Description

Essentially a place for discussing the rationale, design imperatives and function of setting up a podcast for making available audio documentation of the composition experiments of this project. The podcast can then be attached to the project or provided as an external playlist, whichever is easier to manage.

This stems for an earlier question and a problem I have been considering for some time.  When dealing with multi-channel soundscape systems, and indeed multi-phonic acoustic experiences, how does one mediate those experiences and experiments within a broader circulation network so as to provide a modicum of currency to the work, and of course, receive feedback?

Without question, the most convenient and widespread method of audio distribution on the web is via the mp3 format.  There are issues regarding the licensing of the format that make it difficult for example for Linux users to have working mp3 support shipped with free operating systems, but it remains the default audio distribution method for compressed audio.  I would move to ogg vorbis, an open standard compression scheme, but the device support is still not there for now which to me is important.  You, even if what I'm doing isn't intended to be presented as finished composed pieces, I still want people to be able to listen to what I'm doing with the minimum of technical effort on my behalf.  Which is why I think binaurally [0] recorded material distributed as stereo mp3s, and podcast if you wish to adopt the proprietary and commercial term, is the best solution for my aims here.  Podcasting as a medium, if it could be classed as such, actually represents a very efficient distribution mechanism for circulating binaurally recorded material.

One of the bigger problems of binaural recording is that it does not reproduce spatialisation well in an open air stereophonic system.  This is the well known hole-in-the-middle effect where the listener's head is supposed to be.  Podcasts, however, more often than not are intended to be listened to with headphones on portable mp3 players, eliminating the troublesome effects of the differences in playback systems (or at least reduces the variables to the differences in headphones, which whilst vary widely in terms of fidelity and signal to noise ratio, have a fixed stereo spatialisation in relation to the listener's head). I'd like to find some statistics to verify methods of auditioning of podcasts, but I don't have them at the moment. I'll keep an ear out.  Podcasting offers a large user base of rapid access, frequent update, low cost of entry dispersion points. In some ways podcasting shifts the spatial teleology of circulation from the spaces produced by radios and stereos to that of peoples' ear canals, which provides an ideal control within a highly varied circulation network.  It then becomes a question of spinning one's way into the social networks that interconnect these distribution points.

Which indirectly brings me to the question of feedback.  One of the mains reasons I would like people to listen to my experiments in sound is to give me some feedback.  Podcasting, and the associated Internet technologies of commentary systems and user voting allows instant access to audience opinion and circulation statistics that within the radio world at least are provided by ratings services.  Feedback is shifted from a mediated and meta-level to a specifically oscillatory or micro distribution level.  It is a miniaturization and refinement of feedback and active participation in the creation of cycles - social bifurcation forming pattern networks - such that social group formation becomes more organic rather than top-down bureaucratic or market driven corralling.  Social groups emerge through technological facilitation of circulation intersections rather than social groups attracting to already crystallized network of capital flow.  IN other words, currency is defined by social utility and viability to the ongoing life of communities rather than by economic equivalence to a standardized representation of capital.

But what does this have to do with technology the studio and the practicing artist?  I'm assuming that the ethical imperative on the artist, at least working within publicly funded institutions, is to tend toward open networks.  By open networks I mean those patterns of interaction emergent through systemic relationships within practice based systems across multiple domains of being that are transparent and accessible at all levels of organization of those systems.  One of the main reasons for this openness is to maximize the pedagogic and hence social utility of practice.  In other words, what artists should be doing is creating networks of practice that live on well after the act of production has been completed and the exchange of currency with regards to the product has become a memory.