As the collaboration continues, the ability to convey often quite technical musical terms is becoming ever more apparent.
For Violet, this is her first venture that considers sound equally as much as physical movement and dance – so its only fair that she may be slightly overwhelmed and confused by my mentioning of ‘noise gates’ or ‘EQ’ or ‘granular synthesis’. I am reminded that outside of the kind of creative world I inhabit, terms I perceive as simple, such as ‘mixing’ or ‘sequence’ are in reality quite nebulous and obscure.
Because of this, I have found it incredible useful to explain any technical matters through metaphor or demonstration.
To illustrate, it was important that I communicate to Violet how the overall length of the initial loop recorded onto my looper pedal effects the ‘density’ of the sound, as we record endless layers skipping rope sounds onto it.
After a second, I explained that this was like painting with a small canvas, as opposed to a large one. If we start out with our initial small canvas, and endlessly throw paint at it – the literal thickness and density of the image will occur much quicker than if the canvas were to be bigger and sparser.
This, surprisingly, was an effective metaphor and was quickly understood. We now both had a shared idea of the ways in which we can efficiently build an intense wall of sound.
I also found there are matters that are simply to hard to explain without demonstration:
When I found myself having to explain which frequencies we should consider when performing (we want to create a full, intense sound yet don’t want to create anything ear-piercing) – I found it immensely useful to demonstrate how equalisation works, by treating our generated loop with various EQ ‘cuts’ – highlighting each frequency band one-by-one , showing how each effects our overall sound.
A challenge for me also, is learning the ‘language’ of dance and movement-based performances. In fact, whereas Violet has entered this project with some knowledge of sound arts, I have embarked on this journey completely unversed in the world of dance performance – with little frame of reference for the kind of choices a dancer can make, or how something as small as a shift in weight can completely change the emotive weight of a performance.
I’d assumed (wrongly) that often dance is simply a response to sound prompt , rather than being a fully developed language in its own right, with its own logic, pacing, and intention.
— Edit–
In order to gain a further understanding of this discipline, particularly Violet’s own -I began to research her previous projects, and would discuss these with her during future sessions: