Project 4 Workshops — Oct. 5–7

I fired up the list randomizer again and here's our schedule for the fourth mini-round of workshops, focusing on the 30-second loop pieces you made in response to Project 4: Micro-Loops:

• Monday, Oct. 5: Pieper, Nelson, Hoffman, Haig
• Wednesday, Oct. 7: Roller , Edgar, Scheifele, Hardcastle, Baxter

Please send out your work — either as attached MP3 files or a SoundCloud link — to me and me alone no later than the end of the evening on Saturday October 3rd. As I mentioned in the prompt itself, you won't be writing responses in advance for this project. Instead we'll respond on the fly in class, and we should have a little time left on Wednesday for general comments on this round.

Project 3 Workshops — Sept. 28 – Oct. 2

Here's our randomized schedule for the third round of workshops, focusing on the audiotexts you made in response to Project 3: Constrained Cut-Ups. 

• Monday, Sept. 28: Haig, Pieper, Hardcastle
• Wednesday, Sept. 30: Nelson, Hoffman, Edgar
• Friday, Oct. 2: Roller, Scheifele, Baxter

Please send out your work — either as attached MP3 files or a SoundCloud link — to the list by the time of our class meeting on this Friday, September 25th. As I mentioned in class today, you won't be able to do line-by-line comments but do send your peers a short note (either in a Word doc or just an e-mail message) with your feedback on their pieces. Some things in particular that you might want to focus on: sound, semantics, and technique.

Project 5: Improvise and Excise

Robert Rauschenberg's "Erased de Kooning Drawing" (1953)

For our next project, we'll be working with two parallel forces — creation and destruction — to produce a finished poem.

The first step will involve making a short recording of improvised speech (or singing, or freestyling — basically you making words however you'd like), which you'll then process. Ninety seconds might be an ideal length but feel free to do more or less as you prefer. In any case, set the time frame and stick to it.

You should only record one take and fill that time with as much or as little speech as you'd like. Perhaps you'll try to work out a new poem you haven't yet written or recall an old one from memory; maybe you'll make a to-do list or tell a story, talk to a friend, talk to yourself, string together stream-of-consciousness associations, or make one straightforward statement. In any case, once you're done, transcribe what you've recorded. 

Now the second step of the project commences. Using your complete transcription as a source text that you'll break down via the process of erasure to yield a final text, not unlike how a sculptor begins with a block of marble and chips it away a little bit at a time to create their finished piece. You can cut as much or as little as you'd like, and can remove words in complete units (i.e. clauses, sentences, paragraphs) or individual words (or even letters). That is to say that your final piece will be as cohesive (or deconstructive) as you want it to be. You might choose to work in Word itself, deleting text as you desire, or with a print-out of the document, using a Sharpie, Wite-out, scissors, drops of paint, etc. and then retranscribe the results into Word.

Before we get to specifications for this assignment, a few precedents and contexts: Wave Poetry is a publisher with a serious interest in the erasure technique and they've gone so far as to produce an erasure engine that allows visitors to make their own texts from sources as diverse as Melville's Moby Dick, Kant's The Critique of Practical Reasoning, and Aristophanes' The Clouds. Other poets using this technique include Joseph Massey and Mary Ruefele, and one of the ur-texts in this genre is Tom Phillips' A Humument — a book-length text created by "treating" a Victorian novel, A Human Document.  As for improvisation and transcription, those techniques are at the heart of poet David Antin's practice: his published works begin as spontaneously-generated talks in various locations, which are recorded, transcribed, and lightly-edited to yield their final versions.

Your responses to this prompt should be written texts texts (ideally in Word format) of a reasonable length (~1 page) and should be e-mailed out no later than our class meeting on Monday, October 5th. If our class stays on schedule, we should be workshopping these pieces from October 9–14, taking us up to the fall reading days.

Project 4: Micro-Loops

Our fourth project builds upon its predecessor and will work a little different than our usual prompts, but more on that in a moment . . .

Repetition is a technique at the very heart of poetic practice: from the strict patterns of rhythm and rhyme found in traditional verse to devices like litany and alliteration. For this mini-prompt, we'll be taking repetition to absurd lengths via technological means.

