Intermedia Art

New Media, Sound and Performance

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The P0litics of S0und / The Culture 0f Exchange. 31 January - 24 March 2005

Replies: 51
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Re: nude media
Posted by John Oswald, Feb 21, 2005 9:28 PM
I will deposit yet another nude media rumination before moving on (at a later date) to Lina's questions.

On-line text, sound and images each have very different counter-schemes to foil rampant net nudity.

Text is the most digitally transparent (therefore potentially nude) because it consists mostly of oft-used combinations of blocks of data, in the form of words and phrases. (The closest sound comes to this is MIDI). Anyway, because it's so easy to digitally transport and realign these word and phrase combinations, it happens a lot. Some people copy blocks of words from the net and plug them into texts, such as scholastic papers, which they then attribute to themselves. This is commonly called plagiarism. But the very mechanisms (search, copy, and paste) which makes it easy to do this are also used to trace the sources appropriated. So, for example, teachers google suspect phrases to find some identifying clothing for the ideas students have stripped. (Amazon.com's 'search: inside-this-book function gives you access to whole books but presents the text as images of pages; so to copy something requires old-fashioned library methods : copy the phrase letter by letter, or make a photocopy of the page).

To search for an image via google, one still needs to use words. The images have file names, which are more-often than not descriptive. I just did a google-image search of the word 'sound', which resulted in a list has over a million visible items. The first image was from defenselink.mil - a dramatic photo of a jet plane stuck on a button of condensation as the plane breaks the sound barrier.

& here are the next few items depicted:
- a photo of a a fjord or sound-like landscape
- a photo of a bright red/green/blue light
- a drawing of an array of loudspeakers
- a family tree of sound terms at hyperphysics.phy-str.gsu.edu
- a diagram of sound radiation from a tuning fork
- a sign that says SOUND SPACE in yellow letters
- a cartoon of a guy facing some charging wild animals on a savannah
- a photo of the control room of a recording studio called Sound Sanctuary

As can be seen from this list the tag isn't the thing.

One can also search for MIDI files or sound files, as long as they also have a tag: one list (at the top of the google pile of such lists) called WavCentral lists its most popular soundfile of the week as '20th hq.mp3'. This turns out to be the traditional logo music for 20th Century Fox movies.
Nude media wouldn't have a tag, or like the red/green/blue light photo i found, it wouldn't have a tag that you could decipher or trace back to its source.

There has been work done on pattern and colour-recognition of images but so far no popular-as-google software, so you mostly have to search for images by name. David Rokeby has a very clever bit of software called The Giver of Names. It has a large vocabulary and looks at objects via a video camera and describes them in often-poetic ways. It looked at me and called me a 'rusty german'.

There's a very popular and useful bit of software that puts names back on audio CDs and mP3s which are otherwise nameless (a CD track does not have an embedded name tag). It's called CDDB (for Compact Disc Data Base) and i think its found in most computers and many sound systems. The software notices how many tracks a CD has and how long each of those tracks is. It then goes online to compare this with a database of 3.5 million albums (this database was mostly created by listeners who prefer to have their sounds dressed) and over 44 million tracks. If the CD has 27 tracks, and the first one is 1'23", then it knows the album is probably the Wild Why by Wobbly. One could of course subvert this database by creating a CD of completely different sounds that has 27 tracks, each the same length as on Wobbly's disc. The system doesn't pay any attention to what the sound is, just how it's packaged. Because its crude and recorded sound on the net exists somewhere predominantly on albums of tracks (images don't), it works almost always, while the image recognition software is more, dare i say, subjective.

I met some guys at Sony Research in Paris working on a system to analyse sound files for useful vocabulary- pitch recognition, style recognition, etc. One nice demo they had was a Janis Joplin a cappella recording transcribed completely into sounds taken from Beatle recordings. The result was an auralization of what Salvador Dali sometimes called the Paranoiac-Critical Method, with connections to Doug K's examples of R.Roland Kirk and my Plexure.
Networks and Sound
Posted by Lina Dzuverovic, Mar 2, 2005 12:16 PM
As we seem to have come to the end of the ‘nude media’ discussion, I wanted to open the forum discussion to a more general question that I think has been lurking in the background of our discussions so far:

the assumed symbiotic relationship between networks and sound, that I think this forum is based on.

