|
LMJ 16 CD COMPANION
Interpreting the Soundscape
Contributors' Notes
Tonya Wimmer: Scotian Shelf 1 and Scotian Shelf 2
Sounds of seismic survey and delphinid (dolphins or pilot whales) whistles and clicks recorded in the Atlantic Ocean off Nova Scotia, May 2001.
Contact: Tonya Wimmer, Whitehead Lab, Biology Department, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3H 4J1. E-mail: <twimmer@dal.ca>.
In January 2001, I started my master of science research with Hal Whitehead at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The focus of my research was endangered northern bottlenose whales, a beaked whale species that very few people in the world have ever seen.
Northern bottlenose whales are 30--35 ft in length and, due to the presence of a long beak, look somewhat like very large dolphins. The one place in the world where northern bottlenose whales can regularly be found is in the Sable Gully, a large underwater canyon off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada. Previous research has shown that a large proportion of bottlenose whales are present in the canyon at any given time; however, they frequently leave the canyon and it was not known at the time where they would go. My research focused on sailing along the continental slope off Eastern North America looking and listening for bottlenose whales. While conducting these surveys off Nova Scotia, I recorded sounds made by oil and gas companies to find petroleum deposits under the sea floor. I recorded these sounds using a hydrophone towed from the 40-ft sailing vessel Balaena [1].
In order to find deposits under the sea floor, oil and gas companies project very loud sound sources from a series of hydrophones towed by a boat (this is called seismic exploration). These sounds are directed straight down from the vessel and bounce off the sea floor and the different layers of material beneath it. The properties of the returning echo tell scientists what type of material the layers are made of and where oil or gas deposits might be. The sound being emitted is very loud (typically > 200 dB) and is emitted every 12--15 seconds for several hours at a time. Seismic programs can last several weeks to months in a given area. While the majority of the sounds are directed towards the sea floor, some are carried horizontally as well and can be detected hundreds of kilometers away. The recordings presented here were made approximately 20 nautical miles away from our research location.
When listening to the second recording one can also hear whistles and the high frequency clicks of dolphins or pilot whales. Sound is the primary mode of communication for whales, dolphins and porpoises. These animals have extremely sophisticated and sensitive hearing and sound-production organs. While it is not known exactly what impact these loud human-created sound sources will have on these animals, there is evidence that they can have very serious impact on their communication abilities and have even led to the death of some animals.
Note
1.
A 3-m hydrophone was deployed from the vessel, and recordings were made using an analogue NAGRA reel-to-reel recorder at 38.1 cm/sec. The selected recordings are of seismic sounds heard 25--27 May 2001 and were recorded while surveying was being conducted along the slope edge of the Scotian Shelf off Nova Scotia, Canada. The seismic sounds were being shot on the Scotian Shelf off Nova Scotia to determine potential locations of oil and gas deposits. The results have been documented in my thesis at Dalhousie University.
Tonya Wimmer is a marine biologist who studies marine mammals in Nova Scotia, Canada. She is from Nova Scotia and believes very strongly in the protection of the marine environment, not just for sustainable human activities but, more importantly, for the many species that inhabit the ocean. She completed her master of science degree in biology at Dalhousie University in 2003 and is the president and coordinator of the Marine Animal Response Society (MARS). MARS is a charitable organization dedicated to the conservation of marine animals in Nova Scotia through rescue, education and research. She is currently working to raise funds to expand the network to the entire Maritime Provinces in Canada and develop a dedicated research survey program. She also works closely with other environmental organizations to protect the marine environment through the development of integrated management plans for human activities occurring in the waters surrounding the Maritime Provinces.
Andrea Polli and Joe Gilmore: N. April 16, 2006
Sonification of measured (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Arctic program) and model weather data, April 2006. Data modeling by Patrick Market, University of Missouri.
Contact: Andrea Polli, Department of Film and Media Studies, Hunter College, 695 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10021, U.S.A. E-mail: <apolli@hunter.cuny.edu>. Web site: <www.andreapolli.com>.
"What may not be expected in a country of eternal light? I may there discover the wondrous power which attracts the needle and may regulate a thousand celestial observations that require only this voyage to render their seeming eccentricities consistent forever."
---Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
N. is a collaborative audio-visual installation that takes real time on-line data gathered from research stations in the Arctic to build an audiovisual representation of the changing climate and conditions at the North Pole.
