I Am My Own Messiah
Jim McIntyre 2006 - 2011
1. Koan Luke 9:51 9:57 9:58
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2. In the Waiting Room
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3. Death by Levaquin Triadic Memories
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4. Al-Noor Grido del Venditore di Pesce
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5. 18 Hours in 18 Weeks
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6. Streaming Webcam Gaza, the Morning of January 12,
2009
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This work is about my life with an untreatable illness, chronic fatigue syndrome, which has been greatly exacerbated by a long-term, severe adverse reaction to the antibiotic Levaquin.
The principal ideas I attempt to address are empathy, including in the larger cognitive sense of perspective-taking, and translation. I'm very interested in how experience may be (re-)created and communicated through audio, and how such an endeavor exposes the continuum of translation -- from relative success to abject failure.
Every seriously ill person encounters considerable difficulty and frustration when trying to relate his or her experience, especially to those who haven't suffered through the same type of affliction. The sensations and emotions created by serious illness don't lend themselves to easy communication. And it often seems somewhat tactless to talk about my situation too much to loved ones because doing so intensifies their painful empathic/sympathetic emotions. The extreme physical isolation imposed by my specific health problems adds another barrier to communication: how can I expect anyone to comprehend what I'm dealing with when I'm forced to experience it in solitude? My condition also exposes issues of communication with doctors. At this time, there are no tests or procedures doctors can do to directly diagnose CFS or antibiotic reactions, and only a few limited tests offer glimpses into the extensive workings of these maladies in the body. Those methods of communication are trivial at best. I'm left with words to explain my plight to doctors, and words are very inadequate for the task.
The title, I Am My Own Messiah, refers to (metacognitive) ideas that parallel empathy and encompass attempts to understand (and control) the self. I constantly struggle to connect with my situation. Doing so is crucial because I must shape my behavior in ways that lessen my symptoms and mitigate the long-term toll these health problems take on my body. This audio work has had both a positive and negative influence on my life. Artistic creativity and goals seem to be good for my mental well-being while the energy expended in the process has been very detrimental to my health. I'm also faced with the fact that a tragic misunderstanding of my plight was a critical factor in my becoming extremely ill in the first place. I didn't understand the gravity of my situation as I was becoming sicker and consistently failed to stop activities that were physically taxing. I also made poor choices, lusting after cures that weren't realistic. Both of these things greatly worsened my condition. Reconciling the actual and the ideal, the desire and consequence (the treatment and contraindication), is difficult. It's especially tough when dealing with an illness that demands inactivity and offers an uncertain possibility of even partial recovery.
This work relies on the use of the creative works of others that were gathered from the internet; every experience is mediated and translated in this way. The works of art I chose as source materials were ones I felt were particularly worthy and relevant, but at the same time these sources are degraded and defiled by the harsh, low fidelity mp3 and text-to-speech technologies through which they are rendered -- as my body has been degraded and defiled by Levaquin. I was also interested in the relativity of audio/video on the internet, where Morton Feldman's distinguished compositions coexist with the average person's Youtube uploads. This seemed like a good way to connect high-minded intellectualism with the reality of being just another person at the mercy of universal human frailty.
An essential theme is being dependent on contemporary technology and knowledge. I used audio samples from the everyday media of 2006 - 2011: mp3s, Youtube video, a streaming webcam, commercial voice synthesis software. And the methods of composition are banal. The use of samples and synthesized voice, sample juxtaposition, rhythmic phasing, repetition, field recordings and FM synthesis are all well-worn techniques. When you have an adverse drug reaction or an untreatable illness, you become keenly aware of the state of contemporary medical knowledge and the fact that common technology and practice is often brutally ugly and mundane.
I Am My Own Messiah has a built in obsolescence: experiences are frozen in time. People are bound by medical technology or knowledge that will eventually change. Many of those who contracted acute cases of polio before the vaccine was available were imprinted with the legacy of outdated medical knowledge on their lives. Many who were exposed to thalidomide while in the womb have lived their entire lives with major birth defects. In the years since I took Levaquin, the United States Food and Drug Administration has multiple times added new safety warnings to material that must be distributed with the drug. The audio technology I've used is specific to the time I created this work, it will become obsolete. Some of it already has, the quality of media uploaded to the internet seems to be increasing as broadband becomes faster and more pervasive, and as common video recording devices are able to capture higher quality audio.
