Over the last couple of days I've been reminded a few times of a project I completed in May last year, centred on the High Level Bridge. At the time I intended to extend and develop the project, and having had a break from it for a while I think I'd like to do that again.
The main output from the project was an audiovisual piece:
The main output from the project was an audiovisual piece:
I kept a blog throughout the project, which can be found here.
Some thoughts about the project below:
Environment
1. The action of circumnavigating, encompassing, or surrounding something; the state of being encompassed or surrounded
2. The area surrounding a place or thing; the environs, surroundings, or physical context
3. The physical surroundings or conditions in which a person or other organism lives, develops, etc., or in which a thing exists; the external conditions in general affecting the life, existence, or properties of an organism or object
4. A particular set of surroundings or conditions which something or someone exists in or interacts with
5. The natural world or physical surroundings in general, either as a whole or within a particular geographical area, esp. as affected by human activity.
6. The social, political, or cultural circumstances in which a person lives, esp. with respect to their effect on behaviour, attitudes, etc.[1]
My aim in this project was simple: to practice environmental sound art. I chose a location. And I went there, to see what I would find.
The High Level Bridge, Newcastle upon Tyne
The High Level Bridge is an environment. That’s not how you’d usually think of it, though. By its nature, a bridge is usually experienced as a place of transit, and is therefore always temporary. It’s a way of getting from A to B, rarely a place to pause, to reflect, to be in. It’s a link, it’s a way of connecting Newcastle to Gateshead. It’s a route, for pedestrians, traffic and trains; but for the buses and taxies, it’s a one-way route, which forms a loop with the Tyne Bridge. Our experience of the bridge as temporary and transitional doesn’t conform with common conceptions of the word ‘environment’, which for many is synonymous with ‘nature’, or which refers to a place in which a substantial amount of time is spent: ‘the home environment’; ‘the school environment’.
But I’m not sure that this is quite true.
Before starting this project, that was my view of the bridge. But my work has changed my perceptions somewhat. In the time I’ve spent on the bridge, I’ve often seen people lingering on the bridge for long periods of time – having their lunch, looking out over the river, taking photographs. And the sheer volume of graffiti on the bridge implies that the bridge might hold some kind of significance for the various groups of young people responsible for the graffiti – otherwise, why bother? It seems that for some, the High Level Bridge is an environment that constitutes much more than just a way to get from one side of the river to the other.
It’s an environment that’s shared by more than just people. For the pigeons that live on the High Level Bridge, it is a place of permanence, it is home. And it’s part of many other, wider environments: the river; Newcastle’s Quayside; Gateshead’s Quayside; the local road network; the local train network; and many others.
Why here?
There are a number of reasons why I chose the High Level Bridge to work with. First, I was keen to move away from the idea that ‘environment’ is synonymous with ‘nature’. Before studying and working in this area, my conception of ‘Environmental Sound Art’ was sound art made by going out into the natural environment (which would be distinctly rural, wild, and untouched by human influence as far as possible). This conception was challenged right from the start.
Note that I used the phrases ‘going out into’ and ‘the [natural] environment’. Both of these imply a distance between my present self, and the environment – through this statement I separate myself from what is ‘out there’, and separate the environment off and something that doesn’t include myself. It is this (very common) way of thinking that has been challenged by my study of environmental sound art. The ideas of Timothy Morton in ‘Ecology without Nature’ have been particularly influential, both to myself and to many writers and practitioners within the field of environmental sound art.[2] David Michael sums this up nicely:
In his writings on ecology, Timothy Morton discusses this tendency in art to aestheticise nature as creating a convenient distance between ‘us’ and ‘ecology’, allowing for a dangerously detached and rationalised experience of ‘environment’ … Since environment is not considered ‘us’, this separation allows us to do questionable things like bury radioactive waste, produce mountains of toxic plastics, and eat our way through every species on the planet. These are acts done to a nature ‘over there’, while over here everything is just lovely.[3]
Morton’s ideas necessitate a re-thinking of how I understand ‘environment’ on many different levels, and therefore influence the ways in which I approach environmental sound art. First, my concept of environment should not be restricted to ‘natural’ environments, and thus environmental sound art should not engage only with ‘natural’ environments (although there is no reason why these environments should be excluded, either). For the purpose of this project – my first intentional foray into the world of environmental sound art – I wanted to work somewhere that forced me to work outside of my previous conceptions of environment, with the aim of gaining a broader understanding of what environment might mean through my creative practice.
Second, my environment is something that I’m always already a part of – so whatever environment I’m working in will always include me as part of it. As such, the ways in which I effect and interact with my environment should form a key part of my environmental sound art practice, and should certainly not be consciously excluded from it. This idea has influenced not only the way I went about the project, but also my initial choice of project. The High Level Bridge holds personal significance for me – it is a place that I feel a connection to, and there are strong memories and associations that I can draw on in relation to the bridge. It was important to me that the location I chose to work with wasn’t a random choice, but was somewhere that meant something to me.
Third, an environment constitutes more that just physical space, and the things that inhabit that space. It also includes relevant cultural, social, historical, political and economic factors. If these are all factors that constitute an environment, then they are factors that can (and should) be considered in the practice of environmental sound art. There is a large amount of information on all of these factors as they pertain to The High Level Bridge, making it a hugely interesting environment to explore and work in.
Environmental Sound Art
It could be argued that the term ‘environmental sound art’ is meaningless. Sound always happens in an environment, therefore all sound must be environmental sound. But for me the term ‘environmental sound art’ isn’t supposed to denote a specific set of sounds or practices; rather, it represents an attitude towards sound art in which environmental considerations are foregrounded and allowed to influence the creation of sound art at all levels.
Thus an environmental sound art practice cannot be said to have one specific form – there’s no set structure or process to follow that will produce environmental sound art. Practices should arise out of, and be appropriate to, the environment(s) in which the creative practitioner is working. I therefore cannot prescribe my processes in this project as a model that should be followed by others to produce similar outcomes, nor is it a model that I would necessarily follow again myself. The exploration that I describe here was specific to the environment in which I was working, and was developed through a combination of the affordances of the environment, and my own interests at the time.
This does not mean that an account of the processes I have undertaken so far in this project are of no value, either to myself or to others. Much can be learnt from studying the practice of others, and from examining the ways in which practices can be developed and re-worked through engagement with various environments. The development of this project followed a period of months of studying the practice and writings of others working in the field of environmental sound art, and their ideas and approaches have substantially influenced the way I’ve gone about this project.[4]
The processes I’ve employed in the development of this project have been very different to those I’ve previously used, and thus the outcomes have taken different formats to those I’ve produced in the past. The nature of the ideas I’ve engaged with over the course of this module have necessitated this difference in approach; I have been challenged to think differently about the ways in which I undertake creative practice. Two key ideas that have particularly influenced the way I’ve worked on this project have been the concept of site-specificity, and the idea that a focus on process, rather than outcomes, might be a more ecologically sustainable way of working.