English Romantic literature is filled with ideas of polarity, contrary forces, attraction and repulsion, separation and reconciliation. From this perspective, the North Pole functions as a symbol of the fusion of opposites, combining natural beauty and brutality. The Pole is not simply a desolate and remote environment but is remote to a glorified extent. N. is an artistic visualization and sonification (direct translation of data to sound) of near real-time Arctic information from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Arctic research program combined with climate model data compiled by meteorologist and snow and ice specialist Patrick Market of the University of Missouri. According to scientists, a dramatic warming trend experienced by the Arctic over the last decade may accelerate global climate change. The N. installation expresses the isolation and environmental extremes of this remote region and addresses the importance of the region to the global ecosystem. A portion of the raw sound material used in N. comes from live sferics (short for atmospherics)---global electromagnetic transmissions of lightning. The INSPIRE VLF (very low frequency) receiver at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center is the source for this live audio stream. N. also makes use of a custom open-source object for Max/MSP called Datareader, which I designed with artist and programmer Kurt Ralske. Datareader is designed to automatically input and use scientific tables of data in real time to alter imagery and sound.
N. is an ongoing, evolving composition. Directly tied to the turbulent weather of the Pole, the composition is ever-changing, transforming in completely unexpected ways. In the tradition of artworks such as On Kawara's One Million Years, Agnes Denes's Tree Mountain---A Living Time Capsule and Jem Finer's Longplayer, a 1,000-year sound composition, N. unfolds and evolves on a climatological temporal scale, a scale far beyond an individual human lifetime. N. also addresses an increasingly alarming acceleration of the known rate of climate change. In the context of the Kyoto Protocol, the European Union recently defined dangerous levels of temperature change to be 2.5 <degree symbol> C. However, in only 10 years, average temperatures in the Arctic have increased almost 9 <degree symbol> C. In global climate research, a change of this magnitude at this speed is unprecedented. N. tracks the changes at the pole and begs the question: How much is too much?
Joe Gilmore is a sound artist living in the north of England. He is co-founder of rand()%, an Internet radio station that streams real-time generative music by International sound artists, composers and programmers. His music has been released on various labels, including Line, Melange and Alku.
Andrea Polli is a digital media artist living in New York City. She works with city planners, environmental and atmospheric scientists, historians and other experts to look at the impact of climate on the future of human life both locally and globally. Her most recent work, Atmospherics/Weather Works, focuses on developing systems for understanding storms through sound.
Jacob Kirkegaard: Concert Room
Recording of a concert room in the abandoned city of Pripyat, in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, October 2005.
Contact: Jacob Kirkegaard. E-mail: <solvind@myinternet.dk>. Web sites: <fonik.dk>, <secretsounds.dk>.
For my contribution to the Interpreting the Soundscape CD, curated by Peter Cusack, I chose to work on a raw recording from the zone of exclusion in Chernobyl, Ukraine. I made the recording in the afternoon of 26 October 2005 in a concert room in the abandoned city of Pripyat. I placed a microphone in the middle of the room, pushed the "record" button and left the building.
There is a piano in the room, an armchair and a broken shelf. Sheets of music are spread about on the floor. The green wallpaper is flaking off the wall, and fungi have painted the walls black. Otherwise, the room is quite empty. All the windows have been smashed. There is the sound of autumn leaves moving across the floor, and then a tone seems to appear from somewhere behind. Discrete. Disappearing. Reappearing. I wonder if it comes from my recording equipment, but my computer is in the room next door. The only thing I have placed in the concert room is a Sanken CSS5 shotgun microphone. It is connected to a 30-m cable that leads out of the room directly into to my computer.
I had traveled to Chernobyl to select and carry out sound recordings of four rooms that had once been active meeting points, sites of human activities. Despite the absence of people, these rooms still existed as spaces with a history and contaminated with nuclear radiation. These recordings were ultimately released as 4 Rooms by Touch in 2006. I had drawn inspiration from Alvin Lucier's piece I Am Sitting in a Room (1970). Lucier recorded his voice in a room and played this recording back into the same room again and again, until his voice gradually started to dissolve into a singing drone. Instead of mirroring my own voice into the four rooms I visited in Chernobyl, I chose to experiment with the sounds of the rooms themselves. I recorded 10 minutes in each room and then played the recording back into the room while recording it again. This process was repeated up to 10 times. As the layers got denser, each room began to slowly reveal a drone with various overtones.
I spent 3 days in the so-called "Zone of Exclusion" carrying out this method of sound mirroring, and I experienced how different tones grew out of the rooms. I started to wonder where these tones came from. How did they materialize in these seemingly silent spaces? Was I bringing forth a micro-activity that only unwraps itself to the human ear when it is made denser by technical means? Am I just creating a slow feedback? Or could it be myself, my physical or mental presence that opens a gate to a world that was formerly inaudible? An empty room might be "nothing"---i.e. dead in itself---or "something"---i.e. alive and reverberating---but if it suddenly wakes up and starts to sing, something extraordinary must have happened. Simply to leave a microphone in an abandoned room will produce changes. To play back the recording of the room will add something new, give an input, create a disturbance. No matter how careful I might have been not to interfere with it during the recordings, there was an exchange taking place between the room and the microphone.
When I got home I felt inspired to listen more closely to the first takes of these recordings. I was curious to hear whether the tones I had evoked could be heard in the first recordings of the rooms. Were they somehow always there? When did I first perceive them? Would I have to layer the room and know its tone before I was able to "hear" the room as it really sounded?
Concert Room begins with the raw recording. After 3 minutes I start filtering the recording in order to bring forth the emerging tone that I heard. As the track moves on, I let this tone unfold and come out stronger, while at the same time the other sounds of the room begin to fade.
Acknowledgment
Thanks to Siegfried Zielinski and Anthony Moore at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, Mike Harding and Jon Wozencroft at Touch and Rimma Kiselitsa (in memoriam) at Chornobylinterinform. My warmest thanks to Sarah Kirkegaard.
Jacob Kirkegaard investigates sonic membranes and discrete interference occurring in different environments. A graduate of the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany, Kirkegaard has lectured on archaeological and spatial aspects of sound at the Academy of Architecture in Copenhagen. His works include live performances, film music, installations and compositions: Among them are Soaked, in collaboration with Philip Jeck (Touch, 2002), 01.02 (Bottrop-boy, 2003) and Eldfjall (Touch, 2005). Together with CM von Hausswolff, Jim Thirlwell, Brandon Labelle and others, Kirkegaard takes part in the development of the traveling sound project Freq Out. In his new work for Touch entitled 4 Rooms (2006), Kirkegaard explores the sonic legacy of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. His works have been presented at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark, KIASMA art museum in Finland, Transmediale, Kölnischer Kunstverein and the Gallery Rachel Haferkamp in Germany. Jacob Kirkegaard was born in Denmark. He lives in Germany.
Chris Watson: Blue Grass Music and Ant-Steps
Insect chorus track from down amongst the Blue Grass of Kentucky. Wood Ant extract from the Vermilion Sounds radio program on ResonanceFM, London, April 2003.
Contact: Chris Watson, 19, The Riding, Kenton, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE3 4LQ U.K. E-mail: <chrisw@filmcrew.co.uk>. Web site: <www.chriswatson.net>.
The rough pastures bordering a farm estate in central Kentucky hissed as I brushed through the knee-high yellow/green swathe. I listened, then planted a pair of my favorite miniature microphones, spaced a distance apart on a wire coat hanger, into the damp earth and ran about 100 yards of cable back to an old tool store shaded by a group of trees. Just before sunset the first piece began, and I recorded a soft rhythmic chorus of grasshoppers. As the hours passed this grassland changed its tune, wavering, first soft then driving solo tunes and, much later, a midnight tree frog and cicada chorus piercing the night sky.
This piece is a time-compression recording, mixed from a collection of recordings made that night from 5 P.M. until just after midnight.
Chris Watson is a sound recordist with a particular and passionate interest in recording the sounds of animals, habitats and atmospheres from around the world. As a freelance recordist for film, television and radio, Watson specializes in natural history and documentary location sound together with track assembly and sound design in post production. He has released three solo CDs for Touch: Stepping into The Dark, TO:27 (1996); Outside The Circle of Fire, TO:37 (1998); Weather Report, TO:47 (2003). He also released Number One, TO:41 (2005) a collaboration with Z’ev and K.K. Null. In the 1970s and 1980s, Watson was a member of the bands Cabaret Voltaire and the Hafler Trio. From 1994 to the present he has been director of Hoi Polloi Film and Video Ltd.