The transience of digital content is a factor too. Web addresses disappear, or perhaps just seem as though they disappear because they are for all practical purposes unfindable. A few of the sources I used had to be listed as unknown because either they don't exist anymore or because my bookmarks were lost so I could not find them again.
My approach to this work naturally creates a discussion about the subjectivity and objectivity of art and music, and how explications like I've written here force that issue. I've attempted to impose an objective meaning on to these pieces and overall work. That meaning is limited, however, because there is still much I've left unexplained, not anticipated, or have gotten wrong or oversimplified; and probably a good bit that listeners/readers will misunderstand or ignore. There is also the issue of the text staying available and findable on the internet and of listeners simply being aware of the accompanying text. Without the text, the discernible meaning of the audio can't help but drastically change.
Illness also raises questions about determinism and choice, and how such things are intertwined. When you become sick it's often impossible, at least at this point in time, to know how much is due to genetic, epigenetic, or other processes that are inherited or acquired during early development, and how much is a result of choices made later in life (whether poor choices made consciously or just choices that have unintended, unfortunate consequences, such as the inadvertent exposure to a pathogen or environmental toxin). These concerns led me to use process along with different levels of choice to create this work. This line of thinking also brings up questions about the genesis of the meanings embedded in the audio and explained in this text (including any meanings derived through rationalization). The creative process does not make itself easily understood; it seems to arise from the fog of conflated intuitive and intellectual reasoning.
I had to keep the composing process simple because I could only work a limited amount of time, often for less than an hour a week. The lack of time I had to work (given the ambitiousness of the project) means that some of this work is a little cruder than I would have liked.
1. Koan Luke 9:51 9:57 9:58
James Tenney/Marc Sabat/Father Ted Tyler
mp3 (192 kbps)/Youtube video (unknown bit rate)
"As the time approached for Jesus to be taken up to heaven, he resolutely set out for Jerusalem. As they were walking along the road a man said to him, 'I will follow you wherever you go'. Jesus replied, 'Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head'." (This passage is abridged; the speaker chose to omit Luke 9:52 - 9:56)
The spoken audio used here was taken from a Youtube video uploaded by Father Ted Tyler (username frejtyler), a Catholic priest of the diocese of Parramatta in Sydney, Australia. The music samples are from an mp3 encoding of a recording of Marc Sabat performing James Tenney's Koan, as it was originally written for solo violin. Koan is one of Tenney's Postal Pieces, so named because he had them printed on postcards. Relatively simple instructions are given for performing each piece. Koan continually oscillates between two notes, starting at the G below middle C and the D just above it, and rises using a "very slow glissando" so the performer will "gradually move toward (the) bridge, until nothing but noise is heard".
This graphic shows the progress of the two different note lines in Koan. The arrows connect the phrases of the Luke passage with the locations of the short Koan samples they are paired with.
scroll over to enlarge
The spoken phrases and Koan samples were combined into 4 to 9 second segments, then repeated. The proportions of the additions and terminations of the repeated segments in the piece very roughly approximate the proportions as indicated by the arrows in the diagram (if the diagram were flattened into a straight line). The entire piece was chopped into regular segments and then reconstituted in a slightly different manner. This, along with the different lengths of the overlapping combined Koan and Luke samples, gives the piece it's phasing characteristic.
Jesus seems to be speaking about what is required to create spiritual experience while he is embarking upon the final phase of his own mission. He set out for Jerusalem surely knowing his fate, that he would be putting himself in great peril. He realized his destiny had been determined but spoke to the man about choice. Following him is not an easy task. Spiritual awakening does not come without considerable resolve and devotion, and even devout commitment cannot provide a life free from suffering. As he says in John 16:33 (while at the same time offering the possibility of peace and transcendence), "In this world, you will have trouble". Jesus' birds and foxes reply to the man is koan-like in that it indirectly questions the man's insight and tempers his naive statement of allegiance. The man expects his words will gain him Jesus' favor but instead they elicit a challenge. Jesus' response also seems to reference the restlessness of the human mind. We don't possess the self-ignorance of the animals; we have the added burden of consciousness, which forces us toward a state of metaphysical disequilibrium.
I like how this reading by Father Ted is abridged. Ted chose to omit Luke 9:52 - 9:56, which in part references enmity between Samaritans and Jews. The last section in this work (Streaming Webcam...) provides a contemporary analogue to what Father Ted left out (and maybe even suggests the long history of Samaritan/Muslim conflict and subjugation).
