by Alan Jebian

Fist: Do you still consider yourself subversive?
Zev: I would hope so.
Fist: How would you define that?
Zev: Well I don't know about subversive, well maybe on a cultural level. If you are subversive that means you subvert. That means refocus. For one thing I was successful. My intent was to bring a new level of sound into what people would consider musical. In 1989 when IBM wrote their music program for their PC they made 150 sounds for package buyers, and two of them were metal, so that means six years of me being public, IBM, one of the world's largest companies decide what people need to play music. It's obvious metal is now part of the vocabulary which would not have been the case in 1980. I think that's a successful accomplishment. [Fist, Zev interview]

This is a proper introduction to the course of technology and the relationship to ideas generated from outside academic or business circles. We have the beginnings of a technology which promises to draw upon the resources of many disciplines to bring this technology into everyday use. After all, its name, Virtual Reality, claims a big, big space as its domain- 'almost reality' is almost as big as reality itself, maybe bigger. Nobody should believe that this realm is best left to the academic and business community. Especially the aspect of sound needs to be supported by ideas found only outside the academic and business community.

The visual arts have not been the strong hand of culture for at least a decade, maybe not since before jazz. Unfortunately the progress has gone unnoticed by even the art community. Film soundtrack is the only realm that large numbers of people have been exposed to that contains even a fraction of the developments in sound creation over the last century. It should not be difficult to imagine how the use of experimental sound in film will become increasingly relevant to its use in Virtual Reality. The big, big space that needs to be created to fulfill the promises of VR will force developers to incorporate the experimental sound artists, that to this day, remain unaccessed except by a few thousand people on the planet. Developers will find that sounds that have had no place in the lives of most people (users of technology), coupled with visual imagery, will become indispensable and will quickly be taken for granted.

One of the theories Brenda Laurel pushes with apparent success is that human/computer interaction should be modeled with a theater metaphor. The strength of her arguments lie not in assertion that human/computer interaction needs high resolution technology, but rather, dramatic processes must be built into the experience to make it rewarding,

Also found under her editorship, in an article by Scott Kim, is this command to those who intend to make the jump to interdisciplinary collaboration,

From these two examples within the computer design community we may expect greater interest in sound, not only in speech synthesis, and 3-dimensional sound research, but also a new interest in psychological aspects of sound. This last mentioned area of research is the area experimental artists on the very edge of sound have been working with, and these intense developments need to be incorporated in the VR project. The following is a claim put forth from one of the most aggressive of these artists,

To espouse a theory glorifying Sadean principles is something even academic minds are capable of, but to produce the sounds which back up the theory; this task can only be undertaken by the artist. Certainly that is what many TV. and movie directors are discovering. They need to hire sound specialists just as they need to hire special effects specialists. One pioneer of experimental sound, Graeme Revell, has done several soundtracks for mainstream movies in the last years. His original projects, done under the SPK, prepare him for mastery of sound based exploration of the psyche. He, like so many others doing truly groundbreaking work with sound, began his career by exploring the violent and disturbing aspects of sound. These early sounds were quite appropriate when combined with the images corpses copulating. Influences of the Italian Futurists and Dadaists and Surrealists are common - these were the schools that were interested in technological manipulation of the psyche.

David Lynch's "Eraserhead" has got to be the greatest visual point of reference for all artists who have been working with experimental sound over the last ten years. Experimental sound is often thought of as a "soundtrack without a film". [ND, pg 14] It should therefore be obvious that the flavor of experimental music has visual but unnamable equivalents of which "Eraserhead" is a powerful example. It is no coincidence that Lynch was among the first to use the skills of the capable, but obscure, artists working with experimental sound. Stan Brackhage has also tapped into this vein of experimentation, using Zoviet France (sound artists) to create a film entitled "Loud Visual Noizes". These film directors are not as obscure as the sound artists which they work with. Sound is often considered secondary to visual phenomena. One of the most humorous rumors circulating within the experimental sound community about how the makers of the "Twilight Zone" commissioned dAS, a member of sound experiment group Big City Orchestre, for the first four episodes of the revised series (The Grateful Dead did the theme music). The "Twilight Zone" producers hired some who in turn hired dAS to come create in a professional studio with advanced sound equipment. dAS gave them a product that was too weird, even for the "Twilight Zone" and subsequently, dAS has to tame it down. [Interview with Pillar of Plastic, 4/93]

