Numb at first …
So, I think it’s time to re-start this blog, but this time with a broader focus. In previous entries I tried to talk mostly about the actual experience of my hearing loss. From here on out, I think I’m going to focus more on the music I’m writing now, which is very much in response to the situation I chronicled in earlier entries.
Last week I did the first trial performance of the 2nd piece for MONO: Numb. It’s based on a text by an anonymous contributor to the project who lost the sense of touch on the skin of her breasts and belly after cancer surgery. The preparation for the performance was pretty dicey. The way the piece is set up, the text begins scrolling across a video screen while a string trio with digital processing plays. About a 3rd of the way through, a soprano starts speaking parts of the text as they go by, and the text loops and is combined with or processed by the music of the trio. Eventually more and more of the text is sung, until a real “song” emerges for the last couple of minutes.
I planned to use a kind of processor called a vocoder, which effectively superimposes the artifacts of speech on a carrier signal – in this case, the carrier signal is the strings trio, often playing in rhythmic unison with the speaker/singer. The effect is to make the strings seem to talk or sing. As I usually do, I got this all worked out in the studio, making “virtual” string parts on the computer, and recording the singer. The first two rehearsals, one with strings along, and one with strings and singer, just didn’t work. The players were fine, but I couldn’t hear the processing at all. The second rehearsal disintegrated when I ended up with the microphones and processors feeding back uncontrollably, and the players said they couldn’t take it any more and split. What a nightmare! And no matter what I did, I couldn’t duplicate the effects I had in the studio in a rehearsal with live instruments.
I spoke (via email) with my friend and incredible sound engineer Jody Elff, who was on tour in Seoul, South Korea. Back and forth, it seems I was doing everything right, but Jody responded that what I was trying to do was difficult, and that monitoring and balance, as well as adjustment of the parameters of the vocoder and compression of the incoming signals from strings and voice were key elements which I’d need to get right.
The reality of performance, though, is that there’s never enough time in rehearsal to get it all right, at least not for one-off performances like this one. And when we were rehearsing, I just didn’t trust what I heard. I had to ask the players what was coming out of the speakers, because I can’t tell what’s coming from the speakers and what’s coming from the instruments. It’s all just coming from the same place for me. There are a few players who are close friends and long time collaborators, with whom this might work. But not in this situation, where the musicians expect things to roll out as planned. It was the first time most of these players had played my work, and they don’t have a long term commitment to it or investment in it, other than as professionals who are playing what they’re asked to play (and who play spectacularly, I might add). But dealing with my hearing limitations isn’t what they signed on for. This was another situation where I should have hired a sound person to make the necessary adjustments and tunings of the processing for me, someone who knows my work and whose ears I can trust. But there was no budget or time for that with this gig.
The solution was to go back to the studio, where I have more or less unlimited time, up to 24 hrs a day, and use recordings of the players to make a separate track of the processing, generated by the interaction of the strings and the voice as I’ve recorded them. This way I can minimize the problems with my hearing. I can monitor just the processing, or just the live recording, and I can take everything apart to listen to it, and to make sure that the sounds I want to have happen are happening. What a weird way to make music! But it works. The fact remains that I have a very clear aural image in my head (or somewhere within my body) of what the music should sound like, including what the digital processing should sound like. In performance, I just don’t trust what I hear in terms of processing, so I don’t have any reliable instincts on how to tune it in real time … which is something that have I counted on, and assumed, for years.
Ultimately, of course, this isn’t about me being able to do what I do in real time in performance. It’s about making the music work, and sound the way I want it to sound. This “pre-recorded effects” solution worked like a charm. The sound guy on the gig was able to do a great job of keeping my effects-track in balance with the sound from the live players, and the audience had no inkling that the effects weren’t happening in real time. And the nice thing for me was that I seemed to get great feedback from the audience about the piece, which many people said they found moving. Which was, after all, the main idea.
Next week I do a repeat performance, with the full crew of singer, strings, video and two dancers. It’ll be preceded by MONO Prelude, which by now feels like an old friend. And in which I do the processing live. I’m eager to see how these two work together in order to put together ideas about how the whole piece will go. The fact of starting with the focus on me and my senses, and then expending to other people and their sensory challenges is really the direction I want to move in with the piece. We’ll see how it goes.
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