Les said, the better II

Michael Savage and Imus

 

Savage
Beasts

 

Before
I created Coulter Shock,
I listened to other pundits, including Michael Savage, who advocated increasing
prison torture and sticking lit dynamite in the anuses of Arab detainees.  The problem with Michael Savage is that
he does not mean to be taken seriously. 
He’s like Howard Stern.  His
use of "irony" provides a shield where he can say completely
offensive and racist things and then later claim he didn’t mean them.  Ha ha only serious.  His voice is also somewhat unpleasant
and uninteresting.  People clearly
listen to him for his insane content rather than his dulcet tones.  I put him aside, temporarily to work on
Coulter and then Limbaugh.

            After
I finished with Limbaugh, I went back online to search for new material for my
next piece.  I downloaded a Media
Matters clip from a morning show on NBS called Imus in the Morning. 
He was showing pictures of Palestinians mourning the death of Yassir
Arafat.  One of the voice-overs
from the Imus show was calling the Palestinians “animals” and was advocating
dropping “the bomb” on them and killing everyone.  The other co-hosts laughed along with this idea.  Later that morning, they played a clip
of someone pretending to be General Patton, speaking about how an embedded
reporter had just filmed footage of a US Marine shooting an injured, unarmed
Iraqi insurgent.  “Patton” used the
term “raghead,” and the phrase “bearded fatwa fairy.” Imus’ racism was thus
clearly linked to his homophobia.  (If
anyone doubts that these struggles aren’t linked.)  In the first half of the program, one of the male voices
said something about the “fat pig wife of [Arafat] living in Paris.”  Thus he added Francophobia and sexism
to the mix.  Another commentator,
noting the emotion of the Palestinians said, “It’s like the worst Woodstock.”  Hippies are liberals are feminists are
Palestinians are ragheads are gay are women are Iraqis are French.  Every group is standing in for every
other group.  And while they
laughed, one of the commentators kept repeating “animals” and “kill them all.”

            This,
of course, reminded me of the Michael Savage calls to kill all the prisoners in
Abu Graib, whom he called “subhuman.” 
His comments were interspersed with bizarre attacks on media
organizations for being communist, apparently because they published photos of
prisoner abuse.  As if Al Jazeera
would have ignored the pictures if the “communist” New York Times hadn’t run
them.  He called for more prisoner
abuse and then dared listeners to report him to the FCC for it.  Then he claimed that it was the
American People who were really going to suffer.  Because of having a poor image abroad?  Because we could no longer torture
prisoners?  It wasn’t clear.  “We the people” still don’t seem to be
suffering as much as tortured prisoners. 
And certain not as much as would prisoners if, like Savage recommended,
they had dynamite stuffed in their orifices and were dropped out of airplanes.

             Savage
and Imus are both entertainment. 
They were both going for a shocking laugh.  Savage, like Limbaugh and Coulter, is completely caught up
in himself.  All of those people
are in love with their own voices. 
They are completely pleased by their clever sophistry and smug beyond
belief.  At the same time, they
think themselves to be victims. 
Hence, Savage dared people to report him.

            Savage
seemed to be addressing several different issues in his comments, many of them
along the popular right-wing logic that the media lost the Vietnam War by
demoralizing the American people by telling them what was going on.  (If only they had lied, we would have
colonized all of Vietnam!) These were neither here nor there, so I cut them
along with the FCC dares.  I
returned to Imus and made one track that just contained the laughing and
“animals!”.  Then I made another
track that just contained racism and calls for violence, eliminating “fat pig
wife” and “worst Woodstock.”  I
skipped “Patton” entirely.  All
these issues are connected, clearly, in the words of the pundits, but I just
focused on calls for genocide and violence.  I looped the laughing track and played violent phrases from
Imus and Savage on top.  Thus the
Imus men laugh hysterically at themselves and at Savage.  The entertainment value of genocide,
violence and torture is thus highlighted.

            91Angels
comments on this approach, “Cutting away the fluff and feathers and presenting
what they really say in it’s ugliness and baseness, everyone able to see what
is at the end of their fork, engages the listener so they have to make a judgment
(one that you hope will be in favor of what you are trying to communicate, of
course) instead of just being preached to.”  (http://www.livejournal.com/users/celestehblog/66886.html?thread=15686#t15686)  However, as I worked on the piece, I
became discouraged.  NBC was forced
to apologize for the content of the Imus show, but the piece only reminded me
of the left’s failure to turn torture into a mainstream issue.  I decided that offensive statements
about the desirability of torture were not enough to support the piece, as
clearly, not enough people would care. 
Also, “here’s a guy saying something offensive” seemed too weak to carry
a piece. 

I remembered a piece about laughter made
by Kingston, an undergraduate who took MUSC 220 in the fall of 2003.  His piece started out cheerfully, with
friendly laughter, but turned dark and ended with mocking, menacing
laughter.  In our culture, we
generally think of laughter as friendly, beneficial and desirable.  Clubs have even formed where member
gather and laugh, believing it to have health benefits.  Kingston’s piece changed the way that I
think about laughter by articulating its dark side.

The laughter from Imus initially seems as
innocent as all laughter seems. 
However the words “animals” and a disgusted “look at this!” left in the
laugh track showed it’s true, cruel nature.  I decided to make the laughter the focus of the piece.  I create an increasingly heavy overlap
of laughter, using my spatilization algorithm, so that the overlapping laughter
does not interfere with itself or with non-spatialized racist comments played
on top of it.  I used my
phrase-finding algorithm again in this piece, to break up Imus and Savage into
their sound bites.

