Alva Noto

Emma Warren

Welcome to the first of today’s lecture program. I’d like to introduce visual artist and resident conceptualist at the Raster-Noton label, Carsten Nicolai. Welcome! (applause) So we’re gonna be hearing a bit more about what you do and seeing a bit more about what you do. But first off I wanted to ask you quite a serious philosophical question. What is the difference between music and sound? Or is there no difference between the two things?

Alva Noto

Hello. I consider sound a much wider topic than music. When we talk about music, mostly we only talk about a very small, specific frequency range inside of sound. Sound has many more frequencies, frequencies we often cannot perceive. But different animals, for example, can perceive that – elephants have totally different ranges than bats.

Emma Warren

Do small animals have higher frequencies than big animals?

Alva Noto

No, that’s wrong. (laughs)

Emma Warren

I am not a scientist. (laughs)

Alva Noto

This example is probably not proportionate to the size. Just to give you an idea of what sound is, sound is much, much more than we think of. When you think of a classical notation language like notes, then the range of the frequencies is much more narrow than even the classical CDs.

Emma Warren

Do you think there’s a human tendency to turn sound into music? I’ve been in places sometimes and you hear sound around you and it kind of sounds like music almost.

Alva Noto

This happens all the time to me. All day I’m basically in an environmental situation – say, in a huge train station – and you hear the accumulation of the noise, of the people, and you say, “Wow, this is a really fantastic sound.” But this is sound, this is really tone. I would say there’s very little border where people start understanding, is this music? Does it have a musical quality or is it noise? For me, noises have a strong musical content.

Emma Warren

So are you interested in messing with this boundary between sound and music, in presenting sound to people in a musical context but not necessarily in a musical way?

Alva Noto

Sure, yeah. As I started getting involved in sound, and later in music – but first of all sound, for me – basically, I was very interested in the perception of super-high frequencies. I did some research, tests on my own body, to find a way when I really start perceiving these ultra-high frequencies and what they do to me. Do they harm me? Over the long term, do they give me a pleasant / unpleasant feeling? I had a really positive and negative experience with that research. But one little aspect, which brings us maybe to the next topic, was in order to understand if I only imagined I heard things or if I really heard things, I needed some visual devices. In this case it was a very basic oscilloscope to see if the frequency is really there or not there, if I just imagined it or something.

Emma Warren

Are we heading into the area of cymatics?

Alva Noto

Cymatics is a difficult topic. It’s only Hans Jenny who introduced it.

Emma Warren

Some of you may have seen some stuff on YouTube of people sprinkling salt over speakers and watching geometric shapes.

Alva Noto

This is Chladni.

Emma Warren

Oh, that’s something different.

Alva Noto:

This basic principle is by this scientist Chladni. They describe it in physics as Chladni figures. There are many variations of that, you can do this with different materials and so on. But one of the first who introduced it was Chladni.

Emma Warren

I want to stick for a minute with these experiments you’re doing with yourself. I think we should hear some music and also, if you have anything to show us that relates to this, we should see it. But while you’re selecting what to play to introduce us to what your stuff sounds like, these experiments you’re doing on yourself, what were the pleasant and unpleasant experiences you had while subjecting yourself to super-high frequencies?

Alva Noto

One good aspect of the high frequencies was that, especially with 11,000 Hz, I felt really convenient. I tried to find out, why is this happening?

Emma Warren

When you say convenient, can you expand on that?

Alva Noto

I had a good felling, I had a feeling like I’m home. It took me a really long time to find out why this is happening. Basically, I realize that when you have a tube TV – and earlier as a kid we had a tube TV in our home – it constantly gives a high frequency. This works at 11,000 Hz, so when I worked at 11,000 Hz and played any other kind of music on top I felt really at home. I think because I was being socialized with TV, and TV was running and so on, I realize that I really feel I had a convenient feeling.

Emma Warren

Interesting. You’re saying the sound provoked a kind of nostalgic feeling in you rather than a sort of bio-physical effect?

Alva Noto

I think we have a very strong memory for acoustics. You can compare it with when you go to cities or buildings or clubs or so on, they always have a very specific smell; sometimes good, sometimes bad. When you smell again you memorize things. I think similar is with acoustics and how a room is sounding, what kind of tone you’re hearing. I think you have a memory for that as well.

