THE WATER SERIES AUDIO ACCOMPANIMENT INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTION

NAOMI JAYE

Hello, my name is Naomi and I am the artist behind the Water Series. I thought it would be interesting to approach this audio accompaniment with Eric Arneson, who is the creator of the sound piece ‘Submerged’ and the sound design for Pool. We're going to talk to you about how we made the piece, what that process was like, and what our inspirations were.

It started with using the MRI sound as a basis for the whole piece. And we were speaking about having the MRI when you're lying down on one of the beds and hearing the MRI. When you took the headphones off, the room would continue with that same soundtrack.

ERIK ARNESEN

I think when you first told me about the MRI, it occurred to me that I didn't actually know what that sound was. I think maybe people don't know. And I thought about the effect, how jarring it is to hear. So intimate and personal while you are watching and listening to MRI, and then take the headphones off and there's nothing at all. The aim was to transition from an intenseness to some kind of peace. Immediately, if that was possible.

NJ

It was a conversation about how to make the room different from the MRI machine sounds that play in the headphones, but still based on the MRI machine.  So that when you're in the room, the soundscape and the music act as this cohesive gel that sticks the three pieces together. When you're in MRI and lying on the bed and hearing the machine so aggressive and assaulting, that when you take the headphones off you would be hearing a much more gentle version of it. There's something in the end, about the piece that feels quite lovely and there's a kind of nostalgia in to it for me. It elicits a feeling of longing.

EA

As soon as you said it, I started to think of how do you do that? How to transpose something that's so mechanical and violent into something that's nice? What's the jumping-off point? My initial thought was to take all of the MRI sounds and transpose them into MIDI, which is essentially letting a computer instrument be able to read the sounds as notation. But they're so low register that it doesn't make any sense on an instrument. I tried plugging instruments into it, but it's so far down the scale that it makes no noise at all. And then I tried to pitch everything up so that it was more musical, in that realm, and it didn't really sound right either. So it became a problem solving exercise.  How to maintain the spirit of the MRI sound, but make something musical out of it.

NJ

What did you end up doing with the MRI?

EA

I ended up using a software to manipulate all the sounds of the MRI, to stretch them out, working with the audio in a granular sense. It's like taking the whole thing and stretching it and then smudging all the information in between so that it doesn't become this kind of staccato reading of it, like it is in the MRI. And it blurs it all together so it's more like a wash. 

From there you can go in and change any number of parameters about the sound. You can pitch it up or pitch it down or have only one type of frequency, high like in the MRI itself, a mechanical kind of almost machine-gun like sound, and just take those frequencies and manipulate those to be low or high or anything in between. It became about picking out the modulations of that particular moment in the MRI to make it sound more angelic, more beautiful.

NJ

Yes, it's a very layered piece. I think you said a hundred?

EA

A hundred and ten tracks. They aren't all going at the same time, but that information is all in there.

NJ

And what you hear at the very high end of it, it sounds very angelic, is actually the MRI machine transposed in a kind of way.

EA

Yes, it runs pretty much through the whole piece. It was interesting because it was also finding the amount of time to stretch it out too. It sounded at first too much like the MRI. So the MRI is  32 minutes and 50 seconds. At first I tried stretching it out to 2.5 hours, which is still remarkable, but it still sounded too much like the machine. So I think I ended up stretching the whole piece out to 8.5 hours and that created a beautiful kind of wash, a sound that was a better jumping-off point to find the specifics about it. 

When the MRI machine itself is going through its mechanical clicks and clacks and its own modulations - it makes for a really interesting sound when stretched out. It would just slowly rise and fall. You could be listening to the MRI piece, so jarring in the headphones - then take the headphones off and it would be that exact same moment in the MRI machine ‘track’, but more musical. You wouldl hear those same modulations as it's waving up and down, as the MRI machine itself is really aggressively hitting you with all the mechanical sound. I probably spent more time than I should have, messing around with all that stuff. But you have to start to limit yourself, because there are  just too many possibilities. You have to decide - I'm going to pick a chord, or a key and I'm going to find all the pitches of that chord and then I'm going to manipulate those.

NJ

I remember we had a session together where we were using a harmonium and we were also doing some breath stuff. Was this experimentation with the MRI stuff that you had done before that session or after?

EA

That was after because I was still figuring it out.  I had the idea about the MRI but I was still figuring out how I was going to do it. 

NJ

Something else we spoke about was that the piece should have something organic and acoustic about it, and that the MRI was the exact opposite of that. 

