BA Sound Arts Year 3

I’d like to start by saying I’ve already met Gordon Hempton, virtually that is. I emailed him on enquiry about my dissertation process and it came a bit too late for it. Instead, we spoke about field recordings, and being an acoustic ecologist, the process that it takes and following your calling. This then leads me to purchase his book One Square Inch of Silence. I’ve been waiting to read it, and being my final piece of research it felt fitting. I’ve read through the half in the first sitting and feel I’ve gotten what I need, this being a skill I learnt during my research, sometimes you need to be smart and get the information that affects your practice, even though I will finish it after my portfolio module, I gathered enough intel to really get what this is about. Perhaps the most important is his writing or at least in this book, a form of field notes, a story perhaps as well. It’s his experience of being in the field and travelling east coast to west coast across America in search of understanding how this soundscape has changed while visiting the national parks of the areas he goes across. His passion is inspiring, and it’s been a huge inspiration. Here are some quotes.

Today silence has become an endangered species. Our cities, out suburbs, our farm communities, even our most expansive and remote national parks are not free from human noise intrusions.

To consider this as endangered is true, he’s also personifying sound as something that’s alive, which is interesting to consider that although some say silence is death, silence can also mean living away from humans, the natural ecosystem in its balance. Forests are very quiet after all.

We’ve reached a time in human history when our global environmental crisis requires that we make permanent life-style changes. More than ever before, we need to fall back in love with the land. Silence is our meeting place. 

I also discussed this within my dissertation but falling back in love with our planet is key to our existence and our relationship with this planet and other living species. This is a crisis currently, sonically, physically and spiritually.

One Square Inch of Silence is more than a book; it is a place in the Hoh Rain Forest, part of the Olympic National Park-arguable the quietist place in the United States.

This book is centred or inspired by Gordon’s relationship to this national park and the stone he put in the quietest square inch he could find, arguably in the whole of the USA.

Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.

Again this idea of silence being death is incorrect, silence is the presence of everything, and we can hear, understand and learn a lot from listening.

If asked to choose my favourite sound in the world, I doubt that I could do that easily. If forced, I might say it’s the dawn chorus of songbirds

I shall record the dawn chorus and try to see why this is true.

This noble fall has by far the richest, as well as the most powerful of all the falls of the valley, its tones vary from the sharp hiss and rustle of the wind in the glossy leaves of the live Oaks and the soft, sifting, hushing tones of the pines, to the loudest rush and Roary of storm winds and thunder among the crags of the summit peaks. The low bass, booming reverberating, tones, heard under favourable circumstances five or six miles away, are formed by the dashing and exploding of heavy masses mixed with air upon two projecting ledges on the face of the cliff. 

These are the notes or field notes from John Muir who was a naturalist who lived in the 1800s, Gordon recites this field note within his book, explaining that he feels that Muir was field recording with text long before the first field recorders existed. This is inspiring for me, as reading this I can listen and imagine what this soundscape would have been. Such powerful words are written here.

From the sound of the water alone I’ve learned to distinguish the age of a tumbling stream. Older flows, such as those in Appalachia that escaped the last glaciation, have been tuning themselves for many thousands of years. Their watercourses and stony beds, smoothed to paths of least resistance by the ageless cycles of torrents and floods, sing differently. To my ears, they’re quieter, more musical, more eloquent. Youthful streams, with their newly exposed and angular, unsmoothed rocks, push the water aside brashly, with a resulting clatter. In all cases, the rocks are the notes. I sometimes attempt to tune a stream by repositioning a few prominent rocks, listening for the subtle changes in sound.  

These are words from Gordon, we can imagine again what these rivers sound like, although his book first seemed like a story, there are huge amounts of field recordings throughout, even dated times and daily updates of what he can hear and did. I think field notes when accompanied by field recordings really do bring this level of situation that lacks when just heard by themselves.