Process
Listening does not pursue the question of meaning, as a collective, total comprehension, but that of interpretation in the sense of a phantasmagoric, individual and contingent practice. This practice remains necessarily incomplete in relation to an objective totality but complete in its subjective contingency
We’re used to value being placed on finished products. It’s where you get that matters, not how you get there. But there are many practitioners of, and writers on, sound art (and particularly environmental sound art) who are turning this on its head. Maybe what’s more important is how you get there, what you do in the process of getting there, and what you take away from that.
The nature of sound itself encourages this view. Sound isn’t permanent, it is always fleeting. It is always in the present, and always leaving us.
I cannot freeze sound.[5]
And sound cannot be viewed as an object apart from ourselves.
Listening cannot contemplate the object/phenomenon heard separate from its audition because the object does not precede listening. Rather, the auditory is generated in the listening practice: in listening I am in sound, there can be no gap between the heard and hearing, I either hear it or I don’t, and what I perceive is what I hear.[6]
Environmental sound, then, can never be fixed, tied down, or labelled. We can never know what it is, because it’s constantly changing. I can never offer up a finished product, and say ‘this is what this place sounds like’, because that wouldn’t be true. The only way to know what a place sounds like is to go there and listen to it, but even that will only be a snapshot of what it sounds like at that time, to that person, filtered through their perception, and effected by their presence.
In this context, the idea that a finished object or outcome should be the goal of environmental sound art doesn’t make sense. There can be no final answers, no truths. Environmental sound can never be finished, it’ll never be done. That doesn’t mean that nothing can be made or created. But what is created will always be part of a process, a process that started before the work was conceive, and will continue long after its been forgotten. And as such, the process becomes the most important thing - and perhaps the only thing.
Site-Specificity
Site-specific work means different things to different people. According to McIver, the term can be interpreted in two distinct ways: as ‘work made specifically for a site’ or as ‘work made in response to and encounter with, a site’.[7] It is this second interpretation that I have become interested in through the study of environmental sound art. Site-specific work that is made through encounter with the environment could be said to follow a more ecologically sustainable model than works in which art that has not been created in response to that environment is imposed on a space.
‘Site response in art occurs when the artist is engaged in an investigation of the site as part of the process in making the work’.[8]
When undertaking site-responsive work, the questions that are asked are quite different to those I’d usually consider. Instead of questions such as: what do I want to make?; What would sound good in this composition?; Where can I go to record this sound?; I start with a different set of questions: What does this place afford me?; What already exists here?; How can I interact with those things that already exist here?. Answering these questions requires a radically different approach to my creative practice. It necessitates acts of exploration and discovery. It involves going somewhere with the purpose of seeing what is there to be found, rather than with something specific in mind that I hope to find and capture. It therefore takes more time, and requires you to be much more open to the unexpected, and potentially the inconvenient.
Listening is not a receptive mode but a method of exploration, a mode of ‘walking’ through the soundscape/the sound work. What I hear is discovered not received, and this discovery is generative, a fantasy: always different and subjective and continually, presently now.[9]
Let me give an example of this: in my first few trips to the bridge, what really caught my attention was the visual, rather than the aural, particularly the amount and diversity of graffiti that is on the bridge. As a sound artist, this wasn’t the most convenient discovery, and my initial impulse was to disregard it and focus on something else. However I felt this went against the aims of what I was trying to do. This project has been about working with what I find, not what I want to find, and developing new working processes which are appropriate to the environment I’m working in. I therefore spent a substantial amount of time photographing all the of the graffiti, editing photos into collages, and thinking about the different things that this graffiti can mean, to both myself and to other people. Right now, that’s where I’ve got to with this process, and so this aspect of the work hasn’t produced any outcomes (or at least, not outcomes in sound – there are many photos, some collages, and my thoughts on the process so far which could be considered as outcomes, but which I see as a part of an ongoing process of creative practice, which will continue beyond the scope of this module).
Whilst the work I’ve produced for this module has not focused specifically on the graffiti, this process of discovery has had a substantial impact on the work I have produced so far, in that it brought to the fore the importance of the visual in relation to this site. The bridge is a hugely impressive and visually striking piece of architecture, and to ignore the visual in favour of the aural would have meant ignoring a large and very important part of what the bridge is to me.
It also led me to investigate perceptions of the bridge through different avenues than I would otherwise have done. Rather than focusing on written accounts of the history of the bridge, and historical documents such as photographs and newspaper cuttings, I looked instead for contemporary, visual representations of the bridge through youtube. This seemed an appropriate avenue of investigation that was in line with the youth culture that the graffiti represents. I found it really interesting to explore the ways that people engaged with that place and how they represented their engagement via youtube videos – sufficiently interesting that I decided to create a video collage that represented perceptions of the bridge. Following this, I created my own video from scratch, exploring my perception of the bridge through the same media. I continued to work with video as part of a process of working an idea through, a concept that was key to the teachings in this module.
It therefore transpired that the outcomes of my work on the bridge so far have taken the form of videos, drawing on both visual and aural sources. This is not a media I’ve ever worked with before, therefore the project has taken me well outside of my comfort zone. It would have been much easier for me to work purely with sound, but this would have gone against the nature of what I found when working at the site, and in the light of the ideas I’ve encountered throughout this module, this would have been problematic.
Outcomes
The Collage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXacYCHU6VY
The collage video collates a variety of youtube clips pertaining to the High Level Bridge, including a film of scenic shots of the bridge, documentaries about the bridge (both amateur and professional), footage taken from a train as it passes over the High Level Bridge, and a clip from the iconic film ‘Get Carter’, which features a scene on the High Level Bridge. It therefore brings together numerous different perceptions of what the bridge might be, or might mean. This is interweaved with my own perception of the bridge, through footage of me playing on the bridge, and photos I have taken. The soundtrack is made up of various recordings I made on the High Level Bridge, including recordings of me playing and improvising around the High Level Bridge Hornpipe, written by James Hill. Snippets of audio from the youtube clips are layered on top of this. The snippets I chose to use were mostly speech, articulating different ways of thinking about the bridge, as well as a song about the restoration of the High Level Bridge.
