Videos by MICHAEL FOWLER
Electronica composition with samples from Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Telemusik," Yoshihiro Hanno's ... more Electronica composition with samples from Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Telemusik," Yoshihiro Hanno's "On/Off Edit" + short-wave radio, micro Korg and programming in Pure Data. 23 views
A sample of a live performance of the work "sesshutei as a spatial model" from the Akiyoshidai In... more A sample of a live performance of the work "sesshutei as a spatial model" from the Akiyoshidai International Art Village in 2008. The piece was composed in Pure Data and GEM and uses a command line interface for the call-up and spatialization of sound sources into an 8-channel 3-tiered environment of the concert hall. Miscellaneous instruments such as the singing bowls and woodblocks are also used. See the accompanying article: Michael Fowler, Transmediating a Japanese Garden through Spatial Sound Design. Leonardo Music Journal 21 (2011), 41-49. 23 views
This is a sound scene that was composed to accompany the short story "Sounding City." See: Michae... more This is a sound scene that was composed to accompany the short story "Sounding City." See: Michael Fowler, Sounding City, Architecture and Culture, 4:2 (2016), 315-321.
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This is a sound scene that was composed to accompany the short story "Sounding City." See: Michae... more This is a sound scene that was composed to accompany the short story "Sounding City." See: Michael Fowler, Sounding City, Architecture and Culture, 4:2 (2016), 315-321.
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This is a sound scene that was composed to accompany the short story "Sounding City." See: Michae... more This is a sound scene that was composed to accompany the short story "Sounding City." See: Michael Fowler, Sounding City, Architecture and Culture, 4:2 (2016), 315-321.
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Portfolio by MICHAEL FOWLER
Documentation of a sonic research practice.
Books by MICHAEL FOWLER
Birkhäuser, 2017
Architects are used to designing visually. In order to expand their basic design tools, this book... more Architects are used to designing visually. In order to expand their basic design tools, this book explores the interactions between sound, space, hearing, and architecture. To this end, the author uses not only contemporary and historic buildings and projects, but also fictional, philosophical, and theoretical approaches for revealing the auditory within architecture. Sound then becomes not only a source or stimulus, but an instrument of architectural space. By further introducing a metatheory of critical listening, the author encourages designers to acoustically test their projects and contribute to their designs with auditory input from the very first stages of the design process.
Transcript, Jun 28, 2014
Michael D. Fowler presents an interdisciplinary approach to investigating the sound world of trad... more Michael D. Fowler presents an interdisciplinary approach to investigating the sound world of traditional Japanese gardens by drawing from the diverse fields of semiotics, acoustic ecology, philosophy, mathematical modelling, architecture, music, landscape theory and acoustic analysis. Using projects – ranging from data-visualisations, immersive sound installations, algorithmically generated meta-gardens and proto-architectural form finding missions – as creative paradigms, the book offers a new framework for artistic inquiry in which the sole objective is the generation of new knowledge through the act of spatial thinking.
Papers by MICHAEL FOWLER
Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes , 2024
In this article I interrogate Teiji Itoh's axiom of shakkei or the East Asian gardening technique... more In this article I interrogate Teiji Itoh's axiom of shakkei or the East Asian gardening technique of 'borrowing scenery'. I draw on the field of soundscape ecology as well as discourses by Zhang, Chen and Fung on shakkei (Ch. jièjǐng) in terms of its first appearance in the 1635 Chinese treatise Yuanye (The Craft of Gardens) by Ji Cheng (1582-c.1642). In order to reason on the ontological status of Itoh's axiom of shakkei as it pertains to a listening subject, I use a case study of the translocated sōzu (deer scarer) at Jōzan Ishikawa's (1583-1672) garden at the hermitage of Shisen-dō in Kyoto. I trace the history of the sōzu from its agrarian past, and draw on Heian-era poetic references as well as historical Chinese sources to construct a semantics of the translocation of the auditory frame of the sōzu to Shisen-dō. I conclude with remarks that discuss the significance of the ontological dependence between sentiment (Ch. qing, Jp. jō) and scenery (Ch. jing, Jp. kei).
