PSYCHOPHYSICIST :: AUDIO COMPUTING :: ARMCOMM EUROPE CD006
The work Audio Computing has a very long history, important for many reasons. The first recording sessions of Audio Computing began (under the working title Psychophysicist II) with Adi Newton and Paul Prudence in 2016 and then continued throughout 2017. Later interrupted, the sessions for Audio Computing resumed in 2022, then continued in 2023, with Adi Newton and Fabio Kubic.
Adi Newton and Jacques Beloeil worked throughout the spring of 2023 and early summer on the production, equalization, and mastering of the album, which to call hypnotic, cohesive, and granitic in its minimal severity is an understatement.
This album has a sculpted sound, and this is truly due to the patient work of Jacques Beloeil, to whom all the work is dedicated, as he left us suddenly on June 26, 2023. This is the last album he worked on before he died. It has his soul within the sounds. It is his sonic testament and therefore has a very special importance for Adi Newton and for all of Armcomm Rizosfera Europe.
The album Audio Computing has as its conceptual origin the work of the Soviet acoustics theorist Boris Yankovsky. Boris Yankovsky (1904-1973) worked with
the Multzvuk group as a pupil of Arseny Avraamov at Mosfilm, Moscow, from
1931 to 1932. However, he grew disenchanted with what he considered to be
an oversimplified way of approaching acoustics. Yankovsky realized that pure uniform waveforms do not represent timbre and that a more complex spectral approach needed to be developed. In 1932, Yankovsky left Multzvuk to pursue his ideas of spectral analysis, decomposition, and re-synthesis.
His project was based on his belief that it is possible to develop a universal language of sounds using combinations of hand-drawn spectral ‘sound objects’ (similar to the much later cross-synthesis and phase-synthesis techniques). Yankovsky’s work has been creatively reworked by Paul Prudence for Audio Computing.
Psychophysicist is a project founded by Adi Newton & Andrew Mackenzie in 1993- 1994 to develop Psychophysics and Psychoacoustic & electronics in applied Sonology. Psychophysicist being the name of the Project and the self-titled name of the first Release (1996, Side Effect Records).