Habituation II: The Lake, 2022
(installation/composition and live performance debuted at the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles California, April 2022)
The Lake, an outgrowth of the Habituation series, is an intermedia performance that utilizes prose, process based field recording, and live electronics as tools of inquiry into collective imagination and the generation of overlapping meaning through the redirection of attention over extended time periods. As with all works in the series, this piece addresses the common experience of habituation, and unearths similarities between said experience and aspects of living with bipolar disorder.
The Lake synthesizes and transforms three interconnected yet distinct works:
Cloud Light Over Obsidian - A short story about someone returning to a familiar place to disappear;
water and light, mystery and mundanity.
Habituation II [Excerpt] - Fixed sound selected from a realization of Habituation, a serialized, process based field recording piece. Each version is a site specific work defined by the sounds of the location where the score is followed (I was completed in Oakland, CA, II is ongoing in Valencia, CA). The Lake was initially conceptualized as a live realization of Habituation II––this is partially why it is considered an extension of the project;
constants: loud breathing, footsteps, the recordist/performer’s mood.
Four a.m., Then Wind - A composition for live electronics that takes recordings from Habituation II as sound sources for a patch made in Max/MSP/Ppooll. A Bass VI and a light sensitive oscillator circuit built by Lula Asplund are also employed;
grains, long tones, distortion, active listening.
On Habituation:
Habituation is an ongoing series of sound pieces based around the superimposition of daily recordings of a familiar path walked by the artist. Each realization sonifies the process named in the piece's title. Habituation is a psychological process which involves “the decrease in response to stimulus after repeated presentations.”
When I first begin living somewhere I appreciate the minutiae of my surroundings. Over time my senses dull to them. The sounds of frogs in a pond nearby where I lived when the Habituation series was first conceptualized once thrilled me––their acousmatic croaks would arise from any direction. As my daily preoccupations grew, and the sounds became familiar, those beautiful croaks were slowly transposed into “background noise.”
My poetic replication of this (unconscious) experience via recording is the layering and eventual masking of the sounds of a familiar path as they become unrecognizable “noise.” There is another layer of meaning at play here: I noticed that the process of habituation is similar to the feeling of beginning a new mood stabilizer. In both cases the senses dull to the external world over time. This piece compounds these personal experiences: it parallels a drug induced feeling with a universally experienced unconscious psychological process, refracting everything through sound recorded using a process that itself induces the psychological process it is commenting on.
Habituation II at CalArts distinguishes itself from Habituation I due to the presence of traditionally musical sounds found along its path, as well as more general human activity resulting from the lessening of pandemic restrictions. It is both in the lineage of and in resistance to works by artists like Pierre Schaeffer and, later, Francisco López, who utilize acousmatic experience to disembody and de/recontextualize sound. A historical touch point is Schaeffer’s student Luc Ferrari’s Presque rien, although Habituation directs focus towards metaphor and meaning external to the work. In the series the sounds of the body and the personally mundane are emphasized (the breathing and footsteps of the recordist). Habituation is meant to trigger memory associations in the listener and a memory/imagination based experience is encouraged.
Written, recorded, composed, and performed by Kyle Bates