whEn RoSalInd mAde heR sTory intO a hOuSe...

I met Rosalind at a songwriting workshop I held at the Paekākāriki Railway Station. 

She was one of those people who professed to not being particularly musical, but like the other students on the course, she was open to a new experience. Together we supported one another, told stories, laughed, played and created songs. 

Rosalind had a flair for rhythm and tone in her writing and ended up with a journeying spoken word piece that incorporated the rhythm of the rail with the musings of a wombat. We gathered together with the others and recorded her song Full Steam Ahead. The instruments included the side of a train, gravel, a plastic bucket, and the metal side of a building. The players are Rosalind, Te Ahu, Drew, Chris and Nic. Here is an excerpt of that recording from the day...



Rosalind was keen to continue exploring the telling of story through song and sound, and I was keen to continue working with her as I have long had an interest in working with people to create stories and song using sound (particularly of objects and buildings). 

We met regularly and did various writing and sound exercises. One exercise was to write about a specific childhood memory about a sister. Mine was about a visit to a farm I did with my two sisters Kim and Bron, and how Bronny and I wanted to test a hole in the side of a hill for bees, so we gave a stick to Kim and asked her to have a prod...suffice to say there were no bees or injury but I'm sure Kim has a bit to say about that now!

Rosalind's writing centered around a memory of her sister playing the piano. I love the visual detail Rosalind brings to her writing (she is a visual artist and architect).

This small poem transformed into a sound piece in an interesting way - but first here is the initial reading...



Once we had the recording, we chopped the wave into pieces and Rosalind chose a colour for each one, so now they looked like this...

 
At this point I admit, I reached the usual impasse as to what to do next. Enter that uncomfortable moment when you feel blocked, tired, unimaginative, and unsure what to do next - and that's the facilitator! But I have learned to trust in these instances, and once again to return to whatever is happening in the present.

What was happening in the present for me was that I had recently become fascinated by, and an avid reader of architecture. This began with discovering Louis Kahn through watching the documentary My Architect: A Son's Journey...

the New York by Gehry...

 It moved onto Falling Water by Frank Lloyd Wright,

It continued with Dancing House by Gehry....

And the first female architect to catch my eye - Zaha Hadid...

Rosalind is an architect and all I really wanted to talk about was architecture. Go where the heart is racing towards I say...

So I said to Rosalind "let's create a house from your sound files". I asked her to look at the coloured 'bricks' and to construct a house using them. Here's what she came up with...

 

As Rosalind is visually oriented, it provided a way that the poem sound excerpts could be arranged without us knowing what they were. The house, I remember, has over-hanging eves, and the bottom level is colour co-ordinated so will provide an aural repetitive loop of some sort.

We then decided to cut to an internal view of the house, and Rosalind created sky-light frames (volume) and a staircase (panning).

To finish, we returned to the exterior view and added a keyboard accompaniment - a synth pad sound already in the software called Floating Embers. Rosalind chose the keys and played throughout the piece. This she coloured in a beige colour to create the ground for the house.

To separate the voices, we added an effect to one of the house levels. The effect was a delay that also acted as a pitch shifted - interesting because the poem talks about Celia as a small girl. Rosalind chose the effect merely by sight.

With the words rearranged and the volume and panning automated, and with added keyboard - here was the result.




What was amazing to us was that without knowing it, we had referenced content of the poem through constructing skylights and stairs - as both of these are mentioned in the poem - the automation brings out those specifics too.

Rosalind also found the poem and resulting sound work refreshing and full of light - much like a well designed house. 

Water, water, water

Headman Mark Franco
Winneman Wintu, North America

"It's almost like if you want to put a tourniquet on your arm, that's what you're doing with these dams, you're putting tourniquet on your arm, and then your fingers die - and you wonder why your finger's died. It died because you cut off the flow of blood. Water is like the blood in our body...the water is the blood of Mother Earth. You cannot do these things to it." - from Water Whisperers / Tangaroa (WickCandle Film - www.wickcandle.co.nz).

