©Christophe Charles 1997
1- Indetermination
Music is often considered as an art which concerns only the nature of sounds, their mutual relations and their duration. Attention is paid mainly to their acoustical and temporal aspect, but their spatial dimension is then forgotten.
As an example, most concert halls don't allow the audience to move around. In the European classical orchestra, the acoustic space, that is, the musicians' position, is conceived once for all. In the case of electronically amplified music, loudspeakers position is immutable, generally on both sides of the stage. The acoustic space is frontal, and the channel distribution is fixed from the beginning of the concert. In sound engineering, sensibility to acoustic space and to sound spatiality is rare.
However, this situation is not universal: it concerns mainly Occidental "serious" music which has developed from the 18th Century. Some baroque compositions would need the participation of several ensembles, separated by a certain distance and which would react to each other as echoes: remember Giovanni Gabrielli's "Canzone" at Venice's Saint-Marc, and the birth of concertant style. Claudio Monteverdi would also encourage the musicians and the singers to change place from one part to the other. He was conscious of the importance of spatial variation of sound sources. After the Renaissance, the interest in spatiality of sounds has not been completely lost, but the dichotomy between music and the other arts has continued to strengthen, so that the division between time-based arts and space-based arts contributed to eclipse the problem until the beginning of the 20th Century.
With the development of computer and satellite, we have now to think over our vocabulary, especially this which qualifies artistic forms and categories, because the system of distinction hitherto has already lost its value. Music as other forms of art have to get out of their shackles. "Informel" or "Action Painting" appeared because of modern Man's doubt in front of the rigidity of stone architecture and the necessity to double-lock the doors. It is necessary to give back some life to the closed and immutable form by providing it possibilities of movement and opening out. The achieved form and the perfection of the art work causes it to loose its freshness.
This is the aim of kinetic/optical art, which refuses in principle to be seen and to show itself twice the same way. The moving work of art provides a plurality of aspects in a given time; it plays sometimes with the possibilities of diffusion and refraction of light, so that every of its morphological aspects contain a certain part of unpredictability. The sculptures which have a most undetermined form are those which are made of gas or liquid. In the tradition of the fountains and dancing waters of the European garden, or the cascades of the Japanese garden, some artists arm themselves with a stock of scientific knowledge in order to initiate procedures of transformation, where the unpredictability of form defines, rather than an object of contemplation, a contemplation without object.
Not only the work of art, but the artist himself has to earn his freedom by "forgetting his responsibility" toward the perfection of his work. He must free himself from the dependency on a restrictive designation, and has to keep the possibility to use anything, that is, to be a sculptor as well as a cook or a gardener. The freedom of the form of the art work produces then an other type of relation with its audience, who is no more forced to cling to his chair and listen passively without sneezing. In the music of John Cage and his emulators, we have to prick up our ear, to discover and to reconstruct the music work by and for ourself. To compose, to perform and to listen are three different actions, and the quality of indetermination defines for each of them a necessary and particular effort to accomplish.
From the 18th Century, the world of European music has applied itself to develop "authoritarian" system of composition which order to the orchestra to function like an army, under the conductor's baton. In the case of a Beethoven symphony, where some schemes are repeated tens of times in a few minutes, the listener feels that there is no possible deviation. Thanks to personalities like Cage, the situation changes: the American composer decides suddenly that all parameters which define the acoustic element: timber, pitch, intensity, duration-that is, the local time (the duration of a punctual sound event) and consequently the global time (the duration of the composition or the concert in its whole-can equally be subject to indetermination. These elements are sometimes left to the appreciation of the musicians, who have then to restore a freedom which frightens them. In fact, undetermined music prevents from fore-hearing or fore-seeing. But undetermined music has no pretension: because he cannot predict what is going to happen, the composer admits that he is a listener just like everybody else. This is not a resignation, this is a lesson of humility. But Cage has been often accused to sacrifice too much for the Orient.