I'd like you to construct a 30 second audiotext that involves looping as its constitutional technique. While the length is absolute, all other details are open: you can use found sound or record your own audio, and you can select a loop of any length — it might be a five second sample that loops six times, half a second that loops sixty times, etc. and your loop need not begin and end cleanly, either.

"You know what's an excellent word to say out loud repeatedly?" Nicole Bonner chewed her hair. " 'Rinse.' Think about it, Mr. Kerchek. Rinse. Rinse."

— David Schickler, "The Smoker"

The point here, perhaps, is to find a new sort of beauty in language when we divorce ourselves from our usual relationship with it, achieving something not unlike a reduced reaction to semantic information (as in the example above). Or maybe what you'll find will be more semantic à la the potential for truths being revealed through the cut-up process (as Burroughs suggests). Also, while you'll be working in audio, there are textual precedents for this sort of experiment: cf. Ron Padgett's "Nothing in That Drawer," "Sonnet for Andy Warhol" and Two Stories for Andy Warhol (n.b. the detail shown on the linked page is one of ten identical pages from Padgett's book), or Aram Saroyan's minimalist work: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

You can set up loops pretty easily in both Audacity (highlight a portion of the waveform and hold down shift as you hit the space bar to start loop play mode) and Garageband (use the loop button in the toolbar with play, stop, etc. and set your loop area by dragging the edges of the yellow bar above the waveform) and you'll likely want to fine-tune your loops points before cutting and pasting your final product together. Likewise you'll probably want to make a number of these constructs — which can be pretty quickly thrown together — before deciding on the one that you want to present in workshop.

Your responses to this prompt should be in MP3 format — either as a SoundCloud link or an e-mail attachment — and should be exactly 30 seconds long. Please send your pieces to me (and me alone) by our class time on Friday, October 2nd. We'll go over these pieces in class on the 5th and 7th of October in a randomized order and you'll be encountering them for the first time in class, so you won't be writing comments ahead of time. You should, however, come prepared to discuss your peers' work on the fly.

Project 2 Workshops — Sept. 21–25

I ran the class roll through the randomizer again and here's the schedule we got for our second round of workshops, focusing on poems written in response to Project 2: Surveillance Poetics:

• Monday, Sept. 21: Edgar, Baxter, Hoffman
• Wednesday, Sept. 23: Haig, Pieper, Roller
• Friday, Sept. 25: Nelson, Scheifele, Hardcastle

Please send out your poems to the list no later than our class meeting on Friday, September 18th.

Also I wanted to jot down a few reminders on responses coming out of our first round of workshopping:

• You should be making specific comments on certain lines, words, phrases, etc. using the comments function in Word. If you're not using Word or a program with similar functionality, please add numbered references in brackets and make end note-like comments at the bottom of the document. These can be in-the-moment reactions to these elements as you read them.
• You should also write some sort of narrative response to the poem at the bottom of the page. In contrast to the in-the-moment comments this provides you with a chance to reflect on the poem after reading it in its entirety.
• Comments should, above all, be constructive and respectful — which doesn't mean that you can't disagree with the choices the poet made, just that you shouldn't be a jerk about it — and should be substantive. Empty praise doesn't help the poet, nor do vague comments: back up your claims with rationale; explain the effects their choices have upon you as a reader. "I don't understand this" is a cop out as well — make your best effort to absorb the poem and report on the impressions that you do get.
• Proposing alternatives (to word choices, line breaks, etc.) is a very effective sort of feedback as well. Though it shouldn't be the sum total of your response, playing "if I was writing this poem" is a great approach to take.

N.b. I've posted a shrunk (so as to be somewhat anonymized) screen cap of my comments on Kelly's first poem above. You won't necessarily write that much, but it's something to aim towards. Showing your peers that you care about and respect their work is, first and foremost, being a good workshop citizen. It's also not a bad way to get the same treatment from them as well!

Project 1 Workshops — Sept. 14–18

Here's the randomly-generated schedule we'll follow for our first round of workshops, focusing on poems you wrote in response to Project 1: Sonic Survey.

