Micro-Events, Macro-Ghosts: Theta and the Schaeffer Transmission
Daria Baiocchi
Theta
(2024)
Daria achieved an MA in piano, an MA in classical composition and an MA in electronic music. She earned her degree in Classical Literature from the University of Bologna (Italy). Her compositions have been played in theaters and concert halls throughout the World and broadcast by several Radio stations (Holland National radio, France, Portugal, UK, USA etc).
As music composer and composer for electronics she won National and International prizes and selections in Argentina, Netherland, Ireland, Germany, Italy, England, Hungary, USA, Bulgaria, Poland, Lithuania, Canada, South Korea, Mexico, Cyprus, Sweden, France, Spain, Greece, China, Australia and Slovenia. She’s main Professor of Harmony and Music Analysis at “G.B.Pergolesi” Fermo Conservatory of Music and Sound Design Professor at the Macerata Academy of Fine Arts.
Reduced to a 45-micrometer sentient observational node cloaked in a tempus accelerātōrium sleeve, the conscious entity reached relativistic parity of motion with the central nervous system in… literally—no time. This was a scouting trip only, a voyeur’s peak within the CNS. Simply a passenger, or better yet, a hanger-on designed to achieve a filtered sensation limited only to the visual and the aural. True integration and metapsychosis it’s not… yet, at least.
The observational stage in terms of time was 50 milliseconds—relativistic parity transformed it into several seconds of Anthro-time. Hundreds of micro-events unfolded. Synapses activate, and—like a blink within a blink… decay. Microcircuits cycle though entire computational states. Infinities were born, infinities collapsed. Like a curious dog with its head out the window of a fast-moving car… the cinema unfolded and the node was part of it. Within, but not felt, the node’s data sensors were in perpetual collection mode. It was an idiot savant, a benign invader, and in this world it was also an espionage agent par excellence.
The only horizon was the terminus of the 50 ms study zone. The nodes peregrination ended there, and as it approached this endzone, relativistic parity was lost. The node was dead in the water while the electric world surrounding it passed by. Like a river rock in a rushing stream, it lay motionless, senseless, pregnant with visual and sonic data to be extracted. Even without the transformation of consciousness, the ability to “live” the system—the node, like a good soldier, was collected. The data studied, quantified.
The trip was a success. The trip was good. Stuff was found!
All aboard, the next one leaves immediately.
—Michael Eisenberg
This audio work is based on the context of life and its connection with negentropy. Life forms, from the simplest single-celled organisms to complex ecosystems, appear to defy the tendency by maintaining and increasing order within themselves, organizing, structuring and maintaining system’s processes in a state of low disorder-entropy.
Theta grows as a sound that takes care of itself, takes energy and transforms it, changes shape, moves towards entropy but returns on its centrality as a founding element of its acoustic life. The path that it takes could be direct or indirect but the thing that characterizes it is the return to life.
—Daria Baiocchi
Daria and her work can be found on Linkedin
Wayne Mason
Transmissons Psychiques Pour Pierre Schaefer
(2025)
Wayne Mason is a writer and sound artist from central Florida USA. He is the author of several chapbooks of poetry and experimental prose. A product of his working-class surroundings, Mason is as influenced by machines and industrial landscapes as much as he is the cut-up method and deconstruction. He has used these as tools to create writing and syntactical deconstruction that has been published widely in the small press in both magazines and anthologies.
Wayne Mason also records experimental audio, using everything from synths to everyday objects to create sonic experiments ranging from harsh noise to dark ambient soundscapes. For nearly three decades he has been involved in the experimental music scene both solo and as one half of the electronic duo Blk/Mas.
Very briefly, Pierre Schaeffer is the father of musique concrete, the genre of music that utilizes raw sounds as the music’s building blocks that was developed in the 1940’s. These sounds are often transformed in a studio environment with the aid of technology but, there is no requirement to do so. These sounds are also transmitted though loudspeakers. There is no visual component. Let your imagination be your guide because this is the music’s superpower!
This is a two-minute piece that I’d like to believe is a, if not a love letter, at least a thank you note to Schaeffer. I can only hope he’s hearing it, wherever he is.
I love the simplicity here. The single quote below from the composer describing his tools of creation proves that Acousmatic music (what musique concrete morphed into) can be so many things. Its clay of creation can be a recording of a space, any space. A walk around a city, even if it’s a strange city can be a wonderful stage… bigger than any Broadway production. A tour of a factory, even if it’s abandoned. A rundown wooden house still retaining its ambience, its ghosts. A green meadow after a summer storm. Any scenario you can think of leaves a sound signature, and it can be captured. This is the sound artists pallet.
In two minutes, Mason cracks open a visual world begotten from the raw materials of the everyday. It’s a world where the subject can melt into the object and the other way around too. It’s a world that needs to be heard without the distractions of the constant pummeling of a Baudrillard-ian nightmare of sonic and visual media that surrounds us in our daily lives.
At the end of the day, it breaks though that pornographic nonsense and allows us, you and me to engage with something real. Something that has the potential to become fully formed, fully experienced, uninfluenced by the outside falsities, the lies of others that are force fed to us constantly, down our gullets.
Listen to this short transmission. It’s from the outside and it’s asking you to give it meaning. Your meaning, nobody else’s. This is your world and accessing it through sound is a victory, a freedom.
What does this transmission say to you?
—Michael Eisenberg
This is a musique concrete inspired track using scrap metal, radio, and a single oscillator.
—Wayne Mason
Wayne Mason has a cornucopia of artistic outputs. Visit his Broken zen blog to check out his free downloads of both sound and words and his huge bandcamp page which, I personally can’t wait to explore.