It is important to distinguish between film, experienced as a non-interactive projection of sound and sight, and Virtual Reality, a multi-sensory interactive immersion. Those sounds which dominate without provoking a reaction will only have a minor place in the VR soundscape. A muzak background, or rock and roll accompaniment are two varieties for which VR designers will have little use. A recent example of sound use of the kind VR developers should avoid that of the past MoMASF exhibit of the architect Shin Takamatsu. It presented a large video screen., 3-D glasses and stereo headphone available to give a tour of the architect's work. The "tour" was entitled "The Plural Dimensions" by High Definition Video System X 3D. It anticipated VR through its approach to sensory immersion, but since there was no interaction, the music was bad techno created to keep you awake and standing. It did not provoke response. It is a guided tour, and no choices were available.

The current strategies for computer sound use are starting to probe the psychological potentials of sound, as a means to increase bandwidth, for simple applications. An early example is the "Sonic Finder", which uses the desktop metaphor. Previous to "Sonic Finder", interaction with visually perceived objects were accompanied by a beep as an auditory cue. "Sonic Finder" used descriptive sounds such as "scraping" or "clinking" appropriate to the action. [The Art of Human Computer Interface Design, pg. 325] Brenda Laurel gives the field of VR research a nudge,

"In the computer game business, we learned that high resolution audio caused people to report that the game's graphics were higher resolution. It really doesn't work the other way, though: really high-res video doesn't cause people to report that the little beeps on their PC are suddenly rich, full bodied sounds." [Cyber Arts, pg 289]

Speech synthesis and recognition are other aspects of sound utilization which VR developers feel are essential components for a mature VR system. The keyboard is not the ideal mechanism for transmitting linguistic information, and it is not likely that linguistics will be able to evolve unless this mechanism is transcended. For years linguists have been analyzing speech patterns, such as the tendency for two syllables to be the optimal word length. [Sensory Inhibition, pg. 224] Computer based speech therapy [The art of Human-Computer Interface Design, pg. 324] and computer generated voice prompts, like the one called "Touch SJSU" are simple manifestations of auditory phenomenon, synthesized or recognized, which have been used. In VR environments sound can give information to the user for confirmation of a successfully completed action, but more importantly, voice commands can be used to clarify gesture signals to the computer [The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, pg 324]. 3-Dimensional sound has inspired VR developers more than any other sound application. The benefits of 3-D sound will obviously contribute to the believability of 3-D space and will help orient the user in the virtual environment. 3-D sound can give the information about the size of a room or help to define sensory (felt or seen) information from the outside environment. [Sensory Inhibition, pp.200-227] Most systems so far have been geared towards giving a headset wearer the impression of sound derived from points in space that can be localized. The Roland Sound Space Processor is a small unit that has been used to mix sound onto almost any format while maintaining a 3-D effect. Virtual Audi Systems had begun to develop a technology that depended on multi-million dollar supercomputers, hoping to create the added feature that VR demands: 3-D sound that can be mixed in real time with 48 channels of input. [Cyber Arts, pp.98-108]

3-D sound and speech synthesis and recognition are the equivalent advances to high-resolution graphics in VR research. These developments will come in time but will be as temporarily satisfying as a train coming at you in a movie theater or a race car demo in stereo. The real magic of VR will depend upon other factors, such as the content of these sounds. Old synthesizers used to have a range of effects that were combined using patchcords. These machines produced a huge range of sounds which were fairly unique to the synthesizer. Now we use synthesizers more frequently to create samples or approximations of other sounds. This tendency will limit our success with sound; unfortunately digital format has caused us to take several steps backwards in some instances. Fractal technology is one evolving path which may lead us out of the "digital gutter". The 'preset' mentality may also be overcome as new algorithms are discovered and we begin to recover aspects of analog devices while retaining the computer compatible digital format.

