The Wire #364 - and Interestingnesses on the Art of Noises

The latest issue of The Wire (#364) contains my surveyal of the forgotten electro-musical entertainments of the Victorian music halls.  (The electric musical tradition is not to be confused with electronic music, which has different origins, as described in a previous posting).  In the article, the centenary of the Italian Futurists' London debut of the Art of Noises is used as a springboard to examine earlier music hall performers who played advanced forms of 'descriptive' music involving electrical inventions, electric shocks upon members of the audience, imitations of locomotives, storms, battles, etc., and bombastic pronouncements in the stage press.

Whereas Victorian descriptive entertainments sought to simulate recognisable real-world sounds within musical themes, the Futurists radically inverted this: they instead sought to simulate music itself using noises derived from 20th century hubbub - forcibly modulating noises into musical frameworks.  The Art of Noises went way beyond simple imitations of real-world sounds, but nevertheless, superficially it retained 'descriptive' stylings despite efforts to transcend all previous traditions: it can be seen in the titles of the movements, the nods to the noises of urban life, and the provision of programme notes.  Russolo's notes reveal an advanced mode of listening: "my noise spirals are not mere impressionist reproductions of the surrounding life, but synthetically-treated noise emotions.  In listening to the combined and harmonized notes of the Exploders, the Whistlers, and the Gurglers, one scarcely thinks of motor cars, engines, or moving waters, but experiences a great Futurist absolutely unforeseen artistic emotion which resembles nothing but itself".

Luigi Russolo at the Coliseum, 1914

To shed more light on the Art of Noises concerts at the London Coliseum, I have transcribed here one of the most interesting articles about the event.  This lengthy text appears to have gone uncited in Futurist discussions.  It appears in the July 1914 issue of Musical Opinion, and is written by the editor of that journal, the organist Harvey Grace (1874-1944) under his pseudonym 'Autolycus'.

Accounts of Luigi Russolo's London Coliseum performances are few and far between, and some information appears almost contradictory.  It is reported that Futurist mouthpiece F.T. Marinetti gave a rambling speech in broken English on the first night, whereas other sources - presumably referring to subsequent performances - say that Marinetti had discoursed in Italian and was apparently cut short (see the 1930 autobiography of the manager of the Coliseum, Arthur Croxton, Crowded Nights and Days [Croxton's account is copied in Felix Barker's 1957 The House that Stoll Built]).  The Guardian appears to refer to the second night, reporting that Marinetti was absent, leaving Russolo in charge.  Elsewhere, C.R.W. Nevinson's Paint and Prejudice (1937) mentions that a gramophone playing Elgar accompanied the later performances to allay the heckling crowd.

To give some background to these UK performances - it should be said that it was first announced in November 1913 that in a matter of weeks the Futurists "threaten to inflict their music upon us" (the tone of the press was already negative before the first instrument had even touched down in the UK).  One single noise intoner (or, as they were termed at the time - "noise tuner") had a low-key exhibition in London, January 1914 and was said to sound "like a lion roaring".  The Art of Noises was finally debuted at the Coliseum on the week commencing 15th June 1914, and the musicians playing the noise intoners were borrowed from the Coliseum's own in-house orchestra.

Intriguingly, on the 24th June, the Futurists' noise intoners were played at the annual Printer's Pie dinner at the Savoy Hotel, with the noise functioning as a punchline for Hugh Spottiswoode's long, rambling dinner speech (alluding to Marinetti's own rambling introduction to the Art of Noises).  The conductor of the Futurist performance was supposed to be Sir Henry Wood (who had conducted Schoenberg performances earlier that year), but he was unable to attend, so Arthur Croxton - manager of the Coliseum - took his role, and was made-up to look like him by the famous master of disguises Willy Clarkson.  It was a raucous evening with practical jokes, a baby elephant's indiscretion, intonarumori punctuating the speeches, and a boxing match between two characters who were revealed to be illustrators John Hassall and Tony Sarg.

In the light of the reception of the Art of Noises (where the audience supplied its own onslaught of noises) it is interesting to peruse Marinetti's own statements on the music hall - his essay "The Meaning of the Music Hall" published in the Daily Mail in November 1913.