This piece is only a few minutes
long.  I recorded a realization
that came in at 2:22.  However,
when I play that recording, it seems to go interminably.  I would have sworn it was at least
seven or ten minutes.  This piece
had serious crash bugs until the spring break of 2005 and so has never been
performed.  This is absolutely my
last right wing voice piece. 
Unless I take on Bill O’Reilley and Fred Phelps to do a piece concerning
homophobia.  God help me, I don’t
know if I could stand it.
This post is not creative commons. It is copyright 2005 Celeste Hutchins. All rights reserved

Tag: Micheal Savage

Rush Limbaugh

 

The
first pundit that I downloaded was Rush Limbaugh. His voice is not polished,
but he’s been current for many years and is unfortunately not likely to go away
soon.  I downloaded some audio
files from Media Matters.  His
comments were what I was seeking, but I wasn’t sure what to do with them.  I tried looping them in quick
succession, so that the same file would start to play and then another copy of
it would start to play only a few milliseconds later and then another one a few
milliseconds after that, until there was a dense texture.  This made a nice sound, something like
a washing machine.  I wanted to
call it Spin Cycle.
This technique seemed similar to Steve Reich’s audio loops in pieces such as It’s
Gonna Rain.  However, the dense texture obscured
Limbaugh’s words. I feel that the content of Limbaugh’s speech is fundamental
to exploring his meaning and the seductive lies of the right wing.  However, all meaning was quickly lost
by my looping and the text was totally obscured.

            I
gave up on Limbaugh and moved on to create Coulter Shock, returning to Limbaugh when I could no
longer stand Coulter.

 

Rush
to Excuse

 

My
Ann Coulter piece had a proposed third section that I did not complete.  This section was going to find the
pitches of all the short grains of vocal sound that made up the last part of
the piece.  I used the program I
wrote for that instead with a clip of Limbaugh mocking, downplaying and
sometimes praising the torture of prisoners at American-run Abu Graib prison in
Iraq.  His statements were
outrageously offensive and included imitating the barking of the dogs used to
terrorize and bite prisoners, calling officers "orrifcers", etc. 

            I
had an idea that I would play equally-sized short grains of text in a loop
while computing their pitch material. 
As the pitch of a grain became known, a pitched sound would replace the
original audio content.  Then,
after all the pitches were known, the program would then progressively “forget”
pitch content until the grains returned to their original text state.  Meanwhile, like in the second half of
my Coulter piece, I would gradually reshuffle the order of the grains.  My experiments with these methods were
unsatisfying.

            Then,
while I was working on it, Alvin Lucier played Paul De Marinis’ work Odd
Evening for his
composition seminar class.  I told
the class that Marinis had already written the piece I was trying to write and
had gotten better than I was going to. 
Alvin told me to write the piece anyway, so I carried on. 

            I
noticed that shuffling the grains made their meaning disappear too quickly, so
I mixed them with longer phrases, which were automatically discovered, just as
in Coulter Shock.  I decided to change the grain length on
each pass through the loop.  I
think this is a good compromise between the musical interest of hearing the
pitch of spoken voice and political interest of hearing content.  Also, like with Bush’s speech, the
repetition of phrases makes their meaning more evident.

            The
speech starts with an introduction of the just the pitches of the last 20
grains of the clip.  Then it plays
all the grains of the clip, in order, with both the pitch and the text
material.  I then scramble the
grains and play them back mixed up with some longer phrases from the start of
the clip.  Then I double the size
of the grains and again play them back in random order with pitch and voice,
intermixed with longer phrases that come from a bit further into the clip.  I repeat this process until the grains
are long enough that words like “fear” can be clearly heard.  The piece ends with Rush’s mocking
question, “Is that allowed in the Geneva Conventions?”

            I
have submitted this piece to numerous festivals, but it was rejected.  Surprisingly, Limbaugh’s comments
failed to generate much controversy just as systematic torture of prisoners
failed to be reported outside of the Pacifica Network and the left wing
blogosphere.  I worried the piece
would slip into irrelevance before anyone ever heard it.  I posted a realization of it, my
Coulter piece and my Bush State of the Union piece to my website under a
Creative Commons license that makes it possible for people to download, share,
commercially use and remix the piece as long as they include attribution. The
commercial value of these pieces to me is near negligible, especially as the
controversies fade into the forgotten past.  I would rather have people hear them than not hear
them.  Unfortunately, I have not
had time to adequately promote my downloads.  A log search shows that it has been downloaded by one person
unknown to me in the United States and one in Britain.  As far as I know, it has never before
been performed in public.  In the
future, I want to launch a podcast of my music, which I hope will garner more
listeners.
This post is not Creative Commons. It is Copyright 2005 Celeste Hutchins. All rights reserved.

My thesis is so strange
Tag: Rush Limbaugh

Ann Coulter

 

 Coulter Shock

 

I
downloaded a long clip, over a minute, of Ann Coulter on Hannity and Colmes, arguing that it was "factually
correct" that Clinton "was a scumbag."  What was immediately fascinating was the "cross
talk" on the sample, where multiple pundits were speaking at the same
time.  It seems like some pundit
shows are nothing but cross talk. 
Cross talk is information overload.  It is impossible to pay attention to two or three people
talking at the same time.  In the
effort for everyone to be heard, nobody is heard.  Cross talking pundits give the impression of communicating
information while actually communicating nothing at all. I tried overlapping
the sample, creating artificial cross talk into a dense texture.  I like this idea, but haven’t yet used
it in a piece.