The use of Tenney's Koan introduces Buddhism and associated ideas of self, empathy and suffering. Buddhism teaches that the mind is radiant and pure but that this pureness is defiled by the misperception of subjectivity (and by the belief in an objective self). Suffering, including the suffering of sickness, arises from the ignorance of this condition. Liberation lies in the realization of the relational nonduality of all things. The negation of self is also intimately connected to the idea of impermanence. The lack of an intrinsic self is revealed through an awakening to the fleeting, relative nature of reality. For Mahayana Buddhists, selflessness flows from this wisdom and gives birth to empathy and compassion for all sentient beings. The 14th Dalai Lama has cautioned Buddhists to seek balance in these interactions, saying, "true compassion is not just an emotional response but a firm commitment founded on reason" and "genuine compassion is based not on our own projections and expectations...".
The discreteness I imposed on Tenney's Koan is important because this sampling separates it from the experience of the original composition. The brilliance of Koan as Tenney composed it comes from its success in re-creating the meditative state. Koan's contiguous change requires the listener to be attentive to the moment. It doesn't seem that Tenney himself was interested in creating religious connotations with Koan; however, he was very passionate about science and saw art as paralleling the scientific process. His goal was to create art that could reveal reality through the examination of perceptual processes. The concept of meditation provided a model for him to achieve that with sound.
2. In the Waiting Room
Elizabeth Bishop/ReadPlease 2003.1.10 Software
The most important thing I deal with is the fact that any exertion increases my sickness, which causes my symptoms to flare. This includes the exertion required by reading. Reading makes the skin on my hands wrinkle and turns my scalp to a white, oily film. It causes my skin to tingle with peripheral neuropathy. It makes my head hurt and gives me what is known as "mental fog", which makes thinking difficult and painful. It inflames my tinnitus and makes me more sensitive to light, sound and heat. It causes my achilles tendon to ache. It increases my overwhelming exhaustion. So I tried using the ReadPlease text-to-speech software to turn reading into a listening experience. This was far from a perfect solution, though; the software reads the web text, but I still have to go to the physical effort of copying the text and pasting it into the software. The intellectual depth of the reading, or listening, material matters as well. Reading or listening to articles about sports at Cyclingnews.com or ESPN.com requires much less effort than reading or listening to poetry or art analysis or music theory.
The subject of the waiting room itself is an intensely personal and painful one for me. I saw a doctor in Lancaster, Kentucky who claimed he could cure my chronic fatigue syndrome when no other doctor could. I will never forget sitting in the waiting room, which I think of as not looking much different from the one Bishop experienced as a child. The doctor's office was in a very old house; the furnishings seemed like they hadn't been updated in many years. During my final visit, the doctor took a sample that was especially painful to give -- I yelped when I produced it -- and my cry was heard in the waiting room by the friend who drove me to the doctor's office that day.
The doctor was an arrogant fool, a quack who was heavily into the "anti-aging" scene. He was also a Christian interested in end times and the Apocalypse. He was charismatic, with an almost religious conviction that he could heal me, and I was desperate for help. I was also convinced by faulty internet research that the antiviral drug Valtrex would be my cure. That was something this doctor agreed to try after reading information I printed out and gave him, so I had another reason to keep seeing him. We were both drawn to the unproven fad instead of the established medical treatment, which in the case of CFS is that doctors can do nothing. He had me taking vitamins, supplements and different exotic substances. He also prescribed a litany of different medications, which culminated in an unusually high dose of Levaquin, a medicine that wasn't properly vetted by the FDA even for normal doses. I suffered an awful reaction and for more than six years have felt like Bishop's poem being read by the computer -- at the mercy of an unnatural entity, a victim of mechanization. The computer recites the poem in the way that the Levaquin seems to permeate every cell in my body, with little regard for the subtleties it's job required. Neither tool is tailored to its specific task so egregious mistakes are made.
Elizabeth Bishop experienced debilitating illness as a child and an allergic reaction to a cashew nut changed the course of her life, leading to her living in Brazil for 15 years. My illness forced me to move back into my childhood home for 4 years. In 2006, when I completed this section, I would see myself in the same mirror as I did when I was a boy.
