and feel of a soprano saxophone; MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. With a bunch of buttons you could effortlessly play six octaves up and down. Blow harder on it and the sound gets louder. Easily move your fingers around to create blistering arpeggios! Virtuosity? Power? These things are still around, but as expressive instruments they never really caught on (2).
My apologies if the language may at times seem more colloquial and opinionated than the readers of scientific publications are used to. But the scope of this journal extends beyond usual formats, and this particular contribution reports personal creative experience. I will expose why I enjoy playing a touch screen interface in the making of electronic music, and further explore why I like taking it out in the woods to play with birds and ponds.
So. The artificial tiredness with the MIDI Yamaha WX7 comes with the uncanny feeling that one is playing too much, making more sounds more easily than one should be able to do. It has been more than thirty years since that book of mine, and the world of music is endlessly more effortless than then. Ask your phone to play any piece of music and you got it right away. Why even play anything new? Well, that is another question entirely, a bigger one perhaps, but let’s stick to the playing of electronic instruments. Playing them is one of the toughest things to do with them, since by the time you have mastered one machine it has become replaced with something newer, faster, shinier, hipper, more expensive. Compare that to a cello or piano, an instrument carefully refined over the generations, with a long tradition of how to study, learn, practice and perform it. Compared to that march of centuries’ development, I feel that the swift rise of electronics can only be a passing fad, a rise and fall of the in and the out. Hear an electronic sound on a recording, and nothing dates it more easily. The trendiness of these sounds comes and goes. A wind-controller nearly always brings one back to the 1990s.
Or does it not? Open up a DAW – a Digital Audio Workstation – like Ableton Live, Logic, or Bitwig and the tools you see are a panoply of nostalgia. The realm of possible electronic tones to play is a veritable history of electronic music, and of our puzzling attempts to use technology to produce tones and rhythms that sound musical. All methods of digital sound synthesis are theories put into practice, through possibilities that can be programmed or played in the moment: emulations of analogue synthesis, which attempt to simulate sound waves generated by rapidly changing voltages; additive synthesis, which generates complex sounds by combining multiple sine waves of different frequencies; FM synthesis, where one audio signal modulates the pitch of another; wavetable synthesis, a form of sample-based synthesis that operates based on digitally recorded sound; sampling; physical modelling, which uses algorithms to simulate a physical source of sound; and granular synthesis, another form of sample-based synthesis, which operates on the microsound time scale. It is not my place to explain these methods here, but there are good summaries online (3).
I sense that today’s electronic music wants to be nostalgic — we smile when a particular sound takes us back to an earlier vision of the future. We no longer try to be ever more realistic in our emulations of acoustic instruments. We recognise that machines offer unique possibilities of expression.
The way we play these sounds might not have changed so much: many people use physical devices with keys resembling a piano or accordion to play all these emblems of history. I would say that keyboards favour too many notes, rather than super-emotional single notes… This is perhaps why the electric guitar, not the piano or organ, became the signature instrument of the amplified age. More emotion, soul, passion, and power! Bend, scream, distort, enlarge, all those amazing things that electricity can do.
Anyway, now we might have reached somewhere else in music, an era of precise refinement in our listening to artificial sound. We may have become connoisseurs of the digital sound, and favour its crispness more than any original warmth. At least the different types of distortion and emulation are now far better known than when people first heard all these effects, say when Les and Mary Paul ran their guitars through the “LesPaulverizer” on prime time TV (4), and people had no idea what was going on. At least we can say that through twenty-four hour immersion in technological media we are all electronic musicians now.
I do not want to talk about the whole transformation of our lives and our art into ‘media’, but about something more specific: how touching a screen, something most of us do hundreds of times a day, can actually become a fine way to make music; an expressive and powerful interface that feels far more direct than those which try to emulate old acoustic instruments. Precisely because it is so far-out, long removed from our expectations as to what constitutes a musical instrument, touch screen interfaces can be surprisingly spontaneous and musically expressive.
I am surprised that little has written about this topic (5), except to point out why the touch screen is such a bad musical interface (6). It is supposed to be bad for the same reasons the wind controller artificially tired me out — there’s no there there. Touch the screen, anything can come out. Yes, this is still the case. But because every touch screen musical interface is designed differently, we can make the abstract concrete. We can actually play it.
Having music that is playable has always been important to me. I don’t want my music to be programmed or produced, but always played. And I have long wanted it to draw from nature.
