Recently I’ve been watching and listening to a lot of Chicago drill. I am going to change my essay subject to this as I was struggling to think about what to write for my psychedelic experience idea. There is a lot to unpack for Chicago drill and there are many books that I can use to help my research.

Ballad of the Bullet : Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy by Forrest Stuart

The rap on gangsta rap : who run it? ; gangsta rap and visions of black violence / Bakari Kitwana.

Chicago hustle and flow [electronic resource] : gangs, gangsta rap, and social class.

The book starts by introducing the rapper Habit, from the Spanish Cobras. He starts by explaining how in jail no-one doubts your realness like they do when you’re out of jail.

What is creativity?

creative – “to bring into being”

intertextuality Julia Kristeva. ideas are being recycled and influenced by artists predecessors

What constitutes an original work?

everything is a citation.

How might artistic work be research?

Tacit Knowledge (Polanyi 1966) We can know more than we can tell.

Julian Henriques Sonic Bodies

Sonic Knowledge – Knowledge is related to sound

Lawrence Abu Hamdan – Saydnaya (the missing 19dB) 2017. – Worked with Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture to produce an acoustic investigation into the Syrian regime prison, where over 13,000 people have been executed since 2011.

George Brecht – Drip Music (1959) – Performance with water dripping into a container.

Fluxus

Group Work –

Sacred Frequencies XOSAR

Glacial by Audrey Chen is a live recording of “unprocessed cello, voice and analog electronics”. The recording starts off with a repeating cello riff that raises and lowers in intensity, it lowers in intensity and is this accompanied by the sound of almost a single note on a bass guitar and as this comes in the cello notes start to change and the playing gets more and more intense. Beautiful vocals almost Bjork like then accompany the playing. I really enjoyed the end of the piece where it got more noisy and was surprised at how she got her instruments to sound that fuzzy without effects.

I was surprised by the modulation that she was able to do with her vocals without using processing, at parts of the recording it sounded as if she was using distortion and looping processing. This was inspiring for my final piece as it made me think of how I could use vocals and warp voices without processing.

Listening to “Curtain” by Derek Baron released on the 7th of August 2020, I was inspired and influenced by the rawness and almost vulgarity of the recordings which sounded as if they were cut up and stitched together in a beautiful way. I liked the gaps in-between the ever evolving instrumental. I was inspired by this and I think it would be god to take inspiration from this for my creative sound piece that I have to create for this unit. I was thinking I could cut up tape and play around with timing for the final piece as this is something I haven’t got round to doing and would be a good experimentation to see what I could come up with.

I also listened to the piece “Recollects”, the piece starts of with two old people who are suspected to be seen on the cover mid conversation talking about Vitamin C and the grocery store. The piece starts of very intimate and is almost was if you’re in their living room and intruding within their conversation, it feels as if you shouldn’t be listening. They then start talking about travelling and a man that we are not familiar with. The conversation then cuts out and sounds as if someone was on a boat (like the cover), you can hear the water and I suspect Baron and his father talking, I presume it is a father and son fishing bonding session.

I really liked the intimacy of this piece and the way Baron was able to create a feeling of intrusion from the listener, this was done by the way the conversation starts midway and cuts out midway. I also really liked the minimal editing style and that he probably cut up raw recordings and didn’t do much post production with them. I could use inspiration from this as normally I am an over-editor and tend to ruin work with editing it too much so that you can’t make out the original recordings.

Anthropology is the study of human development and culture.

Ethnography – the systematic study of individual cultures. a branch of anthropology.

Minimally ethnography

Sensory ethnography

https://medium.com/@SandeepPrakash/interpreting-ritual-trance-musicking-a-literature-review-9f6bdb5e3376

“Disciplinary developments in the field of anthropology has molded Western ethnographic work that sought to describe meaning and symbols within specific cultural trance practices. Anthropology has also profoundly influenced the other fields — religious studies and ethnomusicology — considered in this review.”

Autoethnography

Sonic Warfare is a book wrote by Steve Goodman (Kode9) about how sound can be used as a weapon

Route A – Dissertation (6,000-8,000 words)

Route B – Audio Paper (30-40 minutes) – A piece of audio that follows the form of an essay

Audio Paper Manifesto –

1. The audio paper affords performative aesthetics.
2. The audio paper is idiosyncratic.
3. The audio paper is situated and partial.
4. The audio paper renders affects and sensations.
5. The audio paper is multifocal; it assembles diverse and often heterogeneous voices.
6. The audio paper has multiple protagonists, narrators and material agencies.
7. The audio paper brings aesthetics and technologies together in mediation.
8. The audio paper is a constituent part of larger ecologies.

Ideas for dissertation –

Give three advantages to writing a dissertation –

1. You are using the language of intellectuals

Give three advantages of making an audio paper –

1. It is easily accessible
2. You can use sound to

Describe three ways in which the two research routes are similar and three ways in which the two research routes are different.

What is your question?

How does noise and sound effect the aesthetic of underground Japanese cinema of the 90s.

What would your question sound like as an audio paper?

Film sounds, interviews, documentary, field recordings, foley

The psychological and human brain effects of music in combination with psychedelic drugs Mendel Kaelen 2017

“Music may be a human invention, but if so, it resembles the ability to make and control fire: it is something we invented that transforms human life. Indeed, it is more remarkable than fire making in some ways, because not only is it a product of our brain’s mental capacities, it also has the power to change the brain. It is thus emblematic of our species’ unique ability to change the nature of ourselves.”

Aniruddh D. Patel

This paper covers the interaction in the mind between music and psychedelic drugs. The paper is very science based as it was published to Imperial College London and includes a lot of tests that were done on patients that were given placebos and LSD and were tested with and without music.

Start of Essay –

Title – The effects of Psychedelia with Sound.

Psychedelics have a profound effect on culture and the psyche. They have been prevalent within mainstream culture since the first synthesis of LSD by Albert Hoffman in 1938.

As psychedelic drugs are illegal and inaccessible in most countries this has made it impossible for scientists to do research on them as they cannot publish their papers.

The

Ecology – The word ecology makes me think of the enviroment and the ology on the end makes me presume that ecology is studying the environment.

Actual definition – the study of the relationships between living organisms.

I have been looking into the role sound plays within the psychedelic experience and the science behind the heightened awareness of sound and audio hallucinations.

I have chosen the text (Explosions in the Mind: Composing Psychedelic Sounds and Visualisations by Jonathan Weinel 2021.)

The text describes the psychedelic experience and how we can recreate sounds that emulate the psychedelic experience and phenomena such as synaesthesia. The introduction to this text briefly guides the reader through the description of the psychedelic experience. Weinel then explains his interest in the topic and how we cannot capture the video and audio of the psychedelic synaesthesia experience with modern day cameras and microphones. This made me think about the future of sound recording technologies, how in the future we may be able to record sound from inside the mind and capture the subconscious.The ethics behind this are debatable as you don’t have full control of your subconscious. A lot of psychedelic music tries very hard to recreate the sounds and feelings within the psychedelic experience this can be seen in the 60s psychedelic rock movement with artists such as Pink Floyd and The Jimi Hendrix Experience having a clear interest in replicating the experience with their live shows and studio recordings. Nowadays we have music such as binaural beats that do a good job of replicating the sound within the experience and live electronic music events that have psychedelic ritual qualities.

“There is no ‘video capture device’ for the mind’s eye”