Cathy AllisonA study of London Records’ “Phase 4”: Selling stereo in the Sixties

In 1961, London Records (a division of Decca1) launched a new division under the label “Phase 4”. Despite the name, these recordings were not quadraphonic; the moniker was simply branding used to market London’s stereophonic vinyl products. At the time, there was fierce competition amongst all the labels for consumer mindshare, even between divisions in a record company. Consequently, each label devised catchy names for their particular packaging of stereo recording, such as Capitol’s Full Dimensional Stereo, RCA’s Living Stereo, Mercury’s Living Presence, EMI’s Studio 2 Stereo, etc. These record companies became pioneers in the production of recorded music used to demonstrate the capabilities of new stereo hi-fi record players.

London claimed that its unique Phase 4 sound was produced using a customized 10- channel recording console. Soon London introduced a 20-channel console, a photograph of which was prominently displayed on most Phase 4 album covers. Approximately 200 LPs were released under the label, including gimmick records using the “ping-pong” effect to make the sound travel from speaker to speaker; big band music frequently led by British bandleader and arranger Stanley Black; recordings featuring a variety of percussive techniques; and historical sound effect recordings. In 1964 the Phase 4 “Concert series” was released, presenting popular “light classic” hits that featured prominent conductors of the time: Leopold Stokowski, Bernard Herrman, Lorin Maazel and the incomparable Mantovani (and his Orchestra, of course!).

In an attempt to better understand how record labels positioned their stereo products (and how the labels in turn were positioned in the recording industry), my paper will discuss some of the marketing techniques London Records used to promote its Phase 4 brand, including album cover design, liner notes, choice of musical genre, co-marketing with record player manufacturers, and endorsement by/collaboration with well-known conductors and arrangers of the time.

Biography

Cathy Allison is a Sessional Lecturer in Carleton University’s Journalism and Communication Studies department. She has a BA in Drama (Toronto), a B. Mus in piano and composition (mainly at UBC but completed at Carleton), and an MA in Communications (Carleton). During the day she is Manager, Enforcement in the Compliance & Enforcement sector of the CRTC, Canada’s telecom and broadcasting regulator. At night, she plays the piano, composes, and is attempting to convert her extensive vinyl collection to mp3 format before she dies.

Michael BakerRockumentary as Record Production: Stereo Sound(s) in Music Documentary

Rockumentary is an audio-visual genre which participates in and comments upon broader cultural discourses concerning the relationship between recorded musical objects and audiences. Through the 1950s, the separation between live musical performance and recorded music grows exponentially on the heels of several sound recording technology innovations, and anxieties concerning the “liveness” of the music industry's orientation post-1948 manifest themselves in debates concerning the relative status of several genres and the real or imagined difference between audio realism and spectacle as it asserts itself in several areas including film, popular music recordings, and live musical performance. Rockumentary illustrates the transformation which finds the recording supplanting live performance in the postwar cultural, industrial, and aesthetic landscape. It highlights a continuing cultural fascination with the live in an socio-industrial context dominated by the recorded.

My presentation will interrogate sound-image relationships in nonfiction film from a theoretical perspective and chart a shift in the sound design of concert films upon the arrival of multi-channel sound reproduction systems to North American production processes and exhibition spaces. The arrival of these technologies and practices fundamentally alters the perceived evidentiary status of the rockumentary genre. Case studies will provide an opportunity to examine how evolving sound technologies and shifting cultural expectations of cinema sound result in diverse creative approaches to the representation of sonic events and push sound design in these documentary films closer to the realm of conventional record production. Concert films are both sonic artefacts and fully artefactual sonic events which highlight the complexities involved in the audio-visual representation of a live musical event and bring into focus fundamental debates within sound reproduction theory over the nature of acoustic events and expectations for their mediation.

Biography

Michael Baker is the FQRSC Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Cinema Studies at the Dept. of Theatre & Film, University of British Columbia. He has published book chapters and articles on a range of subjects including documentary, popular music and film, and new media in venues including the Canadian Journal of Film Studies and Fibreculture. He is currently working on a book manuscript, titled Rockumentary: Popular Music & Nonfiction Film and Video.

Eric BarryMono in the Stereo Age

The advent of stereo technology initiated a characteristically modern cycle of obsolescence and nostalgic revival for monophonic recordings, culminating in the reissue of the Beatles catalog in mono in 2009. My paper argues that the specifics of this tale register a change in the relationship between audiences and recordings. Whereas a majority of listeners, encouraged by the record industry, have sought recordings with “high fidelity” to a musical performance, increasing numbers are treating the original, in many cases monophonic, mix or record, as authentic.In the early 1950s, America’s record labels anticipated the arrival of stereo by promising listeners the sensation of music from all directions, using trademarks such as 360 Degree Sound and Full Dimensional Sound. Dimensionality was suggested by mixing in “room sound” or reverb. In mid-1960s, labels modernized still saleable monophonic catalog in “electronically reprocessed for stereo” versions, again demonstrating a desire to suggest dimensionality that existed in live performances but not monophonic recordings. By 1968, mono records, associated with outdated technology and low fidelity rock’n’roll 45s, were relegated to the cut-out bin, the bargain bin, and the dustbin.

But mono’s story was not finished. A few aging hipsters banged the drum, noting that not only were mono records often “punchier” sounding than their stereo counterparts, but more legitimate, because through 1967, pop producers lavished their attention on the mono versions destined for broadcast and popular audiences. By the 2000s, a substantial portion of audiophiles joined in, supporting new mono reissues and even expensive mono phono equipment. This mono revival indicates that audiences increasingly understand the finished mix or record as an integral part of the process of musical creation. Rather than a transparent recreation of a performance, many seek either original records or a faithful representation of the original mix.

Biography

Eric D. Barry is a graduate student in American History at Rutgers University. He has previously published “High Fidelity Sound As Spectacle and Sublime, 1950-1960” in David Suisman and Susan Strasser (eds.), Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (2010). His dissertation-in- progress, “Sonic Boom: The Business and Culture of High Fidelity Sound, 1925-1973,” examines the resonances between the romantic values of music culture, the technocratic values of engineering, and the marketplace values of consumer society, reevaluating Cold War dichotomies of emotion and reason, the subjective and the scientific, and art and kitsch.

Thomas BrettSurround Sound Art: Experiencing Spem in alium, Technology and Spatialized Affect in Janet Cardiff’s Forty- Part Motet

In his forty-part motet Spem in alium (1570), English composer Thomas Tallis undertook a kind of early experiment with choral polyphony as a surround sound environment. Scored for eight choirs of five voices each, the piece was first performed at Nonsuch palace, the country home of an English nobleman. Tallis scholars believe the composer designed his music to be sung in a round or horseshoe shape in Nonsuch’s octagonal banquet hall, and according to a performance account from 1616, four of the eight choirs were singing from raised balconies. Clearly, Tallis wanted the contrasts in the music—including call and response, imitation of parts passed en masse from choir to choir, and individual voices alternating between sounding and silence—to be heightened by careful placement of the singers in the performance space. In Janet Cardiff’s Forty-Part Motet (2001), a forty-channel surround sound recording installation of Spem in alium, each singing voice is assigned to a single tripod-mounted speaker, the speakers arranged in a large oval facing inwards to create an immersive listening space of hyper-real sonic presence. In this paper I draw upon first- hand experience with Forty-Part Motet at MoMA PS1, ethnographic interviews with museum visitors, press reviews, and Cardiff’s artist statements to undertake a phenomenological exploration of how the work accommodates ambient, intimate and mobile listening. Specifically, I examine how over the course of its fourteen-minute duration Forty-Part Motet invites listeners to “remix” the work in real time as they chart a path through its aural space, revealing Spem in alium to be what Cardiff describes as “a changing construct.” In sum, my findings suggest that Cardiff’s use of multi-channel sound technology radically spatializes Tallis’s music to alternately heighten and undermine our perception, bringing the listening subject inside a four-hundred year-old listening object that remains disembodied and just out of reach.

