Week 1: Introduction to 2nd Year, Sound Studies and Ethnographic Modes

How do we present Sound Art in audio documentary form? What knowledge and framing do we bring, consciously and unconsciously, when providing information?  Do our listening habits inform our interpretation of audio work?  

I was listening to ‘Kitts Beach Soundwalk: Hildegard Westerkamp’, which demonstrated “In this soundwalk composition we leave the city behind eventually and explore instead any acoustic realm of barnacles, the world of high frequencies, inner space and dreams”. I was very interested in this piece because it was actually my kind of taste: ambient dark music. I could feel the depression of the piece and how the environment was blending her dead voice. Everything was too quiet which made me feel a bit panic, cause there was like nothing there, so deep, so dead.

I am thinking myself would be interested in Sonic journalism, which is based on the idea that all sound, including non–speech, gives information about places and events and that listening provides valuable insights different from, but complimentary to, visual images and language. This does not exclude speech but redresses the balance toward the relevance of other sounds

As an experience in my life making broadcasts, I hate electric backgrounds, which I defined as electric noise, I would definitely cut them. I hate children crying when I am doing field recordings. I like to amplify micro sounds like boiling food, touching cloth and raindrops.

I find what Mark said about Participation [performance, re-enactment, simulation] is really fabulous, focus on: Simulation and performance are part and parcel of any scientific process of testing. Listening is often analyzed in labs and rehearsed scenarios. The performativity of cross-disciplinary methods encourage participative approaches to knowledge, rather than upholding the privilege of standing on the sidelines, accumulating neat ‘facts’ at a distance. Within these episodes there are various examples of participation, both in terms of the subjects and myself as the entangled recordist-actor.

The podcast I found it was intriguing was:

https://www.bang-olufsen.com/en/us/story/sound-matters-episode-1

In this instalment Sound matters meet the influential field recordist, bio-acoustician and musician Bernie Krause. Starting out studying classical composition and playing guitar, Krause joined legendary folk group The Weavers in 1963. Krause later became interested in electronic and avant-garde music, and by the late 1960s had started to incorporate recordings of wildlife and soundscapes into his own music. In this episode we speak to Krause about his work as a founding pioneer in the field of soundscape ecology. One of my favourite selection is called “A Novel Sound”, they investigated how the environmental sounds are being recorded, they used 12 water proof microphones to collect the sound of ocean. The quantity of the amounts on ‘snoring’ was also very interesting, they looked at people in different genders, ages, places and tried to differentiate them. How to differ the snoring from my parents is very different for my if I record them and have a play back. Sometimes people could not say what is right and what is wrong, because there are thousands of different sounds in the audio book, and a lot of them are very creative as well. “You have to be quiet to do it.” Putting time in directing people on sound is very valuable. Focusing on different HZ is also very interesting, you know, though we could not hear silence, but sometimes silence just passed away in several seconds.