The Silence of Sound

The concept of the silent disco is gaining ground and business is booming for several UK companies at the forefront of the technology. The concept is simple: DJ equipment is wired not into speakers, but into a radio transmitter which broadcasts to multiple sets of radio headphones worn by the audience.

The practical advantages are several – no complaints about sound levels from neighbours being the most obvious, which allows the party to continue well after normal licences for music events expire (most famously exploited in late night sessions at the 2005 Glastonbury festival which launched the concept of the silent disco into the public eye). Individuals can also alter the volume of their headsets allowing a customised experience, and headphone volume can be limited to conform to emerging standards for safe listening (although this might be seen as a disadvantage by hardcore clubbers). The most intriguing advantage is that the provision of multi-channel broadcast and reception technology means that two or more DJs can play to the same audience, who can flick a switch on their headphones to select which DJ they want to hear at any given moment.

My recent experience of silent DJing at the Off the Tracks festival suggests that this provides a new twist to the old DJ tradition of the ‘soundclash.’ This originated in Jamaica but also became central in American hip-hop as the ‘battle,’ in which two separate soundsystems or DJs alternate tunes, fighting it out to win the approval of a crowd. Similarly, at the silent disco a friendly rivalry emerges as each DJ ties to capture the audience, although canny programming - which for best effect puts DJs playing radically different music together - means that the audience don’t really see it like that, and simply enjoy the fact that they can switch back and forth between different styles as their mood suits.

Potential disadvantages include a loss of the physicality of sound: dance music is designed with a strongly visceral experience in mind, in which sub-bass frequencies are felt in the body rather than simply heard through the ears. Interestingly, an obvious further worry - that the communality of the listening experience, in which crowds enjoy a transcendent togetherness, might be eroded by the isolating effect of headphones - proves misplaced: it seems that the mind quickly ‘edits out’ the headphones and a powerful sensation of shared sound persists, with the twist being that you are not sure if your grinning companions are actually dancing to the same thing as you! Additionally, the headphones seem to have a disinhibiting effect, with an enhanced willingness to sing along in evidence (it is quite a strange experience to enter the room without headphones and to hear people singing along to two different tunes at once in an otherwise silent space, whilst they dance out of synch with each other to the beat of different drummers).

Technical issues for the DJ include above all the challenge of mixing in headphones (normal beatmatching technique involves listening to the front-of-house tune with one ear whilst a headphone cup delivers the next tune to the other ear, allowing for the synchronisation of the incoming and outgoing tune). However, it is possible for the DJ to use a small personal monitor speaker as a workaround for this problem, although this does somewhat undermine the purity of the silent concept, and some DJ mixers already allow a ‘split-cue’ in which one ear cup plays the live tune and the other delivers the cue. A more subtle issue is that it becomes harder to respond to the dancefloor - trying to work out how well your choices are going down, and in what musical direction to travel next is complicated by the difficulty of knowing who is grooving to which DJ. In practice, as the set goes on, it becomes possible to attune yourself to that segment of the audience dancing to what you are playing through an attention to the rhythm of their dance – or, easier, the sound of any singing or whooping along that might be in evidence if you remove your own headphones.

(photo credit: damian scott, creative commons)

Cracking Safes at WOMADelaide

Matt Connell continues his reflections on his experience of WOMADelaide 2009. His previous account can be found here.

Friday 6th March: 'No worries, we'll be able to use an oxy-acetylene blowtorch to cut into the safe tomorrow in time for your gig'

Was I dreaming? No, what a bizarre day this was for me, dominated by 'DJ Disaster Narrowly Averted.' Having locked all my valuables, including my precious CDs, into the hotel room safe, I was perturbed, but not unduly, when on Thursday evening I couldn't open it. A few hours later, when two duty managers and an engineer still couldn't get into it, I really began to worry. A pointed remark to the effect that I'd travelled 12 thousand miles for this gig and now my CDs were sealed in an reinforced metal box resulted in the 'assurance' about the blowtorch. So, I spent the night tossing and turning with nightmare visions of an Ocean's Eleven safe job resulting in a pile of melted plastic and DJ egg on my face. But, thank goodness, the next day a locksmith cracked the nut without any blowtorch and delivered my tunes into my shaking hands. The Hilton gave me a champagne breakfast and some drink and taxi vouchers to make up for the stress. Thus fortified, I was able to go ahead and played a blinder using all the loverly equipment that was installed in the Picture Palace without a hitch by the site crew. The soundsystem was really tasty and sounded sweet. It was a real pleasure - and a great relief - to finally get some sounds on!

