Nicole De Brabandere

This research area engages the intense recombinatorial dynamics of tone as a generative potential. I consider tone, as a value amidst grey-scale gradations, as a register of sound amidst noise, and as a form composed out of particulate textures. These value-based, audio and atmospheric intensities are particularly generative in the sense that they do not arise out of a given mode of identification (such as contour or surface), or the hint at how one should inhabit their volatile dimensionality. As tonal values foreground the affective and situated qualities at the threshold of form, they amplify how the inhabited past informs perception in the present.

The written passages below are excerpts from an audio paper that I composed with Graham Flett. The paper develops audible tone as a generative constraint for emergent choreographies in the urban environment. The audio paper was published by SEISMOGRAF in collaboration with a Fluid Sounds event in 2015 and is available here:

http://seismograf.org/fokus/fluid-sounds

The approach of the beautifully distinct swishing sound of nylon sleeves swishing against nylon sides, first as a rhythmic offbeat. Then the audibility of my own rhythms (woollen sleeves brushing against woollen sides) converges with the regular movement of the nylon body briskly swishing from behind, then overtaking the brushing wool. As the swishing and brushing bodies regain their distance, the sound of walking fabrics again separates into distinctive beats.

And the wheels' of suitcases rolling contact with surfaces articulates their textures and aggregate densities. The sounds dissipate when oncoming traffic forces filing backwards, closing off the physical space with which I inhabit the listening. Then, an attunement to the sound of car engines - belts moving over motors and tires rolling over bridges, pull thinly over bending and screeching, smooth metal rails.

Then doubling-back to hear the movements of crates sliding over the sandy floor of the back of an open van, returning to the sound is a gritty sliding between surfaces. Then repeatedly walking through an automatic sliding door to hear what it is like to pass through the door, but also to hear the movement over the door's tracks, and the change in altitude when the recording device moves to capture the sounds of the door's upper fixtures, its brushing tracks, and the drone of the powered mechanism at one end. Then a turning pivot and re-lifting to hear the closing sliding of the opposite opening.

Then, listening pulls into following the passing sound of a pair of jeans rubbing against inner thighs. Then of a purse, a cable or paper bags crinkling against the thumping force of a parallel walking gait, or the crinkling sound of a hand reaching into a small paper bag in search of a snack on the move.