            Instead,
I started thinking about pundits and meaning, specifically, the difference
between Limbaugh and Coulter.  Ann
Coulter speaks in sound bites. 
Everything she says is designed for maximum punch in as few seconds as
possible.  And the punch she packs
is astounding.  What rational
person would argue that it was "factually correct" that anyone was a
scumbag?  Yet she said this about
Clinton.  And then she goes on to
say that anyone who criticizes our current president is a traitor.  In one clip that I use, she attacks the
very notion of polls when they show low points for Bush but then, without
pausing, attacks Kerry for polling low. 
Her positions are, self-contradictory, indefensible and astounding, but
when she’s asked to defend them, she does, again in little sound bites.  She’s impossible to argue with.  It seems like any show she was on would
dissolve into meaningless name-calling or cross talk.  And indeed, most of what she says is meaningless. 

            Ann
Coulter gives the impression of communicating ideas without actually doing so.
Her books, comments, punditry and columns essentially say nothing but
Republicans are right and Democrats are wrong, over and over again with no
backing, no real evidence, nothing but puzzling and meaningless sound-bites and
name calling.  She is incredibly
talented at weaving nothing
into the appearance of something.

            I
wrote a program that looked for pauses in her phrases and created long
"grains" based on her phrasing. 
I then played out the grains in random order.  I tested this using my original crosstalk laden sample.  It was amazing how little the sample
changed.  The pretense of meaning
was obscured, but the pretense was so thin to start out with that it was as if
nothing had been lost.  When I
played the original clip (without video) for some of my comrades, they found
the unprocessed version nearly as incomprehensible as the re-ordered version.
Then, I tried creating artificial cross talk by sometimes slightly overlapping
phrases.  It was exactly as if I
had punditry on a Television in the background and wasn’t paying attention to
it.

            I
downloaded as many other files of Coulter as I could.  I discovered that her voice only has a few tones.  She is either sarcastic and snippy,
sarcastic and smirking, shrill or defensive.  I could put together phrases from any of her Hannity and
Colmes appearances and,
because the micing was always the same, it would sound like it all came from
the same appearance.  The little
artificially constructed speeches produced by my process almost made sense.  Her lack of timbral variation was as
interesting and useful as Bush’s rich tones.  Which is not to say that she doesn’t have timbral variation,
just that it is much more subtle and she doesn’t have much emotional range.

            Like
with Bush, I became fascinated by her voice.  I created an 11-minute piece.  The first 5 minutes start with her unaltered quote calling
Clinton a scumbag, which is then followed with re-ordered phrases from her many
media appearances. I got the audio clips from mediamatters.org, guaranteeing
that I had her most offensive comments from any of her appearances.  (Also, I was unable to persuade anyone
to Tivo her for me, alas.)  Then,
luckily, in the first week of October, her new book came out, thus greatly
increasing the amount of source material. 
It was like heaven, except that my original fascination for her was
beginning to turn into hate.

            The
second part of the piece takes a snapshot of the last pass of word
reordering.  It then broke that
snapshot in grains all of equal size. 
The number of grains was equal to 4 times the number of clips in the
re-ordering section.  The play back
algorithm plays back the grains in a moving window, like a cloud
algorithm.  On the second pass, the
grains are four times smaller and the window is five times bigger.  This goes on in a loop of decreasing
grains and increasing window for about six minutes.

            The
first part of this piece is inspired by countless speech remixes that are
common in politically themed popular music.  These remixes are a problematic way to approach
discourse.  91Angels points out,
“[The] challenge seems to be to reveal underlying [inconsistencies] and
contradictions in the source material, as opposed to just twisting someone’s
words around or trying to demonize your subject ad hominem  . . .. Anyone can edit words into their
mouths and make them say silly things or take them completely out of context,
that proves nothing and is only good for some cheap laughs.”  (http://www.livejournal.com/users/celestehblog/66886.html?thread=15686#t15686)
I have tried to avoid this trap by having my program make all decisions about
phrase order. Also, my point is not “Look, I can make Coulter say something
pointless and stupid,” but rather, “listen to how little this changes if you
randomize it.”  The listener can
draw her own conclusions on whether this communicates anything about the value
of television punditry.

            The
second part of the piece reminds me of the movies and TV shows about Max
Headroom.  The movie concerns a television
journalist who died but then is replaced by a computer-generated talking head
who can do nothing but stutter catch phrases.  In the movie, the talking head is deemed an inadequate
replacement for journalism.  The
computer stuttering sound used by the fictional program was extremely popular
among children.  My friends and I
would try to imitate it.  This
effect became somewhat overused in the 1980s because of Max Headroom, but I liked it anyway as a degenerative
process.  In the second part of the
piece any plausibility of meaning and content is destroyed.  So the piece begins with a clip which
purports to communicate, is followed by a few minutes of remixed clips which
sound like they may purport to communicate, but do not, followed then finally
by increasingly small and scrambled grains which contain the timbres and
pitches of speech, but none of the word content.

            I
first played in September of 2004 at Open Mic Night at It’s Only Natural.  Unfortunately, this time the people
present were not "friendly" experiencers.  They quickly became annoyed, possibly by the lack of pitch
material.  It was almost the exact
same people as were in the audience for my piece with Bush and digital peaking,
however they were hostile to this one. 
Several people got up and left during it.  One person afterwards was explaining to me about how when he
was in music school, he’d learn to craft pieces that went somewhere and had been cautioned against distorting
recorded voice.

            The
next performance was in Oakland, CA at the club 21 Grand. For that second
performance, I used greater diversity of source material.  Coulter’s book came out in the meantime,
giving her many press appearances and thus more material for me to choose
from.  Instead of making the piece
longer, more samples were added in at a faster rate to cause the content to
change more quickly.  Coulter’s
book hyping created a plethora of material.  I also added in a short clip of Hannity lying about Kerry to
increase the non-Coulter voices and make it sound more like a pundit
discussion.  Since almost all the
samples come form Hannity and Colmes, his voice was already in the piece.

