The acoustic ecology of a space often tells a story of
intervention and the relationship between the quality of the
land surface, the vegetation, and the sounds of habitation,
be they human or otherwise

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/151740266.pdf

Conclusion
Listen gives voice to a wide range of constituencies: to communities living in proximity to the featured sites; to communities distant from these sites; and to the nonhuman and non-sentient constituents of these sites. The digital tools and dynamic website facilitate both a disruption of traditional visitation of pristine natural environments and simultaneously through this remediation, a broadened access. Listen uses technologies to question
embodied experience and to encourage new forms of embodied actions. It integrates significant discussions about
sound, sustainability, and the place of human experience
through creative storytelling, digital mapping, and community collaboration. Listen builds important connections
between the humanities, the environmental sciences, and
media arts through development of new technologies, interdisciplinary research, creative endeavors as well as educational and outreach initiatives. It seeks to foster new environmentally aware communities who through social media can use their voice as stewards of these protected, yet
vulnerable landscapes.
Given such ever-growing challenges as environmental
degradation and climate change, the multifaceted outcomes
of this project will hopefully nurture more sustainable lifestyles and stabilize park ecosystems. The participating
communities will learn to critically interpret their relationships to natural and built environments through new forms
of listening enabled by technology. Across each of these
outcomes, sound plays an important role for establishing
and cultivating individual/community agency and environmental stewardship. In giving voice to individuals and
community members to articulate their own positions in
these natural spaces, Listenn opens up new opportunities
for exploring the import

In conclusion for myself, this felt like a project that embraced ideas of whether sound can create a positive environmental change, using sound with other mediums, providing a fundamental archive and allowing those who aren’t exposed to this landscape and those who are a different experience that challenges the embodied idea of sound.

I found this project after researching her interview with Jez Riley French, this particular project resonated with me highly and I think this is a huge influence for my project.

Can place be investigated through sound?
Do past lives and past events leave sonic traces and how can we hear them in the present?
Using field recordings, interviews and archive materials ‘The Hebrides Suite: mapping the islands in sound’ explores aspects of island life past and present through the medium of composed sound.

I think perhaps I should incorporate interviews within my work, I remember that Mark considered this when I was presenting my work, and he felt like it was an important part of it. But this idea of a place being investigated through the medium of sound presents interesting questions, what are the benefits?

Sound, like memory, can be fleeting and ephemeral no sooner than is it heard it has gone. Recording offers the opportunity to materialise sound and make it suitable for analysis, study and creative use and re-use. But who decides what or who gets recorded or what or who gets remembered?
Recordings both make and are memories – ghostly traces of the past remaining in time and space. These traces of the past echo and reverberate through language, place-names, family stories, song and the sounds of the natural world to form a sonic background to the present.

Again this idea of ghosts within soundscapes and field recording keeps appearing, it seems like I’m chasing ghosts of soundscapes. It’s a great point that recording materialises sound and makes it usable for creativity and research, what happens when it is used as a defining action. Recording is saving ghosts, it’s a memory of time and space.

The Hebrides Suite: Mapping the Islands in Sound  consists of  three eight channel sound works and a large wall piece which maps the Uists according to field recordings made, and places mentioned, in the interview and archive materials used in the compositions.
‘Sandy Jaffas’ (2015) one of the three sound pieces, was  commissioned this for this exhibition and made in collaboration with the S2 Gaelic class from Sgoil Lionacleit in Benbecula, members of the Comann Eachdraidh Uibhist a Tuath (North Uist Historical Society) and South Uist Historical  Society and supported by Museum nan Eilean, London College of Communication and CRiSAP (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice).

So the rest of the project was collaborating with students about what they hate, like and should change. They went and field recorded and this ultimately became an 8-channel installation piece.

I found this blog that Jez runs where he interviews sound artists on their experience with field recording, this was helpful to get a further idea of others’ opinions.