The Technical Stuff
This video collage was created using iMovie, the video creation software supplied with Apple Macintosh computers. When the video collage was complete, I transferred the movie file (both visuals and audio) into Pro Tools, where I combined it with an audio track that I’d previously created in Pro Tools. This audio track had been created using various recordings made on a Zoom H4n handheld recording device, and features recordings of the sounds that could be heard on the High Level Bridge during numerous recording sessions, as well as recordings of me playing the fiddle on the High Level Bridge. I added snippets of audio from the youtube clips to this track, which were synchronized with the video footage. The completed audio track was then exported out of Pro Tools and re-imported into iMovie, replacing the original audio track of the video collage.
The Hornpipe
See Appendix 1
It is useful to elaborate at this stage on the use of the High Level Bridge Hornpipe in the project. This hornpipe forms part of my personal connection to the bridge. It was one of the first tunes I learnt on moving to Newcastle, and is one of my favourite hornpipes. It was written by local fiddler James Hill (1811-1853) in 1849 for the opening of the High Level Bridge.[10]
I often use the fiddle as a way of interacting with my environment through sound. As a practicing folk musician (playing mainly for dancing) I frequently experience new places and environments through the practice of folk music, and so for me playing the fiddle is a way of forming connections to places. As part of this project I wanted to explore ways of foregrounding my relationship to and interaction with the environment, and I found that playing my fiddle in the environment I was working in was one of the most effective ways that I could do this. The tune, which is strongly connected to that environment through association, acted as a link between me and the bridge, and also as a temporal link, between the bridge today and the bridge as it was in 1849, when James Hill wrote the tune.
As well as simply playing the tune, on some visits to the bridge I improvised around it, allowing my environment to influence the way that I played. I responded in my improvisation to things that I could see, hear, feel and smell. The fiddle music therefore not only represented the bridge through the association of that tune with the bridge, but also sounded my engagement with the environment of the bridge.
My Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLZEYhPa3wQ
For me the collage served as a type of introduction to the project, but it didn’t feel personal. The media felt right as a way of articulating the processes I was going through as part of the project, but I felt that I wanted to move away from using other people’s representations of the bridge and make something which reflected my perception of the bridge. I therefore went out with a video camera to shoot my own film. Unavoidably, the way in which I perceived the bridge had been influenced by the videos I’d seen on youtube, so there are obvious similarities between some of the footage on the collage, and my own footage.
I don’t see this similarity as problematic. The youtube videos I discovered form part of the environment that is the High Level Bridge – a contemporary, distributed information environment. It is increasingly important in today’s digital age to consider the importance of the internet as part of our environment. The internet can be considered as an environment in its own right, but also forms part of many other environments. In the same way that I allowed physical characteristics of the environment to influence the processes I undertook as part of the project (things that I could see, the sounds I could hear, and the weather, for example), I allowed the things that I encountered in the distributed information environment of youtube to influence my work.
The video consists of shots of the High Level Bridge taken both on the bridge, and from various other locations that the bridge is visible from. The images are designed to complement the soundscape composition that provides the soundtrack to the video, which is made exclusively of sounds recorded on the High Level Bridge, some of which are processed in various ways.
Links between the aural and the visual
Sounds are like ghosts. They slink around the visual object, moving in on it from all directions, forming its contours and content in a formless breeze. The spectre of sound unsettles the idea of visual stability and involves us as listeners in the production of an invisible world.[11]
There are times in the video when the sound seems to syncrohnise with the visual – there are other times when it doesn’t. This has been done deliberately, as this accords with the way in which we experience sound and vision. ‘What we hear is not mostly what we see, nor can it strictly be pinned down to a given source.. often sound is what lends to directing our visual focus – we hear something and this tells us where to look; it eases around us in a flow of energy to which we unconsciously respond’.[12] In our everyday experience, very often the sounds we are hearing don’t directly correlate to what we are looking at at the time. This is reflected in my video – sometimes the sounds heard might be coming from somewhere out of shot, something behind the viewer, or below them. The difference between film and reality is that in the case of the film, the viewer can’t turn around to find the visual source of the sound – the creation of this visual source is therefore left to the viewer’s imagination.
There are times in the video where the viewer will see something that should sound, but doesn’t – again this reflects aspects of our everyday experience of sound. It is often the case that you can see something that’s too far away to be heard; this is especially the case in an urban, lo-fi soundscape in which distant or quiet sounds may be masked my closer or louder sounds. It also reflects the experience of users of portable music players, who will often have music playing on headphones sufficiently loudly to mask other sounds in the environment, meaning that although they can see potential sound sources, these never materialize into sounds heard.
Further, there are times in the video where the visual source of the sound seems almost to match with the aural, but not quite – this is particularly the case with the footage of me playing fiddle, which are not synced with the fiddle music being heard at the time. Again, this has been done deliberately, but for a slightly different reason. The fiddle music in this piece has a different purpose to the other sounds used, in that it is not usually a part of the normal soundscape of the bridge – by this I mean the sounds that can commonly be heard there. The hornpipe only becomes part of the soundscape when I go there and play it. Therefore the fiddle is more symbolic within my soundscape composition; it exists in imagination and in memory. The idea of the hornpipe existing in the imagined soundscape of the bridge was particularly inspired by a conversation with a musician who, by chance, happened to cross the bridge whilst I was playing there one day. I asked him at what point he was able to hear the music, and at what point he realized it was me playing. He replied that when he had first heard the music, he had thought it was in his head – in his imagination – because he quite often hears that tune in his head as he walks over the bridge. For him, the High Level Bridge Hornpipe is a part of the soundscape of the bridge, but it is an imagined soundscape, that draws on memories of previous articulations of the hornpipe. The way in which I treat footage of myself playing fiddle reflects the idea that this exists in the imagination – the pictures are indistinct, slightly out of focus, behind other images, and they don’t properly accord with what is being heard at the time. There is a definite link between the visual and the aural, but it is a link which is taken out of time – the space in which I am playing remains the same, but the time is different. Multiple times are converging on one point, through the juxtaposition of the visual and the aural, creating a sense of place which is more complex than one event happening at one time – and this complexity reflects how we experience place, with memories of different times all converging on one space.
The Technical Stuff
In making this video, I created the audio track first, and then created the video to complement it. The soundscape composition was created in Pro Tools, using recordings that I made on the bridge using a Zoom H4n handheld recording device. Various processing techniques were applied to the recordings, including time-stretching using Paul Stretch, and convolution filtering using Soundhack. Convolution filtering involves filtering one sound file through another, enhancing the frequencies that are shared, and cutting the frequencies that are not. I convolved recordings of me playing the High Level Bridge Hornpipe with recordings of other sounds recorded on the bridge. I shot all of the footage for this video on a HD video camera. The video was created using Adobe Premier Pro, a much more complex piece of software than iMovie. I used many different clips, shot over multiple days, which blend into each other using the ‘opacity’ feature. This allows video footage to be made transparent, so that multiple images can be overlaid, and to allow smooth transitions between different pieces of footage.