Semiotica, 2024
In this article we provide a mathematical frame to the generation of class taxonomies suggested b... more In this article we provide a mathematical frame to the generation of class taxonomies suggested by Hébert (2007, 167-169) in his analysis of the poem «Quelle affaire! » ("A Sorry Business!") by Gilles Vigneault (b. 1928) as well as a formalization of the structure of semic isotopies in his reading of The golden ship by Émile Nelligan (1879-1941) (Hébert 2020, 157-160). We also examine the characteristics of inter-and intrasemic molecules at work within Réne Magritte's painting La clef des songes. (Hébert 2020, 160-168) Our mathematical frame is Ganter and Wille's extension of lattice theory called formal concept analysis (Ganter and Wille 1999), for which we explore various formalisms and constructs that allow us to reason on semic structures.
Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, 2023
The landscape features of the karetaki or dry waterfall, and karesansui or dry garden style have ... more The landscape features of the karetaki or dry waterfall, and karesansui or dry garden style have been well-codified in Japanese garden design since at least the appearance of the 11th century treatise Sakuteiki (Records of garden making) by Tachibana Toshitsuna (1028-1094). Numerous contemporary scholars have suggested how encounters with these particular features literally evoke the sound of water, even though they exist in the absence of water and are constructed primarily from carefully selected stones and gravel. In this article, I draw on the influence of Buddhist philosophy on Japanese garden design by introducing the logic of the catuskoti (Jp. shiku) or tetralemma -- a series of four propositions that is most famously associated to the Mahāyāna Buddhist thinker Nāgārjuna (c. 150-c. 250 CE). I introduce examples in Zen discourses on sound, and then use the catuskoti as a reasoning tool to investigate the ontology of sound as it pertains to the relationship between sound-images and landscape forms in the karetaki and karesansui.
Journal of Mathematics and Music, 2023
In this article I model John Cage's pragmatics of silence using the mathematics of category theor... more In this article I model John Cage's pragmatics of silence using the mathematics of category theory within the framework of ontological logs. I use this approach in order to represent knowledge within Cage's so called silent compositions—4'33'', 0'00'', and One3. I first generate the category schema F of a database that describes an instance of 4'33'' from its premiere in 1952 which is translated via two functors into the category schemas Z (0'00'') and O (One3). A pushout of Z and O along F allows for the presentation of the category S and its accompanying ontological log as a summation of Cage’s pragmatics of silence. I then introduce the score ``Listening to John Cage listening'' as a progressive update in the category of instances S–Set, and utilize it to further investigate the fiber order of S. I conclude by deriving a semantics from the fiber order and thus reason on persistent spatio-temporal structures of Cagean silence.
Architecture Theory Review, 2023
In this article I introduce the notion of 'borrowing scenery' or jiejing (Jp. shakkei) from Ji Ch... more In this article I introduce the notion of 'borrowing scenery' or jiejing (Jp. shakkei) from Ji Cheng's 1635 treatise Yuanye (The Craft of Gardens). Shakkei became highly influential in the West through Teiji Itoh's instrumentalisation of the technique in his popular book Space and Illusion in the Japanese Garden (Itoh, 1973). I firstly use an analysis of the 1652 Geppa-rō ('moon-on-the-waves') tea pavilion at Katsura Rikyū as a case study that satisfies Itoh's model of shakkei. This allows me to propose an ontological foil to Itoh's model of shakkei that draws on the Ming-era discourse of Shao Bao (1460-1527), contemporary Chinese scholarship on borrowing and sensory icons of scenery by Stan Fung (1999, 2003), Jiaji Zhang (1993), Jin Feng (1998) and Congzhou Chen (2007) as well as David Bohm's (2002) concepts of unfolding and enfolding from his metaphysics of the implicate and explicate orders. I conclude the article with a novel formalisation of what I call an unfolding architecture and enfolding landscape at the Geppa-rō pavilion as one that seeks to frame the subtle slippage between the agency of a subject who seeks to borrow and a landscape that seeks to lend.
