Ian Fredericks has played a prominent role in the development of Australian electronic music and mixed media composition since the mid 1970's. His work in establishing both the SEUSS electronic music studio at Sydney University and the subsequent founding of the computer music and audio-visual composition and performance group Watt with Martin Wesley-Smith in 1976, paved the way for the generations of artists that have since explored this field. The author presents lightly edited excerpts from an interview with Ian Fredericks which presents the ethos of this innovator of Australian electronic audio-visual art. Current directions in Australian music education are discussed as the context of Ian's current work.
With the increasing availability of multi-channel domestic and theatre audio reproduction systems, audio spatialisation hardware and software have begun to appear in numerous commercially available systems. Whilst a knowledge of '3D sound' is increasingly a pre-requisite for professionals in the audio engineering industry, it continues to be an area of research within international academic institutions. This increasing importance of spatial synthesis in mixed media amongst Australian composers is reflected on one level by its arrival as an undergraduate subject at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. The presence of Ian Fredericks within this composition department has a special significance to the many undergraduate and postgraduate students working in this area.
The transcribed interview which forms the body of this paper took place in the Sydney Conservatorium of Music composition department on the 27th of October 1998. During the course if the interview Ian Fredericks spoke at length in a relaxed way, being somewhat familiar with the sympathies and interests of the author. Areas pertaining to spatial synthesis, synesthesia, and the spiritual potential addressed in such works were discussed within the context of Ian's beliefs and work. Subsequently this paper exists as a documented aural presentation of such matters and serves a different function to Ian's pending thesis. This paper begins with a discursive look at the artistic history and philosophical approaches taken by Ian Fredericks before addressing the innovation and experimentation involved in pieces such as Some Quiet Graveyard.
At the conclusion of the interview Ian was presented with an extract drawn from page 159-160 of John Shepherd's 'Music As Social Text'. (See appendix A) As an extension of this passage, the author then proposed to Ian, that by introducing into the visual realm dominant in western culture, the textural components fundamental to all music yet largely negated in significance by the scribal elite due to their inherent defiance of simplistic reduction, the artist working with new technology may in fact be capable of effecting fundamental shifts in the belief structures of an audience. Ian's response evolved into a statement of some of his own beliefs and as such has been placed at the head of the paper as the true basis of all that follows.
"I think what is happening is that technology is putting us in control as artists of some pretty fundamental or primal perceptions. We have to move away from looking at sound in the sense of physics and more in the sense of what we perceive and how it effects our perception. With the spatial thing, why is it that we can hear sounds in this spherical space around us? Its a primal warning mechanism and it has extraordinary emotional implications to us as human beings."
"We've had it happen in Watt concerts that people completely lose it as a result of the types of sound environments that we are creating. People have compared some of these experiences to hallucinatory experiences derived from drug usage, which is a mind blowing thought. To think that we can tap into a kind of hallucinatory mechanism without the person being in some altered state is to me what art should really be about: to explore this kind of perception at this kind of level. At the moment we have only had the barest inklings of this thing and to me its about getting away from this kind of corporeal thing and pursuing perceptions that are only controlled by what the mind can create."
"The function of high art in any culture is to provide a manifestation of the spiritual consciousness of that society. I'm not a religious person but I would say that music is the language of the expression of religion rather than a religion itself. Art is the language by which we express the spiritual vision of our society. Whether thats something like Aboriginal culture, where there actually isn't a separate word for music - they use the same word as they use for spiritualism or religion. Their vision of the universe that they live in is described in the dreamtime and I think that their music and paintings reflect this vision. In the nineteenth century a lot of the imagery in European music was militantism and imperialism and so there were a lot of march styled musics. . . That was very much the reflection of a particular era and a particular sociopolitical consciousness at a particular time. "
"What we have in the twentieth century is a complete break down of any kind of spiritual value and what we've ended up with is this pestilence of economic rationalism, which supposedly is a direct result of Marxism, which is possibly the greatest lie ever perpetrated in western history. Marx was a far more insightful philosopher than one such as John Howard who seems to think that everything relates to the unholy dollar."
"One of the reasons our civilisation is starting to break down is due to the fact that we don't have any spiritualism to guide us. You could almost be bold enough to say that one of the reasons that we have lost our spiritual way is that in the twentieth century is that we have lost our artistic way."
