Yan White: Sound

In the UK, we produce 434 million tonnes of solid waste every year. As a nation, we only recycle 17.7% of it – one of the worst rates in Europe. Due to the aggressive marketing of new technology and a throw away lifestyle, the amount of electrical waste we throw away is increasing by around 5% each year, making it the fastest growing waste stream in the UK. The UK produces 3 million tonnes of plastic waste each year. Approximately 85% is landfilled, 8% incinerated and 7% recycled. Over 75% of waste electrical goods end up in landfill, where lead and other toxins contained in the electrical goods can cause soil and water contamination.

These loudspeakers were collected over the last 2 months from locations across London.

Using freecycle.org, a site designed to allow any useful item to be collected and re-used for free, and a civic amenity site that sorts re-usable goods, I visited these various locations and recorded my journeys… announcements on the underground, birdsong alongside rail platforms, my own musings and comments on newspaper articles or things I have seen along the way, visits to the dump and freecyclers’ houses.

The collection of 192 sound files is played back randomly through 50 of the collected loudspeaker drivers which are arranged in 8 channels/clusters of varying sizes.

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“LMC was one of the major forces in the development of improvised music and sonic arts. LMC history is particularly richly textured, not only because it contains important evidence (audible, visual and textual) of early improvised music and sonic arts activity in the UK, but also because it intersects with other initiatives of self-determination, collective politics and critical art practice in the 1970s, such as radical publishing, feminism, structural film, dance, performance art, and sonic ecology, along with organisations like Music for Socialism and the post-punk explosion of independent record companies and promoters.” – David Toop

Unknown Devices: the Laptop Orchestra with David Toop. 10 min film excerpt from 30 min performance at CRISAP, LCC London in May 2009. Performed for the opening of Sound Traces, an exhibition of the London Musicians’ Collective legacy. Filmed and edited by Mika Kioussis

Watch out for me punishing my guitar about halfway through the video!

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I had been interested in feedback loops for a while and decided to record some experiments.

Using a guitar pedal chain routed back to itself via a mixer I was able to obtain surprisingly versatile results by tweaking settings, changing the placing of pedals in the chain or by varying the level of aux send from the mixer (the amount of feedback)

These sessions were edited and mixed (no treatment other than some fades and panning) to produce a 25-minute piece. Dim the lights and Enjoy!

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Duration: 10 minutes (excerpt / remix)
Format: 4.1 channel (stereo, wide stereo, low frequency)

Programme Note (1 or 2 sentences about the piece which will be on the programme given to the audience):

A composition taken from old (found) vinyl. Classical music records were treated with both analog and digital signal processing, in sessions which were edited, sliced, grouped and placed across 4 channels. The sounds are both an exploration of the textural and physical nature of old records (crackle, hiss) and of the content; re-contextualized, remodelled, re-positioned in space – retaining the drama and emotion of large orchestral recordings, hinting at both the past and the future..

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con·vo·lu·tion (k?n’v?-l??’sh?n)
n.

1. A form or part that is folded or coiled.
2. One of the convex folds of the surface of the brain.

In mathematics and, in particular, functional analysis, convolution is a mathematical operation on two functions f and g, producing a third function that is typically viewed as a modified version of one of the original functions. Convolution is similar to cross-correlation. It has applications that include statistics, computer vision, image and signal processing, electrical engineering, and differential equations.

In linear acoustics, an echo is the convolution of the original sound with a function representing the various objects that are reflecting it.

In artificial reverberation (digital signal processing, pro audio), convolution is used to map the impulse response of a real room on a digital audio signal. Common ways of generating this impulse include bursting a balloon and firing a starting pistol, though more accurate results can be achieved by recording playback of a sine sweep, which is then ‘deconvolved’.

These short films together form a ‘book of convolutions’, documents and processes that seek to uncover the secrets of familiar spaces. Many of the sounds in this piece are made from site-specific recordings which have been convolved with the captured reverberations of these spaces, ambience convolved with itself, everyday sounds take on the shape of a handrail, a creaking door, other voices. I am standing in a room, similar to the one you are in now..

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In audio signal processing, convolution reverb is a process for digitally simulating the reverberation of a physical or virtual space. It is based on the mathematical convolution operation, and uses a pre-recorded audio sample of the impulse response of the space being modelled. To apply the reverberation effect, the impulse-response recording is first stored in a digital signal-processing system. This is then convolved with the incoming audio signal to be processed.