I’m in an interesting position for both portfolio one and Portfolio 2. The first project was been waiting for me to record vocals, mix and master. I’ve also done a lot of reading for both, including project 2, which is centred around field recording at its discourse. I’m now one book away from finishing my research, and today’s trip was the last of experiments and techniques. I recorded three different styles, one was loud recordings, in locations opposite to what I’ve been reading, loud and busy locations, I’m attempting to record harsh areas through a different lens such as a contact microphone. I also recorded a loud sound walk inspired by a paper from the Brazilian sound art book, changing the ideas of sound walks, and also thinking bout words from Mark Peter Wright and considering who is behind the field recording and also the words from Salome who considers field recordings to really shine when the relationship between the recordist and place to come through. I also carried on this extended listening practice located from Jez Riley French. After this post, and this weekend coming, I will spend 3 days recording as much as possible, I will be out all day. On Sunday I will record the dawn chorus and attend sound camp. The festival is at Rotherhithe Ecological Park. The national dawn chorus day.

Firstly I went to the busiest place I could think of close by, central London. I arrived and set up a contact mic, testing fences, light posts and even my bike wheel. I spent time listening, the recordings were at least 10 minutes in length.

I forgot my recorder but remembered Rory Salter from the sound art department recommending the phone as a great alternative and instead recorded my sound walk for 37 minutes with my phone. I was loud, present and engaged as if the recorder was not there. I made an effort to not be overly loud and present but what I would normally be with it, I also did things inspired by the loud sound walks from Making It Heard, I walked into shops, ran across roads, and burped.

I’ll reflect back on these recordings and now prepare for this weekend and Sunday dawn chorus event.

I found his bio on sound cloud.

Hiroki Sasajima is the sound artist residents in Tokyo. He had started the activity of field recording around 2007. Since then, he goes to record various places in Japan actively and releases many works from labels in all over the world. For his live performances, he places field recording sound and the sound of objects in the space to give a chance to rethink about “how to listen or capture the sound” for audiences. He is interested in the beauty of the detailed and missing sound, and searches for the essence and the possibility of the sound with focussing to the characteristics of time, space and regional cultures. He weaves a seamless fabric of vibration with the pure innate vision of sound.

It was Jez Riley French who recommended I listen to his work for my own reference.

I found this on Youtube called Transfer. A piece released in 2013.

I found this project to be in line with my own interest in how contact mics bring out different soundscapes or perspectives within recordings, perhaps a closer more intimate feel.

I also found this performance of his, where he uses found objects and field recordings, with another artist who is using an instrument.

Here are some quotes.

A field recording made using the method of ‘anything goes, just stick your mic in the mud’ misses this tension of transformation. Without its impetus, listeners stare in puzzlement at sleeve notes and press releases trying to intellectually grasp the significance and joy of what is absent. 

I get this from other artists’ works sometimes, where I really have to question what I’m listening to, how it’s affecting me, what are the reasons for it, and how much context does one need to enjoy a piece of work?!

Exciting field recording does not record the field but produces a plurality of fields. It neither abandons the reality of the recorded, nor does it take it for granted, but works with it, responds to it, understands it as one imprint in the landscape made by the body of the recordist and retraced tentatively by the listener. This listener in turn generates a new imprint between the heard and the recorded, listening to the authenticity of a particular rendition rather than its source, and embracing interpretation as part of the actuality of the real. That is at least what I consider to be exciting.

Responding to the field whilst engaging with reality and working with it. A great thought. I couldn’t agree more with this quote

Mark Peter Wright’s recordings are quite literally such imprints: photographs, words and sound – showing us not so much the field as his position within it and reminding us of our own.

Something I also hope to bring with my recordings. To have a selection with more than just audio, but a response to the field I engaged with, these sounds to me are captured moments of engagement ready for the listener to also respond to.

The work of Ximena Alarcón and Christina Wegener, for example, have turned field recording into a practice of social and cultural interaction, and Felicity Ford as well as Antye Greie use it to invite participation and foster exchange. And while Patrick Farmer morphs the field into performance and compositional processes, producing scores and books that do not necessarily lead to music but to an expanded field, Davide Tidoni listening to the boundaries of urban spaces by popping balloons.