Biography

Thomas Brett is an ethnomusicologist, percussionist, and composer who lives in New York City. He has published articles on percussion and electronic percussion in The Grove Dictionary of American Music and recently gave a paper at the IASPM-Canada annual conference that explores the therapeutic uses of soundscape listening apps. He received his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from New York University and has also released two recordings of percussion and electronic music. He writes about music, sound and culture at brettworks.com.

Kelly CaringerWasted Space: Redressing Mediative Transformations in Stereophonic Sound

The spatial properties of an auditory event, are supplanted in stereophonic sound reproduction. Whereas a non-mediated event is localized by virtue of a direct relation between the sound and its auditor, electroacoustic mediation affords the auditor no such link. Rather, two or more point-source loudspeakers provide anchor points in a stereo field between which “phantom” sounds may be perceived. Percepts of these illusory stereophonic images are often ambiguous as the spatial coding process of many stereo microphone techniques fails to anticipate mediative transformations at the loudspeakers. From 1931-1935, Alan Dower Blumlein proposed several microphone techniques that accommodate these inevitable transformations, preempt their negative impact on stereo images, and reconstitute recorded spatial impressions at the ears of the listener. Employing acoustic obstacles, corrective electronic circuits, and complimentary band- limited microphone perspectives, Blumlein formulated solutions to problems we have since learned to live with; and some of the most interesting aspects of his binaural theory have not had a major impact on canonical techniques in the recording arts. While spatial ambiguity is present in most two-channel stereophonic recordings, it is not so prevalent as to perturb the casual listener; but the advent of multichannel sound reproduction via five, six, or seven full-range loudspeakers presents a near-pantophonic environment wherein spatial ambiguities are magnified. In this essay, I will explicate Blumleinian Binaural Theory, illuminating aspects of this work that may yet have a positive impact on methods of spatial representation in stereo and multichannel sound.

Biography

Kelly Caringer is a PhD candidate in the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He was a 2011 Edison Research Fellow at the British Library Sound Archive in London where he investigated early experiments in binaural sound reproduction conducted by Alan Dower Blumlein from 1933-1935. His research in spatial audio has led to the development of a novel multichannel microphone array.

Nathan ClarksonFollowing the Microphone: Reintegration Through Documentation.

Documentary media affords the construction and interpretation of environments and situations. Furthermore, it provides new ways of comprehending the everyday. I propose a comparison of the work of Frederick Wiseman’s observational style of documentary filmmaking with the work of the World Soundscape Project (WSP), particularly that of Hildegard Westerkamp. In this paper I will consider the importance of stereo motion in and of sound recordings in re-creating the context in which subjects were captured and the effect that different sound reproduction technologies have had on the ability to represent reality.

Though one is a sound library and the other is film, both are forms of documentation that employ stereo microphones, with multiple recording techniques, to record the sonic environment for later analysis. The observational genre “emphasizes a direct engagement with everyday life of subjects as observed by an unobtrusive lens [and microphone]” (Nichols, 2001). Wiseman’s approach placed the stereo microphone at the centre of the attention, while he silently directed the camera operator to capture film footage to support the audio recording. The WSP includes a library of hundreds of hours of environmental recordings, likewise made with minimal impact on the setting.

The WSP initially aimed to document the changing sonic environment and create a “museum” for disappearing sounds. Though with an original attempt that was somewhat idealistic, it also catalyzed the formation of new ways to analyze sound and the social relations pertaining to it. Most importantly, it demonstrated the potential of reintegrating the listeners with their own environments. I propose to apply these principals of acute and critical listening to the acoustic construction of documentary film. This paper relates to my ongoing graduate work in the area of soundscape studies, documentary film, and the technical and aesthetic choices that guide the creation of film sounds.

Biography

Nathan Clarkson is a MA candidate at Simon Fraser University and recipient of the R. Murray Schafer Soundscape award (2011). Through his work in digitizing the entire WSP tape collection, he has acquired an intimate knowledge of the collection which spans nearly half a century. This experience complimented his production of two audio tours with the Squmish Lil’Wat Culture Centre in Whistler, BC, aboriginal tourism projects that combined storytelling with soundscape composition. As well, he has contributed to public sound installations and has worked on scoring and sound design for theater.

Steven ColeLike Cartesian perspective, stereophonic sound must correctly position the listener to ensure an accurate representation of reality. Although numerous postmodern approaches have critiqued perspective and representation, these critiques tend to accept Descartes’ standard of truth (an absolute foundation) and simply deny our ability to secure it. Similarly, such positions also accept a depthless Humean ontology in which any system of relations is simply the product of mental habits or language games. In their basic acceptance of long standing philosophical frameworks, therefore, such “radical critiques” ironically turn out to be highly traditional. Conversely, I argue we must embrace an anti-foundational perspective that rejects epistemological relativism and ontological uncertainty. Sound’s ontological status cannot be reduced to interpretation nor deconstructed into a metaphysical abyss. Yet as a social phenomenon, sound is representational and inevitably becomes entangled within problems of meaning and representation. A sound sociological theory must encompass both the objective and subjective reality of the aural realm. Therefore, I use Bourdieu to replace the question, “what is good sound”, with the sociological question, “from what position does something sound good”? By examining the perception of sound through class, gender, occupation etc. we can reposition the perceiver without searching for the correct subject position.

Biography

Dr. Steven Cole is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Bishop’s University. His most recent publication, “The Prosumer and the Project Studio. The Battle for Distinction in the Field of Music Recording”, appears in Sociology 45:3 (June).

Karen Collins and Bill KapralosMultichannel Sound on a Horizontal Surface

For many decades now, we have experienced our audio-visual media on a vertical screen; our televisions, movie theaters, and computer screens have all presented information vertically in front of us. As such, sound (music, dialogue, and sound effects) for television, film, software, and games has been designed accordingly, with the placement of the speakers and the sound mixing all developed based on this format. Recently, smart table-top touchscreen computers (also known as surface computers, smart table computers, or smart tables), where users position themselves around a horizontal computer screen in a manner similar to sitting around a “traditional” table, have been introduced (e.g., the Microsoft surface is a multi-touch computer that responds to natural hand gestures and real-world objects. Although smart tables have yet to be primarily designed as consumer models, with the growing popularity of multi-touch mobility devices (e.g., iPods, smartphones), the move to multi-user touch screens and a horizontal surface is a likely trajectory of the technology. Moreover, these devices may well become a part of social entertainment, where families and friends can interact with each other around a table-like surface.

However, this configuration introduces several design issues, particularly with respect to the sound interface (i.e., input/output of sound), that must be addressed in order to ensure consistent and effective sound interface. More specifically, where do we position the loudspeakers when there are two users opposite each other playing a game (i.e., where is the “front”)? How does our perception of sound change when we are leaning over our computer screen versus facing it? Where should we place the loudspeakers? Where should we position sounds in the mix, (in which speaker) for best reception? In designing user interfaces for multi- user applications on touch screens that rely on hand gestures for more natural interaction, how should the applications respond sonically to these interactions?