• Monday, Sept. 14: Scheifele, Pieper, Nelson
• Wednesday, Sept. 16: Roller, Baxter, Edgar
• Friday, Sept. 18: Hoffman, Hardcastle, Haig

Please send out your poems for this round to our e-mail list no later than Friday, Sept. 11.

Workshop Organization

On Monday we'll start workshopping the poems you wrote in response to Project #1 and I imagine that we will be able to very easily get through three poems a day, so that round should only last the week. Here's how we'll conduct each workshop round over the rest of the semester:

1. By our class meeting on the project deadline day (usually one class before the start of the round) you should e-mail your poem and/or any other supporting materials (MP3s, links, etc.) to the rest of the class in one e-mail message (creating an alias with all nine addresses will help) with a subject line like this: Project X / Your Last Name. If you haven't yet added your address to the thread on Facebook please do so immediately.
2. A workshop schedule will be posted in advance of each round. For the first round I've used a list randomizer to generate slots and if there are no issues we can continue doing this for every round.
3. Prior to each class you should e-mail your written comments to both the poets being workshopped and me (one e-mail per poet) — I'm doing this to ensure that everyone is getting substantive and constructive feedback, basically that everyone is doing their job.
4. At the start of each workshop session I'll set a timer (probably for 12 minutes per person) so that we keep on schedule. Typically the poet being workshopped is not allowed to talk or ask questions until after her peers have spoken but we'll reserve time for dialogue at the end of each session.
5. You're more than welcome to send follow-up comments to your peers after we've workshopped their poems.

If you have any questions about this, let me know. I imagine we'll get into the swing of things pretty quickly.

Project 3: Constrained Cut-Ups

The many faces of cut-up pioneer William S. Burroughs.

You've already received more thorough instructions on this assignment than I'm going to provide here in your foundations readings from Burroughs and Gysin, but for inspiration's sake, here are a few passages from "The Invisible Generation" to help you re-engage with the cut-up methodology:

it's all done with tape recorders consider this machine and what it can do it can record and play back activating a past time set by precise association a recording can be played back any number of times you can study and analyze every pause and inflection of a recorded conversation  

the simplest variety of cut up on tape can be carried out with one machine like this record any text rewind to the beginning now run forward an arbitrary interval stop the machine and record a short text wind forward stop record where you have recorded over the original text the words are wiped out and replaced with new words do this several times creating arbitrary juxtapositions you will notice that the arbitrary cuts in are appropriate in many cases and your cut up tape makes surprising sense 

the use of irrelevant response will be found effective in breaking obsessional association tracks all association tracks are obsessional get it out of your head and into the machines stop arguing stop complaining stop talking let the machines argue complain and talk a tape recorder is an externalized section of the human nervous system you can find out more about the nervous system and gain more control over your reactions by using the tape recorder than you could find out sitting twenty years in the lotus posture or wasting your time on the analytic couch

Okay, so now on to the technical specifics of the project. First, as the title suggests, your participation will be constrained in two ways:

1. I've chosen the four recordings you'll be using for this project and have numbered them in a somewhat anonymous way so that you won't know what you're getting until you've chosen.
2. The number of tracks you'll need to make use of in some way (a lot or a little, this can vary depending on your needs) will be chosen by a random number generator in the form of drawing a card from a deck of four.

Click here to draw your card. The card showing when the page loads is your selection. Then download your recording(s) from the links below:

1   /   2   /   3   /   4

As I said above, you can use as much or as little of the source recording(s) as you like. You can also manipulate the recordings — speed up, slow down, reverse, echo, pitch-shift, distort, ring modulate, etc. — however you see fit. For most poets, the prevailing impulse will be to create something intentional out of these raw materials but you might desire to make more random cuts and juxtapositions and see what emerges. Don't forget Pierre Schaeffer's framing of concrete composition (vs. the traditional "abstract" method; see right), which might be another useful guide as you complete this project.

Your responses to this prompt should be in MP3 format — either as a SoundCloud link or an e-mail attachment — with a minimum length of ~30 seconds and a maximum length of ~2 minutes (if you're really inspired and produce something longer let me know and we can discuss). Please post your response by our class time on Friday, September 25th, and we can probably aim to start workshopping these poems the week of the 28th.