FROM SOUNDS OF NATURE TO ELECTRONIC MUSIC
Paradoxically, it was the sounds of nature that drew me to electronic music in the first place. I used to prefer acoustic sounds to electronic ones, somewhat agreeing with pianist Colin Farish who once told me “life is too short to mess around with electronics.” The reader might rightfully prefer bibliographic references to random comments from friends, but hey, that one has stuck with me for many years, and he does have a point that many acoustic musicians voice. Thinking of how much time I had spent programming confusing synthesisers like the Yamaha DX7 or the Serge Modular… All the possibilities consumed me. How could one ever settle well enough on the sound to play? I guess that what appealed to me in these machines was that each one seemed to embody a different philosophy of sound. As a philosopher, I often preferred the questions to the answer. Never mind what music I might play — think of the library of all possible musics that could be played at any moment.
That is what the synthesiser offered me, a repository of the unknown. On the other hand, it always seemed incomplete and unknown, empty when compared to the known. It seemed always easy to tell what was artificial from what was natural. A good reason to stop messing with it, for many. But somehow I did not want to give up.
I changed my mind about that thirteen years ago, when I started making music with the sounds of insects. The way scientists talk about their stridulating, describing carrier frequencies and frequency modulation (17), sounds just like manuals explaining how synthesisers work. These bugs are little oscillators, generating oscillatory electric currents out there in the trees, sometimes millions of them vibrating at once. I will tell more about this later.
Since I play these electronic sounds out in nature, together with the live, actual sounds of the more-than-human environment, it is natural to connect this work with the rapidly expanding field of acoustic ecology. I gladly support that; the investigations and creations of acoustic ecologists are very relevant. However, some people might feel that my activity is quite distinct: my desire to join in and make a music that no one species can make alone does not imply an attempt to understand the soundscape as completely as possible in order to best preserve it.
THE CREATIVE POTENTIALS OF CERTAIN APPS ON THE IPAD
Thirteen years ago, iPads had just been invented and I just wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with such a thing. There were plenty of early apps that made sounds, but it was hard to find one that was good in the touch screen format.
In the following sections I will focus on what makes certain iPad music apps more playable than others, and expose why I still have not found the app I am looking for; I probably never will. Later I will explain why I continue to bring this abstract minimalist machine out into the wilds, to play along with natural environments – the perplexing secret underwater sounds of ponds.
You will see multiple videos shot in the studio, and you might think “aren’t there enough demo videos of all these apps online, why do we need more?”. But actually, I find most of those videos not especially helpful. The people who make them either talk too much or just demonstrate the preset sounds of an app. Here I want to show some of the surprise and joy I feel in playing them, and that is why I include one video for each app. Most of them mix multiple methods of synthesis, except one that is specifically dedicated to additive synthesis. You can decide whether it seems like I play each app in the same way, or differently. I sense that the theory of sound embodied in each app leads me to use each one differently, and express musical ideas that I would not come up with if I were using another tool. That is the sign of a successful musical instrument. Anyway, I do not want to make this essay too much of a review of these instruments, but more an analysis of my interaction with them.
THE ANIMOOG, THE CICADAS AND A MUSICAL DISCOVERY
The first app that grabbed me on the iPad was Animoog, made by the company that made synthesisers a household name. What is special about this instrument is that from its very design it promoted a kind of retro-futurism, allowing you to bend parameters of the sound with your fingers as you played the keyboard. This proved to be a perfect way to play along with millions of cicadas that appear periodically, not every year; they had just emerged in Columbia, Missouri, where I heard them as music for the first time.
Trying to join in with all the natural ‘noise’ I began to understand the connection between electronic music and nature for the first time. Though it was probably years of listening to electronic music that had taught me that the drones, noise, and hissy beats of the various Magicicada species could be heard as music. (7)
The Animoog may have first caught my attention because cicadas love it (Fig. 1).
Figure 1: playing Animoog on an iPad with a seventeen year periodical cicada, the Magicicada septendecim. New Jersey 2013. Photo by Asher Jay.
There are so many other reasons for it to remain the single best live musical instrument on the iPad. The design is not the ‘flat aesthetics’ now favoured by IOS and Android, but something slightly steampunky or oscilloscope like, suggesting Forbidden Planet or 1950s visions of the future. And its graphical interface enables several unique forms of modulation. It is just fantastic to play and its sound really cuts through other instruments when you increase the signal level on the filter setting or the master output.
Animoog puts a particular design philosophy into practice, showcasing playability and history more than minimalism. It looks and sounds like what you do not expect on the screen — old-fashioned looking, with a weird oscilloscope interface, but with a precise sound that is always a bit louder than one expects. The mixer of the graphic pad, the keyboard based on the legendary Moog-Eaton Multi Touch Sensitive keyboard (a precursor of today’s MPE keyboards) (8), and the knobs for parameters such as ‘filter’ and ‘detune’, all easily accessible on one screen – that means that this instrument suggests a way to use the whole touch screen, as shown in Video 1.