Something I also responded to within my dissertation, which was the work of Ximena, how she made field recordings a collective practice, I’m interested to see how I can apply this to my recordings.

They mark a post-humanist sensibility where we do not seek to own the sounds of this world, to know and to have them, but understand ourselves to be part of its soundscape, not at its centre but simultaneous with it, sounding with and through it a reality that is plural and passing.

I think this is an important section of it, I think through listening and capturing field records I’ve also come across and reflected on these statements, I’ve noticed my own location within the soundscape and I find myself sitting in a temporal experience.

Mabye we should stop recording altogether and simply listen. But I believe the future of field recording lies in the tension created by transforming the heard through participation, collaboration, expansion and play, through which we can try a humbler humanity of shared spaces and renegotiate what is real. 

This is similar to Jez Riley French. He also says similarly, he almost does not want to record, listening is the main focus and the recordings are just an outcome. I really enjoyed this article. I will now try to seek to create field recordings that have interaction and participation.

Again a further text that speaks about the discourse on field recording practice, especially the silencing of the recordist. Here are some quotes and reflections.

Recent sonic arts discourse has engaged with the artistic practice of field recording, calling for scholars and practitioners to acknowledge the presence of the recordist as an active agent in the field 

I think its interesting to see that there has been recent discourse, this puts my portfolio 2 in the current discourse and a trending issue.

Through the radio work I voice personal reflections evoked by listening back to the field recordings I had made, and the music I had discovered while in Rio. The voice-over to the radio show was recorded without a script and in one take. As such, it perhaps captured a personal sense of the emotions that I now associated with the field recordings and songs.

I like this idea, of speaking over field recordings, talking about your memories of them.

Here, ‘fieldwork’ is understood to be an artistic-ethnographic practice that includes observation, documentation, interaction and participation with an identified ‘field’ – achieved primarily through listening and sound recording.

Again I think it’s good to see that fieldwork of field recordings has different definitions for multiple people.

Crossovers between sound arts practice and anthropology are considered, particularly the work of Steve Feld and Ernst Karel. ‘Annotated’ sound art works that reveal the process of fieldwork through field recording (Cox and Carlyle)

Steven Feld and his process of showcasing the field recording and admitting it was not perfect to what he could here, really does draw the comparisons between recordist and artistic practice, from anthropological uses and artistical uses.

As in ethnography, those undertaking field recording are now encouraged to be increasingly relexive. The choices over what sounds one might record, where, when, how and crucially, why, all become much more signiicant factors.

I agree, something I’ve considered within my own dissertation and now within this practice-based research project.

between art and anthropology, noting that field recording might act as a crucial bridge. He says: ‘for me, art-making is something that could be central to anthropological thinking. But it has never happened. Field recording could be an important piece of making the connection’ (Lane and Carlyle, 2013: 211).

So field recording is an artistic medium that could be a bridge to anthropology, where artistic practices coincide with anthropology is super correct.

Schneider & Wright support the art-making as documentation, describing anthropology as being in a state of ‘inertia’:

So anthropology is stuck within its ways, why can’t creative artistic practices also be it?

Ethnomusicologist Jeff Todd Titon (2008) proposes a rigorous redefinition of basic fieldwork to be ‘no longer viewed principally as observing and collecting… but as experiencing and understanding’ (p. 25).

So swapping the view of the recordist and considering their own position within it is important, let us switch roles to experiencing and understanding rather than observing and collecting. Something I want to do with my field recordings.

He suggests that personal fieldwork diaries ‘become useful repositories for critical reflection on the research process as it is unfolding … fieldwork diaries act as the place where personal stories of rapport building and strange encounters are recorded’ (p. 432). My own emotional and critical reflections on the continual unfolding of fieldwork can be heard, for example, throughout the recorded voice-over in Rio: An Outsider Inside, and in questioning my position as recordist-composer through text annotations in Carioca Sound Stories.

