Interview with Paul Steenhuisen

Electroacoustic composer Jean Piché (b Trois-Rivières, 1951) has been an active contributor to the vital Canadian electroacoustic scene since the mid-seventies. In 1988, he joined the faculty of the University of Montreal, where he continues to teach and do research in electroacoustic and computer music.  One of his areas of activity involves the combination of electroacoustic music with video images, of which his piece Sieves is the most recent new work.  As part of SOUNDplay, between November 4 and 7, Piché will be in Toronto to present a talk (November 4) and to premiere his new piece Sieves (Nov 5).  While many other interesting artists will also be involved in SOUNDplay, I took this opportunity to speak with Piché by phone at his home in Montréal. 

STEENHUISEN:  Tell me about the soundworld of your piece Sieves.  Is there a primary sonic idea for the work?

PICHÉ:  I’m using 1930s recordings from a Southern Baptist preacher, as well as the communications tapes recorded during the 9/11 attacks on New York.  But the identity of the sound sources isn’t obvious in the work.  I’m using the material as dramatic texture.  You get the dramatic content without actually understanding what they are saying.  There is urgency to the sound materials, which comes across in the spectra of the voices. The other sound material is from my rather large bank of sound processing that I’ve accumulated over the years – mostly granular textures and stretching of acoustic materials.
 
STEENHUISEN:  But the soundworld is only part of the story with this piece.  Tell me about the visual component.  What are the primary visual materials in the work?
 
PICHÉ:  I’m using HD video for the first time, and the precision of the image is quite extraordinary.  I’ve pulled my images from close-up shots of the ground - the earth, forests and paths in the countryside - so what you see are the intricate details of the soil as I walk with the camera pointing down.  I compose with the images the same way I do with the sound material, in the sense that I will distort and process them with varying degrees of recognizability.  The complexity of the image is associated with the complexity of the sound.  By putting them together in the ways I do, it’s really a new paradigm for composition, in that I compose the image and the sound together.  
 
STEENHUISEN:  Is the ambiguity of a recognizable form important? 
 
PICHÉ:  It is.  The more I do of this, the more I realize how important it is.  The reason this new form works is because meaning is extracted from these connections between the sonic and the visual.  I’m not exactly sure what the meaning is yet, but I think the aesthetic experience comes from recognizing that there are conjunctions.  They do not work based on narrative, but because of how time drives perception.  It comes down to what Michel Chion called synchrèse – a theoretical construct of synchronization where you unequivocally know that the sound you have just heard is produced by the object you are seeing.  The idea is to lead to those points of synchrèse in the work in the same way a chord progression leads to a resolution on a tonal centre.
 
STEENHUISEN:  How do the sound and the visuals interact in your piece?
 
PICHÉ:  In this piece it’s a little more complex, because the synchrèses that I am working with are a lot looser.  As a simple example, if you have a beat structure in the music you can cut the images to the upbeat or the downbeat.  It’s an element of grammar that you can go further and further with by saying that a high-pitched slow-moving sound will visually translate into a form of a straight line that flows slowly across the screen.  But to be interesting, the metaphor has to go a lot further. It’s very hard to describe the mechanisms that lead to synchrèse points that go beyond this direct anchoring. We don’t have a grammar to describe it, so the problem of electroacoustics is transported to the visual.  Synchronization points are an obvious way of having the parts interact.  Where something in the sound also happens at equivalent time and speeds in the image, you’ll see it right away.  Even though those moments will typically only compose 10 to 20% of the work.
 
STEENHUISEN:  Why is the piece called Sieves? 
 
PICHÉ:  The close-up shots of the earth look like you would want to take a sieve and sift out everything but the rocks or the greenery.  That’s more or less what I do with the image processing – I go in and take the colours out, take the movement out, and the forms of the objects I filmed.  It’s a metaphorical process of sifting and filtering through the raw materials. 
 
STEENHUISEN:  We know you primarily as a composer, sound designer, and programmer.  How do these skills prepare you for work in the visual domain? 
 
PICHÉ:  That’s the first question I answered when I started doing this kind of work.  I was doing a lot of sound design for video artists such as Tom Sherman.  We’d go into the studio together and he would do his capturing and processing of images, and I looked at it and realized that this is exactly what I do when I work with sound.  It’s the same workflow that I use when I’m composing with computer.  You have your timeline, your sounds, your processing chops, and with the timeline you organize a coherent discourse.  I started doing it and it was a pure joy.
 
STEENHUISEN:  So your training as a composer is transferable to your work with video.
 
PICHÉ:  Directly.  Composers deal with time, like video artists and filmmakers.  In this new form we’re also talking about design, which can be very intuitive, as long as you have the techniques to put them together, and through electroacoustic music, I have that. I work with some visual artists, and many are completely confounded by the issue of time.  They’re not used to it.  When design becomes movement, it’s a very different set of skills that apply.
 
STEENHUISEN:  Does your experience as an electroacoustic composer give you a unique perspective on the visual?
 
PICHÉ: Yes, absolutely unique. 
 
STEENHUISEN:  How is that different from someone who is trained in film?
 
PICHÉ:  If you’re trained in film, you’re trained in story-telling, first and foremost.  Fiction, non-fiction, documentary – in 99% of film, the central concern is story-telling.  That’s not what I do.  I provide an audio-visual experience that uses coherent language but is non-narrative, or is semi-narrative.  This form has a lot of promise, and technologically, it’s feasible now to do credible images that can be supported by music only, and don’t need narrative.  The means of production for visuals now are extremely interesting, catching up to what we’ve been doing with sound for over a decade.  It’s an exciting new form that has a lot of depth to it, and is linked to a technology that is highly available.  I think it will grow.
 
