“Traité de Bave et d’Èternité” (“Venom & Eternity”) by Jean Isidore Isou (compare and contrast the extraordinary performance by the Lettrist Choir, featured in the opening sequence of “Venom & Eternity”, with the equally extraordinary sound collages of cognitive psychologist Diana Deutsch, etc).

See “Rorschach Audio” book pages 29 to 35, 52, 129 and 140.

See “Rorschach Audio” book pages 105 and 106

Nearly 10,000 people visited the first Disinformation solo exhibition at Fabrica gallery in Brighton in 2001, which included a “Rorschach Audio” lecture, among many elements, and variations on that exhibition toured to 8 different galleries up & down the UK. On the 24 May 2013, Disinformation returns… to perform at this year’s Brighton Fringe. Notwithstanding the opulent Angel House venue being a short hop from central Brighton over the border in Hove, Disinformation & Strange Attractor use antique high-voltage electro-medical equipment to show a bunch of electronic keyboards exactly what we think of learning to play the damn things properly.

“Circuit Blasting” is an auto-destructive art and noise performance, which is “a bit like Circuit Bending, but alot less subtle” – as the Brighton Fringe publicity states “mad science and musical madness collide in a one-of-a-kind performance… the circuits of musical instruments are overloaded to produce a startling, unrestrained series of notes, beats and patterns… electroshock therapy for your ears”.

Admission is free, unusually however the event is at 12.30 lunch-time

Hendrick’s Carnival of Knowledge
Angel House
1 Brunswick Terrace
Brighton & Hove
East Sussex BN3 1HN

http://boxoffice.brightonfringe.org/event.aspx?evId=5304

Event curated by Mark Pilkington

Thanks also to everyone who came along to the Guapo LP launch at Corsica Studios – a great night, and special thanks to David J. Smith for that invitation.

The latter some time after The Quietus already featured “Rorschach Audio”!

Ai Weiwei, the Citroën DS, Bollywood punk-pop, Kuala Lumpur airport, the Victorian underworld, Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas”, opthalmology, cassette culture, Steven Pinker, Cocteau’s “Orpheus”, Rorschach ink-blots, Spiritualism, technology and electronic ghosts – “Art is not necessarily science, but science is always art”.

“Cockneys vs Zombies – Rorschach Ink Blots & the Auditory Undead” features in “Feast of Listen”, the 10th issue of the art and culture magazine Shoppinghour. Other contributors include Alexander Goodson, Amy Pettifer, And-Or, Audun Mortensen, Brian Roettinger, Chandler McWilliams, Dave Okumu, Gee Vaucher, Hayden White, Human Fiction Tartini, Isabella Martin, Jacek Plewicki, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Lefty Le Mur, Mandy Kahn, Martyna Dakowicz, Michal Kosakowski, Mikhail Karikis, Mikołaj Tkacz, Minjeong An, Mushon Zer-Aviv, Niall Macdonald, Nico Krijno, Penny Rimbaud, Sam Beste of Hejira & Sara C Motta. Shoppinghour 10 launches at Super Salon, Warsaw on April 19. The UK launch is at Ti Pi Tin, 47 Stoke Newington High Street, London N16 8EL, on Thursday, May 9 at 7.30pm.

http://shoppinghourmagazine.bigcartel.com/product/shoppinghour-magazine-issue-10-feast-of-listen

The “Rorschach Audio” book’s also got a very good review – by Mark Norton – in the current issue of Fortean Times.

http://gombrich.co.uk/

“The effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous and terrifying. No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined. It was that beauty the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately. Thirty seconds after the explosion came first, the air blast pressing hard against the people and things, to be followed almost immediately by the strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to The Almighty. Words are inadequate tools for the job of acquainting those not present with the physical, mental and psychological effects. It had to be witnessed to be realized.” – Brigadier-General Thomas F. Farrell, 18 July 1945

Disinformation’s “Spellbound” appears at Corsica Studios, Elephant & Castle, London, on 25 April 2013, to accompany the launch of the new “History of the Visitation” LP and CD by the rock band Guapo. Disinformation exhibited the “National Grid” sound installation in the “When the Dust Settles” exhibition, organised by Guapo’s David Smith, with Campbell Works gallery, in the Abbott Street bunker, Dalston, Oct 2010. The exhibition featured 3 nights of (literally underground) concerts, with “National Grid” accompanied by Sara Hubrich (violin), David Knight (guitar), James Sedwards (guitar), David Smith (percussion) and Alex Ward (clarinet) – video extracts are available on You Tube.

