| The Listening Room and Stairwell NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC) Tokyo Opera City Tower 4F, 3-20-2 Nishi-Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 163-1404 Japan installation notebook |
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Friday 4jul03:
assemble equipment, adjust conditions of room - furniture, blinds etc
switch on basic system
position mic and speakers
decide location of everything
final positioning and tidy up
tech assistant Haruhiko Goto
try with and without chairs
Consider retaining a few chairs in the space, positioning to encourage
people to move within the space.
remove or reposition plinths
A speaker should not be on a plinth - that could fetishise the object.
Saturday 5jul03:
mic position - which surface?
what noise will leak into the space from elsewhere?
11.40 The blinds are open and the heat is building up The Difference Room is inadvertently creating
itself where its not supposed to be.
first mic tests on longest wall, LH speaker gets high frequency from floor, pitches indeterminate at the moment.
16.30 Minoru has fixed the air conditioning, but the system is not
behaving in a reliable stable way.
microphone
now on the metal section below the long white wall. A little
better, the 2 speakers sometimes play a little tune alternating between
A and C. But still prone to going silent or going into extreme
feedback on a
very dull note.
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Sunday 6jul03: Microphone now on the metal section below the long window.
Mid frequencies are very dull but the system seems more reliable
and reactive to movement of people within the room. A lot of
activity
outside the door, banging and drilling - the installation seems to be
coping.. |
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All furniture is now out of the room.
Improvement.
Afternoon - change of speakers from JBL Control 28 to Alesis.
Improvement.
A significant difference in the harmonic content.
More work on the stairwell while this is settling/warming up.
Microphone moved to window surface.
Improvement
Things are getting better. I don't know exactly how I want the system to behave but have a strong sense of what areas are interesting.
Working out cable runs and equipment locations for the exhibition.
symmetry asymmetry (speaker placement)
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stairwell: sticky tape for sticking mics on walls in test positions Haruhiko runs about between the two installation spaces with
miles of cables. Rough placement of mics and speakers according
to zone diagram in notebook. Seems to work straight away.
Incremental refinements during the afternoon. Speakers now
mounted on stands - ready to fix the installation into position. |
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Monday 7jul03
Humidity.
I was with Peter Gordon in London last week and he told me about
the engineer/producer Howard Scott, one of the pioneers in the
development of the LP, who recorded the Columbia Masterworks stuff
during the Goddard Lieberson years (as well as the Louisville Orch
stuff Peter is re-mastering). Howard Scott kept meticulous notes on his
recordings including not just the usual things like duration, location,
technical stuff etc but also temperature and humidity. Peter also
adds:
"I remember when
LOLO gave a concert in Milan, the hall was packed and very humid and
stuffy. Eric Liljestrand was mixing and
described having to scramble to readjust his settings when the doors
were opened at the intermission, airing out the place and cooling it
down. I would imagine this was quite an issue
in Kentucky, where the humidity can be stifling."
Today however, Tokyo is wet and reasonably cool so the
installation sounds
the same this morning as when I switched it off last night. So no
opportunity
to check the effects of stifling humidity, plus the room is behaving
much
better since Minoru reset the air conditioning.
The people working on the other installations are crashing and
banging in the next gallery today - that has the unfortunate effect of
making The Listening Room sound really good as it picks up the
noise. When the place becomes quiet, like it would be during the
exhibition, the installation gets very dull - that's what I have to
work on, so maybe this means a late night, when it gets quiet.
Tweaking continues, my current strategy is to set the noise gates
not to cut off the sound but just to drop the level a few decibels -
this is to try and set up a fairly robust although fairly static
installation so that it will survive the duration of the exhibition and
whatever may happen to it during that period. This appears to be
working - the room is relatively small and the level is fairly low so
the sound is very responsive to movement within the space. One
reason I removed all the furniture on Sunday was to encourage people to
move around in the room and explore this aspect of the work for
themselves.
Tuesday 8jul03
This morning I tried to re-hang the microphone (Audio Technique PRO-42) upside down to make the cable run simpler. This turned the feedback into an intensely uncomfortable sustained note which would not go away. Must be something to do with the design of this mic - probably the only microphone I've used that I have never taken to pieces to see how it works. So the cable run remains complicated.
Heisenberg's syndrome persists - I'm now convinced that the position of the mixer in the space affects the sound of the room (this is not unusual, recording studio design has to compensate for the presence of large mixing desks in front of monitor speakers). The less there is in the room, the more every detail of the smallest alteration is magnified.
Late lunch, on my return the installation is silent, the room feels cooler because I have the floor open to site the amplifiers and mixer and there is an underfloor air flow. Strange, as I had this open earlier and the system was quite loud. More working and waiting...
Wednesday 9jul03
A post-midnight check on the installation reveals it has reduced
itself to a low drone - complete stasis.
I have left it running in that condition to see if it is behaving
in a similar way later this morning. Alvin Lucier's 'Empty
Vessels (Tokyo)' which is also real-time feedback
based appears to have lost most high frequency content overnight.
In this case this is down to the the fact that room is
empty, the intervention of an individual within the work activates the
work.
In this case the walk-thru intervention of Minoru Hatanaka (a
curator's job can be a thankless late-night task) restores those parts
that were absent from the beautiful chord I heard yesterday.
The Listening Room is still in stasis first thing in the morning.
This is good in that the system appears to be stable, but it
makes for very dull listening. More tuning and tweaking.