This paper presents an overview of our experiments with sound mixing for a horizontal surface, exploring different speaker set-ups and panning methods, using games as a means to test user preference and functionality.

Biographies

Karen Collins (collinsk@uwaterloo.ca) is Canada Research Chair in Interactive Audio at the University of Waterloo. Her research expertise lies in interacting with sound, particularly as applied to video games. She is currently working with Google and Bill Kapralos on an Android audio project. Her book Game Sound was published by MIT Press in 2008.

Bill Kapralos (bill.kapralos@uoit.ca) is assistant professor in the Game Development and Entrepreneurship Program at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. His current research interests include: real time acoustical modeling and 3D sound generation for virtual environments and video games.

Brian Cullen

The effects of multi-channel audio on the perception stereoscopic 3D

While there has been a great number of studies into auditory localization in psychoacoustics and stereoscopic perception in psychology, few have investigated how these perceptual phenomena work in combination. Studies that examine 2D imagery and sound interaction have highlighted numerous phenomena in the temporal, spatial and even formal domains of each medium. Therefore it is worth examining whether similar phenomena exist in the simultaneous presentation of S3D and spatial audio. With the resurgence of interest in S3D content, display design and multidimensional audio techniques, research into the combined effects of S3D and spatial audio is of great importance.

Our research examines how audio spatialization affects our perception of the stereoscopic field. By presenting participants with controlled interactive environments, which vary in audio spatialization and stereoscopic depth, we can examine the participant’s ability to make depth judgments and/or to notice discrepancies in the stereoscopic field. The sound spatialization settings vary from mono, stereo, to 5.1. The S3D settings range from natural to more extreme retinal disparity or parallax. To coincide with typical movie and gaming experiences the studies range from moving 3D audiovisual objects toward static participants to allowing free roaming players explore game-like environments.

The result of such work is relevant to the design of S3D content for videogames, movies, and numerous other fields. In addition, it is especially relevant to designers restricted to a limited depth budget or who seek to distract the user from S3D discrepancies using audio.

Biography

Brian graduated in Fine Art from the National College of Art and Design Dublin in 2000 where his interests included video and sound installation. He received an M.Phil in Music and Media Technologies from Trinity College Dublin in 2004 focusing on audiovisual composition. His PhD research at the Sonic Arts Research Centre Belfast explored the subtle boundaries between technological representations and how they fuse with everyday experience. Brian’s real world/ computer generated hybrids such as Thrice Removed (2008), Pixel Parasites (2006) and A Natural Balance (2006) have been shown at festivals and venues such as ICMC 2007, Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival 2007, CCRMA Stanford University California, and the ARS Electronica Centre Linz Austria. He has just completed a postdoctoral position at the University of Waterloo creating educational animations for the gambling research team at the department of Psychology. He currently holds a postdoctoral position at University of Ontario Institute of Technology examining spatial audio and stereoscopic 3D.

Anthony CushingHearing isolation: An exploration of stereophonic contrapuntal space in Glenn Gould’s The Latecomers

Glenn Gould’s 1967 radio documentary, The Idea of North, was an exercise in pushing the limits of spatialisation in monaural sound to mixed reviews. It was later, in 1969 that Gould and CBC audio engineer Lorne Tulk took advantage of the CBC’s stereo network–then only three stations–to produce the stereophonic documentary The Latecomers. The benefits of the left-right sonic axis provided a significant new spatial palette for Gould to exploit. This paper explores Gould’s treatment of space as a compositional element via his ‘contrapuntal radio’ techniques and, further, how he constructed and navigated his space, what I call ‘contrapuntal space,’ to create a musically conditioned, if theatrical, documentary form. In particular, I will provide spatial analyses of the most notable scenes in Latecomers, which include: A scene in which Lester Burry, a preacher, appears to be relatively higher on the vertical axis than other characters in the scene (an intended psychoacoustic effect); the dialogue scene with Harold Horwood and Penny Rowe in which they appear to converse, spatialised to the left and right of centre; and, finally, the epilogue in which Gould brings back all eleven of the documentary’s interviewees for a dynamic mise-en-scene that takes advantage of the full stereo separation and swift movement along the proximal plane.

Biography

Anthony Cushing is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at the University of Western Ontario. He holds a graduate degree in music composition from the University of Southern Maine and undergraduate degrees in music and public relations from Acadia and Mount Saint Vincent Universities respectively. His research focuses on Glenn Gould’s CBC ‘contrapuntal radio’ documentaries and theories of digital counterpoint.

Kyle DevineRe/inventing auditory perspective: Bell, EMI, and the prehistory of stereo A history of stereo is not the same as a history of high fidelity, and vice versa. There is overlap, to be sure. But the most remarkable thing about stereophony is that it became a dominant mode of sound reproduction in the twentieth century despite its connections with discourses and practices of high fidelity, not because of them. From this perspective, I am less interested in the proliferation of stereo after 1950s than I am in what made this proliferation possible in the first place. This paper thus looks at the prehistory of stereo. I root the ubiquity of stereo in earlier sets of experiments that were taking place at Bell Labs during 1930s. The goal of Bell’s research was to reproduce music in “auditory perspective” (a forerunner to stereophonic sound). The reproduction of music in auditory perspective involved advances in the frequency response and loudness capabilities of recording and playback equipment, a new preoccupation with the spatial organization of reproduction and, I will argue, a revised theory of hearing. The invention of auditory perspective as a mode of sound reproduction, in other words, evolved in tandem with the reinvention of auditory perspective as a faculty of hearing. Bell’s research (along with similar efforts at EMI) not only paved the way for the technological arrival of stereo, but also laid the foundation for how stereo sound would be made and heard – for the aesthetic conventions of the stereophonic object and the listening conventions of the stereophonic subject.

Biography

Kyle Devine is an instructor in Music at Carleton University, and a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Comparative Studies in Literature, Art & Culture, where he’s finishing up a thesis on the historiography of sound reproduction. He has published on popular music, music sociology and sound studies in a variety of places, including Popular Music (fall 2012) and the Grove Dictionary of American Music (second edition).

Murray DineenMonophelia

In 1954, RCA released “Hearing is Believing,” an lp [RCA SRL-12-1] devoted to comparing “New Orthophonic” High Fidelity with what they term “ordinary records.” Almost a decade later, in 1962, London released a series of recordings in what they termed “Sound 4 Monophonic High Fidelity.” A typical London record jacket [London P 54004, Stanley Black and His Orchestra] included a lengthy description of the “4 Track Master,” in essence four-track recording mixed down to two tracks and ultimately to “one channel of monophonic sound.” Both recordings laud the results of their technological advances in terms reminiscent of cigarette commercials: “more sound – more interest – more entertainment – more pleasure”; “brighter, clearer, truer sound.” The two recordings can be considered relics of a commodity war with stereophony, one that monaurality would lose by 1970.