            This
time, the friendly experiencers were entirely people from my mailing list and
the other performers playing that evening.  They had entirely different expectations than did the open
mic attendees at ION.  Also, it may
have been helpful to play George Bush’s Voice first, thus creating a bridge
between tonal content and tweaked word content.  Fortunately, those listeners liked the piece.

            I
played the same version of the piece at a House Concert at India House for a
mostly grad student audience. 
Jascha Narveson heard it and invited me to submit it to the Red Festival
in Toronto where it was part of a “sound bar” where friendly experiencers
listened tape pieces through headphones. 
I submitted almost the same version as the Oakland performance, except
that some amplitude inconsistencies were altered with selective normalizations.

            This
piece was designed to change over time and it did for several months.  I wanted the source sounds to change as
new material became available.  In
this way, I hoped to extend the shelf life of the piece and be able to keep it
current as events warrant.  I began
to tire of Coulter, however, and have quit adding new material and end up
abandoning a proposed third section of the piece.

 

Further
Coulter Ideas

 

Coulter’s
style of speaking tends to lead to cross talk, as she attempts to shout down
her foes with her insane sound bites about liberals and Clinton.  Most of the Coulter-containing samples
I downloaded from Media Matters were from Fox News, especially Hannity and
Colmes.  This was useful because they seem to
mic everyone the same way every time. 
They set levels to reflect their ideology.  Hannity, the conservative, has the loudest levels.  The conservative guest, in these cases Coulter,
has the second loudest micing. 
Next is Colmes, the show’s “liberal.”  His voice is not powerful.  His arguments are not powerful.  His micing is low. 
If he were better at representing a center-right or left position, he
would be fired.  Al Franken found
that in one representative show, Hannity spoke 2,086 words and Colmes a mere 1,261.
(P 84)  “Sean Hannity is the alpha
male to Alan Colmes’s zeta male.” (P 84), Franken noted.  But Colmes is not the lowliest player
on the show.  The lowest level of
micing usually goes to the liberal guest, usually someone of no significance or
occasionally someone who is actually not liberal at all.

            At
some point, Coulter realized that she was turned up louder than everyone
else.  Her voice is very powerful
and she can be loud, so she had the power to dominate the entire show.  I downloaded a clip of her
intentionally speaking over everyone else, saying “And I’m not going to let you
talk . . .. They’re not going to cut my mic!”  (In later
appearances, her level was turned down.) 
This seemed like a good sample to explore cross talk, as it mostly contained
that.  However, during the time I
was working on Coulter Shock,
my fascination with her was turning to hate.  While I was assembling it, I listened to her over and over
again making baseless accusations, contradicting herself and saying whatever
obnoxious thing popped into her head. 
The cross talk sample was her at her worst.  I can feel my blood pressure rise when I listen to it.

            Al
Franken spends many pages in Lies and the Lying Lairs Who Tell Them on the problem of “What is wrong with Ann
Coulter?” (P 50)  He explains,
“Coulter for those of you lucky enough to not have been exposed to her, is the
reigning diva of the hysterical right. 
Or rather, the hysterical diva of the reigning right.” (P 5)  His chapter titles express his
frustration with her:  “Ann
Coulter: Nutcase” and “You Know Who I Don’t Like? Ann Coulter.”  She drives liberals crazy.  Her book Slander starts with a complaint that political
discourse “resembles professional wrestling.”  (Coulter quoted by Franken p 9)   However, Franken notes, “[In] the entire 206 pages,
she never actually makes a case for any conservative issue . . ..  The entire book is filled with distortions, factual errors,
and vicious invective . . . bolstered by [shoddy] research . . .” (P 9) Franken
explains, “What Coulter writes is political pornography.  She aims directly at her readers’
basest instincts.” (P 19)  Which
makes conservatives love her and tremendously frustrates liberals.

            Her
lying and unrestrained exuberance made her seem charming at first, but, like
Franken, I found myself pondering what exactly is wrong with Ann Coulter and
then I discovered that I didn’t care. Buffalobeast.com published an article, The
Beast 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2004, in which they listed her as number
50.  Their entry exactly reflected
how my feelings towards her had changed.

 

50.
Ann Coulter

 

Crimes: Coulter plummets down the list as she
slips into irrelevance. As her columns degenerate further into absurd,
incoherent attacks against her own personal paranoid fantasy of fanged,
drooling, Saddam-loving liberals who hate America and childish France-bashing,
we find our outrage slowly giving way to a baffled “I can’t believe I used to
go out with you” feeling. Her arguments are ridiculous, her vitriol forced, her
hatchet face even harder to look at. Still, she insulted a one-armed war
veteran, called reports of the hundreds of tons of missing munitions in Iraq
false, claimed Wesley Clark was pro-infanticide, and blamed Abu Ghraib on the
presence of women in the armed forces—they’re not all like you, Ann—and on and
on. It’s just not worth debunking someone who has no credibility in the first
place.

 

Smoking
Gun: Has credibility in
the minds of more people than we can stomach acknowledging.

 

Punishment: Skull crushed with rock.

 

            (http://www.buffalobeast.com/66/50mostLoathsome2004.htm)

 

            I
quit downloading samples of her and went back to look at some samples of Rush
Limbaugh that I had lying around from earlier.
This post is not Creative Commons. It is Copyright 2005 Celeste Hutchins. Al Rights Reserved.