The arts which are described here search not for the control of the viewer/ listener and of the performer, but for his/her freedom. The viewer/listener remains free to move and to create free associations, in both material and spiritual sense: no imposed directions. This freedom has been experimented in cinema or theater: in the works of poet and dramatist Terayama Shuji, indetermination characterizes not so much the images themselves - which are most of the time strange symbols used to criticize particular aspects of Japanese culture - but rather the author's ideas on theater and cinema as a social model.
They are in this sense not far from those of Cage, who also defined his works as social models: no government-conductor stands in the center of the orchestra, and no author imposes to the performers to play exactly what he has written.
Terayama's works are "machines which provoke imagination", and only 50% of their contents is shown. The 50% left are to imagine and reconstruct by the viewer. Video artist Nakajima Kou uses another word: "work in progress", which form extends in present and future. His work "My Life" is conceived to happen on a period of a hundred years - that is, of an undetermined length - without paying attention to the death of its author. Nakajima has already built his own "Video Sanctuary", where visitors will be able to look at his works even after his death - let's remember John Cage's word: "I don't worry about the future of music: there will still be sounds after I die". The other films of Nakajima are all parts of a big tree which grows constantly, the author should be present or not. One could understand them as metaphors of the fundamental, necessary and coexisting elements of the universe. Nakaya Fujiko, who is well- known for her fog sculptures and fog environments also pays much attention to natural phenomenon: she makes them happen, or observes them, but once the process has begun, she doesn't intervene anymore. The "thing" happens by itself and interactions between the works and the environment are a source of contemplation. The results are unforeseeable, as the weather is.
Such works realize the idea of "interpenetration without obstruction" ("Bougai naki sougo shintou", which Cage borrowed from Suzuki Daisetsu) between different techniques and the different expressive impulse. Instead of a reference to the ideal of the artwork as a closed totality, these works show a poly-artistic openness toward a perpetually destabilizing decentralization. There is no center anymore, but the orbiting of a plurality of mobile and multi-functional centrations, which accept without trouble the generalized digitalization: the condition is that the "achieved" work which remains always flexible and adapting to its context, is able to simulate the continuity of a network.
2- (De)compositions
The (de)compositions I have been creating since 1986 follow the principles described above. They are based on the listening of soundscapes and their recording on magnetic tapes, in order to be edited and mixed with music instruments sounds: piano ("Kalkutta Kreis", 1986) or bells ("Unter den Linden" or "Silo", 1987), flutes or synthesizers, in order to create analogies and counterpoint of timbers. In some cases, found materials (stones, pieces of wood, etc.) are used instead of music instruments, and resonate in their environment; the recording intends then to reproduce their "shadow"-or echo-, that is, their spatial dimension ("Der Hirt auf dem Felsen", 1986).
In the case of "Kalkutta Kreis", the recordings of the different places have been edited according to the dynamic of their structure: each part thus features a special tension. The first unit features mainly urban sounds: English cabs, motorbikes, horns and crows. The second unit introduces "organic life": birds and human voices come from the gardens, the river and the markets.
The trains horns of the South Eastern Railways in the fourth unit represent "speed". The wind of the fourth unit gives the feeling of "time", and the Indian Ocean of the fifth unit recalls "Eternity". The whole structure goes from "Urbanity" to "Eternity", but doesn't intend to order things or to determine any kind of hierarchy between them-it is possible to change the order of the parts. The sounds appear according to an arbitrary global rhythm, which is repeated as a long loop: as soon as it ends, it is ready to start again.
The edited soundscapes part of "Kalkutta Kreis" has been mixed together with a piano piece, named "Dialectic Chords", where the main idea is to play a (group of) sound(s), and to wait until it has disappeared. The next sound is determined by measuring the release of the preceding one. Once mixed together, the sounds of the piano appear as a counterpoint with some elements of the Indian soundscapes: the difference of timbre gives them another dimension, and lets them appear more clearly.
