tuesday, apr 14, 2026: music/art entry, pt.2

as promised, here are my notes from the class/workshop which i have enjoyed so much that it made me write TWO blog entries lol.

material studies in sound art,
with Ludger Hennig,
at Uniarts Helsinki

software:

Pure Data – open-source rudimentary visual coding software for sound generation. it is similar to Max which is paid and only available for MacOS.

Amadeus – paid software for MacOS for various audio editing, seems to be similar to Audacity?

FScape – audio rendering software. in class was used for its Complex Convolution module to generate an impulse response of a steel plate (i think???).

SoundHack – various audio editing software, pretty old.

random notes:

• exciters (i.e. transducers) are easy to break when using signals that are too loud/strong. it's good to check if they overheat.
• think what sounds a material/object will "take" and "accept". don't force materials to resonate in a way they don't want to (reminds me of that concept of "affordances" by James J. Gibson from Ava's lectures).
• a bass pump has three points of attachment (and isn't flush with the surface you're attaching it to) to avoid dampening the resonance from the surface you're working with (for example, a steel plate – sounds better when less things are touching it).
• Ernst Cladni discovered patterns that appear on flat surfaces via vibrations when sound is played into them – usually visualized with salt or sand. note: the salt/sand accumulates in spots on a surface where vibrations don't appear or are weak.
• impulse response and reverb are basically the same concept.
• acoustic reverb (before computers) was achieved via coils or steel plates (think of early Beatles music). digital reverb was developed later.
• reverb – sound reflections (delays of sound) that gradually diminish in amplitude.
• DI (direct input) boxes (the brown thing we used in class) are useful for amplifying low frequencies on piezo mics because they change the impendence of these mics (lower it?) since high impendence means less low frequencies are allowed to pass through.
• FFT – fast Fourier transform, used for spectrograms.

sound art to check out:

Rolf Julius – Small Music.

Lori Anderson – Headphone Table (closing your ears in order to listen).

software:

Sound Devices Wave Agent – a program for editing the metadata of sound files. originally used in the film industry.

random notes:

Denis Smalley came up with the distinction of notes, nodes and noises – categories of the spectrum of sounds. also came up with the term spectromorphology.

sound art to check out:

Denis Smalley – Base Metals.

György Ligeti – Atmosphères – a piece for orchestra; from Wiki: "noted for eschewing conventional melody and metre in favor of dense sound textures. after Apparitions, it was the second piece Ligeti wrote to exploit what he called a "micropolyphonic" texture. it gained further exposure after being used in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey".

...some piece involving 127 sine wave oscillators? was not able to find this online

Ludwig Berger – Mapping of Hypothetical Islands on the Scale of 1:1; interesting note: takes a lot of brain power to perceive this piece and brain feels a sort of relaxation when the piece stops.

books:

R. Murray Schafer – The Tuning of the World. Weyes Blood likes this one apparently: "i read this book when i was 18 and it fully changed my life. i had never read such an eloquent take on the auditory feast that surrounds us. it certainly validated my obsession with environmental sounds and industrial horror shows like military jets ripping through the fabric of the sky... Schafer is a Canadian composer who talks at length about how Sound is so esoteric, it alludes to institutionalization, but never has been like the visual arts. the inherent subjectivity of sound makes it so difficult to formally discuss... yet we aren't willing to admit that we've designed our industrialized society to mostly sound like shit. sound is a bit of an afterthought. but we sit within the vibrations of the jarring sounds we create all the time. maybe if we cared about what things sounded like, our environment would reflect a rich buffet of natural auditory phenomena and intentionally curated spaces, and then maybe we'd all feel physically more in tune?".

publications:

Trevor Wishart – On Sonic Art, also see his piece Imago.

Leigh Landy – Organized Sound.

random notes:

spectrogram/sonograph – visual representation of the spectrum of frequencies of a signal as it varies with time. based on FFT – finite Fourier transform.

software:

Acousmographe – free software to create audio from spectrograms.

PaulXStretch – free software for stretching sound for as long as you want without changing the pitch via fancy spectral algorithms.

string arts:

Ellen Fullman – playing long piano strings.