EA

I guess that's how we came to the harmonium. We had talked about the composition as being in three movements. You had given me the jumping-off points: water - obviously, underwater and breath. And the breath aspect of it is one that started the wheels turning. 

I hadn't used the harmonium since I used it with the musical act that I played with years ago. I've never really used it for anything else, but it immediately came to mind because it is like a giant lung. It's like a breath machine.  So I brought it into my recording space.  I have a tiny little microphone and thought, this will be cool, I will just feed the microphone into the harmonium so it's sitting in the middle of the lung. That will make this great breath sound, but it sounded like garbage. I thought it was genius, but it did not sound very good. Then you came over, we were brainstorming. You heard the harmonium, I think I had recorded it. And you said, that's the one. It's very cool. 

NJ

I'm very happy it became a feature of the piece. 

We always knew that breath would be part of the piece, and then we started recording me breathing. Breathing like when I was in the MRI machine. To try and calm myself in this very claustrophobic machine, I would just breathe really slowly. But then we had the idea to have this really rhythmic fast breathing to mimic the machine in a way, so that the breath became this calming thing, but then also this frantic thing as well.

EA

I really like what you said the other day about how grief isn't linear. It's not like it follows any kind of predetermined path. It's all over the place. In a way, this composition is supposed to mimic that too. Like you have the long calming breaths, followed by the staccato breaths, followed by atonal sounds from the MRI machine that have been made beautiful.  But they still rub against each other and they're not quite perfect. 

NJ

There are moments of perfection and there are moments of chaos. The whole piece is the idea that grief is like water and you never know how the water is going to act, if it's going to crash against you or rock you gently. It's this very odd and unpredictable thing.

EA

When we had the brainstorming session about it, you had mentioned waves, like waves crashing over you, which I really loved. And part of the piece is meant to mimic that, where you're being swallowed slowly by waves to come out of it again, to be swallowed by the medium.

NJ

So what were you doing to the harmonium to get that?

EA

Well, it was fun. That was a true collaboration. I was manipulating the harmonium and it's meant to be a chanting instrument, a drone instrument. You pumped the bellows, and it creates airflow, which passes over reeds, which create tones. And that can just go on indefinitely, as long as you are pumping the organ. But on the top, there's a glass window, and it is meant to create an equalization effect on the sound. The glass is inserted and it covers the area where the sound is coming out on top, muffles it, and then you take the glass away and it opens it up and you get more of the higher register. 

So while I was pumping the bellows and keying the notes, you were moving the glass slide in and out. So we were manipulating and creating our own wave effect that way. We were taking away high frequencies and bringing them back in. This is what a lot of effects and guitar pedals attempt to emulate, modulation of frequencies. And then I recorded the sound through an old tape delay machine - an Ace Tone, I think it's from the 60s. Tape delay records the sound that is going into it, being fed into it, and it passes over tape heads, exactly like a cassette tape. You are able to slow down and manipulate how the tape passes along those heads -  which of the heads are engaged, and you essentially get repeats and echoes as the recorded sound passes around the tape heads. Lit gets erased and re-recorded ad nauseam.  

In combination with the harmonium it made this expansive, amazing kind of dreamy sound. 

NJ

And then you ended up recording a whole half hour of it to lay underneath the whole piece. This really great machine sound. It's a very organic sounding machine and it acts as a kind of bottom layer for the whole piece. It works really, really well. 

EA

When I first heard the MRI machine, the rhythm of it was almost this perfect 120 beats per minute, which is a default setting on a lot of software that you record into. And then I had to figure out how to use that as a basis for the rhythm of the whole thing, which is what recording the breath was all about. Can it mimic that? 

I was having a hard time finding something that was satisfying that criterion. And then it became the tape delay machine. When I was reviewing something that we had recorded with your breath, I heard it running in the background, because it was in the room at the time. I thought “my God, there it is!”  And I put a microphone up over top of it and then left the room for 33 minutes and recorded one continuous track of that mechanical sound, put it in the composition and it was perfect. I didn't have to do anything more to it.

NJ

It's funny how this MRI sound, which is so assaulting and so awful, you don't hear it in its authentic state in the piece that you've created. But when I was working with Molly, the choreographer on the dance piece for the MRI, we were filming the video loops and she was having to do this dance over and over again. The MRI sound turned into music after a while, and it had these ‘acts’ as well, and we would talk about the centerpiece as sounding like you were in a club, this kind of techno beat or something. It's really interesting that this awful mechanical noise, if you sit with it for a long time, actually has a very consistent rhythm. It's abrasive, but it's rhythmic. And it's musical. 