Elliot Sharp gave several demonstrations of computer generated music using fractal formulas and operator feedback at New York's Knitting Factory in 1987. he used not much more than a single PC in delivering a complex sound. Compared with the mountains of technology used by groups such as Tangerine Dream, Elliot Sharp was able to deliver a complex sound unlike the thin techno that synth bands are known, and often despised for. The only example of an artist attempting to use sound in "CyberArts: Exploring Arts and Technology" {pp. 67-76], Todd Machover, is typical of the academic approach found at Stanford or M.I.T.. His "Hyper-Instrument" is a common strategy among computer using musicians which VR developers are sure to emulate. Triggers or sensors connected to a computer, which respond tot he performance of a musician, add or change sound in real time so that complexity may arise from a live situation involving few actual performers. The academic approach is identifiable by observing a continuous path of development from the hero of academic experimental music, John Cage, who was deified just before his death by a major symposium at the Stanford Music Department. It is not surprising that Machover began at UCSC where electronic music students study the academic deities Cage, Stockhausen and Glass, while remaining ignorant of artists who have been actively working in the field. As it turns out, patrons of the arts fund artists like Glass or Machover to create new operas for them while Hollywood is beginning to sniff around the cassette culture which often circulates 500 or less copies of a given work. VR developer has also better pay attention to artists who have learned to deliver sounds that can engage the imagination rather than academics who seek to validate state of the art technology. Asmus Tietchens, an experimental musician, in an interview published in October 1991 said this,

This reinforces the earlier statement about the dominant cultural achievements having been made in sound rather than visual arts. Jazz was the first truly international music movement, and as Asmus Tietchens has described above, a new genre has emerged that is the only form since jazz that is international. What he has described is not the academic community; the names he mentioned would not cause the blink of recognition from the faculty or sound labs of most institutions. One might be surprised not to find a recording of a 7Hz sound which causes physical nausea to the listener [Anti-Group] in the library of a person whose field is dominated by aspects of sensory phenomenon, such as is VR.

Also prevalent in cassette culture is the practice ofcollaboration over great distances, by mail or phone. Sound sourced in Japan may travel to Germany and then be processed by someone else. This is the stuff VR promises to be good at: computer mediated collaboration between people of different cultures.

Graeme Revell is one of the experimental sound artists to whom some attention has been paid by those with grant money to give. Using state of the art equipment he sampled various insects and processed them digitally. He soon discovered that all that was required of the insect was inspiration, because his ability to manipulate the insect sound was unlimited, to the degree that he could make an insect of one variety sound like another. [Insect Musicians, Graeme Revell] This is a phenomenon all artists 'using' high-technology must be aware of; there are ways to inspiration that can defeat the paralyzing 'freedom' of high-tech. Of course Jean Baudrillard has something to say about this,

"I still remember a sound booth in a recording studio where the music, broadcast on four tacks, reached you in four dimensions, so that it seemed so visceral, secreted from the inside, with a surreal depth...this was no longer music. Where is the degree of technological sophistication, where is the high fidelity threshold beyond which music as such would disappear? For the problem of the disappearance of music is the same as the disappearance of history: it will not disappear for want of music, it will disappear for having exceeded the limit point, vanishing point, it will disappear in the perfection of its materiality, its own special effect (beyond which there is no longer any aesthetic pleasure, it is ecstasy of musicality and its end)." [Futur*fall, pg. 21]

We can note the far-outness of French theory but at the same time see the manifestations of this theory in the work of experimental sound artists (note the drop of the term 'music').

The visceral aspect of high-tech sound has been part of many "brain toys" which make claims to be electronic drugs. Texas Meta Corp. developed an assortment of chairs and chambers which immerse the senses in pulsating lights, vibrations and sound. One of the items called the "Somatron" changes sound into pressure giving the user a musical cellular massage. Another gizmo uses sound to adjust brain wave patterns and is used for treating chemical addiction among other things. [Boing Boing, pg. 27]

This sort of fringe science is reminiscent of the "Harmonicaphone", a color organ which was capable of responding to the quality of a given sound with light, first described in "Science and Invention" in 1922. [EMI, pg. 19] We had variations of this as discotheques developed. Now we have, in the VR friendly rave scene, yet another version of this called the "Virtual Light System". It is a real-time sound to computer graphics system determined by complex algorithms and programmer feedback. These images will used in virtual environments in 3-D. [Black Ice, pg. 20]

Over and over again in the literature about VR, even from some of the most dry technical minds [Cyberspace, pg 192], the suggestion that VR is going to be part of the next stage of human evolution, calls into question the role of sound in the VR project. Often, visually manifested natural language is the focal point of the evolution hypothesis. Sound therefore will not be language or music, instead it will be felt as an internal sensation. Sound will take the role of the chant and drum in vision quest ritual. Sound will help bring these feelings to the surface,