The primary goal of a convolution reverb is to sample real spaces, in order to simulate the acoustics of the sampled space.

Using a small Genelec monitor I played a sine sweep (12 sec, 30 sec, 60 sec) in the 6-storey stairwell that is used as a fire escape at London College of Communication. The tall enclosed nature of this space combined with hard concrete surfaces and lots of stairs create a unique and spacious reverb. 2 Fostex digital recorders were used, one to play back the sine sweep and one to record in both mono and stereo.

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The Edirol R-09 is a portable field recorder with built-in stereo microphones. I used it as my field recorder for ‘Loop:recycle’ and for capturing various ambiences. For professional work I would be using something like an SQN or Sound Devices 702T.

For its price (around £200) the R-09 has pretty good sound quality, though the noise floor is quite high especially on high mic gain setting. Its main advantages are size and good battery life. The R-09 fits easily into a coat pocket and runs for hours off 2 AA batteries.

Here is a recording of a rainstorm with some thunder from my bedroom window. The Edirol was attached to the inside of a velux window with electrical tape. Although it has a neoprene case it isn’t waterproof! From around 15 minutes of recording this was edited down to 5 minutes of usable sound (without sirens, aeroplanes, traffic and rail noise)

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I found the combination of the sample player and granular synthesis in ready-made patches for Max/MSP to be a very rich area for improvisation. You can hear some of the results of this in an edited 5-minute session taken from V-Drum recordings. I was impressed by the organic qualities, liquid and solid textures and the range of expression and dynamics possible with this instrument.

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I picked up this lovely Bavarian Concert Zither on ebay for about £40.

This is the instrument used on the soundtrack for the movie “The Third Man”. It features 5 fretted strings and 27 open strings which are usually tuned in a cycle of fifths. I used my own unison tuning.

One thing that is really interesting about these instruments is that almost every country and culture has some kind of version of the zither, and it’s basically an ancestor of the guitar.

Combined with a fairly crude homemade contact microphone and my standard effect chain (2 DL4’s, Boss PS-2, Blues Driver, Verbzilla, Alesis portable mixer) I was using this setup for the first Unknown Devices sessions with David Toop. The case acts as a resonant chamber/amplifier and picks up lots of great creaks and friction.

I later edited together this quite dark loop-based composition..

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Bay 66 Skate Park ~ Soundscape

The soundscape

The brief was to record and mix a one-minute soundscape..

I find acoustic ecology’s faithfulness to the location appealing and so my aim was to represent a specific place or idea, in this case BaySixty6 skate park in Ladbroke Grove.

BaySixty6 is situated beneath a flyover and is next to the metropolitan line. As such it has a lot of ambient noise. The semi-open acoustic produces an interesting sense of space in the recordings.

This was mixed on Pro Tools and I used an Izotope Ozone mastering plugin (maximisation and stereo width for cd setting). I used minimal eq, some volume boost and fast panning (with ramp-shaped U-curves) to enhance the realism of ramp sounds. I aimed to cram the minute with lots of information about the space, to represent it as fully as possible.

A couple of difficulties recording at a skate park:

It can be a dangerous place with lots of loose boards flying around

Trying to close-mic a very fast moving target is a challenge and again, could be dangerous to us, the riders and the equipment!

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This is a journey.. into sound… Electromagnetic sound!

These mics are sold as ‘telephone pick-up coil’ for about £5 in Maplin. It’s a small pick-up coil in black plastic moulding with rubber suction pad to attach to a telephone, designed to pick up conversations for recording. Kind of like old-school spy equipment..

Anything electronic or electrical will generate a magnetic field, and this baby will pick up that signal..


..and it goes a little something like this:

1. Library card reader
2. Lift
3. G4 Mac
4. iMac
5. Mobile phone
6. Photocopier
7. PC Laptop
8. TV
9. Payphone

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As part of a field recording exercise for my Sound Arts course at LCC, I recorded some ambience at the Walworth Road market. This was the day after Barack Obama was announced as the next President of the United States (and also my birthday), so there was quite an atmosphere of optimism amongst the traders and market-goers.