I wanted to higlight this assumption, and to ask where this assumtion that there is a direct and special relationship between networked technologies and sound (hence a forum about it).

Because I still don’t think we’ve ‘hit the nail on the head’, so to speak - I think we have been discussing a range of outputs of networks and/or sonic practices, but we have not actually talked about why it is that what we’re referring to here as ‘the cultures of exchange ‘– which is here taken to be related to networked technology, is supposed to somehow be linked to sound more than other media. (hasn’t digital technology, for instance been equally beneficial to those workingwith video, or for that matter, text?).

Is it that sound acts as a conduit in social relations and is thus associated with networked technologies? Or does the relationship between ‘cultures of exchange’ and sound still evade us?
Networks and Sound
Posted by Douglas Kahn, Mar 6, 2005 7:31 PM
Let me see if I can respond to the question regarding a “direct and special relationship between networked technologies and sound” in “the cultures of exchange.” The answer is easy; why is more difficult. No, there is no direct and special relationship, or at least one based on any intrinsic properties of networks, exchange or “sound” (being artistic and cultural products of sound-alone, as in music and other audible arts of sound). If it were possible to make an argument that anything was intrinsic to networks and exchange then, living under capitalism, money would be the most likely suspect. Historically, in networks of communication technologies from telegraphs to satellites, streams of finance have coursed through the skies at a greater rate than anything else. In fact, the early telegraphic codebooks for conducting business were an unwitting source of avant-garde literature. The way they strung together short, disjunctive phrases to signal longer statements generated masses of seemingly incoherent but, given the right interpretive key, ultimately understandable prose that read like L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E for pin=striped=suits.

Living amid capitalist “cultures of exchange” begs the question where are the “cultures of production.” True, people make money “work” for them, and consumption can be a secondary production for de Certeau, but somewhere, grounding the electromagnetic networks, are actual people engaged in manual, intellectual and creative labor. Tracking these relations to the artistic and cultural practices we’re talking about here is tricky, but can generate an interesting array of considerations. Among them, how does mixing and appropriation relate to production and exchange. Too much of the discourse defaults to proprietary rights and notions of free exchange of information at the expense of an examination of the productive attributes and quality of the creative labor, and I would say that there is a politics of an intensity of creative labor as an enactment of a larger set of relations, one that could distinguish parasitic acts (akin to a capitalist making his or her money work) from productive acts (like the virtuosity of certain turntablists).

Roland Barthes has a nicely crude distinction of the two musics: “the music one listens to, the music one plays. These two musics are totally different arts, each with its own history, its own sociology, its own aesthetics, its own erotic; the same composer can be minor if you listen to him, tremendous if you play him (even badly)—such as Schumann.” (Musica Practica) My main interest here is the development of the conditions of artistic possibility of something worth listening to. It doesn’t have to be from one composer; it could very well come from the efforts of a networked community of producers using appropriated works and appropriating each other in an improvisatory mode. In the same respect, the efforts of a networked community of producers using appropriated works and appropriating each other in an improvisatory mode might be very interesting to themselves but banal to others, and it might also be a parasitic exercise where ripping other people off who have put the labor in is seen as a form of democratic communication in action. And the ringer is that it could be a parasitic exercise ripping other people off who have put the labor in that is interesting to listen to.

I wanted to get to some of the historical reasons in the development and deployment of digital technologies to why we might associate sound and networks as intrinsic, but it’s a beautiful spring day here and we need to get some plants in the ground.
Re: Networks and Sound
Posted by Kenneth Goldsmith, Mar 8, 2005 9:54 PM
Doug,

I agree with you in terms of creative versus parasitic labor. We post MP3s on UbuWeb with the disclaimer that all materials on site are free for non-commercial and educational use only. Of course there's no way we can enforce it but when items for sale that are clearly poached off file-sharing appear in stores, it angers the community. A recent example of this is the scumbag who issued a 4-CD set of La Monte Young bootlegs and sold them in places like Other Music. Nothing appearing on the sets was new to anyone who had been file-sharing since Napster. And it's clear that it didn't have Young's permission; it was clearly a case of parasitic hucksterism. (Funny though, before file-sharing, his action might've been seen as making available works to a general public that weren't available before. But in this context, it's just pure profiteering).