Taking Stock
I can come to no conclusion per se, because the project hasn’t concluded, and as such I must end by taking stock of where I’m at now, rather than by attempting to provide any final insights. This isn’t a statement I would have been comfortable making in any previous academic work. It is common for us to focus on outcomes in creative practice, but my engagement with environmental sound art so far has highlighted the importance of process. As such, the outcomes produced thus far do not represent a finished piece of work, nor do they represent the culmination of this project. They are an integral part of the process of working on the High Level Bridge, of getting to know that environment, and of exploring the creative possibilities that arise from this process.
A consequence of this is that much work has been undertaken at this point that hasn’t as yet taken a form that could be submitted as an academic piece of work. Over the last few months I have built up an archive of materials that I will continue to draw on, which include audio recordings, film footage, hundreds of photographs, and a blog documenting my engagement with the bridge and my thoughts about it. I will continue to build this archive over the coming months. There are numerous threads that I’ve started to follow that are in the process of development. It is hoped that these threads will eventually crystalize into further outcomes, using different forms of creative practice, presented using different media.
I have to admit that I’m not entirely comfortable that my submission for an environmental sound art module is so heavily visually biased. I remain convinced that, in the light of the journey of discover I’ve been on over the course of this project, it was the most appropriate way to present my work; but I’m still uncomfortable. To justify it to myself, I keep returning to the words of Tim Ingold: ‘the two [light and sound] are so closely involved with one another as to be virtually inseperable’.[13]
Right now, I have no idea where this project will end, or in what further directions it might take me – and I think that’s part of the point. I went into this with no set ideas about what I might do, and with no specific goal I wanted to reach. This project is about discovery, exploration, and about simply doing things. It’s an exploration of the High Level Bridge, and it’s an exploration of my own creative practice in the context of that environment. Therefore there can be no right or wrong outcomes. The work I’ve produced so far has surprised me. It’s certainly not what I expected I might produce when I started the project. And that’s great, because for me that proves that I’m doing what I set out to do. I’m allowing the environment to guide my practice, to lead me where it will. And in the process I’ve produced something new, something different, and hopefully something worthwhile.
[1] ‘Environment’, Oxford English Dictionary, 2013, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/63089?redirectedFrom=environment#eid (29/05/2013).
[2] Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
[3] David Michael, ‘Toward a Dark Nature Recording’, Organised Sound, Vol. 16, Special Issue 3 (December 2011), p. 207.
[4] The work of John Levack Drever, Jana Winderen, Bill Fontana, James Wyness, Lee Patterson, Bennett Hogg and others has been particularly influential, as well as artists working in other forms of Environmental Art such as Andy Goldsworthy and Robert Smithson. The bibliography provides an overview of the writers in this field that I’ve found most useful.
[5] Salome Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (New York: Continuum, 2010), p. 4.
[6] Ibid, p. 5.
[7] Gillian McIver, ‘Art/Site/Context’, Site Specific Art, 2004, http://www.sitespecificart.org.uk/6.htm (24/05/2013).
[8] Ibid.
[9] Salome Voegelin, p. 4.
[10] ‘James Hill’, Folk Archive Resource North East, http://www.folknortheast.com/learn/biographies/james-hill (30/05/2013).
[11] Salome Voegelin, p. 12.
[12] Brandon Labelle, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life, (New York: Continuum, 2010) p. xix.
[13] Tim Ingold, 'Against soundscape', in A Carlyle (ed.), Autumn leaves: sound and the environment in artistic practice. ( Paris: Double Entendre, 2007), p. 11.
Bibliography
‘Environment’, Oxford English Dictionary, 2013, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/63089?redirectedFrom=environment#eid (29/05/2013).
‘James Hill’, Folk Archive Resource North East, http://www.folknortheast.com/learn/biographies/james-hill (30/05/2013).
Bull, Michael, Sounding out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life, (Berg Publishers, 2000).
Hogg, Bennett, ‘When violins were trees…’, Landscape Quartet, 2013, http://landscapequartet.org/2013/04/28/bennett-hogg-when-violins-were-trees-paper-given-at-beyond-soundscape-symposium-belfast-27th-april-2013/#more-149 (3rd May 2013).
Ingold, Tim, 'Against soundscape', in A Carlyle (ed.), Autumn leaves: sound and the environment in artistic practice. ( Paris: Double Entendre, 2007), pp. 10-13.
Brandon Labelle, Brandon, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life, (New York: Continuum, 2010) p. xix.
LaBelle, Brandon, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (London: Continuum, 2006).
McIver, Gillian, ‘Art/Site/Context’, Site Specific Art, 2004, http://www.sitespecificart.org.uk/6.htm (24/05/2013).
Michael, David, ‘Toward a Dark Nature Recording’, Organised Sound, Vol. 16, Special Issue 3 (December 2011), pp. 206-210.
Morton, Timothy, Ecology Without Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
Murray Schafer, R., The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Vermont: Destiny Books, 1977).
Nagai, Michelle, ‘Listen Compose Listen: A study of perception, process and the spaces between in two works made from listening’, Organised Sound, Vol. 16, Special Issue 3 (December 2011), pp. 211-219.
Voegelin, Salome, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (New York: Continuum, 2010).
[1] ‘Environment’, Oxford English Dictionary, 2013, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/63089?redirectedFrom=environment#eid (29/05/2013).
[2] Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
[3] David Michael, ‘Toward a Dark Nature Recording’, Organised Sound, Vol. 16, Special Issue 3 (December 2011), p. 207.
[4] The work of John Levack Drever, Jana Winderen, Bill Fontana, James Wyness, Lee Patterson, Bennett Hogg and others has been particularly influential, as well as artists working in other forms of Environmental Art such as Andy Goldsworthy and Robert Smithson. The bibliography provides an overview of the writers in this field that I’ve found most useful.
[5] Salome Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (New York: Continuum, 2010), p. 4.
[6] Ibid, p. 5.
[7] Gillian McIver, ‘Art/Site/Context’, Site Specific Art, 2004, http://www.sitespecificart.org.uk/6.htm (24/05/2013).
[8] Ibid.
[9] Salome Voegelin, p. 4.
[10] ‘James Hill’, Folk Archive Resource North East, http://www.folknortheast.com/learn/biographies/james-hill (30/05/2013).
[11] Salome Voegelin, p. 12.
[12] Brandon Labelle, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life, (New York: Continuum, 2010) p. xix.