Video 1: Introduction and demonstration of the Animoog app on an iPad. Video by Jaanika Peerna.
Note that a few years ago Moog Music basically retired the original Animoog and replaced it with Animoog Z, whose name invokes the “Z” axis from the Cartesian coordinate system, used to define an object’s position in the three-dimensional space – losing the retro-futurism, adding a third “Z” dimension to modulation, and creating separate screens for effects including the filter and detune that I loved having on the one screen. (9) My response to this new version has always been “you ruined it”, but to be more charitable I would have to say “I have not really learned how to better play this version”. It does offer some extra features, like arpeggios (notes of a chord played in rapid succession) and that elusive “Z”. Sure, press harder and harder on the screen, you will not get beyond it. This newer version simply does not have the spirit of the original. Newer is not necessarily better, beware the pressure to trade in and get the latest of everything. Remember that in electronic music, like so much else his about history, sometimes you shouldn’t fix what isn’t broken.
ON THE INTERACTION WITH SELF-PLAYABLE MACHINES
Among the tools of electronic music that help an instrument play itself are ‘hold’ keys, arpeggiators for creating an arpeggio when you press down a chord, and sequencers for storing and transmitting sequences of musical notes, chords, or rhythms. These tools let the sound continue while you go on to do something else. There is a long tradition of self-playability, of music going on automatically when the player stops. But what apps (I’d really rather call them instruments) encourage the machine to play itself in new ways?
The simplest solution is often the most brilliant. Though it cannot be too simple. You want something that a five year old or a fifty year old can play. Where you can read and adjust to learn more, or you can just pick it up and make sound.
Waving a pure glass and metal rectangle in the air, unconnected to any wire, is an act of abstraction, a pure postmodern pulse of the Platonic ideal form, a symbol for humanity as a whole, rectangle against flow, culture against nature, the machine in the garden, the silicon dream in the wilderness, minimalism in the midst of maximal mush. I laugh when I play it in the sun and it shuts down in the heat, announcing, “operating conditions are dangerous.”
THE SAMPLR APP AND MY DRIVE TO DANCE WHILE PLAYING THE IPAD
There is something relentless in the pure possibility of the iPad, harsh in its appeal. Especially with another app I worked with, the vowelless eponymous Samplr, which has undoubtedly the best design of any touch screen music app ever invented. So simple that a six year old can figure it out in minutes, so subtle that you can spend years learning to play it. It is a true instrument that looks and feels like no other.
Unique is the fact that there are no words on the screen, just symbols that you can study or intuitively figure out on your own. Six separate samples can be morphed, effected, sliced, remixed, transposed and sequenced, live individually or all on top of each other, in synch or not. Other apps offer a similar functionality, but they do not work as naturally for live on-the-spot playing. I hardly ever play this one with rhythmic beats in sync with each other. I prefer the uncertain, swirling overlap like the patterns of actual life. The included effects are simple, but efficient… They do the job. You can strap it together with more complex effects if you like, but on an iPad this interconnection offers more opportunities for things to go wrong, and technology out in the field must be reliable above everything else.
We are talking about the interface, which includes digital and physical components. The interface must be playful and inspiring beyond being reliable. And it cannot always sound the same. For me it works best when it is not too far away from a vision of playability: when I can play it and move (see Video 2).
Video 2: Samplr app played on the iPad. Video by Jaanika Peerna.
That is also true; I rarely stand still… The machine should speed me up and not slow me down. Inspire me to dance and not to ossify into a screen potato. Watch me and you’ll see…
All right, he moves, but doesn’t he move better playing the clarinet or another wind instrument? Are those acoustic sounds not more authentic, more real? Yes, I think they are… But for me, life is looooooong enough to mess around with electronics.
SHOOM AND A FEW CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT UNPREDICTABILITY
Other apps are simpler than Samplr. One called Shoom is all about placing round dots on a grid, and balancing volume against pitch — each dot can be a tone, noise or rhythm, three separate two-oscillator synths, so three different sounds together at a time, but up to thirty-two possible tones and volumes… The drone possibilities are staggering, and the separation from usual structures of music are very clear. These open-ended dots blow apart my sense of how sounds can be structured, and beautiful experiments come out.