On UbuWeb, we only post out-of-print MP3s or works that are permissioned by the artists. There are many people running small record labels putting out avant-garde works of sound art that make no money, or at best break even. We don't wish to take the small amount of money out of their pockets they're trying to make by posting stuff on UbuWeb that is in print. However, we feel it is our obligation to post works that have fallen out of print, regardless of permission. Should that work go back into print (like Charles Amirkhanian's compilation of sound poetry 12+2 that Other Minds just reissued), we take it off our site immediately.

We hope that UbuWeb will serve as a center for the "networked community of producers" and often times we find our materials have been recontextualized into new sonic environments. Take, for example, Henri Chopin's "Rouge." It's interesting to see what has happened to that work over the past half-century.

Chopin began his tape recorder experiments in the mid-50s, and "Rouge," recorded in 1956, was one of his first pieces. It's a literal sound painting, with the names of colors repeated with different emphasis, almost like varying brushstrokes. Manipulated audio techniques and track layering build up an increasingly dense surface. The piece reflects its time: think of it as an abstract expressionist canvas. It, too, is Greenbergian: its form is its content.

In its day, "Rouge" never made it to LP as an "official" release by a record label. It remained that way, unreleased and without a publisher until 24 years later when it was put out by a German gallery. Thanks to Chopin's highly visible work as a promoter and publisher of sound poetry, however, tapes of his work were making the rounds in advanced musical circles of the day.

A decade after "Rouge's" recording, it curiously appears in the first "Region" of Karlehinz Stockhausen's 1966 composition Hymnen, an electronic and musique concrete melange of national anthems. Although truncated, "Rouge" forms the basis for a short spoken-word section based around varieties of the color "red." Chopin's voice alternates with German-inflected voices reading a portion of a list of Windsor Newton paints. To listen to this excerpt alone and decontextualized, it sounds like an extension of Chopin's sound painting. But squeezed between magnetic tape deconstructions of "The Internationale" and "The Marseillaise," its meaning becomes very different. Chopin's poem is now clothed in the garments of leftist politics.

Twenty-one years later, in 1997, the sampling group called Stock Hausen and Walkman (note the group's name) brought "Rouge" into an entirely different context: that of ironic pop in a cut called "Flogging" (flogging = flayed "rouge" skin). Amidst the cheesy vocals, snappy drumbeats and appropriated mathematical recitations from children's records, Chopin's piece is snatched away from Stockhausen's political agenda and returned closer to its formalist origins. But it's an emptying gesture: finally "Rouge" is just one sample of many, part of a noisy landscape, in which sounds are easily obtained and just as easily manipulated. In such a landscape, no sound appears to have more meaning than any other.

It strikes me that this sort of use has been going on for an awfully long time: parasitic, yes, but also insanely creative... UbuWeb's take on one history of deployment of technologies as it impacts on networks spanning generations
Networks and Sound Part II
Posted by Douglas Kahn, Mar 11, 2005 6:19 AM
Kenneth, that was really very interesting and if appropriation has nothing necessarily to do with parasitism, then we do agree.

To gain a different angle on Lina’s question, I’d like to leave recording and get into synthesis, and thus into simpler forms of digital technologies in both sound and computational networking, scattered across a chronology from punchcard uploads to broadband downloads.

There is no intrinsic relation between music (just music) and networks or at least digital technologies but there has been a historically privileged one based on math, music and computation, the relative technological simplicity of generating tones from code, and the ability of music to constitute itself easily through an organization expressed numerically.

That is why Jim Tenney’s early computer music completed in the early-1960s while he was at Bell Labs, working under the aegis of Max Mathews and John Pierce, can still stand on its own today. Visual work produced on computers from around the same time was derivative and simplistic from the very beginning and holds only historical interest today.

