the texts:

vocal music

Also there is the repetitive nature of the music that allows for the unfolding in time of a recursive spatial arrangement of tones whose parallel can be found in the world of architecture, where structural integrity requires the modular deployment of building materials to create a building’s framework …

Call the mixes and songs generated by the assembly process… the social construction of memory.

Paul D Miller (DJ Spooky)

Shadow Rounds traces the sound and rhythms of texts from the Spitalfields area, bringing them together as a collective voice. This voice refers to the form and content – of speech, writing and meaning; examining speech, word and expressed thought as music.

The work looks at this rich piece of London ground focusing on Spitalfields but also including related texts from Aldgate, Whitechapel, the City and Bishopsgate.

The texts were chosen to reflect a wide variety of experiences and thoughts, but the Charnel House site is the guiding spirit both in its immediate location and in its psychological tenor. The sounds that have been produced for the installation take into account the existing noise of this outdoor site, but the overall feel of the piece is contemplative, through simplicity and repetition.

The texts are from:

  1. Across Seven Seas - Shamim Azad
  2. The House of Fame - Geoffrey Chaucer
  3. Trial transcript of Jane Collins - the Old Bailey Online
  4. Introduction to The English Physitian - Nicholas Culpeper
  5. Sermon 25 - John Donne
  6. Trial transcript of John Doyle
  7. Latin temple inscription
  8. The Tragical History of Dr Faustus - Christopher Marlowe
  9. entry from The Receptacle - Spitalfields Mathematical Society
  10. They Shall Walk in Silk Attire - Henry Mayhew
  11. unsolicited email
  12. English/Hebrew dictionary entries - David Rodinsky
  13. Austerlitz - W G Sebald
  14. 18 Folgate Street, The Story of a House in Spitalfields - Dennis Severs
  15. The Comedy of Errors - William Shakespeare
  16. Whitechapel Idyll - Avram Stencl
  17. Last will and testament - Jean Loiseaux de Tourval
  18. two Anglo Saxon riddles - 47 and 69 from the Exeter Book
  19. Celtic words

Each text is treated as a separate entity and a short sound piece is created within and around it. These pieces, in small groups of four or five, repeat each day from 9am to nightfall.

The sound worlds created from the texts are fragments towards a collective piece, each becoming part of a larger work at the end of the day, where all the texts are concurrent but orchestrated in a mix. (See performance times.)

There are 19 mixes over the 9 month performance period. The mixes are based on the following subjects, moving across content and material:

  1. silence
  2. time
  3. the body
  4. textual/sound structure
  5. identity
  6. matter
  7. death
  8. diaspora
  9. meter/rhythm
  10. movement
  11. elements
  12. truth/lies
  13. memory
  14. place
  15. organisation/belief/knowledge
  16. fragmentation
  17. languages
  18. theatre
  19. variations

Text transformations / sound elements

The individual texts are treated in several different ways.

  1. sound supporting text content
  2. writing style, structure
  3. rhythms from text/reading
  4. vocal sounds
  5. fragmentation of text, sound
  1. Azad – vocal rhythms C
  2. Severs – vocal sounds, contemporary short sentence lengths B
  3. Donne – punctuations, sentence structure, multiple subsections B
  4. Rodinsky – text rhythms and vocal shapes, translation C
  5. Sebald – content, continuity of expressed thought A
  6. Collins – emotional content underlying formal trial transcript A
  7. Tourval – melodic vocal sounds D
  8. Latin – vocal rhythms C
  9. Shakespeare – meter against vocal, iambic pentameter C
  10. Marlowe – meter against vocal, iambic pentameter C E
  11. Culpeper – sentence structure, multiple subsections B
  12. Mathematical Society – formal/informal, contrast A
  13. Chaucer – vocal sounds, meter D
  14. Anglo Saxon – textual structure, alliteration, caesura D B
  15. Mayhew – content, direct emotion A
  16. Doyle – content A
  17. Celtic – sound fragments D E
  18. Patrick – text fragmentation, multiple voices E
  19. Stencl – vocal rhythms, translation C

The transformations are simple characterisations of the texts. These relate across texts as well as internally within each specific text/sound space. The following methods were applied to the sounds, which were made up from

  1. percussion recordings based on the rhythms, structures or meanings of the texts, or
  2. the sounds of the readings/vocalisations of the texts.

The few lines chosen from Marlowe’s Dr Faustus deliberately play on the element of time. This central idea is reflected in the words and the iambic pentameter rhythmical form. I used a rigid, simple, 10 syllable, 5 stressed beat rhythm throughout, contrasting the voice against the structure. The text is built up using the ScaFra technique of the slow addition and subsequent subtraction of material.

The Shakespeare follows the Marlowe text in looking at the line’s relationships to iambic pentametrical rhythms. In this case I tried to reflect and play on the more supple manipulations of line and the flow of ideas, as well as the speed changes between shared character lines (stichomythia) and individual character lines. Also, the shift into and out of the space of the ‘play’ itself is an important part of this text characterisation.

The Anglo Saxon looks at the poetic forms of stress, caesura and alliteration.

The Donne, Culpeper and Severs treatments use sounds to mark the sentence lengths and punctuations. Each of these texts differs widely in their overall sentence length, structure and use of sub clauses.

The Donne makes use of four bell-like sounds to denote commas, colons, semi-colons and full stops. The Culpeper uses the next vocalised sound after each of those punctuations.

Azad, Rodinsky, Latin, and Stencl sound treatments are all based on the vocalisations through rhythmic and melodic means.

Some of the texts were too emotionally charged to analyse in terms of technique or form so they were treated to a parallel sound. The Collins has a continuous hard edged sound to contrast with the detached formality of the trial record and to underline the real tenor of the narrative. The Mayhew and Doyle texts are treated in a similar way.

The Sebald and Mathematical Society texts were also treated with parallel sounds, though they have a different reasoning. The Sebald text sound reflects the beautiful continuity of line that the writer used – creating an incantatory feel. The descriptive and methodical Mathematical text is contrasted with a sound that tries to convey an unruly elemental reality separate from the words.

The Tourval, Chaucer and Celtic texts also deal with the vocal sounds. The Tourval follows the melodic line of the voice. The Chaucer foregrounds the pauses and breaths as well as the rhythm of the line lengths. The Celtic looks at word sounds and fragmentation.

The email text (Patrick) is simultaneously read by three voices, playing with the humour inherent in the random cutup words used, and reflecting a multiplicity of ‘individual’ voices. This text is used as a question about our understanding of contemporary place.

layers, loops and folds

Shadow Rounds is based on four main groups of texts:

  1. Diaspora: translation, fiction, poem, email
  2. Matter: sermon, testament, trial proceedings, social report
  3. Meter: poetry and plays
  4. Enigmata: inscription, riddles, fragments

Sound layout

The groups act as the basic stratification and form for the building blocks of the piece. They allow a non linear layout of the historical periods across the sounding field for the mixes. The diagram above shows how each sound element (text) is allocated a specific space on the window plane. This layout is only used when all the individual text pieces come together in the mix – the last piece of the day.