[13] Tim Ingold, 'Against soundscape', in A Carlyle (ed.), Autumn leaves: sound and the environment in artistic practice. ( Paris: Double Entendre, 2007), p. 11.
Some thoughts about the project below:
Environment
1. The action of circumnavigating, encompassing, or surrounding something; the state of being encompassed or surrounded
2. The area surrounding a place or thing; the environs, surroundings, or physical context
3. The physical surroundings or conditions in which a person or other organism lives, develops, etc., or in which a thing exists; the external conditions in general affecting the life, existence, or properties of an organism or object
4. A particular set of surroundings or conditions which something or someone exists in or interacts with
5. The natural world or physical surroundings in general, either as a whole or within a particular geographical area, esp. as affected by human activity.
6. The social, political, or cultural circumstances in which a person lives, esp. with respect to their effect on behaviour, attitudes, etc.[1]
My aim in this project was simple: to practice environmental sound art. I chose a location. And I went there, to see what I would find.
The High Level Bridge, Newcastle upon Tyne
The High Level Bridge is an environment. That’s not how you’d usually think of it, though. By its nature, a bridge is usually experienced as a place of transit, and is therefore always temporary. It’s a way of getting from A to B, rarely a place to pause, to reflect, to be in. It’s a link, it’s a way of connecting Newcastle to Gateshead. It’s a route, for pedestrians, traffic and trains; but for the buses and taxies, it’s a one-way route, which forms a loop with the Tyne Bridge. Our experience of the bridge as temporary and transitional doesn’t conform with common conceptions of the word ‘environment’, which for many is synonymous with ‘nature’, or which refers to a place in which a substantial amount of time is spent: ‘the home environment’; ‘the school environment’.
But I’m not sure that this is quite true.
Before starting this project, that was my view of the bridge. But my work has changed my perceptions somewhat. In the time I’ve spent on the bridge, I’ve often seen people lingering on the bridge for long periods of time – having their lunch, looking out over the river, taking photographs. And the sheer volume of graffiti on the bridge implies that the bridge might hold some kind of significance for the various groups of young people responsible for the graffiti – otherwise, why bother? It seems that for some, the High Level Bridge is an environment that constitutes much more than just a way to get from one side of the river to the other.
It’s an environment that’s shared by more than just people. For the pigeons that live on the High Level Bridge, it is a place of permanence, it is home. And it’s part of many other, wider environments: the river; Newcastle’s Quayside; Gateshead’s Quayside; the local road network; the local train network; and many others.
Why here?
There are a number of reasons why I chose the High Level Bridge to work with. First, I was keen to move away from the idea that ‘environment’ is synonymous with ‘nature’. Before studying and working in this area, my conception of ‘Environmental Sound Art’ was sound art made by going out into the natural environment (which would be distinctly rural, wild, and untouched by human influence as far as possible). This conception was challenged right from the start.
Note that I used the phrases ‘going out into’ and ‘the [natural] environment’. Both of these imply a distance between my present self, and the environment – through this statement I separate myself from what is ‘out there’, and separate the environment off and something that doesn’t include myself. It is this (very common) way of thinking that has been challenged by my study of environmental sound art. The ideas of Timothy Morton in ‘Ecology without Nature’ have been particularly influential, both to myself and to many writers and practitioners within the field of environmental sound art.[2] David Michael sums this up nicely:
In his writings on ecology, Timothy Morton discusses this tendency in art to aestheticise nature as creating a convenient distance between ‘us’ and ‘ecology’, allowing for a dangerously detached and rationalised experience of ‘environment’ … Since environment is not considered ‘us’, this separation allows us to do questionable things like bury radioactive waste, produce mountains of toxic plastics, and eat our way through every species on the planet. These are acts done to a nature ‘over there’, while over here everything is just lovely.[3]
Morton’s ideas necessitate a re-thinking of how I understand ‘environment’ on many different levels, and therefore influence the ways in which I approach environmental sound art. First, my concept of environment should not be restricted to ‘natural’ environments, and thus environmental sound art should not engage only with ‘natural’ environments (although there is no reason why these environments should be excluded, either). For the purpose of this project – my first intentional foray into the world of environmental sound art – I wanted to work somewhere that forced me to work outside of my previous conceptions of environment, with the aim of gaining a broader understanding of what environment might mean through my creative practice.
Second, my environment is something that I’m always already a part of – so whatever environment I’m working in will always include me as part of it. As such, the ways in which I effect and interact with my environment should form a key part of my environmental sound art practice, and should certainly not be consciously excluded from it. This idea has influenced not only the way I went about the project, but also my initial choice of project. The High Level Bridge holds personal significance for me – it is a place that I feel a connection to, and there are strong memories and associations that I can draw on in relation to the bridge. It was important to me that the location I chose to work with wasn’t a random choice, but was somewhere that meant something to me.
Third, an environment constitutes more that just physical space, and the things that inhabit that space. It also includes relevant cultural, social, historical, political and economic factors. If these are all factors that constitute an environment, then they are factors that can (and should) be considered in the practice of environmental sound art. There is a large amount of information on all of these factors as they pertain to The High Level Bridge, making it a hugely interesting environment to explore and work in.
Environmental Sound Art
It could be argued that the term ‘environmental sound art’ is meaningless. Sound always happens in an environment, therefore all sound must be environmental sound. But for me the term ‘environmental sound art’ isn’t supposed to denote a specific set of sounds or practices; rather, it represents an attitude towards sound art in which environmental considerations are foregrounded and allowed to influence the creation of sound art at all levels.
Thus an environmental sound art practice cannot be said to have one specific form – there’s no set structure or process to follow that will produce environmental sound art. Practices should arise out of, and be appropriate to, the environment(s) in which the creative practitioner is working. I therefore cannot prescribe my processes in this project as a model that should be followed by others to produce similar outcomes, nor is it a model that I would necessarily follow again myself. The exploration that I describe here was specific to the environment in which I was working, and was developed through a combination of the affordances of the environment, and my own interests at the time.
This does not mean that an account of the processes I have undertaken so far in this project are of no value, either to myself or to others. Much can be learnt from studying the practice of others, and from examining the ways in which practices can be developed and re-worked through engagement with various environments. The development of this project followed a period of months of studying the practice and writings of others working in the field of environmental sound art, and their ideas and approaches have substantially influenced the way I’ve gone about this project.[4]
The processes I’ve employed in the development of this project have been very different to those I’ve previously used, and thus the outcomes have taken different formats to those I’ve produced in the past. The nature of the ideas I’ve engaged with over the course of this module have necessitated this difference in approach; I have been challenged to think differently about the ways in which I undertake creative practice. Two key ideas that have particularly influenced the way I’ve worked on this project have been the concept of site-specificity, and the idea that a focus on process, rather than outcomes, might be a more ecologically sustainable way of working.
