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incubator at XEBEC Hall
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I have been interested in the idea of sound-layering for manyyears. By this I mean, the colligation of similar or even identical voicesinto a mass. I have explored this idea in a number of my pieces, but almostalways in a stereo reduction, either on CD or in concert. So when I firstthought about what to do with 50 iMacs I wanted to try out some of mylayering techniques using the "voice" of each machine as a separate soundsource. I wanted to hear that sound. I also wanted to make use of thegraphic capability of the iMac and the fact that all machines wereconnected via a network scheme. Technical aspects aside, I wanted to make a piece which on the surfacewould be a bit disorienting and ambiguous. Visual images of politicalevents, taken from the internet, which transform but never quite resolve.>From texts which range from the private diary of a leader of the KhmerRouge to email traffic on a music mailing list, no real answers existed intheir dynamic display. The sounds ranged from the strange tinkling of avirtual pianist on one machine to hundreds of chanted voices, a strangeshomyo.
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Yasuhiro Otani
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Masahiro Miwa
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Nobuyasu Sakonda
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A network is one of the representations of so called the "Machine". SinceEuropeans in the Middle Ages were infected by the idea of the Machine in frontof mechanical clocks, the Machines have been developing the self-expansion andself-reproduction while connecting themselves with another or absorbing witheach other. With the name of the universality, they have no necessities todepend on materials such as a metallic body but they are a transcendence fromthe substances. They have been repeating the connection / expansion /reproduction in the region of non-substance, thought, sacredness oraesthetics. The notions such as form, structure, system, organism or network,they are all nothing but aliases of the Machine which is itself a mystical thought of beauty fascinating peoples.
At Xebec Hall, I tried to make a situation there in which the Machine comesto start to tell its native memories buried under the notion of utilities. 50iMacs make slight sounds of water so that transient streams and stagnationsemerge here and there. Red screens on all monitors, which change theirbrightness sensitively by surrounding sounds through an audio input, make awaving surface all over the hall. In this wet field of sounds, texts ofrestrained desires are transmitted with some male / female whisper voices, "Iwanna eat you", "I wanna destroy myself"..... Occasionally some fragmentaltunes of the old Tango in SP days running through 50 iMacs with green lightsand sounds of piano note with white flash articulate this spatio-temporal continuum.Each iMac has a set of sample sounds of Japanese phonemes whispered by somemale / female speakers and also has some sound files. It knows its ownposition and neighbors in the LAN network and tells to one of the neighboriMacs the events which it is now performing, what text it is whispering andwhat position of Tango soundfiles it is playing. The iMac which receives theseinformations immediately starts to whisper the text with its own voice or playthe next position of the soundfiles and transmit the informations to anotherneighbor. It seems that this is a kind of network granular synthesis in whicheach computer performs only one grain. As a result whisper voices make asuccession of word of mouth and a tune of Tango runs totteringly through thespace made of 50 iMacs.
This piece seems to be explicitly obscene or erotic. But I think now this"explicitness" is worth trying to reconsider and investigate.
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Masayuki Akamatsu
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The title of my work is "Type A, B, C and more". This work expresses three types of networks that create a model to how we experience sound and visuals. These networks consist of a non-electronic, an autonomously distributed and centrally controlled network.
In "Type A", an eye on the screen opens and sounds a shutter according tosurrounding sounds that are picked up by the built-in microphones, thencloses. Even though each iMac acts individually, the sound of one iMac affectsthe others. Therefore in "Type A" all of the iMacs in the venue create a variety of chain reactions due to the variations in settings of response levels of the microphones and the playback levels of the speakers.
In "Type B", a iMac gives out a light and sounds a chime according tosurrounding sounds. At the same time, it calls other iMacs through thenetwork. If the called one responds, they start a conversation, shiningmutually and ringing repeatedly. When several callings and conversations occur,a kind of emergent phrase appears in the venue.
In "Type C", all iMacs create a sound synthesis according to the command of theperformer. In other words, they function as 50 sound sources that arearranged spatially. For example, the sound images move like a wave and aprofound and complex sound is produced in the venue.
During the performance, the network system was slightly unstable. As a result I became engaged in recovering the system yet I felt this was an unexpected but realistic quality and an interesting comment on the theme of communication networks .
（Each description was written by the author.）
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