Poetry fared well with Alison Knowles’ House of Dust (permutational poetry as event scores), the computer poems of Jackson MacLow and others because it too required relatively simple means to realize sophisticated ends.

Nevertheless, similar text generation in these poems had already existed in combinatory techniques in literature for several centuries, whereas the sounds and means involved in Tenney’s early computer music were new and unheard-of. An equivalent development in poetry would have entailed enough computational facility to produce, say, a neology-in-poetic-action worthy of Khlebnikov.

The privileging in music just meant a technological predisposition toward a certain level of artistic sophistication: it guaranteed nothing. It was fortuitous that it was Tenney who had privileged access to this privileged situation.

There was also a privileged place for music with regard to exchange among networks we know today. As the lonely halls of institutional mainframes were broken down and the population boom began happening with microcomputers, the first digital art was music. Beginning as social and, soon thereafter, collaborative and collective, the move to microcomputers prefigured activity on a mass scale today. Again, when Jim Horton, John Bischoff, George Lewis, Ron Kuivila, Paul DeMarinis, Nic Collins, Chris Brown, David Behrman, and many others were making sophisticated music on microcomputers, the visual art was primitive and simplistic.

I remember seeing Roger Reynolds lament the advent of home computers because it invited "convenience music." What I think he was really frightened of was that some brats would suddenly have accress to the type of hitherto privileged levels of technology he had enjoyed and would produce music more interesting than his own. He was certainly right to be afraid. The defining moment of this reality arrived in Bob Ostertag's statement "Why Computer Music Sucks."

The technological playing field in artistic forms began to be leveled only when speed and memory caught up to recorded forms, first in photography and then in audio and video. I think music and sound still look relatively intrinsic to exchange only because a commensurate technical quality of film and video is still lagging.
Re: Networks and Sound Part II
Posted by Lina Dzuverovic, Mar 12, 2005 1:39 PM
Re: Networks and Sound Part II Posted: Mar 12, 2005 1:39 PM in response to: Douglas Kahn Doug, I agree with you and can see how the relationship between music and networks based ‘on math, music and computation’ works. I think James Tenney’s 60s computer music stands as great example of this, but I disagree with the view that ‘visual work produced on computers from around the same time was derivative and simplistic from the very beginning and holds only historical interest today’.

I’m no art historian but if animation falls under ‘visual work’ then I’d argue that there are, indeed, some outstanding examples of computer generated visual work around the same period. For instance the early computer animations by Whitney Brothers and Lilian Schwartz are of tremendeous historical interest (and visually breathtaking). So, I think that the cases of access to computers (by the privileged few) produced some important work across the board and not just in music. John Whitney was in a similar position to Tenney in the mid 60’s with a grant from IBM in, which allowed access to the advanced computer facilities at UCLA. To me, Whitney’s early computer animations are no less important or impressive than Max Matthew’s ‘Daisy Daisy – Bicycle Built for Two’ (sang by Hal years later) or Tenney’s computer music.

Also, People like Stan VanDerBeek produced very interesting work around the same period while working with computer techinicians at MIT, NASA, and Bell Labs, as did Larry Cuba (maybe slightly later) and the aforementioned Lilian Shwartz.

So to me it seems that the early developments in computer music happened in parallel with similar level of investigation emerging from experimental film and animation communities. I am not sure where that leaves us in the networks/sound relationship discussions.
Re: Networks and Sound Part II
Posted by Douglas Kahn, Mar 12, 2005 6:15 PM
Lina: I know it’s risky to stand like a Hindu god on a prostrate example just to make an argument; it’s not something I’m prone to do lightly. [sorry] I was indeed thinking about the animation of John Whitney and the visual art and animation of A. Michael Noll. The same year Tenney did “Noise Study” using digital synthesis Whitney was working with an analog computer and going over artistic terrain of “visual music” or “optical music” originally generated in the 1920s. “Catalogue” and “Lapis” are beautiful, to be sure, but not huge improvements over more traditional forms of animation available at the time.