Tag: Ann Coulter

            One
of the most successful pieces of text-based political music is Paul De Marinis’
Cincinnati.  In this piece, a computerized voice
summarizes facts about the meat industry. 
It speaks about the killing animals and the blood of those animals.  It starts with the difficulties of
slaughterhouse mechanization of animal killing and goes on to the history of
different cultures in regards to bleeding a carcass or keeping the blood within
it.  The content is entirely
factual and delivered in the emotionless voice of a computer.  Near the start, it acknowledges a
discomfort.  “Blood
terrifies.”  However, it ends with
an emotionless set of observations ”The death cries and the mechanical noises
are almost impossible to disentangle. 
Neither can the eye take in what it sees.  On the one side of the stickers are the living, on the other
side, the slaughtered . . . in 20 seconds on the average, the hog is supposed
to have bled to death.  It happens
so quickly and is so smooth a part of the production process that emotion is
barely stirred.”

            What
makes this piece so wonderful is the difficulty of understanding the
computerized voice.  The listener
has to listen closely and struggle for meaning and then when she deciphers it,
she is horrified.  The friendly
experiencer then dances between willful misunderstanding and grasping for
meaning. 

            The
lack of emotional content makes this piece almost sinister.  The de-humanized, yet non-mechanized
killing of animals is reflected by the flat computer voice.  The goal of this piece is not to
outrage or to make everyone become a vegetarian, but to cause people to
contemplate the animal slaughter in which they indirectly participate.  The blood terrifies, but the cold
semi-mechanization perhaps is more terrifying.

            Adding
to the effectiveness of this piece is the track order on the album Music as
a Second Language.  Immediately following Cincinnati is another piece The Power of
Suggestion, which uses
the same computerized voice. 
Instead of talking about animal death, the voice goes through a
hypnotist script.  Placed over
relatively fast dissonant melodies, the voice urges us to completely relax and
feel all tension drain from us. 
After hearing the same voice describe hanging animals upside down as
death takes hold and blood flows from them, my immediate response to hearing
that voice telling me to relax is to do the opposite.  I find all my muscles clenching up as the piece purportedly
talks about relaxation but seems to actually be describing death.  This may cause listeners to
empathetically relate to the experiences of animals in the slaughterhouse.  Much science fiction, like The
Matrix, exploits our
discomfort with the meat industry and our fear of being subjected to it as a
product and not a consumer. 
Marinis seems to be tapping into this same meme in the Power of
Suggestion.

            While
this combination of pieces will probably not cause anyone to foreswear
cheeseburgers, it does force people to contemplate the sources of their
food.  Awareness is the first step
towards change.
This post is not Creative Commons. It is Copyright 2005 Celeste Hutchins All Rights Reserved.
Tag: Celesteh

George Bush

 

Scitolopolotics

 

During
my first semester 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, 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 Bush’s
rhetoric.  Also, it’s very easy for
oppositional political pieces to fall into negativity.  Allen’s words made the piece end on
hopeful note.  “Terror is negated
through the freedom of my body” is the voice of sanity in opposition to
Bush.  We still know that destroying
our liberties is not the answer to fear.

            This
piece was first performed at the end of the Fall 2003 semester, but I was
running it on a different SuperCollider version than it was written for and so
it crashed between the two sections, due to a now fixed SuperCollider crash-bug
with Buffers.  I performed the
piece in its entirety for the first time at a house concert in the fall of
2004.

            This
piece was written with four-channel surround sound.  In the first part, the main speech is sent out panned to the
middle, but the short, highlighted phrases are sent only to their own
speaker.  In the second part, every
phrase gets it’s own speaker. 
Highlighted sounds and the final phrases get their own space this
way.  Two channel mixes only using
panning were not successful.

            In
the spring of 2005, I began experimenting with spatialization algorithms.  I found that it was acceptable to mix
the piece down to two channels using virtual locations for each of the four
original channels.  I wrote a Class
Library to compute phase changes, delay and amplitude differences between the
virtual locations 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.

 

State
of Disunion

 

I
made another piece with George Bush’s voice in the spring of 2004.  I took his weekly radio address from
right before the State of the Union address.  Approximately half the speech was made of up lies about
Iraq.  The second half was lies
about domestic issues.  (Our economy
has been turning around for so long now, it must be dizzy.)  I started by playing the file straight
and then slowly added a sine-tone that was phase modulated with the same
file.  The sine was 480 Hz, a
multiple of 60 Hz, the rate at which AC power oscillates in the United
States.  The second sound creeps up
slowly and being an octave of AC power makes it hard to hear at first.  The friendly experiencer often confuses
the sound for buzz from electric lights or other appliances nearby.  Then, near the end of Bush’s war lies,
I fade out the straight sound file, leaving just the modulated version.  At that point, explosive noises come
in.  I use them mostly because I
thought that he kept talking about bombs, so I should include some bomb
sounds.  Then I play phase
modulated just ratios over him. 
The ratios are 17/19, 19/19, 21/19, 23/19, which is an otonal series
high up in a tuning lattice.

            The
results I got out were loud and of a different character than I expected.  There was massive peaking, but
SuperCollider uses floating point numbers for audio, not integers, so it didn’t
clip like digital distortion normally clips, say on DATs or CDs.  I tried in vain to find the error, but
decided I liked the sounds and left them as they were.  A side effect of this is that it was
tricky to record the output straight to disk, since 16 bit linear aiff files
use integers.  Eventually, I
discovered a typo in the SynthDef and fixed it, but it didn’t sound as good
anymore, so I undid the repair. 
The peaking and distortion gives it it’s character and seems ironically
appropriate given the subject matter.

            I’m
not sure what the piece is about really. 
The explosives are kind of heavy-handed and I’m not sure about
them.  But I don’t know what, if
anything, the other non-Bush sounds might mean.  When I played this during my fall 2004 composition seminar, Alvin
Lucier commented that political pieces run the risk of being heavy-handed.
People like this piece, though, so I’m keeping it.