Emma Warren

This is an aside, really, but I remember reading about how sound resonating at a certain frequency can make people feel like there are ghosts in a room. But it’s actually a particular frequency that has that impact on humans. Some of the most “haunted” places were discovered to actually just have a broken fan heater that was resonating at this particular frequency that made people feel slightly haunted.

Alva Noto

I have an amazing story about this too. There’s this one guy who went to the doctor and said, “Listen, I hear all these voices telling me constantly what I have to do, that I have to become better and go shopping and things.” They didn’t know – they thought he was just going mad – but he had a filling in his teeth that was working as a radio and he was receiving radio waves. (laughs) The transmission was not acoustically like a speaker, but it was through the bone, so basically it was transmitting through the bone into the ear.

There’s a lot of these fantastic, beautiful stories, and I can talk for hours about what sound can do and of course there’s a lot of imagination inside. There’s a lot of research for warfare, of course. There’s many, many aspects that sound can deliver and the only thing I’m trying to do is when you start using sound – and music is a part of sound – you should be aware of that possibility, too, that this is something that is really important.

Emma Warren

Now, I was there at the gig last night, I’m sure some of you were also there at the gig last night. In terms of the sound that you were delivering there, was there an intention behind that sound? Obviously, I know your work is very conceptual and sometimes the building of the sound has a lot of ideas behind it. But what about the intention of the impact? Or do you not consider how it appears to people? Is it all in the making for you or is there an intention in the delivery? That was a very long question, I apologize.

Alva Noto

(laughs) For me, it’s always half and half. Sometimes I have a very conceptual starting point, but mostly this conceptual starting point ends up more in art pieces rather than music pieces. One beauty, of course, that music has is this indescribable way of how you do it. We have no way to describe how you can compose a great song or how you can make a track that really makes you move. I think this kind of directness, this ability of what you can do with sound, with our feeling, this is something I really appreciate, I really like. I don’t want to blur that too much with conceptual ideas. There’s a polarity at some points.

Emma Warren

Can we hear some of your music?

Alva Noto

Yeah, I can play a track from the new album, maybe.

Emma Warren

This is an Alva Noto album. Obviously, your name is Carsten Nicolai.

Alva Noto

Yes, this is another thing. I started releasing under the name of Noto. Later I used the name Alva Noto. Don’t ask me why, it’s just a name. But basically, the more musical approach is under the name of Alva Noto. I’ll just play the first track off the album. (fiddles with laptop)

(music: Alva Noto – “Uni C” / applause)

Emma Warren

I know you said that actually when you’re making music the concept is not as important as it is if you’re making visual art. But my understanding with this record, similar to the one that preceded it, is you were taking data from PowerPoint, Word files, then transmuting them into sound. Is this true?

Alva Noto:

Yes, in the Unitxt record there were a bunch of tracks where I just took the data of programs and whatever and converted it into audio files. Parts of that data were source sounds for other tracks. I just wanted to show that I’m not using any synths or anything, I’m just using tools that probably everyone has available at the moment to convert any kind of file into an audio file. Using that kind of data or information – not seeing it as sound, but rather as information – and just playing with it sonically. That was an idea, because as we all know, when you use normal synths or anything that everyone has in his house, it’s very difficult to create a unique sound. You always look for different ways to create sound, different synthesis basically, different ways of using sound and making something unusual.

Emma Warren

So what were the source sounds, the source material, for Univrs, this album?

Alva Noto

For this album I wasn’t looking into the data so strongly. I was much more interested in granular synthesis. It’s a little difficult to hear, but I produce many of the constant tones with a specific way of granular synthesis. But with a tool that is mainly used for vocal treatment, I basically used that to generate something totally different that the shorter was not intended to do.

Emma Warren

Would anybody here like a more expanded explanation of granular synthesis? Yes? Would you? I’m not doing it. (laughs)

Alva Noto

I’m not a real teacher – there are great books about it, I can write them down later – but granular synthesis, very roughly, you have a sample and you take a small grain. The grain is a small part of the sound but it has the characteristics of the sound inside. So it’s not really that you’re taking the whole sound or part of the sound. You’re just taking a small grain of the sound. Out of that grain you can produce tones or tonality. It’s very different from a synthesizer, say, that works with oscillation. So it has a very different way of producing sound with that. It hasn’t existed for that long and there isn’t much granular synthesis hardware. There’s not much granular synthesis hardware around, mostly software. It becomes more and more important in Reason production tools. It’s amazing what you can do with that, it’s fantastic.