This paper examines the social aesthetics of stereo from the losing side. It considers the monaural sound image portrayed through advertisement – “brighter,” “more pleasure” – and the equipment associated with it (new “Victrola” phonographs in 1954, a list of specialized microphones in 1962). In particular it examines the aesthetic of the recorded form, an aesthetic that could not preclude the disappearance of successive media – mono recordings, the lp itself, the 8 track tape, the cassette tape, and the CD in our time. The paper takes exception to thoughts expressed by Jean Baudrillard in The System of Objects (expressed as an oxymoron), that after 1940 “significant invention practically petered out,” and in two articles by Theodor Adorno, “The Curves of the Needle,” and the lesser known “The Form of the Phonograph Record.” Monophonic recordings remain significant, and in this sense aesthetically desirable, by their status as non-commodities. The result is an aesthetic attraction comparable to other terminal instances of the phelia, an attraction called here monophelia, or endearment to outmoded monaural sound as an object in its own right.

Biography

Murray Dineen is a professor of music at the University of Ottawa. His research interests in music and society stretch from Adorno to Zarlino (but not quite yet to Zizek). A set of essays entitled Friendly Remainders: Essays in Music Criticism after Adorno was published in 2011 by McGill-Queens University Press. He is presently at work translating from the German a Marxist treatise on music written in Vienna in 1935 by Kurt Blaukopf under the pseudonym Hans Wind.

Ruth DockwrayProxemic interaction in popular music tracks

The spatial location of sounds in recordings and the use of space within the ‘sound-box’ (Moore 1992) can have a significant impact on the way a track is experienced. In certain tracks for example, lead vocalists may appear to be positioned in a different space to that of the accompaniment and seem to be located close to the listener. The intimacy of the vocalist experienced by the listener is an important factor in the understanding and interpretation of spatialization in popular music recordings.

Edward Hall’s (1969) notion of proxemics (spatial proximity) and his identification of four types of interpersonal zones (intimate, personal, social and public) is one theory that can be appropriated into the domain of the virtual performance in order to identify the various types of space perceived in recordings. The spatial aspects such as volume/sound level, frequency characteristics and the relationships of direct to reflected sound, can be perceived as the persona and personic environment relationship (Moore 2005) and is integral to locating subject positioning within the virtual space.

This paper will highlight some of the aural descriptors that contribute to the perception of each interpersonal zone and consider how proxemics, in combination with other musical aspects, can provide potential meanings and ways of interpreting popular music tracks.

Biography

Ruth Dockwray is Senior Lecturer in Popular Music at Southampton Solent University. She completed her PhD, ‘Deconstructing the Rock Anthem: Textual Form, Participation and Collectivity’, at the Institute of Popular Music, University of Liverpool, in 2005. From 2006 to 2009 she worked with Professor Allan Moore on two AHRC-funded projects at the University of Surrey on the spatialization of popular music recordings.

Tom EverrettHi-Fi for Dummies: Headphones and the Failure of Binaural

Between 1950 and 1970, definitions of high-fidelity hinged on the desire for listeners to “transport” their ears from the home listening room to a live performance or recording session. While it was widely agreed that stereophonic (two-speaker) recordings were an impressive way of achieving a true-to-life listening experience, purists often lobbied for a second system known as binaural. Unlike the complicated microphoning/mixing techniques necessary to record in stereo—which were sometimes seen as overly excessive and even artificial—the binaural system required only that an artificial model of the human head be placed in the studio or concert hall, and fitted with a microphone in each ear. Using this recording technique, it was believed that a live performance could be reproduced more faithfully than the best stereo recordings; the catch, however, was that the resulting binaural sound-image required headphones to be experienced accurately. As will be argued in this paper, the binaural standard ultimately failed not because of its technical or aesthetic limitations, but because it asked users to make headphones their primary mode of experiencing recorded sound. In the words of one contemporary writer: “The result of binaural is an uncanny recreation of the original surround sound field... The commercial value, however, is limited because listening with headphones is anti-social.”

Biography

Tom Everrett is a doctoral candidate in Technology & Culture (Institute of Comparative Studies in Literature, Art & Culture), and instructor (School of Journalism & Communication) at Carleton University, Ottawa. He is currently in the process of completing his dissertation, titled Ears Wide Shut: Social Politics of Headphone Listening (1920-2010), and has also done work on North American indie music and the history of popular music in Iceland. His writing has appeared in Popular Music (2008), Public (2010), and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World (forthcoming 2013).

Mary FogartyMultitrack Sound and the Mediation of Dance

Dancing on screen has always been mediated by sound and music. Yet, the surround sound experience of dance in recent films transforms how dance is mediated in very specific ways. In this presentation, I will describe how the sound of dance, music, crowds and the city in Step Up 3D (Chu, 2010) shapes dance into an individual experience. This ‘sweet spot’ experience is not informed by social cues so much as the psychological state of specific characters.

The use of 7.1 surround sound exemplifies recent trends in the mediation of dance on screen. For example, most of the sound mix supplies key identifications with specific dancers who find themselves the witness to new worlds of dance. Here, the psychological use of sound amplifies dance in curious ways and, I will argue, constructs the experience of dance as an individual engagement (with music) rather than a sonically social one (with people). This way of listening to dance owes much to the history of sound recording and multichannel audio techniques and has implications for future understandings of dance practices.

If the sound mix of Step Up 3D sets up this individual experience of dance practice, the crowd scenes, where dance crews compete, offers another perspective. To analyze how multitrack recordings shape dance, distinctions between how live dance competitions sound and how they are represented on screen is useful. I will include interviews with dancers who performed in this film to reveal some of the tensions at play. Here the sound of the crowd, and its position and meaning in both the live and screen sound mix, is revealing. The cinematic stereo experience serves up conflicting ideologies that are rooted in a longer history of sound recording and the meanings of dance are mixed up with these new developments.

Biography

Mary Fogarty is currently an Assistant Professor of Dance at York University (Toronto, Canada). Her recent publications include: “A Manifesto for the Study of Popular Dance” in Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies (2010) and a forthcoming book chapter about older b-boys in Ageing and Youth Cultures: Music, Style and Identity (Berg).

Chantal FrancoeurConvergence and the transformation of stereo sounds experiences on radio

Communicating information through sounds, tone, pace. That is the task of radio reporters. They gather field sounds, ambience sounds, rich silences and oral discourses. They put them together and tell a story. They create an aesthetic impression. It is an organic experience for both the reporter and the audience.

A research done in Spring 2009 and updated in Fall 2011 in a newly converged newsroom shows that media convergence changes that organic moment. The converged newsroom is composed of multiplatform journalists, who feed tv, web and radio. In most instances, it means that radio journalists are forced to use tv data for their radio stories: since tv is the heaviest media to serve, needing images and audio, it becomes the definer of journalistic methods. The logic behind convergence is that once tv is fed, radio can pick what it needs in audio from tv data.

Thus radio becomes a second class media. The main focus of the data collector – mostly cameramen- is images, and sound becomes secondary. Convergence leads to a degraded sound quality and less and less ambiance sounds for audio stories. It means a deteriorated experience for radio listeners.

Media convergence might be built differently. Instead of transforming each journalist into “jack of all trades”, it could focus on sounds, images and text. Converged newsrooms would have audio journalists, video journalists and word journalists. Each reporter would remain an expert in its media. Audio journalists would feed all platforms –radio, web, cell phones, etc.- with their sounds. Then the specificity, richness and unique experience of stereo sound on radio would be preserved and new organic stereo audio stories could be created.

Biography

Chantal Francoeur teaches journalism at l’École des médias at l’Université du Québec à Montréal since September 2011. Prior to that she practiced journalism for 17 years, mostly at Radio-Canada, in news and public affairs.

