𝒹𝒾𝑔𝒾𝓉𝒶𝓁 𝓂𝑒𝒶𝒹𝑜𝓌

FOR LA PHIL

Words by Jacob Cooper & Caila Gale

This past year (2024), LA Phil's 12-hour new-music marathon, Noon to Midnight, curated by Pulitzer-prize winning composer Ellen Reid, explored the intersections of art, technology, and nature through the theme of field recordings, the act of capturing audio in natural or built environments outside of a studio setting. 

Inspired by the festival and itching to be involved, staff members Caila Gale and Jacob Cooper pitched their colleagues on an idea: Create an accompanying digital project that delves into the festival’s themes, bringing the essence and energy of the day online. But, how? 

Reflecting on the experience of listening to field recordings and considering how composers recontextualize sounds, Gale and Cooper sought to create what they called "a sort of digital field recording,” repurposing a familiar platform in an unconventional way. 

Enter the 𝒹𝒾𝑔𝒾𝓉𝒶𝓁 𝓂𝑒𝒶𝒹𝑜𝓌: a spreadsheet that invites users to explore nature and the nature of sound. Jacob and Caila sat down to talk about creating this work.

Caila: In choosing the spreadsheet as medium, we wanted to challenge the way users interacted with a familiar platform and create something artistic in an otherwise unexpected place. How do you describe it? What do you say? 

Jacob: I have been describing it as a visual and innovative exploration of a festival inspired by sound and field recordings. We made a web experience using a Google Sheet! 

Caila: When I pitched making a spreadsheet, what was your reaction? 

Jacob: I was really down to explore the idea. To me, it read very “early internet” in terms of being limited on what we could and couldn’t do with the platform we were going to build on. It reminded me of having to hack at my old AOL (I’m dating myself) or Myspace profile just to make it look cooler.

Caila: This was something we very much created together. What was that like and where do you see that reflected? Do you consider anyone else collaborators? 

Jacob: I love collaborating! I almost prefer it. I see a lot of things we both like, but also what represents the LA Phil as well. Mark McNeill and Julia Ward, the people behind curating Noon to Midnight, were phenomenal in keeping us on track and not letting us venture out too far. Sometimes that’s needed in a project like this. I was worried we would end up with 500 tabs at times, haha. 

Caila: I wish we had 500 tabs! How long do you say it took versus how long do I say it took? 

Jacob: This is up for debate, but I feel like we spent something like three months on it? Maybe because we had so many inceptions of it at first and were testing things out. It was really a piecemeal at the beginning, and we had a few different meetings about it with different people at the org. Maybe it felt like three months, I don’t really understand time anymore. I’m glad the result was what it was, either way.

Caila: Is there anything you wish we did differently? This could be inclusive of content or ideas that didn’t make it to the final version. And it’s also fine if the answer is no. 

Jacob: I think it was a perfect exercise, and I really wouldn’t have done anything differently. It’s really hard to say what I wish we could’ve done differently because Google Sheets aren’t intended for a presentation like this, but that’s kind of the whole point. 

Caila: Do you have a favorite tab? 

Jacob: I like the home page tab a lot, mostly because it’s a fun collage of animated GIFs to build a whole visual scene using cells behind to compliment them. There’s a number of easter eggs you can find on this tab that show more about the research behind the field recordings.

Caila: What did you learn? 

Jacob: I learned a lot of interesting info on plant bioacoustics, skyquakes, and music composed using data sonifications from NASA’s Chandra, Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes. I know you also spent a lot of time researching the history and theory behind field recordings and sounds in nature. What was one of the most fascinating things that you learned and how did you apply those learnings to this project? 

Caila: Can I answer with something fascinating that I didn’t get to incorporate? So much of what I learned is present, and I hope people discover that, but there’s just as much that I wanted to include that didn’t make it in. 

I’m really inspired by the work and ideas of artist and technologist Laurel Schwulst. While channel surfing on Are.na, I came across her research on St.GIGA, the world’s first digital satellite radio station. Founded in Japan in the early '90s, St.GIGA featured a 24-hour stream of ambient music, field recordings, jazz, and occasional poetry, with its programming dictated entirely by the ocean tides. It feels deeply aligned with the spirit of this year’s Noon to Midnight Festival (2024).

Jacob: How do you think our POV related back to the festival’s curation? 

Caila: I’ve always viewed this as a companion piece, inspired by the themes and artists in Noon to Midnight, rather than an overt part of it. I came across this word, parergon, a while back, which is the perfect way to describe it. A parergon is something “viewed as separate from an artwork it frames but merges with the milieu.” (1)

The digital meadow engages with the themes of the festival, like sound, nature, deep listening, vibrations, energy — all of which are part of field recordings — but uses them as a springboard to go wider, deeper, and sideways. 

The tab “Ultrachromatic Revelations” is a good example of this. The name of the sheet is a term coined by avant-garde microtonalist composer Ivan Wyschnegradsky, who has absolutely nothing to do with the festival per programming, but believed in, “creating a work capable of awakening in every man the slumbering forces of cosmic consciousness.” (2)  like Laraaji. There are so many of those types of connections, within that sheet, and in others throughout. I really hope people spend time with it and poke around.

Jacob: If you search meticulously, you’ll find a lot of interesting things in what we built. If you could change one thing about the finished product, what would it be? 

Caila: If we had worked within a single Google Sheet from beginning to end, the version history could have become part of the work, documenting the evolution and rendering the act of creation visible. 

Jacob: Write a tagline to describe your working style. 

Caila: That’s tough. I’d like to think I approach each project a little differently. For the digital meadow, the tagline would be, “Just do it.” I needed to jump in and get started. To explore the possibilities and limitations of the medium. To figure out what works, in part, by what doesn’t. This impulse was also driven by the fact that we weren’t making it solely for ourselves but in response to a larger festival organized by our colleagues, Mark McNeill and Julia Ward. Having various in-progress tabs for them to respond to helped me get a better sense of how they viewed the project and what aligned, or didn’t, with the festival. 

Jacob: What do you think is missing in the visual/digital landscape that this project satisfies? 

Caila: I always want to see more handmade, fun, weird, experimental, temporal, site-specific, soft, kind, poetic websites. I want an internet that connects more than it divides. And one that’s considerate, of the planet and each other. 

Jacob: If you had a direct line to the Google team that manages Sheets, what feature would you pitch to them? 

Caila: Practically, the ability to run app scripts without having to make the sheet publicly editable. That limitation really bothered me. 

Jacob: If you were a field recording, what would it sound like? 

Caila: The percussive sound of someone hitting the backspace key repeatedly. What would yours sound like? 

Jacob: The sound of my dogs chewing on apples or crackers on loop.

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Acid Free

Editors 
Akosa · Catherine Falls · Jenny Galipo · Lisa Kahn
SL Leimbach · Vern Molidor · Kelli Yakabu

Editor-in-Chief
Jen Neville

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Zaira Torres

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