Creating an Awareness for Sound

        Ambiances is a recent recording of a live performance of works by Adam Basanta and Andrea Young, presented online and in that order by Le Viver on January 22nd, 2021, and as a one-hour webcast that can be viewed until July 2021. The pieces are specifically written for and performed by the Architek percussion ensemble, comprised of percussionists Ben Duinker, Mark Morton, Ben Reimer, Alessandro Valiante, and Norm Bierstone. The instrumentations of each composer's work are significantly different, showcasing the versatility of the ensemble. Basanta uses a mixture of electronics and percussive sounds that are typically labelled as unpitched percussions, such as snare drums with the snares off, toms, a bass drum, cymbals, singing bowls and other bell-like sounds, a toy piano, cassette players, transducers, and perhaps other electronics that are not visible. While still utilizing unpitched percussion-like gongs and woodblocks, Young also incorporates pitched percussion into her piece, such as marimba, vibraphone, and bowed saws, such as the larger misery whip and the regular-sized singing saw.

        While both artists have written unconventional instrumentations for the ensemble—such as Basanta's tape players and transducers and Young's bowed saws—and are using unrelated subject matters and tools to inspire and devise their compositions, they both compose with a common goal in mind, which is to create a more immersive and attentive listening experience. For both composers, time and timbre are the devices used to heighten awareness for sound in the listener.

        Bassanta's piece, The Privacy of Domestic Life, 2015, begins with a low-frequency drone on a dark stage with four tungsten lamps that become dimly lit so as not to illuminate the performers. The listener sits in this space for quite some time, making one's ear more attracted to the minute details within the soundscape. A field recording of sounds taken from within Basanta's apartment begins to emerge. As the cutoff frequency of a low pass filter increases, referential sounds from everyday domestic life that would typically be either ignored or found incredibly disruptive begin to appear—muffled voices heard through a wall and what sounds like wooden furniture being moved around. Eventually, one of the percussionists turns on their working light and begins to play sparsely in what seems like a transcription of impulses from the field recording shifted in time. The rest follow, and the piece crescendos rhythmically and poly-rhythmically as the other percussionists join in and then recedes into a reminiscent version of the piece's original opening state.

        By beginning the piece with a low drone created by transducers placed on drums, Basanta creates a pseudo-static sound that first draws one in due to its minute changes in frequency content or it's overall timbre, demanding one's attention to search for any form of change. The time spent in this state makes the listener more attentive and interested in the muffled voices that emerge afterwards because they are not as constant. As the first performer joins in the soundscape, the listener is stunned by the sudden change in quality such that the first strike of a tom drum transports the listener away from the feeling of eavesdropping on one's neighbours through the wall to suddenly being in the room where the sound occurs due to the clarity, volume, and visualization of the sound. While the initial attack of the tom drum could be viewed as an irrational change in listening perspective, it reverberates the concept of a natural soundscape, such that sounds naturally occur at various levels of amplitude and that events are unpredictable. The concept is quite similar to John Cage's 4'33", where a pianist sits in front of an audience for three short movements of "silence." As the performer executes each movement, they are meant to open and close the keylid as if they were going to play the piano. However, the point of the work is not to hear a piano but to frame and be attentive to all of the coughs, rustling and other sounds coming from the audience so that they may be heard as music. (Gann, p. 11)

        Young's piece, Angels Share, 2020, creates a similar effect of making the listener more aware or attentive through sound but employing the compositional tools of time and timbre differently. The piece is an interpretation of the nose, palate, and finish of three different scotch whiskeys made by Ardbeg. (Ambiances, 2021). It is made up of three movements, each for a different whiskey, and each movement has three sections, which represent the nose, palate, and finish of the whiskey. The musical time spent on each stage is probably more than anyone would spend with the scotch in reality, especially in terms of nose and finish, but it does allow the listener to get to know and understand how the gestures and timbres of the instruments relate to the subject. Along with the performance, there is also an interview with Young where she mentions that her inspiration for the piece comes from the interest in research that suggests the convergence of sound and taste in the olfactory tubercle1. While the choice in instrumentation and gestural choices are understandable in relation to her inspirations, it is tough to make the association to the whiskey without having been prompted by it in the description. While the music itself does not explicitly tell one what it is about, as in Basanta's piece, the prompt left in the description leaves one wondering how the sounds relate to the taste of the whiskey thus, creating a pathway for interpreting the work through the listener's memory of the beverage and by relating that to Young's compositional choices.