"Der Hirt auf dem Felsen" (1986) is divided in four sections corresponding to four different acoustic spaces. In the port of Hamburg, the sounds of pieces of wood and their echo on the surrounding walls were recorded one by one. The second part was taken on the Frioul Island of Marseille, where stones where hit in a large space providing a lot of echo. Hand claps were recorded in the Catacombs of Paris, and the last part features the reverberated sounds of the wooden chairs of five churches of the center of Hamburg. The counterpoint to these different spatial sounds is given by a drone of a flute and a bowed electric bass based on breath.
The interaction between the sound of bells slowed down four times and the sound of a grain silo transformed by the autumn wind is at the basis of composition "Silo" (1986). This piece has been "recycled" as a drone for many other recorded or live pieces. In this composition, the different sounds were mixed without any special effect, but it is difficult to tell when the bells turn to sound like a silo, or when the silo becomes a bell.
These three pieces described above have become models for the compositions which have been later developed. The form of "Kalkutta Kreis" gave birth to the "next point" form, while "Der Hirt auf dem Felsen" announce a more static form which doesn't intend to show a development through the composition: the four parts (which become six or eight according to the version) are autonomous and show different aspects of the phenomena of echo in different environments.
"Silo" is a drone which doesn't intend to expand or transform, and is thus even closer to the "undirected" compositions which have been produced since 1995.
3- "Next point"
Although "Kalkutta Kreis" follows a rigid construction based on an Indian Tal (3-3-3-4-3), the first three parts are not only the expression of three different "moods" (urbanity, organicity, technical speed): they are constructed so that some elements announce or recall other ones. In further developments, the processes of the appearance of sounds are gradually formalized. One of them consists in the following pattern: in a sound sequence, some elements are amplified little by little and are prolonged so that they give birth to a new sequence ("next point"), in which new elements appear and develop, completing or contrasting with the former elements, which go disappearing little by little. The composition is thus in constant recycling movement.
The name "Next point" was suggested by Danish composer Henning Christiansen in 1992 when he heard prototypes of the two compositions which have been later published on the CD "let it hold itself up" (Gallery HAM, Nagoya, 1993). In his first works, Christiansen had conceived different composition methods, among them "Perspective Constructions" (1963), and "Next Point" (1964). "In Henning Christiansen's case, this meant to reduce sounds, and by way of repetition and small variations, produce simple structures that he analyzed anew by a method of symmetry, reversing the material back into itself in every conceivable combination. In doing this, he was not only interested in the auditory, but also in the visual elements of the music. The graphic aspects of the manuscript took on the same importance as the intonation of sound" (Niko Tenten, "Sound in Motion", in "Pick up on Henning Christiansen", 1992, p. 11).
Christiansen mentioned then the "next point principle" which seems to be inherent in the "let it hold itself up" pieces. Christiansen wrote about the pieces: "I want to name this art of construction: next point principle. This is a principle of form where you introduce a new sound in order to open on new possibilities. The length makes the whole a symphony, it becomes symphonic. One also gets "dragged" from beginning to end, when hearing it all, and following you through it" (1992-02-07).
The compositions featured in the "let it hold itself up" CD are originally quadraphonic (4 channel)-when performing them, the mixing panel in at the center of the concert-hall, surrounded by the audience, itself surrounded by at least four loudspeakers. The pieces are thus to be perceived in both time and space. On the CD, they have been reduced to a stereophonic (2 channel) version, which cannot reproduce the original conditions of the concert. The sounds of the first part (20 minutes) were sampled from voices of boiled eggs and coffee vendors of Calcutta-Howrah Station, of the monks of Todaiji (Nara, Japan) and of ice-cream vendors in Hangzhou (China). Some sounds have been borrowed from Henning Christiansen's compositions ("Kreuzmusik-Fluxid Behandlung" op. 189, "Klopfen" op. 20) with his authorization, and have been altered and filtered in order to be used in a new context. The last violin phrase comes from the very end of the first movement of Jean Sibelius' 4th Symphony. The second part (40 minutes) has been produced with an Akai S-1000 sampler, and has also been recorded directly from the mixing panel without overdub. Sound samples have been recorded in many different places, in particular in Japan for the flutes (nohkan, yokobue) and at the Jaganath Market of Puri (Bengal). The melodies which are heard at the end of the composition are popular songs of the indigenes of the Timor Islands, who were killed by the Indonesian Army in October 1991 (this composition was created live with musician Takeda Kenichi on New-Year's eve of 1992, in homage to the victims of 1991).
