A sonic composition by Paul Carter and Christopher Williams.

Cooee Song installed at The McClelland Gallery in 22-loudspeaker orchestra configuration

The McClelland Gallery & Sculpture Garden catalogue for Site and Sound (2021) including Cooee Song, can be accessed using this link: Site_and_ Sound_Catalogue_Online

The script for Cooee Song was published by Performance Research in this book of performance texts by Paul Carter: Absolute Rhythm: Minor Works for Radio

Cooee Song is held in the RMIT Sonic Arts Collection.

1. History

In 1992 ‘Cooee Song, a performance work for two actors and their voices’ was published, together with ‘Spirits of the Dead, Sound History of “Cooee”. In 2019 Paul Carter published Amplifications, Poetic Migration, Auditory Memory. As part of the Amplifications project, Carter brought together ten scripts discussed in that book under the title Absolute Rhythm, works for minor radio. ‘Cooee Song’ was included in Absolute Rhythm: while the other nine scripts had been produced and broadcast nationally and internationally, ‘Cooee Song’ had never been produced. In 2019 the RMIT Sonic Art Collection approached Carter with an invitation to record and produce the work. The sonic composition ‘Cooee Song’, completed December 2019, is the outcome.

2. Process

Carter invited sound artist Christopher Williams to collaborate on the production. Williams and Carter were already working on another project, a sound installation called ‘Eloquent Forest’, part of ‘The Pipes’ project at Prahran Square. The plan for ‘Eloquent Forest’ included the call ‘cooee’, and as part of the project ‘cooees’ were crowd sourced; on 9 April 2018 an invited crowd gathered at Carter’s house and Williams recorded their individual and group calls. Back in his studio, Williams transformed selections from the recordings into sample-phrases that could be triggered from a keyboard. In June 2018 Carter and Williams used this real-time composition device to improvise approximately 23 minutes of material. Following performance indications in the original 1992 script, 6 improvisations were recorded under the headings, Ascent, Arriving, Circling, Parting, Approach, Descent. The plan for ‘Eloquent Forest’ included sound quotations from comparable public spaces in other countries. Carter selected extracts from ambient sound recordings made in Berlin, Venice, St. Gallen (Switzerland) and elsewhere. These were cut into, or laid over, the six improvisations. These augmented improvisations were not used in the ‘Eloquent Forest’ project. Instead, they became important in the composition of ‘Cooee Song’.

On 24 June 2019 Carter and Williams gathered with singer/performers Jess Hitchcock and Zoy Frangos in the studio of the Spatial Intelligence and Acoustics Laboratory, located in the basement of RMIT’s Design Hub. Carter had previously met with Frangos and Hitchcock and read through the script. Audio technician Simon Maisch set up the recording pod to Williams’s requirements, who then undertook the recording process. Carter and Williams co-directed the performances. Frangos and Hitchcock read the script. They also sang improvisations using short passages from the script. Williams made a rough edit of the dialogue that ran to 21.34 minutes. A compilation of the sung sections, which included many close variations on particular script passages, ran to 47.22 minutes. Additionally, Frangos and Hitchcock performed an array of spoken and sung ‘cooees’, besides a miscellany of imitative sounds.

On 13 November 2019 Carter and Williams met in Melbourne to review the three sound sources prepared for ‘Cooee Song’: June 2018 electro-acoustic improvisations; June 2019 script reading; and the sung improvisations. Building on an earlier experiment, Carter proposed introducing an additional sound layer: sea and breaking wave recordings made on the northern (Victorian) side of Bass Strait. An analysis of the materials showed that the script narrative fell into seven parts with six transitional moments. Conveniently, the sung improvisations derived their material from passages that fell into the transitional moments. With one exception, the electro-acoustic improvisations similarly gathered to these transitions; the unassigned improvisation (‘Circling’) was provisionally placed at the front of the composition. Williams proposed attempting to integrate elements of the sung performance with the spoken word performance where feasible. Returning to Adelaide, Williams laid up the tracks according to the schema they had devised. In mid-December, Carter visited Williams in Adelaide. Over two days they reviewed the provisional mix, experimented with a number of additions and subtractions, and arrived at a composition that more than met their expectations of the material.

3. Composition

Two features of the composition of ‘Cooee Song’ stand out: the generation of sonic materials; the retention of a relationship to the script. In fact, the distinctiveness of the composition process is due to the combination and integration of these features. Williams writes, ‘The production process in radiophonic art practice is structured around generating sonic materials, and the inscription, or encoding, of their sonic traces onto a flexible medium as an audio recording capable of innumerable instances of reproduction, and on which further operations may be carried out using sound studio technology.’ Williams explains that production is finished only when all ‘the relevant sonic materials have been assembled’ and in many instances, worked. Post-production refers to ‘the process of editing’ and mixing At the same time, Williams and Carter remained committed to respecting the compositional cues embedded in the original script: while the encoding of the written words in sonic traces effected a transference from page to studio, other features of the script had either to be jettisoned or interpreted in other ways.