        There are points in Young's work where the low-end marimba passages could have an interpreted relationship to perhaps a deep woody flavour, or the glissandi of the bowed saws referring to hints of citrus or something sweet, as they provide soft, short yet drawn-out melodies because of the venue's reverb. It also seems that the metallic instruments resemble metallic flavours. Moreover, a roll with metal brushes on a cymbal is referential to the tingling of something sour on one's tongue and rolls with regular mallets on wood blocks to crackling ice. The church's long reverberation time also helps to make the piece sound liquid by smoothing out all of the instruments' attacks and giving everything a long decay time before fading out. Perhaps this is what it would feel like if one were to submerge themselves in an oak barrel full of whiskey, though it is not clear why anyone would want to do that. It is poetic to think that the reverb is the Angel's Share, of which the piece is named. The angel's share is the name given to the amount of whiskey that naturally evaporates in the ageing process.

        The experimental ideas that sound and taste could be converging in our brains, as mentioned, are intriguing. There is research that has been done on anesthetized mice by Wesson and Wilson in 2010. They find that the senses converge in the olfactory tubercle, where they both then dissipate before reaching the olfactory bulb, which is upstream of the tubercle. (Wesson, Wilson, p. 3013). However, it is interesting to think that if communication between the two senses occurs in every person since the convergence of sound and taste is a form of synesthesia. If a piece like this could successfully communicate taste over sounds, then perhaps there is a possibility that synesthesia could be learned. It could be interesting in terms of better understanding neurology and neuroplasticity, but this may not be the composer's intention. Is the piece an experiment to see if new neural connections could be made between sound and taste or if it is a sonic advertisement for Ardbeg's whiskey? Regardless, it is an engaging enough idea for the listener to become hyper-attentive to the minute details and relate the experience in a somewhat shared way since most have at least tasted or smelled whiskey and can interpret the relationship between sound and taste.

        The two pieces in Ambiances do not have much in common other than their use of time and timbre to draw in the listener and make them more attentive to sound, even though they are used in entirely different ways. Basanta's use of slowly changing timbre makes the listener crave change and then be so invested in that change because of the time spent deprived of that. Andrea uses an idea in the show notes to create an interest in the listener that craves understanding through being able to relate sound and the memory of what whiskey tastes like, which requires extended times for each idea and uses timbre to refer to some aspects of taste. Both works effectively achieve the atmosphere and character of the places or beverages they refer to by different means but through the same devices. Together they make for an eclectic show that keeps the audience engaged viscerally and cognitively.



1. The olfactory tubercle is a structure within the basal forebrain responsible for the sense of smell and other senses, in humans and other animals. (Wesson, Wilson, p. 3013)



Ambiances. Performance by Architek Percussion, 22 Jan. 2021, Le Vivier, Montreal, https://levivier.ca/en/concert/2020-21-season/ambiances-wed-diffusion

Adam Basanta, “The Privacy of Domestic Life,” 2015.

Young, Andrea. “Angel’s Share,” 2020.

Gann, Kyle. No Such Thing As Silence : John Cage's 4'33, Yale University Press, 2010.

Cage, John. “4’33,” 1952.

Wesson, Daniel W. Wilson, Donald A. “Smelling Sounds: Olfactory–Auditory Sensory Convergence in the Olfactory Tubercle.” The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 30 no. 8, 24 Feb. 2010, pp. 3013-3021, doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.6003-09.2010. PMC US National Library of Medicine.

Young, Andrea. Interviewed by Bierstone, Norm. “Entrevue avec Andrea Young.” YouTube, uploaded by Group Le Vivier, 25 Jan. 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NapgBA-wRZg