Rafal Flejter: Bridge Vibrations
Contact microphone recording of St. Saviour’s Dock Bridge beside the River Thames, London, January 2006.
Contact: Rafal Flejter, 31 Courtaney Street, SE11 5PH London, United Kingdom. E-mail: <raa077@yahoo.co.uk>.
The Bridge Vibrations recording was made on 30 January 2006 in the early afternoon. I have a homemade contact microphone and a Sony TCD-D8 DAT recorder. I attached the microphones to St. Saviour’s Dock Bridge and picked up the movements and vibrations caused by people passing by as well as the vibrations of the bridge itself, caused by wind. The recording is part of the Phonography group project, which will be presented as an installation reconstructing the sounds of this small bridge on the south side of the Thames River.
Rafal Flejter (a.k.a. CertainGlitch) was born in Warsaw, the capital of Poland. When he was young, he played bass in punk rock bands. When the opportunity arose he became a DJ, playing for 7 years many different kinds of music, always searching for something new. For inspiration, he moved to London 5 years ago, and since then has studied sound engineering and now studies sound art and design at London College of Communication (LCC). He is currently interested in experimental music, improvisation and field recordings, and environmental and industrial sounds.
Chris DeLaurenti: Our Streets! Symphonies of Protest
Extract from Live in New York at the Republican National Convention Protest September 2--August 28, 2004.
Contact: Chris DeLaurenti, P.O Box 45655, Seattle, WA 98145, U.S.A. E-mail: <chris@delaurenti.net>. Web site: <www.delaurenti.net>.
Since late 1999, I have been making overtly political music, but not just business-as-usual pieces with politically topical titles, program notes, pointed dedications, or brief aural allusions. The time to do more is now.
My protest symphonies such as N30: Live at the WTO Protest November 30, 1999 (1999--2000), its optional companion piece N30: Who Guards the Guardians? (2001--2002), Two Secret Wars (2002) and Live in New York at the Republican National Convention Protest September 2–-August 28, 2004 (2004--2005) use the pertinent sonic materials of social change: raw protest recordings, battlefield audio, relevant texts and earwitness testimonies.
Our Streets! is a section of Live in New York . . . that welds combative field recordings of the various protests and art actions, police transmissions, NOAA weather alerts, radio broadcast anomalies (splashes and sprays of tape hiss, enigmatic numbers, glossolalia, crude phase encoding) and wild card audio snatched from the airwaves into a vivid soundscape of dissent.
As a phonographer, I create work that challenges prevailing notions of how field recordings are made and what field recordings can be. The longstanding ideal is to record invisibly, standing still or moving very slowly to document nature, scientific phenomena or folk music with high-fidelity equipment. The recordist excludes unwanted human activity (airplanes, coughing during a song, dropping the microphone), ultimately editing everything into a smooth, seamless “reality.”
I challenge those prevailing practices in several ways. I affirm the inevitable influence and presence of the recordist and recording gear both in the field and back in the studio. Listeners hear me, my struggle, my incompetence and my fortuitous discoveries. My body moves. I run multiple microphone set-ups concurrently, corporeally improvising in the moment with body-mounted mics to shape the stereo image, azimuth and the depth of field while swooping an additional microphone boom for a contrasting aural perspective. My audibly risky tactics (sidling up to riot police, bobbing through mobs, standing fast in stampeding crowds) enable me to document rare, unpredictable instances of non-commercial mass gatherings. As forces move and talk beyond our vision, it is crucial to hear what we cannot see, so I also capture police and other wild card transmissions (surveillance audio, behind-the-scenes media chatter) with a radio scanner.
Back in the studio, I use aggressive editing (abrupt stops, dead silence, frenetic intercutting, obviously artificial polyphony, antiphonal spatialization, the traditional transparent cross-fade) to explore the intersection of speech and music, to preserve oral history made in the moment, and to convey the truth spoken by voices in crisis.