More importantly, the main attraction - the painting of the hoarding - proceeded apace, and as the public flooded onto the festival site we began to get a steady stream of interested people staying to watch the painting for a while. Many people were keen to chat about their experiences of India and of Bombay films, and enjoyed reading all the exhibition information and looking at the collection of original film artworks. It was particularly interesting that people of Indonesian or Malay extraction (of which there are quite a few in Australia) had fond memories of these films, and of painted hoardings, because the films and the culture associated with them were exported all around South Asia, not just within the Indian sub-continent.

(Photo credit: Matt Connell: all rights reserved.)

Jai Ho

Matt Connell continues his reflections on his visit to WOMADelaide. Earlier reports can be found here and here.

Thurs 5th: Had my stereotypical cultural imaginary of Australia as somehow being a bit 'Wild West' shattered today - the culture of Health and Safety is even more pervasive here than in the UK. I cut my finger (using a saw), and had to fill in a form to get a plaster (Action Taken to Prevent a Reoccurrence of the Accident = 'be more careful next time….'). But, joking aside, a big event like this has to take H&S matters very seriously - a chat with one of the site electricians revealed how one of his electrical inspections at another event discovered a bare wire contact with a tent frame that would have electrified an entire row of stalls if it hadn't been spotted - and with up to 70,000 members of the public expected to visit over the weekend, everyone is keen to make the site as safe as is possible.

The artists are continuing their outlining and underpainting of the hoarding - which is combining a classic Bombay film image (of the suffering heroine of Mother India pulling a plough) with an image referencing the recent box office smash Slumdog Millionaire. The Slumdog sweep of the Oscars has generated a huge amount of publicity in India, and has come at just the right moment for the Bombay Picture Palace at WOMADelaide - there seems to be quite a buzz around what we are doing, which is really nice. Although Slumdog is not of course strictly a Mumbai film, most of the crew for it were in fact from the Mumbai film industry. The Hindi phase 'jai ho' ('victory'), which forms the lyric of the climactic song from Slumdog Millionaire, is fast becoming our team catchphase and acting as an endlessly re-inflected lingua franca as preparations accelerate in anticipation of opening to the public tomorrow. Yesterday, I heard this song blaring from a record shop in downtown Adelaide, which was fantastic.

Had a lovely moment today when I invited an Indian taxi driver on site to have a look at what we are doing. On chatting to the artists and soaking up the atmosphere he was quite moved, and rendered palpably homesick for his family in India. He said he loved the venue, and was proud to see 'his people' doing something great in Australia. This was very satisfying, because despite the heartfelt efforts of committed organisations like WOMAD, the whole world music/cultural festival scene is of course prey to the sceptical accusation that it provides a merely 'orientalist' frission of novelty to white middle class audiences without providing any real cultural authenticity or engagement. We'll see what the public make of it all tomorrow….
(Photo Credit: mikecogh. Permissions.)

Constructing a Festival

Matt Connell continues his reflections on his visit to WOMADelaide 2009. Find out about earlier stages of the process here.

Wednesday: The artists (a team from Studio Balkrishna in Mumbai, led by Mr Balkrishna himself) have really cracked on now: with the hoarding gridded up they set to mixing the paints. The concentrated powder pigment was mixed with linseed oil and cobalt drying solution (to speed up the drying time so that the finished hoarding can be hung at the end of the festival). The resulting paints are astonishingly vivid. Then, once a small sacred 'om' had been jotted on the surface to dedicate the painting, outlining of the figures commenced, with rapid progress being made.

Meanwhile, the rest of us have been decorating the marquee with coloured cloth, garlands, and Indian fabric decorations. Festival marquees tend towards the anonymous white cube look, and our challenge is to convert this into a vibrant space redolent of the sub-continent, in which to hang the Bombay Picture Palace collection of original posters and Bolly oil-on-canvas advertisments. The other task has been to begin technical liaison with the various wings of the site crew: electricians, lighting and sound crews, in order to ensure that the correct DJ equipment, lights and PA are successfully installed. I am responsible for this liason, as I am the most technically minded of the team. Thankfully, the WOMAD crew seem very efficient and helpful, so I am not anticipating any problems. But this equipment will be the last thing to be installed, so we won't really know all is ok until the last minute.
(Photo credit: mikecogh. permissions.)

