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pure sound injury

december 31, 2004.

[ This SoundBlog-entry attempts to trace the 'rise and fall of Sound Injury', a netsound project - Netzmusik is a nice German word for it, I like its look and its sound - that creatively exploited the possibility provided by 'Yahoo groups' to attach sound files to group messages. It was initiated in the fall of 2000 under the name 'under_deconstruction' by Joachim Lapotre, then continued, starting march 2001, by Mark Mclaren and other members of the original group, as: 'sound_injury'. Under the name 'sound_recovery' it finally came to a grinding halt when, in the summer of 2003, Yahoo suddenly changed its policy regarding attachments, and the attached files no longer were stocked along with the messages to the group.
The article accompanies/is accompanied by (it depends on where you come from, really ... :) a Raudio Stream Special, bringing you a 24/7 continuous webstream built from 12+ hours of archived sounding results of pure Sound Injury (2001-2003) ... ]

Late july 2000 Florian Hecker sent an mp3-file, named poixi.mp3, to the french Yahoo-group 'potillon1048576'. For what reason, I'm afraid I can not tell you. But the ([ot]) message, and the sound file, caught the attention of Joachim Lapotre. "very nice, how to participate????," Joachim replied, but then he found an answer to his question himself: he modified the sound-file, and posted it back, now entitled rainny_cat.mp3.

"I found this idea of receiving a sound-file, then modifying it, taking it apart, rebuilding it, and sending it back so much fun and so interesting that i absolutely wanted to do it again... and with more people ...," Joachim recalls. He decided to start a new Yahoo group, with as its sole purpose this type of exchange of sounds. In october 2000 he posted to several sound- and media-arts related mailing lists, asking people to join him in the 'under_deconstruction' group, as for example, in the following message, dated october 10, 2000, to the microsound list:

Opening of UNDER_DECONSTRUCTION (?-¿) , a sound mailing ending each month as as an INTERNET-MULTI-SPLIT-TRACK.

UNDER_DECONSTRUCTION (?-¿) follows the rules of the "cadavre-exqui" (delicious-corpse/litteraly in english); Someone writes a sentence then shows the last word to another one who must write the following, and again and again... at the end the players read the whole CHAOTIC text together.

UNDER_DECONSTRUCTION (?-¿) does it with sound.

All UNDER_DECONSTRUCTION (?-¿) fruits will be distributed free on the UNDER_DECONSTRUCTION (?-¿) site

...

The original 'under_deconstruction' group was founded by Joachim on september 26, 2000. (The group actually still exists, and, as if in a virtual coma for four years now, remains accessible online - even though, or so it seems, all the messages have been deleted...)

Here is how it worked: at the beginning of each month an initial soundfile was posted, as an attachment to a message to the list. Group members then could download/save that file, treat it in whatever way they saw fit ("filter pitch mash reverse add substract distort it"), using dsp tools or anything else they might want to try ("PUT in bucket / HIT with big stick"), and post the result of their efforts back to the list, again as an attachment to a message. This would result in a 'new generation' of sound-files, that subsequently were treated in similar ways; and so on, until the end of the month: payday... The next month, a new 'round' would start, with a fresh initial sound file.

[ from a second message by Joachim Lapotre to the microsound mailinglist, once again announcing 'under_deconstruction', dated november 12, 2000 : ]

Though originally announced as an audio version of the surrealist cadrave exquis-game (usually translated into English as 'exquisite corps'), the 'under_deconstruction'-game of course is somewhat different. Whether in its poetry (text) version, or applied when drawing or painting, an essential ingredient of the cadavre exquis 'technique' is that (almost) all of the previous 'contributions' remain hidden to the current contributor. In 'under_deconstruction' that is not the case.

Which is not to say that the 'game' that the 'under_deconstuction' members started playing towards the end of the year 2000 is less interesting. Far from that. The participants outdid each other and themselves in their quest for elect(r)(s)onic surprise. Surprising the others with what you were able to 'get out' of their surprise: this seemed to be a basic driving force. Transforming, modifying, filtering, cutting up, whatever ... uncovering something 'new' in the 'old'. (... "hitting sounds round the head until they sing", it said in the welcome message to new members of the "sound_recovery" group ... ) All files continuously were 'under_deconstruction'... It seems to be a pretty appropriate label, really.
In the 'under_deconstruction' game everybody was a winner.

