Letters

Leonardo,Vol. 4, pp. 97-98. Pergamon Press 1971. Printed in Great Britain LETTERS Readers’ commentsare welcomed on articlespublished in Leonardo. In general, short letters stand best chance of publication. The Editors reserve the right to shorten lettersfor reasons of space. Letters should be written in English or in French. NEW MATERIALS AND MUSIC The articleby Mr. John GraysoninLeonardo 3,295 (1970) is both interestingand honest. He is precise and certainly has carried out his experiments with great precision. Discovering new ways of making sound is a fascinating experience and their incorporation into sculpture is one of the major contemporarychallengesto anartist who isworking towards the integration of the arts. Mr. Grayson’s experiments correspond with ours except in a few minor cases. We studiedmany mathematicalformulations, for examplethose of Lord Rayleigh (English physicist, 1842-1919), and found very few to be of help. A piece of metal is rarely homogeneous. Mechanical hardening processes cause its sound characteristics to be even more unpredictable. As regards cavities, although the Bernouillis found the laws for pipes, the laws for other shaped volumes are still very unclear. Savart and Lootens havelost many years workingon the latter problem. However, though theory is unclear, it is easy to tune a cavity by ear. The effect of adding one cavity to another is, to our knowledge,onlypredictable in pipe organs. We do not think significant results can be obtained in this way for percussion instruments. Even if it were theoretically possible, the problem of locating the cavity would remain. Since it is not easy to correct a weaker frequency in this way, someother way must be found. If the interestingsound made by a new material is not entirely satisfying,it isoften possibleto improve it. This can be done by filtering and amplification and by altering weights and shapes. There exists the manuscript of a contract drawn up by the Doge of Venice to sell a quantity of pine wood unsuited for the manufacture of oars for Venetian gondolas. The buyer was Stradivarius! FranGois Baschet 11 rueJean de Beauvais 15-Paris 5, France M. FranGois Baschet in his kind letter is quite right to dispute the efficacy of applying available mathematical techniques to the development and accurate prediction of complex musical sounds. These formulas rarely parallel the reality perceived by the ear. Physical, real-time sonicresearchis in a very primitive state. I fundamentally agree with the points raised by M. Baschet in regard to cavities. But I hope that further experimentation may result in concrete examples of ‘exceptionsto the rule’. The depth and meaning of new sonicexplorations are being obfuscated and neutralized by the vast and growing amounts of sound sewage permeating our environment. Recent studies show that sound pollution is causing many of us to lose aural acuity continuously. This has been shown not to be the case for people who have remained unexposed to western technological civilization. I wonder if a youngprofessoror studentof ethnomusicology,who has been raised in our sound polluted environment, would still be able to hear the subtle harmonic/ inharmonic interplay that the Balinese musician hears and controls when playing in his traditional gamelan(musicalensemble). Fewartistsareaware of a resolutionpassed bythe International Music Council(UNESCO)in Paris in 1969, the first part of which reads: ‘We denounce unanimously the intolerable infringement [through noise] of personal freedom and the right of everyoneto silence.’ The sound sculptor today must take into account the danger of his work being destroyed by sound pollution. John Grayson 1077 Ouellette Avenue Windsor 14, Ontario, Canada COMMENTS ON BOOK REVIEWS I find LeGrace Benson’s review of my book Language and Visual Form: The Personal Record of a Dual Creative Process (Leonardo 3, 368 (1970)) mostengaging. No otherreviewer,tomyknowledge, has madepoint of the basic nature of my book that it reports on the creation of a ‘bi-media art work‘, as Benson puts it. Other reviewers have gotten hung up in one or another of the rather traditional apparatus of literary or visual art criticism. I have no commentto make on her Freud-Jung considerations . However, I do clearly understand her very 97 98 Letters apt metaphor that points to being ‘beckoned to the mysteries along the darkened edge’. Donald L. Weismann...