Listening in the field

As the initial motivation for this enquiry came from a specific, unplanned, in situ

listening experience, it felt appropriate to explore listening further once the research had commenced. I decided to seek opportunities to engage actively with on-site listening in both familiar and unfamiliar environments – both alone and with other people. As well as active listening, methods identified as appropriate were walking, field recording,

journal/note keeping, personal observation, group discussions and studio listening sessions for material recorded in the field. This led to a programme of activities between June 2009 and September of 2010.

3.1 Listening in the field

While visiting Australia in 2009 I made a series of field recordings in and around the Blue Mountains near Sydney and in the more urban setting of the Botanical Gardens in Melbourne. I saw this encounter with sound as a means to create a sense of otherness and distance as a point of reference with which to return to the more familiar sonic

environments I was habituated to. I hoped this exercise would enable me to listen in a more open and creative way to the acoustic environments I would encounter as the enquiry progressed. At the same time, I decided not to use these more exotic locations as

the core focus for the research as I was more interested in everyday engagement with familiar environments than exploring a spectrum of otherness and difference.

Some Australian soundscapes can sound intensely alien to the European ear. Native birds and insects contribute a very specific character and sound is spatialised in very particular ways. Cicadas are very common and each creates an intense sonic zone. The listener experiences an overall density of sound created from overlapping zones, which appear to shift location and character in relation to wind and the position of the listener. Individual cicadas also stop and start making sound with unpredictable irregularity so there can be moments of relative foreground silence in which a more distant density of sound can be heard. The highly localised calls of Bell Miner birds contribute a curiously musical upper register voice. The specific acoustics of unfamiliar spaces may also intrigue the ear. For example, listening from above the eucalypt canopy to the sound of rain hitting a seeming infinity of foliage – while Sulphur-Crested Cockatoos screech through the damp air.

Stranger still, perhaps, to the un-habituated ear, is the blending of such unfamiliar sounds with everyday human-made content: the sounds of traffic, music and voices. The

resulting montage of natural and man-made sounds presents an extraordinary model of unplanned sonic interaction.

In March 2010, I helped organise a soundwalk as part of the AudioLab10: Language of Place Symposium at West Bay in Dorset. Allan Upton, Adrian Newton, Adam Baker and I walked the footpath between Bridport and West Bay. I recorded the walk and we focused on the theme of locating and interacting with sounding objects. The experience was then discussed, and the recording subsequently edited by each participant into a soundscape composition. One point to emerge from the discussion was the idea of latent sound and the identification of sounds that might be extracted from the objects and structures of the environment. It was here that the idea of ‘playing’ gates and other metalwork emerged – and also the extraordinarily rich sonic possibilities presented by detritus, especially litter such as drinks cans, crisp packets and plastic bottles. This process revealed much about the personal nature of listening; each participant was drawn to different sounds, combinations and treatments. This awareness of multiple ‘listenings’

was something I was able to carry forward into both the design and delivery of installations. As a result, my focus became less centralised on my own reading of the work and expanded to engaging with the participant’s experiences. Another awareness

was the change in listening through the course of the walk and how one’s focus cycled though modes of distraction, intense concentration, heightened acuity and relative ambivalence.

As an artist involved with the satellite programme for the Whitstable Biennale in June 2010 (see section 5.2) I organised and recorded a soundwalk between the Old Neptune public house on the Whitstable seafront and the area knows as Tankerton Slopes. This was a valuable opportunity to juxtapose the focussed listening exercise I had undertaken in order to record and prepare the biennale installation with a more generalised listening experience of the same location in a group situation. In discussion after the event it again became clear that listening was a very personal experience. Participants were drawn to many different sounds and expressed a range of preferences and associations.

In September 2010 I used the opportunity afforded by a family holiday to Thessaloniki, the Halkidiki Peninsula and the island of Hydra, in Greece, to revisit and practice the listening method I first explored in Australian in 2009. Again, I made numerous field recordings of diverse locations, this time including more general urban and suburban soundscapes. Having recently engaged with the soundscape of Whitstable, I was keen to visit and record similar locations in Greece. Again, the idea was to explore, through active listening, the differences and similarities, such as spatialization, the effect of climate, culture and the interaction of individual sonic events and sound signals. This experience was particularly useful when I explored the soundscape of Corfu Old Town during the WFAE conference in 2011 (see section 5.6).

These listening experience, along with the recordings, notes, observations and contextual research I produced during this phase of the enquiry came to inform my subsequent approach to site investigation in the UK.

