Sit with Sound: A Conversation with Sarah Belle Reid

Far too many people use the terms listening and hearing interchangeably. But in reality, as composer Pauline Oliveros noted, “listening is not the same as hearing and hearing is not the same as listening.” The key distinction between the two is the amount of intentional effort the perceiver puts into understanding their surroundings. Listening requires mental labor that hearing does not. When one more actively engages with sound, they can find merit in almost anything they hear. Listening can reveal the emotional depths and power of sounds that mere hearing may suggest as just “noise.” This is the area in which sonic polyglot Sarah Belle Reid thrives. 

Initially trained in classical trumpet performance, Reid was indoctrinated in concepts that there is a “correct” way to make music and that certain sounds were superior to others. But she never seemed quite content with these explanations. She loved the music she could make, but something in the restrictions of her artistic upbringing seemed off. While attending the California Institute of the Art for her graduate studies, Reid encountered two masters of improvised music – Charlie Haden and Wadada Leo Smith – who pushed her to look beyond the notes on the written page. Her time at Cal Arts also exposed Reid to a whole new realm of electronic sounds, ultimately earning her Doctorate with a focus on developing new electronic instruments and musical notation systems. Without abandoning her classical moorings, the confluence of elements of improvisation and electronics has veered Reid onto a new path, one all her own. 

Reid’s music lies at the cutting edge of composition and performance. Highlights include the horrifyingly captivating marriage of horror film soundtracks, grindcore, and tape music on MASS (self-release, 2021). Or, more recently, Nows (Ravello, 2022), her duo with neurofeedback pioneer David Rosenboom, a fascinating study of paradoxes. The album, recorded remotely during the pandemic, focuses on collaborative co-presence. It utilizes many familiar sounds, including those of household appliances, but chooses to leave so much open to interpretation. NOWS is a wild journey through various sounds, never placating or coddling the listener but leaving them to their own devices to decipher it all. The duo will be particularly fascinating to hear live, as will occur on November 15, 2023, at Roulette Intermedium. 

We sat down with Reid to discuss her path from classical training into these less explored sonic kingdoms and how they led to NOWS. We also cover Learning Sound and Synthesis, a unique online program that allows Reid to share her passion for experimental music with people of all experience levels and teach them how to harness the power of synthesizers for their own creative self-expression. 

PostGenre: Your background is primarily in Western classical music, correct?

Sarah Belle Reid: Yes, my origins are in classical orchestral music. That was my original training for many years before coming more into the electro-acoustic acoustic experimental improvisational world. 

PG: Does “jazz” fit into that picture as well?

SBR: I do see influences from the more experimental side of jazz in my works, in terms of improvisation. But I don’t necessarily think of what I do as fitting into any particular genre, to be honest. Many of my influences come from the jazz world but my music equally pulls from jazz, classical, noise, old tape music, and everything in between.

PG: Generally, Western classical music heavily emphasizes using acoustic instruments to play the part as written. Was it difficult to make the leap to electronics and improvisation? 

SBR: For me, it was a gradual shift. There was something that I always craved and wanted to explore in my music-making that emphasized a little more self-expression. I don’t think I even fully understood what I was looking for in my training as a younger student but something felt not quite right. Something wasn’t aligned for me. When I started to discover the more experimental corners of the music world, I felt that I had found my community and home in a very big way. The experience was incredibly liberating.  

The transition was difficult in the sense that it took a lot of courage to do something that I had never done before. I distinctly remember the first time I ever attempted to improvise and do something that wasn’t written down and strictly notated. It was an intense and very awkward experience. But the transition was also easy in the sense that I found a very welcoming community using electronics and it felt much more closely aligned with my path. It was a door opening for me. 

PG: Was that first time improvising when you were studying with Charlie Haden?

SBR: Yeah, it was with Charlie.

PG: How important do you feel having studied with him and with Wadada Leo Smith was to you in finding your musical path?

