[SOUND] While the idea of the formal is crucial to understanding how we experience sound, from the very beginning, we want to introduce how these elements have a social dimension, how they exist in a social sphere. And even more how they have been approached by a perspective of the global south. Candace, you have done a huge amount of work, both with sound but also from these approaches of the global south. Where should we start? >> That's a good question, I think that with sound, it's important to start at the very beginning. We can think of the formation of sound even at the origins of the universe. For example, there's often this term that's thrown around called the big bang and we know that as the formation of our world as we know it. But the big bang, in fact, was completely silent. And it was completely silent because at that point in time, everything, all the matter, all the particles were moving away from each other at a really rapid speed. Which means that there wasn't the opportunity for any sound, because the way that sound is produced, the only way we can hear sound is if there is friction. So that creates a wave and then, that's the thing that we hear in our ears. So through that, I've been interested in, and I think many people are interested in is how sound shapes also our understanding of history. Richard Rath is a sound historian and he's written a book called, How Early America Sounded. And through that, I think we get a very particular view of the past. One example of this is also how we're re-looking at things that we thought that we knew. For example, one of those is archaeological sites. Since the 1970s, there's been a study called archaeoacoustics. We all know what archaeology is. Archaeoacoustics is, in fact, the study of sound at the archaeological sites. And the way that that's influencing our understanding of the past is in fact through exactly that. Through studying the sonic frequencies at these sites, through also thinking about how the architectures were made to produce certain kinds of sound elements. For example, at the pyramids in Chichen Itza, which is a Mayan archaeological site in Mexico, if you stand at the base of one of the pyramids and you clap your hands. The resounding sound from the steps of the pyramid, [SOUND] what you hear is in fact the call of the Quetzal bird. So that made people realize that in fact all the way back through human history, people have been creating and engineering very particular kinds of sound environments. >> As our first element of sound, we thought we would introduce the idea of tuning. Many of us had being to classical performance where you have an orchestra, sometimes dozens of musicians, sometimes even more than a 100. And we tend to erase from our memory or from our perception the first moment of the performance because it doesn't officially count as the performance. And that is the moment of tuning. Yet for many artists, composers but also people in the audience that has been a magical moment where all the instruments find harmony between each other. And they also locate themselves in a particular space and listen to each other, they create the collective sound. [MUSIC] So the idea of tuning has been central to many people concerned with sound. To not just play harmonically in a particular scale or so on, but to actually orient themselves in space. >> Some of these examples that we want to highlight are expanding that idea or that notion of tuning. Because when we think of tuning, we think of, perhaps the question is whether we're in tune. And to be in tune, we know what that means through our voices, for example, of creating the same level of pitch. But in fact, every object in the world has a resonate frequency and every volumetric space also has a resonant frequency, so it also has a different pitch. Artists and musicians have been listening to this and responding to these spaces for many, many years. And that historical precedence is in fact in a performance in 1969 by the composer Alvin Lucier. Alvin Lucier created this work called, I Am Sitting in a Room. His impetus for creating the work, in fact, was listening to someone else, a sound engineer test speakers. And when he was testing speakers, what he was doing was sending out a sound into the room and then listening to how that sound was recorded. So over and over again, he says, I am sitting in a room. And then his recorded voice is played and then he says it again, and then the recorded voices is played. And then by the end of that, in fact, his voice entirely disappears and what you hear again is the resonant frequency of the room. >> I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. >> [INAUDIBLE] sound of your speaking voice. [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC] >> In our experience of sound, we often forget to think about a central component which is silence. Without silence, there is no experience of sound. There is also no experience of language. And to introduce this element, we thought we would cover a fascinating work by the avant-garde composer John Cage. In 1977, in the Teatro Lirico of Milan, Cage staged one of his versions of a piece called Empty Words. Empty Words is basically Cage selecting segments from Thoreau's journals and then taking out all the silences in the work and redistributing it. He would redistribute them playfully, so in certain parts, you could still make out the meaning of the words, but in most of them, it would just become almost like abstract language or concrete poetry. >> [SOUND] >> For this particular performance, which is the one we're highlighting and that you can listen to, Cage was reading this in this full theater with hundreds of students, young people, older people, traditional musicians, also avant-garde musicians. And as he was reading, at the beginning, you just hear Cage reading these words that have no meaning, empty words. But little by little, the audience starts getting restless. First you just hear whispers, people are still trying to be a bit reverent. But then all of a sudden, you hear yelling, people saying this is not art. John Cage you are a bad composer. This is outrageous. And the more this choir of rebellious voices starts growing. [INAUDIBLE] >> [INAUDIBLE] >> [INAUDIBLE] >> [INAUDIBLE] >> [INAUDIBLE] >> [INAUDIBLE] >> [INAUDIBLE] >> [INAUDIBLE] And times [INAUDIBLE]. >> Eventually, people go all the way up to the stage, one of the students grabs the microphone away from Cage and yells into it. But Cage, knowing perfectly well that he's created a happening of sorts spontaneously, just keeps reading So what we have as a result is this more than two hour long recording of this mounting riot. [NOISE] [INAUDIBLE] [APPLAUSE]