"Deposition Yokohama" (52 minutes), which mode of presentation ("undirected installation") will be described hereafter, is also based on a "next point"- like principle. The composition features about 11 main parts of different lengths, according to a dynamic of tension and release, crescendo and decrescendo. The first crescendo (0'00" -ca. 15'00"), from insects singing to urban sounds, opens on the voice of late Demetrio Stratos filtered by the space of Gallery HAM through the use of re-recording. The second long crescendo begins with flutes and dogs barking and leads to the amplified voices of crowded Tokyo. The third crescendo uses Christiansen's "Ror" (sound of the pipe used in "Klopfen") and some parts of "Der Hirt auf dem Felsen" before ending on the Sibelius violin. This composition has been released on a CD, which has been then divided by ID points in 23 parts of exactly 2 minutes, without direct relation to the content of the music. The ID points define nevertheless a new "ready-made" structure into the original structure of the music. The two minutes parts can be thus renamed after the fields which have been newly determined, and played in a random order - in the shuffle mode of a CD player.
Although one can feel a kind of development in which different parts follow one another, these compositions are not based on any kind of story board: they are conceived to be looped and heard continuously, and the order of appearance of the different parts can be changed, for example using the shuffle mode when playing a CD. They don't intend to "tell" anything to the listener, to impose him to listen to a particular ordered development. The audience remains free to listen to the sounds of the environment, and is sometimes led to pay more attention to the sounds which are not featured in the composition. The sounds of the environment happening in real time are in this sense "invited" to be heard simultaneously. The condition for such a phenomena to happen is that each sound of the composition stands for itself, and no one sound covers or eliminates another. The possibility to make "all sounds" audible is realized through the use of specific time structures.
4- "undirected"
At the beginning of the book "For the Birds", John Cage speaks about the idea of method, which is linked with the ideas of structure, form and material, as he had conceived them from the time he had studied with Arnold Schoenberg. He defines method as the procedure a composer uses to discover which sound should follow which other one in a particular sequence. About Schoenberg and Dodecaphony, Cage speaks about "walking with the right foot, then the left one, then the right one, then the left one" (p.28). A method supposes a selection, where one decides that one sound cannot follow any other one, but can only follow a particular family of sounds, in some case only one sound. From the moment he began to use chance operations, Cage gradually abandoned the ideas of method, form and material, and kept only structure, that is, measure of time. Time measure also disappears with 0'00" (1962), the second silence piece after 4'33". In the Eighties, the "Number Pieces" which feature the technique of "time brackets" have soft, or mobile structures. There is no structure apriori, and thus no more method, because the succession of several sounds has no importance anymore: we enjoy a total harmony, a pantonality, where any sound can meet any other sound.
Compared to the "next point" music, the "undirected" works explore further on the limits of intention (desire) and non-intention (chance), as they make an extensive use of random programs of the computer which triggers music instruments, here a synthesizer-sampler. These works invite to perceive and become conscious of layers of reality that are often forgotten, for example those which appears during moments of silence, that is, when no sound is played in the music. They are conceived as living environments which establish particular relations between fundamental elements: the sounds, the spaces, the media technology and the audience, and realize the idea of "interpenetration without obstruction" more clearly than the "next point" works. On the level of time and space structure, sounds appear independently, apart from any global structure which should intentionally impose on them an arbitrary hierarchy. Sounds' autonomy in time is sustained by their spatiality: the specific display of the loudspeakers makes possible a spatial perception of sounds as architecture, environment, or soundscape.