SBR: They were both really important relationships to me. Both Charlie and Wadada asked to hear my voice. That was something very new to me as someone training to be a classical musician. My whole training was about interpreting the music or executing the music that the composer wrote in the way that the composer intended. Improvising was a whole new approach. Previously, I had never really been asked before what I wanted to say on my instrument. 

Both Charlie and Wadada, in their own very different and very unique ways, gave me permission to explore. They were both committed to wanting me to follow my own path. Neither cared about the “correct” way to do things like playing the “right” notes. Instead, they wanted me to say something myself, in whatever way it came out. Those relationships with Charlie and Wadada were really important in my journey. I worked with them both for a relatively short time, but they had a huge impact on me. 

PG: One thing Wadada is known for is his adoption of Ankhrasmation, his system of graphic notation. You also often use graphic notations. How different are your graphic notations from his work with Ankhrasmation? 

SBR: My notations are very different from those using Ankhrasmation because the notations I use were developed separately. I use a very different approach in applying them. But I did draw a lot of influence from how Wadada thinks about notating parameters of sound that you might not typically notate in traditional Western notation. Wadada likes to notate ideas around the velocity of a sound or the velocity of music. Instead of velocity, I was very inspired by the idea of notating different aspects of density. That can be temporal density – how sounds unfold in time. Or it can be spacial density – how much space and silence is in between sounds or within a sound. Or it can be spectral density – how pure or how complex the sound is. 

PG: What interested you in using density as a focus?

SBR: Well, I started as a trumpet player. When I added electronics to my work, it opened me up to a huge new sound world that wasn’t part of the standard tuned pitches or rhythms I was familiar with from playing trumpet. Instead, the focus was entirely on sound and how sound changed over time. This idea of density was something I gravitated towards and felt like it was a helpful way to notate sound for the sake of sound and not the instrument creating it. 

Another thing that has heavily influenced me is spectromorphology, which is the study of how sound changes over time and how people perceive it. Spectromorphology has some origins back to [composer] Pierre Schaeffer in early musique concrète. Lasse Thoreson has also done a lot of work in this area, as has Dennis Smalley. The idea is to come up with a system for notating sound itself, not necessarily “musical sound” in a traditional sense but all sounds. It could be something like studying bird songs or the sound of traffic and how it evolves and changes over time. 

PG: Since you are looking at the properties of sound, do you take much inspiration from the work of people like Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail who focused on spectralism?

SBR: Not directly. I’m mostly listening to sounds in a more conceptual way. I’m more focused on how a sound feels over time than the technicalities of sound waves. I am primarily interested in the emotional implications that a sound may have on the listener over time and how with temporal persistence, even a very noisy sound can sound better. A blast of white noise can become something that we perceive as being very simple and lose density over time if we sit with it for a while. 

PG: Earlier you mentioned how you needed to approach sound differently once you started using electronics compared to your more traditional trumpet training. Do you feel that your experience with electronics has also changed how you approach trumpet performance itself?

SBR: Yeah, 100%. One of the best things that happened to me when I first started working with electronics was that I realized how much more vocabulary I could have on the trumpet than I did previously. I started to hear things like noise going through filters and sounds that were modulated or frequency shifted in different ways. I would go back to my trumpet and try to find those sounds on the horn. I realized that air through tubes often sounds a lot like noise through filters and that you can manipulate and modulate the sound coming through the horn manually. For example, singing and playing at the same time can sound a lot like vocoding or audio rate modulation. I started to find different crossovers between the trumpet and the electronic sound world. I feel like working with electronics opened up a huge new vocabulary for me. Even from early on, I was trained that there were “bad sounds” you should avoid, things like a split tone or a wobble in your sound or noise at the beginning of your attack. But now, where I can come in and out of those sounds and then go to a pure steady tone, is so beautiful. I find all the in-between sounds to be some of the best parts of the instrument. 

PG: How do you determine which electronic elements to incorporate into your work? Do you have a methodical system or is it a lot of trial and error?

