Brandon LaBelle: Social Music

Today I had the opportunity, alongside Ben and Stephanie, to attend Brandon LaBelle's workshop on social music- a way of exploring how social contexts and public situation can create or have an effect (real time) on the way we create sound.
Something refreshing (to a student of architecture) that was discussed amongst the group was the ability that sound has to free someone of the burden of meaning: that sound is a reference to meaning with which people connect without superfluous articulation of what that meaning may be. Embodied meaning and the communication of such is an element that is considered in almost every architectural move: particularly in the academic world (perhaps not as much in the applied industry of architecture). In this freedom, the musician (or digital artist) has the ability to address the audience but there is a point [HT LaBelle] "at which you don't have to be so accommodating" to the aesthetic desire of the audience. For me I find this is true in the way in which I am exploring dreaming in my current project: whilst the consideration is that there will be an audience and my piece will be interpreted, I am not considering how the aesthetic of my work may or may not suffice the audience's desire- it is more about the exploration of displacement through dream.


















The Workshop: consisted of a presentation of Brandon's work across Berlin, Bergen, Malmo, Copenhagen and London. Followed by two hands-on exercises:
1. We were to listen to the sounds of Cuba and return them to their site by way of communication via chalk. I began to listen to the dialogue of Cuba as one conversation rather than individual occurrences, recordning the snippets I could hear as a story on the pavement.
2. Walking from Mighty Mighty to Civic Sq. and back, we explored how specific frameworks of information can be used to create sound: each of us had a whistle which we sounded upon finding an informatino we were looking for- I sounded my whistle every time I saw somebody using their hands/arms to communicate. This facilitated an interesting discussion on how ambiguous language can communicate the presence of meaning (where the precedent for the sound is unknown) versus the communication of the meaning itself (where the content is known and being reinterpreted and therefore, newly understood).