Excess all Areas - Explosives in Music (The Wire #427)

September's The Wire magazine is packed with essays on audio excess.  The issue is the thematic inverse of last year's Minimalism special (to which I contributed a short text on silence broadcast over the radio).  The opposite noisy extreme is explored this month, where I supply a piece looking at the history of explosives in music - titled 'Bomb Culture' - among many other eye/ear-opening contemplations on overwhelmingness.

This explosives+music history is compressed to bursting-point onto a single page.  One enjoyable example that didn't make the cut (deemed more fire-based than explosive-based) was Michel Moglia's 'L'Orgue a Feu'.  A whole book could be written on the subject...  Aside from everything mentioned in The Wire text, there were of course unintentional explosions in musical contexts too: dangerous blasts from mishandled limelight in Victorian music-halls, exploding magic lantern projectors, etc.  Also, of particular relevance to this Miraculous Agitations blog (where post-electronic soundmaking is the order of the day) are early 20th century pre-electronic endeavours to harness the power of explosive potential as an amplifying agent; pneumatic amplifier technologies (such as compressed air gramophones) powered by compressed air cylinders.

Very fleetingly, the rise of outdoor military quadrille bands in the mid-19th century is cited in The Wire piece (exploring the reasons for such bands' popularity at this time is another story).  It may appear that this aesthetic dogged all explosive+music alliances, most visibly in 1980s industrial music's camo-sporting, goose-stepping, theatrical edgelording (where explosives were often detonated indoors).  All this twitchy militarism may give the misleading impression that musical explosivity is an unhinged, particularly masculine quirk, but assumptions are always crying out to be unpicked...  Readers are advised to seek The Wire #427 to learn more...

Suffice to say, regular visitors to this blog know that I regularly excavate pre-electronic electro-musical culture.  Many of the late 19th century 'electrical music' performers happened to be fond of detonating small bombs via their electrical instruments - the effect was epitomised by Dot D'Alcorn's and Maud Irving's variety acts.  The bulk of my research on this, drawn from archives of rare materials, was self-published as 'The Magnetic Music of the Spiritual World' (bankrupting me in the process).  That 2015 paperback was intended as a sort of draft to hawk around publishers, and I had hoped - and still hope - that a publisher will take the opportunity engage me to get my original researches on their roster.  I trust it's not excessively vulgar to remind prospective publishers of this work, which is busting for wider aeration... otherwise I may explode from the pressure.

Read more in this month's The Wire #427 - 'Excess All Areas'

Fortean Times - May 2015 - Early Electronic Soundmaking (Trolling in the 1920s)

The BBC's anti-oscillation pamphlet

It's not generally known that early valve radios were capable of producing electronic tones through the overuse of the volume dial (or 'reaction' dial).  From the 1920s onwards, valve radios could be pushed into radio-frequency feedback states, and audible sinewave tones could be produced by heterodyning against a radio station's frequency.  Problematically, these tones re-radiated through the home radio's aerial, causing 'howling' interference in every other set in the surrounding area tuned to the same radio station.

Fortean Times #327

May's issue of Fortean Times #327 contains my article Rogue Oscillators - the fullest study yet published on radio oscillation.  Anybody interested in early electronic music is advised to peruse it!  Particularly interesting is the evidence that some people oscillated deliberately, and in the light of modern noisemaking culture - exampled by tomes such as Nic Collins' Handmade Electronic Music - it may be reappraised as a rustic, unrecognised form of rogue pre-electronic music performed by anonymous rascals.

To coincide with the article, here I present a slice of oscillation: Song of the R33 (based on a runaway airship that allegedly had its radio communications interfered with by people oscillating their radios).  The only sound sources are oscillating radio valves, and it gives a rather exaggerated flavour of the kind of sounds that polluted the airwaves of the 1920s and 30s.