Emma Warren

So the source material is more granular synthesis than using any particular type of source material?

Alva Noto

Yeah. A normal synth uses oscillators and filters and so on. In this case you go back on the sample base, you take any kind of recording, basically, and you can take tones out of that. It has a very special characteristic and, of course, you can work with samples that have a kind of history, something you can relate to.

Emma Warren

Like what? Can you give us an example?

Alva Noto

For instance, you can say you’re going to record a city, a certain environment, a specific noise, and this noise can become your source sound for a new track. It’s possible.

Emma Warren

There was one other track on Univrs I wanted to talk about. The vast majority of your sound is tonal, you’re using sounds generated by machines or granular synthesis or whatever. But then you had the track, which you played last night, with the poet repeating the words, three-letter acronyms from AAA to ZIP, going all the way through the alphabet. It’s quite remarkable to hear it, because if you’re being transported into a world that’s quite a-human, in a way, divorced from natural human sounds, and then you have a voice, even quite a disembodied one, it was really quite impactful.

Alva Noto

Yeah, this one, I don’t know if anybody saw it. I can try to show it...

Emma Warren

So you perform in front of a big screen, with visuals that are triggered by the sounds. But this one was obviously presented in quite a different way.

Alva Noto

This one, it’s really a video.

(video: Alva Noto – “Uni Acronym” / applause)

Now, I want to ask you about collaboration, but that will take us into a slightly different area. Before we do that, is this the packaging for Univrs?

Alva Noto

Yeah, I’ll just pull it out. We made a special release for that as well. There’s the normal CD packaging, but we also made a DVD, the normal CD and a live show, recorded when I played in Berlin at the beginning of the year. It uses quite a big visual presentation with a very long screening of some software that I programmed together with some friends from Canada. Maybe we’ll have some time later to watch that, a short excerpt.

Emma Warren

If we’re going to talk about collaboration we have to talk about your work with Ryuichi Sakamoto. I heard you saying that the point of collaboration is to create something that couldn’t be created individually. Is that the case and how does that relate to your work with him?

Alva Noto

Yes, I think it’s very important that a collaboration produces something you’re not able to do alone. With Ryuichi Sakamoto I think it’s very easy to understand. When I started working with him it was only piano and very pure electronics. Maybe people don’t know. I can try playing one track.

Emma Warren

Part of the whole point for producers, musicians and DJs who are here is collaboration, testing it out, for some people for the first time. On what basis do you think people should find people to collaborate with? Should you be looking for someone who’s very different to you? Should you be looking for someone who’s very similar? Or are there completely different criteria when you’re finding someone to collaborate with?

Alva Noto

I think I believe in coincidence more or less. When you’re doing work, you’re always drifting somewhere. Then there comes a point when you meet someone and you think, “Wow, this is very interesting what he’s doing. I don’t understand it completely but maybe it’s interesting to try something out.” All the collaborations in the past have not been made with the idea of releasing an album or going on tour. In the beginning it was just this very private situation in the studio, you just sit together and try something. This is how things start and, from this, things develop, they grow.

Emma Warren

What you say there reminds me of a completely different thing, a Stephen King book about writing, one of the best books about writing. He has this suggestion that you should write with the door closed and edit with the door open. The idea is you create as if no one’s ever gonna read it, no one’s ever gonna hear it, that it’s just you in your room, or you and the person you’re collaborating with in your room. But when you edit, you edit with the door open as if other people are going to see it.

In a way, that’s similar to what you’re saying? That when you work you collaborate with no sense of the future, no sense of anyone ever listening to it so you’re not second-guessing what the listener might want. You’re just creating, and with no sense of all of that stuff that comes later on, a tour, an album, whatever.

Alva Noto

To transform it to a certain output is more difficult because sometimes collaborations are really wonderful in the studio, in private situations, for instance, and then you have the big trouble. How can I transform this into a recording? How can I transform it into a show? That can take years and sometimes it doesn’t happen.