Shoom is far less famous than Animoog, in fact I know few other people who play it. Basically you touch your finger to the screen, you create an object, a tone that makes a continuing sound. Could be a drone, could be a rhythm, you can have as many of these screen sound objects as you want, they just stay there continuously. You can move them around, change pitch, volume and other parameters. It feels like having an infinite number of sound creatures to play around in your sound forest — a direct analogy to a screen full of beings, which you play in a whole new way, by moving them around the field of sound.
Forgetting that a sound is playing when you switch to another app is a problem if you have them all open at once, instead of weaving them altogether using a digital connection hub like Aum, or a DAW like Nanostudio, Auria, Logic or Cubasis. You just have to pay attention to the listening and remember what you are doing, while keeping your whole process in your head. Or weave all the apps together. But that sets up more things that can go wrong when playing on the fly, especially outdoors. The simpler the setup the better, and this is where the iPad excels… A purely virtual tabula rasa of an instrument where you wave your hands over a flat rectangle to conjure infinite possibilities of how a musical instrument could be.
I admit it can seem strange, a man waving his flat screen in the air in the wilderness, communing with the music of underwater life. And yet the machine can release any sound, anything can be plugged into it and anything may come out. The flexibility is… daunting. The familiarity is… crushing (see Video 3).
Video 3: Shoom played on an iPad. Video by Jaanika Peerna.
Simplicity and familiarity do not cancel unpredictability. For example, one can easily forget that the Shoom app is running in the background, as it does not like to turn itself off. Additionally, if I am outside and it is slightly rainy, the water drops can play the instrument on their own. Which brings its own charms, of course…
What we are looking for…. Pushing, further, each app deeper into the unknown… After a while, why do they all sound the same? The electronic sound is ethereal, not directly connected to the touching of the screen that creates it… But why, why do we continue? Simply because it surprises us, and we may never be satisfied. As an improvisor when I start to play I am never sure what I’m going to play. The inadvertent machine pulls me ever farther from my oblique intentions or lack thereof. There is the known-unkown and the unknown-known. I want to remain surprised by what I do or don’t do.
ADDICTIVE PRO AND ITS EFFECT ON BIRDS & BUGS
All right, let’s move on to the fourth synthesiser app, Addictive Pro. The name has a truthful reason-to-be: once you start playing it you cannot stop, it allows for so many discoveries. For example, I love a random roll of the dice button, where anything might happen. One parameter changes while others stay the same, or everything changes at once.
The name of this app also recalls additive synthesis, which means piling frequencies, harmonic (multiples of the fundamental frequency) or enharmonic (tones that sound the same but are notated, i.e. spelled differently). With so many frequencies this sound machine can really get birds and bugs responding. Many species are tuned to come alive only when they hear very particular frequencies (10), and if you layer many on top of each other you are more likely to hit a frequency that makes your responding species excited…. Even if humans may not bond with the sound, other creatures may be unexpectedly roused…
This app is extremely playable; it has basic features that suit well my restless mind. The graphical interface uses XY coordinates to adjust various parameters live, with two fingers. So many randomisation options. The opportunity to draw waveforms and mysterious “spectrums”, some kind of filter, and both volume and drive knobs clearly visible. These are the basic tools to tweak what you play in a live situation, and decide how much it needs to cut through a real-live sound situation in the outside world.
The additive synthesis method is one of the most common and pure-sounding methods in electronic music, probably because it is based on pure sine waves that modulate each other; the more frequencies are combined, the greater is the sonic complexity. Notoriously difficult to program. But with this app we can just draw through the waveforms with an ease the developers of the Fairlight could only have dreamed about! (11) – Video 4.
Video 4: Addictive Synth Pro on an iPad. It really is addictive. Video by Jaanika Peerna.
It never crashes, it is not famous, you should use this one, experiment endlessly. Notice how this video is longer than most of the others…. I just could not stop. It is crisper than Animoog, not as warm. More diverse and more easily interactive, but somehow with less personality and more variation. Every time I explore it I realize I should use it more. What keeps it from being the ultimate iPad performance app? I guess I wish it were based on samples, not only sine waves.
But what is interesting is that the animals seem to especially like it. I think this is because of the many frequencies piled up on top of one another, as I wrote above. One study demonstrated that cardinals preferred synthesised sine wave whoops to their own real ones (12). This suggests a kind of Platonic ideal inside their brains, about how their songs should sound. It is perhaps related with the sense in which some human listeners prefer electronic music, sine waves in particular, to the sounds of flutes and guitars that might ring close to them. We chase the ideal well. So why is it ultimately never satisfying?
We have to keep playing. After a while every sound from any electronic app starts to sound the same. So we jump to another one, where the interface is the thing that most distinguishes one from another, how it feels like to play.