I think the fieldwork diary being important is something I’ve recently considered and what I will do for my final project 2. I will incorporate my reflections and my memories, and my emotional response and keep it updated.

The act of field recording may be considered to contain fundamental compositional decision-making at its core. The time, location, choice of equipment, microphone placement, length of recording and number of repeat visits made to a site are decisions made by the recordist-composer. All of these decisions may greatly affect the outcome of the sounds then presented or composed. Therefore, perhaps field recording should be considered an act of composition in itself.

Exactly! Field recording as a composition is how I feel, to consider it just as collecting? Not understanding that it takes a considerable act to place a microphone and to think and listen.

Justin Bennett’sRaw Materials (2011) is an auto-ethnographic composition where sound documents the relationship between place and person, site and social. This work for stereo sound and text consists of a collection of unrelated field recordings chosen at random from the artist’s archive. These are played back seemingly to both the composer and listener in ‘real time’, while a typed text appears on the video screen – a letter addressed to ‘J’. The text, written by the composer, reflects on his personal associations with the sounds. He tells us in the text that, ‘with the sounds come smells, stories, feelings’. As the audience listens to each sound, the text continues: I ask myself: where was it? When was it? What is happening? Who was with me? How did I feel? Why did I record this? What does it make me feel now? Throughout the piece, Bennett answers each question in an informal and personal way. He makes short practical descriptions while simultaneously considering the retrospective memory and current personal impact of the same sound on himself as a composer. This is an example of a reflexive ethnographic approach to field recording, and its presentation in the form of art and performance. The sounds act as field notes, later heard accompanied by Barz’s ‘headnotes’ voice: a self-conscious and self-critical form of re-reading his sonic diary entries

So we must share more to make the recordings interesting and this project by Justin dictates that. And that it is doable.

When addressing how I might begin to communicate the knowledge gained through the process of listening and recording, I questioned whether these recordings might have relevance to anyone but myself. As Salome Voeglin writes: ‘Some field recording is thus incredibly boring and irrelevant for all but the recordist: the exotica of the source replacing the idiosyncrasy of the material recorded, the pleasures and complexities of which are hidden and inaccessible to an audience standing by and listening in’ (2014: 16). A moment inCarioca Sound Stories echoes this sentiment: I find it hard… to make this recording speak / to reveal something, other than what I know (08.00-08.22)

This quote shares the issues with field recordings, without any further context they can come across like this, boring, and irrelevant. This is a huge challenge for myself when using field recordings.

Again another text by Peter Wright gave me further reflection on my field recording practice for my portfolio project 2. Here are some quotes.

The term “Post-Natural” is currently situated within arts and humanities discourse and the pervasive debates surrounding the Anthropocene. This proposed new epoch underscores how humans have, and are, changing the geological make-up of Earth by way of fossil fuel extraction, war, slavery, technologies, and advanced capitalism.

So we are in a current post-human stage of our existence. Anthropocene really is in effect, we must consider how as humans actions have consequences and sound arts is one of the practices.

A Post-Natural filter aids this new approach by reinvigorating environmental sound art’s relationship to silence, technology and subjectivity. Furthermore, it offers new methods for listening, through publications and creative audio works; it provides questions to sonic materials and treats recordings as documents to be read through a listening approach that fuses cartographic research with imaginary speculations

So this post-natural filter we exist in, our technology and artistic endeavours really do help us understand our relationship with our environments in different ways.

In a time where human impact is radically altering the sedimentary signature of the earth, a Post-Natural approach asks if it plausible to claim “non-impact” anymore? Has the long-empathetic notion of non-invasive environmental recording become a redundant ideal that is as illusionary as so-called Nature itself? Can the recording of species and phenomena continue to be deemed inconsequential? How is technological agency performed and part of an ecological approach? Whom do “we” speak for in the sounding of environments? What is the impact of such questioning in the field and how do aesthetic modes of documentation and production respond?

