Scitilopolitics

Celeste Hutchins 2003

This music free to share under a Creative Commons Music Sharing License.

Program Notes:

During my first semester at Wesleyan I read about an acoustical phenomenon where when researchers divided up recorded speech so that each consonant and vowel sound was separated, and then played back the recorded speech with all of the parts in correct order, but with each sound reversed, listeners were unable to detect the reversal. I decided that it might be interesting to write a piece that would make people aware of this phenomenon by crossing the threshold of inaudible reversal and audible reversal. For my recorded speech, I decided to use the words of George W. Bush, because everything he says is so very backwards. I searched CNN.com for aiff files of Bush speaking and only found two good ones. One was him speaking about the ABM treaty, but my ex-wife was coincidentally working on a piece using the same piece of audio and didn't want me to use it. Instead, I used a short speech that George Bush gave on terrorism and destroying American culture. That semester, one of the students in MUSC 220 had used the same audio clip for a different sort of tape project. I had been thinking about the subtext of the speech since hearing that project and about how to make Bush's real message - his desire to destroy pop culture - clear. I started by playing the audio file with no change, and then divided it into grains 0.025 seconds long. I played those grains in order, but each grain was played backwards. I then doubled the grain size and repeated the process for several minutes until Bush's speech became indecipherable. At the same time, I took much shorter Bush phrases, first form the text and then from other texts with similar themes and ran them through the same process. Because those clips were much shorter, they became indecipherable in much less time. These co-processes made the main process clearer and highlighted the sub-text of Bush's speech. The speech was nominally about terrorism, but on repeated listening, it became clear that it was more about causing American culture to shift rightward, to criticize Hollywood and to push the idea of individual responsibility instead of socialized responsibility. Because of the repeating of the speech, which was gradually breaking down, the friendly experiencer was listening carefully, grasping at meaning. The subtext was brought to the surface in that way.

The second part of the piece uses this process but in reverse. I bought a book about lesbian separatist philosophy, Lesbian Philosophy: Explorations by Jeffner Allen (Palo Alto: Institute of Lesbian Studies, 1987), at a bookstore in New Haven. I then picked out four phrases related to violence and terror and specifically picked to annoy my ideologically post-feminist vocal talent. The ideas expressed were as radical as Bush's but from the opposite ideological spectrum. I run the algorithm in the opposite direction, because I take the opposite view of the words. Allen also talks about violence, terrorism and victim hood, but unlike Bush, everything she says is true and real. Her words are ultimately empowering to her reader, giving her readers freedom instead of taking it away. Her viewpoint is equally extremist, but exists in reaction to the sort of evil that Bush proposes. Each phrase went to it's own channel, one of four used in the piece. The sound started completely backwards and so was impossible to pick out meaning, but after a short while, the shortest phrase began to be understandable. I was surprised the way it was easy to focus on one sound among many as soon as words started to be decipherable.

I found that the second movement made the piece much more bearable. Listening to George Bush talk about destroying culture for five minutes made me very tense, but the soothing voice of Jessica Feldman reading about women uprising acted as an anecdote to Bushs and the actual, physical speakers. Using this created enough perception of space to compensate for not actually having all four speakers. I did this because I want to be able to play my pieces easily and without extra hardware. If I can run all of my pieces using only a stereo speaker arrangement, I can use just the line out of my laptop and a very basic mixing board. This greatly simplifies setup and increases the number of venues with suitable equipment. It also makes it possible to create a CD recording.

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