Vol. 7: September 21 - QuietTunes VII: Microscopy
One of the most beautiful aspects of art is its transgressive power. Art makes you look at the world differently, revealing ways of experiencing that you otherwise would not have encountered, whether by placing you in someone else’s shoes or opening your eyes or ears to the hidden wonders around you. Ann Rosen’s Chalk has that power. It reveals the beauty of microscopic sound.
Ann Rosen - Chalk
Swedish sculptor, sound artist, composer, and instrument builder Ann Rosen’s Chalk, as with the other tracks of Thimble Noise and a lot of Rosen’s work, is about bring out the microscopic. So, Rosen devised a setup for ‘drawing’ sound, a high gain mic placed near a sound source so she could capture the minute grains of contact, like chalk against a surface or paper folding. To be honest, I can’t find much information about the album, but I had heard that Rosen had built an instrument for ‘drawing’ sounds: a pad with contact mics underneath, which allow it to capture the vibrations caused by friction on the surface. This seems very possible as Rosen has more and more gotten into building instruments in the last years.
Chalk begins with a bright, acerbic noise (Rosen likens noise to Zonula Occludens, cellular protein complexes which hold to membranes together; noise hold the pieces on the album together), which gives way to a pulsing noise, and finally a collage of gestural, chalky sounds. Sounds like chalk running along a chalkboard, the tapping when you place the chalk down on the surface as well as chalk-tangential sounds: sounds of paper crumpling, pencils being drawn along a paper. As with good art, these are familiar things we ignore everyday, but brought out of that background and into a focused brilliance. Like taking a microscope to the tiny, unseeable things in our world, Rosen takes a (mic)roscope to the quiet, unhearable sounds in our world.
Where the clavichord and guqin were technologies whose quietness players had to adapt to, Rosen here uses technology to expand our abilities. What was too quiet to even hear can now be blasted at full volume until we’re so deaf, we need another technology, hearing aids, to even hear at all! There is something of a contradiction here: as we have progressed technologically, we have brought with that progress a great din of noise. Even where I am now, in the Texas countryside, there is a constant buzz of road noise from the highway miles away. This constant din may have also blinded our ears to the quieter sounds in our life, much like the proliferation of streetlights has slowly blotted out the starry sky our ancestors, even our grandparents, knew. Maybe, in a quieter world, we could sit and appreciate the scrape of chalk along a surface or the crumpling of paper. But as it is, that quiet is hard to find, available only to the rich who can afford thick, fully-insulated walls. For the rest of us, we have to invent technologies to counter the consequences of technology.
Despite this technophiliac medium, Chalk the human element is still present (though, there is an interesting weaving in and out of noise and acoustic sounds). The technology is only an enhancement, it brings out the natural beauty of the sound, the associations with alone time (writing a letter or journal), the embodied sensation of slowly drawing chalk over a rough surface, like children meticulously learning their letters, curve by curve. These sounds sound like our quietest times, the only times we might have been slightly aware of the sound of chalk, when the background din was low or we were so focused on our task that we detuned from it, such in deep reflection or that full-being focus kids get when bodily invested in learning. That full-body engagement is important: quiet listening is a heightened state of attention, a split consciousness between the minute and the universal, a sort of flow state, which one has to attune to in order to appreciate. The sound of chalk will not rise over our background din, but, when engaged in tasks which ask us to think beyond ourselves (learning, reflection, reaching out to loved ones) along an embodied action (writing, here) which requires a careful and focused attention on the action (learning the shapes of letters, writing legibly).
So, this simple one-to-one sonic feedback system (vibrations recorded as they appear) opens up a revelation of connotation, of human gesture, and of beautiful sounds in and of themselves; a quiet mechanism for revealing a quiet world.