User:Danny van der Kleij/Annotations

Annotation 01

Bonnie Jo Dopp (Numerology and Cryptography in the Music of Lili Boulanger: The Hidden Program in "Clairières dans le ciel")

Numerology and Cryptography in the Music of Lili Boulanger: The Hidden Program in "Clairières dans le ciel" contains a rather precise technical description of Lilli Boulanger her music. She placed occult symbols of herself within her music. She believed that when the songs were heard the presence of the spirits(spirits of her own symbolism) would be felt.

The hallmarks of symbolism include obscurity, indirection, and particularity, the notion that a small symbol carries enough representation in it to standfor a greater whole, rather as a whole songcycle

More mystically, symbolist poets and artists believed that a symbol presents a greater reality, that it does not simply stand as a sign of a thing but evokes the thing itself wen received by a views, reader or listener.

Embedding secretive personal symbols in a work as a way to ensure and ongoing life. A work that survives itself. Those who receive the hidden work, feel the presence of symbolism regardless of understanding it's meaning. Subconsious understanding.

Radio and the notion of the non-space/ideal space Utopia + Symbolism hidden within music. Is there a relation between hidden symbolism and utopia beyond the obvious.

Annotation 02

A principle of Hope: Recorded Music Listening Practices and the immanence of utopia

Process philosophy of Ernst Bloch to argue that utopia is not located else-where or else-when in a transcendent realm separate from the present but is paradoxically immanent to 'everyday life'

Annotation 03

Douglas Kahn & Gregory Whitehead(Wireless imagination)

Here Whitehead describes radio as a medium that exists in contradictions. Radio is at once a place where the broadcaster has total control and can create his own space, as that radio is non-existent, it exists out of modulated sound alone. There is no memory in radio, whenever the broadcast is made there is no certainty about its preservation. Radio is at once fleeting as it is an actual space for manifestation.

In the writings of Whitehead, from the idea of contradictions emerges the idea of a Utopian space. There is an Utopian aspiration in all communication technologies, but the Utopian side is counter-balanced and all too often canceled out by the darker drive, the connection between information and war, between communication and the command or control over communities. (Whitehead, 1996, p. 99)

I think that in the Utopian view on radio lies a more well founded fear of its broadcasted sound.

Where Whitehead makes a link between communication and the control over communities it becomes clear when we look at exactly how radio communicates. On a communication level radio is an excellent medium for those who want to exercise control. The radio signal is one way and encompasses everything that is in range of transmission. I think it is this kind of inescapable communication that caused Murray Schafer to write down his views on schizophonia. The agitation that Murray Schafer felt towards the noisiness of the mechanically reproduced sound may have come from the idea of being controlled and overwhelmed by radio rather than the sound quality itself.

Notes on the vocoder 04 F, 5 January , Cabinet War Rooms , SIGSALY

The vocoder was invented at Bell Labs in 1928 by Homer W. Dudley. It was first designed to simplify the voice so it could be transmitted more easily and with greater clarity over telephone lines, later it was used as a means of disguising military voice transmissions. In Kay Dickinson her writings on the usage of the vocoder in popular music she explains the origin of the word vocoder as following ‘Etymologically, the word is an abbreviation of 'voice coder' and so intentionally bears the connotations of 'coding' human expression, of delivering it in cyphers. ’(Dickinson, 2001, p.333)

To mask human aspects of a person’s voice and conceal someones identity during wartime. However there is a fine line where the listener is accepting the vocoded voice as that of a machine and where the listener can still identify with the re-synthesized voice.

How to recognize speech? How to wreck a nice beach/peach?

In the two or so years since Cher's 'Believe' rather unexpectedly became the number one selling British single of 1998, the vocoder effect - which arguably snagged the track such widespread popularity - grew into one of the safest, maybe laziest, means of guaranteeing chart success.(Dickinson, 2001, p.333)