Unlike many soundscape composers, I embrace traditionally unwanted technical flaws. Along with opening up new territory for musicians and encouraging beginners to create with cruddy gear, the liberation of field recording’s forbidden elements---mic handling noise, hiss, narrow frequency response, distorted proximity effect, haphazard directionality, device self-noise, glitchy edits––-admits those overt flaws into the realm of music and helps erode the erroneous idea that recordings objectively represent one “reality.”
So what use are political pieces if only the same small crowd of new music lovers hear it? As an homage to Luigi Nono, who brought his works into the streets and factories, I wanted Live in New York . . . to reach the general public.
Live in New York . . . is the fourth in my series of Ulterior Audio Discs, time-limited and site-specific compact discs that appear before an unsuspecting audience (ideally those who might not or never encounter unusual sound work) in periodicals and other paper ephemera. From 25 to 31 August 2005, the disc lurked as a free bonus in 10,000 issues of Real Change, a Seattle newspaper that not only advocates for the poor and homeless but addresses issues along the entire continuum of social justice: war, economic policy, housing and poverty.
Is Live in New York . . . music? It is if you believe as I do, that music is a way of listening while remembering, anticipating, feeling and thinking. Some might consign Live in New York . . . to the outskirts of unusually edited and layered reportage inhabited perhaps most prominently by Glenn Gould’s The Idea of North and Randy Hostetler’s Once upon a Time; yet for me the lessons of Harry Partch’s speech-music and the pioneering works of Steve Reich (Come Out), Kenneth Gaburo (Lingua II: Maledetto), Luciano Berio (A-Ronne), Gould and Hostetler teach that with careful composition and attentive ears, speech is music.
Christopher DeLaurenti composes music and, as a new music rabble-rouser, serves aboard the Tentacle <www.tentacle.org> (although he is currently on shore leave) and writes music reviews and articles.
Christina Kubisch: Magnetic Nets
Composed from electromagnetic recordings of security (anti-theft) gates of major shops in Europe, Japan, China and the United States.
Contact: Christina Kubisch, Goetheallee 40, D-15366 Hoppegarten, Germany. E-mail: <kubisch@snafu.de>. Web site: <www.christinakubisch.de>.
Security gates (anti-theft gates) are situated at the entrances of large shops, mostly for the protection of clothes, electronics, shoes, glasses, books and records; the gates are also found at warehouses. The public does not notice them most of the time---the gates are like small doors that seem to welcome and invite the customer in. Sometimes a guard can be seen leaning next to the security gate, dressed in black, well shaven and with a bored expression on his face. The gates emit strong electromagnetic signals all the time, but they are not audible to the public. Only when someone tries to exit the shop with unpaid-for goods does the gate become audible. A small tag on the "kidnapped" object is also electromagnetic and triggers an audible sound signal that makes escape difficult.
Wearing an electromagnetic headphone, I can hear the security gate signals as strong, pulsating beats, quite regular and mostly of deeper frequencies. Sometimes the sound changes when a person enters or exits the gates. The sounds (heard at Esprit, the Gap, WOM and Hennes & Mauritz) are alike all over the world or at least usually very similar. Esprit in Tokyo sounds the same as Esprit in Madrid; globalization is manifested in security sounds. The more expensive the shop, the more aggressive and heavy the sound. Sometimes the intensity of the signals is so strong, I am unable to pass through without switching off the headphones. It is almost a physical aggression that happens to my ears. Some smaller shops have security gates at the entrance that are fake. I have a secret list.
Magnetic Nets was composed of the sounds of different signals of security gates in Europe, Japan, China and the United States. The sounds of electromagnetic fields around the shops are also audible in the piece.
Christina Kubisch was born in Bremen in 1948. She studied painting, music (flute and composition) and electronics in Hamburg, Graz, Zürich and Milan, where she graduated. She worked with performances, concerts and video in the 1970s and later with sound installations, sound sculptures and ultraviolet light. Her compositions are mostly electroacoustic, but she has written for ensembles as well. Since 2003 she has again worked as a performer and has collaborated with various musicians and dancers. Kubisch belongs to the first generation of sound artists. Trained as a composer, she developed such techniques as magnetic induction to realize her installations. Since 1986 she has added light as an artistic element to her work with sound. Kubisch's work displays a "synthesis of arts"---the discovery of acoustic space and the dimension of time in the visual arts on one hand, and a redefinition of relationships between material and form in music on the other. Her work has been shown in a number of solo exhibitions since 1974, and she has received numerous grants and awards. Kubisch has been a professor of sound art at the Academy of Fine Arts, Saarbrücken, Germany, since 199,4 and a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin since 1997. She lives in Hoppegarten near Berlin.
