mnartists.org

or go to the advanced search page

brian carroll

<< 1 ... 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 ... 23 >>

soundings (C)

soundings (C)
soundings (C)

soundings (C) | Media List


Statement

I am at the very beginning of learning about music, never having developed a grounded connection with an instrument until later years, tenatively with piano, and slowly with electronic music instruments. Yet there is a gap between the music inside and what can be accomplished with existing tools.

And so what if you sing to yourself songs that are pleasing, or in writing texts that there is inherent musicality to thoughts and shared communications, if not even the harmoniousness of having everything aligned and how nice that is compared to when everything is contested, everything against everything else. So how to access what is already there so to begin to externally develop musical literacy via an instrument.

Like language, my approach was to develop small phrases, words and melodies, and through these repeated patterns, combine and recombine them into coherent structures. That is a goal, yet a gap exists and continually places me back at the beginning, trying to approach it from within, versus trying to correctly interface with an instrument in what may be properly recognized as 'playing music'.

This could be a question of origins of music, in how the voice eventually begins to sing, and how information and communication can also be transmitted and translated through song, if not within additional structural layers than simply writing or speaking. Though that in itself, saying and oral communication, can itself have lyricality, that poetry of speech,and so again it is wondered where a song may begin if 'music' is also in ordinary communication to some extent, at what recognizable point or phase does musicality emerge.

Sometimes I speak to myself in made-up languages, because they sound right to my ear and capture a mood or a hidden layer to events that transports the present into another realm altogether. It is not simply display, it becomes a question of what is communicated through sounds that may be unrecognizable in their specific meaning, not knowing a language, and yet could be inferred via tone and inflection as these relate to emotion and expression. And sometimes another style of voice captures what is absent in a place, reveals more about it, and perhaps it is a question about voices and location, are they actually misplaced in a given context, or would every voice be grounded in some way by being in the universe, in a given place, that there is a potential for that specificity to any given juncture, that those specific meanings could be unlocked in any given location by a mystery observer.

I have also experimented with an electronic transducer which functions as a drum trigger. It was used with the audio mixer to record my heart beat, and also mapped to a cymbal sound on a sound module and triggered via tapping fingers.

It is with voice and tapping finger and heartbeat, then, that the music inside is attempted to be accessed and shared via technological tools, prior to learning other ways to generate a more involved sound that relates to that same driving pulse that continues to find within music its own relation.

In this way, an internal sound is captured that is part of relations with external events and in this, how alignments may or may not occur, given how these same sounds may collide or merge into others worlds and ways of being.

This then further recognizes the question of language and syntax/grammar, not only in playing an instrument, though in being an instrument and the relation of this instrument with other music that goes beyond a particular translation and still exists as music in its abstract yet tangible qualities.

If it need be said, this is a linguistic exploration and not mocking of language- it is about thresholds of understanding and how meaning can occur beyond specific structures and how this relates to music and universal questions of language. In this way, so too playing music on instruments, where that same abstract layer can be a place to begin, even when not knowing how to play via sheet music and only hearing such structural sounds, dynamics, and relations. It is an experiment, though also a practice, to learn about language and about music via such techniques.