Journal of Mathematics and Music, 2020
In this article I build an actantial model (Greimas 1983), M, of John Cage's 1962 indeter-
minat... more In this article I build an actantial model (Greimas 1983), M, of John Cage's 1962 indeter-
minate work 0'00'' (4 033 00 No. 2). To further investigate Greimas' actantial axes of desire, knowledge and power, I generate an ontology, O, that records the facts of the model through hierarchies of relations and concepts. This allows for a conceptual graph (CG) (Sowa 1984), C, that describes the score's instructions and its actants. Extracting subgraphs of C then allows for reasoned arguments about the implications of Cage's instructions in the score, and in particular, the composer's reference to "an obligation to others." Through a conceptual graph rule R, I offer a framework for generating the structure of a score-informed interpretation of 0'00'' (4'33'' No. 2) that is based on a number of key conditionals that map the actants of the piece, and their relation to the unfolding of the work's narrative.
Journal of Mathematics and Music, 2020
In 1983, John Cage used the traditional stone garden, or karesansui at the Zen temple, Ryoan-ji i... more In 1983, John Cage used the traditional stone garden, or karesansui at the Zen temple, Ryoan-ji in Kyoto as a model to generate a series of visual and musical works that utilised tracings of a collection of his own rocks. In this article I analyse the first of the musical works, Ryoanji for oboe, using mix-methods drawn from morphological image analysis and Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). I introduce the aesthetics of the karesansui, and then examine the previous work of van Tonder and Lyons (2005) regarding the Medial Axis Transform (MAT) of the garden at Ryo ̄an-ji. This leads to the use of the distance transform, local maxima, and Voronoi diagram in order to deconstruct the Euclidian space of Cage’s Ryoanji for oboe. Finally, using the technique of FCA for constructing a number of formal concept lattices, the pitch class segmentation of Ryoanji for oboe is investigated in regard to the sound gardens and the classes of Voronoi regions found across sound gardens.
Journal of Mathematics and Music, 2019
This paper introduces the 1958 graphic score Variations I by the American composer John Cage (191... more This paper introduces the 1958 graphic score Variations I by the American composer John Cage (1912-1992). In particular, I trace the resistance that the work has established towards traditional analysis given its meta-score qualities and the 'distance metric problem' which arises from the necessity to generate musical parameter data from the measurement of per-pendiculars between points and lines printed on transparent sheets. I also propose that an extension of Cage's instructions allows the symmetry of the transparencies to be described as the Dihedral group of order 8 (Dih4). I report on the size of the k−combinations (with and without repetition), sound densities and classes, the permutations of musical parameter assignments, and suggest a determinate and indeterminate framework to realising the work.
Journal of Mathematics and Music, 2019
This article examines John Cage’s Silent Piece (commonly known as 4'33''). I analyse the work thr... more This article examines John Cage’s Silent Piece (commonly known as 4'33''). I analyse the work through formalizing the frame conjecture of Whittington (2013), which suggests that the work’s spatial conditions are akin to those found in the Japanese gardening technique of shakkei, or borrowed scenery. By firstly expressing core axioms in natural language that de- scribe the spatial conditions of Cage’s Silent Piece, its’ 1952 premiere as 4'33'', the technique of shakkei, and an exemplar manifestation of shakkei at the garden Adachi Teien (Japan), I construct an ontology that enables the fundamental assumptions of Whittington’s conjecture to be explicated through conceptual graphs. (Sowa 1984) From the ontology, I create a number of graphs and derive First Order Logic formulas that are then used for inference and further reasoning. I conclude by providing a formalism of Whittington’s conjecture via a conceptual graph rule that accounts for both auditory and visual conditions that generate shakkei in the cited examples of the premiere of the Silent Piece as 4'33'' and the garden of Adachi Teien.
Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes , 2018
In this paper I examine both the ink paintings and landscape designs of Zen Buddhist monk Sesshū ... more In this paper I examine both the ink paintings and landscape designs of Zen Buddhist monk Sesshū Tōyō (1420-1506), generally regarded as one of the most important artists to emerge from the Muromachi period in Japan. I contend that there are a number of spatial confluences between his representations of landscape that cover both his ink paintings (sumi-e), and the 4 temple garden designs attributed to him. By firstly exploring Zen Buddhist notions of time and space, I then compare a number of Sesshū's sumi-e with his garden designs, tracing their Chinese influences and investigating their techniques of representation. I further argue that spatial confluences between his 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional landscapes are found through techniques such as the flattening or expanding of the viewable picture space, a predilection towards ambiguities and juxtapositions of scale or time, a propensity for iterating particular rock shapes and rock textures, and an embodiment of the Japanese notion of mono-no-aware ('humans in tune with nature'). I conclude by suggesting that Sesshū's garden designs and sumi-e are essentially frames within a shared space outside of time that serve to present a Buddhist ideal of nature without reverting to dogmatic re-productions of nature.