Jay HodgsonThe Persistence of Mono—Mono as a Mixing Tool & The Problem of Mono Compatibility

The demise of mono is often exaggerated by historians. While mono no longer prevails, it certainly isn’t obsolete. In fact, listeners encounter mono more often than they may realize:- AM radio broadcasts in mono;- FM radio modulates to mono when signal-to-noise ratios grow too large;- iPads, iPhone clock radios, some TVs and cinemas, and some desktop and laptop computers,

offer only mono playback;- PAs in supermarkets, restaurants, malls, and in dance clubs, are often mono;- Improperly positioned speakers, blocked speakers, or speakers encountered from the left or

right of — or from roughly five meters beyond — phantom center, tighten stereo imaging to mono;

- Etc.Engineers have devised a slew of mixing techniques to establish so-called mono compatibility for stereo mixes. These techniques ensure that stereo mixes don’t induce tonal distortions like comb-filtering when summed to mono; that balances aren’t disfigured given the +3 dB (SPL) boost mono summing applies to center channel information; that phase-incoherent tracks don’t simply disappear in monaural contexts; etc. Moreover, mono itself remains a crucial mixing tool. Engineers routinely check their mixes through mono monitors like the notorious Auratone 5C, and they regularly switch to mono at varying points during mixdown, to check spectral, horizontal and proximal balance, and to determine phase-coherence. This paper situates the concept and practice of mono compatibility, and mono technology itself, within the broader context of modern stereo-mixing technique. Synthesizing existing research on mixing procedure, drawing on personal interviews with Grammy and Juno nominated recordists, and offering numerous practical demonstrations for each scrutinized technique from a track I recently mixed and mastered featuring Jay-Z, the concept and practice of mono compatibility, and mono technology itself, are shown to shape modern recorded musical communications and, therethrough, the broader pop soundscape. Mono persists. It is my ultimate hope that this paper helps researchers hear it do so.

Biography

Jay Hodgson currently teaches popular music practice and history, and the ‘project’ paradigm of production and engineering, at the University of Western Ontario, as part of North America’s first (and only) Bachelor of Arts in Popular Music Studies and Master of Arts in Popular Music & Culture programs. His most recent book, Understanding Records (Continuum), is currently nominated for an ASRC Award of Excellence; and he has a forthcoming monograph, titled Navigating the Network of Recording Practice, from Wilfrid Laurier Press. He also maintains a professional practice as a mixing and mastering engineer, and he periodically scores films (including a recent documentary for the United Nations).

Dipna HorraThe Migrating Soundscape

My sound investigations are of the intersections in architecture, art and cultural studies. I work with ephemeral spaces created with autobiographical narrative, field recording, micro broadcasting, as well as hand made microphones and speakers. Through these materials I investigate ideas of hybridity, question displacement and reconstruct a transcultural identity. I combine transpositions of male and female voice and collected sounds with objects from domestic environments. Through the installation of these objects in space I explore a place where the physical absence/presence of memory in sound proposes an elsewhere, an in between dwelling where I can feel at home.

In my current projects I create unhomely domestic spaces as sites for sharing stories. Cultural theorist Homi Bhabha defines an unhomely space in his post-colonial reworking of Sigmund Freud’s notion of the uncanny. In an unhomely space, objects and instances may seem familiar yet foreign at the same time. This can result in an uncomfortably strange feeling. I use the example of an unhomely space to convey an instance of destabilization in the immigrant experience. In my sound research, I examine the Western domestic space as a cultural space that contributes to the construction of hybrid identity. In my paper I will examine uncanny doublings that occur as the past and present, domestic and political reverberate within the same space.

My research has included the work of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage and Mona Hatoum. I found that some of the works of these artists contained the common thread of a non-visual strategy that highlighted the uncanny aspects of quotidian objects in spaces. In this strategy, elements such as performance and sound were used to bring forth a heightened awareness of hidden aspects of the habitual. These examinations reflect aural environments that simultaneously present a sense of location and dislocation. I am intrigued by the ways in which sound helps us understand social space, a politics of place, and the body’s sensorial geography based on hearing. For ‘Living Stereo’ I will investigate conceptual and physical responses to the dislocation of sound as experiential metaphors for migration.

Biography

Dipna Horra is a multidisciplinary artist and Architecture PhD at Carleton University. Her current research practice is based sculptural sound installations. Horra has worked in architecture and art education in Canada and New York. She has exhibited her art in Canada, Dubai, London, Berlin and New York. Horra’s studies address hybridity, identity, and a transcultural synthesis of materials and thoughts. Her current multi-channel sound project entitled, "Dhunia: Septet" opens on March 8th, 2012 at A Space Gallery in Toronto.

Dennis HowardFrom One track to two: The evolution of stereo in Kingston’s creative echo chamber, word sound and power.

The technological innovation of stereo and its impact on the recording process in Kingston’s music scene is not an area which has been given any attention in Jamaican music historiography and academic interrogation. Yet it is an important technology in the development of the Jamaican music production aesthetics. The jukebox introduced stereo to Jamaica and was the precursor to the hallmark sonic soundscape, which it has made Kingston famous. Utilising the concepts of the creative echo chamber and technological culture, this paper through case studies and interviews, will outline the trajectory of stereo in Jamaican music production, moving from mono to stereo and the introduction of state-of –the –art recording facilities in Kingston. The paper will also highlight the technology’s significance in facilitating production techniques which gave birth to dub and its progenies, hip hop techno dubstep and grime. In the process, through the pioneering work of aural alchemists such as King Tubby and Lee ”Scratch” Perry, redefining the soundcape of popular music production forever.

Biography

Dennis Howard is a 30-year veteran of broadcasting and entertainment; you has worked in media as a radio and television personality, producer, programme manager, editor and entertainment writer. In the music business he has a solid reputation as a Grammy nominated producer, artist manager, publicist, sound system deejay and production manager. Currently, apart from working in the entertainment and events business, he teaches part time in record industry dynamics at the UWI. He has a Ph.D. in cultural studies and ethnomusicology.

He has presented his research at conferences in the United Kingdom, Brazil, the U.S.A, Mexico, South Africa and several Caribbean islands. He has also had several articles published in the Caribbean Quarterly, Revista Brasileira do Caribe Revista do Centro de Estudos do Caribe no Brasil and the Jamaica Journal and recently contributed two chapters to a forthcoming book on Jamaican popular music.

Randolph JordanPerforming Hildegard Westerkamp: Stereo Soundscape Composition, Live Multi-Channel Diffusion, and the Conventions of Surround Sound in the Cinema

Hildegard Westerkamp draws upon her research with R. Murray Schafer and the World Soundscape Project to create soundscape compositions designed to promote what Katharine Norman calls “reflective listening”: heightened engagement with sonic environments through awareness of the tensions between documentary field recording and compositional intervention. Westerkamp generally works in stereo for radio broadcast and other forms of home audio consumption. Yet her compositions have been a staple of electroacoustic music concert programs for decades, often presented in the context of the acousmatic music tradition inspired by Pierre Schaeffer and re-interpreted for larger multi-channel systems through the art of live diffusion. And recently her music has come to broader attention by way of its inclusion in Gus Van Sant’s Elephant and Last Days, soundscape composition becoming an integral part of the surround sound design of these films. As such, Westerkamp’s work occupies a variety of positions within the spectrum of multi-channel sound practice, and the treatment of her work in these diverse contexts highlights functional and ideological differences concerning the spatialization of sound across these distinct realms. This paper will address the role of stereo recording and mixing as a function of Westerkamp’s interest in prompting reflective listening, and consider how practices of live multi-channel diffusion and surround format film sound design simultaneously engage with and problematize her work. I will discuss key stereophonic moments from her pieces Kits Beach Soundwalk, Doors of Perception and Beneath the Forest Floor and examine the treatment of these moments in both concert and film situations. I will position her work in relation to the growing discourse of soundscape composition and consider the problems of interpreting this work through the acousmatic ideals of much electroacoustic music. And I will consider how these different ways of thinking about her work can inform our understanding of the function of surround sound in narrative cinema. Ultimately I will demonstrate how Gus Van Sant’s films use Westerkamp’s work to both extend and challenge established conventions of auditory spatialization to inspire audiences towards a reflective listening practice suitable for the audiovisual context of the cinema.