Leon Theremin c.1927

An oscillating radio's pitch couldn't be really controlled accurately - the tuning dial wasn't delicate enough to produce true melodies (and nearby radios wouldn't necessarily hear the same pitch as the oscillating radio), but putting one's hand near the radio could slightly affect the tone's pitch too.  This effect was seized upon by Leon Theremin, who took the oscillation principle and upscaled the capacitive body effect to produce his hands-free electronic instrument, the Theremin.

So, if you want to read about this curious pre-history of the Theremin sound, check out this month's Fortean Times #327.

To end this blogpost here's a poem about oscillation from a magazine called The Ironmonger, Universal Engineer and Metal Trades' Advertiser from December 1924:

The Knob-Twiddler

This is the story of Plantagenet,
Who fiddled about with his wireless set;
He plugged in the coils and he turned all the knobs;
He twiddled about with the thingummybobs.
The one thing Plantagenet never would do,
Was to sit down and listen to gentlemen who
Were doing their best to divert and delight
This ineffably curious twiddlesome wight.
Each time he picked up a melodious air
He knew he could tune in much better elsewhere.
Reaction was tightened; then let loose again,
His aerial howls made the neighbours complain.
Whenever the set was performing its best,
Plantagenet thought he would try out a test:
And caterwauls, mingled with groans and with squeals,
Disturbed all his family and ruined his meals.
But was he depressed? Not a bit! He would sit
Picking up funny noises that learners transmit.
For hours he would sit there in rapture sublime,
With knobs and plug-in coils agog all the time:

Perhaps you have heard the unfortunate fate
Of that knob-turning fellow, Plantagenet (late).
One night he was seized by a transmission wave,
Which transported him rapidly, on past the grave,
Into the limbo where knob-twiddlers end -
The place from which night-oscillations ascend.

So all the good people who twiddle the knobs,
Who will mess about with the thingummybobs,
Whenever they hear diabolic howls -
Should remember the army of Radio Ghouls
All ready and anxious to clap down the lid
On all men who do what Plantagenet did.

Entangled Histories: Digging out Electronic Music's Roots (or, what's electronic, and what's not)

Acoustic Futurist noise-intoner,
London, 1914

With the centenary of the Italian Futurist's first UK performance of the Art of Noises fast approaching, various rustlings are underway to commemorate the occasion.  There are stirrings at Resonance 104.4FM: the expert engineer and sound designer Peter McKerrow is now working on some Futurist acoustic noise-intoners for an upcoming happening - the specifics still under wraps - but these replicas promise to boast some novel visual quirks that will see the 100-year-old acoustic noise-makers (that one reviewer in 1914 described as "sausage machines") brought "BANG" up to date (to use a Futurist noise effect).  For this project I researched the original noise-intoner (intonarumori) patent to assist the construction, and also set myself a challenge of building a prototype entirely from found materials.

In my own rather slapdash attempt (built inside a "red telephone box" CD holder) I took the liberty of dispensing with the soundmaking handle.   The pitch lever (an arm from a hydraulic door closer) remains in place, but the actual handle to produce sound is removed.  Giving into temptation, I decided to replace it with a resonating coil system to electromagnetically resonate the metal string (as an eBow does) - bringing the noise-intoners a big step closer to the proverbial 'mechanical synthesiser.'  My skew-whiff prototype has thus taken a big departure from the original, and now begins to resemble a post-electronic miraculous agitation apparatus...

Electromagneticised noise-intoner - built from found materials

But here I should skid to a halt.  Tony Herrington recently wrote a great piece on The Wire website - "Turn that Noise down!" - drawing attention to the clumsiness of an excitable electronic music collective that has misrepresented Luigi Russolo's Art of Noises as being the birth of electronic music(!).  Woefully, perspectives on Futurist music have been skewed by modern popular accounts erroneously lumping the Futurists in with early electronic developments.   The Futurists did play some "electric" noise-intoners, *but* these only featured electric beaters to strike the strings - the soundstuff itself was purely mechanical, and bore no relation to any electronic instruments.  Regarding my own electromagnetic rebuilding of a noise-intoner with electromagnetic resonators, I must stress that I am bastardising the original!