Where “History of the Visitation” is based on imagery of Arkady & Boris Strugatsky’s “Roadside Picnic” (filmed as “Stalker” by Andrei Tarkovsky), the “Spellbound” video quotes from Saint Jerome and a proverb quoted in “Kwaidan” by Lafcadio Hearn, to encourage viewers to project an anthropomorphic visual illusion, transferred from a photograph of Manhattan Project director and nuclear scientist Robert Oppenheimer (“the father of the atom bomb”), onto an aerial photograph of the “lake” of green glass melted into sand of the Jornada Del Muerte, White Sands, Alamogordo, New Mexico, by the heat of the world’s first atom bomb test, on the 16th July 1945. The video title is a reference to a strikingly similar image (pictured), produced in the same year by Salvador Dali for the dream-sequence in the Alfred Hitchcock film “Spellbound”, and the “Ki ga aréba…” proverb is alluded to as a visual image, rather than quoted in dialogue, in the “Yuki Onna” section of Masaki Kobayashi’s 1964 “Kwaidan” film (also pictured). Contemporary Japanese usage is pronounced “Kaidan”, as the “Kwaidan” title apparently refers to old Japanese, and the “ghost” of Robert Oppenheimer is obviously one that (so-to-speak) still actively haunts Japan. The “Spellbound” exhibit (see video capture) was originally commissioned by Fabrica gallery, for the first Disinformation solo exhibition in 2001.

Guapo + Stars in Battledress + Disinformation
Thursday, 25 April 2013
Corsica Studios
4 Elephant Road
London SE17 1LB

気があれば、目も口ほどに 物を言う。

See “Rorschach Audio” book pages 127 and 128

http://www.corsicastudios.com/whats-on/april-2013/baba-yagas-hut-present-guapo/
https://en-gb.facebook.com/guapoband

http://sounds.bl.uk/Arts-literature-and-performance/ICA-talks/024M-C0095X1003XX-0100V0

As the “Rorschach Audio” book goes to some lengths to stress, the understanding of sound that E.H. Gombrich developed, largely as a result of his wartime work, had a profound influence on the ideas applied in his postwar (visual arts) masterpiece “Art & Illusion”, and, as a result of Gombrich’s work monitoring Axis radio broadcasts during WW2, Gregory also introduces Gombrich as “the first person to report Hitler’s death” (as Gombrich in fact reported this to Winston Churchill, as one possible interpretation of German radio broadcasts, before the formal announcement of Hitler’s death)…

Hitler is Dead, Audio

Gyles Brandreth seems to have mis-remembered extracts from Konstantin Raudive’s “Breakthrough” demonstration record as having been recorded in his presence, and as being the “voice” of Winston Churchill. Dr Stephen Rorke claims to have tapes which suggest that Spiricom inventor William O’Neill rehearsed the (allegedly spontaneous) conversations that feature in Spiricom demonstration recordings. These rehearsal tapes apparently feature good quality audio, while the promotional tapes feature noisy audio, and the practice of deliberately adding noise to make alleged ghost voice recordings seem less implausible – a practice discussed at some length in the “Rorschach Audio” book – is memorably referred to by Rorke as “audio camouflage”. Stephen Rorke also says William O’Neill was a professional ventriloquist, and reproduces the distinctive Spiricom sound using an electro-larynx or artificial voicebox of the sort apparently owned by William O’Neill.

The full programme is available to listen to here –

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01rg1gh

Many thanks to Jolyon Jenkins

First click on, play and listen to the recording Sequence 1 (below). What, if anything, do you think you can hear? Then click on, play and listen to Sequence 2. Sequence 2 is in fact the original recording from which the first clip you heard was derived. Now you know what the original voice was actually saying, listen to Sequence 1 again. Once listeners know what these recordings are meant to say, most people report that much more vivid impressions of meaningful speech pop-up (so-to-speak) out of audio sequences that initially most listeners find almost unintelligible.

Audio Sequence 1

Audio Sequence 2

Sequence 1 was created using a technique called Sine-Wave Speech, or Sine-Wave Synthesis, and although the “Rorschach Audio” book does mention this subject (pages 25 & 26), following Pradheep Shanmugalingam’s excellent presentations on Sine-Wave Speech for The Voice Symposium and Resonance FM radio broadcast (see earlier posts), I wish the book had made more of this subject, because the phenomenon demonstrates the importance of prior knowledge in speech perception very effectively (in fact I stumbled across a very similar phenomenon messing around with electronics as a teenager, but unfortunately never kept the tapes – I’ll discuss that if and when I get round to reproducing the experiment).