Akio Suzuki – interesting stuff with coils.

Limpe Fuchs/Paul Fuchs – tall string instruments.

Alvin Lucier – Music On A Long Thin Wire (we recreated this in class, so cool).

publications:

Gaston Bachelard – The Poetics of Space, French author.

Pauline Oliveros – Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice – American composer, deep listening practices (we did some exercises similar to hers in class. i want to try these more often! good for clearing my head). related to the concept of Reduced Listening – more info here by Michel Chion.

Radio Aporee – "a project & platform for the artistic research of concepts and practices related to sound, place and spatial conditions. it provides tools and techniques for the engagement and interaction with actual environments, in and in between real and virtual spaces. it suggests listening as a way to enrich and intensify the experience and perception of the world around us" (info from this pdf).

random notes:

Echtzeitmusik – catalogue of improvised music/sound art in Berlin. good venues to visit when there.

more artists:

Butch Morris – NYC improv music artist.

Richard Scott – sound artist, works with synths.

Robin Minard – art with piezos as flowers.

books:

Nicolas Collins – Handmade Electronic Music.

Curtis Roads – The Computer Music Tutorial (info on synths).

Perry R. Cook – Music, Cognition, and Computerized Sound.

interesting hardware:

Eagle A171 – electromagnetic microphone i think?? found info that it's for monitoring telephone conversations lol. we tried it out to listen to noises of electronic devices, was super fun.

sound art involving paper and other materials:

Joseph Anton Riedl – Paper Music (1968-1970). quite aggressive. kind of sounds like warfare.

KLANK – Cardboard Quartet no. 3. funnily impressive.

Jeune Fille Orrible – exploring sounds of different random materials. i enjoy this, very chaotic situation.

Thai Elephant Orchestra – bell-like sounds made by elephants, heartwarming backstory.

Extrapolation – John McLaughlin – music album to check out.

idea: art with shredders + electromagnetic mic??

protect your attention span and your ears!!! turn it all off!!!

monday, apr 13, 2026: music/art entry, pt.1

recently i've attended a week-long class about sound art, which made me have brain and life revelations that i hope not to forget. i decided to write them down (as well as compile the info i have managed to remember – i'll post that in the next part of this entry).

oftentimes when i write down these revelations they start sounding contrived and insincere. still, a desperate fear of all my memories and life lessons suddenly escaping from my mind makes me want to try and formulate the important emotions i felt into words.

this class made me feel sentimental in a bittersweet way. the thing is, i have never had a chance to study art as an adult and spend a whole week attending an environment full of artists before. especially in the EU (remember, i am a depressed mf from a tortured post-soviet state that's currently being invaded AGAIN). especially while having my own source of income, albeit limited... etc. okay, see, it sounds so trite when i try to describe these things!

but, listen. as we were saying goodbyes on the last day of class, i told the teacher and other students: it's so easy to lose that mode of perception where you are curious and creative about life and everything around you. where you don't feel scared to try to use any form of art as an outlet for your thoughts and emotions. or, to use it as a form of play even. or, to treat it as a judgement-free experiment and an exploration of "what will happen if i do this rn?".

because – at least that's how life feels for me – so many institutions and people are interested in destabilizing you emotionally and physically and keeping you depressed and distracted. so you just lose yourself, you just want to go back to your dark scrolling hole and never see yourself as a person with agency again. and, AND! when we go back to scrolling, we start worrying about protecting our attention spans and cognitive abilities, because we're just hurting our own selves if we let all that endless barrage of information affect us constantly...