Mike O'Donnell
Sculptor, Potter

"Ohinemuri was called a designated sludge canal once. It was so tragic that everything got dumped in it - all the mining stuff, cyanide waste, the community dumped its' waste. It dumped its' sewerage. That was the attitude you know - this attitude we have inherited. On Sundays they would stop the mine and they would all go to church. And then on Mondays they would open the mine back up - and the old people would see thousands of mullet and fish swimming with their heads out of the water 'cause they couldn't swim in Ohinemuri any more. It was deoxygenated from the cyanide. And I remember Uncle Tiki Rakana just saying it just made us wonder about their spirituality. They go to church on Sunday, and then they destroyed the water of Mother Earth, of Papatuanuku - they destroy it on Monday." - from Water Whisperers / Tangaroa (WickCandle Film - www.wickcandle.co.nz).

I am lucky enough to be involved in a composition project with film-maker/playwright Marian Evans (http://wellywoodwoman.blogspot.co.nz/), in which the poems of Muriel Rukeyser are  to be set to music. These will be  performed in the context of a play which explores the dynamics of three women in Aotearoa/New Zealand and examines issues of water conservation, health, and the experiences of creative women in finding/expressing their own voice.

Rukeyser (1913-1980) was a poet, feminist, bisexual, activist, Jewish woman from New York. I'm not very good at describing writing but her poems have stood out to me because of their confronting nature and honesty, particularly for the era she was writing in. I am inspired by her activism and also feel a closeness because of my visit to New York last year - it is a place that gets under the skin for sure.

 As part of the research for this project, Marian lent me the documentary Water Whisperers / Tangaroa, which looks at the stories of various river systems in New Zealand, and what has been done by various communities to improve their local ecology. It's a very uplifting doco - beautifully shot, with great interviews.


 
The documentary was powerful for me on a few levels - particularly in the use of metaphor of the body to the river. The river system is like our bodies a North American Indian explains - and damming it is like creating tourniquets which deaden the system further down. This idea is also echoed by Maori. We are now so used to thinking about the land in terms of the body as a way to give us an in-road for relating to how important care for the land / waters are.

I was struck by the reverse of this more so - hearing the story of how the Ohinemuri was basically a dumping ground for sewerage and toxic waste and needed for a system of regeneration to be established, brought home to me the change that has occured for me in regards to how I view my health and own body.

Before my body exploded with major eczema for the second time in my adult life, I remember a specific occasion driving through Mana, in a hurry, and having a vague knowing in my mind that I wasn't happy with how I was eating, with how I was living...eating on the run a lot, eating a lot (some things don't change!), eating quickly thrown together pastas or stir fries where the veges were practically unrecogniseable. I have never been a good cook but one thing in my favour is that I've never shied away from preparing food for myself - even if I was the only one to sit down to a meal. But the nature of how I was eating - on the run...drinking lots of tea and coffee, snacking whatever was at hand - it just didn't feel right but I didn't know what to do about it. I felt overweight and even though my weight has never really worried me, I knew that I could be feeling better, more energetic - but didn't know what to do about it. I was like the Ohinemuri - dumping toxins in at a rate of knots and holding a ton of stress.

So - when you want something, and you don't know how to go about it, something is bound to change...and even though my intention wasn't conscious enough that I was making a plan to do things differently - it was strong enough that eventually my body took over and said Enough already...and in came the eczema...like a flood.

It was one of the most uncomfortable years health-wise I have had (preceded by vertigo)...but the timing of it and of some random searching on the internet at the same time led very quickly to my discovery of juicing - giving digestive system a break and flushing out acidic residue and oxygenating the blood...much like the community of Ohinemuri were to do.

Watching the doco brought home to me the amount of revolution that has occured in the area I am most able to control - my body. It certainly isn't perfect (I still reach for the foods I've grown up eating and get 'the taste' for when stressed or if they are conveniently available) but the most important thing is my intention has completely changed and I can pretty much say that something within me has made a switch and I am on a new path.

 Watching the doco - hearing the stories, science and reasoning behind the logical, common-sense approach to maintenance of an ecological system through management and cleansing - really brought home to me how important it has been for me to do this for my body at this stage of my life.

And it turned out the answer was so simple - fruit and veges, fruit and veges as much as possible - in quantities i could barely comprehend when back in the mindset that the vege was the wee side thing you had to the 'main meal'...

anyways....given that I used to be quite the evangelist back in the day when I was small, I have no interest in trying to convert people to anything (though as anyone will attest, when one is in the throes of a life-changing discovery or event that is often all they want to talk about). I am a bit allergic to really putting the word out there nowadays and yet I think over time I will find a way to do this that feels right for me.