Biography

Randolph Jordan is currently Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. His ongoing research explores the intersections between film sound theory and acoustic ecology with a specific interest in how the study of film soundtracks can inform soundscape research on specific geographical locales. His writing has been published in several anthologies and has recently appeared in the journals Music, Sound, and the Moving Image and Cinephile. And he has work forthcoming in Organised Sound and The Oxford Handbook to Music, Sound and Image in the Fine Arts. He is also a filmmaker and sound artist, and his academic and creative work has been presented at conferences and festivals across the globe.

Lewis KayeBetween Hearing and Listening: On Binaural Audio, Mobile Personal Sound Media and Trading Musical Spectacle for Sonic Exploration

The ubiquity of the personal stereo should be obvious to any city dweller. Bull (2000, 2009) argues that these devices are often deployed in response to the noise of the city, allowing users to drown this out with their own private soundtrack. While no doubt useful for the construction of personal boundaries, this can also be understood as a practice that privileges what we listen to over what we hear. In fact, it is a strategy that suggests we listen so that we do not have to hear. In this distinction are some interesting assumptions of how we relate to sound and the city. To listen to music is to remove oneself, while hearing the city involves us. Listening depends upon consumption while hearing demands participation. Nevertheless, Thibauld (2003) reminds us that Bull's listening strategy never fully achieves its goal: the sound of the city inevitably intrudes through one's headphones. Such aural permeability raises questions about how we might deploy such media in a way that blurs distinctions between what we listen to and what we hear, thus making people more aware of their urban sound environment rather than oblivious to it. One such method would eschew traditional two-dimensional stereo content in favour of binaural soundscape recordings specifically designed for mobile media use. When used for urban soundscape recordings, binaural audio helps integrate one into the urban sound field, allowing users the opportunity to explore and reflect upon how the rhythms of everyday urban life (Lefebvre, 2004) are patterned in sound. This paper expands upon and explores this idea through reference to two such sound art projects by the author, You Are Here and Toronto Transit Soundspace, both of which use binaural audio art based upon urban field recordings and relational engagement techniques to allow listeners to use their MP3 players to engage more fully with their urban sound world.

Biography

Lewis Kaye is a Toronto-based sound artist, media sciences researcher, and educator. Currently an instructor in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, he studies and teaches on the relationship between technology, space and aural experience, digital culture, and the materiality of media art. Kaye’s sound art has found expression through a range of media. Major solo works include Through The Vanishing Point, a sound installation based on Marshall McLuhan (exhibited at the Canadian Embassy in Berlin and the Centre Culturel Canadien in Paris in 2011) and YOU ARE HERE, the official podcast audio guide for Toronto's first Nuit Blanche in 2006.

Yannick LapointeStereophony, the hi-fi scene, and the distinctive characteristics of high-fidelity sound, music and technologies

When it started being commonly used at the beginning of the 1930s, the meaning of the term “high- fidelity”, when applied to recorded sound, was pretty clear. It referred to the transparency of recording technologies, to their ability to reproduce as faithfully as possible an external reality that existed a priori to the act of recording. In the following decades up to now, as the technologies of production and reproduction in phonography evolved and new recording ideologies emerged, the definition of the term “high-fidelity” became more and more blurred. As Keir Keightley puts it, “After World War II [...], “high fidelity” came to identify a quality of sound, a sound reproduction technology, and a cult of (male) hobbyists”1.

Drawing on previous researches about the high-fidelity scene, on my own researches about the history of recording technologies, and on interviews made with hi-fi enthusiasts at the 2010 edition of the Montreal hi-fi show (Salon Son & Image), this paper aims to demystify the current definition of the term “high- fidelity” and to determine, from the perspective of today’s hi-fi enthusiasts, what are the distinctive characteristics of the high-fidelity sound, music and technologies. In other words, what are in 2012 the required characteristics of a phonogram or sound reproduction system to qualify as “high-fidelity”? In this paper, a particular emphasis will be placed on the influence the advent of stereophony and multichannel sound had on the evolution of these characteristics, of the hi-fi scene, and of its ideology.

Biography

PhD student in musicology at Université Laval under the supervision of Serge Lacasse and Caroline Traube, my research interests are at the intersection of phonomusicology (the study of recorded music, including its contexts of production and consumption) and psychoacoustic. My master's thesis was about the hi-fi scene, its history, ideologies, and the distinctive characteristics of hi-fi music, from the perspective of hi-fi enthusiasts. In my PhD thesis, I intend to study the human perception of sound extensity (the perceived volume or spatiality of sounds) and to integrate it, as an analysis parameter and a creative resource, in pre-existing models of recorded sound.

Murray LeederMono Mania: 60s Nostalgia, Irony and Bob Dylan’s Original Mono Recordings

Drawing on the work of such scholars as Lee Marshall and Stephen Scobie, this presentation will explore the construction of Dylan’s complex and shifting star image through the October 2010 re-release of his first eight of albums on mono. This expensive, lavish set followed Apple’s similar release of ten Beatles albums the year previous and was coordinated with the release of The Witmark Demos: 1962–1964, the cumulative effect being an invitation to immerse onself in 60s nostalgia. The packaging for the individual albums exactly reproduces the original sleeves in scaled down forms, including photos and poems absent from most CD releases. Mono is constructed as a route not only to sound fidelity but to a fuller engagement with the 60s themselves, seeming to strip away decades worth of tampering with his music to restore the lost authenticity of the young Dylan, and through him, a vanished time.

But as Dylan’s persona wavers between the über-authentic “voice of the promise of the 60s counterculture” and a benign trickster/thief, so was the selling of The Original Mono Recordings tempered with irony; even the package art shows a stone-faced mid-60s Dylan on the front and an impish, grinning equivalent on the back. Columbia also released a promo parodying a 60s informational film. Featuring “voice of God” narration, authorities in labcoats and squeaky-clean faux-60s teens, it denounces stereo sound as a scam to raise the price of records, a deceptive influence that “plays havoc with the still-developing tissue of the teenage brain,” and as a social ill for which “all-American mono” is the cure. Foregrounding the “joker” element of Dylan’s star persona, it was released exclusively to www.avclub.com, it targeted a youthful audience as inclined to mock 60s nostalgia as to indulge it.

Biography

Murray Leeder recently completed his Ph.D. at Carleton University with a dissertation entitled “Early Cinema and the Supernatural.” In addition to publications in such journals as Early Popular Visual Culture, The Journal of Popular Culture, The Journal of Popular Film and Television, The Canadian Journal of Film Studies and The Irish Journal of Popular Film and Television, he also co-authored an essay on Bob Dylan that appeared in Popular Music and Society.