Week 3 — How I Made a Podcast

In the fall of 2013, I put together an "audio essay" to be shared as part of PennSound's 10th anniversary celebration. The resulting piece, the product of maybe 6–8 hours' work, ran just over nine and a half minutes, and you can listen to it below:

I thought I'd document the process of assembling this piece and share my notes with students in the hopes that it might be a helpful tool.


1. Outline your basic concept

I wanted my piece to generally break down into two basic sections: first, a short discussion of how I came to work at PennSound and some of the notable discoveries I made during my early years there, and second, discussion of a few memorable sessions I'd recorded with a few favorite poets.


2. Gather and prep raw materials

I decided upon the recordings that I wanted to use for my piece and downloaded them from PennSound, then used Audacity to make the smaller cuts I'd be using. Note that I've used simplified yet descriptive file names for the cuts I've made, distinguishing the order I want to use them in, or just their contents.

For the section mimicking several Christian Bök tracks playing simultaneously, I made a sub-mix to export as its own MP3 file. The blue shape under the last track is contouring its volume level to create a fade-in. Thought it's not easy to see, I've also stereo-panned the two beatboxing tracks relatively hard left and right, while the "lead vocal" goes closer to the middle.

Here, while trimming down a short snippet from the Ashbery/Lauterbach "Litany," you can see that I've left  room tone (i.e. "silence;" the noise floor of tape hiss) on either side, so that I can seamlessly integrate it with my own voice-over when stitching the track together.

 

3. Prepare your script

It's much easier to record your voice-over when you're reading from a pre-prepared script, so take the time to write things down in advance, and mark out where your insertions will go as well (as you can see below). Even though you're free to improvise when recording, it'll help you work around tricky diction if you have clear reading copy to work from.

4. Record and edit your voice-over

For my piece, I used my little Tascam portable on a tripod right in front of my laptop, then copied the file to my computer so I could edit it in Audacity.  My preferred method is to record everything linearly in one long take, then go through and pull out the individual files as needed. You're bound to make mistakes, and when you do, just leave a sufficient pause and then start again. It's also not a bad idea to give a second take when in the moment you feel less than enamoured of a certain reading. Try to record sections of voice-over in as continuous sections as you can, but leave sufficient pauses between sections so you can trim down, and/or make splices with enough room tone to cover the gaps.

Here, you can see that I've cut a section of voice-over very closely at the head, to eliminate the sound of me inhaling before I start speaking, but left a silent tail that I can use to overlay another voice-over section.

Organize your voice-over sections in a similar fashion as your samples: I've numbered them in order of their appearance (n.b. two pieces that have alternate takes) and added a few words to clue me in to their contents.


5. Final construction

I opted to use Garageband, since that's the software I'm most comfortable using, to lay out my final podcast. Here's what the full piece looks like in the editor:

You'll notice I've used two tracks for voice-over and two tracks for the inserted samples (which are ducked, i.e. the software will always make the voice-over tracks louder than the samples), plus one track for music (I eventually ended up ditching the backing music).  I use two tracks for each section so that I can put together tighter edits using that room tone before and after the sound snippets without cutting any one track short (i.e. those sounds overlap on adjacent tracks so they can play out through the edit point). Edits often need to be fine-tuned by moving a sample back and forth little by little, sometimes just a fraction of a second to get the right pacing, the right pauses, and natural speech-like flow. You can also use fade-ins and fade-outs to make pieces fit together more smoothly.

Here, you can more clearly see the interplay of tracks on a section from the middle of the piece. The second and third tracks are my own voice-over, while the fourth and fifth are samples of other poets. Originally the last track was just for samples that needed fade-ins (namely the Tardos) but I wound up doing a fade-in on the Bök as well.

It certainly takes a lot of trial and error — and by no means would I call myself an expert — but I hope that this might be of use to you over the course of the semester.

Week 3 — A Crash Course in Audio Editing

Spend long enough editing audio and you'll have the same blank stare John Cage has here.