MARTYNA POZNANSKA

I got my first recorder and started to rediscover my urban surroundings becoming aware of the sonic density and my presence within it as well as its endless potentiality. The ability to choose and extract fragments of it through field recordings fascinated me and led me to further studies and exploration in this area bringing me into researching listening and hearing in the urban environment as a bodily experience, which was inspired by the phenomenological approach in the Auditive Architecture course I took some years later when studying at the Berlin University of The Arts.

Choosing and extracting is a great way of describing the manipulation that goes with producing field recordings. As well as hearing as a bodily experience.

I treat it as a substance and a main component I can sculpt in. On one hand plasticity of the sound material and on the other its ephemerality, which contains the possibility of transformation constitutes an ongoing inspiration for my artistic work. Field recording allows me to document the sonic environment in its micro and macro scale, it becomes an extension of my hearing and is being reflected not only through the sonic material but also in my writings and images that become part of my work. Although the listening experience cannot be lived in the same way in a recorded artefact, to record ‘scraps’ and ‘remnants’ of it comes to be a poetic gesture, an ear suspended somewhere along the electric lines in the midst of the city.

Sound being plasticity and also transformative is how I consider it as well. A poetic gesture or a sonic postcard like Sofia does.

CATHY LANE

Most of my work at the moment focuses on a sound-based investigation of a place (eg. my work in the Outer Hebrides http://hebrides-suite.co.uk) or a theme (eg. cultural assimilation and how family memory is preserved and transmitted and lost in ‘The Ties that Bind’ https://soundcloud.com/playingwithwords/the-ties-that-bind-stereo-mix) and field recordings are one of the main elements that I use as compositional material along with interviews and existing oral history recordings.

I think that using field recordings as a sound-based investigation is also perhaps what I’m attempting to do, search for the ghosts and investigate through sound.

I decided to do some research on Jez Riley French, I know he is a famous field recordist and enjoys micro and long-duration field recordings. I went on his website and read his About section.

Jez riley French (b. 1965)

Using intuitive composition, field recording, improvisation and photography, I have been exploring my enjoyment of and interest in detail, simplicity and an emotive response to places and situations since my early teens and as a full time artist for over 20 years.

Alongside performances, exhibitions, installations I also lecture and run workshops around the world on various aspects of sound culture including located sound / field recording, the act and art of listening and their roles in contemporary explorative sound arts. I develop and build specialist microphones now widely used in all areas of sound culture, curate the ‘engraved glass’ label, the ‘a quiet position’ series of online releases / forums exploring the broad ideas surrounding field recording as a primary art of sound / sound art and the online zine ‘verdure engraved’

Areas of work & research include establishing / expanding micro-listening, durational listening, and architectural, plant, soil horizon, aquatic and infrasound recording as key elements of contemporary located sound practices. Working with photographic scores & scores for listening, discussing the gendering of sound cultures and histories, and perception of environments.

My work has included commissions and performances for Tate Modern (UK), The Whitworth (UK), Paradise Air (Japan), MoT – Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (Japan), Spikersuppa Lydgalleri, Oslo (Norway), Baltic (UK), Steklenik (Slovenia), Museo Reina Sofia (Spain), Catalyst Arts (N. Ireland), The Whitworth Gallery (UK) , Artisphere (USA), Harpa (Iceland), Mengi (Iceland), The Wired Lab (Australia), Mullae Art Space (Korea), q-02 (Belgium) and for organisations in numerous other countries around the world. A section of my piece for Tate Modern was also chosen to be part of the ‘500 years of British Art’ exhibition jukebox at Tate Britain.

“Jez is widely regarded as having played a pivotal role in expanding extended field recording techniques and modes of listening in the sound arts, including the use of contact microphones, hydrophones, electromagnetic coils, ultrasonic detectors, geophones and vlf receivers in performance, installation, sound design (for screen, theatre and radio) and music in a wide range of contexts. He is also known for his contributions to efforts to correct historical and contemporary biases in the arts.