"Our seduction by rational logic and the positivism of philosophers like Carl Popper who attempted to relate everything down to what we now we are beginning to realise in science to be a very limited methodology by which to even begin to analyse the real physical world. Its the Newtonian or Cartesian way of empirical analysis. The Philosophers sold out to science some fifty years ago leaving only the Theologians to argue the spiritual case who are being unmercifully attacked by the scientists. Scientists shouldn't even venture into the world of theology because its totally out of their field. They haven't even got the language to talk in this sense."
"I think this whole business of sciences trying to look for proof of God is absolutely ridiculous. What does God have to do with science, or what does science know about God or anything. Science is too simplistic to even approach those kind of subjects. . . I started off as an analytical chemist when I left school and then went on to work at the atomic energy commission as a numerical analyst which is what computer operator were called in those days. I worked for fifteen years in professional science and technology. One of the things that drove me away from that life was the short-sightedness I found in the philosophy of scientists. In those first years of my working life I was a real die hard scientist and I thought that science was the new religion. It wasn't until I got out of science that I realised how shallow science is. I think that new things like quantum theory and complexity theory are a good direction but there is still so much in the universe that is completely overlooked by science. Applying the tenents of science to art and music has tended to destroy it because it makes it too simple."
"If you look at a Schenkerian analysis of a piece of a piece of music you end up with something that doesn't talk about music so much as some kind of overly simplified theoretical structure that couldn't come near to describing any piece of music. In science we are only just beginning to realise to a large extent that with reductionism you begin to lose the essence of a thing in reduction and induction modelling. Often Scientists reduce things down to models then simulate the models and then make the mistake of believing that the model is the reality. In most cases the model doesn't have anything to do with the reality."
"We have a very simplistic model of music that we teach to our children. When you come to start trying to realise, using a computer, a note model you realise how much information isn't there. . . I am amused at times by the arguments that rage around the so called complexists who seem to go to extraordinary lengths to include in their score specification for a piece directions for how it should be played as well as the music. If you compare the amount of information included in such scores to the amount of information that you have to give a computer, the so called complexity is to me pretty simplistic."
Ian Fredericks has worked in the area of electro-acoustic music since the middle part of the nineteen seventies. Many, if not most of his pieces have involved some visual component and many have utilised spatialisation technology in the reproduction of his electro-acoustic music.
"Probably one of the people to most consistently work in the area was Martin Wesley Smith. The way it started off with Martin, I think this is fair to say, was that he was interested in a multi-media idea rather than just something to go with the music. He was interested in combining the photographers art with the musicians art in a concert situation. It wasn't just as something to look at while you listened to the music. It was always a real attempt on his part to do this interactive kind of thing. It wasn't film because the motion detracts from the music but rather an interest in the pristine still image. He worked with a number of photographic artists over the years. the guys he probably worked with the most was George Gittoes."
"George Gittoes used to run the early Wattamulla multi media concerts which involved photographic projections, cinematographers, dancers. George is a general visual artist, painter, photographer etc. George was largely responsible for these things succeeding. There were about six of these elaborate events from which the name Watt was derived. It was a real community thing. These things had such a feel about them. There were a bunch of art professionals who ran the thing. The last one attracted about 10000 people. The performance took place along a cliff top which dropped to a lagoon protected from the ocean by a thick sand dune. The audience crossed the lagoon to the sand dune in row boats to see projections, dancers flying on fox wires, hanging from grappling ropes, climbing and hanging off things on the cliff top. The Wattamulla happenings took place annually from 1976 until 1982."
"There were two concert pieces that were drawn from the last couple of these. One was Martins' called Wattamulla Red and mine from the same year was Viable Alternative. Both are on the first Watt CD. The visual components of these pieces were developed using slides of photographs taken at the Wattamulla concerts. This early stuff started our interest in that kind of thing."
"That was in no way an exercise where there was music and we were looking for something to go with the music. George treated the whole thing like a filmmaker would. It was an extraordinarily complex compositional exercise. We'd get a scene list and an approximate time of what each scene would take. Because of the size of the staging, and the nature of the radio communications that were being used, we were forced to create compositions that were open ended, waiting for cues to crossmix the tape tracks on the many decks that were being used. All the Wattamulla events were night time events. One night in a display of marvellous serendipity, a number of RAAF fighters flew low overhead with their lights all ablaze, on cue with the firing of a number of flairs as part of the piece. To this day we don't know whether George actually organised it, but we've give him credit for it anyway."