Noise-intoner patent

Let's take this opportunity to look at a forgotten pre-history of electronic music, that is, electronic music in its proper definition: electronically produced tone...  As Herrington says, truly, the Futurists are not implicated with the history of electronic music - the history rather circumnavigates around them, tacitly acknowledging, but shy of their presence.  So let's leave the Futurists behind and examine the true beginnings of electronic music...

The principles of electronic music were established in the early 19th century, but electric loudspeakers were not perfected until the early 20th century, so the early quiet experiments did not lend themselves to grand performance - remaining confined to the laboratory.  It was the perfection of the electric loudspeaker that gave electronic music its "mouth" so to speak: giving the electrons a means to sing.  In Britain, the earliest loudspeaker-derived electronic sounds were being dabbled with by the now overlooked electrical engineer Alfred Graham (1856-1929) - his work led to the apparent first UK performances of a prototype electronic instrument to junior scientific audiences at London's Royal Institution in late December 1895 and early 1896.

Alfred Graham was the founder of Alfred Graham & Company (continued by his son of the same name) who put their horn-like electric loudspeakers on the market in 1887.  Graham, through his experiments in telephonic 'amplification', noted that when a carbon granule microphone was connected to a loudspeaker through a battery, and the microphone and speaker brought close together, a musical pitch would emerge - feedback.  The circuit was simple: carbon microphone, loudspeaker horn and a battery (not forgetting a switch).  Alfred Graham patented the soundmaking technique in 1894, and also specified a possible musical application where the microphone and loudspeaker are acoustically joined through a pipe with holes cut in it.  This alters the feedback's pitch by altering the resonance of the pipe.

One of Alfred Graham's 'electric flute' circuits

In his 1894 patent titled "A New or Improved Method and Means of Producing Sound" Graham suggests that the timbre of the tone may also be altered:
"The pitch, loudness or quality of the sound produced may be varied by varying the battery current in strength or changing its direction [polarity] or by changing the forms of the trumpets [loudspeaker horns] or varying the relative position of the instruments [the microphone and loudspeaker]"

Graham's technique was adopted as a showpiece by scientific lecturer John Gray McKendrick (1841-1926).  McKendrick, as a physiologist, wanted to amplify the sounds of the human body.  Such levels of amplification were hard to achieve (no electronic valves existed).  Inevitably, his experiments in pre-electronic amplification met with the extremities of self-oscillating feedback states described in Graham's patent.  McKendrick found this particularly inspiring and wrote a short paper on it in 1896 titled "Note on Mr. Alfred Graham's Method of producing Sound by an Electrical Arrangement".  He enthused that the apparatus "suggests the possibility of constructing a new kind of musical instrument.  Thus diaphragms might be tuned to the notes of the scale, and by pressing on keys, and thus completing circuits, musical notes having something of the quality of those of brass instruments might be produced.  Possibly, also, by piercing holes at proper distances in the flexible tube, these holes might be so fingered as to produce different sounds, and thus we might have an electric flute."

John G. McKendrick's sketch of the soundmaking circuit

McKendrick exhibited the electronic sounds at the aforementioned 1895 Royal Institution lectures in London, where he presented a series of demonstrations for young audiences dealing with sound, hearing and speech.  From what I can tell from limited information, he presented the tones unadorned - in a scientific manner - rather than demonstrating any adaptations to play musical ditties.  This was intended to inspire the young audience about the possibilities of electrical sound production - a technique to be refined by a future generation.

Alfred Graham did not market or pursue the musical possibilities of electronic sound.  Both his and McKendrick's experiments are apparently absent from the 'official' histories of electronic music.  Pushing telephonic sound to its limits to make feedback was rather too ahead of its time, and what was more useful at this time was the prospect of basic telephonic amplification.  Thus, Graham pursued the perfected reproduction of sounds rather than the generation of sounds.  He helped establish on-board communication systems on British naval ships.  His company later popularised the Amplion loudspeaker - designed specifically for radio sets in the 1920s.  It could be said therefore that Alfred Graham helped give electronic music its mouth...