In 2017, as part of Hull’s City of Culture year, he was commission by Opera North & Hull CoC to be involved in the ‘Height of the Reeds’ project, turning the Humber Bridge into a sonic experience that was experienced by over 10,000 people. A reworked version of the piece was later released on cd & in February 2019 Jez was nominated for a Norwegian Grammy for his work on the album.“

I am currently working in collaboration with my daughter, Pheobe riley Law, including on a new publication focusing on the design and detail of spaces between buildings in Japan, a series of improvised performances and other projects combining sound works and text pieces by Pheobe including new ‘scores for listening’.

Works have been exhibited in shows and installations alongside that of Yoko Ono, Annea Lockwood, Pauline Oliveros, Jana Winderen, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Chris Watson, Éliane Radigue, Hildegard Westerkamp, Stars of the Lid, Jeremy Deller, Sarah Lucas, Signe Liden, David Bowie, Alvin Lucier etc.

I also collaborate with a wide range of artists, musicians and film makers.

In recent years I have been working extensively on recordings of surfaces and spaces (natural and human made) and developing the concept of photographic scores. I am particularly associated with the development of extended recording techniques, including the recording of structural vibrations, contact microphone recording, ultrasonics, infrasonics, internal electronic signals via coil pick-up’s and recordings made with hydrophones.

Amongst key recent works are pieces capturing the sound of the dolomites dissolving, ants consuming fallen fruit, the Tate Modern building vibrating, the infrasound of domestic spaces around the world, glaciers melting in Iceland and the tonal resonances of natural and human objects in the landscape.

I build contact microphones, hydrophones and other specialist microphones that are widely used by other artists, universities, film and tv crews, composers, theatres and other institutions. They have been used to capture key audio elements in games, radio & tv programmes and films such as The Green Planet, The Blue Planet,The Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything, Gravity, recent Star Wars franchises and thousands of others.

current series of works include:

‘interference of objects’ – a series of intuitive collaborations with Pheobe riley Law

 ‘choreographies of perception’ – performative talks 

‘audible silence’ – recordings of empty architectural spaces and structural vibrations

‘ink botanic’ – exploring the internal sounds of plants and soil horizons

design and detail of the space between – the sound an imagery of civic infrastructure

 ‘teleferica’ – documenting these sonically fascinating structures across Italy

‘movere’ – a series of pieces composed of field recordings, both passive and involving interactions with spaces and objects

‘salts’ – re-scoring of musical fragments as durational works, recorded using the building structures as filters

‘dissolves’ – hydrophone recordings exploring the hidden sonic structures of minerals

‘scores for listening’ – photographic scores, visual cues for listening

‘instamatic’ & ’emplacement’ – single point field recordings

During the 1990’s, following several years working in the music industry, I set up, along with my then partner, an ethical specialist music distribution service, eventually handling over 1000 labels from numerous countries releasing traditional, classical, jazz and experimental music. I’m currently writing about those years. 

I find this work really interesting and subtle. There is a meditative aspect towards this durational listening, I also want to see his scores for listening and see if I can attempt one.

SAFE SPACE AND THE MALE FIELD RECORDIST (A GENUINE CALL FOR MORE DISCUSSION AROUND FIELD RECORDING AND SAFE SPACE)

He discusses the idea of safe spaces and the privilege male field recordists have when inhabiting urban and natural spaces at night, he considers whether it is always the correct thing to do when taking these spaces, and how we should be vigilant of how we colonise these safe spaces for women.

Migration between Nature and Listening – Jez Riley French

An example of this could be the issue of traffic noise, roads, planes, and trains – the audible smears of human across environments – and how many listeners / artists / recordists automatically think about how such sounds “get in the way”, or should be edited out of recordings. The thing is those sounds are part of the reality of that environment, as much as those we arrive wanting to hear. They are species sound. If we remove them, we aren’t presenting a trace of a reality but a sanitised, pacified, controlled ‘other’, and a  denial of our impact. Presenting such places without the human can highlight what is  being lost, but it is the automatic filtering of wanted and unwanted sound that often  sidetracks the act of listening itself. That can, and I would argue has already, allowed us to spiral back to a rather cliched idea of the majesty of nature. 