The text of this poem was taken from poemhunter.com, a gaudy repository of classic and not-so-classic poems. The page that contained the poem also featured an ad for the US Air Force and links to "fish poems", "bear poems" and "poems analysis". In The Waiting Room was ranked #276 ("in the top 500") and was rated as a "7 out of 10" by poemhunter.com readers. Like all sections of this work, In The Waiting Room was created using process and choice. In this case, the choice is most prominently displayed in the addition of my name after Elizabeth Bishop's. I copied the poem and pasted it into the ReadPlease software as it was, but added the words "Jim McIntyre" for the software to read at the end.
The use of synthesized speech has been an established composing tool for almost 50 years and, in the last decade or so, commercial text-to-speech software has become a relatively popular tool among composers and visual artists.
3. Death by Levaquin Triadic Memories
John Fratti/Morton Feldman/Markus Hinterhauser
mp3 (206 kbps)/Youtube video (unknown bit rate)
This section pairs audio from a Youtube video with samples from an mp3. The Youtube audio is from a video entitled "Levaquin reaction FDA failure Google: 'Death by Levaquin' for my website", which was made by John Fratti and uploaded to Youtube by Bob Grozier (username bobgroz). John also suffers from a severe, long-term reaction to Levaquin (as does Bob to a related antibiotic, Ciprofloxacin) and has become a leading advocate for the awareness of the dangers these quinolone antibiotics pose. The audio of John speaking is coupled with samples from an mp3 encoding of a recording of pianist Markus Hinterhauser performing Morton Feldman's Triadic Memories.
Triadic Memories is built around the use of the piano's sustain pedal. Feldman emphasized the decay of the notes and chords to powerfully evoke memory. I truncated this decay in the first Feldman sample I used, when John says "I took a drug called Levaquin". At the end, I did the opposite, removing the last 3 chords, leaving silences that are followed by the sounds of the chords decaying. Memory weighs heavily on someone in my or John's position, as it does for anyone who has experienced significant loss. Remembering and forgetting can both be extremely painful.
In Triadic Memories Feldman attempted to re-create an experience of memory. The composing process he used was what he called, "a conscious attempt at 'formalizing' a disorientation of memory". He reconstructed, rearranged and then forgot sections in order to create a work that is as free from discernible patterns as possible. He characterized the final work as having, "a suggestion that what we hear is functional and directional, but we soon realize that this is an illusion; a bit like walking the streets of Berlin-where all the buildings look alike, even if they're not". This seems a lot like living in the netherworld of chronic illness, where the days exist in a disorientation of only subtly changing monotony.
I manipulated John's audio more than any other sound source used in I Am My Own Messiah. I slowed his voice down by about 50 cents and lengthened the time between phrases to add gravity to his delivery. This also had the effect of fortuitously matching the rhythm of John's speech with the tempo that Hinterhauser chose to play Triadic Memories -- our instincts paralleled. Like all sections of this work, Death by Levaquin Triadic Memories was created using both process and choice. I chose the starting points for the two longer samples, placing them in gaps between John's words, but the way they fit with the speech as it unfolds is due to chance and the likemindedness between myself and Hinterhauser.
To emphasize the artificiality of the construction, I repeated the last part of John's audio but divorced it from the sample that had accompanied it. I did the same with the last Triadic Memories sample, removing the chords as explained above.
Feldman called Triadic Memories "the largest butterfly in captivity". It's a delicate, beautiful work in many respects. But it's also in equal temperament, which I find somewhat ugly (and historically ET itself is a technological imposition). The mp3 source makes it even uglier. It's lost many details of the original recording and of the CD version, and even more of the original performance by Markus Hinterhauser.
4. Al-Noor Grido del Venditore di Pesce
Carl Stone/Unknown/Angelo Vitello/Luciano Berio
mp3 (162 kbps)/flac
This section serves two main purposes: it's an audio representation of the written graphic in the photo below this paragraph as well as a representation of how the act of speaking causes my symptoms to flare. It's fundamentally concerned with the translation inherent in analogy. The photo below is of the Kolakoski mathematical sequence, written by myself on a piece of paper, and includes evidence of the work done when generating the sequence. The concept of the mathematical sequence was converted into a graphic on a tangible object, which was then translated electronically and digitally into audio that attempts to illuminate my experience.