GEOSHRED AND A FEELING ABOUT THE SIMULATION OF ACOUSTIC INSTRUMENTS
GeoShred is one of the most consistently praised iPad performance apps. I mostly use the violoncello tools, which use a technology called SWAM (Synchronous Waves Acoustic Modelling), supposedly to overcome the traditional limitations of sampling – in which each sampled sound can seem accurate but somewhat static, if the starting/ stopping/ connecting does not make it feel natural or expressive. These tools tend to do what is advertised: make a recording of them and people always ask “who was playing cello?”; on a recording many things can be convincing. Do it live and people sometimes think I am playing a sample of a cellist.
The whole app is guitar-based, hence the ‘shred’ name. So, it often sounds guitaresque, with distortion, reverb, drive. Electrified. It is fun but too easy to play, in a way, like a game. And before playing, the configuration process feels too laborious. The app is deep with all kinds of things to be adjusted, but the layers of effects are exhausting to adjust. That is often a critique with these things: no one wants to endlessly program and adjust, it has to all work on the fly. It should look and sound cool, should impress and make you want to move. (see Video 5).
Video 5: GeoShred playing a SWAM cello instrument on an iPad. Video by Jaanika Peerna.
Or maybe that does not matter, it’s music remember, focus on the sound man. The cello and flute SWAMs sound good. I don’t use the flute one so much because I play acoustic wind instruments. Cello is something I always wanted to play, so I like to add it in. Too bad the SWAMs are only in mono, heard as if it were emanating from one single position in the auditory space… (13) Who can be fooled… Expressivity, musicality, does it lie in the ear of the beholder?
I am not sure this app really twists my sense of what music can be, but it does fool the ear into cello-like effects, being produceable with the touch of a screen. Sometimes a touch cello is just a touch cello.
WORLD PIANO: PLAYING THE IPAD I DON’T WANT TO FORGET IT IS AN IPAD
Another twist-tie of an app is World Piano, which used to be called Taq.sim. Most notable here is that you can choose among a series of Middle Eastern Maqams – that is systems of pitches, melodic motives and patterns – to add a quarter-tone detuned but historically musical vibe to your sounds. There are many choices. It is basically a two-oscillator sampler (each patch can combine two distinct sounds), but I stick to piano-related sounds. They are easy to tweak because the app is made with Audiokit, an open-source iOS app-development platform whose results often share a common design language. With this app it is easy to adjust the attack, decay, sustain and release of the sample (i.e. its volume changes), and slightly filter the piano to make it sound more or less like the real thing. Detuning helps to retain a sense of the uncanny valley, a place between real instruments and simulations, so you don’t quite know where you are. I tend to play linearly, short melodies on this thing, though if I plugged in a keyboard I think I would like to experiment more harmonically and judiciously.
It is definitely not monophonic (see video 6).
Video 6: World Piano on an iPad, with a Hijaz descending scale. Video by Jaanika Peerna.
Playing the iPad I don’t want to forget it is an iPad. It is the ultimate in abstract musical controller art… Just a flat screen you touch and cannot explain, this is why the new and surprising can come out. These detuned scales shake up our equally tempered complacency, and we find an enhanced form of harmony and expression.
TC-11 AND THE APPEAL OF OTHERNESS
One of the earliest touch iPad instruments is still the strangest: TC-11. I do not know why it has that name. Visually it is the coolest of all these apps, in fact as you play it is hard to have any idea what action does what. The editing is secretive, hidden, mysterious. The sounds are loose and electronic, difficult to parse. It looks like a communication device from the future, a time when we speak in graphs and figures, and what counts as music becomes something far and beyond.
In a way I would most like to film this, to watch someone playing it, like videos of people playing games popular among six year olds. I do not know what it all means, how it all works. I am not sure I want to know – Video 7.
Video 7: The mysteriously named iPad app TC-11. Video by Jaanika Peerna.
The single greatest lack of this app is that there is no easy volume control slider on the main page. That makes it hard to trust in the field… Especially if several apps are playing at once.
FACTORY AND THE GAME OF SURPRISE
Some years ago at Superbooth in Berlin I went up to the Sugarbytes booth and I saw an interesting synthesiser plugin being demonstrated, called Factory. It is basically an emulation of an analogue modular synthesiser setup with an undo button, hugely flexible. Seeing how it worked I told them at once, “you really should make this available on the iPad,” and they said, “we’re never going to do that.”
But it came out for iPad a few months later and it is one of the most powerful and unique touch-screen synthesisers ever invented. There are so many choices, so many variations, it can play itself or you can play it, there are so many levels of randomisation and customisation. It takes the number one spot as the most fully realised iPad sound app I use, endlessly surprising, and constantly changing my sense of what live electronic music can be.