SBR: Things often start with trial and error. I might work on a patch or play with an instrument and hear something that I like and follow up and expand on it. But when I’m composing or preparing for a performance, I do tend to eventually settle on a sound world. I live with that sound world for a while, maybe a few months, and get into it. I almost treat the patch that I’ve created as a fixed instrument, more like the trumpet, that I can’t just unpatch and change. I take a relatively fixed timbre and sound world and play that instrument for three or six months and get to know it. 

PG: Where does MIGSI [Minimally Invasive Gesture Sensing Interface] fit into that?

SBR: MIGSI was my first step into the world of electronic music. When I was doing my graduate studies at [the] Cal[ifornia Institute of the] Art[s], I took a class that focused on designing new interfaces for musical expression. I ended up reading a paper some folks at the University of Victoria, in Canada, had written about a sensor-based interface they made to put on a trumpet. Their sensor would detect the movement of the valves on the trumpet. Their project was fascinating but was never really put into practice. I was very intrigued by it, so I sent the researchers a message and asked if I could keep going with their research. They were very excited by that idea and I ended up working on it for the better half of my Master’s degree along with MIGSI’s co-creator Ryan Gaston. We ultimately made a new version of the sensor-based interface with optical sensors in the valves to detect valve movement, pressure sensors on the valve casing to detect hand tension as you’re holding the horn, and an accelerometer to detect the tilt of the instrument. MIGSI fits into everything else I have done with electronics because it was a bridge between the trumpet and the electronic side of things. 

PG: So you no longer use MIGSI?

SBR: At the moment I’m in a little bit of an in-between phase with MIGSI. The original prototype we developed is old and needs a little reconstruction. But I still use it. And even when I’m not playing with the MIGSI hardware, all of the ideas around interaction and connecting the trumpet sonically to the electronics is something that I work into every single project that I do. 

PG: As far as your graduate studies, David Rosenboom was your doctoral advisor, correct?

SBR: He was one of them, yeah. 

PG: Since then, you released a duo album with him, NOWS. How important do you feel knowing each other and working together previously was to producing the album?

SBR: Well, we had a lot of opportunities for deep conversations about topics that matter to both of us, like imaginative listening, the perception of time, and what both mean in terms of music and improvisation. Doing my doctoral research and getting to work through many of those big questions with him gave us a solid conceptual framework and foundation for our duo project. So, when it came time to record the album, we decided not to talk at all. We didn’t want to overthink things. We wanted to let the music emerge on its own.

PG: Your upcoming performance at Roulette will be the premiere of your duo project. For NOWS, you worked remotely together during the pandemic and figured out how to have a conversation from afar. Do you feel the music will be different when you’re actually playing next to each other in a live setting? 

SBR: Yeah, that’s a really interesting question. The way we collaborated when we made the album was a little unique. Instead of just passing files back and forth, listening to them, and iterating on them, we set up a specific time every week when we would each go into our studios to create simultaneously without worrying about being able to hear each other or connect with each other online. 

Our process was a very conceptual thing, but the idea was that if we were each at our instrument at the same time, even on opposite sides of the country, we knew the other person was there, listening, and co-creating. We tried to create our side of things, our piece of the track, while listening and imagining what the other person might do with it as well. But it always felt like a real-time collaboration even though we didn’t get to hear the other person’s side until after we composited the tracks together. 

I think the live performance will be different because we will be creating in the same physical space. But we’re still coming into it with that same sense of deep listening and letting happen whatever spontaneously emerges in the moment. 

PG: Will you be using the same instrumentation live as on NOWS? For the album you collectively use an impressively long list of instruments – quarter-tone flugelhorn, piccolo & C trumpets, Buchla modular synthesizer, voice, MaxMSP, no input mixer, Make Noise Strega, Eurorack modular synthesizer, bowed metal, NS five-string electric violin, Make Noise 0-Coast and 0-Ctrl, Lexicon MPX1, computer, tuning forks, ocarina, aboriginal clap sticks, lizard rattle, herald trumpet, rawhide and wood drum, monkey drum, tambourine jingles, numerous original samples, amplified household objects, field recordings, and other sounding objects. 