"It was great fun!" Joachim told me when I visited him earlier this month in his Paris apartment. "Waking up in the morning, then listening to the newly arrived sounds with a cup of coffee, opening a couple of applications and having a go at one, or more, of them, for half an hour or so ..."

The original 'under_deconstruction' group did not last very long, though. There was a lively exchange in november (56 messages) and december 2000 (29 messages). But, not having the money to continue to pay for his internet connection, after these first few months of 'under_deconstruction' Joachim was no longer able to go on running the group. As it also wasn't clear at the time for how long a period he would not be able to afford a new connection, he agreed when other members of the group asked him if he would allow them to meanwhile continue the 'game' themselves ... Temporarily ...

But time can be a bad playmate...

In march 2001, Mark Mclaren and others migrated the game to a new Yahoo group, and rebaptized it 'sound_injury'. It was as 'sound_injury' that the project really took off, and when finally Joachim was back on line, it made more sense for him to join 'sound_injury' than to try to get 'the action' back under the 'under_deconstruction' flag ... But, "I never liked, nor approved of, the new name, though," he told me. "The concept of 'injuring' sounds ... that was really so far from what 'under_deconstruction' intended to communicate ..."

From: "bheemakonda thiagarajan lokesh" <bheema_lt@y...>
Date: Tue Sep 9, 2003 4:28 pm
Subject: want help PLZ help me out

Hi, i want to know the minimum sound pressure level to scare away the birds
plz help me so that i can design a efficient bird scarer
regards, Lokesh

...

From: [ ] <ub@t...>
Date: Tue Sep 9, 2003 6:08 pm
Subject: Re: want help PLZ help me out

i guess, more important than the actual level ist the predictability and diversity of the signal. if you have sufficient bandwidth, i'd recomend you set up a program that searches the internet for sound files and play them in random intervals. like webcollage does with images. webcollages also scares away the all too sensitive creatures in minutes ;)
hope that helps, ub

...

[ message and reply posted to the 'sound_recovery' group, sept. 2003 ]

Apart from the 'each month we start it all over'-principle, with an impos(t)ed initial file - usually by the group-owner -, 'sound_injury' knew no rules, no laws. It was fundamentally anarchic. Anybody could join ("All ARTISTS and PUNKS and SOUND DESIGNERS are WELCOME"), anybody was free to do with the 'sound_injury' files whatever he or she wanted to, could work on them with whatever means he or she had available, was allowed to use them afterwards in whatever way ... All files were authorless, and part of the public domain. As it read in the introductory notes to the group(s): "Sound Injury fruits will be distributed free" ...

It actually was the limit set by Yahoo to the size of attachments, that, more than anything else, determined the form of Sound Injury's posted results. Yahoo did not allow the size of messages posted to its groups to exceed 1 Mb, which in practice meant that the circulating sound files could not be larger than about 750 Kb. The format used was ("[to avoid] PC vs MAC war") mp3 (sometimes mp2), but also given this relatively economic mode of compression (and concession to sound quality), the sound_injury sounds in general were very short, only seldomly lasting more than a minute. As a rule they have a duration of something between 1 and 50 seconds. The files came in stereo, in mono, in many different bitrates and frequencies. A madly weird crop of - yeah! - pure sounding data ... It was all part of the game.

"It was amazing," Björn Eriksson, one of the long time participants in the project, wrote me in an email, "to randomly receive new files, never knowing from who and how it would sound - but knowing it was related to the starting sound that was posted in the beginning of each month. The best thing about SI/SR was in my opinion the easy way to fast do something creative. It was also very useful for training different aspects of sound processing."

From: "Paul Savage-Wroth" <pixiepuck@h...>
Date: Wed Apr 30,2003 11:28 am
Subject: last minute april postery - brynology.mp3

The optimistic nuclear weapon dogmatically throws some reality at the self-actualized trilogy. If another gang of slobs assimilates the mustache, then an apartment building beams with joy. When Wilson describes another dolphin behind a dolphin, it means that the ego toward a brain uploader hibernates.

