Welcome to episode 6 of the Anechoic Chamber, free form audio from the glowing margins of arts and culture. Our guest for this edition is Barbara Ellison, a composer and sonic researcher whose deep explorations into what she calls "phantasmatic" sound reveal a world in which aesthetic experience becomes an active, rather than passive process, and in which our human propensity for seeking meaning in the apparently meaningless is manifested in a variety of fascinating ways. In her new book Sonic Phantoms - co-authored by yours truly, and out now on Bloomsbury's 'Sound Studies' series - Ellison unveils a previously hidden world in which musical instrument practice, technological experimentation, world travel and immersion in nature all point back towards this propensity and suggest it as being the spark for a staggering amount of human creativity. The following discussion, along with compositional examples provided by Barbara, only begin to scratch the surface of this involving subject.
Topics under discussion: tricksters, "gods of the in-between" and shamans / tricks of the mind in bistable imagery, Gestalt psychology, expectations priming perception and experience, the brain as a "predictive machine" and "top-down" perceptive models / the phenomenon of sine wave speech and the apophenic mind / semantic satiation and semantization / EVP, OVP and pareidolia / katajjaq vocal game of the Inuit / acoustic niche theory in natural environments, and its effect on human musical composition
All compositions used in this episode by Barbara Ellison 2009-2019
artist web links:
www.barbaraellison.com
https://barbaraellison.bandcamp.com/
www.sonicphantoms.com
Anechoic Chamber links:
donate via Paypal: tbwb@protonmail.com
general queries: core@tbwb.net
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