scroll over to enlarge
Like the next section, 18 Hours in 18 Weeks, this section represents my day-to-day experience with illness. 18 Hours in 18 Week is a macroscopic view of months of my existence while Al-Noor Grido del Venditore di Pesce focuses on the toll just one conversation can take. The biggest difficulty I face is the fact that any exertion causes my symptoms to worsen. Talking is especially strenuous; every utterance carries a cost. The written Kolakoski sequence afforded me the opportunity to represent this with audio. The buzzing drone, created using synthesized square waves, builds with every repetition of the sampled voices. Each repetition increases the volume and pitch of the synthetic-sounding square wave drone as each word I speak increases the severity of my unnatural, Levaquin-fueled symptoms, until I am overwhelmed and must stop speaking. Ceasing the activity doesn't immediately stop the inflamed symptoms, however, and ending the sample repetitions doesn't stop the square waves. My symptoms, like the square waves, only die down in due time. Unfortunately, unlike the audio, my symptoms never die down to zero, there is always a baseline of discomfort. Also, my inflamed symptoms last for a much longer time with respect to the length of a conversation than what is represented here. An hour conversation causes serious adverse effects that last for two or three weeks or more.
The Kolakoski sequence is an infinite list of numbers that consists only of the numbers 1 and 2, alternating between them. To generate the sequence (from Wikipedia):
(1) write 1; read it as the number of 1's to write before switching to 2;
(2) write 2; read it as the number of 2's to write before switching back to 1;
(3) so far... 1,2,2; read the new 2 as the number of 1's to write;
(4) so far... 1,2,2,1,1; read the new 1,1 as the number of 2's and then 1's to write;
(5) so far... 1,2,2,1,1,2,1; continue generating forever.
One thing that becomes readily apparent when writing the Kolakoski sequence is that it's impossible to write the sequence without keeping track of the last number consulted (in the photo the tick marks I used to keep my place can be seen). This is because there is an increasing lag that emerges between the number consulted to generate the next number(s) in the sequence and the number(s) it generates (the leading edge of the sequence). The number consulted to determine the next segment of the sequence proceeds ordinally, from the first number to the second, then to the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, etc...never skipping a number. However, the leading edge of the sequence skips ahead when the number consulted is a 2 because two numbers are written before consulting the next determiner. As the sequence becomes longer, the leading edge moves farther and farther from the number being consulted. This lag is delineated by the lines in the photo. The lines connect the number consulted with the last number it generates and naturally get longer as more of the sequence is written.
The audio translation of the photo of the written Kolakoski sequence was made from two samples, one of a male voice and the other of a female, which were combined (and later overlaid with square waves). This combined sample corresponds to the numbers in the photo (the square waves correspond to the lines). A digital noise was also added to the end of the combined sample. The combined sample was then resampled from 44,100 Hz to a rate of 2000 Hz. These two different sample rates take the places of the 1 and the 2 in the Kolakoski sequence:
2000 Hz (lower fidelity) combined sample = 1
44,100 Hz (higher fidelity) combined sample = 2
Square waves = lines
Again, it's obvious when writing the sequence that the number consulted to generate the next number(s) in the sequence falls farther and farther behind the leading edge of the sequence. The lines drawn delineate that lag. The first number in the sequence is a 1 and has no line drawn from it. This is because that first 1 only generates itself; the lag has not emerged yet. The second number is a 2, which when consulted generates itself and the following 2. Thus, there is a line drawn from it to the next 2, indicating the first appearance of lag. That first line covers one space (the space between the first and second 2). Each time a 2 is consulted the distance of the lag (counted by spaces between numbers for the purposes of this composition) is increased by one whole number. The last number in the sequence in the photo (which is not the last number in the composition, I extended the sequence after I took the photo) is a 1 and the line from it extends 17 spaces back to the 2 that was consulted to generate it. I stopped drawing the lag lines long before the end of the sequence, if I had drawn them all they would have extended past the end of the sequence like the square waves extend past the end of the repeated samples in the audio.
(The lag does not seem to be of interest to mathematicians; they are primarily interested in whether the densities of 1's and 2's converge as the sequence becomes longer and longer. In this respect, the lag is an unintended consequence - a side effect.)
To construct the audio, I used silences between the repetitions of the combined sample to generate distances that re-create the lengths of the lines in the photo. This can be seen in a screenshot of the audio file:
scroll over to enlarge
Later I superimposed square waves over the string of repeated samples, re-creating the lines in the photo.
