Q-O2 News ::: Oscillation 2021 Bulletin ::: episode 3

Dear Readers,

We are one night’s sleep away from the grand Opening Night of the Oscillation Festival.

In understanding what the stakes are in thinking about sound, tuning is a constant touchstone. Tuning is a system, but also an activity: it plays a major role in how musicians play together, both in improvised and composed music, but it’s also deep-baked into the vocabularies of radio, music technology, DIY and environmental awareness. While in music, tuning is primarily understood as the relation of tones, it equally concerns the equilibrium between people and between human and machine. It’s a concept that can lead us to reflect further on the limits between natural and constructed; between person and environment; the human propensity for convergence; the self-regulation of systems; and the question of canonicity.

In order to understand the phenomenon better for our festival, we split the broader topic of tuning into three sub-categories of relation, which together form a cycle: attuning – feedback – detuning. These categories are themselves unstable. They overlap and intersect, and many of the artists we have invited to contribute to the festival would be equally at home in two or three of these sub-thematics. We approached attuning as a movement of coming into consonance, to site oneself in regard to others, positioning oneself in a reciprocal relationship to one’s surroundings. Feedback creates a dynamic balance of stability / instability which demands constant calibration, and is a site of reception, correction and learning. In detuning we wanted to remind ourselves that sometimes a cut is necessary, to zoom into another perspective, or to hack the system from the inside. Like sound itself, all of these are actions in time, constantly moving in and out of phase: what is now in tune will not stay that way.

We reserve a special mention for the composer and inventor Daphne Oram, who was a wellspring of inspiration on this topic. Further, we feel a deep kinship with her approach to research as something rigorous, intuitive, subjective and full of space for imagination. Her book, An Individual Note, was published in 1972, at a moment in which electronic technology for sound production and generation was changing many underlying assumptions about tuning, feedback and other sound phenomena.

The artists we have invited for the festival contribute in various ways to our reflection on the thematic framework.

So, sit tight, and tune in tomorrow at [removed]. There’s a wide variety of fellow radios broadcasting bits and pieces of the festival: Radio P-Node and Listening Arts Channel will cover the festival extensively from Friday until Sunday; there will be short features on Radio Campus (Sat. 18:00-20:00) and Radio Lyl (sat. 15:00-24:00). Radio Helsinki and Cola Bora Dio will stream bits and pieces in the aftermath of the festival, so they will a good source if you missed parts. A warm thanks to all our radio friends!

The Oscillation Crew