Train whistles keep me company, at night, suspended in sonic glop, massaged by an awareness of the landscape.   Long ago - longer than I can count - Pittsburgh was part of a large, flat plain extending from the Alleghenies to the end of the world.  The Garfield Water tower and the section of Forbes avenue running through  Squirrell Hill are reminders of this original level, when the Allegheny and Monongahela flowed broadly across the plain.   

When the glaciers receded, the flow of water increased and the rivers settled in to the deeper and narrower paths followed today. The Point is the confluence of the two contemporary rivers. If you walk down Murray avenue from Forbes, you are walking in to the vestigial river bed of tributaries that were cut off as the rivers sank further in to the bedrock.

The landscape promotes (provokes) sonic phenomena - the region is shaped like an ancient greek theatre with the Point as the proscenium.  The Point is recognizably significant.  Martin Aurand writes  in The Spectator and the Topographical City:

"Many cultures represent the center as the sacred mountain and axis mundi, the place of connection between the cosmic realms of heaven, earth and the underworld, or as the omphalos, the navel or point of creation.  Pittsburgh is, by its topographical nature, a place of differentiated space, prone to centering." (p12)

Grant Street is a rapid ascent, and forms the lip of the orchestra:  interesting to note that Grant's Hill was perhaps an ancient burial ground and in the late 19th century was lowered significantly to allow smoother roads from the water to the main section of town.

From the stage, two hills on the left (Troy and Observatory) form a wall moving East that is mirrored to the right by Mt. Washington.  Together, these diverging lines are  the walls of an auditorium ending with the back wall at the rise of Penn Hills several miles along the East Liberty plateau.

In an ancient greek theatre, the Parados was an entrance reserved for the chorus to enter the proscenium. Panther Hollow serves as parados for the Pittsburgh auditorium, rising from the Monongahela up in to Oakland and joining with the gullies around Squirrell Hill. 

The landscape modulates sound in two ways.    First, frequency appears to change as an object moves closer or farther.  We are all familiar with the sound of an emergency siren approaching at a higher frequency and then appearing to dropp as it passes.  This is a result of the Doppler effect.   

Second, the shape of a chamber affects the resonant frequencies.  Consider the didgeridoo, which is played by creating a standing wave of air inside a hollowed piece of wood, traditionally Eucalyptus.  Variations in the interior surface cause complex harmonics and overtones. A skilled player can also manipulate the harmonics by changing the shape of their mouth, moving lips and toungue to create a changing cavity.  The same technique is used to Khoomei in the Himalayan polyphonic style.  (Also the basis for a good impression of Marvin the Martian (hat tip to Earrach...))

Trains enter Pittsburgh from the East.  The sound of the engines and the sound of the whistle swirl through Panther Hollow and emerge in to the auditorium of East Liberty.  Machines in the distance are enormous drones:  bagpipes, didgeridoo or wandering throatsingers.  When we hear them sound at night, we are hearing the original noise modulated by movement through the changing resonant chambers created by the landscape.

A few years ago, friends circulated a christmas email that included a recording of a Pittsburgh  factory whistle.  The operator was manipulating the control to play christmas carols.  It must have filled the air for miles, with the same effect that a church bell would have had a thousand years ago before we filled the sonic landscape with other noises.

The recording was made by Tony Schwartz for the Smithsonian Folkways collection.



A while ago, in 2000, I gave a paper at a conference on Art and Science of Extraterrestrial Message Composition.  The conference was co-sponsored by SETI and by Leonardo, and Doug Vakoch wrote up a nice article afterwards.

I was interested in the physiology of sound, how our shaping of sound represents our bodies.   

My brief was that if we performed analysis on a large enough sample, we could identify some generic gestures, probably based on units of basic metabolism, and use that as material to construct an outbound message to ET.  

The tool for this was the spectrogram, which I started to write about in an earlier blog on Fourier transform. The spectrogram takes 'sound' out of 'music', presents the material as an artifact outside of culture.  

“A Waveform in one medium holds meaning in second.  The Paris paper started to suggest the idea of sound as an architectural object.  We could take all these sonic objects ("pieces of music"), create a morphology of generic structures, then transduce those to the electromagnetic spectrum.

(Elsewhere, I've commented on limitations of radio astronomy as the format for ET communication.)

The key to transduction is a shared measurement of Frequency.  Everything that unfolds in time can be measured with a frequency.   If something happens 10,000 times per second (10,000 Hertz)  in air, it can happen 10,000 times in electromagnetism.  Or in water.  Or soil.  Or if it happens once every 10¹⁷ seconds

To reiterate: when I say 'music', here I am not referring to cultural styles.  I am referring to the conscious manipulation of pattern as represented by a waveform that can be applied to any medium.

