"That's Beautiful ..." and Other Tales from Concordia Electroacoustics circa 2015/2016

Phonemes

The only guest lecture I recall from my time at the program was from a phonetician. This was a pre-cursor to the first composition assignment we were given in first-year. Why teach phonetics to an electroacoustics student? Well, this first assignment had the constraint on it that you could only compose using the phonemes available to the human voice, all of which must be recorded by you. Effects or processing were required to be minimal to none - I seem to recall some EQ being acceptable, and you could certainly adjust the amplitude of the channels in your DAW. But certainly no reverb, delay, distortion, etc.

One stand-out demonstration from this class was where the guest lecturer played two sound clips, one was of a person saying the word "Guy", and another of the word "Sky". By moving the start of the second clip to just past the 's' phoneme in 'Sky', the two sound clips became indisguishable. Both sounded quite a bit like someone saying "Guy". This was because both words contain a voiced-velar plosive 'g', followed by a diphthong 'aɪ'. The exact location of the play marker did not matter too much - it would be very difficult indeed to find the sample, where if the clip was played from it would be heard as 'Sky', and if you instead played it one sample later, you would hear 'Guy'.

This made the point loud and clear that phoneme classification is somewhat similar to organs in the human body - phonemes are no doubt distinct from eachother, much like the stomach and small intestine are distinct from each other. But if you try and identify the exact place - to the atom - where the stomach ends and the small intestine begins - you will have trouble.

A useful tool in this assignment was to record yourself uttering a phonetic pangram. A 'pangram' is a phrase that contains every letter of an alphabet - you are probably already familiar with these - "The quick brown fox..." etc. A phonetic pangram is like that, but instead of letters you have phonemes. For some reason I went for this strange phrase:

"Shaw, those twelve beige hooks are joined if I patch a young, gooey mouth."

Frequency

One time, as we sometimes did, in a electroacoustics classroom, we listened to a work. Unfortunately, I don't remember the specific piece - my best guess is something from Iannis Xenakis.

Our professor had what I recall as a guarded or reserved affect - he was not particularly animated in the classroom, but you could nonetheless tell if you were paying attention that there were things he was thinking but not saying. We were discussing the parameters of the piece, and it was pointed out that there was a droning sub-bass, and fluttering, panned, swirling highs. A classmate, whom I will refer to with the name 'Klaus', remarked that it was "like a tree" - in that there was a trunk that was fixed, but the branches blew by freely in the breeze. Our professor's tone shifted immediately and said "that's beautiful, Klaus".

Melody

This professor occasionally engaged in quasi-socratic acts. Asking questions, to which he probably expected no answer, or if he did, he expected to pick apart the answer easily, ostensibly for our benefit. I say 'quasi', because it was clear in at least one case that he knew the answer himself - or at least had an answer in mind. One day he asked openly: What is melody?

The classroom was quiet for a short while as it often is when professors ask hard (or rhetorical) questions. I recall one classmate tilting his head, pausing for a few seconds, and saying: "Leading, monophonic, pitch-contour?".

My professor pursed his lips.

Eventually he said: "it doesn't have to be leading".

Timbre

Another one of my professors held a concert, on a thursday or a friday evening at the Oscar Peterson Concert Hall. He quite shamelessly offered bonus marks in exchange for attendance and a short write-up on the pieces presented. I was an absolutely terrible student and barely attended my classes, but for whatever reason I decided to attend this concert with a notepad in hand.

There were 5 pieces performed. The first 4 were live performances, with a variety of players, on a variety of instruments - primarily piano, cello, and flute. The fifth, was a fixed-media piece, played through the sound reinforcement system in the hall. The lights were dimmed for this piece. I wrote notes, as the piece played, an exact copy of which are below:

"The fifth piece is an electroacoustic work that begins with a bouncing L/R high pitched noise that evolves spectrally throughout the piece. Initially it sounds thin and sharp. From under the hard-panned noise emerges a clarinet-esque melody that fades in and out slowly, amplitude wise. In a similar way to the clarinet sound was introduced, a piano-esque sound is brought forward very slowly. It remains soft behind the other elements. The high pitched initial noise somewhat resembles a tambourine at this point. A very spatially and spectrally rich sound reminiscent of a harpsichord is brought to be the primary feature eventually, which continues to evolve melodically and spectrally. At this point I notice a theme – everything sounds like they could’ve come from a DX7"

I submitted the assignment, and in grading my professor semi-confirmed my suspicion about the DX7 - I recall he said "you are right - ...", but then went on to name a related-but-not-exactly-the-same synthesizer, like the DX100. Unfortunately, I've lost his marking notes to confirm.