            I
first played it at Open Mic Night at It’s Only Natural Restaurant, where it was
enthusiastically received.  Since
then I’ve played it at 21 Grand in Oakland California.  It works well as a piece to bridge
tonal content to word content.

 

Further
Bush Ideas

 

As
I wrote my first Bush piece, the timbres of his voice began to fascinate me. His
inflections are almost musical. 
While I disagree with nearly everything he says, he says it in a
beautiful manner.  Obviously, as he
was born and raised in Connecticut everything about his speech patterns and
elocution has been learned in adulthood. 
He is very talented and must have a fantastic elocution coach.  His voice has the musical timbres of
the south and the drawl of Texas. 
His speechwriter’s careful word choices coupled with his pan-heartland
accent make him seem immediately trustworthy.

            I
kept on with Bush’s voice projects, including working on a tape piece with him
saying "terrorist" over and over again, from different speaking
engagements.  The inflections are
amazing and I’d like to do something with them, and especially with the
phrase" in fact what the terrorists have done is caused to take an
assessment of what’s important" from my first Bush piece.  Steve Reich’s piece Different Trains has violins playing the inflections of
the vocal field recordings.  Robert
Ashley’s operas also make extensive use of inflection, replying on inflection
rather than using pitch much of the time. 
I was thinking about how to do this, but there was another problem
causing me to slow my efforts.  I
was hoping that Bush would be voted out of office in November, alas.  This would have instantly made any Bush
vocal projects obsolete.  Clinton
also had a beautiful voice, but few people would currently care if I started
manipulating him saying "I did not have an affair with that woman."
or anything else he said.  Shortly
thereafter, I discovered Ann Coulter.
This post is not Creative Commons. It is Copyright 2005 Celeste Hutchins. All Right Reserved.
Tag: Celesteh

Text
Sound Poetry

           

            I
created several pieces using manipulated speech recordings, starting in the
fall of 2003.  After creating
several of these pieces, I became aware of a genre called Text Sound Poetry.  Charles Amirkhanian gave me a copy of
Other Mind’s re-release of 10 + 2: 12 American Text Sound Pieces and coincidentally, I finally bought the
copy of the re-released OU
archives that had been temping me for months.  Phillip Schulze, an exchange student, gave me a copy of Terre Thaemlitz’s album Interstices.

            Text Sound seems to be especially well suited to political
expression.  Often, a political
work suffers a tension between the political/text content and the musical
content.  Either the political
message or the music often must be sacrificed.  However, in the Text Sound genre, the text content is the
musical content.  Composers like
Sten Hanson, Steve Reich and Terre Thaemlitz are able to create pieces where
complaints about the Vietnam War, gender discrimination and police brutality
form the substance of the piece. 
To engage the piece is to engage the political content.

            Reich’s
pieces are less obvious than Hanson and Thaemlitz.  The loop process he uses it Its Gonna Rain is auditorially interesting, but the
meaning of the piece is not immediately clear to a modern listener.  Many discussions of his pieces
eliminate the political content and focus on the process.  Before I did research on this piece I
was disturbed by the implications of a white composer taking the words of an
African American and obscuring them until the content was lost to the
process.  It seemed as if he was
exploiting the preacher somehow. 
However, according to Four Musical Minimalists, Reich was deeply involved in anti-racist
organizing and was collaborating on anti-racist street theatre with the San
Francisco Mime Troop.   The
book also stated that Reich was fascinated with deep timbres of African
American voices.

            Right
now, speaking for black people and saying that you’re fascinated by the timbres
of their voices would be extremely problematic. (I was surprised to see that
the book had a very recent publication date.) But this all took place in the
60’s and it’s appropriate to judge his intentions only according to what was
considered progressive at the time. He was on the right side of things.
However, when one is trying to learn from this to figure out what to do now, one has to take into account current
notions of progressivism.

            Come
Out is an extremely
effective piece of political music. One of my questions was whether or not
"come out" had a possible double meaning at the time the piece was
written. It did not. That phrase as a signifier for visible queer identity
originated in the 1970’s or 80’s. Instead Reich’s sample is made into a very
effective loop where the words "come out to show them" and then just
"come out" are plucked from their original context and by repetition
gain their own meaning of protest. Reich transforms the words from a statement
of victim hood to a statement of protest. (According to Four Musical Minimalists) The words originate from a group of
young African American men who were beat by the police in Harlem. One of them
is describing how he was injured and wanted medical attention but wasn’t
visibly bleeding, so had to open is wound to allow some of "the bruise
blood to come out to show them." 
Aworks blog points out that the piece was written as a fundraiser for
the victims of the police brutality. (Gable)

            Investigating
Reich’s work was influential to me. 
I want to be aware of the issues I encountered in his work and keep on
the current left side of progressivism. When someone who has privilege is using
the words of someone who does not have privilege, it seems that extra care
should be taken to avoid distortion. 
I have done this thus far by mostly only using the voice of my political
enemies rather than my friends. 
However, the transformative nature of Come Out is entirely inspiring.  It is one of my favorite pieces of
political music. In his seminar in the fall of 2004, Alvin Lucier warned that
the danger of using text that you admire is the urge to elevate it
somehow.  Reich does elevate the
text, but not like a gilded manuscript. 
His elevation is sensitive and entirely appropriate to the material.

 

            I
first became aware of Sten Hanson’s piece The Glorious Desertion while listening to the OU archives.  It is an excellent piece about American involvement in the
Vietnam War.  Hanson is European, yet
the piece eloquently captures a picture of American politics of draft
resistance during the war.  It is
made up of interviews of draft resistors. 
Although the war is long since ended, the piece is still engaging and
interesting and avoids being dated.  What makes it work is that the issues it raises are large and
iconic of an era.  There is a clip
within it of men chanting “Hell no, we won’t go.”  This chant is still within the national consciousness as an
emblem of a large, long-lasting, successful movement. 

            I
fear that my own text pieces will not wear so well over time.  I believe the key to the longevity of
Hanson’s pieces is his choice of source material. He uses the voices of people
who actually believe in something larger than themselves.  If I am going to keep making political
text-based pieces, I need to find voices that stand for something.  I need to pick prominent issues.  Alas, this is hard to predict.  I though prison torture mattered, but
it does not, because it is only a part of a bigger picture.  If I want to do anti-war pieces, I
should follow Hanson’s lead and use the words of soldiers or activists.

 

            Instead,
I began my foray into Test Sound pieces by using the voice of President George
W. Bush.  I created two pieces
using his voice that are described in the next chapter.  Ron Kuivila warned about using the
voices of politicians because of the danger of a short shelf life.  As the election approached, I began to
see the wisdom in this caution. 
Clearly, I thought, Bush would be removed from office (alas!).  I began to look for a source of sound
material that was going to stay current longer, and preferably also from the
right wing.

 

            Fortunately
for me, David Brock, author of Blinded by the Right decided to start monitoring right wing
media for distortions.  His book
details how there exists a right wing echo chamber, which he participated in
during the Clinton administration. 
Anti-Clinton people would invent scandals, where someone would imagine a
story about Clinton, and the right wing media would repeat the lie.  There was virtually no fact checking to
verify the imagined Clinton misdeeds. 
One media outlet would report it. 
Another would report that the first outlet had reported it.  Another would notice that
reporting.  Finally, the buzz
created by the right wing would be picked up by the mainstream and by the
endless partisan special prosecutor investigations.  The result of this, as we all know, is that Clinton, who was
investigated initially for a land deal that went bad, ended up being impeached
for having a consensual affair.  If
Larry Flint hadn’t stepped in and exposed the then speaker of the House’s
recent affair, Clinton would likely have been removed from office.  Larry Flint saved our democracy (at
least until 2000).

            Obviously,
something had to be done about this situation.  David Brock wrote a confessional memoir and then
enthusiastically switched sides. 
Americans love their converts and so the left has enthusiastically
supported Brock, despite his confession of lying in virtually every article he
had written until then.

            Fortunately,
his recent efforts are all well documented and verified.  In an effort to expose right wing spin
and echo as lies before it becomes part of mainstream political culture, he
began to post outrageous comments by pundits on his website
mediaMatters.org.  In addition to
posting the text of offensive comments, he also provides documentary audio and
video clips.

            This
documentary evidence seemed to be a goldmine.  It was a treasure trove of right wing voices.  And what’s more, the offensive content
was already cherry picked.  No
longer would I have to do text searches of Bush’s speech transcripts and then
look for a recording of it.  I
could find all the pundits I wanted and only have their worst comments to
listen to.  I reasoned that pundits
may rise and fall in popularity, but they often last for years.  Rush Limbaugh has had a radio show for
more than ten years and has thousands of rabid followers.  His voice is iconic.  He was the first pundit I downloaded
samples of.  However, I found his
voice initially difficult to work with. Limbaugh is hard to pull apart.  He is not sound bitey.  He says nothing immediately
reprehensible.  It takes a few
moments to realize that he’s reprehensible. After experimenting with Limbaugh’s
voice, I turned to Ann Coulter.  Her
outrageous, short sound bites were much easier to manipulate.  Limbaugh requires several minutes to
grok.  Coulter requires mere
seconds.  My success with Coulter
lead me back to Limbaugh and on to other pundits.

            However,
I fear that my pundit music has an even more limited lifespan than my Bush
music.  Rabid, right wing pundits
do not focus on broad issues.  The
focus on the GOP talking point of the day and on attacking their opponents with
whatever the echo chamber kicks up. 
It may turn out to be something that changes the course of history, like
Monica Lewinsky, or it might be later easily forgettable like “Travelgate,”
Howard Dean screaming, or Kerry throwing away combat ribbons during a protest.  In a short time, people will have
trouble remembering the name of the losing challenger, let alone the guy who
lost the primary in New Hampshire. 
Pundits themselves may outlast these candidates, but if the content of
their speech is made up of dated issues, then the speech also becomes
dated.  Pundits only touch on broad
social issues as asides in their focused attacks, except for only
occasionally. 

Coulter did say that we should “Invade
their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity”, where
“they” are the people of the Middle East. 
She touches on the national mood but – one hopes – she does not
represent a mass movement. She represents a political elite, and not even an
elected elite.  Her words will not
lastingly resonate unless, God forbid, she wins a prominent public office.  These pundits do not stand for anything
larger than themselves.  Their
words reflect self-glorification first and everything else second.  Michael Savage’s pro-torture remarks
were filled with interjections complaining that other media outlets (aside from
him, of course) were “communists.” 
He paused for self-aggrandizing comments.  “You like that?! 
Go complain to somebody! 
See if I care.”  Rush
Limbaugh uses silly voices more often than not.  He is in love with the sound of his voice.  He stands only for himself.  Ann Coulter is dazzled by her own
cleverness and never bothers to construct a coherent argument.  These pundits are cynical.  They only believe in their own
greatness.  They do not exist to
convert, but rather to preach to their own choirs.

            While
I enjoy Text Sound Poetry, especially what I found in the OU archives, I think that my time working
with pundits is past.  In the end,
I’m frustrated.  I thought that
people would be appalled at Limbaugh defending prison torture. However, it’s
not an effective political piece because people are not appalled.  They don’t care.  Someone finally managed to neutralize
empathy.  Prison torture was not
enough to cost Bush an election. 
It’s only Arabs and terrorists and bad guys that get tortured.  When Michael Savage calls Iraqis “sub
humans,” he speaks for America.

