Whitehot Magazine

Daniel Neumann: Tone Field Horizon at Wave Farm

On the Mic. Image credit: Lucy Bohnsack.

By AXEL BISHOP August 25, 2024

Tone Field Horizon, the latest performance-installation by Brooklyn-based sound artist, Daniel Neumann, was recently presented at The Wave Farm in Acra, NY. A meandering audience experienced the work by walking the Art Park property of the unique media arts organization in the Hudson Valley, a program dedicated to creative experimentation with the electromagnetic spectrum. An amalgamation of the five field stations (and one mobile station) that formed Neumann’s project was also broadcast live on local radio. The broadcast, though quite enchanting in its minimal tonalities, veiled the experiential nuances of the work encountered by roving throughout the sites.

The distinction between the two ways of relating the work suggests a philosophical position of the artist. TONE FIELD HORIZON is at once a formal, compositional experiment, and a pedagogical model for engaging acoustic phenomena and creating space for understanding complexities through an ontological method; coming to understand ‘place’ through a multisensory framework grasped through thoughtful movement, deep listening, adapting and orienting to subtly changing conditions both internally and externally.

Neumann constructed each of the field stations around his software instrument, Room Tone Generator, producing, “finely tuned tonalities that blend into the nearfield environment”: Each station is an assembly of sensitive field microphone, software patch, speaker system, and the subtly unpredictable materials of the immediate soundscapes.

As an open inquiry, the work asks, what results will this yield? What values might this result contain? One imagines that, as a sound engineer, Neumann anticipates the kinds of affect that his work may produce, yet the uncontrolled acoustic environment allows for potential intrusions from whatever [human or non-human] sources may come into the range of the acoustic field, and what may influence electromagnetic behaviors unpredictably. Neumann’s system responds to what it hears and what it is programmed to accomplish based on the parameters that he has established with the instruments of each station, calibrating an orchestrated event uniquely emplaced in the moment to a human/machine/environment dynamic.

Daniel Neumann. Image credit: Lucy Bohnsack.

The environmental information that we become sensitized to through the careful listening that the work provokes, enables finding causal and poetically approximate relationships between the elements at play around us. As Murray Schafer pointed out in his 1971 essay, The Tuning of the World: Toward a Theory of Soundscape Design, the invisible force of wind is evident by the impact that it has on the physical properties of its
environments. Walking the labyrinth of TONE FIELD HORIZON, we “see” the breeze in the movement of leaves. This impresses upon what is heard by collaboration with the output of the tone synthesizer, which gathers and processes such features and re-articulates them in a much less compartmentalized acoustic language. In fact, the voice of the work is more like a breathing apparatus. In this sense, as a listening and breathing system, the work also calls to mind the pursuit of the late Pauline Oliveros and her enduring Deep Listening Institute. In TONE FIELD HORIZON though, it is the system that is breathing and responsive, and the sensitive audience that may become attuned to the auditory construct, thus gaining access to this dialogic earth-machine interface.

Speaker in a Field. Image Credit: Lucy Bohnsack.

The “acoustic horizon”, the edge of our aural depth of field, defines an elusive space based on where we are situated and what waves of audible information come over the horizon and into our perceptual range. The first performance of John Cage’s 4’33” performed over 70 years ago, among other things, contributed to expanding audience awareness to engage with a much wider range of sounds. This broader spectrum accessed through the portal of what was previously considered silence or absence instantly included within the arenas of traditional instrumental music, the sounds of our own bodies, the room itself, and what stirs just outside of the context of the music hall. This perceptual shift opened dynamic channels of interdisciplinary sound and music modalities, and TONE FIELD HORIZON moves us still further. The formal, compositional aspect of Neumann’s project builds on this lineage, where music, sound, audience, and environment conspire.

If one interacts with TONE FIELD HORIZON by walking and listening, unaware of the technical operations, historical precedents, or theoretical framework at play in driving this activated project, there persists a relational disposition about the construct and its arrangement that communicates the politics and poetics of the work through its transmission and our willingness to confront unknowns. The concept of “blind listening” is inadequate to describe what is happening here; more appropriate may be ‘susceptible listening’, -submitting to be shaped by one’s sensorial experience. The five stations are tactically coordinated to accomplish several tasks. The spacing and placement coax us along the determined passage and modulates pacing. Each station is sited at a distance just enough to gently fall into our audible (and sub-audible) awareness, overlap elements in our movement, and encourage us forward. When entering into the superlocal conditions of each, the soundscape introduces its signatures of what becomes present, and surprisingly begins to differentiate the specifics of each location while also combining them all into one underlying structure, like Britten’s “Instruments of the Orchestra” applied to acoustic ecologies. It is a subtly radical statement regarding this non-anthropocentric reality. In a recent interview on this project, the artist has said that he, “...sees listening as a process of de-centering”.

There are additional off-site audiences that will experience this same work quite differently, as channels from all tone field stations are combined and transmitted via local FM broadcast and radio stream. To hear the work in a less physically spatialized way emphasizes its minimalist musicality. It also places the work in a much broader field in which it is gathered as a unified composition, carried by electromagnetic signal, and therefore makes more evident the way in which Neumann has instrumentalized the entire infrastructure of the Wave Farm. WM

You can listen to the archived version of, TONE FIELD HORIZON at: https://wavefarm.org/radio/wgxc/schedule/cpnq0w 

 

Axel Bishop

Axel Bishop is a poet based in St. Johns, Newfoundland. Bishop lectures and writes about art and architecture, and reviews exhibitions concentrated in the Northeast United States and Canada. Recent writing has appeared in Architectural Inventions (Laurence King, UK), Cornelia Magazine (Buffalo, NY), and WTD Magazine (UAE).  Image credit: Heike Storm 2019.

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