3.2 Field recording

A field recording is any recording that takes place outside the specifically prepared environment of the recording studio (see Frank Dorritie, 2003, p. 4). Field recording, almost unintentionally, captures the acoustical traces of landscapes, locations and populations; the potential intertwining of topography, meteorological phenomena, architectural acoustics, fauna, flora and mechanical processes. The terms field recording

and phonography are often used interchangeably in contemporary writing, and this is the case with this thesis. However, it should be noted that there is an alternative use of the term phonography associated with the writing of François-Bernard Mâche (1983, p. 131) that emerges in the context of electroacoustic composition, as defining a category of non-musical material.

Street observes that the development of early field recording techniques establishes the practice of separating sounds from their environmental context (2012, p. 102). It is tempting to assume that this form of sound collecting is an extension of the 19^th century naturalist’s focus on collecting and archiving (see Charles Darwin, 1909/2008). However, John Drever observes (2013, personal conversation) that the development of an apparent species-ist approach can also be attributed to the limitations of early sound recording technology, which made getting as close to the source of a sound as possible a necessity.

Before the introduction of portable, clockwork Nagra tape recorders in the 1950s, field recordists took studio equipment on location. For example, Ludwig Koch’s (1955) pioneering bird song recordings of the late 1920s and 1930s were achieved using bulky direct-to-disk recorders. Radio and television stations maintained recording vans, from which microphone lines could be run. This was a technology and a degree of mobility employed by Pierre Schaeffer (1952/2012). During the 1920s, location sound recordings were also made using telephone lines to transmit the signal back to a central facility.

These approaches provided a degree of flexibility, but also severely limited access potential. The first battery-powered portable stereo Nagra tape recorder, the Nagra III was launched in 1958 (Nagra, 2012). Luc Ferrari was one of the first people to adopt the new level of portability, and compose with the field recordings he collected. Music Promenade (1968) was followed in 1970 by Presque Rien N° 1 ou le Lever du Jour au Bord de la Mer. Recording from the window of his lodgings in a Dalmatian fishing village, he documented the emergence of sound from silence between 3am and 6am over an unspecified number of nights.

“I recorded those sounds which repeated every day: the first fisherman passing by same time every day with his bicycle, the first hen, the first donkey, and then the lorry which left at 6am to the port to pick up people arriving on the boat. Events determined by society. And then the composer plays!” (Ferrari, 1998)

In Ferrari’s reimagining of the dawn we hear cows harmonise and cycles of everyday activity repeated so as to become subtle rhythmic patterns. A boat engine merges with the sound of footsteps, which in turn becomes the sound of horse’s hooves. Time is

compressed and narratives are interrupted. However, content and context remain central to the work – unlike the situation with musique concrète where the exploration of

environmental sound as pure sound is paramount. This work, as David Grubbs points out in the liner notes to the re-release of Interrupteur/Tautologos 3 (1999), can be identified as representing a new genre of music for its era, one that Grubbs identified as sound art.

When Warner Brothers commissioned Bernie Krause and Paul Beaver to produce the album series that included In a Wild Sanctuary (2006) in 1970 it required field recordings. Krause, who had no previous location-sound experience, recorded these himself using a Nagra. In a Wild Sanctuary is generally accepted as the first music album (Wendy Carlos’s Sonic Seasonings [1998] was released in 1972) to, “use long segments of wild sounds as components of orchestration, and also the first to feature ecology as a theme” (Beaver and Krause, 2012, p. 15).

“Like a pair of binoculars, my mics and earphones brought the sound within a close and intimate range, exposing a range of vivid detail that was entirely new to me… I didn’t feel like I was listening as a distant observer; rather, I had been sucked into a new space – becoming an integral part of the experience myself… I realised, even then, that wild sound might contain huge stores of valuable

information just waiting to be unravelled.” (ibid., 2012 p. 16)

Krause (ibid., pp. 83-105) went on to coin the term biophony in the 1980s, to describe the overall orchestration of animal sounds, in a niche hypothesis where individual species adapt to occupy particular parts of the frequency spectrum or times of day – so as to avoid the masking of their auditory communications by other species. Biophony, along with geophony (sounds created or related to physical phenomena) and anthrophony (human made sounds) are a useful set of classifications for analysing acoustic environments.

Equally important in establishing the contemporary phonographic field is the pioneering work of Steven Feld. As an undergraduate in the 1960s Feld studied sound recording, musique concrète and electroacoustic composition with Herbert Deutsch and

anthropology with Colin Turnbull (see Feld, 2013, p. 203). Immediately prior to his first

visit to the rainforests of Papua New Guinea in 1975 Feld also studied film sound with Jean Rouch. At the time, field recordings were usually made from fixed locations. Feld (ibid., p. 205) adopted the approach of wearing his heavy equipment; “I would walk with this rig in the way I had learned, from Rouch, to walk with a camera to record the body’s tracing of space.” Thus we have the development of method toward mobility and

performance. Feld’s general comments concerning the experience of heightened and focussed listening as a consequence of on-site monitoring share a similar revelatory tone to those of Krause⁶.