The Sonic Dimension of Deep Tech
In a previous article about the sonic dimension of the metaverse, I dicussed the way inwhich the conscious integration of soundscapes into virtual worlds could have the potential to radically amplify our experiences and sense of place within them. This article describes some of my own sonic and musical influences, projects and ambitions, so I won’t repeat those elements again.
The place I would like to start is with a brief musing about Erik Satie’s Gnossienne 1. While YouTube has many excellent interpretations, the one I would like to share is by pianist Alessio Nanni who really I think conveys the original meandering and pondering slow pace.
As Nanni notes in his introduction to the piece:
“Satie’s coining of the word “gnossienne” was one of the rare occasions when a composer used a new term to indicate a new “type” of composition. Satie had and would use many novel names for his compositions (“vexations”, “croquis et agaceries” and so on). “Ogive,” for example, had been the name of an architectural element until Satie used it as the name for a composition, the Ogives. “Gnossienne,” however, was a word that did not exist before Satie used it as a title for a composition. The word appears to be derived from “gnosis”; Satie was involved in gnostic sects and movements at the time that he began to compose the Gnossiennes.[citation needed] However, some published versions claim[citation needed] that the word derives from Cretan “knossos” or “gnossus” and link the Gnossiennes no 1 to Theseus, Ariadne and the Minotaur myth.”
Building on these notes, another viewer expanded on the definition:
“Few people know the meaning of Gnossienne. This is the explanation I give when I teach them this song (my explanation). Gnose in French (from Greek gnosis) means knowledge (“connaissance”, feminine noun) and “sienne”, feminine adjective for “sien” means oneself. Gnossienne is the knowledge every one makes out for oneself. So it’s an introspection on how you express yourself musically (but it works for language too) and how you should choose to express yourself.
All the Satie’s annotations on the score show this. They are really important and often not respected because few people understand them.
- “Très luisant” means “Show off” (what you probably do at the beginning when you play).
- “Questionnez”: Question yourself about what you’re doing.
- “Du bout de la pensée” refers to an achieved form of thinking. It’s your thought just before speaking or playing and it’s your natural thought coming from yourself.
- “Postulez en vous-même” : Think in yourself among several possibilities and postulate, make a decision.
And finally “Sur la langue”: on the tip of your tongue, what you are going to play, after a thorough thinking, but without being completely sure, because nobody can be sure of one’s knowledge.
Thank you Mr. Satie for this music and philosophy lesson!”
However, one other viewer offered an alternative definition of ‘gnossiene’ attributed to Satie which I went to investigate to see if there was any truth in it. I found the full quote on a website called The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows:
gnossienne
n. a moment of awareness that someone you’ve known for years still has a private and mysterious inner life, and somewhere in the hallways of their personality is a door locked from the inside, a stairway leading to a wing of the house that you’ve never fully explored — an unfinished attic that will remain maddeningly unknowable to you, because ultimately neither of you has a map, or a master key, or any way of knowing exactly where you stand.
Wow — what a reflection. Maybe Satie did not compose this definition, but someone did. How incredible is it that this piece of music inspired such a bittersweet articulation of the emotions triggered by such a seemingly simply yet poignant composition.
Other people commenting on Nanni’s rendition offered the following range of comments:
- I believe this to be one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written.
- My friend told me that this sounds like vampires dancing in a ballroom, in the late 19th century.
- The first time I played this I had tears in my eyes. I got an image of an old man, dressed in bearskins, placing flowers on a grave in a frozen, snow-swept landscape. Weird, I’ll grant you, but very moving.
- This song is so aggressive and painful yet so soft and relaxing, it’s so fast and interesting yet so dark and slow.
- This is the song that will be played when the world ends and it’s the end credits.
- Mysterious, magical, captivating… it’s another world!
- It’s as if mysterious beauty and the foreshadowing of regret had it’s own theme.
So what do these evocations of paradoxical emotions and memories have to do with deep tech. The answer for me lies in the motive for the creation of the technology being created, and the depth or lack of, in that which has been created. As humans we are visual beings, and if we look at how we represent deep or advanced technology nowadays, what comes up from an image search in Google for “deep tech” are the following:
A search for ‘advanced technology” comes up with pretty much the same restricted range of corporate stock imagery, all seemingly in the same palette of blues:
In our book Deep Tech and the Amplified Organisation, we wanted to stretch people’s imagination and shift from a focus on the advanced technology such as AI, 5G, quantum computing, onto not just the impact that advanced technology is making in our lives, for good or for worse, but on the ability of deep (profound) technology to help humanity articulate it’s highest expression, and to lead us to bring new worlds into being. Our philosophy is captured in these seven principles of our Deep Tech Manifesto:
- The purpose of Deep Tech is to use deep thinking to find deep solutions to complex problems;
- Deep Tech combines analytical thinking and artistic consciousness;
- Deep Tech creates augmented intelligence, the combination of artificial intelligence with conscious human endeavours;
- Privacy and ethics are core elements of Deep Tech algorithms;
- Deep Tech is developed by talented people who come from a rich diversity of backgrounds;
- The values of Deep Tech are the five universal human values of peace, truth, love, righteousness and non-violence;
- Deep Tech helps us to explore our world and ourselves in ever more meaningful ways, honouring what it is to be human in our world.
When I see stock images of virtual reality headsets, it still leaves me a little cold. Here for example is one from Pexels, in which a person is separated from nature, and missing the beautiful rainbow.
It’s funny as I was involved in VR tech in the early 1990s at British Telecom. Our team would visit cities, and demonstrate the latest technology to excite and engage teenagers who were at the stage of choosing their subject matters for university and college. Myself and another colleague were responsible for introducing them to the very new virtual reality equipment we had access to in the Human Factors department. For those who are interested, here is a video which demonstrates the state of the art in this era.
We have had over 30 years to perfect the experience, and while computer games have of course embraced the technology fully, creating exciting immersive worlds, I’m just still not convinced we have achieved anything profound, anything that has the ability to trigger such emotive reflections as the music of Erik Satie.
For this reason, I myself have been exploring the sonic dimension of deep tech in my own experiments with soundscapes, enabling me to gain a better grasp of where music can complement all that is being achieved with both physical and biological advances in technology. Before exploring this further, I’d first like to discuss a little about the state of the art in electronic music composition and production.
I’ve always tried to take whatever equipment I have had to the limit. In the 80s as a teenager, I had a Casio CZ1000 synthesiser, a professional instrument whose degree of state of the art I do not think I really fully appreciated. Here’s a very short clip of the introduction of one of my first compositions which I played with my first band, Iffy Ban Who, at a school variety show, 1986 if I am not mistaken.
You can hear the ambition of my idea in the use of the Jean Michel Jarre-esk sweep I used. While the recording equipment was pretty basic, the tone still sounds surprisingly modern and expansive.
While stuck at home during lockdown, I did return to composition, but was somewhat lacking in having the correct equipment to hook up my guitar to my computer. I did manage to hack a solution which while reducing the quality of the audio, was enough for me to capture my ideas. Here for example is one of my songs which uses a sample of A Festa by Brazilian singer Maria Rita.
I share this song to show how AI was used in two different ways. The first was to extract the vocals from the music, something I could not have achieved. And the second use of AI is actually in the drum track, which I added after I recorded the guitar track with no metronome to keep me on track rhythmically. The drum software within GarageBand was able to produce the best match to me playing, after which I then selected the style and fills etc.
I wrote my my most recent composition last week using my new Roland EX30 midi-keyboard, GarageBand (Apple’s music studio software) and one of Spitfire Audio’s Labs software instruments. Spitfire Audio create virtual instruments and sample libraries for music makers, partnering with the world’s finest pioneers and studios, including Hans Zimmer and Abbey Road. You can listen to it here:
To understand a little about how my track was made, I first need to explain the nature of keyboard sound reproduction. An electronic keyboard is slightly different to a synthesiser, in that the systhesiser has dials and modes that allow a person to change the nature of the soundwave being produced. An electronic keyboard on the other hand only has a range of pre-set sounds such as piano, strings, organ etc, which can be modified a little through pitch bends, sustain and modulation.
Many modern keyboards are midi enabled. This means that they are essentially just a keyboard, with the sound being produced via the computer they are connected to. I have an electronic keyboard which has sounds and drum rythyms, but which also connects to my Mac, enabling me to really experiment with complex multi-layered sounds, such as those produced by Spitfire Audio.
The Textural Pads plugin that my composition comes from Spitfire Audio’s LABS, which they describe as “An infinite series of software instruments, made by musicians, for musicians — for anyone, anywhere”. It is described in the following manner:
Inspired by sci-fi soundtracks over lockdown, Spitfire Audio developer Mark Summerell sampled a selection of instruments at his home studio — bowed and scratched bass guitar, kalimba, cello and vocals. Combining these sounds with synths from developer Harnek Mudhar, he used bespoke granular effects to transform his recordings into otherworldly textures.
So my composition was produced using a phenomenal combination of digital and physical technology, as well as human artistry, allowing me to composition a multi-layered ethereal piece of music that I would never have been able to create even just a few years ago.
Spitfire Audio do something incredible. What is so inspiring is not the ability to visually explore the world-famous Abbey Road or Maida Vale recording studios, but their ability to place us in the audio experience of actually being there. We do not just listen to the BBC Symphony Orchestra as an observer, when we play a note on our keyboards we are afforded a direct connection to the greatest orchestral musicians in the world when we give expression to the notes that they meticulously recorded, one by one.
When we think sonically, we enter a very different “world” to that of the visual metaverse.
It is this dimension of technology that can enable a person to evoke the human spirit and open up new worlds that our deep tech manifesto is aiming to articulate and draw attention to. It is that difficult to pin down quality that I feel is missing in so many implementations and representations of technology that is not physical, is not digital, is not visual, but sonic.
My article The Sonic Dimension of the Metaverse was written exactly two years ago, and the promised explosion in metaverse applications has failed to materialise. Many user experience and user interface designers are being replaced by AI tools, but I am not seeing generative AI produce anything that come close to the ambitions of our Deep Tech Manifesto that we vision. The greatest human creative endeavours come from understanding the place that technology has in our lives, rather than simply requesting plagiarising (generative) AI to come up with. And the sonic dimension is very much a part of that.
When deep tech achieves the same evocative qualities as the poignant delicacies of Erik Satie’s Gnossienne 1, we will know we have a higher level of conscious innovation so many of us are striving for.