This handwritten graph sketches out the idea.  At the center is a linear axis, exponential values representing frequency from Zero to Infinity.

1 cycle per second, (1Hz)  is the human heartbeat.

The chart breaks down into bands of activity, representing  different sources of data, different medium.  I've been talking about Electromagnetism and the Audible Spectrum, both shown here:  but I also wanted to include biological, seismic, galactic time scales.  As the chart is developed I expect to include other animal characteristics such as whale song and insect noise.   I show  diurnal activity (ocean tides), the solar calendar and then a jump up to the current age of the universe. I could also draw a block that represents the frequency of the martian orbit, the rotation of the Milky Way, the Age of Aquarius or the frequency of a human life.

The graph represents transduction as a jump between bands - for example from audible to electromagnetic, or seismic to sonic.  This is more than just manipulating pitch to represent data.  There is a 3 dimensional mathematical artifact that is moving between media.

If we take the frequencies of Visible light (let's say around  10¹⁵ ) and Transduce that to Audible, we are first changing the mechanism generating the energy so that now energy moves through.   But we also need to consider Transposition.  10¹⁵  if played on an instrument ( a hell of an instrument) is far beyond the range of human hearing. Although sonoluminescence is an intriguing possibility.  But for us to 'hear' the pattern created by light, the number needs to be divided down so that it is more like 10^{3 .}

The math is interesting, because the fundamental relationships between frequencies are ratios rather than exact measurements.  The energy required to double the frequency is always the same.  To move from 440Hz to 880Hz requires the same energy as moving from 44000hz to 88000Hz.  Higher frequencies have a lower energy distribution.

Back to Paris for a moment.   The output of Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is a series of time-sequenced frequency arrays, which suggested to me that using some kind of algorithmic analysis (maybe humdrum?) I could look for shared sequences across a wide body of recorded samples.  Those sequences could occur in any of the measurable vectors - beginning with pitch, but also looking for patterns in the overtones, shared sequences of amplitude changes. 

(I've also thought that this could be a useful approach to whale song.  The analysis of whale song I've seen has assumed that change in pitch generates a bit of information - but if we were to apply that method to the Hildegaard sample I presented in Paris, we'd miss all the meaning.  I would propose an analysis of whale song that considers the periods of silence as a signifcator, or looks for patterns of changing amplitude at certain subsonic frequencies.)

The paper was really more a musing on the subject.  I also played a recording of a composition.  I was starting to think about composition in these generic terms.  Along with a didgeridoo, I used electronics to create other drones, pulses, nothing you would call a beat - repeated surges and upwellings.  We were fortunate to be hosted in the Malina family home:  Frank Malina was an engineer at NASA  and an artist.  Many of his pieces were painting overlapping lights with different levels that moved, rotated to create complex sequence of colour.  Roger Malina commented on how the aesthetic of the music merged well with his father's paintings.

The piece had been called Dream of a Debauched Dodo, I should dig up a cassette from the archive.  At the gentle insistence from Doug - who understood the audience better than I did -  I temporarily used the title Music for Didgeridoo and Electronics.

Button Ballet is choreographed for Button, Blackberry and Employee ID card (a strange love triangle).  There are 4 short dances, with original music that I have composed and recorded on piano along with video of the dances. 

Dance 1:  Button and Blackberry
Dance 2:  Button and Employee ID
Dance 3:  Lament for the Button
Dance 4:  Blackberry and Employee ID 

Francis Poulenc wrote a set of piano pieces called Badinage.  The word means something like "silly pieces of nothing".   In the same vein, Poulenc wrote music to accompany a recitation of Babar the Elephant.   Sometimes the greatest sadness is found in the poise required to touch lightly.

This piece could be subtitled "Idle Hands", after the un-named character who participates in each dance.

If we listen to a piece of music, it unfolds as a time-laden event.  If we consider that same piece as a spectrum, we can intuitively interact with it as a single form abstracted from linear chronology.

 Here is a spectrum taken from a recording of Mahler’s second symphony (“Urlicht”).  

The spectrum is an analytical artifact.  It reveals patterns, relationships, form.  I could zoom in and show details down to the fraction of a second - digital technology allows us to interrogate sound outside of time limited only by patience and a bit of discretionary cash.