Emma Warren

Are some things just private, then, and shouldn’t be shared?

Alva Noto

Yes, there are a lot of things you should test and try. Sometimes things are not good, or they are great but you don’t want to share it with the pubic and that’s fine. I always see this as a learning process. You take some kind of knowledge with you and maybe this knowledge will come back later and you can use it later.

Emma Warren

Keeping it in the drawer, as we say in the journalistic trade. Can we hear some music then from you and Sakamoto?

Alva Noto:

Yeah, I’ll play a track from the second album.

Emma Warren

You did four or five albums?

Alva Noto

Five.

(music: Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto – “Moon” / applause)

Emma Warren

How did you two start working together? Also what was it about his work in particular that appealed to you?

Alva Noto

Basically, I started with a remix offer from him. He sent me approximately 60 minutes of material for me to do whatever I wanted to do with. But from the 60 minutes there was maybe 59 minutes of purely electronic stuff. I realized I’m not so interested in the electronic part because that’s what I do all the time. There was this very, very tiny piano phrase inside. I said, “Oh, that’s interesting for me.” I’m not a pianist, I don’t play an instrument and I don’t really want to relate to the melodic approach.

So I was, “OK, let’s try to work with this one and combine it with something that wouldn’t fit in the first place, some really pure simple sine waves, some pulses, some rhythmic constellations, some noises with this natural piano.” So I sent it to him and Ryuichi was really, “Wow, yeah, that’s great.”

So the next day he sent me some more piano stuff. Over two years I recorded the first album. It was sitting in my studio for at least one year and then at some point I said, “Listen, we have got a record. Why not put it out on Raster-Noton, our label?” So he said, “OK, let’s do it.”

Emma Warren

So, actually the first album was an accident in the sense that you had material coming to you which you worked on, changed, added to, then at some point you realized you had an album’s worth of material?

Alva Noto

After the sixth or seventh track you realize it makes sense, it’s something you want to share with other people. I played it to my friends and they really liked it. I also started playing it in my house and because I really liked it, so I said, “OK, maybe it’s time to share it.”

Emma Warren

You used a phrase a minute ago that I’m not familiar with, rhythmic constellations. Can you explain what this is, even if only for me because everyone else might know what this is?

Alva Noto

Maybe it’s just a translation from German. It’s basically rhythmic patterns.

Emma Warren

So much more beautiful as constellations. I’m sure the answer to this is very simple, but what to you was the appeal of Sakamoto’s music? How had you enjoyed, or interacted with it, or listened to it in the past?

Alva Noto

I think the great thing was he introduced something into my world of sound, something I’d almost tried to avoid. He has this cinemascopic, very emotional, very beautiful harmonic feeling. He can write wonderful melodies, he’s a great pianist as well. That’s something that really expanded my world.

But, on the other hand as well, I’m still very shy of going into that very musical approach. I like to stay a little bit where I started, where I come from – the minimal, very simple idea of electronic sound. I’m not so interested in moving on to the next world or the next trend or whatever.

With this collaboration, it feels like a wonderful chance to work with someone who has great experience creating this kind of cinemascopic feeling. Part of that collaboration I took back later into my work. This is something that you learn. I lost some of my fear of these melodies. I can see that potentially there is this inside world that I have to start slowly with.

Emma Warren

Actually, that leads me onto something I’m interested in. Should a collaboration change you a little bit or should a collaboration give you a sense of who you are as an artist and what your creative world is?

Alva Noto

In the best case, maybe both. It should make you aware of what you do. Also, this collaboration made something really clear. I turned out to be the conceptualist electronic musician, but I didn’t know I was this kind of thing. As we started touring I made the visual concept, the stage design. I designed everything necessary for this tour.

Ryuichi was really amazed by how carefully I planned the whole thing. Normally you hire a stage designer. I really felt I wanted to control the visual presentation as well. I think you should learn from each other. If it makes you aware of what you do or how you do things it can make you stronger, more focused about what you can achieve, which way you can go.

Emma Warren

Is a remix situation very different for you? Because you did one of the remixes for Björk’s new album, didn’t you?

Alva Noto

Volta or the new one? Volta, yeah. This was a funny situation. I met Björk through my friends Matmos in New York. After the album came out I loved the album and I wrote to her and she offered me to make a remix.

