In April 2021, I created an ambisonics (full-sphere surround sound) installation / composition for Amoenus, with Tom Fox and Christian Duka. This was supported by Amoenus’ R&D project. With Christian’s technical support with the AUDITIF ambisonics in the space of Iklectik Art Lab, Tom and I created a new reactive soundscape, de-composing nature scores and their conventional symphonic order. Using Tom’s ultrasonic sonar distance sensors attached to the trigger objects for my sound channels, we created an interactive environment which, rather than approaching silence as a form of “stopping and listening”, approached it as an active strike action. The surround-sound elements moving around the space – from howls to lullabies – each drew out different perspectives and horizons of nature documentary in manipulable loops. In particular, the instructive voice of human recital was drawn from Alexander von Humboldt’s sketch of nature contemplation in Cosmos, from “the lowly heather” to “the planetary light”. Altogether the work created a new sense of the alignments and horizons of nature contemplation from the perspective of different forms of agency within an interactive sonic terrain of different scales. Each visitor to the composition will experience it differently based on their own intervention with the anti-ensemble of four instruments, which act as triggers. The choreography of the composition’s sound elements reflects ecological principles of the environment - for instance, the human monologue descending from the higher speakers to the ground, like an acousmatic voice of God/ disembodied observation, subject to intervention by the audience.
The R&D phase of this experiment has now been concluded and there will be a public experience of this work subject to Covid requirements later in 2021. For more on Tom Fox’ work, including with Vulpesinstruments and with Hackoustic, please see his website.
SONIC CONTEXTS, from jellyfish blackouts to 3D sound:
This work re-choreographing the sounds and spaces through which we passively consume nature is inspired by wariness around consoling ideas of ‘chorus’, ‘orchestra’, and ‘symphony’, as well as stock voices and sounds. Nature films, like city symphony films, were and still are scored in ways which artificially reinforce four-part seasonality and symphonic order. In fact, it is possible to think of a nature documentary as a form of lullaby – a “lulling machine”, telling stories about the ends of lives and worlds, which allows for sadness about this fragile state, but ultimately sooths us into passivity. We wanted to work to create more activated/activating/activatable experiences of the environment, using my own techniques for “unspooling” our existing audio-visual training on nature and the presence of certain languages in our psyche. This includes, for instance, my work de-constructing the base chords of nature documentaries, as well as re-processing and disrupting its monologue forms and the human/male instructive voice of these ‘feeling machines’. In order to reveal aspects of the composition and more delicate interactions, participants in the space must move to disrupt the overriding lullabies of our various audio “lulling” machines and channels.
I have recently been reflecting on the fact that certain approaches to sound art seem past their expiry date – including those which privilege specialised listening approaches, or ways of stepping back and reducing the human presence in the spectrum. The seeming promise of these forms of (literally) anti-social listening are in fact no longer a restorative approach, notwithstanding certain post-Covid announcements (Chris Watson: ‘You can hear into the distance now’). We worked with the AMOENUS 3D sound facility to create a sound piece which suggests that what we need to develop is not just quiet restraint, or solitude, but in fact new forms of active, and even system-disruptive, solidarity. In other words, the space of encounter is now only in the gaps we can create and defend in these embattled territories of sound. Rather than the various types of listening pavilions, sonic observatories, booths, and installations being added to the world, this piece enacts the need to de-construct or de-compose our current sonic climate, through ongoing actions to provide and maintain better sonic sanctuary for ourselves and others. This continues my work on the possibilities of nonhuman encounter in work which can be described as “hacking” or “tactical” in its principles and media – de-constructing or de-composing dominant sounds to travel agencies beyond the human.
The discourse of ‘stopping and listening’ has flourished in the wake of this year’s unprecedented wave of silence around the world, or seismic “global quietening” (The Guardian 23 July). Some of this seems too easy: a return ‘from the human doing to the human being’, which Schafer once called for as a first step towards re-balancing the natural orchestra. We deliberately took this moment to install a work in the IKLECTIK Art Lab which does not take such an easy approach to silence as a simple “stopping doing”. Instead, this work relies on forms of strike action, where the participatory element, or “doing”, is to take action to block or interrupt certain sound signatures. In essence, it is the listener’s/audience’s responsibility to create and protect (in embodied ways through their presence) the silences, or acoustic affordances, they want to hear. I wanted to work with a real-world ambisonics installation because I want to work with the presence of the audience as something inescapable – which they must therefore make useful. Rather than divesting ourselves of our selves as a presence, I am interested in forms of consequence and responsibility. How can we think of ourselves not as spokespeople for nature, but as another kind of conductive or even disruptive presence?
Like capitalism’s rising sea temperatures leading in turn to jellyfish “blackouts” of power stations, this composition plays with solidarity blackouts. From the original scores for post-Covid nature, a smaller more resonant encounter can emerge with each active listening and participation – but not if we do nothing, because as soon as one stops silencing certain elements, the system veers back to worst case scenario in which important melodies, interactions, and spectral niches are masked. From the original spherical array of the sound field, therefore, the listener/audience can work backwards, with a greater task than just absenting themselves. By making choices to discern and dismantle certain sound-marks or keynotes, they may reveal new fragile modal melodies or resonances in the texture. They may even act to “expose” some channels to critique, by reducing the audio field supporting or echoing them. In this way, de-construction and strike action become vital to the art of emergence (the creation of a space for life to move onwards) in our territorial soundscapes, and the literally speech-based politics of “democracy” and “advocacy”, in which silence can be passive, or instead, strategic and active. This installation can therefore invite more disruptive forms of encounter in the way visitors discover they can distort, warp, and stop certain signatures. The visitors must stay apart from each other (due to Covid), but even apart from each other they can find new ways to act with the solidarity of an anti-ensemble or anti-symphony – since the meeting points of these encounters can no longer hold as they are.