Now.  Imagine if Mahler had begun with that image, and set about composing a piece to reveal the same form.  The compositional logic would be determined by the  visual form - not by the harmonic language, the melodic/psychologic  variations of late Vienna:  the piece composed so that a performance would have this and only this entirely specific spectral form.

Let’s consider three different species of spectral composition. 

sonic
An evolution of impressionism, a meticulous crafting of harmonics to create a specific timbre.  May mirror an existing instrument, or create an elaborate and complex evolution of sound.  Although most of the music I think of as spectral is composed using electronic means, dive in to  the composer  Giacinto Scelsi who has used orchestral resources to create music that is governed by spectral considerations. 

gestural  
Here, the spectrum is a  visual representation of form meaningful in terms of  structure or  architecture.  To help think through these ideas, I set myself the task of writing a series of pieces where the spectral building blocks are a series of rectangles.  Various sizes, some filled, some outlined with lines of different thickness.  Placed higher or lower on the frequency spectrum, overlapping or intersecting.  Overall relationships can be determined by mathematical formula.  Not being particularly adept with numbers, I choose  series like Fibonacci applied to duration (length) and frequency (height).  I worked with pure sine waves or blocks of static, and think in terms of weaving warp and woof across the spectrum.  

It is the idea that structure is a musically dominant element.  Xenakis the composer studied with Corbusier the architect.  Two interesting anecdotes:  first, Corbusier influenced the development of Pittsburgh (here, from an old Post Gazette article)

"French architect Le Corbusier, a Modernist, provided the archetype for countless urban renewal projects with his "Radiant City" concept -- a set of tall apartment and office towers surrounded by parks and superhighways.

"The whole city is a park," the architect once said."

Second:  as I sat here to write this blog, I couldn't for the life of me remember Corbusier.  I kept Googling 'Courvoisier' and wondering what the hell I was thinking.

Metanoic
This is another of my bastardized coinages.   Noia is greek for mind, and Meta is greek for ‘on steroids’.  Metanoia is a laser beam that cuts through the cerebral cortex.  Noia also appears  as the ‘noo’ in Noosphere.  

Metanoic Spectral Composition, asides from being a term that rolls over  your lips like ice cream and unfiltered Camels,  is an approach to the spectrum where the source of the visual material is more important than  the sonic output.     Ask the question:  what would the shape of Pittsburgh’s 16th street bridge sound like?  What would a spectrum taken from Sylvia Plath’s handwriting sound like,with  the spectrum of her voice reading the same text?  The  possibility for conceptual   counterpoint is considerable. 

It all requires a willingness to manipulate the technology towards a definitie if not predetermined aesthetic that  makes sure you don’t end up with crap because of too doctrinaire a commitment to the idea of it all.  

When it works, it is galactic.  Aphex Twin made an awesome track using a picture of his face.

I took an MRI of my head - the MRI where they first identified my NF2, you can see the right acoustic neuroma.  Analyzed, considered, composed with it until it became this piece, as yet untitled, but working with something  like “Galactic Mindfuck”.  It's long, over 20 minutes and is a bit unrelenting.  But I like it.

This is deeply personal, this metanoic spectral composition, it is. The composer might be is a technologist, might may be a shaman, eschataologival (outside of time, towards the end of time), fetishizing the sonic artifact.  It is a deeply romantic approach to composition.  Revealing the connections of memory.  The apperceptions of memory, the aura around a human that is the form of life (the spectral analysis of a life).

(Other songs I wrote with text by A.E. Houseman)

In an earlier post about George Butterworth and Morris Dancing, I mentioned a song cycle I had written with text by A.E. Houseman.  Butterworth wrote many songs from the same volume of poetry, A Shropshire Lad.  There were 5 songs in the set I wrote:

1.  Bring in this timeless grave
2.  With Rue my heart is laden
3.  If it chance
4.  Into my heart
5.  The true lover 

I'm in the process of uploading these from cassette.  This one, 'WIth Rue my heart is Laden" was always one of my favorites.

The performance was part of a composition seminar at the University of Pittsburgh, perhaps in 1997 but possibly in 1994.  Prism Ensemble came in for readings of student work.  The singer was Mary Nessinger, but I'm afraid I don't have a note of the pianist.  I thought this would be the song that got me the Rolling Stone cover.  Here's text of the poem:

WIth rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade 

We use "Rue" as a verb, as in to bitterly regret something.  Rue is also an herb, with an astringent quality.  I grow rue by the side of our house, mostly to remind myself of this song.