Emma Warren

Did you email her or write her a letter?

Alva Noto

Yeah, I emailed. The funny thing was, I travel with my laptop but this time when I got the email off her, basically I had no studio because I moved to Italy. I’d been living for a year in Italy and in a way I got two remixes. Timbaland was basically producing this song, so I got this amazingly huge Pro Tools session which I could not even open because I don’t have the Pro Tools maximum. You need to go to the studio to get it open. So I called all my friends in Rome, “Do you have a studio where we can open this Pro Tools session?”

Emma Warren

Sometimes the simplest things can be the most difficult.

Alva Noto

I just wanted to see how things are being done. What we ended up with, because I really only had my laptop with me, was just opening every single sound file that he sent me and try to imagine how to make the song, how everything is sitting.

I never saw the real arrangement in the real window. But it was quite interesting to get all that. There’s been a lot of try-out sounds inside as well. A lot of rough things untreated, without effects and so on. But it was quite nice to see how such a song is produced. You can learn from that. But then, of course, you do your own thing with it. You just take the parts you like. With Björk it’s very easy because of course her voice is the main element. I took a modification of Timbaland’s beats. That was quite funny.

Emma Warren

That’s really taking the song apart, isn’t it? The equivalent of taking a bicycle or car apart and laying all the pieces out on the garage floor.

Alva Noto

Yeah, it’s a bit like taking everything apart but you have no idea how to put it back together.

Emma Warren

Do you have it here to listen to?

Alva Noto

I don’t know. (searches laptop) No, I don’t have it. Sorry.

Emma Warren

Seeing as we’re talking about another artist we should definitely talk about your label too. In about 15 minutes we’re going to put it out for questions. This isn’t the place to talk about your artistic influences, but who are your actual musical influences? Who are the people you grew up listening to, the artists and musicians who mean something to you?

Alva Noto

I always tell this funny story. I grew up in East Germany, so we had very little access to... Let’s say, we couldn’t go to the nearest record store and buy music. We had to basically look for it and find it.

Emma Warren

And, of course, a lot of music wasn’t available because it wasn’t allowed.

Alva Noto

There was nothing available. You could ask your friends to borrow a record or swap a tape. But the only real-time information we had was radio. In East Germany you could receive some West German radio stations and there was a very specific station, which was obviously very specialized in underground avant- garde music.

It was a Bavarian station called Zündfunk. I always like to mention them because I listened to all the features and they’d play the new Peter Murphy record or Laurie Anderson. When something interesting came out they played everything. But what was happening with internet radio stations, there was this kind of Russian military transmitter which tried to stop these frequencies.

What they did was they started telling Russian numbers. It’s maybe known on the numbers station, there are great websites about it. I just needed to wait and see if they stopped, sometimes after an hour, sometimes after ten minutes. I was just sitting there, listen to this Russian number woman talking number number, number. And in a way I think one of the main influences was listening to that kind of... (laughs)

Emma Warren

You played a track last night that had lists of numbers.

Alva Noto

Maybe that explains why I like that kind of rigid list of things. It has many aspects inside. It’s a code, then you’re trying to imagine, “OK, what this line of numbers is making. Is it an espionage kind of thing? Is it secret information?” Just the imagination of that thing is wonderful, it’s a kind of readymade.

Emma Warren

You’ve just reminded me that when I was a kid I used to have the same thing with the shipping forecast, which is a transmission that happens on the BBC, where they describe the weather forecast for the shipping lanes all around the UK. And they all have these funny names. But it sounded like a strange list, almost for spies.

Alva Noto

When I go to the airport I always have this strange feeling, like, “Where am I? How did I find my way here?” (laughs)

Emma Warren

You know, sometimes people talk about the geographic location of music, Detroit techno and somehow this music is Detroit-y. Or people talk about Jamaican music or London music as having a quality that relates to the location. Do you think that’s overstated or with your experience in East Germany, does the effect of where you grew up come out in your music?

Alva Noto

Totally. I grew up in a small industrial city, maybe it’s comparable to Manchester in the UK. I don’t wanna say Detroit but it’s a very rough industrial city with a lot of huge industrial architecture. It has the same problems as all these cities, the huge factories are empty, the city is shrinking.

