There were two stand out excerpts this morning from my 7am sound walk that I wanted to share. The birds have a particular rhythm that I anticipate impacting my music over the next two months, and yes, another close mic of a bee!
The practice of waking up, and then going out to circumambulate the land at The Soil Factory while listening intensely to the landscape, is a really powerful and intense experience. As an artist/researcher, it immediately brings to mind the work of Pauline Oliveros, Hildegard Westerkamp, and R. Murray Shafer. With Pauline, her work on deep listening is so pervasive in the field that one really cannot engage in a listening practice without her coming to mind as we owe so much to her in this regard. She was one of the faculty in residence at Bard when I was working on my MFA, and I remember so many of my peers talking about her and her meditation offerings she gave them, and listening to her talk about listening was a real treat. Walking and listening were two of Pauline’s biggest ‘prescriptions’ it seemed in her lessons with others (I never personally experienced this, so this is very much anecdotal second hand information). I know zen buddhism influenced her practice a lot, and it has influenced my practice as well. So as I walk and listen, she is omnipresent as I move through the land here.
I think on a craft level, I keep coming back to the work of Hildegard Westerkamp as I do my walking. In particular, I keep coming back to her piece Kits Beach Soundwalk.
I teach this piece a lot, as I always start out my introduction to electronic music courses with this piece, usually around the the practice of sound walking. In this piece, she introduces the site she is visiting, and gives us a really fantastic treat of listening to the sounds, then a deep dive into micro sound and processing out the outside interference. It’s a great way of showcasing how we can manipulate recordings to get what we want out of them, while also allowing us to sink into a location as both a non-fiction and fictional space. It might be strange to frame the manipulated sound as fiction, but it is a fantasy of what we want to hear, even though we receive it as actual rather than constructed sound. This space of hyper manipulation is always fictional to my minds ear. I don’t mind it, because I don’t think that fiction doesn’t mean we can’t learn from it and observe important things. But it keeps coming up for me as I do not have the tools on hand to remove the constant freeway and wind noise from my recordings here. I may not be able to, because it is so present it might just have to stay there. So as I walk I wonder: is it best to represent what is, or to focus in only on what we want to hear, on what we want to preserve in the moment?
After writing this, I went outside and took some recordings using contact microphones. Basically, I just put the mics on the ground, or amongst the plants at the surface, and hit record. I tried to get ants, but was unsuccessful. I did, however, make several unusual recordings in areas where I did not know what the outcome might be. One is recorded in the marshy garden, where I placed contact mics under rocks on the dirt directly. This one has been denoised, in a very ‘kits beach’ way, or at least, as well as I can with the tools I have here. The second, recorded directly on grass with contact mics, has been unaltered. You will notice there is a slight hum in it which is from the recording device.
I have fewer things to say about Shafer here. His writings on acoustic ecology were foundational to my early thinking in listening and field recordings, and he is a part of the fabric of listening and thinking about the world we live in. His book “The Soundscape: The Tuning of The World” is a foundation text in environmental listening, and I definitely recommend it to anyone wanting to go deeper in this.
There is something really powerful about spending time observing a landscape from an intentional sonic and visual perspective. In some ways my method might seem odd, as I am bifurcating them a bit. I go out with my audio recorder and make my field recordings, and then I go out again with the camera to look and observe by looking. This doesn’t mean that when I am walking around I am not looking at things. I’m doing both, but I have made the conscious decision to not take images while recording, at least for now. This has two reasons: on a practical level, I don’t want to be carrying all the things, having to shuffle about and make more noise problems for myself to deal with later. The audio recorder I use has a terrible problem with EMF interference, so if I pick up my camera or my cell phone while using it, it records them turning on and off with weird little crackles and whines. But on a more personal/artistic level, I find that allowing myself to really focus on being present through sound is a more enriching practice. I’m able to be present, to observe what I am experiencing, and not have to shuffle between phenomenological modalities. When I am out with my camera. I am hyper focused on what I am seeing in a way that I begin to exclude my ears. I am no longer hearing outside of my eyesight, and that would make sound too hard to contemplate in a meaningful way. It makes for a complicated juxtaposition, though, because sometimes I have better lighting when listening than I do when using my camera. This means I might miss a good shot, but in the end it is worth it. I am not too worried, because I am repeating this process regularly, so I am likely to get something else or similar that is satisfying.
