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 attempted to address are empathy, including in the larger cognitive sense of perspective-taking, and translation. I'm very interested in how experience can be (re-)created and communicated through audio and how this communication exposes the continuum of translation, from success to failure (with failure predominating).
Every seriously ill person encounters great difficulty and frustration when trying to relate his or her experience, especially to those who haven't suffered through an affliction of the same illness. Strong sensations and emotions don't lend themselves to easy communication. In addition, 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 particular health problems also expose issues of communication with doctors. At this time there are no tests or procedures doctors can do to understand the workings of CFS or the drug reaction in my body. Those lines of communication are nonexistent. All I have are words to tell the doctors how I feel and words are very inadequate for the task.
The title, I Am My Own Messiah, refers to ideas that parallel empathy and encompass attempts to understand (and control) the self. I constantly struggle to really connect with my situation. How can I both emotionally and intellectually grasp what I'm dealing with? Doing so is crucial because I must shape my behavior in ways that lessen my symptoms and mitigate the long-term toll these health issues 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 is very detrimental to my health. I'm also faced with the fact that a tragic misunderstanding of my plight was a big factor in my becoming very 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 that 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. This approach also advances ideas of identity and perspective, which are very affected by illness. Passing through the threshold of a serious change in health creates a break with familiar feelings of identity and causes radical shifts in perspective. Each section of this work sets up different relationships; between...myself, the listener, different composers and musicians (living and dead), a poet, people who uploaded video and audio to the web or are captured by a webstream, those who design and implement technology, different religions. The path a sound takes from original it's source to it's appearance here is also notable. The audio used has gone through complicated paths from it's original source to the listener's brain.
The internet has become my main window on the cultural world. Like all artistic people, I can't help but define myself by the art I find significant. 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 mp3 and text-to-speech technology through which they are rendered (like my body has been degraded and defiled by CFS and Levaquin). I was also interested in the relativity of audio and 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.
Another important issue is being at the mercy of 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. Also the styles of composition are banal. The use of samples and synthesized voice, rhythmic phasing, field recording, FM synthesis, resampling and sample juxtaposition are all well-worn techniques. When you have an untreatable illness you become keenly aware of the state of contemporary medical knowledge and the fact that common knowledge and technology is often brutally ugly, low tech and mundane. The lack of chronic fatigue syndrome treatment possibilities among mainstream medicine led me to an alternative doctor who greatly increased my suffering by prescribing an avalanche of unproven or incorrectly used remedies. Now I have very competent doctors who simply tell me that there is nothing they can do. There is no avant-garde treatment, no cutting edge experimental medicine. There is only the harsh reality of the present.
I Am My Own Messiah also has a built in obsolescence. I wanted to illuminate the fact that 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 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. I've lost some of the internet locations where I found content. Web addresses disappear, or perhaps just seem like they disappear because they are for all practical purposes unfindable. A few of of the sources I used had to be listed as unknown because either they don't exist anymore or 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. My subjective, programmatic use of samples paired with this explication attempts to impose an objective meaning onto these pieces and overall work. That meaning is limited, however, because there is still much I've left unexplained (or have gotten wrong or oversimplified) and much I'm unaware of that the listener may be able to glean (or may misunderstand). 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 discernable 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 through development, and how much is a result of choices made (whether poor choices made consciously or just choices that have unfortunate unintended 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 both 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) also means that much of this work is 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 rendering 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 point to the locations of the short Koan sections I sampled and paired with each phrase of the Luke passage:
scroll over to enlarge
The spoken phrases and Koan samples were combined into 4 to 9 second segments, then repeated. The pairings were chosen to somewhat illustrate the phrases. For example, decisive moments occur at the points where the lines merge, when Jesus "resolutely set out" and "replied", and the birds/air and foxes/holes phrase is matched with a point where one line is much higher than the other. The proportions of the addition or termination of the repeated segments in the piece very roughly approximate the proportions of Koan as outlined in the diagram, although compositional circumstances didn't allow a direct translation of the diagram (an example would be that I wanted to start the "Son of Man" phrase much earlier than the very end of the piece).
The entire piece was chopped into regular segments and then reconstituted in a slightly different manner. This, and the different lengths of the overlapping combined Koan and Luke samples (from 4 to 9 seconds each), gives the piece it's phasing characteristic.
After the first 78 seconds, when the second phrase ("he resolutely set out for Jerusalem") begins, the majority of the piece features two sets of combined Luke/Koan samples running concurrently. The phasing ensures that the two spoken phrases are almost never both heard as if in balanced conversation. One is chopped up when the other is intact or both are in different states of disintegration, sometimes with one moving toward completeness while the other trends toward disintegration. Often both awkwardly sound at the same time. All of this is an attempt to represent general problems in communication. The dialogue is undermined by the constantly shifting relationship. The disintegration is also a represention of the futility of the word when trying to communicate experience.
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 knowing his fate, that he would be killed. Political anxieties, which had been building and which he would inflame, were squeezing out his place in his world. 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 great 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. Man doesn't possess the self-ignorance of the animals. We have the added burden of consciousness, which forces us toward a state of metaphysical disequilibrium.