Yes it can substitute a vast rack of analogue modules, and yes it has an infinite undo, and constantly sounds fresh and unknown, and like the best of them, it can cut through the mix and be heard.
Playing it is a bit like playing a game. I told the same about GeoShred, but mean it differently here. If you begin by wanting it to do one thing it soon does something else, then if in doubt, jump ship, just try something else, testing, listening, ready to give in to surprise – Video 8.
Video 8: Sugarbytes Factory on the iPad, like a modular synth with an undo button! Video by Jaanika Peerna.
That being said, it can easily just make too much sound, with too many effects and too much drone scratch and noise. Which can be said for a lot of electronic music. The answer: just turn it down, make it variable, sometimes turn it off. Have it play quietly in the background and turn up the live noise: birds, ponds, clarinets, flutes.
If you don’t like it, just pick the X or Y axis on the grid and rewire everything, in a moment. If you don’t like it: undo, go back. The previous state is still there. No other app has that flexibility.
PLAYING WITHIN NATURE
How to make any of these flat screen treasures be useful? Stop playing, take a break, be sure to listen where you are and how what you wish for may or may not fit in.
Do not be afraid to stop, pay close attention, remember that when the machine is in the garden nature will always win in the end, lasting longer than electricity, offering up the best and most eternal sounds.
Still we human are there, endlessly inventing, never satisfied, always looking for the next big playable thing — a tool to extend our desired into the abstract sonic world.
Up until now we have been testing this device in the studio, but I started by warning you I would be taking it out into the wilderness. Sacrilegious you might say, taking such a technology into nature. Why would nature want these sounds? It does not. Why do we want them? If we do, it is because they speak to an abstract purity in our essence, one that we want to test while in the field.
Lately, field recording has been critiqued for being colonialistic, imposing, extracting, taking nature as a soundworld to be mined for its beauty and inspiration (14). Sure, it can be all those things. But listening to nature and taking a piece of it home with you can also be innocent, expansive, beautiful. Most people who do it, from whatever culture, and most who listen to it, feel its value more directly before problematising it.
To me, joining in and morphing this into music seems more honest. As a musician I want to learn more from all possible sounds. As an improvisor I want to delve into new situations where I might engage with the unknown. What is the right or wrong unknown? Sometimes the most right are those sounds that have preceded us on this Earth, and those that will endure long beyond this brief human time. To celebrate this endurance, we must be prepared to dance and explore with the most unexpected of tools. That is why I continue to do this, and why it continues to grab me.
Video 9 shows what it is like to take this very abstract musical machine out into nature, and to play it along with the equally abstract underwater sounds made by real concrete beings: plants, insects, fish.
Video 9: The iPad in itself, out in the world, live along with natural, underwater sounds. Video by Jaanika Peerna
Here, by the Pirita Jõgi river in Estonia, I demonstrate all that which has been introduced above.
First of all you hear the live sounds of the river, underwater, as picked up by an Aquabeat hydrophone. The regular rhythms come from plants, the grumbles from fish, and the occasional electronic buzzes and whirrs from water bugs who stridulate, making sounds by vibrating their penises against their bodies underwater.
What is exciting to me is that my time spent practicing these different touch-screen digital instruments has changed the way I hear these sounds that come directly from nature. They are buzzy, scratchy, droney and clicky, and because I have gotten more interested in electronic sounds over recent years, I hear these sounds as being more musical than I used to.
This alien, unfamiliar live natural soundworld is the perfect place to add unfamiliar electronic instruments, like those described above. These sounds are playing through a small JBL Charge speaker, pre-amped through a Sony A10 recorder. It is sounds of such strangeness that led me to become more interested in playing electronics live in nature, and the iPad has proven to be a fluid and flexible instrument for this. The sound is coming out through that black and white, camouflaged Ultimate Ears Boom 2 Kool Savas Limited Edition model behind to the right.
Sugarbytes’ Factory is used at first to play a plucked droning sound, which is soon augmented by a sample of a terrestrial insect, a green katydid, pitched up, then down. Then TC-11 comes in with high whirring, abstract sounds, which blend in with the drone and highlight the live underwater clicks and scratches. The human accompaniment stops and then Addictive Pro is brought in for a kinder, additive and filtered drone. At about 3:15 minutes in, the best blend of human and animal appears, as the higher frequencies are attenuated live with the two XY pads on the screen. Then I switch to a GeoShred cello for a solo section. Do the background aquatic plants change their beats in response to all this? It certainly seems so.