Attachment (not stored)
brynology.mp3
Type: audio/mpeg

[ message posted to the 'sound_recovery' group, april 2003 ]

The Sound Injury project was alive and kicking for about two years and a half, every now and then moving on to a 'new' group space (and consequently a new group name), when the storage space taken by the stocked audio-messages exceeded the limits imposed by Yahoo (512 Mb). So after 'sound_injury', there was 'sound_injury2'. And after 'sound_injury2' had been filled up, the project - in march 2003 - found its final (fourth) home in yet another Yahoo-group, this time once again under a new name: 'sound-recovery'.

The group of people involved in the project was variable, but did include a more or less stable core of contributors that were pretty much continuously part of 'the action' (there, "where biscuits fall into the ocean" ... ). Sound Recovery, which, apart the now 'empty' original 'under_deconstruction' group, is the only of the four groups that still is accessible on line - though inactive for far over a year now - at the time of this writing still lists 64 members. (As the inscription is by alias and/or email address, this might include an ocassional 'double inscription'.) Most of the members still listed joined the group early march 2003, which most likely means that they 'stepped over' from 'sound_injury2'.
Joachim Lapotre estimated the average membership volume at about 70, of which some 20 were actively participating in the 'game' (i.e. as opposed to merely occasionally).

"At the height of activity," Mark Mclaren stated in an email, "we were getting a little over a hundred sounds a month, and at the occasional low periods only ten."

Apart from the fact that all these sounds, at the time, remained accessible to all (as they were being stocked with the group's messages), a series of CD(rom)s was made, as an additional means of archiving the project's fruits. These were freely distributed among the contributors. In total 7 Sound Injury albums were produced, starting on a monthly basis. The first in the series used the group's material of march 2001, the second one that of april, the third that of may, the fourth that of june 2001.

"As for assembling the albums I think I'm right in saying that Doug [velvetdoug@...] did the second half of the first cd and all of the second cd, and I did the rest", Mark wrote. "I started with the idea to just place one sound after the other in a kind of democratic composition, but soon realised that this sounded awful. So instead, I assembled each month's sounds into groups as they related to the source sound and to each other. The source sound always began the pieces so I wanted to demonstrate the process of gradual mutation and injury that the game created. I made each piece using only the sounds provided, a few volume changes, crossfades and a splash of EQ here and there. I never used plugins or effects or additional sounds, sometimes I might extend or reduce a sound by editing it, but that was about it. I thought a lot about how to create a fair mix of everyones' sounds, but at the same time make something that sounded good, it was difficult to do both. With this in mind the resulting albums are probably a bit more my taste and show the way I was working with composition rather than presenting a truly equal view of everyone from sound injury. [...]"

In the liner notes on the CD covers one can find lists of sound injury contributors. For each of the first four albums, there are between 14 and 18 names listed, totalling to some 32 different 'sound injurers': appareil, big eugene, björn eriksson, brian labycz, bryan schmitz, cecil touchon, doug shearer, entrancetoe x it, erik pearson, eskender kaddour, evil paul, jim bob, joachim lapotre, john gacey, jon hayes, ken, kerry uchida, larry jesus, mark khemmohl, mark m, matt lyon, pascal, paul wroth, rob paul, ryan laws, Sergio Lugue, shza, sluggo, t wilson, thuja, tony kennedy, velvet doug ...

"The CDs just arrived after answering on some mail that Mark (?) sent out to the list," Björn Eriksson recalls. "It went like: 'those who have contributed - send me your adress and I send you a copy of the SI cd...' I responded to this first message and then I think I got all or maybe I had to resend my adress once or twice. [...] It was a really fantastic service. It was always a nice surprise when a new SI album arrived in the mail box. The strange thing is that I really had no clue from whom it was because I did not connect the aliases muttondeluxe or velvetdoug with any real person names - so I don't know if it was Mark or someone else who did send them..."

In the summer of 2001 the british core of the group (Mark Mclaren, Jon Hayes and Doug [a.k.a. velvetdoug/sluggo]) reserved the domain name soundinjury.co.uk, and off list invited regular contributors to provide some biographical data for inclusion on a 'sound injury' web site, as well as suggestions as to how a 'Sound Injury' site should function. One of the ideas of course would have been making the Sound Injury files available for download from the site. The web site, however, never seems to have gotten beyond a very sketchy, preliminary, version. (It still no longer is accessible online. )

Meanwhile, of course, the game continued. As did the production of the Sound Injury CDs, which, however, no longer appeared on a monthly basis.