The illustrated transcriptions of Autolycus' musings and Marinetti's variety theatre manifesto are here:
Autolycus on The Art of Noises (1914) [transcribed from Musical Opinion July 1914]
F.T. Marinetti - The Meaning of the Music Hall (1913)

Exact Change #8 - Acoustic Circuit Bending: Hacking the Physical World

The current issue of the e-zine Exact Change (No. 8) features my illustrated article 'A Primer of Post­-Electronic Music and the Alchemical Subharmonic Lottery'.  This gives an outline of what I'm inclined to call 'acoustic circuit-bending' - a technique revolving around electromagnetic feedback fields and the acoustic coupling of found materials - a form of 'post-electronic' soundmaking.

The concept of 'post-electronic music' was first elucidated in my rambling, incoherent 2005 book Dropping Out where attention was drawn to the benefits of electrically sustained vibrations in mechanically drawing out combinations of subharmonics in acoustic apparatuses.  This inversely mirrors somewhat the emphasis on harmonics in traditional electronic tone building.  The practice was tied to dumpster-diving, where unpremeditated object combinations can be observed.  I originally wanted to recreate the complex sounds sometimes heard when travelling on decrepit old trains - and this precipitated a peculiar habit of resonating every ferric object I could find.

To my present shame, Dropping Out incriminated me for multiple indiscretions.  The foremost was my description of attempts to resonate rows of lampposts.  The concept had such genuine sonic promise, and it was not my intention to deliberately antagonise.  The acoustic potential of lampposts can be beheld by using a soft-headed mallet to strike the tubular neck, and immediately placing one's ear to the lamppost.  Because the tops of lampposts are usually open (to prevent build-up of humidity / moisture?), bits of leafy grit and muck accumulate inside the tube, and the striking of the mallet shakes down all this grit in a harmonic metallic cascade.  Many different partials and upper modes of vibration momentarily manifest themselves in this luscious sound.  Extensive trials also reveal that although lampposts - clustered in a particular street - are standardised in their construction, every lamppost has slightly differently pitched resonant frequencies.

Any low fundamental tones - typically associated with pronged structures - are absent in lampposts.  They are heavily damped to prevent this.  One may imagine, in some parallel universe where lampposts are undamped, on a blustery day they may gently hum in the wind: aeolian lampposts.  I dreamt that powerful electromagnets in cradles could be clamped to the necks, and rows of lampposts could all resonate in a chorus...  'Bowing' lampposts with giant Ebows.  But, because of this damping, electromagnetic resonation is impractical, and only the higher frequencies are accessible, therefore a piezo-electric system was devised.  The project, however, was scuppered in a 'disgraceful' attempt to have each lamppost self-powered by step-down transformers drawing off their own mains supply.  This is described in embarrassing language in Dropping Out (a juvenile production - and I'm relieved to say that copies are not generally available at the time of writing this).  Subsequent to this, some experiments were made with bits of lamppost and other street furniture.

Cover to a manual relating to a slice of errant lamp-post resold as an experimental instrument (circa 2003).

Resonating railings (photo courtesy of Toby Clarkson)

A similar effect to the imagined streets of resonating lampposts can be realised by resonating railings.  Like a grille, each rung has an ever-so-slightly different resonant frequency (a typical railing has a very low fundamental tone of around 30-50Hz).  Cardboard, plastic or wooden boxes can be wedged into the resonated railings to act as sounding bodies to diffuse the sound or introduce buzzing subharmonics.  When multiple railing rungs are resonated, an internally conflicted drone is produced that is both lively and trance-inducing when concentrated upon.

I was embroiled in an interesting altercation last year during a busk in Cambridge with my electromagnetic apparatuses.  I had procured some coinage on previous occasions through busking on my resonated wok toneshapers powered by car batteries.  On this occasion, I was busking with my baking tray resonator (which drones and alters its harmonic/subharmonic content according to the arrangement of coins inside the tray - £17.24 was obtained on this particular day) alongside resonated railings that I had engrafted my gubbins onto.  Two Police Community Support Officers accosted me.  I had assumed they would take umbrage at my electromagnetic 'EBowing' of street furniture, but this was not the issue.  Apparently, doing toneshaping drones is a form of begging(!).  A handwritten sign encouraged passersby to throw coins or paper notes into the EM resonated baking tray to alter the tone of the drone.  I argued that it was plainly *busking* which is perfectly legal - hence the acoustic element.  But they disagreed - it was begging because there was no "music".  We then argued very publicly about what constitutes music, touching upon every argumental cliché that has ever been farted out in amateur music-theory debates since the 1900s, but the argument took a surreal turn, because the PCSOs then accused me of committing a public order offence by simply protesting my case to them!   The argument itself became an offence!   I couldn't argue with that, although it was they who initiated the argument.