Matthew MalskyCinemaScope, Stereo and the Suburbs

CinemaScope, a wide–screen format with stereophonic sound, can be seen as Hollywood’s most successful response to two related forces: a broad demographic shift that moved film spectators out of metropolitan areas, and the associated changes in the way American consumers used their diminished leisure time—the explosion of both television and the suburbs. While it was available in first-run urban movie palaces throughout the 1950s and 60s, cinematic stereo was not ubiquitous for the American film spectator until the late 1970s with the introduction of Dolby. Although CinemaScope’s sound system failed to capture the market, if not the imagination of 1950s America, films such as How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) do presage the delayed revolution in American film sound practices in two ways. First, in the face of new options, stereo sound is used to reassert conventional, narrative–affirming uses of the new sound technology. Second, by displacing the music of “Street Scene,” using it in the concert prelude instead of as the underscoring of the movie’s establishing shots of NYC, the music was “domesticated.” This domestication functions allegorically to show how spatial listening itself through the 1950s would move out of the city and into the realm of the private domestic sphere. This paper will explore these fantasies of excess and containment, and the gendering of listening space reveal a radical shift in the conception of modernity through a close reading of several CinemaScope films from 1953–1958.

Biography

Matthew Malsky is Chair of the Department of Visual & Performing Arts at Clark University, and George N. and Selma U. Jeppson Professor of Music.

Eric W. RothenbuhlerThe social reality of fidelity

Fidelity appears to imply a simple model of communication that is, also simply, not true. If recorded music, film sound, radio programs and so on are not copies of an original, but unique, constructed artifacts, and then not independent of the recording, transmission, reproduction, and response, but tied to them in a social system, and on top of that each moment of reproduction and reception is its own unique event as well, then how does “fidelity” apply? To what “original” can we compare which instance of reproduction? And if fidelity in the sense we appear to use the word is not only not possible but maybe not even logical, what does it mean that it continues to enjoy such prominent use? Why is fidelity still used to organize professional work, to sell products, in consumer literature, and by audience members? This line of thinking leads to a well- known critique of fidelity as an ideological construction and to a variety of more nuanced analyses of the social practices of its construction—in the discourse and practices of recording professionals, advertising and consumer magazines, reception and use of equipment and recordings in the home, and in self-regulating communities of hobbyists.

Essentially absent from the literature, though, is a theoretical position that can accept the critique of fidelity and still explain its endurance. The concept of fidelity continues to be used because it continues to work; it continues to work because of its status as social reality and its utility as an ideal. After reviewing the above critiques, this essay offers an analysis of fidelity based on the actual complexity of the communication situation in which it is experienced, rather than the obviously too-simple model its dictionary definition seems to imply.

Biography

Eric W. Rothenbuhler is Associate Dean of the Scripps College of Communication and Professor of Media Arts and Studies at Ohio University. His teaching and research address media anthropology and communication systems ranging from ritual through community to media industries. He is co-editor (with Mihai Coman) of Media Anthropology, author of Ritual Communication: From Everyday Conversation to Mediated Ceremony, and co-editor (with Greg Shepherd) of Communication and Community. He is author or co-author of over 60 articles, chapters, essays, and reviews on media, ritual, community, media industries, popular music, and communication theory.

Rogério Santos and Nelson RibeiroThe Introduction of Stereo in Portugal – Changes in the Landscape of Radio Broadcasting and Music Production

Broadcasts in FM took place in Portugal for the first time in 1954 on RCP, a national private-owned station. In 1963 RCP would once more take the lead becoming the first Portuguese station to offer distinct programming on AM and FM. This meant not only two distinct program schedules but also the need to arrange sponsors that would finance the two broadcasts. In which concerned programming, AM and FM meant two different styles. While AM broadcasts continued to air mostly Portuguese popular music, FM became dominated by urban shows with Anglo-American music, which coincided with the expansion of pop and rock music due to the enormous success of bands like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Doors. Stereo would be later on introduced on RCP’s FM broadcasts which made them even more appealing for younger audiences (1968). Moreover, stereophony became responsible for the rapid acceptance of new musical styles and the emergence of Portuguese bands whose style was mostly inspired in international artists that had achieved high recognition. As will be discussed, this led to internationalization of music tastes and fashion styles which was very much visible in Portugal even though the country was then living under a dictatorship regime that mostly promoted national values and culture.

Based on archive research and semi-directive interviews with presenters and technicians, the proposed paper will present evidence on how the tastes of FM stereo programmers evolved in the 1960s. The social and cultural backgrounds of these new programmers and the relations they maintained with the record industry are topics that will also be discussed. In fact, this new generation of radio programmers broke with the rules of AM broadcasting. How this disruption occurred is what this papers aims to explain.

Biographies

Rogério Santos (PhD, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2002) is Associate Professor at the Catholic University of Portugal, where he is Coordinator for the Communication Sciences Scientific Area. Member of Research Centre for Communication and Culture, in Lisbon, his latest books are on media studies and cultural industries.

Nelson Ribeiro (PhD, University of Lincoln (UK), 2009) is a Lecturer at the Catholic University of Portugal. He is the author of several books and journal articles on transborder broadcasts and on the history of Portuguese media. Member of the Research Centre for Communication and Culture, in Lisbon, his latest book, published in 2011, is entitled BBC Broadcasts to Portugal during World War II: How Radio was used as a Weapon of War (Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston, NY, and Queenston, Ontario).

John ShigaDeepwater surveillance: Multichannel sound and the control of undersea space

This paper explores multichannel sound in the context of military surveillance systems during the Cold War. I focus on the U.S. Navy’s Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS), a $16 billion dollar antisubmarine system which used deep water hydrophones to detect and identify potential threats underwater. SOSUS was one of the world’s largest multichannel sonar systems, enabling acoustic surveillance over large areas of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. While multichannel sound has been key to the reproduction of acoustic spaces in the media and cultural industries, the military also used multichannel sound to sense, trace and intervene in geographic space. While multichannel sound and related concepts and techniques such as virtual acoustic space, multichannel recording, and sound perspective had a significant impact on the creative industries, few studies have explored the role of these developments in contemporary forms of sonic warfare and surveillance. Through analysis of military, legal and scientific and popular discourses surrounding SOSUS, I suggest that the global sonar network has become a key site for the exercise of power in what Steve Goodman describes as the “micropolitics of frequency” in which sound becomes “captured, monopolized and redeployed.” From this perspective, the SOSUS project and the broader military use of underwater sound channels can be understood as forerunners of contemporary geolocative media and real-time surveillance networks, which incorporate sounds on the threshold of audibility. Finally, the paper suggests that the repurposing of SOSUS in the 1990s in environmental and aesthetic projects articulates a tension between, on the one hand, multichannel sound as a means of controlling sonic environments and, on the other hand, multichannel sound as a way of interacting with sonic environments that escape prediction.

Biography

John Shiga is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. His current research focuses on sound, technology and subjectivity in interspecies communication research.

Jonathan Tee'Looking past the loudspeakers: visual listening strategies in 1950s multi-channel sound installations'

The problematic status of the visual scene of listening when sound is projected through loudspeakers is a theme evident in the writings and practices of composers such as John Cage, Pierre Boulez, Pierre Henry and others working with multi- channel electronic and electroacoustic presentations in the 1950s. In this period letters and articles in consumer-focused magazines engaged with how best to deploy new stereo equipment in the home and evidence related concerns for example as to how best to obtain the desired implied visual staging, through stereo sound, across which sounds could be located by the listener with careful loudspeaker placement.