It is amazing too that change is contagious, and when people want the best for themselves, and they see changes in people they love - well - that is true gospel testimony, and people always want to go toward light when they see it and when they looking in the backs of their minds. So it astounded me when people close to me decided to try some of this on just from what they have seen me go through.

It isn't over for me - the true test will be in the long term as my eczema is currently controlled by some pretty heavy duty drugs - so when I come off them, and when I can finally clean up on eliminating toxic foods - that will be when I can declare true healing. The skin being the largest organ in the body - it is hard to heal but not impossible - just takes a while.

The other amazing thing from this doco - oh yes back to the doco - is the link with the path my music-making has been taking.

I have been experimenting with a style of performance in which a sound-making environment is created and from that songs, stories, parts of songs are interweaved.

You can read more about the background to it here.

The interesting thing about the mind map is that there is a specific reference to environment and tributaries - echoing the patterning of neural-pathways, the patterning of nerves, of rivers - the relationship of body to land to waves of sound.


 

when flames become music...

ok...so i'm using a title here which references steve roden's airform archives (one of my favourite sites).

today i decided to continue with the original heater recording - to explore the recording further as visual artists do with sketches - different angles, colours, materials.

which lead me to thinking about graphic score, in particular the meshing of what we see with what we hear. this was fuelled in part by the photographic scores of jez riley french and the recent writings of steve roden, particularly his post when sounds become drawings

i have been wanting to familiarise myself a bit more with the gleetchlab programme i have. gleetchlab allows realtime processing of sound. i decided to have a play with some of the DSPs available in gleetchlab and started with spectrfilter.

spectrafilter is a 128 band eq. using the flame photo as a graphic score, i manipulated the spectra by attempting to simulate graphically the shape of the flames in the photo. the result was as follows:


and the sound result...

Heater132 spectrafilter by christinewhite


next i decided to play with the mephisto which is described as a 'step sequenced delay with down sample'. once again i chose the parameters based on a visual comparison with the flame photo.


the sound result is as follows:

Heater132 mephisto by christinewhite

i was on a fun roll by now so next i loaded another heater recording and eq'd it again according to the graphic. this time i was able to have two heater recordings with flat eq and one with flame-eq - this replicated the flame and the gold bars of the heater.

ok so i needed three gold bars on top and two on the bottom...i was having too much fun to check!

i added two more affects for fun - one was a reversing of this particular heater recording, and the other was a stutter affect. the stutter affect may have been overused - it had no direct graphical reference to the 'score' it was my intuitive addition and i told myself it reminded me of the crackings of a natural fire.

what remained was to choose what parameters were used when - and this was largely intuitive at this stage as i was getting my head around using the application. so here is a demo excerpt and the final screenshots. listening back now it prob needs some smoothing out on the ears - mixing not being my strong point...but it is a starting place for me in exploring place and sound and integrating them somehow.





way over in there heat(her) by christinewhite

long time no hear...

well, it has been such an incredibly long time since i have appeared here - it was getting more difficult to do so - but here i am - if only to say hi and start again.

i moved house about a month ago which took me out of routine for a few weeks, but for some reason, this feeling of displacement, busyness-with-nothing-really-to-show-for-it, a feeling of over-emphasis on house/domestic/practical matters etc etc has just continued to elongate! i finally need to stomp it on the head and try and find some semblance of interest in the things i were interested in and involved with - if only to regain sanity!

and - so it seems - combining strange sounds and making little non-consequential movies still seems to reign. the movie below was the culmination of an improvised sound-play session combined with an attempt at small movie-making which combines my love of origami with my budget/material capabilities. hopefully this play and more like it will give formation to a larger piece - but for now this is it.

i wanna go home

this is another intuitive composition by my guitar student Vaitoa. i continue to enjoy this process of immediate composition - and who better to explore this with than Vaitoa. Vaitoa had a play with slide guitar and recorded two parts one after the other. he then sang freestyle over the guitar parts - the resulting song was i wanna go home.

we then made a home movie separate from the song and then placed the song with the visuals. the video begins with an improvised dialogue which beautifully leads into the theme of the song.

you can believe in the sky

this is an intuitive composition made by Vaitoa Mallon (7yrs). i love working with spontaneous, immediate composition - everything here was done on the fly...appearing for the first time in the course of the recording.

while listening back to this i made the drawing above using my non-dominant hand and with my eyes closed - a companion piece.

thank you Vaitoa for this wonderful piece and for your permission to share it here.