But the city doesn’t have any music school or big band or anything and I think the greatest moment was the early ’90s after reunification when we had a chance to access all these computers or whatever. These production tools started coming along and one of the easiest production tools of all is electronic music. We’d been socialized in electronic music.

Emma Warren

In what way?

Alva Noto

Electronic music was really important. I didn’t grow up with blues or guitar music so much, I really grew up with electronic music like Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream – I saw Tangerine Dream twice in East Germany, they played there. Of course, early pop bands like Depeche Mode were very influential in the East as well. Of course darker bands like Einstürzende Neubauten. This was very well communicated. Culturally we felt really at home in that area.

Emma Warren

This is possibly showing my ignorance now, but was that music considered “allowed”? How much was that controlled or considered unacceptable under the regime? Was it actually that there was some stuff that was acceptable at that time?

Alva Noto

My generation, I was very lucky in that at the end, from let’s say ’85 on, the government didn’t control it much any more. Or if they controlled it, they did it in such a way that they tried to allow more to happen. There’d been very young bands. Olaf Bender and Frank Bretschneider, who I run the label with, the main founders, they had a record deal in East Germany and they basically were a band that did electronic music in that time. So there’d been possibilities inside that system.

Of course, not fantastic, but there’d been possibilities. Very small, very slightly. There was one radio station that features this kind of music intensively and of course people really followed that a lot. Almost everybody I know heard that radio station. Because there was so little information available, then this station was really important. It was the effect of these limitations, let’s say.

Emma Warren

Now, you just mentioned the record label, Raster-Noton, which actually started life as two record labels. Do you want to tell us how those came about and a little bit about them?

Alva Noto

Yes. I have some images so I will show a few images as well. This is a little movie, I’ll skip this one. This is a live performance, Frank, Olaf and me. The label was founded – this is a story I always like to tell – because there was no other label around who you could imagine wanting to release our stuff.

Emma Warren

That’s always the reason to do a label. There’s nowhere else to do our thing.

Alva Noto

The other thing, as I mentioned, Olaf and Frank had a deal in the East part and also the West part. It was really important for us to control as well the packaging, how things come out. This was never really satisfying for Olaf and Frank especially. As I started my little edition – it was more an edition than a label – I was only interested in making beautiful objects rather than distributing it and bringing it into the shops.

This is a live performance (shows picture) but maybe I’ll show some packages we wrote. (changes picture) For instance, this kind of CD we released, it was ’96, I think. We had a series of CDs called the Clear Series, so we tried to make everything so minimal and really transparent. This record was a collaboration with Mika Vainio from Pan Sonic – the first collaboration ever, I think. We tried to be really careful with everything, with sound, how it was presented in the packaging and so on. We really wanted to control that as much as possible.

Emma Warren

It’s funny when you mentioned Pan Sonic – I started out working on a magazine called Jockey Slut in the mid-’90s in Manchester and my colleague, Joanne Wain, another writer, interviewed Pan Sonic. The thing I remember them saying so strongly is, “Our music is raw, like horse meat.” It always just sounded like the most remarkable way of describing your music, in a way that someone who isn’t from Finland couldn’t imagine saying. But yeah, Pan Sonic, one of the people you’ve released on your label.

Alva Noto

Not Pan Sonic but Mika. Pan Sonic have always been released on Blast First, but they are really good friends and their approach to music is in our tradition. We are really good friends.

Emma Warren

Before we put it out for questions, you’re going to play us something at the end, aren’t you? So how long is that? We need to make sure we’ve got the time for it.

Alva Noto

It’s four minutes.

Emma Warren

We’re on quite a tight schedule, you have to be back at the airport pretty pronto. So while you guys get your questions ready, do you want to tell us about the opera? You wrote an opera as well, didn’t you? (pause) Or did you? Is this the internet telling lies?

Alva Noto

Kind of. With Michael Nyman, we wrote an opera. But this is too far now, it’s another topic.

Emma Warren

All right then. End of.

Alva Noto

I’ll try to find this video.

Emma Warren

Can we have a mic please because we have a question over here?

Audience Member

In the beginning you said you extracted sound from software. Do you mean pieces of code and how do you do that?

