Failing Memory Palace, 2021
Kyle Bates
A composition, sound installation, and audiovisual work (intended as a series).
Please reflect on the text present in Failing Memory Palace: #1 Childhood Home (1992-2011) Inside of the Center for Contemporary Music (2019-2021).
Imagine:
There I am, in the music building at Mills College with four pairs of speakers, mapping out how my sounds speak to the walls and mingle in the air. I am alone with the imposing space, both because of an ongoing global pandemic, and because it is 2:47 a.m. –my ears awaken in these quiet hours. Night upon night has been spent this way, working over my sonic memory palace, and naively trying to capture, in two dimensions, a something that exists only in this momentary aural environment. Later, I will turn towards the hyperreal. Now, vibrating frequencies and drifting thoughts collapse into my sleepless fugue; only the sounds–and specters of past selves–are here listening with me.
Composed, installed, recorded, and directed by Kyle Bates at the Center for Contemporary Music from September 2020 to March 2021.
Mastered by Christopher Davidson.
Promotional photos by Lula Asplund.
I. Score
Who is that man moving slowly in the lonely building, stopping at intervals with an intent face? He is a rhetoric student forming a set of memory loci.
―Frances Yates
Mentally map out the rooms of a building you remember vividly–such as your childhood home–to serve as the foundation for your memory palace.
Compose a collection of sounds to represent each room, creating a sonic room. Each collection of sounds should be roughly the same length and the way the collections interact musically should be considered (are they harmonious? Dissonant? How do they relate in volume?).
The sonic rooms can be derived from the impression of the room: is there a specific emotion the room gives off that can be represented by melody? Is the room associated with “loud” memories or “soft” ones? etc... The sounds can also be created as metaphorical representations of physical objects in the room or the architecture of the room itself. What does that poster on the wall sound like? How large is the room you are composing? How dense is the room? Also consider: who inhabits or inhabited the room?
While composing the sounds consider which version of yourself they apply to. Do the rooms sound like your present-self reflecting or your past self-reacting?
After the sonic rooms are complete make sure you are able to loop them infinitely and choose a building that is significant and familiar in your current life.
Choose a room in this building in which to install each sonic room. The room choices can be made for their specific sonic qualities—perhaps a large sonic room is installed in a reverberant space—or personal metaphorical qualities.
Install the sounds in the rooms, paying specific attention to how they interact with the acoustics of the space. You may choose to EQ your sounds specifically for each space. Attention should also be paid to how the sounds flow through and interact in the hallways or other spaces in between. Do you prefer the way these marginal spaces sound with the doors open, cracked, or closed?
Once all installations are complete let the infinitely looping sonic rooms play, flooding the building with sound and creating the failing memory palace.
This piece is iterative and a new failing memory palace can be constructed whenever you become intimately familiar with a new building or recall a different memory space you want to explore. A personal mnemonic device is being built: each iteration will serve in the construction of your expanding internal memory palace.
Figure 1: A quick sketch of sounds traveling through a building late at night that was drawn while the initial concepts for Failing Memory Palace were formed.
II. Notes
In every discipline artistic theory is little avail without unremitting exercise, but especially in mnemonics, theory is almost valueless unless made good by industry, devotion, toil, and care. You can make sure that you have as many places as possible and that these conform as much as possible to the rules; in placing the images you should exercise every day.
―From Ad Herennium as quoted by Frances Yates
Below are some thoughts on the meaning that my initial realization of Failing Memory Palace carries for me; the true meaning of the work will be created in the mind of the listener. I have also included instrumentation and composition descriptions for the four sonic room sections that construct Failing Memory Palace’s shifting sound structure, as well as a copy of the wall text that was displayed with the first realization of the work.
A. On Meaning
This realization of Failing Memory Palace places sonified memories of rooms from my childhood home, and the selves that existed therein, inside of physical spaces in the Center for Contemporary Music that are relevant to my current self. I am constructing a mnemonic device which fails through its unconcealed artifice, highlighting the fiction inherent in the way that we use memory as a system of (self) belief.
In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard summarizes the theories posited by Henri Bergson in Matter and M emory on the function of the imagination in constructing memories:
The liberties that the mind takes with nature do not really designate the nature of the mind.
Bachelard disagrees with Bergson, as do I. In his response he writes:
By the swiftness of its actions, the imagination separates us from the past as well as from reality; it faces the future. [...] If we cannot imagine, we cannot foresee.
In light of these words, this piece can be seen as my own response.
B. The Four Sonic Rooms (1992–2011 / 2019–2021)
1. Attic / Mysterious Space Above Foyer
Instrumentation:
Buchla 100 with microphone into module, small hand bells fed into patch via microphone, reel to reel with erase head disabled for sound on sound recording to produce dense delays.
Composition Description:
A one take recording of a Buchla patch with multiple voices and live input modulation. The modulating tones of the Buchla represent the imagination of a child running amok in a dark attic space. The unstable tuning and otherworldliness of the instrument further emphasize this headspace. The Buchla was chosen partially for its cultural significance: the historical sounds of the 1960s synthesizer represent the various memory boxes and ephemera left in the attic by parents whose formative years were spent during that time. Hand bells ornament the composition, acting as the small trinkets scattered around the “floor.”The continuous reel to reel tape delay frames the "attic" in cobwebs and dust (wow and flutter, and saturation).
2. My Room / My Practice Room
Instrumentation:
Moog Subharmonicon through a transducer placed on the strings of a Fender Jaguar that has been tuned to an open B flat, signal from the pickup processed with Max/MSP/Ppooll, transducer vibrating on strings recorded by stereo microphones in the room.
Composition Description:
A drone sounds and deepens over the course of six minutes, slowly enveloping the listener. The cocoon-like qualities of the sound replicate the solace found in a childhood bedroom. The drone grows more complex over time as does one’s relationship with their room. Guitar, synthesizer, and computer are used together to represent the overlapping temporalities of my musical selves and their relationship with the instruments. This piece was recorded in my current bedroom to further emphasize this multitemporal connection.
3. Kitchen /The Pond Room
Instrumentation:
Organ, vibraphone, processed recording of an industrial refrigerator. Composition Description:
Vibraphone and organ are used for both their tranquil qualities and the tension that is produced in the sustained interplay of their tones. The organ sounds at predictable intervals, representing meals (the family meal is both a comforting and imposing presence). The vibraphone plays timid, uncertain melodies, representing the growing self navigating a complex family dynamic. The sustained tremolo tails of vibraphone notes between “meals” (organ tones) represent reflection and, again, uncertainty.
The processed refrigerator is a drone that slowly emerges in the background, coloring the compositions with a slight dissonance: the sound of an increasingly unstable marriage.
4. Parents’ Room / Distant Hallway
Instrumentation:
A new instrument built for the piece: a Casio MT-65 with a handmade Kraakdoos circuit and extra speaker installed inside––played via copper touch points on the keys, field recordings processed with Max/MSP/Ppooll.
Composition Description:
The interplay between the Casio drone sounds and crackle circuit installed inside of that Casio represent the complex dynamics of a long term marriage. The two sound’s qualities are associated with the qualities of each partner/ parent. These qualities are to be inferred by the listener. The shy field recordings that pop in and out are my adolescent self in a place it isn’t supposed to be. Field recordings of the outdoors are used here to accentuate this disconnect.