Around 2.00 this afternoon the system went into dramatically loud
continuous high frequency feedback. So it is still unstable. My
solution is to change the amplifiers. This morning Haruhiko
temporarily swopped amplifiers on one channel of the Stairwell and it
sounded very poor on the new amp, a Ramsa, the same as
is in this version of The Listening Room. My current theory is
that these Ramsas have some kind of built-in protection system and they
don't like sine waves or feedback. So now the two installations
have exchanged amplifiers. Stairwell was fairly easy to re-set,
but it's back to square one with The Listening Room. Which has
been the case every day as the system was so unstable. The new
amps have improved things somewhat but another overnight test for
stability is required. If it is still unstable I'll have to swap
mixers tomorrow. I also decided either to replace the mic with a
more omnidirectional type or to add another Audio Technica Pro 42 to
broaden the soundfield in the hope that I could get more
harmonics into the situation. At the moment it's mostly a monophonic
approximation of what should be a polyphony.
An Audio Technica Pro 42 from the Stairwell is now in place in The
Listening Room. The system appears to be stable and harmonically
more interesting, a rather feeble chord is sounding when the room is
empty, but the presence of people in the space is creating additional
harmonics and modulation. Again, on test all night, so a
late one for me. If it is still behaving tomorrow morning that
will reassure me that the installation will survive the exhibition.
What I want is a really hot sunny day just in case the the heat
on the mics makes a difference.
Thursday 10jul03
Waiting for Haruhiko with the replacement mic for the Stairwell.
12.30 - Severe HF feedback again, not as bad as yesterday - people
are saying it is some factor to do with the building, the lifts
affecting the humidity. Haruhiko returns with an Audio Technica
Pro 43. This is a new one on me, not in the catalogue but
presumably it has some relation to the 42 or 44. Somwhere
in-between, probably omnidirectional (there is no manual either in
Japanese or English). It goes on the wall in the stairwell,
where, if it is omni, will respond better to the live space. Finally
both installations are in place.
The Ramsa amp on the stairwell starts up from cold with a massive
HF noise. I turned the mixer down and left the system to settle
while getting on with speaker placement and soundcheck
for Sunday downstairs in the lobby. By 3.30 the stairwell
is up and running. Different with the new mic but interestingly
and acceptably different.
Friday 11jul03
Both installations are behaving fairly consistently now. The
Listening Room sounding better than yesterday now that the space is
less busy. Some visitors are spending quite a long time in there.
Sunday 13jul03
Documentation of The Listening Room with people in the installation this afternoon. Unfortunately the presence of a camera and another microphone in the almost empty space confuses some viewers who tap the camera mic to see what it will do. The room is behaving but almost no high frequency content in the feedback. It seems to respond ok when there are as many as 8 people in the space, people are being quiet within the room and this helps. Yesterday there was a lot of microphone tapping - this is pointless as it shuts down the feedback cycle - I heard people clapping their hands in Alvin's installation.
Tomorrow we will run The Listening Room for a day with air conditioning set to some ridiculously high temperature as a test to see whether it can survive the full rigours of the Summer.
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Very slow guitar playing into the ProTools mixer delay
system
with the PA speakers spread around the space in odd positions and at
odd
angles so that I am playing into the room, working with the space.
Played
at about twice the volume that I soundchecked as I couldn't hear much
from
the room, masked by the audience. It didn't entirely go as I
planned
but still much better than playing on a stage. A borrowed guitar from Minoru Hatanaka, a borrowed guitar
strap from Haruhiko Goto and a photograph courtesy of Aki Shimatani,
thanks very much. |
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click here for mp3 download of the reception
performance |
Monday 14jul03
Last night's performance and talk seem to have been well received. The performance took place in the lobby, a strange but not uncomfortable experience of playing to the queue waiting to get in to see me.
Some people were there for my pop music past, others were there for the installations. I made the connection, took it forward and hope that it made sense. The first public reading of the principles - had to go through a printout of them with Reiko (translator) in advance as the vocabulary is arcane. The Principles are a work-in progress which attempt to rationalise guidelines and aspirations for my installations.
Talking through a translator in short sentences seemed to keep the flow and I had the sense that Reiko did a good job. Alvin Lucier said afterwards that the audience liked the asides (some of them were inadvertent).
This was followed by Alvin's talk and performance. He summarised his history as a composer or artist, gently revealing his discovery of the principles of his work (in contrast to my obscure manifesto), talking about how the innate systems of balance derived from the ecological or physical world taught him to allow a process to take its natural course, not to force something on to or out of the work to enable the content and the process to be the same thing. A profound and generous non-intentionality.
The Gallery is closed today and Shinji and I are testing The Listening Room system. The air conditioning has been set to allow the room to reach 30c overnight but cold air is coming in from some other part of the system so the room is in fact comfortably cool and sounding well. The intricacies of the air flow system are beyond me. Echoes of The Difference Room.
Shinji turned off extractor fans somewhere in the building, red lights flashed on the air conditioning control screen shortly to be followed by a visit from a building maintenance man who turned everything on again. We just sat there and tried to look innocent. It would seem this extreme testing is not officially sanctioned. It also seems we can only increase the temperature to the outside ambient temperature which is not much use today. So the decision is to set the air conditioning to keep the room at around 20 although this makes me concerned that this will create fluctuations rather than the steady-state environment which seems to suit the system.
I've been through the technical setup with Minoru and Shinji so they know what to do if it goes weird. The equipment will be photographed with printouts next to the mixers so that things can be reset.
Wednesday 13aug03
Weather:
'last week big typhoon struck Japan.
in Tokyo it was very strong wind and rain.
so sometimes your installation made strange high frequency.
but now it is working very well.'
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