SI_5 and SI_6 seem to have been based upon material harvested by the group between july 2001 and january 2002. Each of the two volumes lists about 25 contributors, many - but not all - of which already were among the contributors to the first four albums.

The first quarter of 2002 must have been a particularly busy and fruitful period in Sound Injury's history. The seventh - and last - Sound Injury CD (whose finished production was announced on the 'sound_recovery' list only as late as june 1st, 2003) is based upon the materials from february, march and april 2002, and lists a number of no less than 125 contributors (a list that reads as one of those blocks of random text included in junk mail in order to pass spam-filters :-) : glitterboyblue, bonkrz, statemusic, maru_p, sheep_dispatch, billsuspect, thirtysevenpercent, jon_h, mutton_deluxe, velvetdoug, humanisfilth, phonkje, brabant004, carlso1978, susuexp, bigceoguy, t0ner, bempa, ctouchon, noiseman 433, pixipuxk, semj_1, patakero, byrontwilkes, jlau802,swdirect, blandrewb, brokengadget, failsafedefault, almobunt, jman_2k, acidsquid69, johnstarrysky, cosmodelia, peter_s_dawson, porkyhardkor, jasper_vader, tyrantraiden, bulk_dvh, alexbleep, mile48s, bawk_2, typhique75, aesova00, musicalmexicana, silvawhale, menu1033, mickblah23, klangfarben9, rebirth242, dlyon217, treatkor, circular_riot, indianropeburn, gnoma_error, saad3salem, spudchows, mark_rob26, alicedee25cs, sculptsnd, g_montel, mr392, Kaleja, auto_ivanh, ericashamed, ncjames2, subliminal_sandwich, matilda1ls, elektrokami, newplacemat, joel_linden, Q_bot, svalvolazz, mr_d_a_tito, phil_is_phil, theurbanmonkey, inallhissplendour, teardr0pb, jlapotre, remixes22, Kris_DAY, thepunck2002, iekomedia, pics4tim, psr_illogik, luther_blissett_99, yaxupaxo, casio_balbao, datajackmovim, djtoucan, mbaartse, zippy_dooda, skrinkus, znrk5, koanuk, anton_sporz, dinnercommitees, marvin_schingermeicke, jfheule, albaris2, dhendricks1952, iestynr, nanoplex71, ostberg2001, rtnprods, bindingvoid, vorpal138, xterminalx, kosmichewizards, jarad, pasifperifrastik, Raveau, david, Matt_h, golo, abstrait, daveisthatyoudave, karrrlo, eva_revox, appareil, maitreyana, gentlejesus, m.c.vanpoppel, Big Eugene, shza) ...

Even though the 'game' continued for more than a year still, until the summer of 2003, the series of SI-CD's stops there, in april 2002...

It in fact has been Mark Mclaren's announcement, about a month ago, that, under the flag of his sijis-label, he had made the complete collection of 7 Sound Injury CDs available for free download at archive.org that once again drew my attention to the project ...

I actually have been somewhat involved in it, but joined the 'sound_recovery' list very late, on june 12th, 2003, having learned about it through a Placard that was announced to take place in Paris, Belleville, on the 21th and 22th of june. The event was organized by Joachim Lapotre and Julien Bécourt (eva_revox), and, indeed, announced as the 'Sound Injury Placard'.

"I had already tried before, earlier that year, to organise a Sound Injury meeting," Joachim told me, "as I thought it would be great once to meet at least some of those that you knew for so long now, but just as a name - or even only an alias - on the list. But that wasn't so easy. Many of the group members did not seem very keen on such a thing; they seemed to be pretty much satisfied just sending a sound every now and then from their home. I contacted a big webcafé here in Paris, that even might have wanted to join in at least part of the travel expenses. But in the end there wasn't just that much reaction from the list ...".

Sound Injury Placard (6_13)

A Placard seemed to be a reasonable - virtual - alternative, and Julien Bécourt opened up his Belleville appartment to host the 24 hours non-stop event. (Which, at the very least did cost him a large glass table top, if I remember rightly, crashing sometime during that fête de la musique night of the 21/22th of june under the weight of beer zipping and headphone wearing bottoms it never had been meant to carry :-) ...
Apart from the usual one-hour 'slots', the event was to include a Sound Injury multi stream, 'allowing many Sound Injury members from different locations to play live and stream at the same time': the whole CHAOTIC noise together ... But again: it proved far from easy to motivate group members to participate in a such event, as is witnessed by the somewhat desperate sounding message that Joachim posted to the list on june 12th: "This is my sort of last call of HOPE, for placard performance subscribtions: I'm kind of sad because we organised that event especially for SOUND_INJURY members and only two of you have suscribed...EVA-REVOX opens his own appartement to anybody that wants to listen to SOUND_INJURY members live [...]"