We had another session where I started playing you a lot of  pieces of music from a film called After Sun - the cello music. And that's how the cello became part of it. Because I find the cello to be... there's something very human about it. It feels very close to the human voice I guess. I find the cello has a way of really cutting into you. It is a very strong and quick way into emotion. 

EA

And it's beautiful because it's bowed back and forth. There doesn't have to be a break, unlike a wind instrument where humans can only generate so much breath unless you do circular breathing, but that's a whole other thing. The bow can just be relentless. It worked really well with this too, where the tones from the MRI were similar to that, relentless. They just keep going. There are no breaks. There's something about the register of the cello, where it can go low, or it can move into an upper register that's got a lot of dynamics to it. You can get pretty emotive.

NJ

We also spoke about this piece as not being just music, but a kind of soundscape.  That you would be surrounded by this sound that wasn't necessarily musical all the time, but it would evoke things. And the cello, I just heard it again last night when I was listening to the piece. Certain moments with the cello sounded like a foghorn in a great way, which speaks to the third part of the installation, SAIL, and it really made me think of those boats and hearing this foghorn brought them to life in a way. 

EA

There is cello, but the really low register thing is actually bowed bass, but they work so nicely together. 

We talked about the three movements in the piece. There was the breath, the waves, and the third part of it where you talked about having the MRI machine re-created by something organic. There was a struggle with that part for a bit, what it was supposed to be, how to define it. And it became pretty obvious as we struck upon it.

NJ

It's been a really interesting process. It feels like following your nose, it's interesting how thoughts and ideas come. It feels like it's been a clear connect-the-dots. One thing has led us to the next. 

EA

Those early brainstorming sessions were very helpful. You had clear ideas about what you wanted and what you didn't want. It's important to know about what you don't want, because then I don't have to bother with that anymore. And there's something very nice about that. At the beginning I had the MIDI, I had mapped the notes, and I was mapping it to some instrument. At first it was a lot more musical than it has end up being.Once you shared those example pieces with me and talked a bit more about it I thought “okay, this direction is way better.”  You gave me a way better picture of what this is supposed to be.

NJ

I think it's an interesting thing to be speaking about the sound and the structure that it provided for the piece as a whole. The piece runs on this 32-minute loop, which is the length of a breast MRI. And POOL…We didn't even talk about pool!  The pool video loops run at half the time of the MRI loops. So you can get two pool loops into the whole MRI experience. 

Creating that change room for POOL, maybe we can just touch on that a little bit, through sound as well. 

EA

The interesting thing that's going to happen with POOL is that there's no stereo field, which means you don't sit in front of something and know there's a stage before you where everything is directional, like this is coming from the left. It's truly directional because it's all coming out of one speaker that is hung in a certain place to indicate what part of the environment that speaker occupies. It's really effective to have these offset sounds. 

NJ

That was a bit of a leap. For a very long time I've worked exclusively in film, where you are doing a sound mix to create space. But of course in installation there is space. It's three-dimensional. You can move and walk around, so then it becomes important to simply place the sound in the right space. It doesn't have to be manipulated in any way, because it is manipulated by the space.

EA

I like the idea that you'll be watching one screen, but then the noises of an activity will come from a screen behind and to your right. And the sound of that activity will only come from that screen. So then you'll be looking over your shoulder, just like you would if you were in a change room. 

Creating the sound collage for that was a lot of fun. There's going to be a fluorescent light fixture that is hanging from the ceiling. To create the constant sound of that fluorescent light, I looped a shorter clip, but then wasn't crazy about it. Then you pointed out - this mimics the MRI machine. It had a rhythm. You might not make that connection at first, but eventually hopefully you will make that connection. 

NJ

There are all these subtle connections throughout, of water and waves and wind. And in a way it's a kind of big lung, moving and breathing, with mechanical elements to it as well.

EA

That's what I like about it. I like that reference to the lung. You spoke about being in the MRI machine, which is a singular experience and a claustrophobic experience, to say nothing about the sound that you're being assaulted with. In the composition, it is claustrophobic at times, but it opens up, it breathes like a lung.

NJ

It moves through various states. There is something about the whole piece and about the music as well that you have to be... there is a patience that's required, it's durational. If you can just sit with it and allow it to wash over you, it pays off in the end. It lulls you into a space, into a headspace,  into an emotive space. 

Thanks Eric.

EA

You're welcome.