Doppler Diaries

the push and pull of sounds and words

  • Sound Experiments: Random Fields – Caen

    My first activity while here is go to the Institute mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (L’IMEC) where Pierre Schaeffer’s papers are housed. Perhaps just as intriguing as his papers, is the old abbey, L’Abbaye D’Ardennes, that is the site of the archive. After filling in many forms and approvals and making sure I have enough French… Read more

  • Exhibition Notes: Sophie Calle vs Picasso

    [Visited 7 January 2024] While Sophie Calle is often called a photographer, I’m interested in her because of her unabashed reliance on text — her bold assumption that we will read these lengthy narratives in a gallery environment. I tend to opt to experience her in full via her beautifully formatted books. But of course it’s… Read more

  • Exhibition Notes: Gertrude Stein vs Picasso

    [Visited 15 January 2024] Since I been here I’ve been living with images of Gertrude Stein taped to my wall, mainly as decoration, but perhaps a bit of a patron(ess) saint or (tor)mentor perhaps. There is Robert Rauschenberg’s  Centennial Certificate featuring Picasso’s  portrait of Stein in graphic collage and Deborah Kass’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Women#2… Read more

  • Exhibition Notes: Viviane Sassen 

    [Visited 17 January 2024] Viviane Sassen is a Dutch art and fashion photographer who spent the first four years of her life in Kenya. The main body of works here are photos that explore her return to Kenya and another trip to the former Dutch colony in South America, Suriname (where Dutch is still the official… Read more

  • Berlin Bruits

    Here on the third floor in Schönhauser Allee there is a kind of periodic rumble that is maybe the underground, or is it the tram on Torstraße. We are on the 3rd floor but you feel it uniformly vibrate the building, however compared to the endless upper spectrum assaults of Paris it is pleasantly comforting. There… Read more

  • Growing Words for Sound

    Sometimes I wish there were more words for words, that is more sounds that form words, sounds that we recognise as words. And then we would have more words for sounds, more sounding words that allow us to describe the the sounds of sound.  Does sound writing always have be like this — to have… Read more

  • Pantheon for the Patriarchy

    I’ve just been flaneusing on the left bank. Headed to the market at Place Maubert. Of course, for once I prepared with my binaural microphones ready to get the market calls. Because of this it was a quiet affair — no shouting — just a few fruit stalls to choose from. A few butchers. Not… Read more

  • Soundable

    So many sirens – so many Valentine’s Days wrecked.  I’ve been trying to record the sirens as way to deal with them. I captured some this morning that were good and have made a little piece of from them. Trying to turn them into some kind of soft dreamscape without losing the slight sense of… Read more

  • Scrawlings

    Last night, listening to Loscil and Lawrence English I think about what it is when I try to write about sounds. It’s a proto form of writing —scrawlings.   Scrawling has a desperate air, an urgency to catch things, jot things down, gather sounds as things before they dissipate… Systems for my own understanding, that’s… Read more

  • Exhibition Notes: Sniffing Around

    [Visited 24 February 2024] The smell of frankinse, oud, musk, rose and orange blossom has intensified as the afternoon has progressed. This is from a few drops of oil on my palms at the end of the exhibition, Perfums d’Orient at the Institute du Monde Arabe. What does it mean that my two most pleasurable experiences… Read more

  • Blast from the Past to the Future

    In a nice serendipity, my time in France allowed me to participate in the Audioblast festival in Nantes that is run by the valiant APO-33 —a small and dedicated organisation led by Julien Ottavi and Jenny Pickett who have been “doing it with others” and keeping Nantes noisy and hackivist for over a decade. «Resonant… Read more

  • Pin Prick

    Leaning down, using the arm of the couch as a base and something tiny pricks my hand – the pain disproportionate to the almost invisible wound. Not being dramatic here, just descriptive. Not meaning I felt I had had a limb amputated just that it I could see a tiny dot but feel a pulsing  ache. … Read more

  • Metro Poems

    Métro poems are a form concocted by Oulipo writer Jacques Jouet. You are to invent the lines in your head between stations, and only write them down when at the stop. Jouet did not edit his, but as I am not a card carrying Oulipo-utian so I have used the constraint as initiating device.*  … Read more

  • Sirens’ Song

    The dominant sound here is the sweep and swoosh of traffic — and SIRENS.* Each siren pushes the air towards me shortening its wave so that its pitch increases, air pressure intensifying. As it arrives where I am there is, perhaps an infinitesimal moment, its true pitch — the pitch at which the siren emits… Read more

  • Sound Experiments: Doppler Dreaming

    A delirium of doppler sirens – a city lullaby of misfortune – a dream within a dream. This is a draft of a soundscape that I am intending to make into a 360VR ambisonic piece. Read more

  • The Apartment

    What is it to be in the place of people who are significant?  It’s not so much a pilgrimage, rather I am interested to see  the environment in which Schaeffer created, thought, thrived. He lived opposite a library, up the road from a gallery, around the corner from a garden. Did he have time, amongst… Read more

  • Something Like Silence

    I’ve written elsewhere about the surprisingly endless flow of traffic outside my window, but today I awoke to… nothing! Blissful silence. I had noticed there was going to be a half marathon going past the building but hadn’t gone so far as to think that would actually close the four lane arterial road. Amazing to… Read more

  • Exhibition Notes: Vera Molnár

    [Visited 6 March 2024] The clean and confusing lines of Vera Molnár. Vera Molnár was born in Hungary, migrating to France 1947. She lived to be 100, continuing to make art in her nursing home.  She said she works between three “cons”  – constructionism, the conceptual and the computer (n, m — pretty close).  She… Read more

  • Breaking up with Romance

    The sun sets directly behind Notre-Dame at around 6.30pm now. It rises just after 7am to the left, glinting off the creamy limestone of the two exposed towers and the golden spire that has now been revealed.  The beauty of Paris in this spring light is insane and I’ve been thinking a lot about the cliché… Read more

  • Sound Experiments: Midi Mutations: Metro 7

    A collaboration between me and my machine — translating a field recording made on a journey through the Paris Metro (Line 7 Place D’Italie to Pont Marie, March 8) into midi-generated harmonies. I made the field recording, and chose the instrument, set the frame. The machine chose the notes. I am uneasy with the ease,… Read more

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