Alva Noto

Very simple. There are some basic editors that allow you to import raw data and then you can basically crack any file. That’s very easy, but if you want to make it more difficult you have to rewrite the headers of the files and then you can open it in any program.

Emma Warren

Hold on, hold on, you need the microphone. Otherwise people afterwards won’t know what you’re asking.

Audience Member

So is it basically converting the file bits and then transcoding them as sound?

Alva Noto

Yes. In a way it’s kind of an interpretation because the file doesn’t tell you exactly what is left and right channels, so they take the file as if it were a music file and then it just opens up. It’s a great noise that happens. Sometimes it’s surprisingly melodic, sometimes it’s totally noise.

Audience Member

Do you also experiment with signal processing and using some algorithms to process sound and try to vary the actual equations themselves rather than just the parameters? Do you know what I mean?

Alva Noto

I’ve never been super-interested in real-time processing. There’s Max/MSP and in the tradition of building instruments we can do that. There’s plugins and this whole culture is huge. But I was always more interested in doing it offline, let’s say. Calculating it out, seeing what I like and if it really makes, and if I like what I see I use it.

I was never so interested, for instance, in this organic real-time processing idea. I do it sometimes in concerts with Sakamoto or Blixa Bargeld and I have material. But it was always a little bit too uncontrolled for me. It’s kind of nice, but I’m not this kind of freak.

Audience Member

And the visuals, are they unmetered or are they triggered like you said? How does that happen technically?

Alva Noto

Technically, as I did last night, I have three layers. One is programmed where I use a digital interface, Quartz Composer. Maybe some of you know it. It’s a graphic programming environment where you can program visuals, but it’s all based on sound analyzers.

On top of that I build a hardware device, which allows me to feed audio into the signal wave of the video and distort the video signal. That produces mainly line patterns. Since I built this little device, from my application I can send the channels into the video and manipulate specific colors and colored patterns, so the connection of the sound to the image is absolutely direct. When I play a sound the image you sometimes see is the sound, it’s nothing else.

And the third way is what I included the first time, where I involve parts of movies. For instance, the movie I showed with the logos, I had to prepare that, I cannot do it in real time. But I’m using Quartz Composer as well, implementing parts of tracks as I’m running it and synchronizing it with parts of the files in the live application. Then I have the possibility that the video runs and I can manipulate on top of that, so it’s free.

Audience Member

Just for a personal project I’m interested in measuring frequency. What’s an effective and inexpensive way to do that? I’m not very familiar with your equipment.

Alva Noto

There’s a lot of software, inexpensive software.

Audience Member

In particular I’m interested in biogeometric measuring harmonics and frequencies within shapes. It’s an installation I’m thinking about.

Alva Noto

What is it exactly?

Audience Member

I’d like to measure frequency within space. I’ve got an idea of a pyramid, measuring. So an actual device...

Alva Noto

The simplest thing and one I can really recommend, it’s fantastic, is the new Motu – it comes with an analyzer that is incredible. I don’t know if you have the most recent Motu here, but it comes with a software package that will mean you can use that analyzer. It’s very, very powerful, very impressive and of course you need a microphone and a good soundcard.

Emma Warren

We have a question over to the other side.

Audience Member

I just want to ask if there has been any connection to the people at Mille Plateaux.

Alva Noto

Yeah, I’ve released on Mille Plateaux. Two albums and several compilations. Unfortunately, the label doesn’t exist anymore, but it was a really active part of that… they call it clicks and cuts, but I really hate that [term]. But I did some albums for them. Is that what you want to know?

Audience Member

Yeah. Was it just you releasing there?

Alva Noto

Frank Bretschneider made an album for Mille Plateaux. Myself as well. Then we had a compilation called Cyclo, a collaboration with Ryoji Ikeda. We released one track on the label. But basically Mille Plateaux observed what younger labels were doing and as we came up they tried to incorporate us a little bit in their label. It was okay to collaborate in this way. It helped both labels.

Emma Warren

Any other questions?

Audience Member

I have a technical question because I’m also interested in visual art and audio installations. The project I’d like to carry on is when the sound is generated and triggered by movements in space. There might be some photo elements or devices that perceive the movements of the human body and transform them into generative sound. Could you please give us some technical side of the questions, maybe some software?