I want to enjoy them perhaps more than understanding them, so I treat them as a surrounding soundscape in which to join in. It does not matter to me whether the sounds of the underwater plants and animals change as a result of my engagement with them, though it often feels like they do. I see no need to try to prove it; instead I am just trying to make a music that the human species could not make alone. I need those plants and animals secretly performing underwater for the whole music to be produced.
Some days, what is heard underwater can be truly remarkable. There it was, a strangely warm day in March. The foxes walked slow and silently in the forest. Tried John Allen Pond. Beneath the surface, not a sound. Tried Hidden Lake… What an astonishing volume! Loud as a whale they say. The water boatmen were out. I thought my equipment had gone haywire. Then I realised what was up: this was the exact day their sonic battles began.
The lesser water boatman Micronecta scholzi can make a sound as loud as a whale, minety decibels, by vibrating its penis underwater against its body. Do not, I cannot stress this more strongly, try this at home. In a pool maybe okay, but still it’s risky. When James Windmill and Jerome Sueur discovered this phenomenon, they were sure something was wrong with their equipment. Nothing underwater could be so loud. (15)
And yet… here it is as I experienced it. I had the same reaction when I found this sound myself, completely unexpected after the previous pond I tossed my hydrophone in was silent. Here, though, it was all sooooo loud. So I joined in with something exuberant, and had to add this track to my record release Secret Songs of Ponds. (16)
Audio 1: So Loud, So Still, from David Rothenberg, Secret Songs of Ponds.
All water boatmen, greater, lesser, big and small, sing on, sing on….
You have read this far… Guess the apps I am using. Hint: Addictive Synth Pro, GeoShred SWAM cellos, and at the very end…. You know, I’m not even sure….
In Sweden, in August 2024, I played a forty minute set with the unusually active Länkelven River. Beneath the surface were sounds I had never heard before: truly surprising, very electronic sounding tones, entirely natural, blowing apart my earlier prejudice that I could always tell the natural from the artificial (Fig. 2 & 3 and audio 2). So much for that.
Figure 2: Playing with the Länkelven at the Hyttdreva Festival. Photo by Jan van Boeckel.
Figure 3: Performance introduced by Annika Göran Rodell. Photo by Jan van Boeckel.
Audio 2: Maybe a Monster: Live with the Länkelven River, Hyttdreva Festival, 2024.
Sometimes what we hear makes more sense when we see it. Video 10 is a visualisation of a life iPad performance with a pond full of water boatman bugs, from March 2023 in Fahnestock State Park, upstate New York. This track appears on the album Secret Songs of Ponds, but in the moving image bellow you can see the structure of frequencies against time. It was made with Spectralayers, the graphic sound analysis and editing program.
Video 10: The Many Colours of a Sonic Pond. Made with Spectralayers Pro, by David Rothenberg
At first it is hard to tell the sampled underwater bugs from the real ones, but after spending time with the moving image, you too will know. Or will you not?
We cannot remove the unknown.
A THIN BLACK RECTANGLE BY THE WATER’S EDGE
So here is what seems a paradox to me: I started out believing that in making music, the acoustic is preferably to the electronic, because it is more natural than artificial. Over time my prejudice began to lessen. Always impatient with new tools, I became enamoured of those that are instantly expressive, and offer quick-changing ways to let me express sounds I am never completely in control of, the hallmark of the possibility for improvisation. I started by taking natural sounds into the machine and twisting and turning them into new directions, always hoping the original naturalness might still shine through. Then I got more excited in bringing this ultimately abstract instrument back onto the land, with its sun, wind, rain, dirt and mosquitoes, and giving the sound back to its source.
Is this any different from playing a guitar or a drum by the water’s edge?
To some people, the spectacle of a clumsy human waving a Malevich-like black square around in the air, supposedly causing sound to come out of a modest, unattached small speaker, is as far from fitting into nature as any cartoon one could dream up. Making music with cicadas looks better with a clarinet or soprano sax, as The New Yorker decided in this caricature of me in 2013 (Fig. 4).
Figure 4: The author in the Talk of the Town, New Yorker (2013). Drawn by Tom Bachtell, used by permission.
Though I was also playing iPad back then, it would have looked even crazier than this. I do not care so much what it looks like, but more how it sounds. People sometimes ask me why bring such a soul-sucking machine into the swamps. Look how pissed off everyone was with the iPad ad that showed the big black flatscreen crushing art studios, music studios, all the mess of human creativity in an advertisement – so offensive that the company pulled it back within a week.