Read all about acoustic circuit bending and the use of electromagnetic coils to resonate objects in Exact Change #8.  In fact, 'reading' is a bit old hat now.  Being an ultra-modern e-zine, you can also look, listen and watch!

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...

LMJ #23 - "Electric Music" on the Victorian Stage

There are many obscure, under-explored sonic marvels to be found in the old music hall annals - I'm rustling to publish a detailed survey soon.  In the meantime, the latest Leonardo Music Journal (#23) features my paper on 'electrical music' in Victorian music halls, focussing specifically on the work of the eccentric Johann Baptist Schalkenbach and his imitators.  In the 1860s Schalkenbach developed an act in which he played on an amalgamation of instruments he called the Piano-Orchestre Électro-Moteur (built around a reed harmonium).  Whilst playing, he would simultaneously trigger musical, noise and optical effects via the electromagnetic triggering of circuits connected to objects placed around the hall.  It's a delicate precursor to the noise machines of the Italian Futurists.  Over the decades, the apparatus gradually became more spectacular as new features were added.

For some years now I've been hunting down ephemera relating to Schalkenbach and his copycats in the hope of shedding some light on the electrical music contraptions.  Precious little information exists, despite Schalkenbach performing for almost 40 years.   LMJ 23's "'Electric Music' on the Victorian Stage: The Forgotten Work of J.B. Schalkenbach" forms the most complete account so far of Schalkenbach's work.  My research also suggests that in the 1870s Schalkenbach assisted in the construction of acoustic magic tricks for celebrated magicians Maskelyne and Cooke.  Schalkenbach's conspicuous absence from the "standard" prehistory of electronic music can perhaps be accounted for by the lack of credible information about the electrical aspects of his Piano-Orchestre Électro-Moteur.  Minor gripes rooted in nationalism possibly also contributed to his present obscurity - one early review states that Schalkenbach's act met with great applause, but: "we fancy it would have gained still greater favour but for [his] singular resemblance to the great German Chancellor Prince Bismarck, which did not quite please some of the audience."

Maskelyne & Cooke's Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly. (Demolished in 1905)

Schalkenbach played upon the mysteriousness surrounding "electrical music".  One newspaper reporter presumed that the rain sounds were electrically produced: "in a moment even electricity travels to the roof of the building and also to the apparatus around the hall, and causes vibrations as if a thunderstorm were heard approaching from the distance; you hear the howling of the wind and the downfall of a torrent of rain."   Investigations reveal that, in reality, the electric action was only employed to control a door, releasing buckshot that rattled down concealed descending shafts (later to become a popular off-stage acoustic rain effect).  But Schalkenbach's instrument was nevertheless very sophisticated.   In the 1890s, an electrical journal asked, "was it telephonically or phonographically that Herr J. B. Schalkenbach transmitted sounds to a distance?"  It is unlikely that either of these techniques were employed.  It appears to have been primarily electromagnetic triggering (including percussive sounds, motors, release mechanisms, explosives, detonations and light effects), the possibility of trembling-bell style feedback, and the basic wind bellows with their artful acoustic couplings through pipes and funnels.  Although, there are still many mysteries.

The descriptive, noisy, electrically actuated music pioneered by Schalkenbach was subsequently copied by many music hall acts, including Professor Beaumont (aka John Walmsley Beaumont) "Necromancer and Electric Musician", Herr Renier, and most interestingly, H. F. Juleene (aka John Parsons) and Dot D'Alcorn (aka Susette D'Alcorn), a double act who titled their demonic centrepiece Mephisto.   Dot D'Alcorn is possibly the first professional female performer of an electrical musical instrument.  Juleene and Schalkenbach had an interesting run-in played out in the The Era stage newspaper involving aggressive placement of adverts.