In the end, though, quite a couple of 'sound injurers' did stream a Placard set, from wherever they were, and the event - for me it was the first ever Placard in which I participated - was a great success. As unforgettable as it was CHAoTiC ... And at the time I guess nobody would have even suspected that, in fact, this 'Sound Injury Placard' marked the project's end.

...

From: tofu <tofu@a...>
Date: Wed May 7, 2003  3:01 am
Subject: jeep beats

Boooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom

Attachment (not stored)
tofu - my yam me.mp3
Type: audio/mpeg

...

From: "pun_c_k" <punck2002@l...>
Date: Sat May 10, 2003  12:20 am
Subject: offf i hope!!

Attachment (not stored)
offf.mp3
Type: audio/mpeg

...

From: "Paul Savage-Wroth" <pixiepuck@h...>
Date: Fri May 16, 2003  3:02 am
Subject: punckkncup p p p k

PM denies leadership deal
Angry Crean to miss troop welcome
New probe on backpacker killer
Abalone poachers target South-East
ATSIC officials told to quit
Telstra sale put off
Chopper plucks couple from flash floods
Pill fraud penalty boosted
Bush vows to get bombers
Howard rejects child sex inquiry
Public housing crisis looms
Downer issues Saudi travel warning
Porn crusader brands laws as 'silly'
Clark refuses to step aside
Train 'out of control'
Opera House hopes for Heritage list
Living legacy for Bali victims
Trio face music over internet site
Doctor 'not a convincing witness'
Aust to reopen Baghdad mission
'No alert' in jets' near-miss: report
"Fizzer" virus hits Australia
Car hits children on crossing
Laws crack down on handguns
Coachman fights mobile phone fine
Australian killed in terror blast
Hogan to return for gay comedy role
Deane refuses to join G-G debate
Sackings get MPs' pulses racing
Blast over gas venture

Attachment (not stored)
offff++.mp3
Type: audio/mpeg

...

[ messages posted to the 'sound_recovery' group, may 2003 ]

Yahoo announced - it must've been some time in july - that on august 7, 2003, they would implement the following 'service-changes': "Yahoo! Groups will continue to deliver all attachments sent via email, however, the attachments will no longer be archived within the Messages area. On Aug. 7, all attachments in the Messages area will be removed ..."

I actually do not know whether it has been this 'erasing' procedure early august 2003 that actually brought forth the total disappearance of the 'sound_injury' and 'sound_injury2' groups (not only of the attached files, but of all messages and other information) from the Yahoo! Groups area. Maybe the 'clean-up' at the time involved more than the mere erasing of attachments stored in the message area? Maybe for some reason certain non-active groups were removed completely? I doubt that, as I do know of other groups that have been inactive for several years already, and that still are accessible ... But whatever the reason... Fact is that these two early groups - including all of the messages exchanged - disappeared from the web. Which is quite sad, really, as along with these messages evidently a big and important part of the 'sound injury' project's history has gone down the drain ...

Not that there were lengthy discussions going on between the participants; about sound injury, about where the project would be going; comments on how he or she treated his of her file; discussions about the 'sound injury' itself; or about 'music' and 'sound' in general? No. Not at all, really. It is another aspect of the sound injury project: the almost complete absence of any communication other than by means of the sound files that were being exchanged. "I think part of the nice thing about SI/SR project was the lack of talking/discussions about the project. [...] There has seldom been very much discussion about what we were doing - the project was mainly focused on sending sounds," confirmed Björn Eriksson.

From: Björn Eriksson <nowerik@a...>
Date: Fri Jul 18, 2003 12:05 am
Subject: [sound_recovery] /dev/sixsixsix

Attachment (not stored)
l1ll212l.mp3
Type: audio/mpeg

[ message posted to the 'sound_recovery' list, july 2003 ]

Pure sound?

Well ... I'd say as pure as you can get as long as there are these 'wet squishy brains' around that send the sounds and react to them ...

