Free Improv and the Environment: listening, but also hearing

[This is guest post by Alistair Isaac, who is about to join the Edinburgh department. Recall Mohan's post.--ES]

I'm a long-time fan of a form of music one might call "free improv": improvised sound unconstrained by any traditional melodic or harmonic structure (a movement which grew out of free jazz on the one hand and minimalism and punk on the other—note this usage is more restrictive than wikipedia's definition). One thing about this music which has puzzled me is the large gap between the excitement of experiencing it live and the stillborn dullness of most of it as recorded—especially true of the more minimal varieties, e.g. Sachiko M, Toshimaru Nakamura, Keith Rowe, or Axel Dörner.

Here I draw attention to one relevant factor: the shared experience within a single sonic environment possible only during live performance. When performer and audience are listening to the same sounds, the performer's improvised response can illustrate how she heard those sounds, thereby retroactively affecting the audience member's own experience in the moment. But this dynamic interaction also defeats the possibility of capturing that moment with any mechanical recording device. Consider for example this instance by the Boston-based duo Nmperign:

In addition to the sounds made by the performers, some of the background sonic ambiance of the park bleeds through here, and we get a small sense in the video of the responsiveness of the performers to this background environment. But no recording device directed at the performers is going to capture the entire panorama of sonic ambiance, especially if the music is soft and minimal, allowing for arbitrarily faint or distant sounds to interact with the performance. For every twitter and whisper of the park we hear here, there are infinitely more missed by the mic, but subtly contributing to the overall sound in a way only a physically present audience member could hear and appreciate. This is more than a mere technological limitation, more than a question of quantity. The point is not how many sounds are reproduced, but which sounds are heard or noticed in the moment. "Exact" reproduction (if such a thing were possible) of the sounds at such a performance would not generate an equivalent auditory experience in the listener.

One of the most memorable improv moments I've ever experienced was at a concert by Keith Rowe and Toshimaru Nakamura at a venue in the Houston warehouse district. During a quiet lull in the performance, a train passed by softly in the background. Far from detracting from the improv, this environmental contribution was responded to and interacted with by Rowe and Nakamura just as if it were a sound contributed by a third improviser. In this moment, the accidental ambiance of the urban landscape and the deliberately created soundscape inside the hall spontaneously merged in a way which completely defeated mechanical reproduction. A recording which captured the sound of the train, would not have captured also its spontaneity, and so neither could it reproduce the emotional effect of the performers' response.

A key factor here is the role of listening in the more minimal forms of free improv. In its louder and noisier cousins, there's no space for the environment to affect the sonic landscape. In this example from Hanatarash, for instance, surely much is missed by watching a recording rather than being physically present, but what is missed it not a sonic contribution from the environment, or a source of spontaneity missed by the recorder (umm, NSFW?):

Hanatarash, like Rowe and Nmperign, improvises a music from sounds without any guiding melodic structure. But in noise music, there's not the same kind of role for listening on the part of the performer—he or she is too busy generating the sound to pay much attention to the environment in which it is embedded. When the performer is listening, though, what she hears is just as important to the performance as the sounds she makes, and in a sonically rich environment, the shared hearing between performer and audience can create an overall experience which defies recording and reproduction.

The reason is that hearing is something which happens in the moment. When the performer and audience are in an environment together, and they both hear the same sound, they may hear it in different ways, but the immediate reaction by the performer informs and shapes the audience's retrospective experience of that sound. Think about the refrigerator hum which is only noticed after it shuts off—the change in sound affects how you conceive your previous auditory experience. "Noticing" here, however, is just a special case of categorization. Just as a creak on the stairs from an imagined burglar's footstep can be recategorized as the squeak of a mouse, the sounds in a sonically rich environment can be recategorized as part of the performance, as standing in different states of timbral similarity to one another, as playing different roles in a rhythm. The active role the performer plays in influencing this re-hearing of sounds by the audience depends crucially on their mutual attentiveness in a shared environment.

This is why the emphasis amongst improvisers on being in the moment; without attention to the moment itself the immediacy of the reaction, and thus the effect on the listener, is lost. See for example, the comments Dörner makes here around 1:30:

The comments Rowe makes starting at 5:33:

The comment by Sachiko M at :50:

"I just want to listen: no playing."