In performance, Schalkenbach played his own music (which does not seem to have survived), and also included selections from operas, such as Daniel Auber's La muette de Portici‬ and The Storm from Rossini's William Tell.   Mephisto on the other hand, was more grounded in music hall styles, and some original Juleene compositions do exist.  Dot D'Alcorn would play the electric instrument dressed as Mephistopheles.  I have transcribed the surprisingly twee Mephisto Gavotte (the electrical parts are not scored) - it gives a flavour of the Mephisto repertoire.  It is a MIDI arrangement:


Schalkenbach and his ilk are particularly interesting in relation to the post-electronic music techniques outlined on this blog and elsewhere.  In 'post-electronics', acoustic sounds are wrought with close adherence to classical electronic music techniques.  Essentially: acoustics aspiring to electronic sound.  In Schalkenbach's art, acoustics likewise aspire (or are styled) to 'electric' sound despite the utter non-existence of any "electric music" listening paradigms at that time(!).  Schalkenbach produces acoustic sounds - musical and non-musical - distant from the console, and presents them enigmatically as electrically produced sounds - sounds of mysterious provenance: the beginnings of sound art.

More coming soon...

Leonardo Music Journal #23 is out now.

Fortean Times - Sept 2013 - Crook Frightfulness

This month's Fortean Times #305 (a sort of 'paranoia special') features my exposé of the extraordinary anonymously-penned book Crook Frightfulness, self-published in 1935 by "A Victim".  In this blog post I'll present some thoughts on the book's semi-acoustical ideas.

Crook Frightfulness was first brought to my attention by the marvel Westwyrd the Bard: drum-specialist and custodian of curiousness.  For those unacquainted with the book, it's an autobiography of a man tormented by crooks who embark on a campaign of staring, ventriloquism and covert psychological harassments against the author.  The "Victim" writes of his personal hell in which everybody else is either complicit, or simply fails to notice the ventriloquist abusers who stalk him across the British colonies.  Crooks are also able to hear the Victim's thoughts by a theorised listening apparatus used with headphones (a sort of powerful stethoscope device).  Some of the antiquated colonial sentiments add an extra dimension of bizarreness.  A colleague described Crook Frightfulness as an "acoustic mystery thriller" although it's generally seen as a schizophrenic emission.  For anybody interested in sound, its psychology and its perception/misperception, it's a particularly fascinating book, as the author manages to "attain a degree of impersonal interest" (as he puts it) and proceeds to investigate the phenomena from his own practical, acoustical viewpoint.

Crook Frightfulness is split into three parts.  The first part - some 40 odd pages - begins almost like a potboiler; autobiographical sensationalism comparable to, say, Sydney Horler's 1934 exposé, London's Underworld.  Part two is written more matter-of-factly, albeit disjointedly and with heightened paranoia.  Here, the author writes of his experiences and travels around the colonies to outmanoeuvre the 'crooks'.  The third part is the 'Vital Climax' where the crooks' terrible practices are examined (involving listening apparatuses).   In FT305, it is suggested that the Victim did experience a genuine low-level persecution that left a lasting resonance.

Charles Wheatstone's 'Telephonic Concert' at the Royal Polytechnic Institution

The listening apparatus is hypothesised in general terms.  It is assumed to be able to pick up the minutest sound, akin to an amplifier, functioning in a stethoscope-like arrangement - presumably non-electric.  This acoustic method of sound conveyance conjures to mind Charles Wheatstone's ideas on acoustic transmission through solids.  Wheatstone coined the term 'microphone', not in reference to an electric transducer as we know it now, but to refer to an apparatus where sound is carried by direct transmission through solids to the ear.  In one adaptation of this to sounding bodies, at the Royal Polytechnic Institution in the 1860s Wheatstone exhibited a 'Telephonic Concert' - completely non-electric (à la tin-cans-and-string) - where thick wires coupled to musical instruments, played on a concealed lower floor, acoustically carried the sound silently through intermediate floors to a performance stage above, where the wires reconnected with the sounding boards of harps, rediffusing the sound as if by magic.  Wheatstone also visualised the invention of an ideal acoustically conductive material to stretch vast distances, to communicate from Aberdeen to London.   In Crook Frightfulness - 'A Victim' presents a visceral horror in which crooks can acoustically subjugate you in this Wheatstonian manner:

"I frequently tried to stifle the annoyance by stopping or closing my ears with my fingers, and when doing so, I rested my elbows on my knees or put my elbows upon the wooden table.  Strange to say, I found that neither of these expedients stopped or banished the sound (...)  The sound when I stopped my ears must have travelled through the wood of the floor and of the table and then through my bones to my ears!  (...)  They no doubt send sounds (by means of some instrument) to molest any intended victim who is in the same premises, or even in adjoining premises."

Likewise, crooks are said to "hear your thoughts - the sound travelling through the floor you are standing on (...) to perhaps that next room or adjoining house, to the crook listener".   Thoughts are heard by closely listening to sub-vocal articulation: "when you think (in 95 cases out of a hundred) you actually shape your words in your throat and mouth.  When we breathe through our mouth or nose it is possible for these fiends to hear your thoughts."  The Victim's theories evolve as Crook Frightfulness progresses.  Some later editions feature paste-ins where a "sound 'outfit' like the BBC" is theorised.  In spite of the book's skew-whiff nature, some of these ideas were certainly at the 'cutting edge' - an early example of widespread covert listening is seen in the early 1940s with the hidden electric microphones around Trent Park's prisoner-of-war compound to capture prisoners' conversations.

A BBC "sound 'outfit'" of the period

Last year, the writer and long-time Crook Frightfulness aficionado Phil Baker sold me a first edition of the book.  Baker was also keen to know more about the book's author.  This spurred me on to compile all the scraps of information I'd collected over the years with a view to building a profile of "Victim".

The compilation of biographical facts (gleaned from both the first and expanded editions) revealed the author was born in the East End of London, in or around 1875.  He was involved in rent collection and property.  He left Britain for New Zealand in 1924, moved to the British West Indies around 1928, and returned to Britain to settle in Aberystwyth in March 1932.  Many hours at Kew's National Archives yielded a list of some fifty or so names, gradually whittled down as each name was followed up.  The use of digital archives plays a key role in such research.

It is revealed for the first time in this month's Fortean Times that Crook Frightfulness was written by an east London estate agent named Arthur Herbert Mills.  He left Britain using the name Herbert Mills, and returned as Arthur Mills, which slightly confused matters, but further research has confirmed the connections.  His story is very interesting, and only a bare outline could be condensed into the article.

The book presents quite a sad predicament, but it's hoped that the discovery of the author's name will enable further study of the text, which charts the onset of auditory disorientation at a point in history where technology could not quite yet provide reasonable objective explanation for the phenomena.  There are a surprising number of narratives very similar to Crook Frightfulness (some early examples are examined in the article).  Today, people with these afflictions/assailments often cite James Lin's 1978 textbook Microwave Auditory Effects and Applications that superficially appears to corroborate all sonic "unseen assailment" phenomena (although, in practice, such technology is very impractical).

Anyways... It's not my intention here to delve into the arguments surrounding these phenomena (perhaps in a future posting), it is simply to examine curios and mythologies from acoustical hinterlands.  (It is worth mentioning that a semblance of 'voices' can be perceived during exposure to fluctuating white or pink noise for extended periods. This is a psychoacoustic effect: auditory pareidolia.  In one notable example, it is employed in a sound installation by U.S. sound artist Ellen Band in her Acoustic Mirage.)

The full particulars on Crook Frightfulness can be found in Fortean Times #305.

Bookophonics: Making Music with Books

The bookophone is described in an earlier post here.  It involves a paperback book and a bowing rod - preferably some kind of hollow tube, upon which the friction tone is amplified.  The character of the tone derives somewhat from the choice of bowing rod.

Playing bookophones

Last Friday, a short bookophone piece called 'Summer Song' was debuted on William English and Chris Weaver's Weavelength (part of a series of Wavelength specials touching on cassette culture).  All the sounds in this piece are created by four paperback books overdubbed together: 'Social Anthropology in Perspective,' Bird's 'Mathematical Formulae,' 'Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition,' and 'Is it Just Me or is Everything Shit?'.   The books are played with plastic and chrome bows.

