“In folk and jazz, it is respectively the song and the improvisation that count; in rock, the record is the basic unit of musical meaning.  In this respect, hip hop and techno represent the apotheosis of rock’s interest in sound-in-itself (timbre, effects) and virtual space (unrealistic acoustics) . . . its fictitious psycho-acoustic space, its timbres and textures and sound-shapes to which no ready real-world referents attach them-selves.” – Simon Reynolds –  (Reynolds, 367)

With the invention of the phonautograph, patented in 1857, “Thus came into being autographs or hand-writings of a data stream that heretofore had not ceased not to write itself.”
– Friederich Kittler –  (Kittler, 26-27)

The project Opho explores audio production via participation, probability, and synthesis.  The critical idea guiding this project considers that culturally, if humankind is to engage itself in relationships with media, objects and imaginative tools, as certainly it is, practitioners of media applications must be prepared to adopt  processes which allow for broader interpretations of trails of information in order to extract from those trails latent, previously indeterminable, impersonal meaning.  Not merely data storage, retrieval and navigation, but data and application investigation and mixturization.
(Kittler, 16, 37)

To achieve this, Opho is set forth as an experiment investigating such a proposed process—within the realm of audio production—utilizing a limited number of software applications, collaborative submissions via email and chance operations to create and manipulate audio elements into coherent structures which transcend composition intended necessarily to articulate deliberate meaning, instead focusing on the principles of tool usage, indeterminacy and information exchange.

The end result of these elements becomes a phonautograph as it were—a recorded artifact imbued with the data-stream production signatures of numerous participants collectively sharing audio data elements and agreeing to the application of ‘randomly’ derived production possibilities in order to yield a collaborative end product that could be created by no one single author. In other words, the originating data-stream signatures have undergone a transformation of both responsive (chance operations) and combinatory (re-assembling the disparate elements) processes, thus yielding a work which could never have existed via the concocting of one creative mind, nor is it the result of a true collaborative effort—in both cases, because the expected, inherited values and assumptions have undergone dramatic, unforeseeable shifts from their original states. Although the artifact will serve as a record of these concatenated collaborative forces, in fact it is the process itself that forms the basis of the product. Much like the experimental electronic process-music work of Marina Rosenfeld (who organized large groups of female musicians working freely, essentially, within a range of musical choice limitations), Opho as a completed work unfolds as a sort of orchestration of people, or the contributed source materials of participants, and instincts, or production constraint wild-cards, rather than simply being an extension of one solo artist’s musical tastes and compositional intentions.  (Holmes, 246)

With that said, a central audio producer still acts as a singular, formal Engineer (acting like a conductor, for lack of a better term) of disparate elements in order to effectively distort, re-arrange, and manipulate beyond recognition originating sound sources submitted by the collaborators. This Engineer finally places, or synthesizes, those elements into a series of sequenced events (i.e., “songs” or “tracks”, as it were), concluding in a recorded collection of various experimental works not more than 74 minutes in length (the “playback-safe” duration of a full-length CD recording). Experimental composer John Cage remarked “that there was no such thing as true randomness, just somebody’s definition of true randomness,” and that even within the acoustic realm of probability-play the intent of any musician is still to exhibit a degree of focused control within the work, even noise-art.  (Holmes, 237)  Thus the justification for still allowing for one artist to act as the central audio Engineer, or conductor, focusing these otherwise dissimilar elements into a singular coherent work.  And certainly, even though the outcome will be defined by certain constraints, or production parameters, the input for this content cannot in any way be determined solely by this Engineer, nor any other participatory artist, whose collective work all becomes subject to certain variables employing a high degree of randomness, even within the scope of a narrow range of probabilities.