I get that concern, I really do. There is something faceless about a slim glossy rectangle that claims to do everything. Is there any ‘there’ there? We are so afraid of absence and nothingness.
I want to reveal the incredible sounds of these ponds and rivers, including those that previously might have been negatively characterised as ‘noise’. They already sound so much more like music than they once did, given our world’s increased acceptance of all sound as music. Toss a hydrophone into the most modest of ponds, plug in a speaker, and just listen.
If you are a musician, dare to join in. Play as if you are joining a music from another culture, with interest, love, and respect. That is how we should first treat nature: as this enduring world that makes everything we do possible. Beyond an inspiration it can be a collaborator, if you let its wonderful sounds into your sense of what music can be.
I never regret taking my music outside, and blending it with the real sounds that are. Sure, you can be clever and say everything humans do is also natural, because we are natural. But that really depends on how much you want to see, hear, and feel of the world around us. The challenge is to play and explore while also realising where you are — in a resilient world that will no doubt outlast us but is also under siege by our whole civilisation. The human way has a choice: to run counter nature or to listen and fit in.
I want to hear my way in, to a meaningful sound world that just might welcome me. And you too.
Figure 5: Cover of David Rothenberg’s album Secret Songs of Ponds.
REFERENCES AND NOTES
1. David Rothenberg, Hand’s End:Technology and the Limits of Nature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
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2. Yet, in 2023 Andre 3000, previously a rapper, started playing one in an ambient context. It does sound kind of cool: <https://floodmagazine.com/150671/andre-3000-new-blue-sun-essay>, accessed September 2024.
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3. Among many summaries of different types of synthesis, here is a good one: Adam Douglas, “10 Types of Synthesis, Explained: FM, Vector, and More”, Reverb, 18 June 2019, <https://reverb.com/news/10-types-of-synthesis> accessed 11 September 2024.
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4. Ian Port, The Birth of Loud: Leo Fender, Les Paul, and the Guitar-Pioneering Rivalry That Shaped Rock ‘n’ Roll (New York: Scribner, 2019).
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5. Little has been written about touch screen musical interfaces in practice, but here are two theses: Tuomas Ahva, Padworks: Building a Solo Live Performance with iPad, Masters Thesis (Otaniemi: Aalto University, 2016); and Healy, Daniel, The Influence of Technical Proficiency On Clarinet and iPad Improvisation Achievement, Doctoral thesis (Evanston: Northwestern University, 2021).
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6. See, e.g., Stefano Papeti and Staitis Charalampos, eds., Musical Haptics (Cham: Springer Nature, 2018).
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7. David Rothenberg, Bug Music (New York: St. Martins, 2013).
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8. Both keyboards currently reside in my office at New Jersey Institute of Technology.
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9. A review of the Animoog Z: Rob Redman, Music Radar, 8 February 2022 <https://www.musicradar.com/reviews/moog-animoog-z>, accessed 1 September.
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10. See, e,g,. Micah R. Bregman, Aniruddh D. Patel and Timothy Q. Gentner, “Songbirds use spectral shape, not pitch, for sound pattern recognition” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, No. 6, pp. 1666–1671 (2016).
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11. How does the Fairlight fare today? See Mark Roland, “The Fairlight Era: The Dawn Of Sampling”, Electronic Sound, 8 February 2018, <https://www.electronicsound.co.uk/features/long-reads/the-fairlight-era-the-dawn-of-sampling>, accessed 11 September 2024.
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12. Gabriel J. L. Beckers , Roderick A. Suthers and Carel ten Cate, “Pure-tone birdsong by resonance filtering of harmonic overtones“, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 100, No. 12, pp. 7372-7376 (2003).
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13. See the SWAM instruments, which can be used in various apps: <https://audiomodeling.com>, accessed 11 September 2024.
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14. Lauren Rosati, ed., Sound, Colonialism and Power, MAST – Journal of Media Art Study and Theory 2, No. 2 (2021).
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15. J Sueur, D Mackie and JFC Windmill, “So Small, So Loud: Extremely High Sound Pressure Level from a Pygmy Aquatic Insect (Corixidae, Micronectinae),” PLoS ONE 6, No. 6 (2011).
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16. See David Rothenberg, Secret Songs of Ponds and Secret Sounds of Ponds at <http://secretsoundsofponds.world>, accessed 1 September 2024.
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17. See, e.g. H C Bennet-Clark, Sound production in insects. Science Progress 62, No. 246, pp. 263–283 (1975) and Michael Greenfield, “Synchronous and Alternating Choruses in Insects and Anurans”, American Zoologist 34, No.6, pp. 605-615 (1994).
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