The technical system consists in a sampler-synthesizer and a computer. All parameters of the synthesizer can be controlled numerically by the computer program, which number values subject to automatic and/or manual variations. The quantity of numbers which inter-modify themselves is high enough so that their combination provokes unattended phenomena. Each program's parameters are determined according to the characteristics of sound samples which are used in the program. Because of hardware limitation, the samples have to be repeated a certain amount of times, and the program has to be conceived so that the sound samples can be heard and repeated in the most adequate range of variations. For example, one sound will "sound" better according to a certain range of pitches, duration, or other parameters. The setting of the program will then take in consideration this particular range. During the performance of a work, the parameters modifying the characteristics of the sound are left under the control of the computer. What the computer cannot control is the general volume and balance, and the length of the parts and of the whole, because it is not (yet) able to "perceive" exactly enough its environment-it is able to a certain extent, but the human performer is still probably more capable to assume such a task.
The "environment" consists in several elements, which form a whole by being together and reacting to each other. One is the real space in which the music is heard, its architectural, climatic, etc., that is, physical characteristics.
In this space are standing, walking or sitting the listeners, who react to the music in very different ways. These reactions confer to each sound a particular space, which is real as well as abstract, and the perception of each listener is also modified by this particular space. The "environment" is on another hand the conditions of creation of the composition, which is for instance a command from an institutional or private party. It has to fit conditions such as conceptual elements, for example in the case of a collaboration with other artists: choreographer, painter, architect, etc. It has sometimes to fit more general conditions such as the historical, political, social or economical situation.
According to such premises, I realized several installations and sound works. The installation "Deposition Yokohama" was presented at the Yokohama Museum in 1995, and used the CD described above. It had to fit not only the real space, but also-and mainly-the political and administrative conditions which are specific to a Japanese museum institution. Technically speaking, six loudspeakers were set with an infrared sensor sensible to the movements of visitors in a 200 square-meters space. The sound is electrically transmitted to the loudspeaker when the sensor is activated, that is, when someone or something moves around it. By walking in the space, the visitor can thus experiment different angles of hearing, different ways of superimposing the music, and different sound spaces. The global composition is thus closely linked to the presence and the movements of the listeners, and is thus realized as plural and "undirected".
The first "undirected" project was then presented as a development of "Deposition Yokohama" in Kyoto (Pig Nose Gallery, 1995). This installation used six speakers set on the floor and the ceiling, and six infrared sensors in order to control a K-2000 synthesizer-sampler through a Macintosh computer loaded with Max and a MIDI trigger. The sensors produce impulses which are transformed in MIDI signals. These signals are routed through the computer program and sent to the synthesizer, causing parameters of pitch, velocity, effects and various controllers to change. The audience reacts to the sounds and moves around. These movements produce variations in sound and light, and cause the sensors to produce new impulses. Moving in the space provokes thus a kind of entropy in the computer system: complex combinations of parameters of the K-2000 programs and combinations of the programs themselves are produced. Thanks to the panning possibilities of the K-2000, the sounds move from one speaker to the other, according to the position of the visitor who creates her/his own sound-space, resulting sometimes in phenomena of displacement of the perception.
Compositions which have been realized for "statics" (published by CCI Recordings/Ikeda Ryoji, 1995) and "In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze" (published by Mille Plateaux, 1996) are developments of the Kyoto installation: the computer chooses the parameters of 22 sounds ("statics") or 48 sounds ("Deleuze"), so that their combinations don't appear twice. The resulting music does not seem to progress. Sounds are displayed at random/by chance in time, and the freedom of the listener is thus realized: he can listen when he likes to, without being feared to have lost something. In such conditions, he/she should become conscious of his/her entire responsibility of enjoying the present time of his/her listening performance.