Charles Stankievech: Möbius Fields (soundwalk)
Conventional and electromagnetic recordings made in Montréal, March 2006.
Contact: Charles Stankievech, 5007 Ste. Cotilde, Montreal, PQ, H4C 1L9 Canada. E-mail: <charles@stankievech.net>. Web site: <www.stankievech.net>.
Using the structure of a möbius band, this soundwalk travels from Montréal's Oboro media arts center to Jean-Talon Market---and back again. Traveling there I used a M-S microphone recording the stereo sound field we normally perceive consciously with our ears. Traveling back I took the same route and recorded many of the same events/objects but instead used a mono electromagnetic microphone to record the electromagnetic fields. The transition from one side of listening to the other occurs at 03:13, when I crossfade from the acoustic mic to the electromagnetic mic while listening to the same space. All the recording was done in one continuous trip.
Track Itinerary
00:00 gravel in hand in front of Oboro, 4001 Berri
00:16 footsteps along Berri
00:28 crossing the threshold into the metro
01:00 ticket turnstile
01:14 transfer punch machine
01:19 pay phone
01:36 metro arrival Berri-UQAM station.
02:18 interior of metro to Jean-Talon station
02:34 metro doors open into Jean-Talon Market (jump cut)
02:56 HVAC warehouse vent in textiles district
03:13 möbius flip to electromagnetic microphone (crossfade)
03:17 HVAC warehouse vent in textiles district
03:37 idling car
03:46 parking meter
03:59 pay phone
04:08 metro turnstile
04:20 quartz wristwatch
04:30 metro arrival Jean-Talon station.
05:00 metro gearing up for departure Jean-Talon (inside car)
05:12 metro gearing up for departure Berri-UQAM (outside car)
05:27 riding up the escalator
Charles Stankievech works in the constellation of cinema, architecture and sound. Balancing philosophical questioning with explorations of materiality, his work combines a subtle play between the history of ideas and the history of technologies.
Sonic Arts Network: Sonic Postcards
Sonic Postcard 1: From Chelsea Children’s Hospital School, London, created by the pupils from the Collingham Gardens site, facilitated by Jo Lucas. Sonic Postcard 2: From Ashcott Primary School, Somerset, created by Sophie Hunt-Davison and Victoria Langford, facilitated by Tony Whitehead. Sonic Postcard 3: From Market Place Primary School, Aberdeenshire, created by class P6, facilitated by Pippa Murphy.
Contact: Becca Laurence, Sonic Postcards Project Director, Sonic Arts Network, The Jerwood Space, 171 Union Street, London 5EI OLN, U.K. E-mail: <becca@sonicartsnetwork.org>. Web: <www.sonicartsnetwork.org>, <www.sonicpostcards.org>.
The Sonic Postcards pieces are examples of results from a creative education program devised and delivered by Sonic Arts Network, a national U.K.-based organization that promotes and explores the art of sound through performances, releases, commissions and education programs. Sonic Postcards enables pupils from across the U.K. to explore and compare their local sound environments through the exchange of sound postcards with other schools via the Internet. The project focuses on the impact of sound on our lives and the possibilities for creativity through the manipulation of sounds with technology. As with ordinary postcards, Sonic Postcards allow the exchange of information about local environments, providing windows into a variety of places, lives and cultures.
Building on other soundscape education projects that have taken place in Europe, Canada and Japan, Sonic Postcards offers not only the opportunity to explore creativity with sound, but also a greater understanding of the world we live in from different perspectives.
Now in its second year, Sonic Postcards have reached over 2,500 young people in over 90 schools across the U.K., from Shetland in the far north of Scotland to the end of Cornwall in the southwest and many urban, coastal, rural and suburban locations in between. Working with their own teachers in a range of subjects and with local workshop leaders, pupils have created inspirational and observational statements about the places in which they live and, by exchanging their creative endeavors, have developed relationships with one another.
The project has been a success in a broad range of schools---not only mainstream primary and secondary schools, but also a wide range of special schools, Pupil Referral Units and hospital schools. Through the delivery of this program, partnerships have been initiated with diverse organizations such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), Scottish Natural Heritage and the BBC.