STEENHUISEN:  What do you call this new form?
 
PICHÉ:  I call it Video Music.  To distinguish it from Music Videos, and Visual Music. 
 
STEENHUISEN:  What is Visual Music?
 
PICHÉ:  It’s actually a very old field, going back to Scriabin, whereby the colour organ would give you shades of blue in the high pitches, and shades of red in the low pitches, and so on.  It’s a very simplistic way of considering the relation between image and sound, but over the years, with the work of Stan Brakhage, Norman MacLaren, and James Whitney, etc., a lot of people have worked on the idea, developing that relation in a semi-scientific way, in which they would say if the image of a square is small, it’s a quiet sound, if the square is big, it’s a loud sound.  A lot of people have tried to work with those 1:1 correspondences, same with Lissajoue figures.  Lissajoue figures are what happen when you take an oscilloscope and you put one signal in the X-input and another one in the Y-input.  You get figures that are directly proportional to the frequency and amplitude of both signals.  It was a way of generating mandala types of images.  Whitney has become known as the father of the form, and what it has given rise to in the sixties and seventies was a kind of psychedelic, very colourful mandala image moving to the related sound.  That type of work has become visual music, and it has picked up again in the U.S, because of the opening up of the means of production.  Theirs comes from a representation of sound by image, and vice-versa, but I think that’s an unsatisfactory way to go about it. 
 
STEENHUISEN:  So how do you negotiate that difficult balance between sound and image?
 
PICHÉ:  The music has to be able to live on its own.  I should be able to take away the image, and listen to the sound and it would be fine as a piece.  That’s not true for film music.  There, if you take out the image, the music loses its reason to be.  It’s important that the music have a certain complexity, that it can work independently, but when the image is present, you get the immediate impression that one cannot be without the other.  The video will be worthwhile on its own too, but the work will assume its complete sense when the two are together.   
 
STEENHUISEN:  How did your work as an electroacoustic composer evolve into working with video?
 
PICHÉ:  I did a few film scores, and also worked with video artists, but I think the evolution was rooted in a profound dissatisfaction with the public space of electroacoustic music.  It wasn’t enough for my personal enjoyment of the music to go to a concert and just look at speakers, to listen to sounds in the dark... . At the same time, I don’t want to short-change the decision to go into visuals as a kind of ersatz for lack of visual support in the concert stream.  But it was a consideration.  The other reason is that in the late 70s and early 80’s I did some collaborative work with a San Francisco video artist who had worked at the Art Institute of Chicago with Dan Sandin, who was one of the first people to build a modular analogue video processor.  We had a Sandin Image Processor and while we were working on the piece, I plugged the output of the music into the image processing unit. Whispers in the plane of light had the control signals of the audio synthesizer control the switches on the output of the image processor.  At that point I realized that video and electronic music are one-and-the-same, in a very elementary sense, because the compositional paradigm is the same.  It’s only with narrative that this type of connection falls apart. Images tell a story, but sounds (at least musical sounds) don’t.  What I’m aiming for is to accommodate the problem of narrative so that the form can develop a discourse where image and sounds are more than a direct commentary of one by the other. It’s a thorny problem and I am trying to push the issue in every successive work.
 
STEENHUISEN:  But it’s also interesting to try to describe the type of process you’re involved in.
 
PICHÉ:  Yes, it is, and the most satisfactory description for me is through process.  Music analysis is really process analysis.  You do this that way, and you get that.  The best way to explain the work I’m doing is by explaining how I am doing it, and the processes, in a streamlined way.  I collect data, I treat the data, and I reorganize the data, and get an art piece at the end.  Like with electroacoustic music, you work from the material up.  One thing suggests another, and you pull out from there. 
 
STEENHUISEN:  With the realization that the description is not the whole thing. 
 
PICHÉ:  Yes, of course. As I said the problem I am currently struggling with is the one of narrative, and how to deal with that.  You can’t do without it, and at the same time after looking at the work you’re left with the impression that this is not what you’ve seen or heard.  It goes beyond narrative, and is more all-encompassing, or, depending on the point of view, it doesn’t reach narrative. 
 
STEENHUISEN:  Is your work with video a response to the problems of “Cinema for the ear?”
 
PICHÉ:  My discomfort with electroacoustic music, since its inception, has been the problem of performance.  No matter how many loudspeakers you put into a room, there is something that is not engaging...  There is a bit of a fallacy in a performance of that kind, because the music is composed in the studio, and 96 speakers in public performance don’t render the correct signal.  It has been considered heretical for an electroacoustic composer to say this too loudly, but every composer has felt it and felt a need to address it.  To me, the legitimate output of electroacoustic music is the CD, which you listen to at home.  There are other solutions to performance, such as mixed music and live electronics (though these have their own problems).  No matter how it is done, it will never be like a cellist sitting in front of an audience, and knowing that the sound is coming from the pressure she or he is applying to the bow at that moment.  Electroacoustic music is abstracted by its very nature.  Video music restores the visual link I find essential to public presentation. However, that’s not the primary reason I moved into visuals.  I did it because the combination of abstracted image and sound make a fertile ground where an entirely new poetry can grow.