Notes for collaborative assignment with SA 66/68 (taught by Jack Wilson)
(Assignment #5 for Music 104)

Assignment given: April 25
Assignment due: Sometime in the (four day) week of May 22-26

• Two students from architecture class collaborate with one student from Music 104
• Locate, secure, and modify a space, indoor or outdoor, within walking distance of Bregman/Hop that is usually not meant for performance (e.g Collis, Brace Commons, Hop, Bregman are all off-limits). The more unusual, unexpected, and in particular, radical the possibilities for redefining the space, the better.
• Make a piece (event, installation, intervention (dude!), sonic environment, what-ever!) in that space. The piece should be electro-acoustic, collaborative, and site-specific. The piece should relate to  the space itself (redefine an acoustic environment, change human or natural interaction with the space, etc.)
• The piecemay happen once, may be ongoing, happen at intervals, erratically, be sensitive to prescence (human, natural, cosmological, or otherwise). The only criteria is that we must  know when to visit the space in order to see and hear it (that is, if we show up, it must happen, in some way).
• The piece must be documented on the web (video, photographs, sonically, in prose, and in any other ways you think communicates the piece).

Some Suggested Readings on Sound Sculpture, Sound Art, Soundscapes, Acoustic Ecology
All Readings On Reserve in Paddock Music Library
 

Musical Instrument Design, Bart Hopkin. A collection of practical essays, drawn from Hopkin's many years of editing the journal Experimental Musical Instruments,  on construction of interesting musical instruments, including many non-traditional, installation-appropriate ones.

Environments of Musical Sculpture You Can Build, Phase 1. John Grayson, editor. A landmark and now out-of-print book on experimental sound sculpture, published in 1976 by Grayson's innovative A.R.C Editions in Canada. This is a xerox of the manuscript.

Interviews with Sound Artists. Rene Van Peer. Wonderful collection of interviews with important workers in the field, like Richard Lerman, Joe Jones, Christina Kubisch, and others. A useful book to understand the philosophies and aesthetics of some interesting pioneers (not necessarily all installation artists).

Sound and Structure and Sound and Silence. John Paynter. A very English approach to rethinking music in a kind of post-Cagean fashion, these books may be especially useful to the architectural students in the class as a simple way to become acquainted with some modern concepts of music and sound's redefinition. While there is some information on sonic installation and sculpture, these are more intended to kind of level the linguistic playing field vis a vis "music" and "sound".

The Tuning of the World and Handbook for Acoustic Ecology. Murray Schafer and Barry Truax (respectively). Two of the major texts to emerge from the Canadian-based world soundscape project. Schafer's book has become quite influential, and Truax's is an highly useful work in defining fundamental concepts of sound, acoustics, acoustic ecology, and in fact, the principles of electronic music. These are well-worth reading by both the musicians and the architects in the class.