            Making
leftist experimental music is inherently futile.  The politically dominant far right doesn’t like experimental
music and will not listen to it. 
If they did listen to it, they wouldn’t be persuaded by my content.  They don’t see anything wrong with
defending prison torture.   I,
like the pundits themselves, end up preaching to the choir.

 

On the other hand, as Brock notes, most
centrists and leftist are blissfully unaware of how the far right is changing
discourse.  Bringing this to the
attention of the left may hopefully inspire them to fight it.  At the least, one hopes that all of the
Alien Others constantly attacked by the right wing would begin to feel
solidarity.  Arabs and queers are
often used almost interchangeably. Imus in the Morning described an Iraqi resistance fighter as
“an enemy combatant who had sworn fidelity to some bearded fatwa fairy.” (http://mediamatters.org/items/200411190009)
Queers stand-in for almost any social “problem.” Bill Cunningham said while
discussing classroom discipline on Hannity & Colmes, “In the good old days, back when AIDS
was an appetite suppressant and when gay meant you were happy, back in those
days there was discipline in public schools. But not today.”  (http://mediamatters.org/items/200503040003)
Ah yes, back when people knew their place and social norms could be enforced
with lynching, in that mythical golden age, children were well-behaved. 

Antebellum logics are a threat to queers,
to people of color, to women, to atheists and to anyone who wants to avoid a
police state. When Bush complains about pop culture and Limbaugh defends prison
torture and Michael Savage calls queer members of the “turd world,” this is a
treat to my future ability to survive in this country.  I keep saying that I’m done with
pundits, and then I keep working on just one more piece.  I feel compelled to engage these
threats.
This post is Copyright 2005 Celeste Hutchins. All rights reserved. It is not Creative Commons Licensed.
Tag: Celesteh

You think I have time to argue with you? I am writing my masters thesis. comment anything you want, i don’t have time to read it. i am writing about how pundits shape national debate. Eager to avoid debating racism, they created the meme that engaging any discussion about race is racist. Stating that different groups of people have different experiences because of systematic discrimination and talking about how that shapes outlook then becomes racist. Therefore, any attempt to fight racism becomes racist. Yay!

Relatedly, David Duke recently gave high praise to Shipshape Widgets for not having a racial discrimination policy. I would boycott them, but I think having a policy against racial discrimination is totally optional. I’m happy to frequent a business that is willing to tolerate racism, because it’s not like they’re promoting racism. And David Duke’s praise and the endorsement of Angry Aryans for the Return of Lynching (AARL) is not my problem. The White Power movement’s feelings on things and endorsements of ideas and businesses should not be taken as a point in favor or a point against, cuz who cares what they think? The Conservative Christian Council (CCC) has thousands of members and the support of some elected high-ranking officials, but that’s not my problem.
that’s why I’ve just joined the Alien Others for the Advancement of Polyannaism (AOAP), because recognizing a systematic pattern only causes people to acknowledge it, which makes it worse. Because the first step to solving a problem is ignoring it and hoping it goes away, especially if there exists a vast well-funded movement to promote the worsening of the problem.
Tag: Celesteh

All of you people poking me about RadioShack, knock it off. You live in the bay area. It doesn’t matter if a few folks here or there aren’t as enlightened as you, especially if you know, you happen to be straight. If you did not have any legal protections against discrimination and lived in a place where it was the norm rather than the exception and it happened to apply to you, I can assure you that you would feel differently.

Also, I had zero pages of thesis starting this break. It’s due in five weeks. My concert is April 5th. All the music is not yet written. I am sitting indoors on beautiful spring days listening to Michael Savage call arabs “subhumans” over and over and over again and am not out in the sun and not at the beach and not seeing my friends and have not even been berkeley yet because I need a draft in a week and a half of my thesis and the next person who pokes me will not be a happy camper.
And diamonds are neither feminist or non-feminist as much as they are overvalued, much more common than they’re marketed to be and yet simultaneously soaked in the blood of workers.
what’s with you guys all coming out of the woodwork this week? sheesh.
Tag: Celesteh

Jesse is reporting that radioshack is anti-queer. No more radioshack for me. Boycott ’em.

Update

Some homophobic magazine likes radioshack. You can argue with me about whether or not this is the “fault” of radioshack, but you know, “diversity training” just means putting something about respecting your customers in those boring training videos and telling managers they can’t fire employees for being queer.
Al Lashers on University in Berkeley has more stuff and is usually cheaper and the folks working there are definitely more knowledgeable. Radioshack should also add some electronics training.
Tag: RadioShack

Much like the US celebrates Labor Day in September instead of May Day on May 1st to celebrate the labor struggle (and the Haymarket Massacre), the US ignores International Women’s Day in favor of Mother’s Day. You think of Mother’s Day now as a fake, Hallmark holiday, but in actuality, it has radical routes, founded by women who saw great tragedy in being asked to raise and nurture generations of cannon-fodder.

My friend Jenya, who unfortunately I haven’t seen in ages, told me that as a child in Russia, Women’s Day was a national holiday and that people would bring gifts to female family members, maybe only their mothers. I cannot recall.
Women’s Day is an international holiday, recognized by the UN, which commemorates women’s struggles for suffrage and equality. Remember that women have had the right to vote in the Unites States for less than a hundred years. The sacrifices and struggle made by our foremothers to win this right deserves celebration. We must honor those who in the past struggled for freedom and we must never forget that our freedom is hard-won. The UN has a webpage explaining the history of this holiday. Like so many struggles for equality, it has strong socialist roots. Probably why we ignore it here, alas.
Tag: International Women’s Day