Process
Listening does not pursue the question of meaning, as a collective, total comprehension, but that of interpretation in the sense of a phantasmagoric, individual and contingent practice. This practice remains necessarily incomplete in relation to an objective totality but complete in its subjective contingency
We’re used to value being placed on finished products. It’s where you get that matters, not how you get there. But there are many practitioners of, and writers on, sound art (and particularly environmental sound art) who are turning this on its head. Maybe what’s more important is how you get there, what you do in the process of getting there, and what you take away from that.
The nature of sound itself encourages this view. Sound isn’t permanent, it is always fleeting. It is always in the present, and always leaving us.
I cannot freeze sound.[5]
And sound cannot be viewed as an object apart from ourselves.
Listening cannot contemplate the object/phenomenon heard separate from its audition because the object does not precede listening. Rather, the auditory is generated in the listening practice: in listening I am in sound, there can be no gap between the heard and hearing, I either hear it or I don’t, and what I perceive is what I hear.[6]
Environmental sound, then, can never be fixed, tied down, or labelled. We can never know what it is, because it’s constantly changing. I can never offer up a finished product, and say ‘this is what this place sounds like’, because that wouldn’t be true. The only way to know what a place sounds like is to go there and listen to it, but even that will only be a snapshot of what it sounds like at that time, to that person, filtered through their perception, and effected by their presence.
In this context, the idea that a finished object or outcome should be the goal of environmental sound art doesn’t make sense. There can be no final answers, no truths. Environmental sound can never be finished, it’ll never be done. That doesn’t mean that nothing can be made or created. But what is created will always be part of a process, a process that started before the work was conceive, and will continue long after its been forgotten. And as such, the process becomes the most important thing - and perhaps the only thing.
Site-Specificity
Site-specific work means different things to different people. According to McIver, the term can be interpreted in two distinct ways: as ‘work made specifically for a site’ or as ‘work made in response to and encounter with, a site’.[7] It is this second interpretation that I have become interested in through the study of environmental sound art. Site-specific work that is made through encounter with the environment could be said to follow a more ecologically sustainable model than works in which art that has not been created in response to that environment is imposed on a space.
‘Site response in art occurs when the artist is engaged in an investigation of the site as part of the process in making the work’.[8]
When undertaking site-responsive work, the questions that are asked are quite different to those I’d usually consider. Instead of questions such as: what do I want to make?; What would sound good in this composition?; Where can I go to record this sound?; I start with a different set of questions: What does this place afford me?; What already exists here?; How can I interact with those things that already exist here?. Answering these questions requires a radically different approach to my creative practice. It necessitates acts of exploration and discovery. It involves going somewhere with the purpose of seeing what is there to be found, rather than with something specific in mind that I hope to find and capture. It therefore takes more time, and requires you to be much more open to the unexpected, and potentially the inconvenient.
Listening is not a receptive mode but a method of exploration, a mode of ‘walking’ through the soundscape/the sound work. What I hear is discovered not received, and this discovery is generative, a fantasy: always different and subjective and continually, presently now.[9]
Let me give an example of this: in my first few trips to the bridge, what really caught my attention was the visual, rather than the aural, particularly the amount and diversity of graffiti that is on the bridge. As a sound artist, this wasn’t the most convenient discovery, and my initial impulse was to disregard it and focus on something else. However I felt this went against the aims of what I was trying to do. This project has been about working with what I find, not what I want to find, and developing new working processes which are appropriate to the environment I’m working in. I therefore spent a substantial amount of time photographing all the of the graffiti, editing photos into collages, and thinking about the different things that this graffiti can mean, to both myself and to other people. Right now, that’s where I’ve got to with this process, and so this aspect of the work hasn’t produced any outcomes (or at least, not outcomes in sound – there are many photos, some collages, and my thoughts on the process so far which could be considered as outcomes, but which I see as a part of an ongoing process of creative practice, which will continue beyond the scope of this module).
Whilst the work I’ve produced for this module has not focused specifically on the graffiti, this process of discovery has had a substantial impact on the work I have produced so far, in that it brought to the fore the importance of the visual in relation to this site. The bridge is a hugely impressive and visually striking piece of architecture, and to ignore the visual in favour of the aural would have meant ignoring a large and very important part of what the bridge is to me.
It also led me to investigate perceptions of the bridge through different avenues than I would otherwise have done. Rather than focusing on written accounts of the history of the bridge, and historical documents such as photographs and newspaper cuttings, I looked instead for contemporary, visual representations of the bridge through youtube. This seemed an appropriate avenue of investigation that was in line with the youth culture that the graffiti represents. I found it really interesting to explore the ways that people engaged with that place and how they represented their engagement via youtube videos – sufficiently interesting that I decided to create a video collage that represented perceptions of the bridge. Following this, I created my own video from scratch, exploring my perception of the bridge through the same media. I continued to work with video as part of a process of working an idea through, a concept that was key to the teachings in this module.
It therefore transpired that the outcomes of my work on the bridge so far have taken the form of videos, drawing on both visual and aural sources. This is not a media I’ve ever worked with before, therefore the project has taken me well outside of my comfort zone. It would have been much easier for me to work purely with sound, but this would have gone against the nature of what I found when working at the site, and in the light of the ideas I’ve encountered throughout this module, this would have been problematic.
Outcomes
The Collage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXacYCHU6VY
The collage video collates a variety of youtube clips pertaining to the High Level Bridge, including a film of scenic shots of the bridge, documentaries about the bridge (both amateur and professional), footage taken from a train as it passes over the High Level Bridge, and a clip from the iconic film ‘Get Carter’, which features a scene on the High Level Bridge. It therefore brings together numerous different perceptions of what the bridge might be, or might mean. This is interweaved with my own perception of the bridge, through footage of me playing on the bridge, and photos I have taken. The soundtrack is made up of various recordings I made on the High Level Bridge, including recordings of me playing and improvising around the High Level Bridge Hornpipe, written by James Hill. Snippets of audio from the youtube clips are layered on top of this. The snippets I chose to use were mostly speech, articulating different ways of thinking about the bridge, as well as a song about the restoration of the High Level Bridge.
The Technical Stuff
This video collage was created using iMovie, the video creation software supplied with Apple Macintosh computers. When the video collage was complete, I transferred the movie file (both visuals and audio) into Pro Tools, where I combined it with an audio track that I’d previously created in Pro Tools. This audio track had been created using various recordings made on a Zoom H4n handheld recording device, and features recordings of the sounds that could be heard on the High Level Bridge during numerous recording sessions, as well as recordings of me playing the fiddle on the High Level Bridge. I added snippets of audio from the youtube clips to this track, which were synchronized with the video footage. The completed audio track was then exported out of Pro Tools and re-imported into iMovie, replacing the original audio track of the video collage.