(Here  for all my Eurovision posts)

I've put together a chart that shows the first year entered for each participant nation in the Eurovision Song Contest (the red line).  Next to that, I've shown the member status for the European Union or it's predecessor organization (the blue line).  Green squares indicate years that the country won the Eurovision Song Contest.

There's a lot to pull out of this, and I'll be looking at it over the next few days.  Some information that I *haven't* yet put together would be the years when a country who had previously entered chose not to participate.  For example, I just read that Armenia is pulling out of the contest this year, probably as a result of a flare up in tensions.  I note that the publication date of that piece is May 31, 2011, just two weeks after Azerbaijan won the Eurovision Song Contest for the first time.

Participants in the Eurovsion Song Contest come from active members of the European Broadcast Union.  In order to compete, they must have broadcast the show in the previous year, and come up with some entry fee.    The European Broadcast Union is based on a region that extends in to North Africa, the middle East and Western Russia - a broadcasting region that is defined by longitude and lattitude rather than current political boundaries.  Not every active nation in the EBU has entered Eurovision, but each (and only those)  could.

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is a United Nations specialized agency responsible for assigning global radio spectrum (not sure what is the relationship between the American FCC and the ITU, an interesting tangent perhaps). The ITU defines the region of the EBU as:

The western boundary of Region 1 is defined by a line running from the North Pole along meridian 10° West of Greenwich to its intersection with parallel 72° North; thence by great circle arc to the intersection of meridian 50° West and parallel 40° North; thence by great circle arc to the intersection of meridian 20° West and parallel 10° South; thence along meridian 20° West to the South Pole.^[29]

The EBU is not affiliated with the European Union.  The European Union is the descendant of the European Economic Community (EEC) formed in 1958 (multiple modifications in form, name  and membership).  The chart shows that each of the founding members of the EEC were also part of the first Eurovision Song Contest.

I should actually reverse that, because one pattern that emerges clearly here is that membership in the Eurovision Song Contest is a strong indicator of eventual membership in the European political union. 

There would have been significant technical challenges to overcome in any live broadcast across a region with varied capabilities, standards and approaches.  The  EBU continues to provide guidance and regulation on technical matters, including for example EBU R128, published recently and which defines 'Loudness' for European broadcasts. No word yet on what they consider 'Noise'.

In 1956, the Eurovision Song Contest began with entries from Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands and Switzerland.   Joined the next year by Austria, Denmark and the United Kingdom.   It's hard to imagine the political vision (audacity) required to bring together nations who still rationed food, still laboured to rebuild town halls and cathedrals. But there you have it....when I hear people now describe Eurovision as <fill in your own dismissive term>, I have to wonder what they're looking at.  This is a model for supranational cooperation even before it is a cultural event.  It's the best we've ever done.

One of the principles of Sonicism is:

“A Waveform in one medium holds meaning in second”

A wave is the movement of energy through a medium.  We are most familiar with 'sound', which is the motion of energy as waves in air.  A wave can be analyzed mathematically through a process called Fourier analysis.  Those results can be visually represented in a spectrum.  A spectrum is an analytical artifact, a visual representation of the results of Fourier analysis.  It is also a tool that allows for intuitive reckoning with the structure of the wave. 

This is a spectral analysis taken from a fragment of whale song. 



I use Sonic Visualiser, because it is awesome and because it is free. I remember seeing pitch analysis of whale song as an undergrad in a music theory lecture. Later reading of Robert Cogan showed how spectral analysis could be used for musical thinking.

The Y-axis of a spectrum (whether music or any other wave) represents frequency - think of it as the keys on a piano, with 'up' being 'higher'.   The width of these buckets is an important consideration.  On a piano, each key represents a half step.  There are obviously an infinite degree of smaller steps in between each recognized pitch, and the same is true of the frequency buckets used for Fourier analysis.

[Now is not the time to get in to details about the well-tempered systems, plural, used on the piano over the past 4 centuries.  Suffice to say that the above statement referring to equal half steps is incorrect by ommission.  ]

So we define the granularity of the frequencies that will be represented in the analysis.  A standard default is 1026 across the audible spectrum, roughly considered 20 - 20,000 hz.  That math is beyond me, but it means that some equal distribution of frequency is assumed.

The X-axis represents time.  Just as we broke down the frequency range into buckets, so we break time into discrete windows.  Each window of time captures the frequencies present in each bucket at that instant.  From this information, our analytical tool paints a pretty picture.