Some strains of multi-channel concert-hall practice in this period included dynamic visual foci – e.g. visible performers – to try and sustain listener attention. Home listening practices exhibited various strategies. Static seated listeners used the concert-hall as an envisaged frame model. Other people deployed multi-channel sound as a form of interior auditory design and moved around while listening thereby creating a dynamic visual scene. These strategies illustrate an interaction between new forms of multi-channel sound amplification and evolving compositional and listening practices operating and interacting across both the auditory and visual domains.

Drawing on original research in my Ph.D. thesis, my paper will argue that the increasing prevalence of multi-channel sound reproduction in the 1950s exposed the importance of the visual to listening practices and provoked new kinds of compositional and listening techniques. The debates and emergent strategies in this period as to how to cope with the absence of an engaging visual scene corresponding to the heard sounds may also be read as a challenge to a disciplinary tendency to focus attention predominantly on the auditory aspects of musical and sound-based works. These suggest the importance of a multi-sensorial engagement with auditory culture both in theory as well as in practice.

Biography

Jonathan Tee is a Ph.D. candidate at Birkbeck College, University of London where he is completing a Ph.D. titled A Cultural History of the Loudspeaker: Amplified Sound in Britain, 1930–60 under the supervision of Steve Connor. His research interests in particular revolve around the intersections between the meanings and uses of sound and technological change.

Asbjørn TillerHighlighting the subjective through combinations of stereo and mono sound in film

Through the use of Dolby’s noise reduction systems and multichannel sound systems since the 1970s, the soundscapes of film has increasingly become more complex and dense. At the same time these technologies has facilitated a detailing of the sounds and soundscapes that give film sound designers the opportunity to create vast soundscapes that extend the spaces depicted in the film. In addition, the technology facilitates the use of multiple sound sources at a given moment in the film.

The outset for the paper is a discussion on how contemporary film sound makes use of a combination of mono and stereo sound to bring forth the subjective state of mind of characters in film. An outset is also that mono and stereo sound is closely linked to the notion of intimacy and vastness. Especially this seems to be the case in contemporary horror and action films. The discussion will include both technological and aesthetic aspects of this practice.

To discuss these aspects of stereo film sound I will make use of the Norwegian horror trilogy Cold Pray, and the discussion will be based on interviews with the sound designer of the trilogy. The aim of the paper is to bridge theoretical and practical aspects of the combination of mono and stereo sound. Phenomenology will serve as a theoretical outset.

Biography

Asbjørn Tiller is an Associate Professor at the Department of Art and Media Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. Tiller teaches media studies, film studies and practical video production. His main research area lies within the use of sound in different audiovisual expressions, mainly in film and art installations. Tillers PhD thesis focused on spatial experience in experimental sound and audiovisual expressions. He also has a background in practical sound production in music and film.

Patrick ValiquetFixing the medium: spatialization practices in electroacoustic music and the mobile ontology of Gesang der Jünglinge

The notoriety of Karlheinz Stockhausen's unfinished 1956 electronic composition Gesang der Jünglinge has been mediated to a significant extent by the composer's own assertions regarding its synthesis of the antagonistic sonic palettes of the post-war studios of Paris and Cologne and its systematic integration of pre-standard five-channel stereophonic recording and playback technologies. Although complicated by the fact that original master tapes no longer exist, Gesang's reputation as the instantiation of a revolution in “spatial music” has taken on almost mythological status. Indeed, in Stockhausen's words, listening to the two- and four-channel “reduced” versions which circulate today should be considered analogous to looking at “photograph[s] of a sculpture.” Confirming a tacit belief in the primacy of the composer's individual agency and authority, most analysts and historians have sought to strengthen the level of agreement between their accounts of the spatiality of the lost auratic original and the composer's often contradictory technical descriptions. A survey of the literature surrounding Gesang, however, reveals only an accumulation of conflicting speculations.

This paper presents a multi-faceted account of Gesang's career across time and space from conception to canonisation, considering contemporary documentation, studio technology, audio analysis, and the contributions of Stockhausen's technicians and interlocutors. The troubled ontology of the missing original spirals out into a series of spatial transformations contingent on the steady drift of recording media into obsolescence and the gradual accretion of multi-channel standards in electroacoustic concert practice. While myths of quasi-sculptural origin imbue Stockhausen's electronic music with a sense of permanence and singularity aligning it with the Romantic work concept, the mobile and contingent spatiality of Gesang undermines any imagined ontological fixity. This paper proposes that the durability of spatialized music in practice depends upon a web of human and machine interventions into the processes of production and preservation.

Biography

Before focusing on the study of experimental and electronic music practices, Patrick Valiquet trained as a classical pianist, earning a BMus at McGill University in 2000. After several years as a practicing musician he resumed academic studies in 2006, earning a Graduate Certificate from the department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University and a research-based MMus from the Institute of Sonology at the Royal Conservatory of the Hague. He currently holds a doctoral studentship on the project Music, Digitization, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Musicology supervised by Professor Georgina Born in the Faculty of Music at the University of Oxford.

Kent Walker and Allyson RogersThe emergence of the independent mixing engineer, the Yamaha NS-10, and the rhetoric of fidelity

There have been large changes in loudspeaker technology in recording studios in the last thirty years. A shift has occurred where engineers of commercial music have come to rely heavily on smaller loudspeaker systems (near-field monitors) that resemble consumer products, as opposed to larger custom-designed systems. Near-field monitor technology evolved in response to the growing trend of contracting independent mixing engineers for large-scale commercial music productions. These independent engineers used portable loudspeakers as a consistent aural reference between the various studios in which they worked. One loudspeaker in particular became emblematic of this shift in technology and practice: the Yamaha NS-10. First marketed to consumers in 1978, the NS-10 was quickly adopted as a studio monitor by several influential engineers of the period. Its unintended popularity in the studio led Yamaha to re-brand it less than a decade later as a professional monitor (NS-10M Studio). Despite the NS-10’s deviations from standard measurements of technical fidelity and its audible colorations, many practitioners have found its idiosyncrasies useful for the mixing process and it has become a studio standard. Indeed, a significant number of hit records have been mixed exclusively using NS-10s. Yet some speaker designers, particularly designers competing for a share in the near-field monitor market, deride the NS-10 as a low-quality studio monitor. The NS-10 thus represents a conflict in the audio community—one of practical versus theoretical knowledge—where the knowledge of practitioners appears to be in conflict with reference conditions established through scientific research (technical fidelity). This paper uses the example of the NS-10 to discuss the rhetoric of fidelity and tensions between different ways of listening and knowing.

Biographies

Kent Walker is a Tenure-Track Lecturer of Audio Engineering Technology at the Mike Curb College of Entertainment & Music Business at Belmont University (Nashville, TN). He is a PhD Candidate at McGill University's Schulich School of Music in the Sound Recording Area. His publications investigate human perception of sound recording technologies. (A list of publications and recordings can be found at www.kentwalker.net)

Allyson Rogers has a Bachelor of Music from the University of Alberta and a Master of Arts (Music and Culture) from Carleton University. Her MA thesis, titled "Fidelity to What? Negotiating the Uneasy Relationship Between Sound Recording and Classical Music Culture," examines the rhetoric of fidelity surrounding the practice of recording classical music. She has worked as an audio engineer, and as the program coordinator for the Audio Program at The Banff Centre for the Arts. Allyson lives in Nashville, TN.