The three schools represented here are all very different, but honestly reflect the pupils’ view of life in their part of the U.K. Market Place Primary School in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, visited their local cattle auction to capture the sounds of cows, as farming is key to that area. Ashcott Primary School in Somerset collected their sounds from a local RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) wildlife reserve, which eloquently reflects the rural location of the school. Chelsea Children’s Hospital School in London took a trip on an open-top tour bus and interviewed tourists to demonstrate the diversity of languages and accents of the city---something that also reflects the wealth of languages represented at the school. The work created in every project is entirely that of the pupils. The projects have resulted in a performance of work, a gallery exhibition or an installation, as well as a Sonic Postcard sent to the other participating schools.
Sonic Postcards is an imaginative partnership between schools, arts organizations and other agencies and develops the arts within formal education; it provides teachers access to best practices in the performing and creative arts and through training and participation enhances their own professional development. Above all it offers inspirational educational experiences for children, who have responded imaginatively and creatively to the project and the sounds around them. The program continues to explore innovative ways to develop the work on-line as well as to deliver inspirational and creative projects in many more schools in the U.K. and abroad.
Yannick Dauby: Taiwanese Animal Phonography
Frogs and insects recorded in Taiwan, Summer 2005.
Contact: Yannick Dauby. E-mail: <yannick.dauby@free.fr>. Web site: <www.kalerne.net>.
I had the chance to spend two summers in Taiwan in 2004 and 2005. I tried as much as possible to listen to the local sound environments through my microphones and headphones, with a recorder between them. This may sound absurd: Why should I put such a technological interface between my auditory perception and acoustic spaces? For one main reason: as a sound artist or musique concrète composer (or whatever) I try to capture sound events to enable me to transmit them---to pass them to another person, for example, to the person that I will be later, in a few weeks or years. This enables me to listen over and over again to the same moment/place, to experience it each time differently: transmission and memorization.
A nature recordist is a kind of "extended organism" (I borrow this expression from biologist J. Scott Turner). In approaching an animal, one's strategy might be, for example, wandering and walking through a natural area and recording what will occasionally happen. Contrarily, one might hide and wait for the chosen specie to appear. These strategies also include tools: The use of a highly directional parabolic microphone or a very wide stereo microphone will completely modify the recordist's listening behavior. Perhaps in the latter case, one may be more interested in the acoustic space as a whole rather than in focusing on the vocalization of one animal individual. Audio technologies not only act as filters that create a distance between the recordist and his environment. They can also help enhance the way of perceiving; as with telescopes and microscopes, technologies act as mediators.
What should not be forgotten is that the process of recording is not at all neutral; these recorded sounds are not recorded reality. They result from a series of air vibrations, their interaction with electronic components and, more importantly, with a way of listening in a particular situation, through one's two external eardrums, the microphone and the headphone. While in the field, I have already made aesthetic choices by my spatial positioning, the way I hold and/or move the microphone and, of course, by my choice of the fateful moment when I press the "record" button. From this point, we leave the area of "field recording" and its documentary aspect for the "phonography" paradigm, which I define as the creative use of field recording.
Later, as a composer, I will play with these recorded sounds and use them to produce new and different listening situations. My time in the "studio" (usually just my laptop and two loudspeakers) is the time of the standard electroacoustic techniques: selecting the recordings, suppressing whatever I do not want to keep (e.g. some human-made sounds), transformation of the sound texture, collage and assemblage of various layers and sequences of sounds.
There can be problems. The sounds of the wind in dried leaves, a train passing or something less identifiable easily might be considered for themselves rather than for their signification (I am referring to the reduced-listening ideas proposed by Pierre Schaeffer). Most of the animal sounds, however, have a certain quality that reminds me more of a voice than a signal. These sounds resist becoming something other than the expression of a live being. Hercule Florence (born 170 years before me, in the same city) was a naturalist illustrator, a photographic pioneer (in fact, he invented the word "photography") and he imagined, while exploring the Amazon forest, the predecessor of the sonogram. He called "zoophonie" the practice of recording the "words" of the animals. We share with other animal species the ability to communicate through sound. Animal sounds may give melodic inspiration to musicians, but I am much more impressed by their vocality, by the tiny connections between their voices and mine.
