Author: Patrick Shaw

In selecting a field recording to study on the global soundmap website Radio Aporee, the first recording I happened upon at random turned out to be a significant and poignant one.

The recording was made at the Milk Grotto in Bethlehem, in the West Bank of Palestine. Prominent in the soundscape is the call to prayer, a distant musical underpinning of the human activities that are more foregrounded. Footsteps, indistinct talking in Arabic, and high birdsong feature throughout.

I was immediately struck by the poignancy of this soundscape of normalcy, prior to the recent outbreak of near-total war, and the escalation of violence between Palestine and Israel. In the dispassionate media landscape of today, it’s rare to glimpse or touch truly human moments, and hearing this recording, with its chatter, birdsong and sense of life, really helped remind me of the sanctity of ordinariness that we all so often take for granted. Rarely do we get to truly, honestly and empathetically embed ourselves in another’s life without a perspective, pollution, an authorial voice, a ‘take’ superseding it. Sound, especially field recording like this, has the potential for true empathy in this way. This is the rawest form perhaps of the documentation of human culture around the world, undivided in its attention to the random, uncontrolled events happening in that environment, on that day, in that minute.

I didn’t read the description until after I had listened to the recording multiple times, I think this greater aided my sense of immersion, having to piece together what was happening as an alien, forming my own emotional response. The description provided is as follows:

Milk Grotto St 25, Belem, Israel, Palestine. Nativity Church.

‘The chanting of the mosque is heard in the background and in the foreground a group of Palestinian policemen talking in Arabic. There is a mix of locals and tourists, mostly Christians visiting the Church of the Nativity in Belen, where Jesus Christ is said to have been born. It is a sunny and busy day and you can also hear the voices of the people in the streets and the birds.‘

We discussed between us after lecture the questions surrounding our sound art practices, interviewing each other on what inspires us, what challenges us. I think a point that almost all of us came away agreeing on was our ranging difficulty in verbalising our work. Sound Art is a nebulously-defined discipline, and we all shared our issues explaining our interests and work to the average person. “I make weird stuff with sound but not music”, “it’s sound, lights, lasers, noise, art”. I find “I work with sound but from an artistic perspective” is effective. It’s concise yet vague enough to avoid digging in deep with strangers. Fun!

Another interesting topic that I discussed with a classmate was, ‘what has/will challenge you?’. We talked about how we respond and reflect when encountering a work we unabashedly hate, in our case John Cage’s 4’33. My ultimate realisation being that emotional reaction doesn’t undermine, or deny the possibility of, an interesting analysis or discussion about challenging works. It’s very easy to hate, but digging into reasoning, finding justification for artistic choices is always important for gaining a theoretical frame of reference.

‘What has inspired you so far?’

The boundlessness of how to conceptualise sound art, the way it can arguably be anything.

‘Where are you at with your practice right now?’

Despite the perceived, often debated, delineation often drawn between music and sound art, I’m exploring the combination of popular musical forms with processed field recordings to create immersive sonic environments.

‘What direction are you heading in?’

Away from utilising sound as performative political violence. Moving toward a potential exploration of romanticism’s place in contemporary art.

‘What have been/will be the challenges?’

Becoming assured with the format difference in presenting sound artworks and fine artworks, gaining more confidence in producing a more concrete foundational, conceptual descriptor for my work that I can draw from when in a crit. It has been challenging pivoting towards the necessity of having something to say about a work; the expectation of reaching beyond the self.

As I am interested in genre fiction as a legitimate, inclusive platform for art, I chose to sonically analyse the closing sequence from season 5, episode 7 of The Expanse, ‘Oyedeng’. The Expanse is a science fiction show about the spiralling consequences of human colonisation of the solar system in the near-future.

Some context: Held captive by her former romantic partner and perpetrator of the largest terror attack in history, our main character Naomi escapes to another ship by faking suicide, traveling across the vacuum of space without a spacesuit, just an injection of hyper-oxygenated blood to help her stay conscious without breathing.

Tense, low-frequency throbbing transitions into tragic, string-heavy music as the scene climbs towards Naomi’s jump. This very heightened, manipulative non-diegetic score misdirects the viewer into thinking she could actually die. In a sense it’s empathetic, because it’s acknowledging and responding to the genuine pain that brings her to this risky plan, but there’s a sleight of hand in how it emotionally tricks the viewer. The intense score then sets up the tonal tipping point between initial emotive reaction, and realisation of the stakes of her action, emphasised by a period of silence.

The silence not only underscores Naomi’s vulnerability in the hard vacuum without a suit, where sound does not travel, but also focuses the viewer’s anticipation as they will her on. Breathlessly, like her. The silence suspends the action, artificially extending her motion, adding a sense of the improbability of her survival. Functionally, it could be considered diegetic. Famously, sci-fi rarely holds true to the silence of space, as extended silence actually kills tension. A non-diegetic, rising harsh noise illustrates the pain as her blood vessels burst and skin burns on the sunward side of her face, in a close up.

The deadened impact sound effects as she hits the other ship, totally without reverb or ambience create a feeling of desperation compared with the stakes of the life or death situation. For me, they are the most sonically effective part of the sequence; their abruptness and smallness undercuts our expectation for a ‘big moment’, making the scene feel more dangerous by upholding the audiovisual illusion and finding a place for stark realism. Finally, the non-diegetic, empathetic score softly returns, almost acting as the breath of relief.

Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Hymnen is an ever-evolving electronic, concrete collage of national anthems from around the world, interspersed with short-wave broadcast noise, tape manipulation and electronic effects. Swarming, sped-up music sharply pans across the stereo field. Familiar melodies swim to the surface. Existing initially in 1966 as exclusively a tape piece, it then progressed to include 4 soloist musicians and by 1969 a ‘Third Region’ was added, where an orchestra played alongside the tape.

Inherently, the anthems ‘sampled’ by Stockhausen provide a source-bonded experience. Recognising certain ubiquitous melodies like the Russian anthem in spite of their manipulation is part of the experience. I almost imagine it was, in the late 1960s, what aliens would have heard listening to Earth: A chaotic, all-noise-at-once-from-everywhere compilation of international chatter. There’s a ‘satellite’s eye view’ quality, an overhead-ness I feel when listening to this piece. It’s kitchen sink electroacoustic music.

The way Stockhausen describes the piece (1973) is very visceral, revealing his gestural approach to its creation; ‘after traversing nine columns of sound… it then swoops down and becomes recognisable as a human cry before further developing into bird calls – marsh ducks quacking – and human yelling, right up to the deep black recollection of the Marseillaise at one eighth of its speed.’ (p. 59)

As much as Hymnen involves the world’s national anthems, so too does the sound itself have a roaming, constantly moving world of its own in Stockhausen’s phrasing here. He lends a synaesthesia to the relationships between each sampled sound, and the transitions to travel between them. Compositionally, Hymnen exists as a network, a thematic portrait of the complex international, and interpersonal relations across the world.

Stockhausen, K. H. (1973) ‘Stockhausen’s notes on the works’ in B. Hopkins (ed.) Stockhausen: Life and Work. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 59

Longplayer is an aspirational sound art piece intended to last a millennium from its inception in 2000. A thousand year sequence of six singing bowl recordings are algorithmically mapped and replayed through a speaker system into the loft of the Trinity Buoy Lighthouse in London.

Conceptually, Longplayer is about hope for the future; reflective and concerned with its own survival in our world, destined to change beyond contemporary recognition or understanding. Like site-specific installations or kinetic works, Longplayer requires constant maintenance, and is therefore a generational asset in trust who are entrusted with its future. To me, it felt reflective of our own mortality. The objects in our lives that will outlive us, contextually changing without us to explain their value or meaning. Trusting the next generation with either taking care of them, or making their own decisions with what to do with our debris.

Being sound, I appreciate that Longplayer can be accessed online from anywhere. Apart from streaming media, visual arts are largely confined to the gallery space, locked down. Steve Connor (2005, p.48) believes that ‘this power of sealing or marooning things in their visibility and this allergy to things that spread that makes art galleries so horribly fatiguing and inhuman’. If Longplayer exists to reach into the future, it concerns all of us, it’s designed to spread and be sonically disseminated. In this way, it is distinctly countering the traditional perceptions of space, as visual arts would occupy it. As beautiful a space as the Trinity Buoy Lighthouse is to house the guts of the piece, the acknowledgment of how all the infrastructure, the technology supporting the piece is temporary is almost more poignant to me. It’s interesting how Finer created a work that has to capably exist independent of a physical element, or be compatible with speculative future technology. It is successful in potentially embodying the purest definition of a sound artwork that I’ve seen; the sound itself and the concept being the only common threads in what I presume to be the many iterations and locations the piece will go through on its journey.

I am often challenged by works where the conceptual idea is arguably more compelling than the actual sound itself. While taking in the intention and understanding how and why Longplayer exists, I found myself at times completely ignoring the ever-present sound. By its very nature, it resides in the background, but I appreciate the aspirational qualities of Longplayer.

In many ways I was reminded of NASA’s Voyager probes, and the famous golden records they contained, intended as humanity’s introductory emissary to extraterrestrial life through sound and image. Both the Voyager probes and Longplayer are aural, sensory-forward summations of our contemporary life, reaching out into a future none living now will see.

The bowls themselves, much like Voyager’s records, engraved with mysterious, near-absurdist donor names and phrases, act as both instruments for live performances of Longplayer and future archaeological finds. The anachronistic meld of the tactile, ancient instrument and futuristic, technological transience is an exciting, successfully multi-faceted contrast.

Connor, S. A talk given in the series Bodily Knowledges: Challenging Ocularcentricity at Tate Modern, 21 February 2003. It has been published in FO A RM, 4 (2005), 48-57.

The long extract:

‘With such an enlarged acoustic mirror, sound may figure as an increasingly relevant and important category to offer the self a new set of codes by which to operate, as a medium intrinsically communicational and heterogeneous, and by which to negotiate and utilize the increasingly animate and telepresent world, for sound embeds itself in the creation of meanings, while remaining elusive to their significations.’

Referenced version:

LaBelle posits (2006, p.16) that sound art’s relevance is linked to its diverse communicate properties, both for the self and the world, and its many shades of meaning: ‘sound may figure as an increasingly relevant and important category to offer the self a new set of codes by which to operate, as a medium intrinsically communicational and heterogeneous… for sound embeds itself in the creation of meanings, while remaining elusive to their significations.’

LaBelle, 2006. Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc.