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Sounding the Object: a Timebase Archive
David Toop*
The timebase archive is a museum of imaginary contain-
ers without objects. As a curator I have been invited in the
past to assemble exhibitions of sound work in galleries.
This always raises contradictions in that much of the work
I would like to include has no tangible or visible presence.
Its timebase is fleeting and therefore entirely unsuited to
environments in which spectators are presumed to linger
over exhibits that appear to be static. Time Base theory
first came onto my radar through the work and ideas of
artist John Latham. His expositions on time base and
event structure can be found in many publications.1 To
reduce these ideas down to their bare bones, he proposed
a new way of thinking about the world in which reality is
perceived not as solids and intangibles co-existing uneas-
ily in a progression of time but as a world in which all
phenomena can be understood through the insistence
of events. This is particularly apposite to the domain of
sound in which we discover that concepts such as a His-
tory of Listening or a Museum of Sound are not viable
within the current administration of such projects except
in fatally compromised form. If there is nothing to see,
nothing to touch, then in our current view, there is very
little to be done.
My own experience has developed in a variety of set-
ting – live performance, recording studios, in ‘the field’
(in settings that may appear to be anthropology, phonog-
raphy, art, journalism or scholarship but are really just dif-
fering strategies in a single investigation into sound and
listening), in books and other media for the eyes, in exhi-
bition settings and the digital domain. Attempts to bring
together such variation in types and intensities of engage-
ment tend to be unwieldy and reductive (what happens
to sound in a book, for example, or what happens to pres-
ence in a website?). Perhaps it is better to propose hypo-
thetical solutions to intractable problems.
Vitrine 1
Researching in the sound archives of the BBC in 1971 I
came across a recording of a live beetle jews harp from
Papua New Guinea (this unique artifact had already been
released on a BBC record compiled by John Peel so I knew
it existed but to find the ‘original’ was exciting). No details
of the instrument were appended to the recording but a
photograph found elsewhere shows the performer hold-
ing a beetle close to his mouth. This creature is balanced
on a blade of grass, the overtones of its buzzing modu-
lated by the varying cavity of the player’s opening and
closing mouth. Although the technique is comparable
to a more conventional jews harp, the technology is radi-
cally different. In New Guinea, jews harps were made from
short lengths of bamboo. The bamboo was shaped to form
a point, then split on one side to form a thin tongue. Held
against the mouth, this tongue can then be hammered
rapidly with the knuckle of the thumb, which is in turn
attached to a string. A complex thought process is evident
from this shaping of available material and the devising
of two separate ways to generate sound through physical
action and yet the economy of the live beetle instrument
is impressive. There is no instrument, only contingency,
a moment of (admittedly unequal) partnership between
two living organisms.
Vitrine 2
In the same year I formulated the concept of Bi(s)onics:
the science of (sound) systems based on living things. This
encompassed Bionics – the science of systems based on
living things; sonics or sound; and bi (two). So, a combin-
ing of two areas of study (figure 1).2
The Wasp Flute, made in 1973, was an instrument built
according to these principles and clearly influenced by
the live beetle jews harp along with other unusual instru-
ments that could be viewed in collections such as the
Horniman Museum, London, and the Pitt Rivers Museum,
Oxford. Although the Wasp Flute was built and, in theory,
would have worked as intended there was no real desire
to entrap wasps, bees or any other buzzing insects in its
attached container. The thinking was less about an actual-
ized music than a question about the boundaries of tech-
nology. If a musical instrument becomes a sound source
rather than a machine for delivering a particular system of
musical theory (as was often the case in the 20th century)
then where are its boundaries? Can it be described as an
object (and therefore archived and exhibited as object) or
is it a cluster of events whose material presence is only
one point on the time base? Of course there was also the
irony that the instrument was silent, a condition shared
with the extraordinary instruments displayed in museum
collections (figure 2).
Journal of Conservation and Museum Studies 10(1) 2012, 39-43 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/jcms.1011203
* Senior Research Fellow,
London College of Communication,
London SE1 6SB, United Kingdom.
A proposition for a hypothetical environment in which intangible multi-sensory events can be expe-
rienced as if in a museum. This museum of the imagination displays various sounding devices and lis-
tening events, all of which are footnoted by ancillary theoretical, conceptual and anecdotal material
from the author’s sound work practice and research between 1971 and the present.
Sounding the Object: a Timebase Archive40
Fig. 1: Bi(s)onics
Sounding the Object: a Timebase Archive 41
Vitrine 3
This opportunity to conduct research within the BBC
sound archives at Broadcasting House arose as a conse-
quence of a letter written to the BBC in October 1971. My
impassioned if naïve plea demanded greater conscious-
ness from the Corporation of its responsibility to our
changing auditory environment and those parts of musi-
cal culture fast disappearing as the way of life into which
they were embedded also disappeared. “This music is
dying,” I wrote, “and it is no longer enough to lump it
under the heading ‘primitive music’ – the diversity and
strangeness of the sounds is amazing. There is so much
to learn and the slate is being wiped clean before the
pupils have had a chance to read the words . . . It is a
world that is only very recently being discovered in 20th
century terms, a field of incredibly rapid expansion. It
is just too ironic to witness its simultaneous disappear-
ance.”
Eventually a response came back from a remarkable
woman – Madeau Stewart – at that time a BBC Sound
Archive producer. It was her series, Music of Necessity,
that prompted me to write my letter and her commis-
sioning that allowed me to explore the archives en route
to making three programmes for BBC Radio 3. The first
of these – Crossthreads, broadcast in May 1972 – pro-
posed an ambiguous equivalence between human music
and bioacoustics, drawing upon the many voices, instru-
mental and oral, buried within the museum. The tech-
nique of mixing lengthy sequences of sound without
explanation or formal logic was closely associated in my
mind with two related experiences: the perception of
environmental sound, whereby many voices co-exist as
a ‘composition’ according to the way they are processed
by listeners, and the practice of improvisation, through
which highly individual voices (again, the term ‘voices’
intended to be read in the broadest sense) work towards
an unfolding, always contingent state of communality.
Vitrine 4
The reptile house: a large lizard stands immobile within
its glass-fronted enclosure at London Zoo. There is move-
ment between this moment of stasis and the next but the
human eye is too slow to register the movement itself.
One position in space appears to have been succeeded by
another position in space without any intervening transi-
tion.
From this observation I came to write the first of four
text compositions for improvising musicians entitled The
Bi(s)onics Pieces. Lizard Music was written in May 1972:
Fig. 2: Wasp Flute
Sounding the Object: a Timebase Archive42
lizard music: a figure, phrase, cycle, sound, etc. is
played specifically to create a feeling of stasis. at
various points throughout the piece all players
change simultaneously to another statement as if
the previous one had not happened. no statements
are pre-arranged between the players. satisfactory
systems of simultaneous change are investigated.
lizards are studied.
Vitrine 5
1976: the negotiation of a placement within London Zoo
by Barbara Steveni of Artist Placement Group.3 At the
time I wrote about my interest in inter-species or ‘alien’
communication. In particular I was interested in thresh-
olds and zoomorphism in musical instruments (or should
I say instruments of sound). Zoomorphism, for example,
might include instruments made from or decorated with
animal parts, instruments such as hunting calls or ritual
noisemakers used to imitate animal sounds, and instru-
ments which act as a vehicle of transition to ‘animal’ and
other extra-human states. All of these definitions might
also apply to threshold instruments – auditory devices
which bring together the intentions of humans with
the actions of non-human species (like the amphibious
lizard, capable of surviving in more than one medium).
Incidentally, such instruments might also make sound
on the threshold of music. During my placement in the
zoo I presented a small exhibition of my research into
such instruments, including the Ko-tze pigeon whistles
of China (figure 3).
Vitrine 6
A pigeon whistle collected in Beijing, 2005. Invited to Bei-
jing in 2005 to create work for The British Council Sound
and the City project, I heard Ko-tze for the first time in
situ, an eerie chord from the sky that moved in space,
drifting and formless like the heavenly chords of Chinese,
Japanese and Korean ceremonial music from ancient
times. Walking through the old hutongs of the city in
search of a pigeon loft we found the man who owned this
flock of avian musicians, all of them flying with globular
eight-note whistles attached to their tails, ostensibly to
frighten off birds of prey. The practice of flying pigeons,
or making such whistles, will die out of course; the sound
itself, already so evanescent as to be impossible to record
properly or even hear for any length of time (because the
pigeons are never static) seems to encapsulate the idea
of an instrument that is of time, a conglomerate without
fixed boundaries and possessed of only partial human
agency (figure 4).
Vitrine 7
A museum of listening, existing only in time.
Notes
1 See, for example, John A. Walker’s monograph, John
Latham: The Incidental Person – His Art and Ideas, Lon-
don, 1995, or The Portable John Latham, edited by An-
tony Hudek and Athanasios Velios, London, 2010.
2 The word bionics was coined by Major Jack E. Steele
of the Aerospace Division of the US Air Force in 1960
and launched at a congress in Dayton, Ohio, Septem-
ber 13-15, 1960 (see Gérardin, Lucien, Bionics, Lon-
don, 1968).
3 My association with Artist Placement Group, the or-
ganization founded in 1966 with the aim of placing
artists in non-art situations such as industry, govern-
ment departments and other institutions, began at
the beginning of the 1970s. Like many artists of that
time, I wanted to get away from the existing platforms
for art and music, to engage with the materials of my
practice in settings that might catch people in a state
of unreadiness. My desire to work in a zoo was consist-
ent with many of my interests but it also turned on
the idea that a zoo was an involuntary performance
space: the paying ‘audience’ was not at all clear about
its own desires and the ‘performers’ were entrapped
unwittingly within the scope of a relentless gaze with-
out meaning. Even to read an animal’s behaviour as
‘reluctant’ or ‘shy’ did violence to the true dynamic
of the event. From a music performer’s point of view,
this seemed an environment of great potentiality in
which to work.
Fig. 3: Ko-tze pigeon whistle
u
Audio clip 1: Pigeon whistles
Sounding the Object: a Timebase Archive 43
Fig. 4: Lizard