So this is what really shakes me up, this archetype of a nature recordist, who says they have a non-impact way of recording. I think it’s interesting and what has taken me to be more free within my second project, I really have taken a step back from my nature recording passion.

The dominant aesthetic message is an unheard one, as recordists perpetually mute their own presence for the most “natural” or technically “cleanest” documentation of an environment or species. The recording “I” is associated with lo-fi acoustic detritus such as microphone handling, wind, and interference noise: all are aspects that must be silenced as part of the general signal-to-noise ratio. Whether for science or art, self-dissolution hovers over every instance the record button is about to be pressed.

Muting our presence is true, I have been taught this or perhaps thought this was the correct way of recording. It’s something that was imposed on me without reflecting on why, which now I have done, has allowed me to consider different ways of recording and using field recording equipment.

I take seriously the proxy proposition that sound is a social political agent and strive to treat the medium as material that matters, working against a culture of digital sound capture that falsely claims inconsequentiality as its implied default.

I agree, I think if we consider a recording as something that matters and can be used as a social-political agent, we would listen differently, but currently, we don’t even consider recording as creation, but as documentation. That recording even if you do nothing in post-production is not creation.

I saw this in another essay bibliography and through searching online for more research to do with field recording discourse. I found this short essay/article interesting as it describes and relates the noisy-non self as a monster, something that stays hidden throughout the recording. I want to perhaps challenge this with my own recordings. Why do I chase this idea of perfection and silence myself through the recording? Why can’t it be a loud recording, something obvious?

Here are some quotes.

This article endeavours to re-hear the fringe identity of the environmental field recordist and analyze the promises and threats of self-erasure. I propose a new concept , the Noisy-Nonself, as a way of understanding such an identity. It is a chimeric figuration that seeks to collapse human, animal, and technological binaries, prompt ethical critique, and ask, “What are the consequences of hearing our own monsters?”

I like this opening statement, to consider the threats of self-erasure as something worthy of discourse is down my league currently.

Recording and archiving environmental sounds enabled the medium itself to be considered a viable social and cultural artifact, something that soundscape studies and the World Soundscape Project would later harness in the context of acoustic ecology. These bioacoustic archival bloodlines silenced their own authors in order to privilege objective “facts.” The legacies that arrive from such preservation-based contexts prioritize non-intrusive or hi-fidelity recordings of an environment or species.

This battle between science and the arts, for the silencing of the recordist, means that perhaps the value of the field recording is for information on the recorded subject or environment and the human noise is unwanted, but why do we still consider this for our own creative field recordings?

I initiated a persona that would represent a troubling doubling of the archetypal nature recordist: a crypto-character, part shadow, part absurd doppelgänger, a bipedal assemblage of another. I moved towards my own spectral and material skins that grafted technology and the body as well as the animal. “Naturally” a fluffy onesie that resembled a microphone windshield was developed (!). Windshields or windjammers are used primarily to suppress breathing sounds and wind noise: they are the mediators of self-silence. Made commercially from synthetic fur but often adapted by DIY enthusiasts from real animal furs such as wolverines, the material encases the microphone within its meshed cage. They are commonly referred to as “fluffys” or “dead cats.” Smaller windjammers are known as “dead kittens.” The windshield continually cancels mediating bodies; technical, human, environmental apparatus, and subjects are softened into an absorbent milieu. It renders recordists as soundless agents: mute performers matted within the flesh and fur of their own bodyapparatus.

Mark created a personal onesie covered in Ryecote windjammer synthetic fur. Something I recently purchased, I was angry at the recordings being windy, perhaps I should take it off? Wind noise could be good? If on purpose? I also like this idea of the archetype of the nature recordist, part shadow, the sneaking silent person who records animals without disturbance, attempting to never influence the environment it goes into, it’s kind of difficult not to think how absurd this sounds.