The audio starts with the lower fidelity combined sample (representing the 1), immediately followed by the higher fidelity combined sample (representing the 2). There is no time between the sounding of these first two samples because there is no line drawn between the first two terms of the written sequence in the photo. Next is a section lasting 6.076 seconds that is filled by a 50 Hz square wave tone (representing the first line). I made this space between the second and third combined sample (the first two 2's) equal to the time of the combined sample twice, 6.076 seconds. I then divided that amount into fourths, which allowed me to cut and paste two-fourths or three-fourths of the 6.076 second section between the repeated samples throughout the piece to make the increasing lengths of the square waves correlate with the increasing distances of the lines in the photo. For example, the line from the 8th term in the sequence in the photo (which is a 2) to the last number it generates (which is also a 2, the 12th term) covers 4 spaces between the numbers. So the square wave that begins immediately after the 8th combined sample lasts for 4 x 6.076 seconds = 24.304 seconds, from the end of the 8th combined sample to the beginning of the 12th combined sample. The sequence in the photo contains 52 terms and the longest line covers 17 spaces. The audio composition is extended to 113 terms, and the longest, final square wave (beginning immediately after the final combined sample ) is 58 spaces long (352.408 seconds).
The loudness of the individual square waves rises and falls as the lines in the graphic extend outward from, and back to, the number sequence. This translation exposes problems encountered when converting a graphic to audio, especially a graphic not specifically designed to become sound such as standard musical notation or a graphic score (there is software that translates digital images into sound but that didn't allow the specific symbolic expression of experience I wanted here). The square waves represent the lines but the need for each square wave to begin at 0 decibels (thus relatively mimicking my symptoms) means the two have conflicting properties: the square waves can't fall and rise like the lines drawn below the number sequence. Also, sound waves interfere with each other as they are overlaid. Each line in the graphic can be followed and distinguished, but the same can't be said of each square wave in the audio composition.
I chose to use square waves instead of sine waves for a few different reasons. Square waves with lower frequency fundamentals are heard as having higher pitches than similar sine waves. This property allowed me, essentially, to use a more compact range of prominent frequencies than if I had used sine waves. I also liked the dissonant timbre of square waves and the fact that square waves exhibit duality in their two-state trajectory, which reflects the duality of the Kolakowski sequence. Most importantly, the square waves, especially the higher frequency ones used at the end of the piece, better approximate the sound of my tinnitus.
The frequencies of the square waves used in this section were generated by dividing the frequency range into equal increments. The first square wave has a fundamental of 50 Hz, and the frequency of each square wave added is increased by 5 Hz, up to 335 Hz (the frequency of the fundamental of the final, 352.408 second, square wave). When deciding what gradation of frequencies to use, I had to take into account the fact that I didn't want the first frequency to sound too low, it had to have power, or the last frequency to be too high. The highest frequency had to be in a comfortable hearing range, first and foremost because my illness has made me extremely sensitive to higher frequency sound. A square wave begins to become painful to me when its fundamental is about 400 Hz. I tried using a just intonation system to generate the square waves but the resultant pattern of beats didn't provide the character I was seeking. My goal was to create a sound that minimized subtleties, like the computer-read speech of the In The Waiting Room section.
The female voice sample was taken from Carl Stone's Al-Noor (2007) and the male sample from Grido del venditore di pesce, a Sicilian folk song. Grido was included on an ECM New Series CD of Luciano Berio's Voci (1985) and Naturale (1985-86) as reference material (the recording of Grido was procured from the Ethnomusicology Archives of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome). The sound file I used is a flac encoding of that CD. Both Voci and Naturale are based on Sicilian folk songs (Naturale features a tape recording of Sicilian folk songs but Grido is not used); Grido is a recording of the cry of Angelo Vitello, a fish-seller who is advertising his product. The Al-Noor sample is from an mp3 encoding of a CD released on the in Tone label. For Al-Noor, Stone manipulated a found recording of a woman singing a Vietnamese lullaby. The sample of Al-Noor I used is untreated by Stone; however, it's from early in the piece before the transformations begin. As Al-Noor continues, he uses software to add Western-sounding harmonies to her originally monophonic vocal.