"This was our beginning in the audio visual world. That was when Watt actually started around 1976. It was Martins idea to formulate the group. At the time I was studying at the main campus of The University of Sydney and Martin had just started lecturing at the Conservatorium. I met Martin when he used to come over to teach electronic music at the main campus. We hit it off musically and as friends right from then. One thing led to another and we just used to do things together."
"When I built the new studio at the Seymour Centre called SEUSS (Sydney University Experimental Sound Studio) which I ran for about fifteen years, I built the place and was the technician there while Martin was teaching. Eventually I took over the teaching. We had two studios, one at the Conservatorium and one at the Seymour Centre so we used to make a point of getting together once a year to do these Watt concerts which were a combined effort between his studios and my studios. At the time these were the only two educational electronic studios in Sydney and were the focus of all such student activity."
"There has been no real solution to the overall problem of visuals overpowering the audio material in multi media performance and to a certain degree no real research done into it in our experience anyway. In most cases in our work in WATT the idea has been the combination of the photographers art with musicians art, often within the context of a sociopolitical statement. "It its fair to say that these pieces are attempting a combination at a philosophical level rather than at a pure artistic level. One of the things that I think are important if we are going to go down the road of a highly combined thing is that the visual images must be totally abstract. I think as soon as you have an image that is an recognisable image, you immediately start to put on some kind of a heavy sociopolitical thing. It immediately casts the work into that vein."
"When I started to get Spatial Synthesis happening properly back in the SUESS studio on the main campus, the first sounds I synthesised were a music sequence done with an Old ARP Odyssey back in 77. I did this thing in four channels. Id built some panning equipment and a distance fader so I was simulating distance effects and four channel panning. The distance fader was based on a model drawn up by John Chowning first published in the Journal of the Acoustical Engineering Society in 1972 where he described a computational model for doing spatial sound synthesis. I devised a set of analogue equipment based on his model that incorporated a four channel panning device and a distance fader that used a set of four filters coupled together each controlling a different aspect that achieved the spatialisation."
"One of the faders controlled the level of the audio signal for example, while the others generated voltage control signals one of which was used on a digital delay device for simulating Doppler shift. There was a voltage controlled filter built into this device that simulated the effect of high frequency attenuation due to distance. I also controlled as illustrated in the Chowning paper the relative values of what he called Global reverberation."
"What happened with this was that it was so effective and so stunning that what I perceived when I first got it going, was that I didn't hear something, I saw something, I could see this thing that moved and changed shape and colour from a deep brown then a yellow and eventually it exploded into the room and became extremely red and then disappeared out the back of the room. This was something you saw not something you heard. So I actually asked a number of people to come down and listen to this thing and tell me what they perceived and every one talked about what they saw which I thought was amazing. This was back in 1977. This is what led to the piece Some quiet Graveyard. This was my first experience of this effect which you called Synesthesia."
"What interests me at this stage of my life is some kind of a visual art form that takes the same kind of structure as the audible art form; namely temporal. One of the reasons for why we see music as being a highly elusive or high art is because of itstemporal nature. You cant pin it down. I intend to do a fuller discussion of this in my own thesis. This first started to occur to me in the context of the idea of visual music, which as far as I know is just my term. What visual music means to me is this kind of thing, which comes from this internal thing which I get in my mind. I often have this experience. As a composer one develops this ability to hear sound structures and musical structures before you actually write them down. What I find actually happens a lot is that this process of hearing them is very strongly related to a visual process so that one is inclined to say that I can see the sound or I can see the music. Its very hard to describe this but a very simplistic example of this that I've experienced is sort of like an amorphous mass that expands and contracts, it has specific colours - it might be green or something - and this I see as a sound structure and not as a visual structure."
"It doesn't come with a sense of place. Its very much an abstract thing that exists in a non-space: like music. It doesn't have any form. As a mass it would seem to belong in a space, but it doesn't seem to belong in a space but rather just seems to glide in and out of my psychic space as it were. What I aim to do with these things is to devise ways of realising these structures. When I am actually writing music I actually work a lot in this way. I get some weird sound structure that floats into my mind and then I might spend weeks months sometimes even years trying to realise these things. When it comes back off the speaker to me, then I know I not insane, Its that kind of exercise."