5- About "undirected 1986-1996" (Mille Plateaux MP33)
"undirected 1986-1996" is a 60 minutes CD-ROM which features compositions produced since 1986, like "Kalkutta Kreis". Two layers of these compositions are mixed together with the "undirected" programs of the Macintosh/K-2000 system. The ROM part consists in a Max patch which is used in the composition process, as well as audio (AIFF), visual (PICT) and text documents. The following text is an e-mail-interview by Martin Conrads (Berlin) which was made for the 'convex tv.' radio program on February 2, 1997.
Martin Conrads: The relationships between image and sound in popular culture are more focussing on abstract (rhythm) or narrative format (just think of videoclips), but not on the production process or the pure technical visualization of sound. At the same time sound notations via popular software programs (techno music...) are possibly done by more people than ever due to cost and popularity. Do you think with this step you make with 'undirected' (audio+rom!), there is a chance that this relationship could change (in this emancipator, democratic sense, or, as you mentioned in 'time notations', regarding the relationship between the ear and the eye in the Dufrenne sense)?
Christophe Charles: I consider rhythm also as a physical-concrete element, which is able to stimulate the perception of sound (timber) and light. In the music produced with my computer program, regular repetition is avoided because random objects control the value of the metronome objects. In this sense, there is no one central rhythm but rather multi- or poly-rhythms.
Sound is not immaterial. One of my interest is to pay attention to its physical quality, and this actually doesn't have much to do with the "abstract" and "narrative" characters which you mention. Because of its physical quality, I can use it as a formative element of space. Its volume, its movement and other characteristics can be felt physically (bodily), and sound can thus be used as a material to define space and realize a invisible architecture in which one can move freely-through the walls.
I can feel on another hand that sound stimulates physically the ear similarly as light stimulates the eye. A big sound will "hurt" the ear quite the same way a flashlight will "hurt" the eye. When I display images-for example in the patch which stands on the ROM of the "undirected" CD-, I consider these images as light images. Eventually one can perceive sound and images as meaningful information, but in this case I don't: what I want is to have here is a relationship in time between the different visual and audio variations, that is, a physical stimulation of ears and eyes happening simultaneously in order to make a "synaesthetic" or "synaptic" experience.
This kind of experiment reminds the works of Fischinger and Whitney, but the difference between film and interactive computer technology is that we can change in real time the parameters of sound and light image, and thus experiment combinations which are not yet realized, or which happen very seldom. This interactivity thus reinforce the physical aspect of the experience and force the listener/player to stay awake and responsible of what is happening.
Computer technology dealing with the other senses: touch, smell and taste, is still unpopular. And there are anyway no smell-lamps, no touch-speakers. The priority of the audio-visual should definitely be questioned more often, in order to leave room for a more global sensibility.
MC: To present the soundscapes according to their alphabetical proximity on the audio part of 'undirected' seems like a paradox regarding the general purpose of the CD-ROM-part to achieve the freedom of creating new orders of sound out of generating one's own idea of priority of sound. Yet, it is obvious, that the audio-CD has to follow the principle of linearity due to ist technical conditions. Would you compare the different kinds of sound- experience the listener/user get out of the audio part on the one hand, the CD -ROM part on the other to the principles of 'direct listening' and 'memory listening' you mentioned in the 'time notation'-text? (e.g.: 'direct listening' then would mean: on the audio part you can't influence the priorities, so it's a kind of perception you can't modify or escape from. 'Memory listening' in this sense would be creating one's own priorities of the parameters of speed, volume, duration etc. in order to create an 'un-direct', modified and thus technically memorized form of music?)
CC: The presentation of sound samples as mini-soundscapes according to alphabetical proximity followed the idea of "ready-made". In this case, such an arbitrary order has the meaning and effect to avoid using my taste. But I found that I didn't need to avoid using my taste at this point, because the combinations are already the effects of chance meeting of different samples.