Coming back to animal sound recording and collage---in the end, what does a listener have: A beautiful sound object? A trace of an animal communication behavior? The proof of existence of animal aesthetics or subjectivity? Some documentation of a location? Or maybe the representation of the recordist's conception of nature, his relationship to sound environment?
I would like to stay at a very humble level by saying that the resultant recording could be merely an attempt to provide a snapshot of some of the amazing sounds that (still) exist in the animal world. In so doing we retain as much as possible the ambiguity of nature recording considered as a musical practice.
Yannick Dauby is a composer and field recordist born in 1974 at the border of France and Italy, between the Alps and the Mediterranean Sea. His musical experiments and interests led him to research related to sound environments and soundscapes, and he is currently focusing on animal-human relationships through listening. He has released several compositions on various labels and has performed at international festivals using field recordings and electroacoustic devices. His complete biography is available at <www.yannickdauby.net>.
Pascal Battus: Sound Massages
Binaural recording at the Musique et Quotidien Sonore Festival, Albi, France, May 2005.
Contact: Pascal Battus, 3, impasse Honoré Bertin, 93170 Bagnolet, France. E-mail: <pbattus@free.fr>.
I have been performing Sound Massages since 2000. I make acoustic sounds, quasi-inaudible and sourced in everyday objects and tools, close to or directly into the listener's ears. My aim is to bypass the medium in which the sound wave propagates and divides---air---and substitute instead skin, bone and flesh. This radically upsets the listener's space and inner listening. The interesting point is that I can neither hear and nor feel what the listener hears and feels; what we both can feel is that, being so close to each other in a physical contact, a certain threshold of intimacy is crossed. At the same time, the listener is alone in a new and intimate space of deep listening that spreads from surrounding rumor to sounds that seem to come from within his or her own head. I had recorded sound massages in the past for Pink Records, and in the studio I had to move from the real experience of working directly with real ears to facing blind microphones. In May 2005 the Musique et Quotidien Sonore Festival in Albi, France, invited me to present Sound Massages, and while I was there, Peter Cusack invited me to record them: He sat in front of me with binaural microphones on his hears while I, trying to improvise, listened through headphones to the sound coming from the DAT.
Acknowledgments
I thank Le Groupe de Musique Electroacoustique d'Albi---Tarn, Jean Pallandre and Peter Cusack.
Discography
Misère et cordes (Pascal Battus, Dominique Repecaud, Emmanuel Petit, Camel Zekri, W), Au ni kita, Potlatch CD PT-P101 (2001).
Phéromone (Pascal Battus, Eric Cordier, J-L Guionnet, W), Disparlure, Corpus hermeticum HERMES 038 CD (2002).
Pascal Battus, Parmakli (duet with J-L Guionnet), on various artists, Musique Action 3, Vand'Oeuvre 0224 CD (2002).
Pascal Battus, Massages sonores #2, Pink Records P 05 CD (2003).
Pascal Battus, Thierry Madiot and Seijiro Murayama, Lo, Ektic EKT005 CD (2004).
Pascal Battus, Pick_Up, Amor fati CD (2005).
Pascal Battus, Kamel Maad and W, Eyear m3 production DVD (2006).
Pascal Battus and Ferran Fages (Fagus), Dans l’involucre entr’ouvert (A Question of Re-Entry), CD (2006).
Pascal Battus started out in music as a teenage rock guitarist, then studied percussion (at Ecole National de Musique Le Mans and ENM Noisiel France) and finally focused on experimental music and improvisation, shaping his instruments to match his own gestures. He now presents a wide range of sound possibilities and experiences, including the surrounded guitar, acoustic and amplified percussion, objects, acoustic Walkman, guitar pick-ups and saz. He has performed with musicians as diverse as Thierry Madiot, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Seijiro Murayama, Thomas Lehn, Martin Tetreault and Charlotte Hug, but also with dancers, sculptors and visual artists, notably in his duet Eyear with Kamel Maad (video) and with light artist Christophe Cardoën. At present he is developing what he calls Graphones, in which he produces sound and drawing with the same gesture at one and the same time.
LMJ 16 CD
Updated 1 November 2006
Leonardo On-Line © 2006 ISAST
http://leonardo.info
send comments to isast@leonardo.info