It appears that temperature affects the bookophone sound.   Bookophones are generally deeply unplayable things and near-impossible to wrest a melody from, despite weeks of practice.  In the summer season, books are apparently more stubborn than usual in producing tones, demanding a more vigorous action (as heard in this piece).  This is perhaps because there is less discrepancy between the environmental warm temperature and the momentary heat caused by the bow friction(?).  Dryness certainly deadens the tones.  Anyways, it just means that in the summer, when playing the bookophone, you must really 'give it some welly'.

I can't seem to find any similar technique employed in making books 'sing', but surely over 500 years somebody must've tried something similar.  Maybe a romantic poet?   Incidentally, the very clever Maywa Denki laboratory has produced a musical electric book beating apparatus.  (Maywa Denki received exposure in the UK some years ago with a memorable appearance of a self-playing acoustic guitar on BBC One's Adam and Joe Go Tokyo.)

Wok Music: Music of the Hemispheres

The process of obtaining 'miraculous agitations', as I've written before, revolves around chance occurrences.  From a purely intuitive standpoint, it's hard to pin down the catalyst that transforms a vibrating apparatus from a 'bone-idle-tone' into inspirational 'tone-drama' (that is, the once-in-a-blue-moon complex and inspiring acoustic stuff).  It appears as a chance convergence of microscopic parameters: an imperceptible movement of some element suddenly causing an emergent state...

The standard stainless steel cooking bowls (un-wok-like), with a paucity of tone-ballast.

The cauldron is perhaps the paradigm of all this tone-drama-seeking malarkey.  In fact, it's surprising that cauldrons aren't used more often in improv gigs.  Objects may be placed in a vibrating cauldron and stirred until the much longed-for 'tone-drama' emerges.  The cauldron body would be resonated electromagnetically, and eventually, with enough stirring trials, there will arrive a point where a highly specific configuration is obtained, bringing about pulsing rhythms or harmonic progressions.

When I was angling to incorporate pseudo-cauldrons into resonant assemblies, the adage "beggars can't be choosers" manifested itself in the galling fact that dishes and bowls receptive to magnetism are very hard to find.  If you walk into a shop, all the stainless steel bowls will be non-magnetic.  This is frustrating, as many of the most resonant bowls will not be suitable for resonating via the electromagnetic field method (a non-contact method of resonating).

Looking in bins and trade waste containers can yield older steel bowls, where the steel was treated differently during manufacture, thus retaining its ferric virtue and allowing for EM resonation.  Although, these are rare.

Wok mounted to a sounding board with resonator and pickup coils.

Whereas in the past the poverty and unemployability that necessitated my dumpster-diving actions lent a teeth-gnashing restrictive atmosphere, it's now obvious that this impoverished flâneur approach embraces chance happenings: a good thing.  One day, a wok presented itself.  Woks can be easily adapted to resonate.  When a wok handle is removed, woks resound like Tibetan bowls...  And they're always (in my experience) responsive to magnetism too.  Woks are also somewhat hard to find, but they're easily spotted, at least, whether in bins, car-boot sales, or vistas of ruin.

When a resonator coil is fixed in proximity to a wok's rim, several harmonics can usually be obtained.  The most harmonically rich woks happen to be Ken Hom woks - this particular brand was the heaviest/densest I've so far found (the chrome handles of certain Ken Hom wok lids also make excellent subharmonic-generating objects to place inside woks).   The polarities and phase of the resonator coil / pickup coil combo can be arranged so that a descending scale of harmonics can be elicited by moving the pickup anticlockwise around the rim, on the right-hand side of the resonator (as shown in this scrawling).  When subharmonic ballast is added, a veritable sonic stir-fry is formed... with all the potency of the paradigmatic cauldron: thaumatacoustics in action.

So far, I have found four woks.  It is interesting to note that the resultant chords obtainable purely from the woks themselves - without adding objects inside - are chords of chance provided by the trade waste bins.   A convergence of people all deciding at a certain time to discard their woks resulted in this very specific chord.

I recorded a short and unpolished study simply to display aspects of this chord. (Please excuse the unskilful pickup collisions)....