Although a relatively cheap mic, the ECM-MS957 delivers quite natural-sounding dynamic stereo recordings. It also features rotating Mid/Side (MS) capsules with switchable pick-up angle. The midcapsule picks up monophonic sound while the side capsule picks up left/right-difference sound. Subtracting and adding the two capsule signals yields separate left and right channels, and permits electronic adjustment of the pickup angle. The mid/side switch also selects the pickup angle between the left and right channels, either 90 or 120 degrees. The recordings were made with a Marantz PMD-660.

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I was inspired by an excercise used by Pauline Oliveros, where you are asked to remember 2 sounds you loved and 2 sounds you hated from this morning. It makes you think about how you perceive and remember sound, and I found that for me these sounds tend to have an emotional context which makes them stand out from the general noise and routine soundscape that we filter out.

So I took my R-09 recorder and asked some random people to talk about these sounds..

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I took part in a 3-day Taiko workshop at the Royal College of Music, taught by Mark Alcock of Taiko Meantime.

By the second day my shoulders were on fire and my wrists felt like rubber.. luckily there was a lady taking part who was also a trained sports massage therapist!

ghOst produced a couple of 6-minute tracks for Otaku magazine’s ‘Kaidan’ issue. These are entitled ‘jitenshi-kaze’ (bicycle/wind) and ‘amatsu-kaidan’ (celestial ghost).

Otaku magazine is really beautifully presented and researched, and follows a different theme for each issue, in this case ‘kaidan’, japanese traditional ghost stories. Otaku manages a great balance between genre history, artist contributions and manga comic book content (not to mention the awesome cover cd). I recommend getting hold of a copy quick!

Listen to ghOst here

I was commissioned to score a 40-minute documentary for Parthenon Films to be aired on National Geographic Channel.

The documentary is titled ‘Living Edens: Yellowstone (America’s Sacred Wilderness) and focuses on a recent experiment to re-introduce wolves back into Yellowstone, restoring the natural equilibrium between the animals.

High in the American Rockies, Yellowstone Park is a place of extraordinary landscapes and geysers. Created by the largest volcanic explosions in the planet’s history, it became the world’s first national park. With the return of wolves, it has become a world-class wildlife sanctuary, the best place to see wolves and grizzly bears chasing elk.

The score uses a mixture of blues and slide guitar, appalachian orchestral arrangement and native american sounds.

View the documentary in full here

Having developed an interest in dance (contact improvisation and butoh), I was asked to play an improvised set at Moving East. Following the workshop there is a 4-hour period where dancers can explore themes from the workshop and their own ideas, often accompanied by live music.

I recorded the second of these live improvisations. I used an electric guitar with effects and loops, along with various homemade percussions, an SM57, and a metal salad bowl with contact microphone attached.

These are edited tracks from the session. Enjoy, and if you feel compelled to dance around your living room please feel free…..

I was commissioned to compose music and create sound design for a piece of physical dance theatre by Etta Ermini.

After initial discussions about the concept I made the decision to use only sounds recorded from bicycle parts. The chainwheel, forks, frames, wheels, brake levers and spokes became percussion, bells, gongs and were struck or bowed to create a library of samples and loops for placing into Sony Acid. You can listen to the individual cues here

Fixed Wheel is a 30 minute Physical Theatre piece for two male performers and a bicycle. It depicts the joys and pitfalls of the life and love of a geeky bike freak and his alter ego. The movement material is explosive and, at times, quirky. Dialogues are witty and acerbic. The acrobatic use of the prop, a bright blue BMX bicycle, heightens the tense atmosphere. This playful look at loss and longing aims to connect to the personal experiences of the audience. Be safe, wear a helmet!

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experimental postrock band featuring:
Yan White (Guitars, composition, mixing)
Matej Setinc (Drums)
Taigen Kawabe (Bass)

Debut album ‘Stem the Tide’ released on Sacred Cow records (2008)

Gigs across London including Fopp records and Badge of Friendship DIY Festival at the ICU, London, 2007.

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ghOst is a vehicle for experimental electronic music in the ambient/drone/noise/subsonic field. Influenced by themes of the celestial and ethereal, other-worldly soundscapes are explored within a narrative framework.

The dvd was produced for use as a projection backdrop at ghOst laptop sets I was doing at The Pool Bar and for a slot at Immersion experimental electronica festival at The Flea Pit.

Most of the video was shot on a 2mp camera phone (at 320×240) and edited in Premiere. The footage is closeups of various random tv programmes with scanlines and interference forming part of the final image.

Listen to ghOst here

Here are a series of still images from the dvd.