Fourier analysis is based on the insight that a complex wave can be represented as the sum of many sine waves.  A complex form is revealed as a series of discrete waves, each represented at a particular frequency.  The width of the Y-axis frequency buckets in the spectrum  determines how precise we can be in isolating each discrete wave.  If those waves were added back together, the peaks and troughs would enhance or cancel each other, and the original complex waveform would be re-calculated.

Fourier analysis assumes that the wave is unchanging after the first period. Music obviously *does* change over time, as do most complex wave patterns. Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) performs Fourier analysis on each window of time, and then sequences those slices of time together. 

The results of Fourier analysis can be reversed to generate the original sound. They can also be manipulated before engineering the sound.  Visual forms can be constructed to create new waveforms.This is a particularly rich source of compositional inspiration.

Back to Sonicism. It matters not if the wave under analysis is taken from sound (energy vibrating in air) , from ocean (energy vibrating in water) from the sun (energy vibrating in the electromagnetic spectrum). If the wave can be represented mathematically, it can be engineered in any other medium.

When NASA releases ‘The Sounds of Jupiter”, we should not imagine a giant booming noise emanating across the solar system. Well, we should imagine that, because that would be cool. But what has really happened is a representation of the electromagnetic wave as a sound wave. This process, moving waves across medium, is called Transduction.

There’s a bit of coinage going on there, I use the term very loosely. A very familiar transducer is the mechanism in the human ear that takes energy waves in air and reforms them as electrical impulses in the human brain. The HiFi speaker does the same thing, taking electrical impulses from the piezo mechanism on the LP needle and groove, transferring them into vibrations on the speaker cone which then activate energy in the air.

If we were to take the direct values of the electromagnetism of the sun and represent directly as sound, it would be outside the audible spectrum. The values need to be mathematically modeled so that they appear within the desired range of the target medium. This process, we call Transposition ( a solid musical term). The maths are complex because an octave is exponential not linear: always twice the frequency. So 800 is an octave above 400 (difference of 400). 8000 is an octave above 4000 (difference of 4000).

And the octave is a relationship worth preserving in any medium.

Transduction and Transposition gives the artist a powerful set of concepts and tools.  I write ‘music’ that is ultimately intended for electromagnetic ‘performance’. It is not ‘heard’.   It is not really experienced . The musical forms exist only within the electromagnetic spectrum.  (See notes on Voices of the Noosphere, for radio telescope and didgeridoo as well as Keynote Address on Music as Cultural Dialogue, which I presented at UNESCO in 2010

What if we create waveforms that would be 'played' within the Earth, a controlled seismic event?  Or establish and control standing waves on the surface of a lake - like an enormous chinese water bowl.  Light patterns that are the direct corrollary to a piece of music - not just a laser show, but the actual transposition of sound to light?  The process is like some geomantic matrix, rich in the capability to psychogeographically manipulate the environment/noosphere. 

I imagine this is how we will identify ET culture. Their ‘instruments’ will be galactic, manipulation of gravity waves, structures of electromagnetism, formulation of time. 

Thanks Eric and Diana, we were out for a dinner a few weeks ago and spent the night watching Morris dance videos.  (Eric's blog is always worth a read...).  We watched The Way of Morris, I drank a bit of Johnny Walker Red label, and then Eric pulled out a collection of ancient film.  It was like the Hallows unveiled.  I don't remember anything of what I saw, except a granulated fragment filmed of George Butterworth dancing.

(As an aside, before this goes to far, I do need to reference A LIfe With Bells, and hope you all will watch).

Thanks to the InterWeb, which I have installed on my computer since 1994, I’ve been able to determine that what he danced was a Molly Oxford.  Here’s a still photo (again , thanks to Eric who forwarded this to me)

The image is an artifact from beyond time, recorded without sound, granular, fragmentary.  It is like memory extracted from the brain - from wherever memory resides - made real.  

Butterworth went off to the trenches and died at the battle of the Somme, age 31. 

His compositions accumulated memory.  British folk was isolated, it is hard to recall before Richard Thompson and Ashley Hutchins, a victim of the growing urbanization of the country. Butterworth  uses folk music in his orchestral pieces as a skeleton. a framework.  Morris  is the Jungian alchemical chalice.  

The romantic musical language around it is the framing, the current mind.  Music, as much as memory,  requires context.  The craft of composition is to place the memory so that it will be heard by others with the same resonance as the composer.  A simple idea, a Morris dance, now also evokes Butterworth and all related thoughts for me.  If I were to set a Morris dance, I would want you  to hear it through that filter.  The idea prima facie  exists within an aura of the original hearing.  Listen to Berio giving Mahler the treatment...Berio's music is the arc holding that experience.  In the same way Mahler treats his memory of street music. 