Whom do “we” speak for in the continual sounding of species and phenomena? What is really being captured and processed beyond the so-called signal? What is not being heard

Again to think that our recordings represent something, or perhaps even other species, that have hugely different ways of experiencing our field recordings is not accurate. I strive to do the opposite, I want my field recordings to be an emotional response. Not fact.

The Noisy-Nonself simultaneously invades environments and evades self-analysis; it occupies a parasite-host duality like a shimmering thing caught in its own medial web of entrapment.

It’s true, the recordist fails to analyse their own position in the field, something I believe is what I’m attempting to do currently with this project. How will I do that? Perhaps by making sure I’m heard in my recording.

In a similar capacity, I researched this Brazilian artist. I found one project on Bandcamp that was three pieces of audio of sound walks, recordings, and other audio.

https://alefenerich.bandcamp.com/album/cole-o-peripat-tica-de-sons-peripatetic-collection-of-sounds

The written element to accompany the book held many interesting aspects, quotes, writings, drawings, and memories from the audio as well as explaining what they had recorded.

Thelmo Cristovam

After reading into Thelmo’s work I found this on Bandcamp the description says this. 

https://thelmocristovam.bandcamp.com/album/stenella-longirostris

The work that Thelmo Cristovam takes to Fernando de Noronha challenges symbolic boundaries between art and science, synthesizing them as a method of sound mapping of the archipelago, in a continuous attempt to understand the world and to invent tools to research and describe it. in the form of art and consequently, preserve it.

This research trip where I accompanied him, in October 2018, was the continuation of work that Thelmo has been doing for decades, in Northeast Brazil and the Amazon, mapping soundscapes of places where one can stay without the intercession of human noise. or sound signals not coming from natural phenomena. As much for art as for science and finally for politics, it is of immense importance to record these environments, which tend to disappear as the so-called modernities gain. These recordings guarantee, in some perspective, that this natural heritage will be preserved for the future.

This time, what takes us to the archipelago are the underwater sound noises, especially from the cetaceans that inhabit this rich maritime environment. This work takes place in collaboration with the NGO Golfinho Rotador, which since 1990, together with ICMBio, has been working on research and preservation of this species and the sustainability of its habitat.

I found the recordings really lovely to listen to and had similar themes to Gordon Hempton on the importance of silence and at the border between science, and artistic endeavours of sound-based recordings, and a good map in a non-linear way/format. He seems to enjoy not making an actual map but more of the sound collection as perseveration.

What I did find interesting is he is recording in a human way of listening, preserving recordings for humans, but without human interference? I think as a political statement it does raise good questions, but I think recordings with a human presence for the sake of stating that it is better is a confusing argument for me at least.

Before I did an exercise I decided to actually see how I could make a sound map.

I thought first I would identify what I want.

I would like a Google maps style sound map, where you click a pin and audio plays. Something similar to Locus Sonus.

It would be nice if I could include a name, photo and embedded audio?

Also free, easy to access and not required to set up a whole website. Or maybe a website might be good? Could the sound map be a part of my work as well? As well as the small booklet, the Photos, the field notes, and the sound map can offer a sense of place that perhaps is missing?

I found this website here that went through two different ways of making sound maps.

https://www.spencerbruce.com/blog1/2021/8/2/building-a-sound-map

Firstly it was using google my maps, you can insert pins and attach a title and description, the only issue is that the audio has to be on another platform such as SoundCloud which means that once you click out of the map you may have to close down another webpage to get back to the map which is not ideal, as well as this the map still has lots of things to click on and can look cluttered? The advantage is that it is simple, and does not require any website or anything else, just a Google account. Looks good. I tried it out quickly with some recordings I took from Brighton and it was working pretty good! Looks interesting.

The photo and audio are not correct but it was more of a test.

The next website advertised was a $40 plugin for WordPress, where the actual audio link was embedded within the map such as this.

I did feel this looks a bit ugly, hmmm. Need to research more perhaps, or fill out the original google maps webpage that was simple.