After the Labor Day holiday, and before we begin our workshop rounds in earnest, I thought it would be worthwhile to spend a little time going over the basics of audio editing. In particular, we'll be discussing the very powerful freeware editing software Audacity (which you can download here; you'll also need to download the LAME encoder here to be able to process MP3 files), though you can use any other method or program for editing audio that you're comfortable with. This will hopefully give you enough of a foundation to start playing around on your own in preparation for later workshop projects that will either use the recording medium as a compositional tool, or produce audio works as their final products. You'll note that the first few prompts are writing based, so you'll have more time to get familiar with Audacity before you actually need to use it.

As part of your audio experimentation, you might want to use some of Audacity's built-in effects, and I encourage you to play around with them. You'll find Wikipedia pages for various effects here and more detailed descriptions of some of the basic types of effects you'll encounter here. Another helpful resource is Audacity's own tips wiki, and of course, you can and should also feel free to use our Facebook group to troubleshoot any obstacles you face.

I've been editing audio and recording digitally for more than eight years now (through Adobe Audition, Audacity and Apple's Garageband), and before that spent many years working on 4-track recorders and regular tape decks. Programs like Audacity are relatively user-friendly, but that doesn't mean you won't run into difficulties along the way, especially if you've never worked with audio before. A few general pointers before you get started:

• The best way to learn is through trial and error. You will make mistakes, accidentally erase tracks, and maybe even lose projects, and it's better to do that this weekend than a few hours before the midterm project's due.
• Always be sure to save backup copies of your recordings, work with safety copies, and export new mixes as new versions rather than overwriting your originals. Copy rather than cut, and open a new project or window if necessary. Redundancy is key here, but don't forget that you can always download a new copy of online recordings (from the sources below or your SoundCloud account) if needed.
• Thoroughly document your efforts: use descriptive file names and keep a log of the various steps you take while manipulating your audio, including settings for effects, filters, etc. This will make it easier to recreate processes if you want to apply them to multiple samples or to start over when needed.
• Undo (ctrl/command+Z) is your best friend. If you screw something up (and you will), it's better to undo it and try again rather than take further steps to try to fix it.
• Wear headphones while working and remember that you have the whole stereo field to work with. You can go a long way towards making cleaner, uncluttered recordings if you aim for dynamic range and balance: pan two voice tracks left and right for separation, keep higher and lower frequency sounds apart for greater definition, give quiet sounds room to breathe away from louder signals.
• Try to have fun with the process and remember that nobody expects perfection.

Finally, here are some sources for audio that might be useful over the course of the semester:

• UC's Elliston Project
• PennSound
• UbuWeb Sound
• the SFSU Poetry Center Online Archives
• the Internet Archive Community Audio
• the Library of Congress' National Jukebox
• the Alan Lomax Archives at Cultural Equity

Project 2: Surveillance Poetics

Gene Hackman, detail from movie poster for The Conversation (1974).

If you've ever dreamt of working for the NSA, then perhaps this is the poetry prompt for you. Our second project builds off of the active listening that you did in Project 1 but changes the scope somewhat, with the focus this time being speech exclusively, instead of non-verbal sounds. It's based, in part, on separate entries from Charles Bernstein's experiment list ("Write a poem consisting entirely of overheard conversation.") and Bernadette Mayer's list of poetry journal ideas  (which lists "answering machine messages" and "telephone calls [taped?]" among other possibilities). Bernstein offers Kenneth Goldsmith's Soliloquy as an example, and you can find that work — "an unedited document of every word [Goldsmith] spoke during the week of April 15–21, 1996" — and instructions for navigating it here.

Of course, as Goldsmith's book suggests, your own speech might be a part of this project, though one's first inclination might be to only consider others' speech. As was the case in the first project, your choice of listening location, time of day, etc. will greatly influence the outcome. You might also opt to record ambient conversation and then transcribe, but simply writing things down as you hear them is probably quicker and easier. Feel free to include/exclude material as suits you. Your responses might walk the fine line between Chion's notions of semantic and reduced sound, as well as touch upon some ideas from Eno/Schaeffer (re: the re- or de-constructive manipulation of materials) and Burroughs/Gysin (in terms of juxtapositions and gaps).

Your responses to this prompt should be written, and again there's no minimum or maximum length (though be reasonable). Let's tentatively say that your poems should be posted no later than our class on Friday, September 18th and depending on how quickly our first round of workshops goes, we could start talking about these poems as early as September 21st.