Sine-Wave Synthesis is a technique that was developed by the experimental psychologist Philip Rubin of Haskins Laboratories in the early 1970s, then further explored, notably by his colleague Robert Remez. The technique involves synthesising artificial, computer-generated replicas of human speech, by analysing the audio spectrum and tracking the major energy bands or formants in a given speech recording, then creating usually 2 or 3 pure sine-wave signals that follow the rhythmic contours of those original formants. Technical details notwithstanding, as yours truly pointed-out in the group chit-chat before the Resonance FM show, the effect sounds a bit like the space mice in Oliver Postgate’s charming and atmospheric BBC children’s TV show “The Clangers” (and that comparison is not trivial, since the sound effects used in “The Clangers” are all the more effective for creating fairly passable illusions of plausible speech, and for several reasons “The Clangers” really is a classic piece of contemporary sound art, albeit for kids).

In context of Electronic Voice Phenomena demonstrations, listeners are almost always prompted how to interpret the ambiguous and often badly distorted stray communications chatter that EVP researchers present as recordings of ghosts. In the case of EVP researcher Konstantin Raudive’s “Breakthrough” record, these prompts were announced by narrator Nadia Fowler before each EVP clip. In the case of the EVP tapes recorded by Raymond Cass, introductory prompts did, as I understand it, exist on Raymond’s original cassettes, but, although these prompts were edited-out before his tapes were re-published on “The Ghost Orchid” CD, his prompts still exist in the form of the printed track titles on “The Ghost Orchid” CD sleeve-notes.

As shown by Sine-Wave Speech demonstrations, if we know what an ambiguous speech recording is meant to say, as long as the meaning attributed to that recording is reasonably plausible, it’s much more likely that we’ll interpret ambiguous material in a way that appears to corroborate the opinion of the person who told us what to expect in the first place. Sine-Wave Speech demonstrations illustrate the extent to which expectations and prior knowledge condition perceptions, so, in context of considering EVP, it’s relevant to quote the art historian EH Gombrich’s full description of his work for The BBC Monitoring Service during WW2, as described in his book “Art & Illusion” – the most important passage to highlight here is where Gombrich states that if his colleagues sought a second opinion about the meaning of an ambiguous speech recording, unlike EVP researchers, they would not tell subsequent listeners what they personally thought that voice might have said…

“It so happens I had an opportunity to study this aspect of perception in a severely practical context during the war. I was employed for six years by the British Broadcasting Corporation in their Monitoring Service, or listening post, where we kept constant watch on radio transmissions from friend and foe. It was in this context that the importance of guided projection in our understanding of symbolic material was brought home to me. Some of the transmissions which interested us most were barely audible, and it became quite an art, or even a sport, to interpret the few whiffs of speech sound that were all we really had on the wax cylinders on which these broadcasts had been recorded. It was then we learned to what extent our knowledge and expectations influence our hearing. You had to know what might be said in order to hear what was said. More exactly, you selected from your knowledge of possibilities certain word combinations and tried projecting them into noises heard. The problem was a twofold one – to think of possibilities and to retain one’s critical faculty. Anyone whose imagination ran away with him, who could hear any words – as Leonardo could in the sound of bells – could not play that game. You had to keep your projection flexible, to remain willing to try out fresh alternatives, and to admit the possibility of defeat. For this was the most striking experience of all: once your expectation was firmly set and your conviction settled, you ceased to be aware of your own activity, the noises appeared to fall into place and be transformed into the expected words. So strong was this effect of suggestion that we made it a practice never to tell a colleague our own interpretation if we wanted him to test it. Expectation created illusion.” – Ernst Gombrich “Art & Illusion” 1960

Incidentally, according to Wikipedia, and to an interview with Oliver Postgate conducted by Clive Banks (no relation), the voices used in The Clangers were created using swanee whistles, or piston flutes, played, much like Sine-Wave Speech, in a way that “followed the rhythm and intonation of a script in the English language” (with resultant perceptions being reinforced by a conventional spoken narration). It is also consistent with various “Rorschach Audio” type and psychoacoustics phenomena, that “when the series was shown without narration to a group of overseas students, many of them felt that the clangers were speaking their particular language”, and that a “non-worded but [musically] scored script seemed to allow the clangers to say almost anything”, including (predictably) “swear words”. At the beginning of the third episode a door to the clangers’ cave system fails to open, Major Clanger says “oh, sod it, the bloody thing’s stuck again”, and kicks the door to make it open, with the words being sufficiently well articulated that apparently the BBC asked Oliver Postgate to have these sounds removed (well, at least, that’s what Oliver Postgate said 36 years later anyway).

