My presentation, “Two Feedback Studies”, touches on the subject of feedback musicianship and compositional aesthetics in the 21st century through a set of tools, in both the analog and digital audio domains. The research output is in the form of a sound study consisting of two electroacoustic compositions, “dìaw / เดี่ยว” and “khûu / คู่”.
Feedback, as a compositional tool, has been around since the dawn of electronic music history (tape era, elektronische Musik, musique concrète) and has evolved over the years, following the trend of technological advancements. In its early years, composers like David Tudor (Toneburst, Pulsers, Rainforest), Éliane Radigue (Feedback Works) and Karlheinz Stockhausen (Kontakte) have extensively used electronic feedback in their works with equipment like laboratory equipment (impulse generators, spring reverberation tanks), audio equipment (generic mic-speaker feedback loop) and homebrew circuit boxes (Toneburst). The aesthetics of composing with analog technology has slowly faded away throughout the 70s and 80s, having its place taken by computer music technology. In the late 90s and early 2000s, surprisingly, a reemergence of interest in analog audio technology or the so-called “analog renaissance”, had popularized the No-Input Mixing Board along with other electronic music instruments like the Eurorack and Frac Rack format modular synthesizers.
The No-Input Mixing Board (NIMB) is an instrument that produces sound by patching the output of the mixer back into the system, creating a static feedback sound that can be further shaped through the use of equalizers, compressors, and other audio effects. The NIMB itself is often associated with the aesthetics of “junk” or “substandard” audio gear, stemming from the 90s trend of accessible audio gear that allowed music to be made from supposedly “junk”. The work(s) that laid the foundation for the NIMB to rise to its popularity as an instrument are the No-Input Mixing Board series by Toshimaru Nakamura, a Japanese sound artist and composer. Nakamura explored the sonic possibilities of the NIMB in various settings, including drone, ambient, noise, and microsound.
Audio gear in this era geared towards sonic exploration, specifically modular synthesizers, has also started to look into feedback interactions in a voltage-controlled environment. The Eurorack itself is a perfect example, having modules that explore both the feedback interactions at audio (20Hz to 20kHz) and control rates (~0Hz to 40Hz). Examples range from Rob Hordijk's "Rungler" sample-and-hold-based shift register feedback to the Djupvik Electronics’ Shakti and Gen Thalz No-Input Mixer module.
My compositions as a result of this study investigate feedback in two settings: digital feedback and its modification through the use of computer music-oriented effects (granular synthesizer, resonator, physical modelling synthesizer) in dìaw / เดี่ยว, and the reconstruction and recontextualization of NIMB gestures through an electroacoustic composition in the elektronische Musik style in khûu / คู่.
In dìaw / เดี่ยว, I created a modular synthesizer patch that is essentially a “controlled feedback system” using my personal Eurorack system. The output from the end-of-chain module, Mutable Instruments Beads Texture Synthesizer, is fed back into itself, with a copy of itself sent into the Mutable Instruments Rings’ resonator input. Sonically, the result is a continuously varying microsonic texture, modified by the twisting of knobs and changes in the resonator's structure.
For khûu / คู่, I aimed to reconstruct the time-based sound world of recorded NIMB gestures in a new linear timeline, in the style of tape music (elektronische Musik), utilizing computer sound transformation. The sound source of the piece comprises recordings of NIMB improvisation totalling around 5 hours, with the NIMB patched in the style of a stereo “complex oscillator” voice. Gestures from the improvisation are extracted into miniature clips, ranging from 1 second to 1 minute, which are then edited and processed into a 9-minute electroacoustic piece. Fortunately, this piece was also commissioned by the Princess Galyani Vadhana International Symposium and the Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre (BEAST) for their joint performance featured as part of this year’s symposium.