Journal of Mathematics and Music, 2017
In this paper I present a novel application of Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) to the problem of in... more In this paper I present a novel application of Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) to the problem of interpreting and analysing the non-standard graphical music score Electronic Music for Piano (1965) by American composer John Cage. The avant garde nature of Cage's score, presented on a single page as a series of anecdotal texts written in natural language, resists traditional approaches of music theory analysis. I utilise FCA for its suitability for delving into the work's taxonomy as well as its ability to vi-sualise and analyse semiotic patterns and relationships within the natural language text fragments of the work. In this regard, FCA is also used as a means in which to frame what many writers have previously identified as k¯ oan-like qualities in many of Cage's works. A k¯ oan is generally understood as a type of unsolvable Zen Buddhist riddle filled with contradictions and ambiguities. I subsequently theorise Electronic Music for Piano as a type of musical k¯ oan, and by applying FCA, demonstrate how various derived formal concepts, object extensions, and subset groupings of the work supports this theory.
Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes , 2015
I argue in this paper that although there is an immediacy and visual strikingness to the design o... more I argue in this paper that although there is an immediacy and visual strikingness to the design of Japanese gardens in Japan, what is most often overlooked in reading their aesthetic qualities is an attention and balance afforded by their considerations on sound design. As such, I briefly examine historical notions regarding Japanese cultural listening modes forwarded by Imada (1994; 2012), and then through the introduction of the terminologies of acoustic ecology (Schafer 1977; Truax 2000) and aural architecture (Blesser and Salter 2007), I survey an array of typical sounds found in Japanese gardens. These sounds are then classified through the construction of a taxonomy that describes the sounds of a Japanese garden as a function of a heirachy of family (or collection), class, subclass and element. By further highlighting the connections that are established between landscape forms and those ensuing designed or anticipated sound classes that emenate from a garden's design, I argue that a Japanese garden is a synthesis of considerations born not only from visual articulations of space but those corresponding auditory and semiotic qualities that sounds potentiate.
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Videos by MICHAEL FOWLER
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Portfolio by MICHAEL FOWLER
Books by MICHAEL FOWLER
Papers by MICHAEL FOWLER
minate work 0'00'' (4 033 00 No. 2). To further investigate Greimas' actantial axes of desire, knowledge and power, I generate an ontology, O, that records the facts of the model through hierarchies of relations and concepts. This allows for a conceptual graph (CG) (Sowa 1984), C, that describes the score's instructions and its actants. Extracting subgraphs of C then allows for reasoned arguments about the implications of Cage's instructions in the score, and in particular, the composer's reference to "an obligation to others." Through a conceptual graph rule R, I offer a framework for generating the structure of a score-informed interpretation of 0'00'' (4'33'' No. 2) that is based on a number of key conditionals that map the actants of the piece, and their relation to the unfolding of the work's narrative.
[Headphone use recommended]
[Headphone use recommended]
[Headphone use recommended]
minate work 0'00'' (4 033 00 No. 2). To further investigate Greimas' actantial axes of desire, knowledge and power, I generate an ontology, O, that records the facts of the model through hierarchies of relations and concepts. This allows for a conceptual graph (CG) (Sowa 1984), C, that describes the score's instructions and its actants. Extracting subgraphs of C then allows for reasoned arguments about the implications of Cage's instructions in the score, and in particular, the composer's reference to "an obligation to others." Through a conceptual graph rule R, I offer a framework for generating the structure of a score-informed interpretation of 0'00'' (4'33'' No. 2) that is based on a number of key conditionals that map the actants of the piece, and their relation to the unfolding of the work's narrative.