This synth was probably in my mind because I was very interested in, and familiar with FM synthesis (the dubstep hype wave of 2013 was still relatively recent), and I recall he mentioned in class that he owned this particular synth at least once. It felt good to be positively reinforced, at a time when I was receiving very little of this (due to my lack of attendance/poor student performance), even in the context of a bonus assignment that one is highly unlikely to grade poorly or with any kind of viciousness.

Me, at the time

warning: this section talks about mental health and depression

I was diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder while studying Electroacoustics in 2015 or 2016 (for reasons unrelated to the program I assure you - my suspicion is I had some form of this for at least several years prior). I was lucky to have the ability to see a university doctor. One of the symptoms of the disease is anhedonia, which is something like the inability to experience pleasure. Robert Sapolsky summarizes MDD as the condition "... where somebody can't appreciate sunsets". Electroacoustics in a lot of ways was the perfect synthesis of everything I found exciting up until that point in my life, and I was completely unable to appreciate it or take advantage of the opportunities in front of me. I flunked out after barely 3 semesters - not via letter from the University, or going to the student offices to drop - I simply stopped showing up.

Ongoing during this period of my life was guilt - certainly some depressives are not in a situation where they are actually able to study the one and only thing that ostensibly matters to them - I was and am lucky. So why am I the way I am? These are the kind of things that were going through my mind.

Affecting the guilt was the fact more or less all of my professors and colleagues I thought were some of the smartest and coolest people I've ever met. Much smarter and cooler than I, certainly. A decade later, I still think that's largely true - though I question how much one can really know people when you only show up to approximately one class a week.

One day while sitting in the waiting room at the doctors office on the university campus, I noticed that one of my professors was also sitting down, on his laptop. He was there before me. When you attend classes as infrequently as I did, you end up in situations similar to when you forget to ask someone their name, and then keep seeing them again and again, and you know you should ask them their name, but part of you just hopes someone else will say it in front of you and save you the embarassment. I knew this professors name of course, but did he know mine? Did he even recognize me? Part of me thinks he did, and part of me probably wanted to believe he did. I felt a kind of desparation in me bubble-up. This particular professor was especially generous to me. I was sorry, and wanted to express that, and perhaps hear some kind of consolation.

Of course, I did not do this in a doctor's office waiting room with someone who I was not even sure knew me.

In my 3rd and final semester, we had a end-of-semester meet-up for my class. I actually attended two of these, the first of which was by accident. I initially went to the wrong meet-up for the wrong class.

It was a strange and almost out-of-body experience sitting down at a desk - one of many arranged in a circle - shortly after realizing that everyone else sitting at these desks - save for my professor - was not actually my colleague, but instead a year behind me in the same program, but for whatever reason still sitting in-place, almost paralyzed, while we all went around saying a few words about the end of the semester in a open-sharing forum. I don't recall much of what I even said when it was my turn, but I do remember something about how today "wasn't Wednesday after-all", and that my professor laughed.

After, I did approach my professor and apologize in a un-specific way for my behavior (I had in mind my total lack of attendance for months, not my accidental attendance of the wrong meet-up on that day). It wasn't really the kind of thing an apology is for, but he nontheless accepted it by way of saying something to the effect of "you don't owe me anything". We chatted a bit, and then went our separate ways. That was one of the last times we interacted.

Sound Walks, Deep Listening

The occasional class at EA was replaced with a 'Sound Walk'. The 25-ish person class would simply go on a walk (I recall often around the base of Mount Royal) and have the stated goal of 'listen'. Listening in this case is meant to be closer to the late Pauline Oliveros' deep listening than the layman's sense of 'listen'. Over time I have become more and more attracted to the ideas of Pauline Oliveros, and the perspective of the late John Cage, which I see as similar in spirit (Cage once credited Oliveros' Deep Listening as teaching him what 'harmony' means - a quote of this can be found at the top of Oliveros' biography on her website).

A contender for the biggest regret I have about this period of my life, is that I did not attend a single sound walk. I'm hoping to make up the time when I can on my own.