Alva Noto

The simplest device to do that is actually a theremin, which I really love. I think it’s one of the best things ever invented. It’s this Russian, Leon Theremin, this inventor from 1910, really early. You can build it yourself, one that’s great and goes all wrong, I’m sure. Or you can buy one, which is quite expensive, from Moog.

Audience Member

There are toy devices, Japanese.

Alva Noto

Japanese theremin, that’s even better.

Participant

But it’s the specific sound the theremin produces.

Alva Noto

But it’s assigned to oscillators. But of course you can change that. You don’t need to have this kind of frequency with this kind of oscillator. You can assign it to any kind of… I used, for instance, Doepfer was a modular system and they had theremin modules and you can basically use the theremin modules as LFOs or as whatever.

They produce a frequency, which you can use as a pure frequency or you can use as modulation for another frequency and tune whatever frequency you want to have. But a physical device, the hardware for the theremin modules, may be one of the most direct ways.

Of course, there are other tracking systems. I worked with infrared tracking systems in the past, but I really recommend the theremin. But it has one disadvantage – it’s not very far. Maybe if you’re lucky it’ll go for two meters, but it’s not more than that. If that’s enough then try this.

Audience Member

On that topic, if you know a fair bit of programming you can use Microsoft Connect system. It can actually track up to eight people so if you can program software, I think you’d be well off with that hardware. It has two cameras and infrared and it can measure depth and movement in X and Y, so it’s pretty useful. But you have to know how to program.

Emma Warren

You’re going to show us this film, but my final question to you before you do that, you’ve said in the past that you were interested in finding out what sound was. That’s what led you from being a visual artist to someone dealing with sound, to someone making stuff that fits in the broad area of music. Would you say now that you know what sound is?

Alva Noto

No, I don’t. It’s a fantastic universe. But when you research it you realize how little we really know about sound. I wish there would be more research on that, which probably could solve a lot of problems. For example, they call it phenomenon because it’s still not clear what happens. And this phenomenon was discovered in 1938 by two scientists doing research into sonar systems.

Emma Warren

Is this a chemical in the body?

Alva Noto

No, it’s called a bubble sonar luminous sense.

Emma Warren

Oh, it’s a phenomenon.

Alva Noto

We cannot explain why it’s happening but we can see it is. Basically, it’s a frequency around 28,000 Hz, which is not so super-high. It’s out of our hearing but it’s still sound. Put the right way, attached to some small glass with water inside, this can produce a bubble that has more than 10,000 degrees temperature inside. This could be a possible energy source, for instance. It could provide us energy in a very small scale, just putting a little glass on the top of the table and providing all the energy we need here right now.

This is something I think is really incredible. There are scientists researching on its source right now, but it’s unstable, which is why we can’t use it. But if there could be more research in that, sound could be incredibly helpful for all kinds of purposes.

Emma Warren

Wow, sound is power.

Audience Member

I know of artists working with these bass frequencies that can’t be heard. Have you ever worked with these frequencies?

Alva Noto

Yeah, a lot. Sure. What do you want to know?

Audience Member

How hard is to have speakers that can produce them?

Alva Noto

It depends how low it can go. This is a nice speaker, actually. (points at one of the speakers) Probably it can go down to 27, 25 Hz. But you don’t hear much there, it’s more that you can see the membrane moving and the wind. You’ll hear more air moving rather than a tone. But to perceive that low frequency, things can vibrate – a floor, for instance, or a chair.

There are devices for drummers when they rehearse and put a little transducer under the chair to feel the bass drum really kicking in. These devices exist, it’s called a transducer. I played in a place in San Francisco where they had an incredible soundsystem and, additionally, these transducers in the floor for everything below 50 Hz. This was kind of scary, overtaking your body. It’s kind of hot to the body. But we like bass. I think many people like bass. But it can be quite demanding to the body too.

Emma Warren

A gruelling marathon of bass. So, what are you gonna show us?

Alva Noto

A video. It’s rather short so I’ll have to look again. It’s what I made for one of the tracks from the last album. (searches for video)

(video: Carsten Nicolai – “future past perfect pt. 03 (u08-1)”_)

Emma Warren

The only thing really left to say is Carsten Nicolai, thank you very much.