William Kolakoski himself suffered severe medical problems; he was a chronic schizophrenic. From a letter written by Mike Vargo, a former classmate of Kolakoski (via Wikipedia, although this information has been edited out of the Wiki article at this writing):
"Here was this extremely active and facile mind...yet there was this thing living within him that was always threatening to take over... So, given this paradoxical situation, one subject which preoccupied Bill was the question of free will. This was the central question of his existence. He wanted to think he was free, yet he knew all too well the power of an "invisible hand," and this drove him to determinism. Back and forth he went...it seems to me that, given this quandary, it was very natural for him to try to create a self-generating number sequence. This particular form of mathematical exercise seems a natural byproduct of a mind preoccupied with the question of free will. You 'invent' the sequence yourself, thus exercising free will - and yet - it was already 'there' waiting for you, wasn't it, so actually you just discovered it...and once you set it in motion, it goes on self-generating in marvelous order, turning into a profoundly pleasing manifestation of determinism."
In his letter Vargo also touches on the prescription drug problems that Kolakoski, like most people with schizophrenia, struggled with.
5. 18 Hours in 18 Weeks
Unknown (freesound.org)
18 Hours in 18 Weeks deals with the translation and communication of experience most directly. Because of my illness, I'm only able to visit with people in person (or on the phone) an average of about an hour a week -- anything more is too taxing. Usually this is with my family. I live alone and my mother, sometimes accompanied by my father or nieces, visits once a week to deliver groceries and attend to things I need. 18 Hours in 18 Weeks recreates those visits. It is an hour and 25 minutes in length but more than an hour and 24 seconds of it is silence; the silence corresponds to the 3006 hours I spend every 18 weeks without direct human contact. The other 30 seconds is the only time the silence is broken. That 30 seconds is audio, downloaded as a wav file from freesound.org, of young girls having an animated conversation. The audio of the girls is broken up into 18 sections and interspersed somewhat regularly throughout the 85 minutes of silence. It corresponds to the 18 hours of direct human contact I get every 18 weeks.
This section also employs process with a certain amount of choice. First, I spaced the 18 snippets of the conversation evenly, with one every 4 minutes and 40 seconds. Then I manually lengthened or shortened the silence between each snippet of conversation to approximate the rhythm of the weekly visits I receive. Sometimes my family visits are exactly a week apart, at other times they are separated by a different amount of days.
I've tried to find the audio of the girls' conversation again at freesound.org but have been unable to do so as of fall 2011; thus the uploader's username is not credited. The file may have been removed from the website.
6. Streaming Webcam Gaza, the Morning of January 12, 2009
Unknown
streaming audio (<100 kbps)
The last section is audio recorded from a streaming webcam located in Gaza, early in the Gazan morning of January 12th 2009. This was during the Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip known as Operation Cast Lead in Israel and the Gaza Massacre in the Palestinian territories. The camera was placed on a tall building looking out over the city.
Evidence of people trapped by technology is inescapable: the constant sound of Israeli propeller-driven reconnaissance drones overhead mixes with occasional gunfire/explosions, ambulances and Israeli fighter jets. This conflict was also notable for the use by Israel of white phosphorous as a weapon. White phosphorous is an incendiary munition that causes severe burns, and absorption through the burned area can lead to organ failure. I watched this webstream during the Gazan nighttime and saw white phosphorous being rained down on Palestinians from Israeli helicopters. Being trapped by technology is often a result of being trapped by political systems. These systems include religions, nation states and occupied territories, intrastate entities like the Food and Drug Administration (which approved Levaquin despite the substantial risk it poses), interstate systems like medical science (which has historically been slow to undertake chronic fatigue syndrome research) and pharmaceutical corporations.
Along with the sounds of military conflict, the mundane sounds of any morning are heard: roosters crowing and calls to prayer. It's a strange experience, thinking about myself sitting in a sickbed in Birmingham, Alabama in both a normal and abnormal state of poor health, listening to this both normal and very abnormal day in Gaza (mediated by a great distance and a digital network).
This section is almost wholly process: I just started recording the audio while watching the stream. I did choose to leave in the silences that resulted from the stream buffering, making explicit the fact that it was an internet stream -- I wasn't there -- and undermining the experience. In real life there is often no break from hardship and suffering.
Streaming Webcam Gaza, the Morning of January 12, 2009 is a field recording, but one I had to rely on a network of common technology to create. I was also dependent on the person or people in Gaza who set up the webcam and initiated the stream. I believe the webcam was provided by a Palestinian news outlet, although I'm not sure because the stream was accessed through a web page with no identifiers either on the page or in the URL.
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