WOMADelaide: the Bombay Picture Palace

Matt Connell continues his report from the WOMADelaide 'Sounds of the Planet 2009' festival, highlighting some of the complex 'behind-the-scenes' processes involved in producing cultural events like festivals.

The festival opens to the public on Friday. It's now Tuesday, and on site preparation in the beautiful Botanical Gardens in Adelaide is well underway, with stages going up and a real bustle about the place. There has been some heavy rain - v.unusual, and most welcome - firstly, because they need the water in South Australia, and secondly because usually the main problem at festivals here is dust. So long as it clears by the weekend, everyone is happy for some dampness now. Having survived a few very muddy festivals in the UK, it certainly feels strange to be happy about rain!

The Bombay Picture Palace tent is up, and decoration has begun. The main task for the team has been to check that the complex set of rigging kit, artists materials and shipped exhibition items has been correctly assembled. The process of long range ordering of materials by the Mumbai artists , which has taken place via the Charity Shop DJ team in England communicating with the WOMAD group in Australia, has involved various translation issues and the potential for 'chinese whisper' communication distortions. In fact, as everyone gathered around the boxes and crates and began checking everything off, everything was more-or-less as hoped for.

Building on the detailed organization by the CSDJ team in the UK, the WOMAD team over here in Australia have done wonders getting several hard-to-source items, and the relief of the Indian artists was palpable as they could see that they were now equipped to to what they've come to do. One of the more interesting aspects of this was their need for dry powder pigments, to be mixed and blended with linseed oil on site, to produce their own paint. This way of working is now more-or-less unheard of outside India, with almost all European, American and New World artists using pre-mixed paints - so tracking down the right powders and potions was quite a tricky task. Everyone is happy. The space is taking shape nicely, the shipped exhibition items have arrived (including the Bombay Picture Palace collection of Indian film posters, hoardings and paintings).

Prep work on the 'Bolly' hoarding that will take shape over the course of the festival will begin in earnest tomorrow, with the large boards being gridded up using thread and chalk (the chalk is rubbed on a thread which is stretched across the board and then twanged, leaving a dead straight chalkline across the board). The grid will then be used as a guide for penciling in the outline design. I'll let you know about that - and the pigment mixing - in my next post.

'Dr Matt' at WOMADelaide

Matt Connell, whose current research includes the intergenerational DJ project , writes as he prepares to go to Australia to shadow the Kala Collective and Charity Shop DJ as they put on a venue at the WOMADelaide 'Sounds of the Planet 2009' festival in South Australia:

In the hopeful expectation that I'll be able to get on the decks at some point, I'm busy sorting out my tunes for a set at the Bombay Picture Palace at the WOMADelaide festival in Australia next week. This has involved recording a lot of vinyl to CD, through a laptop, because the recent heat wave in South Australia makes having a box of vinyl outdoors a high risk business. This recording process is something I’ve been meaning to get my head around for ages, because a lot of my rare ‘Asian Beats’ records are irreplaceable. This is an example of the way a potential gig like this forces one’s professional development, catalysing the effort to learn a new technological trick. I do use a CDJ deck, but up to now I’ve been pretty strictly an analogue kinda guy, so it’s been good to dip my toes more deeply into the digital waters. However, now instead of worrying about melting records, I’m worrying about whether airport X-rays mess with CDRs. Most chat forums say no, but a couple of people do report having their recordings scrambled, so it’s fingers crossed - and a Flash memory card backup in the bag!

I’m going to be learning a lot about the administration of a major art’s event – some of the paperwork I’ve been looking at is mind-boggling: from customs certification that traditional wooden instruments have been fumigated, to intricate Performing Rights legal declarations, insurance documentation and the dreaded Health and Safety bumf, the behind the scenes activity that goes into putting on an enjoyable festival in our totally administered world is enormous. For every punter letting their hair down, there seems to be two organisers pulling theirs’ out.

The Bombay Picture Palace venue where I’ll be based features an exhibition of original Bombay film hoardings, alongside a team of Indian artists painting a new one for the festival. This is a dying art, because nowadays digital poster production is eclipsing the tradition of painted advertisements. My family tree includes an Anglo-Indian root, so I’ve always been interested in the Audio-Visual cultures of the Asian diaspora. I’m really looking forward to interviewing the artists, and the team bringing the whole event together. I’ll try to make a post or two while I’m out there – but for now, it’s off to buy some factor 50 sunscreen….

(Photo credit: Clive Rowland)