Good numbers from bad sounds

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After a short stay at Falkirk, Doonan was awarded his certificate. He returned to engineering and six months later, by accident, he ran into Allen. The two went back to Doonan's studio, and began what would become a seminal experimentation with sound.

"His parents had recently split up at that time so he was living in a caravan inside a warehouse, which was absolutely derelict," says Doonan. "I had a house in Portobello right next to the beach in Edinburgh, a huge house. I had my studio all set up. Mark and I had this amazing rapport. He understood me and I understood everything [about him] and we got on great.

"Initially when we first started out, I would show him how the machinery would work, and the ideas that he would come up with in order to make the machinery work differently were just absolutely outstanding. All the weird sort of ways that we came to make music using his ideas of what he wanted to do. [We had] my knowledge of how to achieve that with the machinery and it just kind of took off from there.

"He thought outside the circle. With engineering courses today, everybody gets taught specific ways to record. There are so many different ways you can record anything and come up with the most diverse results."

Doonan covered all Allen's rent, leaving him free to try out his ideas in an advanced recording studio. Many of these innovations were, if not eccentric, at least unusual, as one anecdote reveals.

Doonan says: "The beach rolled right out to the back garden so you could pretty much walk right out on to the sand. One day, the guy next door was renovating his house. He had taken all these plastic and clay pipes from his gutters and they were all lying on the front street waiting to get picked up. Mark, who had spent the night sleeping in the airing cupboard because it was dark, and it was quiet, and it was warm [came up with an idea].

"I was in the kitchen cooking breakfast and he walked past - just ignored me - walked right out the front and then walked back into the house carrying a ten foot plastic pipe. He opened the back door, went screaming down on the beach and dumped the pipe. Then he said to me 'We are going to have to record something, can you get all your recording stuff set up?'

"Once he had started getting a few more pipes I figured out what he wanted to do. We sat on the beach, cut (the pipes) all off at different angles, different heights, stuck them into the sand in all different areas and then waited until the wind caught the pipes and made tones. Then we sat there for a couple of hours and recorded it all with microphones."

Allen was endeavouring to find out if the wind would emit a loop through the tones. "Mark came up with this idea of making all the music, incorporating it into a program, then eliminating all the frequencies independently, which took eight days. He then split them all back up and put them all back together. So we could get all the noise from the wind, all the air noise from the microphone. He made 74 minutes worth of music just emitted by these random tones. That is where we first started with these strange ways of recording. From there on we started doing some really crazy gigs. The electronic music club in Edinburgh, which was the kind of club where you had to be invited to play at by your peers. We did some really strange things there. Things that you weren't supposed to."

The technique of disassembling sound loops and re-assembling them to create new sounds became the basis of a new approach. In the arcane world of electronic music, it is common to modify recorded or sampled sounds to produce electronic music. Allen, however, was hoping to approach sound generation in a new way.

He did not disappoint. When Doonan visited Australia on a music scholarship in 2002, initially for a year (it has since extended to two) Allen was left with the equipment to try out his ideas. Within a year, he had developed his own algorithm and software. Computer designers usually spend years developing code to make computer systems work. Allen did it in less than a year despite having no computer training. A hint of genius was in the air.

A slightly awed Doonan says: "He developed his own program that generates algorithms that stretches and manipulates audio entirely with numbers. What he has come up with is one the strangest algorithms for making the bizarrest sounds you have ever heard. And it is all done with numbers. Numbers make sense to him. If you give him a stream of numbers he can dissect it down and make it all work. All these codings for the way algorithms of sound are made up using oscillators he can split them all off into multiple frequency ranges and then make a song out of a single tone."

Being able to create music purely from numbers has been an ambition of electronic musicians for many years, but there have often been insuperable technical obstacles. Allen's approach is to create feedback, which he manipulates and turns into algorithms. Doonan says Allen's main innovation is the use of feedback. "He would stretch it, cut it, chop it, sequence it, move it with these drums, mix it all down together. It was done just by feeding things through the wrong way and then making all these bizarre sounds and then sequencing that."

So why is Allen called Beatwife? Doonan explains the etymology. In Scotland, he says, if a person is pedantic they are called an "old wifey". Because Allen was being pedantic with beats, he devised the name Beatwife for himself. Not surprisingly, the reaction was one of alarm. "He got put off a lot of messaging services, and internet providers because he was using the name Beatwife," says Doonan. "And he was copping a lot of flack from ladies' activist groups because they thought he was actually advising people to beat their wife.

"He was very abrupt in his way of explaining. When internet providers said you can't use that name he would say you have no idea what you are doing, it is nothing to do with that whatsoever. We kind of lost contact for a couple of months. Eventually, he developed a more normal name."

Beatwife now has three record contracts, with Schematic Records in Holland, Somia Music in America, and Planet Mu Records in England. Doonan believes he has gone further than other exponents of glitch music. "Mark is a league above the others because he is creating it from scratch. That is difficult. [Other] guys are taking already pre-made loops and then taking them to bits. Mark does the lot from scratch."

Most electronic music does not stray far beyond the imitation or modification of natural sounds or instruments. Often the effect has been to remove nuance and expression without introducing any new musical dimensions: a diminution, not an addition, justified more by its novelty rather than its musicality.

But the potential to take an entirely different approach to the creation of sound has always existed. To use the distinction posed by the literary critic George Steiner between novelty and originality, the ventures of Allen and Doonan represent novel originality: a new starting point for the creation of music.

"It is creating a new instrument through numbers, number crunching. Then you take the algorithms that the numbers spit out and re-sample them back in, cut it back down, then keep churning the same thing over. It emits lots of different algorithms and Mark uses lots of different modulation sources, and manipulation of oscillators, and programming and sequencing, to make it do things that it is not really supposed to do.

"When you come up with some scary sound that everyone would scream at, that is when it is stripped down to its bare necessities and music is made out of it. You could use any sound, but the kind of sounds that upset people emit a lot of different tones. If you take something like reverb it gives you a bit of space. If you put that into your mix and make it go round in a loop it starts phasing off itself. Then it starts emitting different harmonic tones. When people get that they automatically conclude that they have got feedback in the system and immediately stop it. Mark tries to get the machines to do that. He is trying to get harmonic tones that are unnatural, and his thing is all about unnatural sounds."

Doonan was himself something of a young prodigy. At an early age, he could reproduce long pieces of music from memory. But he was denied formal education at 13 because he could not read conventional notation, and his school did not teach synthesiser music. When he was asked to go back to his school, at 19, to talk about his budding career in music, he refused.

That undercurrent of resentment and determination to prove himself remains, despite his obvious success. "From a naturally trained musician's point of view it is hard to make any sense out of [our music]. You have got to understand the concept and how much work has gone into it. It is like asking an artist to stand there on the spot and create a brand new colour and give it a name and explain it to you without showing it to you. It is very difficult to explain. Our music is evolving, but not a lot of people are understanding it yet."

Unlike new styles of music, which initially surprise but then usually either fade or become stylised, Allen's and Doonan's approach is likely to be only a small harbinger of much greater potential. Beatwife may not be remembered as the J. S. Bach of the next century, but he may be remembered as having helped devise something as radical in its impact as the invention of the well-tempered scale. Just as chaos theory changed thinking about the natural world - the discovery that mathematical formulae could generate patterns similar to naturally occurring shapes - so the use of algorithms threatens to change profoundly our thinking about music and the creative use of sound. Doonan says he is working on projects with filmmakers and animators that will combine visuals and sound in ways that would not be possible with conventionally composed music. "Making an accident happen gives you sound. But making an accident happen to give you the sound you actually want is a very different thing."

Catch Jason Doonan glitching at the Bourgie Bar in Melbourne on August 26.

Hear some of Mark Allen's glitches.

David James is a former Miss Universe who plays alto flute like an angel and sings like a pipe stuck in a windy beach. He usually writes about money but not from personal experience.

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The horse's mouth
Can longtime music industry heavyweight Frank Stivala now be described as a "colorful racing identity"? We hear he recently celebrated his 50th birthday (are you really that young, Frank?) at the Moonee Valley Racecourse. The races apparently had music industry related names. Big word is that Frank won a cool $34,000.00 on the day betting on the gee gees. Maybe he'll want to share it with the musos he's booked over the years...perhaps not.

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The Bachelors from TAFE Pt2
In our previous issue, Intelligence reported the rumour that Victorian TAFEs would offer degrees, and that at least two institutions were considering music degrees. Box Hill Institute of TAFE has just announced their new Bachelor of Applied Music degree to be available in 2005. Apparently the emphasis will be on "applied".

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Federal Arts Minister Rod Kemp has recently announced yet another "review" of Australian Orchestras. Our sources seem divided on this one. Some are of the opinion that the appointment of James Strong and Professor Malcolm Gillies to respectively chair and assist indicate that it might be a serious reappraisal. Others seem to think its just the latest in a long running effort to slash funding..

Intelligence is gathered by Major-General Richard Dunbier, RN, QC, VC, FRS (not her real name).

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