Dia dhuit! (Namaste!) My name is Jo and this is my first time setting up a blog or a website thingimebob. I was already in the middle of doing this in the traditional way by using pens, pencils and paper but I think this is more accessible to everyone as well as saving the environment on recycling costs etc. Well, I am a student at University College Cork. I’m studying Music and I’m presently in my final year. I am doing my final exams at the moment and everything is getting quite busy around here, but I’m not alone and that helps. Well cyclosonic is a word I thought I had invented but it unfortunately already exists but luckily not according to my definition or meaning, even so I decided to somewhat change it and instead call it psyclosonic. I love cycling, music and sounds. I was in a rut at college, I couldn’t think of what to do as my end of year dissertation or performance until one evening this came to me (like an Aisling), it fell from the sky, I had to grab it.
I have studied many different areas in music over the past four years. I came from a classical music background with a strong interest in African rhythm and dance. Throughout my life I have had a very broad interest in music and that has been accentuated largely at college. I have covered some areas like Jazz, Pop, Classical, World, Experimental, Minimal, Sound Art and the Avant-Garde as theoretical research subjects as well as in practical ways. I have also done an introduction in to Sound editing. In an effort to bring this all together, to make the full connection between all the subjects and ideas I have studied over the last four years both inside and outside the college as well as throughout my life. This is where my cyclosonic experience came from, it is initially a reflection of me and my passions in life, cycling and sound and from there I want to draw upon ideas that have influenced my cyclosonic experience on its adventure in an attempt to let you see how it has progressed, grown, emerged, changed and altered along the way.
My Proposal for my end of Year Major Study: It will consist of a live sound-art installation at the Granaary theatre on the 25th of May, 2007. I intend to explore my recent growing interest in sound art as well as draw upon aesthetic ideas that are of interest to me, such as chance procedures like those used by John Cage or others to decipher my bicycle route, also the ‘derive’ and pscho-geography, two terms coined and explored by the Situationists, it expressed their idea of the unguided walk and their emphasis on th experience and how different the experience of going is if you are taken on a journey as well as briefly referring to the Futurists, who explored sound in revolutionary ways in the early 1900s paving the way to make such an event as this possible today in 2007. I wish to record sounds using a binaural headphone set as well as other microphones while cycling and acting as I normally do on a bicycle over the course of a few cycles. As well as this, I wish to record visuals of the aboce using three digital video camcorders. On my first trip, I will be recorded cycling my bike head on, a friend will record out through the back of a car. Then, I intend to repeat the cycle again, perhaps taking a different route and this time , I will use two digital camcorders, one on each handle bar to record images taken at a slight angle facing outwards rather than head on. Then, I intend to return home to start the editing process of both the sound and the visuals. I intend to distort and alter both in some way to create various effects before putting them onto DVD format. After all the editing has been done, I would then like to perform the piece at the Granary theatre at the assigned dates in order to create my cyclosonic experience. I will attempt to have arranged a number of cyclists to join me on a cycle to the event in an effort to get them excited about what’s ahead as well as to create an atmosphere. I then intend to have three screens showing visuals, one in the middle and two at either side. The one in the middle will play footage of me cycling my bike head on, the two at either side will show footage of the environments within which I cycled. The sound will be played over many speakers. This is where we come face to face with the distorted idea on both sound and visuals, an idea set out to disrupt peoples experience of the event, by enabling them to hear things that aren’t really there and vice versa. I intend to start in a naturalistic manner with visuals and sound moving in their natural directions and then I wish to do something quite surreal with it by gradually distorting them as the piece moves on. For example, I might use the same sounds but change the visuals (by using a night scene that’s very quiet against a loud busy city scape of hooting traffic, etc.) or vice versa anbd then perhpas increase the speed of the film with the middle screen still moving forward bu the two at either side moving in opposite directions, one backwards and one forewards. With the piece gradually moving in different directions visually, aurally and mentally, I wish to take the audience as well as myself on a cyclosonic experience.
I have had many other perfectly crazy ideas to make the experience even richer. I wanted to ideally have surround visuals including both the cieling and the floor and I also intended to have surround sound as well as speakers playing the sound while numerous microphones picked up other sounds both in and outside the Granary theatre and played them back over the speakers again with my prepared recorded sound and visuals to be re-recorded over and over again. I also wanted revolving seats so the audience can move around comfortably to see what they like. Another idea, was to place my bicycle on a stand and power it to a dynamo, cycle the bike which powers the dynamo and plays the prepared recorded sound back at a different speed. There will also be some headphones at a space between the audience and the set for people to approach and listen to the sounds on headphones to get the full binaural effect throughout the piece, it is impossible to supply the whole audience with headphones. Essentially, it is a piece attemting to connect the present worlds of sound, art, life and my individual self.
In an effort to use a chance procdedure to decipher my bicycle route in my cyclosonic experience, I tried to use I-Ching. I did it mant times as an experiment, changing and altering it respectively to see if it would change the final result but it didn’t really. I have done many drawings and calculations, these I intend to scan onto the website later.
I find I -Ching a bit difficult to take further but as a beginner I can only perceive what I can and that is, in my experiemnt in four phases, the hexagram ‘khien’ (six straightlines of equal length on top of the other) showed up twice. I changed around the streets in each phase just to see if it would change very much or remain the same. From this experiment, I have chosen to take streets that came up in both ‘Khiens’, that is the South Mall, the Mardyke, Patrick Street , the Marina and in that order too.
I will now try another experiment, not changing around the streets to see if it changes:
From this, I have realised that to do this experiment fully, one would have to assign a hexagram to each street in order for it to work possibly the most correct way but as I am slow to fond to things especially things with numbers, I have decided and concluded that in both experiments the South Mall and the Mardyke featured the most. I could spend hours at this I-Ching but I am going to stop there for the moment and use the analysis I have gathered thus far. I now intend to cycle down/up both these streets on Sunday morning 22.04.07 at 9a.m. I intend to have three video camera artists in the back of the car filming me cycling behind them at angles shown below.I have already tested this out but using the cameras at different angles, one in the back seat looking at me (faced forward, and two on each of my arms facing outwards. This didn’t work at all because one was facing towards the ground and the other towards the sky. The one going face forward worked a dream, some of these scenes I will use in the end product anyways (to distort things). while doing this I used binaural microphones to pick up the sounds as my ears heard them, I attached them to a pair of sunglasses and also felt a particular wig was apt. I intend to record using the same microphones again with the wig and glasses etc.I tried to do this experiment again on other occasions but due to not having a car and having to rely on someone else’s goodwill, time and effort which is plentiful and abundant yet not always possible. Also, my bicycle of almost eighteen years ( I had had it since I was ten years old, oops!) was attacked, leaving its frame completely destroyed, gnarled and twisted forever. This took some time to recover from but now I am okay, perhaps I will do something yet with my bicycle, let’s see…..(lots of ideas).
In between all this, I have been reading lots, researching ideas, theories, notions, music periods, genres, attitudes, etc. I have read some books relating to themes of the twentieth century – starting namely with the Isaac Newton’s Principia on ‘absolute time’, an idea that created te sense that the world moved in a way that only allowed for one progression or one sequence of acts but running through various ideas, movements who reacted against Isaac Newton’s theory anmely; futurism, surrealism, situationism, Dada, Merz, the Avant-Garde, Fluxus, the Happenings, Bauhaus, Experimentalism, Minimalism al the way throught o sound artists, sound sculptures, sound walks, sound spectographs and more, coming across wonderful vocabulary along the way like acoustic ecology, psychogeography, the ‘derive’ and much, much more.