The Hornpipe
See Appendix 1
It is useful to elaborate at this stage on the use of the High Level Bridge Hornpipe in the project. This hornpipe forms part of my personal connection to the bridge. It was one of the first tunes I learnt on moving to Newcastle, and is one of my favourite hornpipes. It was written by local fiddler James Hill (1811-1853) in 1849 for the opening of the High Level Bridge.[10]
I often use the fiddle as a way of interacting with my environment through sound. As a practicing folk musician (playing mainly for dancing) I frequently experience new places and environments through the practice of folk music, and so for me playing the fiddle is a way of forming connections to places. As part of this project I wanted to explore ways of foregrounding my relationship to and interaction with the environment, and I found that playing my fiddle in the environment I was working in was one of the most effective ways that I could do this. The tune, which is strongly connected to that environment through association, acted as a link between me and the bridge, and also as a temporal link, between the bridge today and the bridge as it was in 1849, when James Hill wrote the tune.
As well as simply playing the tune, on some visits to the bridge I improvised around it, allowing my environment to influence the way that I played. I responded in my improvisation to things that I could see, hear, feel and smell. The fiddle music therefore not only represented the bridge through the association of that tune with the bridge, but also sounded my engagement with the environment of the bridge.
My Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLZEYhPa3wQ
For me the collage served as a type of introduction to the project, but it didn’t feel personal. The media felt right as a way of articulating the processes I was going through as part of the project, but I felt that I wanted to move away from using other people’s representations of the bridge and make something which reflected my perception of the bridge. I therefore went out with a video camera to shoot my own film. Unavoidably, the way in which I perceived the bridge had been influenced by the videos I’d seen on youtube, so there are obvious similarities between some of the footage on the collage, and my own footage.
I don’t see this similarity as problematic. The youtube videos I discovered form part of the environment that is the High Level Bridge – a contemporary, distributed information environment. It is increasingly important in today’s digital age to consider the importance of the internet as part of our environment. The internet can be considered as an environment in its own right, but also forms part of many other environments. In the same way that I allowed physical characteristics of the environment to influence the processes I undertook as part of the project (things that I could see, the sounds I could hear, and the weather, for example), I allowed the things that I encountered in the distributed information environment of youtube to influence my work.
The video consists of shots of the High Level Bridge taken both on the bridge, and from various other locations that the bridge is visible from. The images are designed to complement the soundscape composition that provides the soundtrack to the video, which is made exclusively of sounds recorded on the High Level Bridge, some of which are processed in various ways.
Links between the aural and the visual
Sounds are like ghosts. They slink around the visual object, moving in on it from all directions, forming its contours and content in a formless breeze. The spectre of sound unsettles the idea of visual stability and involves us as listeners in the production of an invisible world.[11]
There are times in the video when the sound seems to syncrohnise with the visual – there are other times when it doesn’t. This has been done deliberately, as this accords with the way in which we experience sound and vision. ‘What we hear is not mostly what we see, nor can it strictly be pinned down to a given source.. often sound is what lends to directing our visual focus – we hear something and this tells us where to look; it eases around us in a flow of energy to which we unconsciously respond’.[12] In our everyday experience, very often the sounds we are hearing don’t directly correlate to what we are looking at at the time. This is reflected in my video – sometimes the sounds heard might be coming from somewhere out of shot, something behind the viewer, or below them. The difference between film and reality is that in the case of the film, the viewer can’t turn around to find the visual source of the sound – the creation of this visual source is therefore left to the viewer’s imagination.
There are times in the video where the viewer will see something that should sound, but doesn’t – again this reflects aspects of our everyday experience of sound. It is often the case that you can see something that’s too far away to be heard; this is especially the case in an urban, lo-fi soundscape in which distant or quiet sounds may be masked my closer or louder sounds. It also reflects the experience of users of portable music players, who will often have music playing on headphones sufficiently loudly to mask other sounds in the environment, meaning that although they can see potential sound sources, these never materialize into sounds heard.
Further, there are times in the video where the visual source of the sound seems almost to match with the aural, but not quite – this is particularly the case with the footage of me playing fiddle, which are not synced with the fiddle music being heard at the time. Again, this has been done deliberately, but for a slightly different reason. The fiddle music in this piece has a different purpose to the other sounds used, in that it is not usually a part of the normal soundscape of the bridge – by this I mean the sounds that can commonly be heard there. The hornpipe only becomes part of the soundscape when I go there and play it. Therefore the fiddle is more symbolic within my soundscape composition; it exists in imagination and in memory. The idea of the hornpipe existing in the imagined soundscape of the bridge was particularly inspired by a conversation with a musician who, by chance, happened to cross the bridge whilst I was playing there one day. I asked him at what point he was able to hear the music, and at what point he realized it was me playing. He replied that when he had first heard the music, he had thought it was in his head – in his imagination – because he quite often hears that tune in his head as he walks over the bridge. For him, the High Level Bridge Hornpipe is a part of the soundscape of the bridge, but it is an imagined soundscape, that draws on memories of previous articulations of the hornpipe. The way in which I treat footage of myself playing fiddle reflects the idea that this exists in the imagination – the pictures are indistinct, slightly out of focus, behind other images, and they don’t properly accord with what is being heard at the time. There is a definite link between the visual and the aural, but it is a link which is taken out of time – the space in which I am playing remains the same, but the time is different. Multiple times are converging on one point, through the juxtaposition of the visual and the aural, creating a sense of place which is more complex than one event happening at one time – and this complexity reflects how we experience place, with memories of different times all converging on one space.
The Technical Stuff
In making this video, I created the audio track first, and then created the video to complement it. The soundscape composition was created in Pro Tools, using recordings that I made on the bridge using a Zoom H4n handheld recording device. Various processing techniques were applied to the recordings, including time-stretching using Paul Stretch, and convolution filtering using Soundhack. Convolution filtering involves filtering one sound file through another, enhancing the frequencies that are shared, and cutting the frequencies that are not. I convolved recordings of me playing the High Level Bridge Hornpipe with recordings of other sounds recorded on the bridge. I shot all of the footage for this video on a HD video camera. The video was created using Adobe Premier Pro, a much more complex piece of software than iMovie. I used many different clips, shot over multiple days, which blend into each other using the ‘opacity’ feature. This allows video footage to be made transparent, so that multiple images can be overlaid, and to allow smooth transitions between different pieces of footage.