I never set a Morris dance, but I did write a song cycle with text by A.E Houseman.  That may not be true, I might have used a Morris dance in a piano trio I wrote, but the  piece has vanished into obscurity. Butterworth also wrote a song cycle with text by Housemann, The Shropshire Lad.  When I watch the video of Butterworth dancing the Molly Oxford, I am also seeing the memory of my own writing.  We both set With Rue My Heart is Laden ( I will try to dig out the cassette ).

Morris becomes an object in memory, as it has done for ages.  The twee dancers on the village cricket field, the scholars reading Cecil  Sharp reconstructions, the medieval Morris fornicating  fertility on the fields.  The dance is the object of memory.  In psychogeographic terms, it is a Quidd, a measurable unit of meaning placed upon the physical timestream.

Nabokov has Van and Ada speak of this, as children

“Ada had worked out her own little system. Hardly a week had elapsed since Van’s arrival when he was found worthy of being initiated in her web of wisdom. An individual’s life consisted of certain classified things: "real things" which were unfrequent and priceless, simply "things" which formed the routine stuff of life; and "ghost things," also called "fogs," such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occurring at the same time formed a "tower," or, if they came in immediate succession, they made a "bridge." "Real towers" and "real bridges" were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened, though. In some circumstances, in a certain light, a neutral "thing" might look or even actually become "real" or else, conversely, it might coagulate into a fetid "fog." When the joy and the joyless happened to be intermixed, simultaneously or along the ramp of duration, one was confronted with "ruined towers" and "broken bridges.” 

Morris has it’s darkness, it is not all hankies, sticks and swords and can be broken bridges as surely as it can be real.  So to see an image of Butterworth, moving images, dancing.  Extraordinary.  All the more so when you see this selection of photographs taken while our fond protagonists were studying Morris themselves.  Click thumbnail for full slide show: 

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation recently issued a DVD collection  of all the  television performances recorded for them by Glenn Gould.  From the early years, there is a recording of Gould rehearsing Bach Partita #2 - he's working on the articulation in a left hand passage.  Gould plays with a precision of intent, looking for not just the overall downward sweep of the gesture, but also some intricate patterning within. 

He is surrounded by his dogs, and the practice session is taking place in a cabin . Gould leaves the piano and stares out the window, continuing to mutter the rhythm of the music.  His hands are contorted, conducting, performing, extracting something from the air.  

Bach is a convenient medium for the ideas he is examining, just as the piano is a convenient instrument for expressing them in sound.  I'd go further and say that Gould is tapping in to some sonic experience which has Glenn Gould as it's most convenient avenue for expression.  Gould is ensorcelled.  No wonder he has his dogs around, they are atavistic companions to ensure a safe return. It makes me think of Carl Ruggles Sun-Treader.  Ruggles also had an unrestrained, magnificent relationship to counterpoint and the title for his symphony comes from Robert Browning describing Shelley --"Sun-treader--life and light be thine for ever."  We don't think of Gould as a romantic pianist, but that's because of the repertoire he preferred.  His approach to sound belongs with Shelley, although Gould wasn't one for jumping on the roof or sailing in home made boats. 

The interface for all that are these fingers.   Gould sat low at the piano, using a 14 inch stool his father made for him as a boy and which he used for the rest of his life.  Who knows what really this allowed.  Certainly the leverage on the hands would be affected. 

The physical act of playing is more important to me than the sound created.  In part no doubt because my damaged hearing  interferes with the one, I'm never sure exactly what I'm hearing any more.  But the haptic sense of a piece has always been important.  My teacher, Natash Chances, had been a student of Cortot.   I practiced the Cortot exercises as a student.  The exercises begin with each finger holding down a key so as each progressively complicated pattern is played, the non-active fingers stay sunk in the keys. 

Gould practiced 'Finger Tapping' exercises developed by his teacher (Guerrero).  The music was played slowly, hands separately, and with the non-active hand tapping the fingers of the hand under examination. 

When I play, I sit fairly high and often press my leg up against the base of the keyboard.  I feel like the keys are being moulded by the action, like clay.  Other players, you can see that .they are leaning in from above, the full strength of their torso used to impress the instrument.  And then there's this guy

None of this prevents a delicate tone.  I'm speaking of the root for the pianistic movement.  The hands take all that energy, channel into specific articulation, from whatever the source,  Sitting so low, Gould would be pulling the keys in towards him. 

Speculation. Time to listen.