LP + 29 pages booklet – Cejero

On small differences in Sensation by Eric Frye gets gently and stubbornly more impressive after the listening as the auditory and space contexts are taken into account. This almost too precisely highlights the title and the implicit idea that to a decodification of subtle phenomena should correspond to an adequate training in the use and awareness towards the ordinary, which sometimes is not that ordinary. The whole project, which has been recorded at the Harvard University Studio for Electroacoustic Composition of Cambridge and in the anechoic room of the Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis, has been published by Cejero which has chosen to create a 24 page booklet to accompany the issue including brilliant texts by the authors, Andrè Ehresmann, Mathias Bèian, Fernardo Zalamea and Inigo Wilkins. The topic of the research is a delicate mix of technology, composition and construction of psychoacoustic events, a kind of whole including changes, a synthetic cut-up of topological spaces or – as stated by Frye himself – “a series of de-complexication processes of the sound landscape”. From Psychoacoustic to Maths it’s a short distance and even for for common listeners it will be hard to identify dynamic categories and not easily approachable theories, The different fields (scientific, artistic and philosophical) seem to reconnect during the listening. This originates imaginative and didactic deviations. We are thus moving in multidimensional spaces and changing coordinates: the effects of this exposition to single frequencies-to the mercy of all good math theories are not totally forseeable and even not verifiable (even though there is a software designed and developed by Guerino Mazzola and Sam Folk to support the complex vibrational changes). “The issue at the root of the analysis of small differences of sensation is that of continuum,” underlines Inigo Wilkins, an enthusiast of border sounds of the rationalisation of undetermined and accidental phenomena. As a matter of fact we have understood that, if compared and put in relation, small differences would be less noticeable or as Greek Atomist philosophers speculated, sensible qualities have no independent reality.

 

Eric Frye – On Small Differences In Sensation