It was 1966 when Whitney started working with Jack Citron at IBM on digital gear, and that’s when you get the “visual spaghetti” or spriograph look associated with early digital animation. Compare that with digital animation now and it simply doesn’t stand up. It would be comparable to sitting some kid down with a game of Pac-Man. However, if you listen to Tenney’s work it does stand up not only with the music of its time but also music now. And all I’m saying is that this is a result of Tenney himself and of music’s deeper historical relationship to digital computing.

Where I agree with you in one respect is that “Whitney’s early computer animations are no less important or impressive than Max Mathew’s ‘Daisy Daisy – Bicycle Built for Two’ (sang by Hal years later).” First of all, thanks for bringing up the much maligned Hal: some day we’ll get his side of the story (there’s a PhD topic for someone). I was being hyperbolic when I said that this lacked historical interest, the tempering case being our present discussion. I wouldn’t necessarily put Mathew’s ditty with Whitney’s work, and certainly neither with Tenney’s work. Mathews knew that what he and the other engineers were doing at Bell Labs was not awfully sophisticated (I think Pierce might have entertained higher ambitions but was too busy being one of the most formidable technologists of the second half of the century) and that’s why they brought in actual composers, first the largely absentee David Lewin and then the in-residence James Tenney.

A. Michael Noll’s visual art and animation is even a clearer example. His work would be akin to the level of Mathews, but he reworked the abstract ditties of modern art. “Computer Composition with Lines” from 1964 is a simple copy of Mondrian. He was an excellent engineer with not a great aesthetic sense rationalized to make art by pushing digital computers to allude to the apparent attributes of abstraction. We can’t begin to compare the substance of the art from which Noll’s work derived or sought legitimacy, or the contemporaneous work, without being ridiculous, but he was obviously not working anywhere within the vicinity of such comparisons. At best, he was doing very important work developing new tools.

Engineers like Mathews, Pierce and Noll were involved primarily in making demonstrations to exercise what digital synthesis might be able to do. Tenney and after him Jean-Claude Risset were driven by other aspirations, and in collaboration with the engineers ended up pushing the technical capabilities further. I haven’t looked into the tenure of Whitney at IBM, but I imagine the same could be said of that instance too.

The problem, of course, comes from the possible confusion generated "music’s deeper historical relationship to digital computing" with that other argument for intrinsic properties found among the discoures of art music as the highest expression of Western civilization. Luckily, the subsequent development of digital technology from synthesis to recording, simulation and networking has eroded such historical claims and indeed set up a number of machine-critiques about the delimiting qualities of such discourses on artistic possibility and cultural practice.
Re: Networks and Sound Part II
Posted by Douglas Kahn, Mar 13, 2005 1:54 AM
I have a sneaking suspicion that Lina’s resolve for “hitting the nail on the head” paired with my historical conjectures are dampening the culture of exchange on this panel. What else could explain the relative silence? You can’t blame Club Med because they have to be wireless just to follow the daiquiris around. Perhaps instead of investigating the assumed relationship of networks and sound, we should assume that they exist and are doing quite well and get more specific about what they are in fact doing, shining examples and odd behaviors, and what they could be doing?
File Sharing
Posted by Kenneth Goldsmith, Mar 13, 2005 2:18 AM
Doug,

I've enjoyed reading your historical responses. And, yes, all is well!

Question to all: are you a part of any file-sharing networks / servers for sound art / experimental music?
Re: File Sharing
Posted by Lina Dzuverovic, Mar 13, 2005 9:09 PM
hi Kenny, good to have you back! I'm not part of any file sharing networks, because (dare i say this) i actually spend very little time online, so I'm rubbish at participating in any online things at all. How about you - any servers, networks you can want to tell us about? I would actually love to hear about this. Anyone else?

ps. Doug - i take your point about Tenney -in your last post. Being a big fan of people like the Whitney Bros etc - i felt it was my 'duty' to give them the mention they deserve when the conversation headed in that direction.
File Sharing
Posted by Douglas Kahn, Mar 14, 2005 4:51 PM
Ken:

Because I’m the director of an academic program, many of the files I share are called memos. I’m online quite a bit answering dozens of emails a day, using my library proxy to drag misshapen nets through journals, corresponding with people I write about, pestering professors around the world with obscure questions, and participating in the Tate Online d_culture panel.