In the handbook for the 1989 release of The Australian Anthology of Music on Disc, Some Quiet Graveyard is described thus:
"Some Quiet Graveyard was inspired by thoughts of the awesomeness of the universe. Hanging raggedly of an insignificant star in a minor galaxy somewhere on the outskirts of the universe is a minor planet which on a cosmic time scale can at best be considered 'some quiet graveyard'. Beyond the moon Beyond the darkness Starkness One small cloud of dust Just Some Quiet Graveyard Beyond the speed of light."
"The piece Some Quiet Graveyard, which was the first piece where I really consciously set out to map a visual thing to a musical thing, didn't really start until 1983. We were just starting to be able to do meaningful computer based sound synthesis without having access to large and expensive computer installations. Some Quiet Graveyard was done with an instrument I built using an Apple 2 computer. It was performed in a Watt concert at the downstairs theatre in the Seymour Centre. For the Watt concerts in those days, the downstairs theatre would be booked for a week. There would be a massive amount of audio equipment. We'd spend two days setting up the gear and then have two days for rehearsals and then have performances between the Thursday and Saturday evenings."
"For the performance of Some Quiet Graveyard there was a four track recording performed using a four channel desk. The way the piece was realised musically was with this instrument I built as I said, in an Apple 2 computer running a sound board called mountain valley sound card for which I built some control devices for this one of which used a foot pedal to control the volume envelope. There was a drumming percussive aspect of the piece performed by tapping my other foot and a joystick was used to control the timbre and the distance fader device I had built. I then had to spend a number of weeks learning how to play it. It ended up being very expressive in terms of its sound synthesis techniques. It would have been too messy to perform live. Anyway there were a number of parts. There were four or five percussive parts and two lead type parts."
"There was some work done at Stanford in the late 70's by a guy called John Gray who showed that it was possible to synthesise any continuous musical type timbre using only three harmonics. Using five harmonics only skilled listeners could hear the difference and using seven harmonics, nobody could tell the difference. So I built this instrument based on three harmonics that ran on the Apple 2 computer. The joystick controlled the relative values of the three harmonics. When it was back towards me I got all of the fundamental, as I moved it forward I got the second or third harmonics and mixtures thereof. Every sound on this piece; all the percussive sounds, all the long sounds, fast high pitched sounds; were created using this instrument before being spatially manipulated. I had to learn to play the instrument in different ways in order to create different timbres."
"Visually the music came first. The programmatic concept of Some Quiet Graveyard was a vision of planet earth as being Some Quiet Graveyard. The piece had cosmic proportions. The visuals for the piece used photographs of stars. What I wanted was some kind of correlation between something that was happening in the music and something that was happening in the visual presentation apart from this programmatic kind of level. So it occurred to me to use the Maxwellian light formula. This equation explained how to simulate any colour in the spectrum by adding together RGB values and was developed in the late nineteenth century by the physicist Maxwell."
"What he showed was that if you took the relative intensities of these monochromatic colours and mixed them so that the sum of their values was always equal to one, What you get is an infinite number of hues. This is obviously used in television and computer monitor now. So here was an equation in real physics that described light and colour that was identical to this one that described sound timbre. So colour and sound timbre sold be mapped absolutely precisely with these three components. The only we had of doing this colour trick was with three slide b+w slide projectors that had glass rgb filters. It was controlled using this system we were using for multiple slide shows at the time - the clearlight system. This is where I brought Martin Wesley Smith into the project, because he had the expertise in using this computer generated thing. It was to difficult to get the tracking, visual thing happening in real time so we set ourselves up in one of the studios at the conservatorium with the slide projection system and listened to the music and programmed the slide projection stuff by feel and improvising. The whole piece came together using this wonderful counterpoint between timbres, colours and image changes. As with all artistic exercises as distinct from scientific exercises, once you start to write the piece, it starts to talk to you and tell you what it needs. It all has the basic underlying consistency of all having come from the same basic theory."
"The lighting system was run by a Fairlight system that Martin established at the Conservatorium which utilised an Apple 2 based system that generated a set of control voltages that were used to control thyristors in the various slide projectors. It was quite a common system used back in the 80's for multiple slide projections. Martins system incorporated nine projectors. It has been used for an enormous number of pieces in the context of Watt concerts."
