[X-music Lab 22春] Recap on the Semester
Growing up in an Indian household in Japan, my relationship with my roots and cultures have been mostly centered around sounds I’ve been surrounded by — whether that was of phone conversations in Tamil I couldn’t completely comprehend, or of reciting Hindu sacred texts, or perhaps simply of the sound of cooking a traditional south Indian meal. Before joining X-music lab, a lot of my work had been focused around the themes of spirituality and conversation. There was a part of me that separated this with other forms of music — whether that be jazz, western classical music, etc. — which I was strongly involved in from a young age. Somehow they seemed to have different frameworks of what was considered to be ‘good’ music. Unlike the latter having a pre-existing set of benchmarks as to assess quality, creating “X-music” that was for the future, meant making music and in parallel also rebuild a framework to assess it. This was something that seemed extremely daunting. Throughout this semester at X-music, I worked on reassessing a somewhat basic, but increasingly complex essence of ‘music’, and “x-music” itself.
The new-comer workshops revolved around finding what “X” meant to us, and consisted of the following four stages.
ws 1 : listening to sounds around SFC
The first “new-comer workshop” was to listen to sounds around designated places in our university campus. As a group, we went around the campus taking notes of what we heard, taking a break to discuss and share, then listening again for the second time. Though it seemed like a seemingly simple exercise, this brought into limelight some tendencies we have as listeners. Firstly, even if we were at the same place listening to the same soundscape, the things we heard individually varied quite drastically. In addition, the discussion largely affected what we would concentrate on — at the forest near school for example, after one student mentioned that there was construction going on nearby, our ears would tend to lean towards it. Although it may be seemingly obvious, it made me realize the impact of verbalizing, and consciously directing our senses towards a particular direction. Adding on, because the discussion was a prerequisite of this workshop, a lot of us seemed to listen to sounds that were easier to verbalize, and we explained them using other sonic terms (e.g. drone, reverb, etc.) that we were familiar with.
The way listeners listen to sounds is not only determined by what is presented in front of us, but is also largely dependent on the circumstances, environment, and people we are surrounded by. Perhaps the concept, space, and presentation are not only as important as, but in fact are a part of the sound itself.
ws2&3 : finding music "at the boundary"
The second workshop was focused on creating a hypothesis for what what we individually felt was music, then finding an existing piece of music that was “barely music” according to those standards. During this week, I had experienced a loss of hearing in my left ear, for which I had to take a medical listening test, which I felt a sort of musicality in, and replicated.
The test in itself had no ‘player’, and on its own, may not be considered music. However, the moment, in which I had felt a sense of musicality in it, was when I think it could be considered music. With a given hypothesis that music is labelled music when there is creativity or some sort of expression associated, I felt as though creativity does not have to be limited to the creator. In the case of sounds around SFC, if a particular sound is able to cultivate imagination in a listener, even if it wasn’t intended to be, perhaps that is enough to deem it as music. In reality, this may not be as extreme : music is more often constructed between the reflexive relationship between the creativity of both the ‘creator’ and the ‘listener’.
This then brings up the question of- can music stand alone as music without a listener?
With these perspectives in mind, I went back into my initial research motive of religion and music and took a look at the Islamic call for prayer, or Azhaan, as a form of music.
The Azhaan is essentially a call for Namaz (the daily five prayers in Islam), and could also be considered to be part of the soundscape of cities with mosques. The purpose of the Azhaan is to notify the time of prayer, and instigate prayer — one could say that neither the listener or the caller considers this to be music, but there is undoubtedly an aesthetic value associated with it. Personally, having lived next to a mosque in India, the azhaan was a sound of the city, closer to an early morning alarm than music, and it was not until recently that I was able to appreciate its ‘musical’ value. In this way, what one perceives as music can vary with time and environment, and definitely influenced by how it is labelled, defined and presented as communally.
The concept of ‘music’ in islam is particularly interesting, with many who even consider it a sin. In a religion like islam where idolization is strictly prohibited, music is often associated with entertainment and pleasure, and dissociated with religion. This is predominantly the music that is considered ‘sinful’. (Though Debated), music with religious context, words from the quran, or with the motives to praise god is seen as different from ‘music’, but rather as praise, and is categorized as ‘Sama’, while also being backing ideology behind traditional islamic music such as Sufi music. Thus, the Azhaan is appreciated as a devotional art form, but not as ‘music’ in the perspective of entertainment. To the non-muslim listener however, the Azhaan may hold no spiritual relevance, but still be appreciated as art… would that turn it into music?
This brings into limelight the fact that music and musicality is not always just a matter of sounding good to the ears, but is also determined by the accumulation of cultural, religious, and social frameworks.
ws (final) :
Our final presentation revolved around this concept of the flexibility of music, and how what we consider to be music is influenced by our environment. Our work, “nature (of music)” involved the recitation of two poems about nature — one in English, and the other in Japanese. The poetry would be recited into to microphones, that were plugged into Ableton Live, where we composed a piece to convey the theme of environmental protection as reflected in the poetry. The volume of our recitation was tracked by an envelope follower, which outputted values that were mapped onto different effects. As a result, the non-verbal aspects of our recitation changed the sound of our composition in real-time. The listeners were then given the freedom to choose whether to listen to the recitations, or to put on their headphones and listen to the music it was producing. The work aimed to allow listeners to broaden their perspective of music, by enhancing the ’musicality’ of verbal recitation, as a means to extract a form of meaning that goes beyond simply the meaning attached to words. By giving the listeners the freedom to go back and forth between the audio and recitation, we hoped to instill a sense of discovery and reflection as to what ‘music’ may have meant for them.
The biggest realization of this semester was the change in perspective from ‘music’ being something definitive and changing with time, to something that is much more flexible.
The same background music in a cafe could be unnoticed, then noticed and found as musically pleasing, then go back to being part of the sound of a cafe within a few minutes. Given that music is evolving by nature, to what extent is it the responsibility of art to deliver a message to its audience? And whose responsibility is it to cultivate understanding of — or even just exposure to — the musicality of so-called avant-garde, or “X” music? Where is the line between sound art and music? Does it even need to be drawn?
Going forward, I hope to delve deeper into these questions and continue research on enhancing the musicality in sounds & rituals we may not consider to be ‘music’ in order to cultivate an appreciation & understanding beyond a purely political perspective (particularly in regard to different cultures/religions).