This is something I agree with and found with my Epping Forest field recording session, I should embrace these non-wanted sounds as they actualise the experience, I’m trying to showcase the real “ghosts” that can be heard. Not sugarcoat it at all.

After reading the book on forests I decided to take a trip to Epping Forest to search for these “Ghosts” Found in these places of natural beauty, looking for what I can hear within the soundscape that represented the past and present of Epping Forest.

I took some equipment with me, Lom Geophon, Zoom H1N and TASCAM DR100 MKII

I then cycled all the way from south London to Epping Forest. Gear in hand, On route I went to Jez Riley French exhibition about soil and the sounds of roots.

The installation was a quadraphonic room with sounds from soil, and the inner sounds of plants. I saw there was a talk on Sunday happening and I emailed afterwards as it was sold out and managed to be able to purchase a ticket I asked nicely and said it would contribute towards my portfolio project.

Following this I finally reached the forest. I went to the NW part of the forest and discovered Grimston’s Oak, the oldest tree in the forest, estimated to be 350 years old. I approached it and laid my Geofon contact mic around the base and picked up the slow movement and creaking of the large tree. I also followed into the forest and recorded birdsong and small streams and rivers. Overall the search for the ghosts was prominent, I could hear how the soundscape has changed I suppose. There would have not been so much noise pollution. But as the rainforest book said, sometimes the ghosts are listening to what is still there, the balance between noise pollution and actual sounds of the wildlife is proof of the fight and co-dependency that exists. My windshield broke, the TASCAM DR100MKII also broke, I got super muddy, and I need hiking shoes it seems. I guess this was the universe telling me I need to prepare better for the next trip, which I’ve decided will be near the birling gap.

I need to get the setup correct and take the right equipment with me, park my bike not take it with me. I left with a few sounds and a further determination to research and see what I can do with my sounds.

So next steps are, to reflect on some more research, and plan the gear for the next trip. Go to Jez Riley French talk next Sunday.

So I ended up purchasing this book, as it reflected the idea presented within my dissertation very well. They gave further research into rainforests within Britain that I had no idea existed. I wanted to use this book as a bible or a guide to research these forests but I found even more exciting information. The concept of ghost woods, or searching for ghosts within these environments that once existed and still hold on for dear life. How can field recording preservation within an artistic context occur as a reflection within my portfolio work, and can these pieces of work position the listener to feel more inclined to love and save our ecological planet? Here are some quotes.

A temperate rainforest is a wood where it’s wet and mild enough for plants to grow on other plants. Temperate rainforest is actually rarer than the tropical variety: it covers just 1 per cent of the world’s surface. 

I think it’s good to define what a temperate rainforest is, in contrast to a tropical rainforest and that they only cover 1% of the world’s surface, even more rare than a tropical rainforest!

Britain’s rainforests, in short, are truly the pinnacle of our country’s woodlands. Not only are they extraoridinary places to experience, providing a fest for the senes. They’re also treasure-troves of biodiversity, home to globally significant populations of rare species of lichens and mosses, birds and mammals. And the carbon that our rainforest trees are busily soaking up — not just in their trunks, but also via the epiphytic plants that festoon their branches — make them some of our best allies in the fight against the climate crisis. 

I think people often forget that nature and ecological sites like these rainforests are actually a helping hand against climate change that we face, and they soak up massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Even at 1% coverage of the world they still go a long way to help our planet stay at its correct temperature.

Between the first earth day of 1970 and the rio earth summit of 1992, millions of people across the world rose up to demand action against air and water pollution, environmental destruction and the despoliation of the natural world.

I read about this during my dissertation research. Earth Day and the moon landing created this unified feeling within planet Earth Showing us for the first time all together. I think this contrasts the same argument towards the natural world that we exist with.

The first modern ‘tree huggers’ were the Chipko women of Uttar Pradesh in India, who chained themselves to trees to stop them being cut down. 

I think it’s interesting to see this within the context of Western-sided research but in fact, the first tree huggers were the Chipko women of India!