...idk man (here i'll just start inserting the messages i texted to my friend Susan):

• i felt such a relief being on these classes
• and the stuff we did was so meditative and careful
• we did some listening exercises where we're supposed to listen to sounds "as they are" without trying to interpret them, give them meaning or think where they came from
• which is so hard with fucked up attention span and overthinking
• but it's so helpful to try to do this
• just completely removing all inhibitions
• also liked that the art university vibe is so... understanding
• i was walking around the halls listening to how sound reflects against walls with closed eyes and i KNEW nobody would gaf
• so freeing. I don't wanna go back to hurting
• i don't want to plunge into another dark hole of hurtful, bleak, bland perception of life

***

recently i also fell in unreciprocated love with a person who, maybe due to my own delusions, made me believe i was liked back (i was not). it made my emotional state even more funky than before, but also gave me more important revelations.

i started thinking: why exactly was this person attractive to me?

what i've found: i saw intense vigor and passion about music (and even other things) in them, a desire to learn and to be focused on the subject and to find some truth in it. a desire to fully immerse themselves in it, make it a part of their psyche. not just dabble in it to pretend they're interested, or use it as a way to attract attention and then forget (which, in my life, i've encountered and hated a lot, especially in my own self). essentially, i saw the better version of myself in this person, someone who could inspire me to love not only them, but also my own self; to allow myself to finally engage in art and learning (instead of slipping into that aforementioned dark hole)...

...the class made me feel similarly i guess. i wanted to combine these two topics as they have had the most impact on me recently (well, also war, but that one i cannot make sense of at this moment still).

***

so. yeah. it is what it is. now that i have these revelations in text, what is next for me?

friday, jan 9, 2026

helloooo look who the cat's dragged in. the state of the modern online spaces has become so scary lately that maybe it's a good idea to bring personal webpages back. i shall think of this one as my tiny plot of internet land for cultivating fresh homegrown thoughts (like those tiny plots for growing produce in Finland that they call viljelypalsta).

ofc so much has happened since 2020, great things and horrific events, but i am glad to be in this moment typing out these words with my fingers. the sentences that come out seem unfinished and kind of narcissistic. but you know what, maybe if i keep writing, they will eventually grow into something more substantial? so here goes.

a friend has recently shown me this incredible performance of an unreleased song by Andy Boay (if the timestamp doesn't work – it's from 01:02:24 till 01:11:49), which is most definitely the best song i've heard in 2026 so far (it's only the 9th day of 2026 though). it feels like something that could've been popular in the 80s, melodically. it gave me goosebumps and made me feel like i am still in 2018 (the good year).

in 2025 i have once again struggled to read, struggled to create, struggled to learn and also got into listening to kpop which is more of a type of entertainment and not music. listening to that makes me feel like a child without a care in the world, so probably that was the reason a deeply commercialized presence like that was needed in my life.

i always feel like i need to apologize, mostly to myself, for not being cool and smart enough to intentionally seek out and enjoy "deep" art – for me it has always been something i only do occasionally and with a certain sense of struggle. but at the same time i want to make that activity the basis of my personality – look at me, i care about "art". i am unsure why it's such a struggle – not disciplined enough? not intelligent enough? don't have a habit of engaging with the art world due to my upbringing? still, it feels like something so intrinsic and true to myself but something i am unable to fully access, as if something in my brain is blocking me from becoming more smart and curious. oh well, let's keep fucking around and finding out for another 10 years.

hm. the post is getting quite long and meandering, so i must finish it up with some images, of course. maybe i'll share my four most favorite images of 2025, how about that.

p.s. i have added links to some of my other online plots to this page + an email address for love, hate or indifference letters – reach out if you feel like it, i am ready to yap about most topics at most times.

p.p.s. maybe i love you (haha and you thought i wouldn't make you listen to a sweet kpop song), if you spent your time on earth reading at least half of this bs – my love for you is at least at 20%, and i hope that warms your heart by at least 20% as well.

thursday, oct 1, 2020

blurry images from

✶ 2018 ✷

2018 was a fun year for me (i think)
the fun things from 2018 have already been undone though.

thursday, sep 24, 2020

more images. they don't make me feel good but they'll stay here.

thursday, aug 13, 2020

it's been a while. i still have nothing to say, so i'm adding this image.

tuesday, feb 18, 2020

i want to tweet about this webpage, but i'm too embarrased of my css. there's ways to improve and normalize it. ugh. well, we'll see.

btw, if you are on desktop and the rotating circle on the right is annoying you, you can stop it by clicking on it, and start it back up by clicking anywhere else on the screen.

wednesday, jan 29, 2020

what am i doing here? what should i write about? i don't know yet.

this dingbat looks cool ✿

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