The phrase "Son of Man" in this passage is key. Jesus is both God, the Messiah, and human. Both natures have shaped his path. This is symbolic to me on a personal level, as it echoes the title of the overall work. I refused to change my exhausting pace of life even as it was making me sicker and sicker; like an animal that tries to walk even though it has a badly broken leg. I also ignored warning signs when I was receiving dangerously incompetent medical care, signs that should have been obvious to someone like myself who has training and experience as a scientist. I acted partly out of desperation and partly because of hubris. Both my animal and intellectual natures conspired to doom me.
I also liked this reading by Father Ted because of the way it's 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, however, 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 key tool used by Buddhists is meditation and Zen Buddhism emphasizes meditative experience over doctrinal texts. Intuitive understanding is valued more than intellectualization. Zen meditation makes great use of koans and mantras (which are evoked by the repeated spoken phrases in this section).
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 it's 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, though. He was very passionate about science and saw art as being a parallel to 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 this 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 or watching, material matters as well. Reading, or listening to, articles about sports at Cyclingnews.com or ESPN.com requires much less effort than reading poetry or art analysis or music theory.
There is an obvious irony in the computer reading this intimately personal poem centered around ideas of identity and of the strangeness of being human. However, there are also moments when the computer's perspective and Bishop's perspective find an uncanny harmony, such as when the computer says, "Why should I be...anyone?" or "I read it right straight through". In addition, the use of text-to-speech software resonates with references to technology in the poem, not just with dental procedures or light bulbs but with the extension of Bishop's existence through the information technology of National Geographic magazine and with her knowledge of the war.
The subject of the waiting room itself is a very 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 imagine as not looking much different from the one Bishop experienced as a child. The doctor's office was in a very old house and the furnishings seemed like they hadn't been updated in many years. 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 very 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 with after reading information I had printed out and given 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 a very high dose of Levaquin, a medicine that hadn't been properly vetted by the FDA even for normal doses. I suffered an awful reaction and have felt for more than six years 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 requires. Neither tool is tailored to it's specific task so egregious mistakes are made. It's also impossible to escape the lack of emotion, the relative monotony with which the poem is read. This reflects my formerly vibrant life that has been rendered colorless.
Elizabeth Bishop suffered from severe allergic reactions too. A reaction to a cashew nut changed the course of her life, prompting her to live in Brazil for 15 years. Also, my illness forced me to move back into my childhood home for 3 years. In 2006, when I completed this section, I would see myself in the same mirror 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 the 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 addtion 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 commercial text-to-speech software has become popular among composers and visual artists in the last decade or so. Some composers and artists have even used it without accompaniment, like I have here. For example, Luke McGowan created a version of Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate (called Robo Ursonate) this way.
3. Death by Levaquin Triadic Memories
John Fratti/Morton Feldman/Markus Hinterhauser
mp3 (206 kbps) /Youtube video (unknown bit rate)
This section pairs the audio from a Youtube video with samples from an mp3. The Youtube audio is from a video entitled "Levaquin Pharmaceutical sales rep Google: Death by Levaquin for my blog", which was made and uploaded by John Fratti (Youtube username bobgroz). John also suffers from a severe, long-term reaction to the antibiotic. That audio is coupled with samples from an mp3 rendering 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. The decay of the notes and chords is emphasized by Feldman 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 very 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 a great 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 discernable 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". It also seems to me 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 the 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. I also edited John's statement to make it more concise and to reflect my personal experience with the Levaquin reaction.
To emphasize the artificiality of the construction, I repeated the last part of John's audio and divorced it from the sample that had accompanied it. I did the same with the last Triadic Memories sample, removing the chords as I explained above. I wanted to show that any sentimental effect the pairing of these two audio sources creates is to a great extent false. Empathetic feelings may arise from the activation of common neural pathways in two different people but there is still a gulf of experience that can't be bridged. Atttempting to understand another's experience is ultimately a false pursuit, even if some connection can be made.
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. Once again this translation is a highly mediated experience and another reminder of my formerly beautiful health that has become defiled by contemporary technology. Equal temperament is emphasized and taken to extremes in the tuning of the square waves in the next segment, Al-Noor Grido del Venditore di Pesce.
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 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 symbolic expression. 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 illuminates my experience. The photo below is of the Kolakoski sequence, written by myself on a piece of paper, and includes evidence of the work done when generating the sequence.
scroll over to enlarge
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 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. The lines 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 just to help frame the sound. 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 = the lag encountered when generating the sequence
Again, it's obvious when writing the sequence that the number consulted to generate the next number(s) in the sequence falls further and further 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 musical piece.
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 the square waves over the string of repeated samples to represent 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 6.076 second section that is filled by a square wave tone (representing the first line). I made the 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 in the audio construction, 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 individual square wave tones rise and fall in amplitude like the lines in the photo rise and fall or fall and rise (depending on whether the lines in the photo are upside down or right-side up). This exposes a problem translating from written graphic to audio. The square wave tones represent the lines but the two have inherently different properties. The square waves can't fall and rise like the upside down lines in the photo, at least not for the purposes of this composition, and sound waves interfere with each other as they overlaid. Each line on the photo can be followed and distinguished but the same can't be said of the square waves in the audio composition. This touches on the difficulties in translating a pictorial representation to sound and translating one not specifically designed to become sound is even more difficult than translating one that was purposefully created to produce it, 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).