This loss of cultural memo, this great forgetting that we once had rainforests, is almost as heartbreaking as the loss of the forests themselves, It points to the phenomenon that ecologists call ‘shifting baseline syndrome’: society’s ability to grow accustomed to environmental losses.

I didn’t realise that not only did we lose the forests in Britain but we also forgot. Which is even more important. How can our society forget they existed and dominated Britain at one point?

Britain’s rainforests remain under-recognised, unmapped, and largely unacknowledged by politicians and a wider public.

Something is also discovered while reading this book, it’s difficult to locate these forests and find them. I’m optimistic I can find out despite the rain that falls there.

The ecologist Ian Rotherham has joined the term ‘ghost woods’ to describe the landscape emptied of trees. As we now know, after the last Ice Age, Britain was far more wooded than the pitiful 13 per cent woodland cover we have today. 

Ghost woods as a landscape emptied of trees is a super interesting concept to me. The idea is that they are still there the spirits of the trees, and that you can tell by the landscape that they existed.

Fowles wrote in an essay about Wistman’s wood, ‘thermal black hound is the Moor itself – that is, untamed nature, the inhuman hostility at the heart of such landscapes. But there is also something else haunting about Wistman’s wood and the barren moor that surrounds it – a nightmare that stalks the twenty-first century imagination far more than tales of ghost hounds and bogeymen. It is the spectre of ecological collapse. Forget the ghost stories: the real ghosts in Dartmoor’s landscape are the ones rising from the bones of the rainforests that we destroyed. 

Ecological collapse is the real ghost that haunts Wistmans woods. How can we protect and understand these places on the edge of an ecological collapse?

But Rotherham’s search for ghost woods isn’t intended merely to mourn what’s departed, rather to resurrect what still survives 

I think this is a key idea here, the ghosts are not what has gone but also what remains, what remains shows us what was there which is important.

If we have no love for nature, it seems unlikely that we’ll protect it. And without experiencing nature, regularly and close up, it’s hard to see how that love can be cultivated.

Very similar to what Gordon Hempton writes about that in order to save the planet we must make the population fall back in love with planet Earth.

How do we get people interested in rainforest plants, many of which are seldom seen by the general public? And, having got the public interested, how do we prevent people from loving our rainforests to death?

This contrast that falling in love with our forests like the Victorians did, which killed our fern population and also protected it, is a fine line. With more exposure comes more potential foot traffic and damage in these forests.

When you visit one of Britain’s magnificent rainforests, remember the essence of the Countryside code: take only photographs, leave only footprints.

Something I will follow when I take a trip to see them.

I also noted a few forest names within this book to think about the trip I want to take, to visit Wistmans wood.

RAINFORESTS:

Holn Chase 46

Wiseman’s Wood

The gizzard

Young Wood Lake District

Black tor beare

I also saw a map with a guide online on his website. I think the next steps are to continue research and also do experiments in other natural ecological sites before taking this big trip, perhaps they can all intertwine?

In this project, Katie bought a library of 100 trees in Norway. With the premise that in 2114 they will be cut down and made into books. Selected writers were chosen to join this book with a strict NDA to not share what they have written.

Time’s Urgency

Series: The Study of Time, Volume: 16

E-Book ISBN: 9789004408241Publisher: BrillPrint Publication Date: 09 Jul 2019

This book in chapter 3 is where I read this, I found it interesting as she describes this project as a way of understanding our passing time, nature and earth will live beyond humans.

“The idea to grow trees to print books arose for me through
making a connection with tree rings to chapters, the material nature of paper,
pulp and books, and imagining writer’s thoughts infusing themselves, ‘becoming’ the trees, over an expansive period of time. As if the trees absorb the writer’s words like air or water, and the tree rings become chapters, spaced out over the years to come.”

I think these sorts of projects are interesting as they are not necessarily about climate change but they have shortcomings within their message, to destroy and cut down trees for a statement? Does this make the point?

I read about her work in a book, the turntable record that spins at the speed of the earth and takesKatie Paterson – Future Library 4 years to end, as well as her ice record.

