Name: Emanuele Porcinai aka WSR
Nationalities: Italian
Occupation: Sound artist, composer
Current release: WSR's Dicasmia is out via Stray Signals.
Recommendations on the topic of sound:
Oliver Sacks – Musicophilia, The Mind’s Eye
Trevor Cox - Sonic Wonderland

If you enjoyed this WSR interview and would like to find out more about his music, visit Emanuele's official homepage. He is also on Instagram.



Do you think that some of your earliest musical experiences planted a seed for your interest in sound?

Definitely. The first musical experiences were very curiosity-driven, in my dad’s recording studio, trying out his gear from the 80s and 90s.

Do you experience strong emotional responses towards certain sounds? If so, what are examples for this – and do you feel there is a systematic or logic behind these sensations?

My perspective on the complexity of the emotional connections between sound and one’s own memory is difficult to explain here. But I can definitely recommend a book that is very dear to me on the topic, which is Oliver Sacks' book Musicophilia.  

Are there places, spaces, or everyday devices which intrigue you by the way they sound? Which are these?

Spaces and places - many, perhaps too many to tell. One that is dear to me even though it is a place of work is the anechoic chamber of the Technical University of Berlin, a very, very large space with little-to-no sound.

 In fact, my fascination for the many relationships between sound and space has actually led me to pursue a career, alongside the musical one - in academia in the field of acoustical engineering, which is where I am currently researching the way architectural acoustics influences musical interpretation.

For some, music equals sound, to others they are two distinct things. What is the relation between music and sound for you? Are there rules to working with sound, similar to working with harmony, for example?

I do not think so much about definitions of this sort whenever dealing with music or art in general. I think that what’s important for me is the way meaning and narrative are conveyed.

Whether this is done tonally or not (in a musical context) plays a very minor part, or at least this is the way I see it.

What were your very first active steps in terms of working with sound and how would you rate the gains made through experience - can one train/ learn being an artist/producer?

Downloading a digital audio workstation at 13 years of age was probably the first active step. Looking back now, at 32, it seems that my first years, when I had absolutely no notion of sound engineering, when youtube tutorials were not even a thing yet, were probably the years where I was most free in the creative act.

Most of my effort nowadays goes into trying to build a frame to allow that playful approach towards creation to occur. Twenty years of learning all of the tricks of making music with technological means make it difficult - but it’s a challenge worth pursuing.

For your own creativity, what is the balance and relative importance between what you learned from teachers, tutorials and other artists on the one hand – and what you discovered, understood, and achieved yourself? What are examples for both of these?

One of the things I like the most about living in this city (Berlin) is being able to cultivate a shared musical environment with friends and collaborators of mine - to name the most important one my sister Elisabetta (with whom I have the duo Aperture) and my friends Andrea Belfi, Alf Brooks, Giovanni Bonelli, Davide Luciani, Margareth Kammerer, Jordan Juras.

With some of them I co-curate the collective Stray Signals - writing and performing together with them is a vital part of my creative process and the need to share, as in give and learn, ways of expressing musical concepts is just as important as it is to explore it further in my own space.

One of the best examples I could give of learning from my peers is how to try and linger in liminality, which is something that Alf Brooks is a master of. I think this worked out well in this piece:



How and for what reasons has your music set-up evolved over the years and what are currently some of the most important pieces of gear and software for you?

The longer I make music the stronger becomes my wish to reduce my music set-up. I used to be much more reliant on gear and plugins whereas now, my dream would be to make things as simple as possible, to carve the music out with very few tools.

One of the most important ones at the moment is probably the EHX 95000, which I use to perform as well as to record pieces in multitrack without having to rely on a computer.

Yann Tiersen, in a surprising statement, told me: "I feel more sincere with electronic instruments." Is that something you can relate to?

Definitely not :)

Late producer SOPHIE said: “You have the possibility with electronic music to generate any texture, and any sound. So why would any musician want to limit themselves?” What's your take on that and the relevance of limitations in your set-up and process?

The way electronic means allow us to explore and augment texture is definitely the main reason why I still use computers to make music.

That space between natural and extended timbre of acoustic instruments that can be reached with digital signal processing is one of my lifetime fascinations.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of one of your sounds, pieces, or live performances that's particularly dear to you, please?

Back in 2015 I performed using a string instrument I built myself to be able to improvise freely with extreme timbral capabilities, combined with electronic sources.

This performance was the first one where I used the performative aspect as a way to convey energy in a live setting rather than through electronic means and it set the way to many of the processes that followed in the way I write music:



In relation to sound, one often reads words like “material”, “sculpting”, and “design”. How does your own way of working with sound look like? Do you find using presets lazy?

I personally find it difficult to work with synthesisers and electronically generated sources in general. I tend to be able to build a personal relationship with a sound-making object if I am able to have a tactile interaction with it, with the sound and vibration coming from the resonant body of the instrument.

In this respect sculpting for me has been a way, electronically, to either augment or extend the timbre of the original sound.

I am lately however becoming more interested in ways of physically sculpting sounds with unorthodox interactions with instruments, before going in the box.

To some, the advent of AI and 'intelligent' composing tools offers potential for machines to contribute to the creative process. What are your hopes, fears, expectations and possible concrete plans in this regard?

I am very skeptical of any use of AI as a way to generate narrative and meaning.

I believe the area where it is still surprisingly under researched, although potentially the most interesting, would be to generate raw elements (i.e. sound palettes) with it that one could use to make their own narratives and meaning.

How important is sound for our overall well-being and in how far do you feel the "acoustic health" of a society or environment is reflective of its overall health? What importance does silence hold in this regard from your point of view?

There is a whole, relatively new field research which spans across acoustics, urbanism, psychology, sociology and architecture that deals with these questions and that I’m interested in although not actively involved in.

I have had the chance of witnessing from up close how some key questions in this respect have been answered or at least formalised, since some of my research colleagues are working in this field - soundscape research.

I find that one of the most interesting questions is how the emotional response to different kind of sounds is affected by our own cultural background and how this translates to, in an urban environment, very different kind of interactions between people and sound.

Although the definition of silence is quite fluid I do find that pursuing absence of sound is a vital aspect of being a human being. I like to explore this in music too, in particular when performing in a more improvised acoustic setting such as with the project Aperture.

Tinnitus and developing hyperacusis are very real risks for anyone working with sound. Do you take precautions in this regard and if you're suffering from these or similar issues – how do you cope with them?

Very important. Wear earplugs :)

Seth S. Horowitz called hearing the “universal sense” and emphasised that it was more precise and faster than any of our other senses. How would our world be different if we paid less attention to looks and listened more instead?

I think that I find more interesting the question of considering the possibility of the absence of one of the two senses and be curious about what that would entail.