It is true that the CD in its present form is a linear recording, similar to most paintings or sculptures in the classic sense. But nowadays, with computer-controlled CD drives, it has become possible to get it played in a programmed (dis)order, although there are still problems of discontinuity due to mechanical limitation of the searching/scanning devices. I want to show with the patch included in my CD, although it is provided in a very simple form, that it is now possible to transform the CD drive into a machine which is able to produce new combinations and thus new experiences. The sounds should be anyway copied as sound files on the RAM (random access memory) of the computer ,which can be accessed much faster than any (hard-)disk. The ideal amount of RAM would be the amount of what is on the CD (about 650 MB), then it would be possible to really random-access the CD without problem of discontinuity in the perception. Nevertheless, there is no personal computer with such an amount of random access memory, and it that sense, all what we can produce are prototypes, proposals. But it will be possible in a few years from now.
The process of listening is thus in question: the listener has now the responsibility of producing his own music, that is, his own boredom. Thus he has to develop his skill of listening, that is, both "direct listening" or "real-time listening" (the faculty of paying attention to all strata of a soundscape at once) and "memory listening" (the faculty of memorizing and analyzing what has been happening in order to create new combinations and avoid boredom).
The audio part has been realized according to these ideas and this process, and even if it is just a recording, it should be complex enough to challenge one's ability to hear-at-once and to memorize everything what is happening. Listening ability changes according to the conditions of internal (state of mind) and external environment (space acoustics, reproduction system technology, etc.). When playing this kind of music in a environment which is already full of city or nature sounds, that is, non-intended sounds, new combinations are then created, which also develop listening skill.
MC: As far as mass music production, sampling and quoting of musical sounds has become a general topic. Looking at 'undirected', there is also just a small amount of soundscapes taken out of others' musicians' works (e.g.: Sibelius). Why is it you aren't interested in using samples as a form of quotation the same way it is used in pop-music or 'new electronica' but more following the principles of cage's 'Roaratorio' or the ideas of musique concrete?
CC: My music is full of quotations: Henning Christiansen's music, Buddhist monk's music, dog's music, Noh theater music, etc. I consider as a quotation any recorded sound which was intentionally produced by a human or an animal. Moreover, the question of quotation concerns not only physical sound, but also ideas of composition.
Most of the sounds made with music instruments are less complex than environment sounds, which are combinations of many sound strata. I have more interest in listening to complex sound combinations, for the reasons I explained above. But there are also "simple" soundscapes, where only a few sounds are necessary. When I use the end of the first movement of Sibelius Fourth Symphony, it is because I hear it as a (minimal) soundscape, and because these four notes resume the whole symphony. In this sense, they have a very special complexity, which is maybe more related to "memory listening". I use quotation for this precise quality of complexity related to memory. In this sense, each sound represents a little world; it is the visible part of the iceberg.
Long quotations are more easy to recognize than short ones. Repeating a long sequence will often lead to boredom. There are technical limits of RAM memory, as I described above. My sampler has only 16 MB, and I cannot avoid repeating samples-quotations. I cannot help repeating them, but I try not to have twice the same setting of parameters for a same sound, in order to avoid pure repetition and boredom. The most precious we have is time. I don't like to spoil time by repeating a sound, even a beautiful one.
MC: At the end of the audio-part of undirected there is silence for more than 3 minutes -is it due to technical reasons or can it be seen as a statement to make aware of 'silence' as an qualitatively equal element of sound (which would be a digital silence then, or a digital citing of Cage's 4'33''?)
CC: "Music is continuous, only listening is intermittent" (Thoreau). The silent sequence intends, as you write, "to make aware of 'silence'" as environmental noise. At least to be aware of how noisy a CD player is. I placed it at the end, so I don't force people to listen to it: they can cut, or forget it more easily than if it were in the middle of the recording.