"After the performance of the Some Quiet Graveyard piece many people were saying that the trouble with the piece was that they couldn't remember hearing the music of the piece because the visual material was so strong. But a very interesting thing happened here, I watched the video piece time and time again and couldn't quite agree with this criticism. I set up a little experiment where a group of us watched the piece and agreed that the visual image was incredibly strong and totally dominant. What we did then was to turn the music off and just watch the visual image. After a very short period of time, like thirty seconds, people started to get board with just watching the image. The point about the piece with the music was that you didn't get board. The piece was about twelve minutes log and you were just captivated with this whole experience."
"I really think that what was happening was that the music was in fact dominant but it goes in at a subliminal level. This is why in this piece and in other pieces that you totally lose track of time. I used to ask people to estimate how long they thought the piece was taking and Id get all sorts of answers, mostly much shorter than what the piece was actually taking."
"I find this very exciting because to me the function of art in Western society these days, is partly to confuse as it were, our conscious mind and let us live in this subconscious thing for a few minutes which is the same mechanism as in meditation. I think that if a piece can confuse the rational mind by this combination of visual images and aural information so that you are not really conscious of whats happening, but rather taking this in on a subliminal subconscious level is enormously exciting."
Ian Fredericks, is at this stage expecting to work for two more years on his Phd at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. The thesis proposed as part of this degree will no doubt provide the most thorough description and evaluation of his life's work and the ideas on which it has been based. There has been no mention included in the body of this paper of Ian's numerous current works in progress such as the Starmist piece or the software package 'Ians Muse'. It is hoped however that this paper will suggest in a more concise way the incredible contribution Ian's work has made to the development of Australian electronic music. Besides his various technical innovations there can be no doubt that his vision, conception and execution has served to bring a great source of inspiration to all who have been involved within the community over the last twenty years. With the pending closure of the Latrobe University music department, his presence within the composition department at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music takes on a greater significance. Ian has proved time and time again that he is not afraid to put his weight behind a cause and fight to see its realisation. This fact has not been lost on many.
"Music, Gender and Social Stratification. The argument to be developed here is that the visual stress on controlling and structuring the public world has had certain consequences for the development of both of 'classical' and 'popular' musics. These consequences can best be approached by understanding first that the very fact of music, based as it is on the physical phenomenon of sound, constitutes a serious threat to the visually mediated hegemony of scribal elites.
To reiterate: vision, smooth and silent, stresses separation at a distance. It is the sense that allows us to inject ourselves into the world, to operate on the world over time and space, rather than simply having the world come in on us circumambiently and circumjacently. Touch is the sense basic not only to activating an awareness of ourselves, but also to making the fundamental distinction between us and not us. Sound, by contrast to both vision and touch, stresses the integrative and relational. It tells us that there is a world of depth surrounding us, approaching us simultaneously from all directions, totally fluid in its evanescence, a world which is active and constantly prodding us for a reaction. Similarly, the voice, which is the paradigm of sound for most people, is fundamental to the particular form of communication, language, which both facilitates and gives rise to that which is essentially human in people. The orality of face to face communication cannot help, in other words, but emphasise the social relatedness of individual and cultural existence.
If timbre, as the nature of sound itself, is the very vibratory essence that puts the world of sound in motion and reminds us that, as individuals, we are alive, sentient and experiencing, then as the essence of individual sonic events, it can be said to speak to the central nexus of experience that ultimately constitutes us all as individuals. If timbre is the texture, the grain and the tactile quality of sound which brings the world into us and reminds us of the social relatedness of humanity, then in touching us and stroking us it makes us aware of our very existence. Symbolically it is our existence.
The existence of music like the existence of women is potentially threatening to men to the extent that it sonically insists on the social relatedness of human worlds and as a consequence implicitly demands that individuals respond. When this happens music reminds men of the fragile and atrophied nature of their control over the world. Expressed in terms already outlined with regard to gender relations, the male fear of women is mirrored in the threat posed by uncontrollable musical experience to the "moral fibre" of the rationalistic scribe state'.
But since music cannot ultimately be 'denied' any more than social relatedness, the answer to music's 'threat' for post-renaissance men has been to isolate those components, pitch and rhythm, which can be objectified and frozen through a 'fully analytic' notation. Pitch and rhythm, as spatial and temporal extensions of timbre, are thus distanced from the core of musical articulation precisely in order to decontextualise articulation through transfer to the written or printed page, and so control and 'silence' timbre as a central component of music. This parallels the way in which a material and notational control is exercised over processes fundamental to the creation of people and the reproduction of culture in general. . . "
-John Shepherd, Music as Social Text. Cambridge MA: Polity Press, (pp 159-160), 1991.