I rarely swap music/sound files since the listening I do is usually tied to my research or writing commissions. I will more often simply purchase obscure materials from online auctions, Verge, Forced Exposure, or directly from individuals. For the people I’m writing about, I would rather pay them money or return the favor somehow, than pull down their work for free. My interests are broad and always developing and although over the years I’ve amassed a formidable amount of text, media and documents they are not as concentrated in specific areas and they would be for a collector, an archivist or a fan.
Re: File Sharing
Posted by Kenneth Goldsmith, Mar 14, 2005 5:08 PM
I've been a file-sharing fan since the Napster days when I plugged in the keywords "Xenakis" or "La Monte Young" and thousands of returns came back. I quickly began gorging and never turned back.

These days, while I still troll peer-to-peer networks, I've dedicated myself to a private server for experimental music. It's not a huge group of people, but they're very intense, often uploading a dozen or more discs. The group's members come from all over the world and are generally the types you'd expect to be reading The Wire closely. As such, the server's directory structures reflect that magazine's interests:

Electronic and Samples
- Beat Remnants
- Comtemporary Electronics
- Cut and Paste

Improv and Jazz
- Contemporary Improv
- Free Jazz and Fire Music
- Non-Idiomatic Improv

The Avant Garde
- Early Electronic and Concrete
- Electroacoustic
- Foundsounds and Field Recordings
- Minimalism "System Sounds"
- Novelty Acts
- Orchestral Avant Garde
- Outsiders, Deviants and Artists
- Radio Art
- Sound Poetry

The Rockist Agenda
- Ambient, Minimal and Drone
- Contemporary Improv Cut-Up
- Experimental Art Noise
- Japan - Noise, Free and Psych
- New Zealand
- Progressive and Euro Art Rock
- United Daires and Friends

Unconventional Ethnic
- Aborigine Music
- Chinese Traditional
- Indian
- Japanese Gagaku
- Japanese Nh
- Others
- Sublime Frequencies
- Tibetan - Buddhist History

Each category is packed with hundreds and hundreds of files, holding much more than any record store I've ever been in.

Often I pluck items uploaded to this server and re-post them on UbuWeb for the general public. The recent spate of Fluxfilms of UbuWeb were grabbed off of this server and made available to all. The server and its community have become a massively important part of my life; it feeds my radio show; and constantly supplies new content to UbuWeb. Needless to say, its name and location cannot be revealed.
File Sharing
Posted by Douglas Kahn, Mar 15, 2005 12:30 AM
Ken:

In terms of the politics of exchange and production, I can see how your personal position producing UbuWeb and a radio program in a major metropolitan area might assist the folks whose work you admire, but I imagine there are plenty of people you’re swapping files with that are not in a position to assist. You might call them consumers, except for the fact that there’s no money being exchanged. If this is a barter system, what is being exchanged?

Are the musicians and artists benefiting from the system in some way? Should we send them clothes, medical supplies or symbolic capital, or would they prefer money? Should they benefit from the good fortune of their creative productions?

Academics like myself write for free most of the time because we have a mechanism called merit and promotion, if not tenure, to translate these writings into a livelihood. Most academics I know “live off the smell of an oily rag” (as the Aussies say) for a long time until they land in a decent place, if at all. Some privileged folks walk through the ivy at the front door, but most enter through the wringer in the back laundry.

Do artists and musicians have a similar mechanism, even if just a promise, in file-sharing? Does one exist or could one be designed?

Should artists and musicians expect a livelihood? I know that issue arises already in the class system of aspiring artists and musicians in NYC where most wait on tables while the rich kids work hard on their shows.

The “dematerialization” practiced by a number of conceptualists was possible because they didn’t have to work or sell things for a living and could postpone cashing in until their transgressions delivered them into an adequate level fame.

Is there a way to steer file-sharing into a way of supporting artists and musicians so we won’t have to get all our Bohemian goods from Biff and Betty?