SBR: [laughing] No, we won’t be playing all of them. For practical purposes, we will be a little reduced in terms of instrumentation. There were many random things that we used on the record. One of the perks of recording from home is that you can go to your kitchen and mic up a blender if you want to. We won’t be doing that live. But, in place of those sounds, we will be bringing in some sampled material and field recordings to still have that kind of sound world. In terms of live instruments, I will be providing trumpet, voice, and electronics, both laptop and modular. David will play the electric violin, modular synth, and some other electronics as well. 

PG: You will also each present new compositions. What can you share about your new pieces?

SBR: We’re each going to premiere a new solo piece.  Mine will be a new work for trumpet, modular synth, and electronics. Like a lot of the work I have been doing lately, it will be an investigation into how we grapple with time and memories. I’m fascinated by the fact you can have certain insignificant, fleeting moments that, for some reason, linger with you forever while other precious things that feel like they mean the world to you can fade away, disintegrate, and get lost. The piece is the result of my grappling with these types of issues. I’ll be working with different ways to manipulate time through feedback loops, glitching, and capturing snippets of audio. 

PG: Since you mentioned synthesizer a few times, one of your projects is to teach an online program called Learning Sound & Synthesis (LSS) where you teach others to play synth. You also previously taught college courses. What do you like about teaching LSS compared to instructing in a more formal setting?

SBR: I love teaching in general. I had a great time teaching at the colleges that I did, but one of the things I love about independently teaching is that I am working with people from all over the world and from all different chapters in their lives. Some of the students are folks who are fresh out of school, starting out, and building their careers. Others are retired and, for the very first time, coming to their lifelong passion project of making music. Some students have been professional musicians for thirty years and are looking to pivot or for a change to something new. The diversity of the students is very inspiring to me because the conversations that they cause to emerge are incredibly rich and meaningful. 

I also really love that with LLS I can go as deep into an area as I want to. That aspect is a little different from my experience teaching at colleges, where you are confined within the bounds of a semester and course plan. When students get intrigued or passionate about a certain topic we can go there in LSS. I love that because I’m a giant nerd and teach all of this because I find it so fun and fascinating. When something comes up that isn’t in the class or hasn’t been discussed yet, I get very excited. I get a lot out of teaching the class in terms of a constant renewal of inspiration.

PG: And as a final question, earlier you mentioned integrating interesting sounds into the music. But what is music? Do you ascribe to the view of John Cage that all sound is music?

SBR: That’s a good question and I could talk about it for a very long time. But ultimately, I don’t think there is a distinction between “music” and “sound.” I find as much intrigue and beauty in the sound of a construction site or a suitcase being wheeled over a sidewalk as I do listening to more traditional instruments. 

I’m also heavily inspired by people like Pauline Oliveros, who talk about the act of listening as a way of connecting to sound and discovering, through sound, something about both the world and yourself. In an interview, Pauline Oliveros expressed the idea that if you encounter a sound that you don’t like or that makes you uncomfortable, that’s the best sound to stay with. The best thing to do is to linger with that sound long enough to try to understand it more. That’s an approach that I try to take whenever I hear something I don’t really understand at first. I try to approach it with curiosity rather than closing the door. I try to sit with the sound for a while and listen to it a bit deeper. Even play with it a little. And, ultimately, I see what I can learn from it. Some of the best sounds are those you don’t understand easily. Sometimes it takes a while to understand something that asks you to listen in a new way, beyond your familiarity and comfort. And that is beautiful.

NOWS is now available on Ravello Records and can be purchased on Bandcamp. The duo will also perform at Roulette Intermedium on Wednesday, November 15, 2023 at 8:00 PM. More information on the event, including how to purchase tickets, can be found on Roulette’s website. The evening can also be livestreamed, for free, on Youtube and will be archived for future viewing. More information on Sarah Belle Reid can be found on her website. You can find more about Learning Sound and Synthesis here.

Photo credit: Scott Groller