Great fun to see how 'extra-sonoric' communication continued to slip into the mostly highly cryptic messages accompanying the files, and their successive namings! As Björn recalls, "that was another interesting aspect of making SI/SR sound bites: also to name the files. For me this was definitely part of the SI/SR process. I think this will hold as well for most of the other participants ."
As the sounds themselves, the names of the corresponding files were mutilated, inversed, added to - sometimes 'encoding' somehow what the 'author' had done to the sound, or simply adding the author's 'signature' ... part of the game, indeed, as illustrated by the following two extracts from the list of names of sound files posted in may 2003 to the sound_recovery group: "01may_sourcesound, may_be_sound, mayberry, Maythefourthbewithyou, tofu-yam, tofu-my yam me, tofumyyamme_mOUtediT" ... "bnkhldy, bnk, bnkhld, benikaholeda, bank-a-ho" ...

Several of the participants indeed confirmed this 'communicating via non-text means such as filenames'. "0n my posts," (velvet)Doug wrote, "I firstly tried to make them small compositions in themselves, with sections and themes. I also indulged in ultra low frequency in/out of phase workouts, because i knew the others would be viewing [the files] in a sound editor, and I figured the distorted, spidery waveforms would give the others a kick. I wanted the waveforms to LOOK good as well as sound good..."

But apart from the attached file, many of the messages simply remained empty, contained a piece of 'ascii art', or were filled with some lines of random text, as in some of the messages cited above or, for example, in the following post by pun_c_k in the may 2003 'bankholiday' series that earlier on had been started by velvetdoug:

From: velvetdoug@a...
Date: Mon May 26, 2003  9:27 pm
Subject: Bank Holiday Special

Attachment (not stored)
bnkhldy.mp3
Type: audio/mpeg

...

From: "pun_c_k" <punck2002@l...>
Date: Tue May 27, 2003  9:58 pm
Subject: bnkhld

The gains you make with this strategy will be 1000s of times the bank charge of 5 bucks lol. You could deal with this or you could deal with that ;> Hi lex i am using your is that all there is design and i was wondering if you could possibly help me change the cast word to poetry?! My lifebeer and movies is that all there is. You can go to two of my diarys if you like both at opendiary. With a hey nonny nonny and a hot cha cha if you like onea try. Yet almost everyone with a fetish knows the circumstances under which it is developed and its erotic significance for them. We know where almost everyone was last night and we still dont know who broke. I have a gun i know where it is and i know where i put the cartridges in another place :( She does not know where he is although she could figure it out in under three guesses :P A true friend cares about her other friendsperhaps sydney does not know what being a true friend ismaybe well never knowanyway someone forewarded this to me and it is so totally funny. He is my one true friend and my one and only savior ;) Brody armstrong is my one and only supreme goddess. And worships brody armstrong and has a dog with a hula skirt and holyday sunglasses! Armstrong and asking him to write me another prescription but i heard that serzone causes liver failure or something and to be honest i want to be the one responsible for ruining my liver. For one i found 2 teachers that hate me slightly less than all other teachers who are willing to write me college reccs. She turns back to him with an expression slightly less enthusiastic than the last ;> An expression crossed her face that ive never seen in the face of a fifth grader.
We started an email friendship that went on for a few weeks. Exposition that we started to make fun of him hoping that hed take the hint.
Time for bed, punck.

Attachment (not stored)
bnkhld.mp3
Type: audio/mpeg

...

[ message posted to the 'sound_recovery' group, may 2003 ]

All of it, after a couple of last hiccups and messages by participants wondering what the heck had happened, came to a halt when indeed early august 2003 Yahoo deleted all stored attachments, and no longer stored new sound files send to the sound_recovery group ... Worse: all archived files were irretrievably lost. Except for those that were privately and locally saved by the participants.

"After Yahoo's announcement I spent a lot of time downloading as much as possible of the files from the group's sites, before they would be gone forever," Joachim Lapotre told me. His personal archive contains some eight hundred and forty of the originally posted files. It is, however, not complete. Also, understandably, for lack of time, he did not save additional information (as name of poster, date of posting). Therefore, from the original, chronological, archive no more is left than a - partial - alphabetical (on file name) projection.