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 to essentially 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 square waves exhibit duality in their two-state trajectory, which reflects the duality of the Kolakowski sequence.
The square waves used in this section are generated from equal divisions of a frequency range. The first square wave has a fundamental of 50 Hz and each square wave added increases by 5 Hz up to 335 Hz, the frequency of the fundamental of the final wave (which lasts 352.408 seconds). 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 sound. A square wave begins to become painful to me when it's fundamental is about 400 Hz. The necessity of the 58 steps up in frequency meant that each step had to be relatively small. I tried using a just intonation 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 voice samples used in this section are taken from Carl Stone's Al-Noor (2007) (the female voice) and from Grido del venditore di pesce, a Sicilian folk song (the male voice). Grido was included on an ECM New Series CD of Luciano Berio's Voci (1985) and Naturale (1985-86) as reference material. The recording for that CD had been procured from the Ethnomusicology Archives of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. The sound file I used is a flac rendering of that release. 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 an mp3 rendering of a CD release. For Al-Noor, Stone manipulated a found recording of a woman singing a Vietnamese lullabye (the title Al-Noor just refers to a restaurant, Stone titles his works after his favorite restaurants). The sample of Al-Noor I used is untreated by Stone, however. It's from early in the piece before the transformations begin.
It's important to note that both of these samples are of sounds I found on the internet that had been used by other composers. They are third generation source materials and have gone through many permutations since the songs were originally sung and picked up by microphones. There are also issues of distance between the composers and their sources. Stone is a California man (who spends much time in Japan). Berio was a cosmopolitan academic. Both source materials are folk songs that have been used anachronistically (at least as far as music history is concerned), or perhaps anachoristically, in relatively avant-garde art music. Does Berio's referencing of the folksongs transcend a certain obsolescence of that folk culture? How do Stone's specific manipulations of the lullabye recontextualize it? As Al-Noor continues, he uses software to add Western-sounding harmonies to her originally unadorned vocal.
Like the next section, 18 Hours in 18 Weeks, this section represents my day-to-day experience with illness. 18 Hours is a macroscopic view of months of my existence while Al-Noor Grido focuses on the toll just one conversation can take. The biggest issue 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 chance to represent this with audio. The square waves build with every repetition of the sampled voices. Each repetition increases the synthetic-sounding drone of the square waves like 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. 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.
As far as I know the lag is not of interest to mathematicians. They are most interested in whether the densities of 1's and 2's converge. The lag is just an unintended consequence, a side effect.
William Kolakoski himself suffered severe medical problems. He was a chronic schizophrenic. From to a letter written by a classmate named Mike Vargo (via Wikipedia, although the infomation has been edited out of his 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 schizophrenics, 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 hour a week, anything more is too taxing. Usually this is with my family. I live alone and my mother, sometimes with my father or nieces, visits once a week to deliver groceries and attend to things I need. This section 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 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 of young girls talking about outer space and the possibility of alien life, downloaded as a wav file from freesound.org. 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 increased or decreased 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 chose the audio of the girls because my favorite visitors are my young nieces, who are also very intelligent. I could have recorded my nieces and used that audio but I chose to find a sample on the web because this entire work is concerned with highly mediated experience.
I've tried to find the audio of the girls' conversation again on 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.
This section takes advantage of a fundamental change the internet has afforded audio works, especially as faster broadband has proliferated. Continuous audio is no longer restricted to the time length provided by a CD, or by one side of a record or cassette.
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 the morning of January 12th 2009 in Gaza. 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.
There are major empathy issues raised by my watching and listening to this war going on thousands of miles away from my sick bed near Birmingham, Alabama. Issues of people being trapped by technology are also inescapable. You can hear the constant sound of Israeli propeller-driven reconnaissance planes (probably drones) overhead and occasionally the sound of Israeli fighter jets and gunfire, as well as a passing ambulance. This conflict was also notable for the use by Israel of white phosphorous as a weapon. White phosphorous is an incendiary chemical weapon that causes severe burns, which 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 in many cases 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 major risks it poses) and interstate systems like medical science (which has historically been slow to undertake Chronic Fatigue Syndrome research).
Along with the sounds of military conflict, the mundane sounds of any morning are heard, roosters crowing and calls to prayer. So it's a strange thing, thinking about myself sitting in my sickbed in Birmingham, Alabama in both a normal and abnormal state of poor health while listening to this both normal and very abnormal day in Gaza, mediated by a great distance and computer technology.
This section is almost wholly process. I just started recording the audio while watching the stream. I did make the choice to leave in the silences that resulted from the stream buffering. This makes explicit the fact that it was an internet stream, I wasn't there. The silences betray it's artificiality and undermine 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 but I'm not sure because the stream was accessed through a web page with no identifiers either on the page or in the URL.
