Five Variations of Phonic Circumstances and a Pause
Five “poetic actions in regard to machines” treat with great sensitivity the question of how technologies of all times have dictated relationships between orality and literacy, and created subsequent relationships of power. Each work is part of a discourse surrounding the culture of listening: the audible, acoustic technologies, the gesticulation of narration, the audible texture of the voice. The machines of Five Variations on Phonic Circumstances and a Pause are constituted as mechanisms whose particular use is processing sounds or, more precisely, phonic circumstances. The machines’ goal is to translate and interpret sound events – noises, orality, readings, narrations, murmurs, secrets, music – by changing them from one phonic register to another, transmuting them into text and code. These devices lie somewhere between science fiction, Victorian steam technology and the latest artificial intelligence and word processing technologies. The five variations refer constantly to a number of communication models and format transformations that create tension in the relationship between scientific knowledge and the human factor, and additionally emphasize the dislocation experience present in the expansive range of contemporary media. What part of a letter bears its sound? In what part of a musical note does the music reside? Is music a language? Can you speak of a code when speaking of poetry?
PIANOLAS
The first punch cards used as code were developed and applied by Joseph-Marie Jacquard on mechanical looms. The punched paper rolls for the first Pianola were made by a technician, perforating the paper after it was marked up in pencil using the original music score. Punched cards were the start of what would become digital programming. Pianolas is a digital adaptation of a player piano in the form of vitrines whose insides contain the instruments’ typical perforated rolls, yet in this case a reading of their binary information does not happen mechanically, but rather through optical readers. The music they play is “written” by means of perforations in the paper rolls, where each placement of the perforation represents a musical note. The paper roll goes around endlessly in a loop through a system of motor-driven rollers and their perforated notes are read as they pass in front an optical sensor connected to a frequency generator that reproduces the corresponding tones. Since the melody’s lyrics are printed vertically and into syllables, the mechanism of movement forces the viewer to read from bottom to top. Pianolas involve new “ways of reproducing” that affect what can be heard, but also what can be read. Pianolas make visible one of the first binary mechanisms for recording music, together with a device that synthesizes sounds, and at the same time proposes a destabilization of reading.
Bio
Tania Candiani (Mexico City, 1974) is a Guggenheim scholarship fellow in the Creative Arts category and she is part of the Mexican National System of Creators since 2012.