[Joachim intends to release his base of sound injury files together with a Flash interface as a Sound Injury CD rom, enabling the looped playing back of up to eight (randomly picked) sounds simultaneously, with several (also randomly) adjustable parameters, thus creating a 'Sound Injury Instrument' (somewhat in the spirit indeed of our 'Island of Sound' CDrom).]

A number of group members that still were frequenting sound_recovery in the fall of 2003 started discussing possible alternatives, in order to continue the project outside Yahoo, using a different 'webtool'. A wiki? A common ftp-space? ... As a matter of fact, Joachim Lapotre, in mid-octobre 2003, presented an alternative 'home' that was up and ready to go: a Sound Recovery Forum, installed for him and the group by Xdot, a friend. But even though the new forum - after the cleaning up of some bugs, and replacement of the original french interface by an anglophonic one - in principle provided more or less the same functionality as the 'old' Yahoo groups, the Sound Recovery Forum never ever took off. It is still sitting out there. Remaining pretty much empty ... and unused for more than a year. The sound files simply never 'started rolling' again.

Earlier this year [U] || >X< (a.k.a. [·] , a.k.a. znrk5, a.k.a b0mbhead) proposed the creation of a sound demon, a 'bot', that would act as an artificial, though not too dumb, soundinjurer, and 'participate' in the forum - maybe even initiate new traffic there. The demon should act on sound files being posted, but also it should be able to submit its 'own' files, maybe 'composed' from sounds it harvests at regular intervals from the web ... A fascinating, though very different of course, idea, and I for one would be interested to see a such thing realized and put to work.

But of course, on the other hand, the mere emergence of such a 'revival' idea was but another indication that indeed the original project willy-nilly had come to its - natural? - end. Like 'snow in april', say.

From: "Dennis Anthony Tito" <DennisATito@a...>
Date: Mon Apr 19, 2004  9:11 pm
Subject: Re: continuation

[...]

the bot-talk is interesting, but, from my point of view, personally, and all that, i'd rather hear the aural products of something with a wet squishy brain, which is one day going to die, and kind of knows it. amongst other things.

i'm not trying to discourage the AI lovers, it's not my place to do so, but i wouldn't like too many of the sound_injuries in my mail box to be purely algorithmic, just a few would be ok. unless you boffins can program something that can continuously rewrite itself and get neurotic and vain and evolve into something largely irrational and also do other things like go for walks and watch films and develop a personal relationship with sensory stimulation and feel insatiable lust and get scared of going mad, but not too scared to commit folly.

[...]

[ message posted to the 'sound_recovery' group, april 2004 ]

I guess Dennis Anthony has a point ... points to what apparently made the 'old Sound Injury' tick ... that point being that at heart it was a very social, communicative and collaborative project, even though hardly any textual messages were being exchanged, and - apart from a couple of local 'cliques of real life friends' - participants didn't know, nor get to know, one another at all. "In my view it was like sending away 'messages in a bottle' to any stranger," Björn Eriksson wrote, "and then later receive an answer from someone you didn't have any clue about who they were . . . or maybe not an answer ... more like someone making a new painting over your own painting (sent in a bottle in the sound ocean)."

Is it music?

Well of course it is! Very much so, and - even though maybe not quite complete - an amazing lot it is, this 'whole chaotic noise together'! SIJI's seven CD's, Björn Eriksson's Placard set, Mark Maclaren's ResonanceFM mix, all of Joachim Lapotre's archive ... the Raudio Sound Injury Stream Special, is bringing you all if it, continuoulsy, 24/7; and we will continue to add any archived material that still may surface to the stream (currently containing over 12 hours of Sound Injury material).

Why? Because with all of it thus strung together, randomly, with neither a beginning nor an end, Sound Injury has become what four years ago it set out to be: a 'corps' indeed, but a tasty one; a cadavre exquis, an 'exquisite corps' - of pure sounds ...

[ Many thanks to Joachim Lapotre (France), Mark Mclaren (UK) and Björn Eriksson (Sweden), who provided the sound files that make up the RaudioSISS, and who filled in a lot of the details of the project's history by answering many of the questions that I kept on posing, either in person or by mail. Björn moreover took the trouble to make hi-resolution scans of all of the seven CD's together with their original inlays and covers; lo-resolution versions of some of these images are among the illustrations above. ]

[ take me back up ]

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tags: net art, sound art, sound injury

# .133.

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