Taking Stock
I can come to no conclusion per se, because the project hasn’t concluded, and as such I must end by taking stock of where I’m at now, rather than by attempting to provide any final insights. This isn’t a statement I would have been comfortable making in any previous academic work. It is common for us to focus on outcomes in creative practice, but my engagement with environmental sound art so far has highlighted the importance of process. As such, the outcomes produced thus far do not represent a finished piece of work, nor do they represent the culmination of this project. They are an integral part of the process of working on the High Level Bridge, of getting to know that environment, and of exploring the creative possibilities that arise from this process.
A consequence of this is that much work has been undertaken at this point that hasn’t as yet taken a form that could be submitted as an academic piece of work. Over the last few months I have built up an archive of materials that I will continue to draw on, which include audio recordings, film footage, hundreds of photographs, and a blog documenting my engagement with the bridge and my thoughts about it. I will continue to build this archive over the coming months. There are numerous threads that I’ve started to follow that are in the process of development. It is hoped that these threads will eventually crystalize into further outcomes, using different forms of creative practice, presented using different media.
I have to admit that I’m not entirely comfortable that my submission for an environmental sound art module is so heavily visually biased. I remain convinced that, in the light of the journey of discover I’ve been on over the course of this project, it was the most appropriate way to present my work; but I’m still uncomfortable. To justify it to myself, I keep returning to the words of Tim Ingold: ‘the two [light and sound] are so closely involved with one another as to be virtually inseperable’.[13]
Right now, I have no idea where this project will end, or in what further directions it might take me – and I think that’s part of the point. I went into this with no set ideas about what I might do, and with no specific goal I wanted to reach. This project is about discovery, exploration, and about simply doing things. It’s an exploration of the High Level Bridge, and it’s an exploration of my own creative practice in the context of that environment. Therefore there can be no right or wrong outcomes. The work I’ve produced so far has surprised me. It’s certainly not what I expected I might produce when I started the project. And that’s great, because for me that proves that I’m doing what I set out to do. I’m allowing the environment to guide my practice, to lead me where it will. And in the process I’ve produced something new, something different, and hopefully something worthwhile.
[1] ‘Environment’, Oxford English Dictionary, 2013, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/63089?redirectedFrom=environment#eid (29/05/2013).
[2] Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
[3] David Michael, ‘Toward a Dark Nature Recording’, Organised Sound, Vol. 16, Special Issue 3 (December 2011), p. 207.
[4] The work of John Levack Drever, Jana Winderen, Bill Fontana, James Wyness, Lee Patterson, Bennett Hogg and others has been particularly influential, as well as artists working in other forms of Environmental Art such as Andy Goldsworthy and Robert Smithson. The bibliography provides an overview of the writers in this field that I’ve found most useful.
[5] Salome Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (New York: Continuum, 2010), p. 4.
[6] Ibid, p. 5.
[7] Gillian McIver, ‘Art/Site/Context’, Site Specific Art, 2004, http://www.sitespecificart.org.uk/6.htm (24/05/2013).
[8] Ibid.
[9] Salome Voegelin, p. 4.
[10] ‘James Hill’, Folk Archive Resource North East, http://www.folknortheast.com/learn/biographies/james-hill (30/05/2013).
[11] Salome Voegelin, p. 12.
[12] Brandon Labelle, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life, (New York: Continuum, 2010) p. xix.
[13] Tim Ingold, 'Against soundscape', in A Carlyle (ed.), Autumn leaves: sound and the environment in artistic practice. ( Paris: Double Entendre, 2007), p. 11.
Bibliography
‘Environment’, Oxford English Dictionary, 2013, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/63089?redirectedFrom=environment#eid (29/05/2013).
‘James Hill’, Folk Archive Resource North East, http://www.folknortheast.com/learn/biographies/james-hill (30/05/2013).
Bull, Michael, Sounding out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life, (Berg Publishers, 2000).
Hogg, Bennett, ‘When violins were trees…’, Landscape Quartet, 2013, http://landscapequartet.org/2013/04/28/bennett-hogg-when-violins-were-trees-paper-given-at-beyond-soundscape-symposium-belfast-27th-april-2013/#more-149 (3rd May 2013).
Ingold, Tim, 'Against soundscape', in A Carlyle (ed.), Autumn leaves: sound and the environment in artistic practice. ( Paris: Double Entendre, 2007), pp. 10-13.
Brandon Labelle, Brandon, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life, (New York: Continuum, 2010) p. xix.
LaBelle, Brandon, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (London: Continuum, 2006).
McIver, Gillian, ‘Art/Site/Context’, Site Specific Art, 2004, http://www.sitespecificart.org.uk/6.htm (24/05/2013).
Michael, David, ‘Toward a Dark Nature Recording’, Organised Sound, Vol. 16, Special Issue 3 (December 2011), pp. 206-210.
Morton, Timothy, Ecology Without Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
Murray Schafer, R., The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Vermont: Destiny Books, 1977).
Nagai, Michelle, ‘Listen Compose Listen: A study of perception, process and the spaces between in two works made from listening’, Organised Sound, Vol. 16, Special Issue 3 (December 2011), pp. 211-219.
Voegelin, Salome, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (New York: Continuum, 2010).
[1] ‘Environment’, Oxford English Dictionary, 2013, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/63089?redirectedFrom=environment#eid (29/05/2013).
[2] Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
[3] David Michael, ‘Toward a Dark Nature Recording’, Organised Sound, Vol. 16, Special Issue 3 (December 2011), p. 207.
[4] The work of John Levack Drever, Jana Winderen, Bill Fontana, James Wyness, Lee Patterson, Bennett Hogg and others has been particularly influential, as well as artists working in other forms of Environmental Art such as Andy Goldsworthy and Robert Smithson. The bibliography provides an overview of the writers in this field that I’ve found most useful.
[5] Salome Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (New York: Continuum, 2010), p. 4.
[6] Ibid, p. 5.
[7] Gillian McIver, ‘Art/Site/Context’, Site Specific Art, 2004, http://www.sitespecificart.org.uk/6.htm (24/05/2013).
[8] Ibid.
[9] Salome Voegelin, p. 4.
[10] ‘James Hill’, Folk Archive Resource North East, http://www.folknortheast.com/learn/biographies/james-hill (30/05/2013).
[11] Salome Voegelin, p. 12.
[12] Brandon Labelle, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life, (New York: Continuum, 2010) p. xix.
[13] Tim Ingold, 'Against soundscape', in A Carlyle (ed.), Autumn leaves: sound and the environment in artistic practice. ( Paris: Double Entendre, 2007), p. 11.
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