Here are some more examples of Sine-Wave Speech, presented by Matt Davis of The Medical Research Council’s Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit –

http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/sine-wave-speech/

Joe Banks, 23 March 2013

For future events – collider@thresholdstudios.tv // @colliderartslab

“Honour eternal is due to the brave and noble of people of Spain, worthy of better rulers and better fortune! And now that the jobs and intrigues of their juntas, the misconduct and incapacity of their generals, are sinking into the deserved obscurity of oblivion, the national resistance rises nobly out of the ridiculous details… The resistance was indeed wild, disorganised, undisciplined… but it held out to Europe an example…” – Richard Ford “Handbook for Travellers in Spain” 1845

See “Rorschach Audio” book page 52, and “Assigned to Listen” post below

In a similar manner to the illusions produced by Diana Deutsch’s “High-Low” recording and the “DK Bose” song (described in earlier posts), the joke comes from a Spanish children’s game, in which, when the sound “Jamón” – “Ham”, is repeated over and over, listeners tend to perceive the illusion “Monja” – “Nun”. The song is a duet between film director Pedro Almodóvar and musician and painter Fabio McNamara. Related symbolism is alluded to in the movie “Jamón Jamón” (directed by Bigas Luna, starring Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem and Jordi Mollà).

See “Rorschach Audio” book pages 29 to 31, 129, 140, 176

Thanks to Cecilia Martin for the heads up

The British Library
96 Euston Road
London NW1 2DB

http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/quickinfo/loc/stp/index.html

The first “Rorschach Audio” presentation of 2013 is confirmed for Northampton’s (literally) Legendary Labour Club, evening of March 5th – come along for mind-scrambling audio-visual illusions and electromagnetic hauntology. After the audience’s perceptual software’s been suitably re-wired, the evening climaxes with Strange Attractor & Disinformation discharging 30kV shocks into anything, or anyone, that doesn’t make it to the Fire Exit fast enough… live “Circuit Blasting” (which is “a bit like Circuit Bending, but alot less subtle”). Bring your friends.

Legendary Labour Club
95 Charles Street
Northampton NN1 3BG
collider@thresholdstudios.tv
Doors 7pm, £2

http://legendarylabourclub.com/blank-stares-cricket-claps/
http://legendarylabourclub.com/where-to-find-us/

“… it seems unlikely that the Conservative Club on Whitworth Road will be promoting a visit from Bilge Pump, Gay Against You or Drum Eyes anytime soon”.

My dad’s copy of “Orphée” by Jean Cocteau – special thanks to Colin Banks

See every single published version of “Rorschach Audio”

“Open your ears, for which of you will stop
The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks?
I, from the orient to the drooping west,
Making the wind my post-horse, still unfold
The acts commenced on this ball of earth.
Upon my tongues continual slanders ride,
The which in every language I pronounce,
Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.
I speak of peace while covert enmity
Under the smile of safety wounds the world…”

Henry IV, Part 2, c.1596

See “Rorschach Audio” book pages 23 to 26, 29, 49 to 51, 117 and 132 to 133

See also E.H. Gombrich interview (below)

“Bear with me. You might find this interesting.” He flashed Max an expression of camaraderie. “We were doing some very, very sophisticated zero light weapons scopes for military application. Developed something called an image accumulator. It used a system of vidicon tubes, a closed circuit where we amplified indistinct signals from tube to tube, to create images where the physics books said there wasn’t enough light for an image to exist. We made a kind of helmet with conical fibre optics – didn’t want to get into lasers – and you know? The damnedest thing happened to some of the boys who were testing her in the field… Under simulated combat conditions, the boys who used her began to hallucinate. Images began to appear that weren’t really there – and the images lasted for hours after they’d stopped wearing her. Took us quite a while to figure out that the boys were starting to project their own images through the optical accumulator, images that came from their brains and ended-up exciting the vidicon mosaic like an electron gun. Video hallucinations, Max, that we have recorded on tape.”

David Cronenberg & Jack Martin, “Videodrome”, New English Library 1983

See “Rorschach Audio” book page 124