I know that people like to trumpet the putative democracy of Jacques Attali’s epoch of composition, but what happens to those trumpets amid the acoustics of his bank office with all that marble? Should people be able to make or contribute to a livelihood or should it be relegated to leisure time activity until musical predictions of Attali's utopia are realized in the political economy? Are entrails and tea-leaves a new historical form of musical notation?

As for the Unconventional Ethnic category, see Steve Feld's article: "Pygmy POP: A Geneaology of Schizophonic Mimesis," in the Yearbook for Traditional Music, 1996, Volume 28, pages 1-35.

It seems crucial that system creators need to design, if they have not done so already, ways to support suppliers to the system. Is there an equitable way to do this without becoming Starbucks? If not, then the infantilism of consumerism, the kid in the candy shop, will eat its offspring.
Re: File Sharing
Posted by Kenneth Goldsmith, Mar 15, 2005 5:27 AM
I'm with you all the way here, Doug, except that I don't get the feeling that, sadly, most sound works of this nature ever make much money. Seems to me, from the many folks I've worked with on UbuWeb, etc., that for them, it's about getting the work out and heard rather than try to wring a paycheck out of it. In this case, file-sharing and free distribution systems like UbuWeb for innovative sound works are a blessing.

We're back to Bruce Nauman here where his sound works command thousands of dollars and others working exclusively in audio are happy to just have it heard. (A similar analogy can be made to Jenny Holzer's work, which must be the most valuable language on the planet. Makes the poets fume...)
File Sharing
Posted by John Oswald, Mar 15, 2005 4:18 PM
I stopped buying records in a concerted fashion back in the early '70's. Then i discovered some people and some institutions who had large collections of the unusual audio artifacts i was interested in. Given that i had finite listening time, i tended to prefer to listen to little bits of a lot of things, rather than extended periods of any one thing. I remember one particular university library that allowed bin browsing. I would carry stacks up-to-my-chin of records to a little listening kiosk and proceed to needle-drop my way through them. I usually brought or smuggled in a recording device and dubbed short samples of things i found interesting.

I don't ever remember purchasing compact discs in any concerted fashion, unless it was for a specific project (i.e., 'i need a couple of dozen versions of Strauss' Zarathustra'), but somehow i've ended up with hundreds or more likely thousands of CD's, most of which i have listened to at least once, but haven't ever organized them in a way which would make them easily accessible. I find now that i'll sometimes download something i know i've got a hard copy of somewhere, because finding it on the net is sometimes more time efficient.

I continued the habit of dubbing little bits of things when i was gathering the resources for the aforementioned Plexure ('92), which has electroquoted samples from at least a thousand pop songs from the '80's. The interesting difference was i was now cloning, rather than copying: i was making digital transfers of exact duplicates of the sound information on the CDs, which was often an exact duplicate of the master tape from which the CDs were made.

I was a relative latecomer to Napster, but discovered the browsing facilities were only slightly less wonderful than back in the library days. One interesting aspect of finding soundfiles on Napster was that during this period my CD purchases increased by an order of magnitude. I'd find a bit of something in generally crappy sound on Napster that would lead to wanting more or better of that thing. I couldn't figure out, based on my personal habits, why the Recording Industry destroyed Napster.

These days if i want a pristine audio copy of something i'll first of all try to order a hard copy (usually CD) online. If i'm just curious to hear what something sounds like i'll try listening to the 30 second low-bandwidth snips that are often part of audio online sales or check some web radio indexes. If that doesn't do it for me, i pay, depending on where i go, 25¢ or a buck (which, with inflation, is about what it would cost to listen to a song on a juke box these days i'd guess) for a mid-fi MP3 track. If i can't find something for sale (for instance the biggest online supplier doesn't sell individual tracks that are longer that 10 minutes) i go p2p looking for it. I'm entirely selfish in the latter environment because i don't upload. In my vocabulary uploading is synonymous with publication, and publication, for me, has always involved trying to take some sort of unique editorial stance, and i've been working on some things along these lines for the net, which i haven't made available yet.