Guy Debord - excerpts: Society of the Spectacle Situationist international founding member
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on musique concreteness: In the simplest of terms, it is a matter of taking a sound, equivalent to a musical gesture, out of its original context and juxtaposing it in a new set events, e.g. collage. This re-contextualization has a psychological effect on the listener. The new context allows the listener to hear the sound from a different perspective. They are also allowed to focus their attention on the medium itself, primarily, because there is no other associative sensory input or temporality. This is achieved namely from editing. A more dramatic perspective can be achieved by the recording technique. There are many sounds that humans just cannot perceive, simply because you can place a microphone in odd places, that you cannot, or may wish not to, place a human head. It is this novel approach to sound recording that truly changes our perception of a sound. Thus, we can say that one aspect of technology, is that it functions as an interface for events which lie outside the domain of human perception.
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"through this small intervention of man, a fragment of the vast space of nature becomes a place, in the sense that, from this moment on, it distinguishes itself from the rest of the surrounding space through a certain symbolic or physical quality."
...A site specific work can be a deep, meaningful experience. There can be a sense of inevitability to it, an expressive quality to its finality or apparent eternity
...It's worth remembering that while the findings at the early centers for electronic music in Paris and Cologne introduced the world to the notion that sound and its location and direction in space could be a real expressive musical parameter, the firstly monophonic and later stereophonic reproduction of sound on consumer audio systems have certainly changed our ears in terms of how we expect a live performance to sound. The experience of direction, location, natural reflections in a space, and distance – while fairly well represented using more recent recording techniques – are attributes of a physical acoustic space, and any attempt to reproduce that space is an image, an interpretation. It is a question of authenticity of intent, not a question of experience. The experience is always there to be had but is dramatically changed by the space. Headphones are the most extreme example of this, where an almost completely contained environment essentially replaces acoustic space with artificial space.
...The world is full of sounds from all directions. It helps us navigate. So why would we want to capture it? It is inevitable that all music on the deepest level comes out of the experience of the sounds in the physical world, that it is an image of what we hear in our every day lives. The attempt to focus sound, to gather it, and to present it as an object of expressivity, is probably something deeply human, because the general complexity of life and our perception of the world lead us to want to organise things in order to understand them. And recordings have changed everything for good.
...If the 20th century was all about sound, the 21st will be all about space
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