Katie Paterson

Here is her bio.

Katie Paterson (born 1981, Scotland) is widely regarded as one of the leading artists of her generation. Collaborating with scientists and researchers across the world, Paterson’s projects consider our place on Earth in the context of geological time and change. Her artworks make use of sophisticated technologies and specialist expertise to stage intimate, poetic and philosophical engagements between people and their natural environment. Combining a Romantic sensibility with a research-based approach, conceptual rigour and coolly minimalist presentation, her work collapses the distance between the viewer and the most distant edges of time and the cosmos.

Katie Paterson has broadcast the sounds of a melting glacier live, mapped all the dead stars, compiled a slide archive of darkness from the depths of the Universe, created a light bulb to simulate the experience of moonlight, and sent a recast meteorite back into space. Eliciting feelings of humility, wonder and melancholy akin to the experience of the Romantic sublime, Paterson’s work is at once understated in gesture and yet monumental in scope.

Katie Paterson has exhibited internationally, from London to New York, Berlin to Seoul, and her works have been included in major exhibitions including Turner Contemporary, Hayward Gallery, Tate Britain, Kunsthalle Wien, MCA Sydney, Guggenheim Museum, and The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. She was winner of the Visual Arts category of the South Bank Awards, and is an Honorary Fellow of Edinburgh University.

Katie Paterson is represented by Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, and James Cohan Gallery, New York.

Specifically, these two works interested me.

Angus came for a visiting practitioner lecture and it was fascinating. His lecture was on field notes and something he called.

“field notes against sonic exceptionalism”

Now this sentence has stuck with me since the lecture, field notes against sonic exceptionalism are a bold statement but also perhaps a good thought process. Sound arts and the whole canon do have this idea of sonic exceptionalism that sound is everything. If only we closed our eyes and listened maybe we’d understand more is what we say. But also as Angus discussed, the ecological issues with recorders that take these sounds into captured material is terrible for the environment. Capturing sounds with plastic recorders that have mined lithium for their batteries and cobalt for the chips. It destroys jungles, dangerous for the communities that work for little to no pay with no safety equipment. Perhaps the field note is a response to this.

Also field notes as, he believes that they can exist as of themselves, such as the work for Fieldwork for Future Ecologies, Radical Practice of art. Field notes as the specific piece of their own things, Field Notes as Voice (the Horror) He vocalises them, he took them too far he says, he started speaking his notes in the spaces that influenced them.

He finds field notes as a way of representing the environment he hears, he worked on a project with Simon James, translated by KYRIN Chen 2022,

He now will play us field recordings he considers field notes, 

I think this whole field note process is super interesting towards my project, as a counter-argument and counter source of representation of environments, and also a response to my dissertation that doesn’t sound. Could the field recording be written, could the field recording be a drawing, a photo, or a captured sound. What is a field recording? Again big questions, but I want to take a small notepad with me when I field record and see the difference between the notepad and the recording through sound.

I should also do some research into field recordings and field notes?

I decided to do a first field recording trip around the Thames near my flat before I make bigger travels into other areas and use better equipment. Consider this an experiment and a test run. I am not sure what physical form my protect 2 will take but I am sure it will explore the themes from my dissertation, field recordings, acoustic ecology, can the benefits of listening to field recordings promote environmental change?

I took my phone, as I was told that my phone is a great tool for field recording, and wrote what I could hear. Inspired by Angus Carlyle and his lecture at UAL where he spoke about field notes as a more eco way of field recording, I thought why not do both?

I walked and cycled along the Thames until I came to this disused pier, I could hear the pier screech under the rough river splashing against it. I wrote some field notes.

“The river Thames was frothing,
The ancient dock was decayed and squeaking as the waves and current bashed against its metal base.
Squeaks that sounded like screams and quivers.”

I then recorded the audio. Found a closeby record shop and bought field recordings on vinyl of birds and savannas from Africa. I think my interests will develop and I’ll perhaps create something with the recordings I took today as an exercise of what I could do?