In selecting our specialisms for the second year, I chose Option A: Spatialisation for Installation & Performance. At present, I would consider myself somewhat agnostic with regards to multichannel installations. I have always held a shameful, discreditably unshakeable scepticism of the gallery space. Especially in London; a city that feels oddly dislocated from the outside world, yet grossly boastful of its own significance, a narrow shim of reality. The uncomfortable intermix that’s created when the individual stimulation of each artwork meets a spatial sterility.
Taking space within a gallery is like terraforming; creating an opening to a new world inside another altogether vacuous one. I am curious to explore the possibilities of an interaction between the distal space and the enacted space, blurring the boundary between performed sound and organically documented sound.
At home in Sussex, I made ‘blank slate’ field recordings of a bank of trees in the wind, and then sheep eating cut branches with my Zoom H1n. To illustrate the difference with more movement across the stereo field, I have also included a field recording of delivery motorcycles in the rain, that I made in the summer in South Korea. Making mono and stereo versions of each recording, I found that they have wildly different effects and potential uses. With stereo information, we can parse out environments and the actions occurring within them with greater clarity as the listener. Mono recordings squash the sound, rendering less spatially distinct, and more as an artefact that could be placed in a wider work.
This is what caused me to think of the acousmatic, wondering how rigid or elastic that definition could be. Sheep eating in mono is arguably unidentifiable, it could be mistaken for wind in the leaves. Yet in stereo, the sonic event becomes more apparent, however slightly. Psychoacoustically, aural space helps the listener map what is occurring. Moreover, I don’t believe anyone could identify the source of this field recording without some guidance. Such is the elusive nature of recorded sound, and the murkiness of intention.
I worry it can be very easy to stray into an unwanted between-space when exclusively dealing with the acousmatic, where a total absence of signifying footholds brings an apathetic response. In numerous prior lectures on the topic, I have found myself listening to complex effects processing at length, wondering what more I am supposed to feel or comprehend. I am interested in the earthen, the human, the mystery gleam from within the obvious. Significantly, I feel keenly drawn to ‘less is more’, a dawning awareness. What can that mean?
Already, I find myself interested in the various nested cultural and contextual evocations that intentional source-bonding gives rise to. There could be a lot to explore there. As Denis Smalley (2007, pp. 38) states, ‘on the other hand, the kinds of spatial forms and organisation found in the natural environment could be taken on by spectromorphologies whose surface identity might appear tangential in source-cause terms. The idea of source-bonded space is never entirely absent.’ I am compelled to violate the obsession with the acousmatic veil by pursuing the facets of enacted space and aural inference.
References:
Smalley, D. (2007) ‘Space-form and the acousmatic image’, Organised Sound, 12(1), pp. 38