Carter’s original script called for two voices (Charlotte 1, Jackson 1) and their doubles (Charlotte 2, Jackson 2). The two pairs were conceived in an echoic mimetic relationship played out in the real time of a performance space. Two production options were canvassed: the two performers interacted with their virtual doubles through the medium of programmed motion sensors; the two performers were physically doubled by two additional performers. In the studio production, this incipient choreography had to be communicated through a different means. Reflecting the double structure of the drama, the original ‘Cooee Song’ script is written in two registers, physical and metaphysical: fragments of plausible dialogue alternate with unplaced commentary on the scenes unfolding. In composing ‘Cooee Song’, this double register was partly communicated by performing certain lines in two ways (sung, read) and partly through the composition of electroacoustic interludes themselves cutting together signifiers of different sonic milieux.

The equivalence thus achieved between all the sonic elements, together with the strong narrative – an archetypal story of shipwreck and transformation that transposes parts of the Odyssey to the colonial setting of Bass Strait – produces a work that resists lapsing either into theatre or into music. This compositional poetics is foreshadowed in Scene 11 of the original script:

(Walkabout. Jackson and Charlotte yarn conversationally across the performance space)

Jack 1. Listen to a primitive tale.
Char 1. Of OU and EE.
Jack 1. (I.e. YOU and ME).
Char 1. Of self-sufficient sounds.
Jack 1. Sounds as such.
Char 1. Not music, not poetry; neither thoughts nor words.
Jack 1. Beyond, before these.
Char 2. Didst thou not say thou camest hither from beyond the sea?
Char 1. Not ’luminous details’, but the glittering intervals between.

4. The Artists

Paul Carter’s career as a sound artist is documented in the publications mentioned elsewhere in these notes. He has previously worked with Williams on a range of sound productions, including public art/public space installations (‘Breath Pattern’, Mildura, 2019; ‘Eloquent Forest’, The Pipes, Prahran Square, Melbourne, 2019), works for national radio broadcast (‘Mac’ (2011), ‘The Letter S’ (2006) and settings of his own poems (‘Scarlatti in Lisbon’, 2016)

Christopher Williams

5. Documents

Preparing recordings for performance

Williams writes:

‘The original voice recordings were made on location using a Neumann U87, a Rode NTK, and a Rode NT4 recording to ProTools via an Apogee Ensemble mic-pre and interface on to my laptop hard disk. Back in the studio, the Cooee Song fragments of vocal performances were reproduced from and transformed by hardware samplers triggered from a keyboard in real time, and subjected to hardware electronic signal processing and effects. Many of the effects and sonic transformations have been tuned to the keyboard pitches via MIDI control data. Two types of samplers were used: the Roland S760 sampler is used for the purposes of mapping a range of phrases across the MIDI keyboard controller (a Korg SG1D). This allows for the real-time performances of phrases (including in simultaneous multiple-phrases) triggered from the keyboard (and set to retrigger with each keypress) and arranged by ear – a very different process to cutting and splicing audio in a DAW arrange window. The second sampler type used is a Roland VP-9000 Variphrase processor, which is designed to be able to replay samples polyphonically while maintaining duration and in sync. This was used for the phrases “Outis” and “coooee” in particular. Other phrases were replayed on the VP-9000 and subjected to real-time manipulation using the variphrase time, formant, and pitch control knobs. I also programmed the VP-9000’s onboard effects engines to give the phrases a new sonic colour. All the sampler phrases were fed through an Eventide H3500 DFX Harmonizer pitched echo algorithm and a TC Electronics M3000 reverb processor stereo hall algorithm.

This approach allows for real-time composition/improvisation to precede a process of post-production and additive mixing, as opposed to cutting and splicing out-of-time (i.e. in reel-time). Triggering samples in real-time overcomes the time-lag associated with reel-time montage composition and adds a performance dimension to the composition. The sonic feedback that becomes available in a real-time sound generation process serves as inspiration for the composer/performer – the electronic system becomes interactive. In this sound composition (and with the participation of Paul Carter) I try to convey the sense of calling to overcome distance, separation and longing brought about by journeying; and the displacement of peoples and loss of language and identity by which they become an “Outis” (a nobody). Through a conscious engagement with sound equipment and practices across the whole development of sound studio technological and creative practice, I aim to integrate the (subjectively) best features of audio technology, electronic compositional practice, and studio work practices across the whole historic spectrum of electronic music studio practice.’